The Midnight Diaries of Catty Wampus

This month’s tip can be applied in any number of ways in any number of situations.

I’m going to start off with a demonstration using the graph editor. But first, there’s a small test I want you to take. Below this paragraph you will find a white square with a blue dot in it. All you have to do is click on that dot. Nothing will happen when you click on it, this is just to check your eyesight and dexterity. Ready? Go!

 

How did you do? My guess is that you either were a pixel or two off of the dot, or you spent quite a bit of time steadying your mouse hand, squinting your eyes, leaning towards your monitor with your neck held stiff, and making sure that nothing shook out of place when you clicked your mouse. In other words, it wasn’t very easy or very quick.

Now, here’s the second part of the test. Do the same thing with the square below this paragraph–this square is shown at 10 times the size of the previous one. And….. go

 

I’ll bet you did a lot better this time, quicker with less straining, right? That’s because, and I know this will be a shocker, it is easier to see and touch something that you’re closer to.

A friend of mine gave a great example once, using the difference between grabbing a doorknob that you’re standing a foot away from, and grabbing the same doorknob from across the room using one of those extendo-arm things they sell to change lightbulbs in high-ceilinged buildings. As you can imagine, it would be a lot more difficult to be accurate with the extendo-arm from across the room.

Now, I’ll tell you what this has to do with your graph editor.

Let’s say you’re animating a hand doing a simple move up and down, and you are keeping your eye on your graph. It looks pretty good–like a good, smooth curve should look. Something like this:

You say to yourself “Excellent. Looks fine to me, and so I’ll move on.” 

But hold on, Buster Brown! The truth is that if you were to zoom in on that curve, you would see that it might not be so perfect after all. Check out this quicktime where we push in to see the curve up close:

Now we can clearly see that there’s a hitch in that curve, and it’s a lot easier for us to tweak the tangents and make that curve as pretty and as smooth as we thought it was when we were way far away from it. 

(For Maya users, you can zoom the graph editor horizontally by holding down the Control and Alt keys while click-dragging with your Middle Mouse Button. Likewise, you can zoom vertically by holding down the Control and Alt keys while click-dragging the Right Mouse Button)

When I get down to that stage where I’m really ready to start polishing up my animation, I’ll go in and look at each individual animation curve throughout the chunk of animation I’m working on. I’ll run through it like it was a roller coaster, starting at the beginning and going straight through to the end, making sure that there are no crazy hitches. The process looks something like this:

(see if you can tell where the curve looks fine from far away but has obvious trouble when you see it in close up detail)

I’ve found my work with the graph editor improved vastly once I started zooming in and getting up close with it. 

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But, hey! We’ve hardly even started yet! There’s another place that getting up close makes things easier. Let’s take the example of a character delicately holding a flower in front of himself. Like this: 

Now, I want the hand holding that flower to look clear and natural and to have an appealing pose, right? I’ll need to select each of those finger joints individually to rotate them. From this far away, however, it’s almost a guarantee that I won’t click on the right finger joint with my first try. It’s also unlikely that I’ll be able to see the results of my teeny-tiny rotations in any meaningful way. Remember our boxes with the blue dots? Remember our doorknob across the room? Same principle. 

What’s the solution, then? Zoom in! Get up close with those fingers!

In fact, here’s a little tip: Make a duplicate camera and make that camera orthographic. An orthographic camera has no depth–which means that no matter how tightly you zoom in on your character, you will still see the same shapes you see at your regular camera distance. This is super helpful for maintaining and adjusting your silhouettes!

UPDATE: I have been informed by Matt Gaward that this orthographic trick won’t actually give you a silhouette that’s true to your original one. He suggests this:

1) Select your perspective camera that you want to zoom, and open the Attributes window.

2) In the Film Back section, there are three values you can change:

Pre Scale; setting this to any value above 1 will zoom by that factor.

Film Translate X and Y; these values will then allow you to move your scaled view around the scene as if it were orthogonalI’d suggest doing this on a copy of your shot cam. That way you can zoom in temporarily, move around the scene as necessary working on fine details, and you don’t lose the perspective-ness. Great for to-camera face work on a distant character.

Thanks, Matt!

In addition to that, Jean-Denis Haas recommends the “Zoomerator” tool, available at HighEnd3d.com. Thanks, JD!

To continue:

Up close, the hand looks like this:

Much much much easier to select the proper fingers and rotate them the proper amounts. 

See how much fun this is? But wait, I’ve got one more for ya.

