Release. Pressure. Animate.

development 22 . Since the tracking and managing of the arcs are an important part of the
character handling this‟ll be in one of the concepts as well.
Another improvement is on managing the keys and data. There‟s still some
functionality towards easier inbetweening and timing adjustments that aren‟t standard in
Maya. Some animators 23 have set shortcuts for moving a key by one frame to the right
or left. Shortcuts can bring a lot of these tricks into the personal workflow, but especially
for starters it can be hard to find their way around and know-how on how to create these
shortcuts. Even more, shortcuts also provide a limited use (often just a single
functionality), and they need to be remembered as well. For managing keys and data I‟ll
also discuss tools that can helps making adjustments to timing faster, especially useful
for tweaking and testing out the timing in your animation. Often you‟ve to see and feel it
to know what is the best timing, spacing and amount of follow through. As such tweaking
and testing can be done simpler the overall investment of time should be a lot lower,
hence increasing efficiency. For the management part simplicity is of utmost importance
as well for keeping focus and goals clear, and thus introducing tools or ways for cleaning
or managing the data in simpler ways are more than welcome and will be discussed
within the concepts as well.
Another quick testing concept could be coming from real-time capture from the
mouse (or even a motion capture suit) to introduce quick ways towards a first pass for
the motion. It could be easily used as a starting point for aiming of the eyes for example.
The character would look where the mouse is while the timeline plays and the eye‟s aim
is being recorded. You might‟ve seen similar things on websites where the eyes of a
character in a flash video are constantly following the mouse. It should be minded that
such a technique could hardly introduce final animation, but could again help with testing
timing, attitude of the character and so forth. Any increase in inspiration and creativity is
a worthy addition.
A big problem while animating is to pivot (rotate) around another point in the scene
instead of the object‟s own pivot point. There are numerous scripts out there that create
complex set-ups so you can key another object to let the controls rotate or move about,
but they are extremely hard to oversee and often can produce problems if you don‟t
know how they work. Introducing a technique that can let you rotate around any point as
well, but instead apply these effects directly to the controls‟ keys makes the extra
overhead go away. Even more, such a system would provide a way to move all keys (or
a chosen amount of keys) with the same transformation. Making it way easier to
reposition the whole animation, especially when the global controller already has its own
22
Since Autodesk Maya 2012 there‟s a feature in the software that allows the user to adjust the arcs of a
motion in the viewport.
23
Animator Aaron Koressel provides a simple yet effective script on his website that creates such functionality.
4. Developing a toolset
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