Release. Pressure. Animate.

tools that really helped with the character posing and the character
handling/management that is part of that. The concepts explained within the
preplanning, notations and reminders mostly came from the mindset I got from
researching the other animation fields and the creation of Mac „n‟ Cheese. Thus these
came in later stages of production and it would‟ve been hard to introduce or even
develop these production tools to be still used in our production. Nevertheless the tools,
especially what we‟ve missed and would‟ve loved in production, have been discussed
thoroughly within the team and with other animators as well.
5.2 Using the tool together with other animators
The toolset that has been created was tested and used by me and the team members
involved in creating the animated short Mac „n‟ Cheese. The proof of concept toolset has
thus been tested by me, Tom Hankins, Gijs van Kooten and Guido Puijk. At the beginning
of production we‟ve all worked without the toolset (while I was developing the base of it),
then I started solely using it for first testing. After a while the rest of the team followed
and started using it too when most simple bugs were removed.
The toolset we used for the longest period of time in our
project – as seen to the right – contained the functions listed
below. Note that sometimes I refer to the name of a tool
mentioned in the previous chapter. In our project we made
use of the following functions (solely from the toolset):
- Easier character selection in a compact but efficient
system. This was really one of the first things the
animators praised. Also options for setting keys and
in-betweens and deleting those were added. As well as
an option to reset the controllers.
- The simple inbetweening system (Quick Tween) as
explained in the previous chapter that allows
interactive control – with overshooting – for the
selected objects.
- The small but very useful retiming section that allows
the adjustments of timings between -3 and +3 frames.
This is a picture showing
one of the toolses versions
we„ve used in production
pipeline of Mac „n‟ Cheese.
- Small shortcut sections with presets for selection masks and viewport view
options. Often opening a new animation scene resets the selection masks and
5. Stress testing the toolset
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