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Let’s talk a bit about staging your shot.Now, I’m not going to pretend I’m some brilliant cinematographer or a genius storyboard artist. But I can tell you that I’ve seen a fair amount of animation reels and animation tests, and one of the most common things I see among many new (and some not-so-new) animators is that they love to have their characters very small in the frame. I suppose that the notion is “I want you to see everything, including the character’s feet, and their weight, and everything all around them.” The irony is that with characters so tiny in the frame, you can hardly see anything at all. 

I’ll take two examples based on some shots I’ve seen. First up:

You almost have to squint to actually see what’s going on, don’t you? Without changing the angle at all, we can push the camera in and get the much more visually pleasing: 

See? Now I can clearly see every move this character makes, and the zoomed in camera has the added bonus of making the scene much more congruous with the intense anger this character is expressing. 

Here’s another example:

If I were to see this character acting, I would feel virtually no connection with him at all. Even if you want to show that you can control the entire character, from head to foot, wouldn’t you feel more connection with this composition: 

Or, if this is an intimate dialogue shot, why not reflect that intimacy in the composition by coming in even closer: 

Doesn’t that last picture feel so much more present and alive than the first version? 

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Finally, there’s one other way that the idea of Zooming In can really affect your animation workflow. But instead of trying to articulate it myself, I’ll point you over to Jason Schleifer’s wonderful post from 2005, “The Fear Of Moving Past Blocking.” He clearly addresses the importance of zooming in on your keyframe range so that you’re only animating 20 or 30 frames at a time instead of trying to tackle 250 in one go. Brilliant stuff. 

Wow–I start blogging about animation, and suddenly I notice that my humble little blog is receiving a bunch of new readers. Thanks especially to Kevin Koch at Synchrolux and Jean-Denis Haas at the Academy of Art Character Animation Blog. I’m truly flattered to have been referenced from these gentleman and if you haven’t been to their sites, I highly recommend RSS’ing them.

Please allow me to welcome any newcomers (and re-welcome to oldcomers) to the Midnight Diaries of Catty Wampus. I am an animator living in Portland, Oregon and as you can see, I’ve also been enjoying this whole blogging phenomenon. Now that I think of it, I’ve been blogging just about as long as I’ve been animating–which isn’t that long.

But I love the idea of sharing thoughts and opinions with anyone who cares to listen in. It can start some interesting discussions as well!

You’re probably mostly here because of my posts about animation, but I hope that you don’t mind the occasional digression as well. Well, to be fair, animation tends to be the digression around here. Our lives are filled with so many wonderful things, and our conversations range all over the place, and it’s just as fun for me to talk about people I’ve met, or movies I’ve seen, explain the indisputable rules that govern the food we eat, or share stories from my experiences in this crazy ol’ world.

But now that I know there’s more of y’all tuning in, I’ll try to make the animation posts more frequent.

Most of all, I simply hope that I can provide random smiles whenever you choose to drop on by. Pull up a comfy chair, and get cozy; I’m here to entertain.

Welcome!

C’mere and listen close kiddies, because I’ve got news for you:

Your shot could be better.

The shot you’re working on right now, the one you’ve been animating for a week now–there is a lot you could do to make it better.

Whoever you are, whoever is reading this–whether you’re Jane Newbie or Glenn Keane–your shot could be better.

I used to listen to the animator’s commentaries on my DVDs (yes, “used to”–hey Disney/Pixar, where’d the commentaries run off to??), and the animators would say “There’s still things I’d like to go back and change about the shot you’re seeing right now.” And the shot I’d be seeing would be some of the most appealing, engaging, heartfelt, and believable animation I’d ever watched. What could the animator possibly wish to change about it?

And then one day I was showing a friend a shot I’d worked on, saying that there were still little details I wish I could do again. “I don’t understand,” said my friend. “It looks good to me.”

Both of these examples get to the heart of something I’ve been struggling with for a while. I see what can be better in my shots; I just don’t know how to actually make those improvements.

My eye is a better animator than I am.

This is natural, I believe. As frustrating as it is, it is natural. My eye can tell when a pose isn’t quite as appealing as it could be. My eye can see the slightest movement that has a hitch in its arc. My eye can see that the body of my character could be a lot looser and natural.

As much as I try, however, it’s really difficult for my hands and my mind to make the changes necessary to make my shot better.

Since my first bouncing ball, I could tell that something with the bouncing ball just didn’t feel right–but I didn’t know what to do to make it better. I didn’t know anything about timing or spacing at the time, so I didn’t have the tools to critically examine my work. All I knew was that my bouncing ball could use a lot of improvement.

I daresay I could do a much better bouncing ball now. But even as I’ve developed the skills to animate a convincing bouncing ball, new goals have appeared on the horizon. I don’t feel as confident in my posing as I’d like to. I don’t know quite how to get the most out of my timing and spacing. I see awkward rotations in my character’s limbs and struggle to find the solutions in my graph editor.

