Introduction

Keith Lango has a really really good animation tutorial explaining blocking and pose to pose stuff more in depth than what I do here. You should definitely check it out too!

Starting Out

The clip here is from November 2001, and is a soundbite of Christopher Walken from Mouse Hunt, saying "You have to get, inside their minds...you have to know what they want, need, you have to think, like a mouse."

You can Download the Audio Clip yourself.

Each part of how I approach and my animation process is described below. At the end of each, is a link or image you can click on to download that particular animation for that step, to see how my progress looked.

Listen to This!

I'm all too guilty many times of just running ahead of starting out, but if you can take the time to sit there and loop the audio over and over again listening to it, getting idea, it will make your animation stronger.

After listening, and usually physically acting out some of the motions myself, I'll do one of two things. I'll either start right on the computer blocking poses in, keeping in mind what I thought of, and working with poses, but putting them in one after the other (in a somewhat straight ahead fashion). Or else, I'll sketch out my ideas on paper. Both are about the same, but the paper helps to have something to look at and go back to later on. Especially if you mark down facial emotions, it can help you out.

My sketches are usually quite simple and fast when I do them, just enough so that I can remember myself what I am doing and where I want to go. I'll usually end up with a variation of my sketch in the final product. That is I won't hold myself to it later if I want to change something. But it's a good place for me to start.

Here is the sketch I did for this particular clip:

Layout & Blocking

Once I'm happy with the layout of the shot, I'm ready to actually start animating. I'll look at my thumbnail sketches if I have any. I scrub the audio, and start putting in my key poses.

At work I've used "Step" keys. This way if I have a pose at frame 1, and then another pose at frame 20, I can just key those 2 frames. Everything "holds", there is no interpolation. At work we've termed this "pop-thru" (once again see Keith Lango's Tutorial as well), because everything seems to "pop" from one pose to another, because there are no inbetween frames.

In MAX it's a bit of a pain to have to switch from step keys to linear keys and such, and in addition, I wanted to kind of get a feel for the timing just a tad more, especially since it is such a subtle clip. Therefore I opted to just use "Linear" key interpolation instead.

If I wanted a pose, once again on frame 1 and 20, what I would do is pose the first one on frame 1. Then figure out how long to hold the pose, say maybe I want 15 frames, so I'd go to frame 15, key all the character body parts there the exact same as on frame 1, and then go to frame 20 and key the second different pose. That way things stay the same and don't interpolate from 1-15, then there is a 5 frame change, and then the next pose on 20.

I pretty much continue this cycle of new pose, hold pose, then new pose, hold pose, until I am done. In some cases as shown here, I have some moving holds, because in reality the poses weren't supposed to pop. However as you notice, it is still very very rough.

The idea at this "Blocking" stage is to simply get a quick picture of what the poses are, and what is happening in the shot to make sure it looks ok. The important aspect of this block stage are:

• Very quick to do. You're just putting in the basic poses.
• You can tell what is going on overall body-acting wise.
• Interpolation and timing isn't too important right now, you're just doing a first shot at it.
• All parts of the body for each pose are keyed on the same frame. This makes it very easy to slide the keys/timing around later.

BLOCKING Movie

Rough Animation

Once I'm happy with that I'll also start to add more flourishes or sub-poses, which are really just the same pose, with some variations in them. I'll also add anticpation and follow through as I progress.

The idea here is even with linear keys, the animation should start to look more complete. If I key more than one part of the body, then I'll still make sure all the keys are on the same frame. ie: there is no offsetting. But there is more detail and refinement in the poses, timing, and details.

I usually work in blocks, of 50-100 frames or so at a time. That way I can focus on just a small chunk, make it look good, then continue forward. Below are 3 clips of my progress through the rough stages.

Notice on the first Rough 1 movie, all I really did was start to add detail to the beginning of the clip, since I hadn't gotten farther yet. In the Rough 2 movie, things have been fleshed out pretty well. I don't usually do any facial animation so the face is hidden, although I did do a quick eye move to help me read what was going on. In Rough 3, I decided to push the poses a bit more, exaggerating some of the moves a little bit more extremely to add some variation.

The important things about the Rough stage are:

• Timing gets corrected.
• Poses get refined, inbetween poses are added. Anticipation and followthrough poses are used.
• No facial animation yet.
• Everything is still using Linear key interpolation.
• At the end of the rough stage, the body animation should almost look as good as done, even though it has linear keys.

ROUGH 1 Movie

ROUGH 2 Movie

ROUGH 3 Movie

Facial Animation

Then I'll go back and add some emotion into the mouth, adding more or less smile or frown around what is going on in the lipsync. The keys are all still Linear in this stage as well.

After the mouth is done, I'll go and start the eye motion. Typically I'll animate the brows and lids for expression as needed. All Linear keys, but with no blinks yet. Just keys for expression poses to keep things neat and clean in my timeline. That is the Facial 2 movie. I'll also make sure the eyes are looking where they need at this stage.

Eventually I'll be ready to tweak any lipsync and facial issues and to add blinks into the poses. Essentially fixing up the facial animation as needed, all with Linear keys still. This is the Facial 3 movie below.

The aspects of this phase of the animation for me are:

• Everything is still at Linear keys, this helps to not have to worry about accidental overshoot due to interpolation.
• I tend to block in the proper lipsync mouth movement, then add emotion after.
• At the end of this stage both the body and face have been pretty much finished, but with Linear keys.

FACIAL 1 Movie

FACIAL 2 Movie

FACIAL 3 Movie

Cleanup Animation

This allows you to get perfect smooth motion but with no computery accidental peaks or valleys in the interpolation. Normally you'll have to change things to spline/smooth, and then manually tweak tangent handles to get rid of overshoot if it occurs.

I then see how it looks, and tweak things accordingly, maybe offseting some things, making slight adjustments etc... This is where you can offset rotation keys from translate if desired, or just offset each spine bone one frame later, and so on, as needed or desired.

I tend to preview these at a larger resolution since I want to make sure it will hold up when it goes to video on a bigger screen.

This phase has:

• Smooth keys
• Offsets of keys if desired
• This is the final animation.

CLEANUP 1 Movie

CLEANUP 2 Movie

Final Animation

The final animation I did is shown below.

FINAL 2 Movie

That's All!

		Thumbnail Sketch	0.5 hrs

		Layout, Set, Blocking:	1.5 hrs

		Rough 1:		1 hr

		Rough 2:		2 hrs

		Rough 3:		2 hrs

		Facial 1:		1 hr

		Facial 2:		1.5 hrs

		Facial 3:		2 hrs

		Cleanup 1:		0.5 hrs

		Cleanup 2:		1.0 hrs

		Lighting/Final Tweaks:	1.5 hrs

		--------------------------------

		TOTAL			14.5 hrs approixmate

That's about it. We tend to animate about 15-20 seconds a week where I work, so this isn't too bad. There's some acting issues I probably would have changed, but I opted to keep what I had when I started so that this article fit together nicer.

Special Thanks

Keith Lango for his help and support. Check out his cool tutorial that is more in depth on all of this animation stuff!

Discreet for making such a cool program!

All those guys on the Penguins Team at Big Idea that either taught me or made me learn what I know about rigging. :)

About the Author

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