Release. Pressure. Animate.

A library can grow and especially for a TV series or big production the amount of
saved poses can become huge further into production. Therefore we need the ability to
filter and search through the library so we can quickly find the pose we need. Also it‟s
important to allow the creation of a personal library with your own poses and favorites
instead of constantly working in the global production‟s library. This is all important to
minimize unnecessary search times and limit, order and customize the data to your own
needs. To organize and clearly separate parts of the character the aniPalette contains
tabs and submenus. This is important for working layered and helps keeping focus on
only a part of the character constantly. It‟s also very important that it supports both
single poses and sequences of poses (animation.) The difference should be clearly visible
(play icon above sequence) and the animator should be able to show only still poses or
animated sequences so he‟ll only be looking at what he needs. This makes it more
organized and reduces the amount of data he has to go through while effectively still
showing all that he needs.
For a pose library to „pose‟ effectively there‟s a couple of requirements for control
needed by the animator when setting a pose. He should be able to blend in a pose, apply
it interactively to test what looks best and tweak the result. This interactivity increases
the directness of controlling the character and returns a faster response at the same
time. This direct result provides instant gratification. Furthermore when selecting a pose
it should be possible to apply it only to the selected controls to quickly adjust only a
portion of the character and work directly on what we‟re currently actually working on,
thus helps staying to work only on the parts you‟re actually changing. Also poses are
often stored as absolute values, but you don‟t want the character to instantly move to
totally somewhere else. The animator should have control about what stays where and
let the pose be assigned to that current position, thus relatively. This way the pose will
always fit and be at the position you intend it to be. For more information about the
aniPalette and its functionality I recommend reading its documentation.
One of the things we need as animators is a reliable way of testing out the animation,
for traditional animation you had to master flipping/rolling. For computer animation you
need to playback the scene in real-time. Maya‟s standard playback will not play with a
constant frame rate and is thus not a reliable source of reference. Reliable playback of
the animation is currently only possible by creating a so called playblast. This creates a
preview file to be played back in a video player that supports the exported codec. Tools
for creating clean playblasts are available to download from the internet, both against
payment and free. (TragidiTools and ShotView both contain a playblast script for
example, but there are also separate scripts for download.) Though many provide
convenient options they always still need to export to a separated video player. Since
previewing is a constant process it should be interweaved with the software so you can
4. Developing a toolset
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