My eye still sees where improvements can happen. And my skills as an animator are constantly chasing my eye, running after it in a vain attempt to catch up.

This people mean when you hear about animation being a craft that forces you to constantly learn more and more. You hear that Frank and Ollie were still learning to be better animators into their 70’s and 80’s. It never ends, and it’s simply a fact we have to acknowledge and embrace. As soon as you learn one thing, two more new things you had never considered before will challenge you.

It’s so important to keep your eye running ahead of you. You need to always be just a shade or two behind your eye. If you ever feel like you’ve caught up to your eye, chances are pretty good that you’ve stopped learning.

Granted, there are times when you will look at a shot you’ve done and think to yourself “Hey, my shot looks pretty good! I can’t see anything that could be improved.” This is where your friends, co-workers, and colleagues can be invaluable. When I ask my friends to look at shots that I think I’m done with, they always find things that could be better. Sometimes it’s really tiny things, and sometimes it’s something so large that I can’t believe I missed it.

Just this last week, I thought I was finished with a shot. I called my a friend to my desk to look at my beautiful work and he said “Lookin’ good. The arm feels a bit floaty between frames 70 and 85, though.” Lo and behold, the arm did feel floaty between 70 and 85! I set about fixing the arm’s movement, but before I did that I made a mental note that was something like this:

“Dear Eric: This isn’t the first time that you’ve been told that one of your character’s limbs looks floaty. You should be a little more diligent when checking your animation to make sure that your arms, hands, and finger movement don’t feel floaty. Talk soon! Love, Eric.”

This is one big way I make sure that my eye is always traveling at a faster clip than I am. Sure, it would have been easy to take my friend’s advice and fix that arm without giving it a second thought. The really important step, however, was to pay attention to the trend of people noticing floaty animation in my work. I recognize this weakness in myself, and now I can work to strengthen that area of my skills.

And now, the big message:

This can work for you, too! Make sure that you keep training your eye to be a kick-ass animator, and then strap on your running shoes because you’ve got to start chasing your eye.

The further your eye goes, the further you go.

Good luck!

I am thrilled and flattered that my Animation Tips have been so well received by so many people. I’ve received a lot of compliments and notices about the tips being posted on animation forums around the web. I couldn’t be more tickled pink.

Many people have also asked me to continue posting more and more tips. And I want to promise you that there are more on the way. Sometimes they’re just a little slow in coming because of how long it takes to put them together well. But a lot of the time, it’s simply because I’m so new at this animation thing, there’s very little I feel like I can speak with any kind of authority about. But I’m always happy to share what I’m learning, and happy to know that other people get to benefit from what I’m learning as well.

There will be more soon, bat-fans. Stay tuned!

Computer animators, beginners and professionals alike, often feel constrained by the rigs that they’re given to work with, or by trying to keep their f-curves pretty and simple. And it’s true that there are often rigs that don’t lend themselves to the kind of motion that an animator would like a character to perform. Just as often, however, these kinds of limitations can be lifted by shifting your thinking to a more traditional approach.

I know this is kind of hard to describe in words, so lets get to the pictures and movies, shall we?

I first came across this idea in my first term at AnimationMentor. During the last weeks of the semester, we were learning how to build a convincing walk. At the risk of personal embarrassment, I’ll show you what I came up with at the end of the first part of the assignment:

 

 

 

 

Now, it’s a bit poppy in some places, and in particular I’d like you to look at how the foot and toe leave the ground. Here’s a close-up:

 

 

 

 

Look particularly at frames 15 and 16. Over the course of one frame, that’s a pretty drastic move for a foot that should more appropriately be rolling easily from the heel to the toe and then off of the ground.

My mentor pointed out that I could remedy this easily by including a frame or two like this:

 

 

 

 

The colored lines represent where the bottom of the foot would be on each successive frame. See how he suggested that the toe stay in contact on the ground until it was lifted away? Also notice that the heel should move in a nice arc.

The trouble was that the rig didn’t allow for the toe to roll off of the ground like this. The foot had a Foot Roll control that came up with the toe planted on the ground, but nothing that would rotate the entire foot while the toe stayed on the ground. I was really frustrated that my mentor would recommend I do this without understanding that the rig simply wasn’t set up that way.

But that’s where my brain was being tricked: I wasn’t thinking like an animator, I was thinking like a technician. There was a very simple solution, if only I could shift my thinking into a frame-by-frame way of seeing things. Do you know what the solution was? I’ll give you a minute… Got it yet?

