Running Scared

On the last entry we talked about the importance to have a reference in animation and also the difficulties that might arise when we try to animate a very complex and cartoonish movement.
With the help of a drawn reference it is possible though, to have an almost immediate appreciation about what the end result might be without having to go all the way down to blocking on the software.

Once we have the reference drawn with a tool like grease pencil, we can now start posing our character into the software. In this case I came up with the following results:

Feel free to acomodate things a bit over the reference in order to hide little details on the rigs or if you see the end result simply seems better. You will be continuously changing details over the process until you (or your manager) feels that the animation delivers. Just be careful not to get into changing things a lot because sometimes (if not always) you might find yourself changing it like forever and thus never ending it.

Once you have your basic poses in place, lets have a look of it without the 2D lines:

Not bad for a start, not bad at all.

However, now you can start posing a bit better the character as you might find some details that were not visible when using the reference over it.

A very good tip I got from Keith Lango is to take note of all the changes you need to do and do them first on the next pass. After that you shall take note on the new ones and go get them corrected in the next pass. This seems to be a very well organized pipeline that also helps you to stay on track with your changes, further preventing changing things that were already on its place and thus never ending with a satisfying result.

This is the final blocking stage just before getting into the linear one:

Now it seems everything is in place and we're ready to start the linear pass. In order to do so it's a good practice to have all you controls keyed in each pose, just to make sure everything will hit its frame in place (meaning all the character's parts in the place you want at the frame you want) just before we proceed with the next list of changes.

In this pass you can see that aside from the holds (or those parts where the character mantains a given pose for a few frames), everything keeps moving and changing from one frame to another in a, yes, linear fashion.

After some cups of coffee, LOTS of cookies and hitting the bed very early in the morning, I came up with the following final pass.

Here you can see I added facial movement and get the holds with a little bit of movement in them (a common practice in 3D as opposing to 2D where you can have 2 adyacent frames looking exactly the same). Now every frame is changing (even if by a fraction) and that is good.

Finally, here's the animation after adding some fancy effects like lighting, shadows and motion blur. This is sometimes called 'the beauty pass', and with it, the animation is ready to be reel material.

So, there you have it. Next I will be covering a basic level 'Making Of' as some people have already asked me to do so.

Have a nice week !!!