Hey Everyone!
Welcome back to my blog, and today we will be continuing on with day three of the animation test, in this section I will be talking about what I did in the "Splinning" stage of the animation, the kind of routines that I get into whenever I head into this stage, and explaining the pitfalls that may happen during the course of animating at this stage.
I find that there is a lot of animators who hear the word "Spline" and they would panic and freak out! Or they would shake their head in dismay, and I wouldn't blame them, it is probably the most frustrating stage of animation, especially for animators like me starting out and still working out the kinks in body mechanics, but I do find that if you had a really good plan that lead towards good amount of blocking and inbetweens, coming to this stage of animation work won't be too bad.
The thing that scares a lot of animators about this stage of animation, is that all the timing efforts they put into blocking, getting it right, making it snappy, goes down the drain. That's why I mentioned in the last post to not put too much effort into getting the timing precise in blocking, the "Spline" stage is where you will really feel the timing. So with everything in 'Spline' the animation will be all smoothed out, and you will see all your timing off, don't panic! What I do at the start, is fix the timing, start moving all the key poses closer to each other if you need them to move from one pose to the next a little faster or if you want poses to take longer move them apart a bit more, if there is a key pose you know you want to hit at a particular frame, just create a hold from the last pose a little longer before hitting that pose. Play with the timing and get it right before even thinking about getting the arcs and overlap into the animation.
After getting all that timing correct and sorted, comes the arcs. This is very important to get a hold of, it took me a long time to understand the importance of movements working in a circle, and the very first thing you want to smooth out is the character's core movement. The character's core movement is the body itself, if you study enough motion in life you will notice that everything moves in a circular fashion, even the body, though it maybe the world's most subtle movement. The core is important to get right first because it effects everything else, from the head, arms and legs.When I first learned about that I thought "Wow! That solves all my issues!", so I started to make everything move in a circular fashion for example even when I want the body to move straight up and down I would try to add a circular movement for it, which was good, but I did it too much! I exaggerated the circular movement, and the animation ended up looking really choppy, because the core would be circling in large movements in the smallest frames. So what I am trying to say here is, yes! Put arcs and circles in, but know when to exaggerate and when to use it subtly.
As I am putting in the arcs and getting the core right, I will also be refining the timing between poses, working out the ease in, and ease outs, and changing the spacing between poses as I go. Spacing was again another one of the many animation principle that is easy to learn, but very hard to understand, I am only now just starting to understand spacing believe it or not. The trick with spacing is that you have to understand that it works in conjunction with the number of frames you are working with, for example you can still make a movement feel slow within a small number of frames, by making the spacing between each pose closer, and at the same time I can still make very fast movement with a large number of frames by making the spacing between each pose further apart. So I would play with the arcs and the spacing between poses until I get to what I want from pose to pose, it's very important to remember to get the animation to the way you like, don't let the computer do it and accept it because the computer knows best, the computer doesn't know what's best and what you will end up with is evenly spaced poses, and that leads to very boring smooth animation.
Once all the smoothing is done, this is where I will start offsetting things, making the hand come out of pose later or earlier, always in the back of my mind that the body leads the way in every movement. Majority of your offsetting can be done during your the blocking stage which can save you a bunch of time here, but I will try to explain how to do that in a future post :). The offsetting I would be doing here is just making things land at different times by either two or at most four frames, anymore then that can start looking strange, you just have to play around with it until it feels right to you. At this stage, there is really no turning back, if you are still making decisions on changing the poses, then you are better off scrapping everything and starting again, believe it or not that will actually save you more time, then trying to fiddle around with what you have and frustrating yourself out. There will be times of course when the directory changes the shot, or has a new idea for the shot, and you will need to change it, the best advice I have heard and have tried, is to do what I have been told is "Surgery Animation", I will again explain that at another time :).
With the smoothing, arcs and offsetting all done, I can really start seeing the animation come to life, the character really feels he has weight, personality and the timing is to my liking. The next stage will be adding in the lip sync probably my favorite part of animating (but seems to be hated but most animators) is polishing! So stay tuned and join me for my final post on the test, and I will also upload the outcome of my four day test.
Cheers,
Meng The Hobbit.
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