Learn how to control the computer and produce high quality 3D animation.
In hand drawn animation, it’s common for animators to create the key poses, extremes, and breakdowns for a shot before leaving the inbetween drawings to an assistant or “inbetweener”.
In 3D animation, we start out the same way. The key poses, extremes, and breakdowns form our blocking pass. Once we’re happy with this, we can make use of the computer as our assistant by switching our curves to spline and allowing the computer to add the inbetweens.
This sounds great! Unfortunately, the computer is the world’s worst assistant!
Switching from blocking to spline is the moment that all animators come to dread. It’s when you hand over your carefully crafted blocking to the computer and wait to see what it does with it.
Typically the result is an unusable floaty mess.
The problem is, the computer doesn’t understand animation principles or your intentions for the shot, and all it will do, by itself, is create a smooth interpolation between the poses you’ve given it.
In hand drawn animation, before handing over their precious drawings to an assistant, animators would add timing charts which defined the spacing they wanted to be used for the inbetweens.
This is something which we discussed within the spacing lesson of my Into Motion course, and the 3D animation equivalent of the timing chart is the graph editor.
When we simply switch our curves to spline, we are doing the equivalent of handing over our animation to an untrained assistant with no timing charts.
It’s only by manipulating the curves within the graph editor, or adding additional keyframes, that we’ll get the result that we’re looking for.
In the latest lesson of my Into Motion course, I demonstrate how to move from the blocking stage to a final, polished, piece of animation.
We discuss the use of moving holds, and you can watch every step that I take to ensure that I control the final result, rather than leaving the computer assistant to blindly create the inbetweens.
