Whats your workflow for animating characters?

[Simon-S]

Hi All,

I seem to be getting in a bit of a pickle once i have all of my poses and timings done with stepped keys, and I start to change the curves to TCB or Bezier. Everything obviously becomes very floaty with the initial curves and I seem to be having problems keeping focused on where I'm going with things.

It always seems such hard work to clean things up and I think I end up with way too many keys. I get there in the end but I never feel like I'm in full control of things.

I just wondered if anyone had any tips on what to do once you have your key poses set out, or if anyone could share their workflow?

Cheers.

[RebelHill]

Well, in my experience there's about as many workflows as there are animators.

Generally I find the best way, organisationally speaking is to work ur curves up. So start stepped, get ur timings down, keep on stepped whilst doing your first tween pass, to get ur spacing. Then into LINEAR, as this'll let u see the actual flow of motion in time without curve smoothing to muddy the view of whats keyed and whats interpolated. Once I got things playing nice with linear keys, which includes keying up my ease ins/outs in linear, then I go over to curves to refine.

I also often find that once I go to curve, some of the linear keys I placed to handle ease in out, can be removed, and replaced by curve behaviours/tangents... but tis the having the linear keys in place first that keeps the graph organised, giving me a clear view of where, and how hard I want to pull my curve.

[Simon-S]

That's a nice tip. I was always going from stepped to tcb or bezier. Will give that a go, thanks.

PS I'm using your RHiggit Lite for most character stuff I do now...very solid rig! Good work. :)

[wrightyp100]

I second Rebel Hill. I start stepped. But I think I stay in stepped a bit longer. I add break downs, then add my anticipations, then my own hold frames while in stepped.

Only when I'm happy with all that will I venture into tcb territory. No matter what app you have, computers are rubbish at inbetween animations.