new to character animation

[ODD]

very good questin i´ve thinked of this many times!
when u are animating wich steps do u follow? and wich tools are u using??

[steveblake]

Ah.. I remember asking the very same questions about 8 years ago (it's all very confusing at first isn't it?). So I'd like to step in here and try and help...

The simple answer is, it depends on the character. Also the rig, what you are trying to do and which method you want to use.

Now I know that isn't going to help at all, so...

The slightly longer answer... is that for walk cycles - yes, you can move the pelvis first, and assuming your feet are IK, you could then go back and animate them. But since the feet are dragging behind you'll have to play catch up. So, a slightly easier way of doing this is in the first instance, to grab the IK feet and pelvis and key them together. Then go back and refine the pelvis. Then re-animate the feet. As one of your final stages get the feet placement right and then look at the knees, and finally stuff like foot shuffles and little energetic jumps etc. etc. Be careful here, some rigs have auto-weights for feet and pelvis, basically means that you move the feet and the pelvis stays centred between the two - [[shudder]] ..As you can I personally don't like them and always turn them off immediately.

You may also have heard of 'pose-to-pose' (hunt out Keith Lango's excellent Maya tutorial for more info this) and the 'straight ahead' method (Shamus Culhane virtually wrote a whole book on the subject). Anyway in CG, both of these will eventually be tweaked with 'layered' animation passes to get things just so.

Layering is a very good method when doing walks as much as anything else as you get to focus on each part and do that in full before moving on. Some people even turn arms and legs off at first, to get the body looking right, then add the arms and get them working, then the legs. It's a nice idea..

Briefly tools used by animators are their intuition and the Translate, Rotate and Set key options. :)

...However individuals will probebely gather various scripts from the web for repetative tasks, big studio's will tend to write their own plugins (and sometimes even whole animation applications). These propriety animation tools vary enormously. On the whole I imagine there will at least be ways of selecting & keying a rig, maybe even tools to sharing pose/animation libraries. Even thoigh these things are useful, in the end it comes down to the skill of the individuals...

As a final note, someone posted some Shawn Kelly notes that I happen to have to hand. It's a good list that you might find interesting... I've copied it here (with a couple of additions):

ANIMATION METHOD
1st Pass
[BLOCKING - linear, flat or stepped keys]
* Timing of Action
* Main Poses (showing attitude & flow of 'power centres')
* Suggest Emotion (include rough face and eye animation)
2nd Pass
[EXTREMES]
* Breakdown Poses
* Offset
* Successive breaking of joints
* Suggest Overlap & Follow through
* Tweak timing
3rd Pass
[INBETWEENS- somehere between 2's & 6's]
* Create inbetween Poses
* Finish offsetting body parts
* Fingers/Toes
* Check + Adjust arcs
* Finish Overlap & Follow-through
* Finish Eye animation
* Foot shuffles
* Knees
Final Pass
* Facial animation
* Lip sync
* Muscle animation
* Seconday stuff - clothes, props etc
* Intersections

Hope this helps!!

:)

[sahajyogi]

Steve,
Thanks for all that detail, very useful!

[sagmam]

Hi, I've been reading the above, and although I've learned some things myself, I would like to share what I use for animation as well. It's a bit long though :-/

Some of my techniques are based on the Maya Character Animation 2nd Edition book, by Jae-Jin Choi. From all books, tutorials and manuals, this was the one that I could really find suitable for me. But most of what I write is based on some experiece that I've had with characters and knowledge I collected along the way, as you will, too.

Like steve said, the animation workflow depends on your character, rig and scene. If I take a closeup walking cycle, where you see the whole character, you obviously have to take care of everything :-) So I'll use this as an example.

Make sure your joints are oriented correctly. The arms are usually oriented in opposite directions, while the legs are oriented in the same direction. Technically, it means that when you mirror the arm joints, you use the "behavior" option and when you mirror the leg joints, you use "orientation". This means that if you rotate both shoulders, your character will look like its trying to fly. If you rotate both knees, your character will look like it's preparing to jump.

Create support joints that control the main skeleton via connected channels or parenting. Very very useful. For example, in the book I mentioned, you see an interesting concept: You put ik handles on the leg, and you parent the handles to a set of joints (that are not linked to the main skeleton). This little set of joints, if placed correctly, makes sure that the legs don't move when the body lowers or rises. That's because the ik handles remain in place and "hold" the feet with them! Now, if I move the root joint, the legs remain in place! You can later set the root joint's X and Z attributes to be the average of those support joints (using an expression). I sometimes even set an expression on the root's Y value (because then a foot rises, the body rises too), although it's not an average.. More like 1/6th instead of half. So if you move the feet using the support joints, the body is always balanced between them. It's a real time saver for walking cycles.

MEL script can help you a lot. It's pretty easy to learn (by example) and it can save valuable time. For example, I've written a small script that exchanges the position of the hands of ANY character, assuming the joints were oriented like I mentioned earlier. That makes it pretty simple to do a walking cycle: I position the hands in frame 1, go to frame 30 and run my script. The hands exchange their rotation values, thus creating the walking effect. Then I can go on and tune the movement. I did the same for the legs (it behaves a little different there because of the orientation).

Try creating a skeleton that will suit many characters. This will save you time later when you want characters to share similar movement patterns. Simply save the skeleton seperately and later skin it with different skins. It's even better if you could use the same skin for your characters (with only transformation differences - don't remove/add any vertices). Then, you can even use the same skin weights. This alone will save you a week of skinning per character. Skin weights can be imported/exported. John Homer sent me a script that adds to the behavior of Maya's import/export skin weights: it also imports/exports influence objects! Great script. A great time saver.

Work with clips in Trax Editor. I find it very useful, because I can export and import movements between characters. For example, if I create a "default" walking cycle, I can later import it to several characters, to serve as a basis for modifications. I can then make one character walk like a stiff, and the other walk like a drunk :-) Another great time saver.

That's about it at the moment. I can't really go in to smaller details without also getting into things from the book, so just try it out and see how this works for you. If you need any of the scripts I mentioned, send me a private message to remind me, cuz I don't have access to them from this machine.

[davidfro]

thanks for all the tips, I really appreciate it.

Davido

[DaddyMack]

Briefly tools used by animators are their intuition and the Translate, Rotate and Set key options. :)

Hope this helps!!

:)
:thumbsup:

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