Animation Tips & Tricks, Volume I - Animation Mentor

Felt-tips hanging out with Hi-lighter pens... Ball-points chillin’ with metallic ink pens... Sharpies buddy-buddy with... yup, onceagain, you guess it - with dry-erase markers.So, this anonymous animator, who may or may not be.... um.... me, snagged the nearest fat pen out of his jar and started tracking hisarcs on his monitor. Luckily, his animation-induced euphoria only lasted for the first two dots before he realized he was marking hismonitor with a fat-tip PERMANENT SHARPIE!That’s right. Sharpie. Guess what happens when you put permanent sharpie ink on your monitor? It stays there! PERMANENTLY! I...I mean, the Anonymous Animator, had to live with two beady little black eyeballs dotting his monitor for the next few years.So, trust me when I caution you to be extremely careful which pen you use to do this trick, ok? Dry-erase only! Make sure it saysdry-erase on the marker, or don’t put it anywhere near your expensive screen.Okay, back to the trick...You’ve likely already heard the importance of building nicely flowing arcs and figure-8 curves into the movements of your characters.(If you haven’t, shoot me an email, and maybe I’ll make that my next topic!) That’s all well and good from a theory side of things, butpractically speaking, how do you make sure your arcs are nice?Well, there are a couple of ways of doing this (many animation programs have a ghosting function you can use to see the arcs, forexample, but I find this difficult to use in complex motions,) but my favorite, and the favorite of most professionals that I know, is thesimple act of plotting a dotted line on your monitor with your trusty dry-erase marker.You should be thinking about your arcs in the planning stages of your work. Certainly, in the thumbnails you should be consideringwhether or not the head will move in an over-arc or an under-arc, or how the tail might swish back and forth with the tip tracing afigure-8 pattern. Next will be the blocking stage, and you should DEFINITELY have your arcs in mind when blocking in your keysand breakdowns. One of the primary functions of the breakdown, in fact, should be to define the arcing path of the hips and limbs,in my opinion.However, no matter how well you plan your arcs, and how well you block in your scene, your arcs are not going to be perfect mostof the time. You might play your scene back and think, “wow, my arcs are great!” but if you really get in there and track them, andtruly smooth them out, you will see a subtle but powerfully fluid difference in your next render.Here’s what I do:Once I feel like I’m about 80-90% done with my work, I bust out my trusty Marks-A-Lot or my Expo, and get to work.First, make sure you’re working from your camera view. Those of you creating in-game 3D work for video games will have an evenbigger challenge as you’ll track the arcs from many different angles, but for many of you, your animation will end up being seen ona flat 2D surface (a computer monitor, a TV screen, a movie theater screen, etc.) In those cases, the only camera we’re worried aboutat this moment is the actual camera view, because that is the arc that will matter.So, in my camera view, I’ll first select the hips of my character. In Maya, I can select the nurbs sphere that I use to control theplacement of the hips and hit the “w” key, putting me into “translation” mode. This is nice, because it brings up your little multi-axisicon, and that icon has a little box in the center of it. This is an easy way to see the exact center of the hips on any given frame.So, I’ll go to any parts of my scene where the hips are doing something big. Let’s say my character is going to ring a bell by pullingdown on a rope. Through planning my scene, I’ve discovered that all of the force the character is going to use to pull on that ropeis through a wave action that moves from the hips, through the spine, and finally out into the arms, and that wave action is causedby a clockwise outwardly-spiraling arc of the hips.Wow, was that confusing? I wonder if I could possibly have chosen a more complicated example for this... jeez. Well, it’s too latenow, folks. We’re in too deep. See, we’re already two paragraphs into this example, and I haven’t eaten dinner yet (nope, not friedchicken tonight... I wish!) so there’s no way I’m going back now! We’ll just keep slogging through the bell-pull. Trust me, we can do34Copyright 2008 by AnimationMentor.com. All rights reserved. This ebook may not be reprinted or distributed in electronic, print, web, or other format withoutexpress written permission.