The solution to this problem goes like this:

1) Get the foot into the right pose (that is, shape)

2) Rotate and place the foot exactly where it needs to be so that the toe looks like it’s exactly where it had always been, and the heel looks like it’s following an arc.

In other words: “Put the foot where it needs to be.” The actual foot controller might be way away in a crazy direction from where it’s had been in the previous frame, but it’s important to remember that your audience won’t care where your controllers are, they’ll only care about where the body parts are.

If your character, or a part of your character isn’t where it’s supposed to be, put it there!

Once this was explained to me, I was able to hand in this assignment with feet that look like this:

 

 

 

 

Look at how those feet roll off the ground now! Nice and smooth, right?

I know this isn’t the best animation ever–and there’s still a lot of problems with the feet. But I felt that this was a really good example of how I learned the “put it there” technique, despite its other problems

In my most recent project, a commercial for Quaker Peanut-Free Chewy Bars, we had to make a troupe of granola bars dance around a supermarket. (and as an added fun bonus, we were animating in a stop-motion style, using a lot of animation on 2’s!) I came up with a spinning dance step that seemed like it would be fun. The idea was that the granola bar would lift itself up on its “toe” (actually the lower flap of its packaging) and spin around. However, the rig didn’t include a pivot around the toe, the pivot was in the center of the bar. And if you’ve been reading this far, you already know how I was able to get the performance I wanted: put it there!

 

 

 

For each frame (yes, each frame–sometimes that’s what it takes!), I rotated the bar around its center, which moved the character way off of its axis, and so I had to move the character back to where it looked like that toe was in the same place frame after frame. If you were to look at the graph editor for this move, you wouldn’t be able to make sense of it. But just by working visually, I was able to come up with a performance that I’m pretty proud of, and I think it’s a lot of fun to watch.

I use the “put it there” technique all the time. It’s mostly useful in situations where you need to make IK hands or feet look like they’re moving smoothly, or rolling off of surfaces, or placing an object on a table and convincingly letting go of the object. I’m sure that there are dozens of other places where it’s applicable, too, and you’ll find them the more shots you do.

The important thing to take from this is to not feel limited by what your rig can or cannot do. Chances are that you can always get your character into the pose it needs to be in for a frame, and simply put it there.

As animators, one of the fundamental elements we try to get into our poses is a clear silhouette. This means that a pose should read clearly, even if the entire character were shaded in with solid black. We should still be able to tell the character’s attitude, and their place in he story of the scene.

But I’ll tell you something: it’s not always true.

Sure, having a great silhouette can be great. And it’s certainly something to strive for. But sometimes, you just can’t have the arms and hands clearly extended from the body. Sometimes the head is tilted down so far that you can’t tell its position in relation to the neck and the rest of the torso. What do you do in these situations?

Why, you rely on the concept of the internal silhouette.

Have a look at this pose of Sylvester the Cat.

 

It’s pretty clear to us that he’s looking sneaky, sly, and mischievous. He probably has evil intentions for that egg he’s cradling so gingerly away from its nest.

But Sylvester’s silhouette is really muddled together. Check out what happens if we fill in Sylvester’s shape with black, leaving the rest of the scene blank:

 

We can’t even tell which direction he’s facing, let alone what any of his body gesture is. Still, I say that this pose reads clearly, and here’s why: The internal silhouette is clear.

See, the idea of a silhouette is really an exercise in contrasting colors. That’s what we mean to do when we shade in a character with black: we’re contrasting the character’s shape with the background. Black on white, see?

So we have this opportunity to take advantage of a character’s design, using the design to contrast the character with himself. Sylvester is a black cat, but his body is white, his cheeks are white, and his hands are white. These help provide a contrast so we can see the shape of his internal silhouette.

Don’t believe me? Check it out. Here’s that same silhouette, but this time we’ve shaded in all of Sylvester’s white parts to see their shape as well.

 

Much clearer now, isn’t it?

That’s one of the reasons the character is designed the way it is. As an instructor said to me at school: “Why do you think all of those 1920’s and 1930’s cartoon characters wore white gloves?? It was so you could see their hands when they brought them in front of their black bodies!!”

And it’s absolutely true. You can even see it in live action. Here’s a shot from American Psycho:

 

This character’s attitude seems very clear to me. In control, and maybe a bit pompous about it. But here’s the blob of a silhouette we get when we shade him in:

 

How do we figure out what to make of this big black nothing? Have a look at how the skin tones contrast against everything else:

 

Now it’s as clear as day!

An even better example can be seen here, in this shot of Jack Lemmon in The Apartment:

 

Look at how constricted and balled up he is! Is there any way that we could tell what he’s doing just from his basic shape? Nope!

 

So how do we figure out what’s going on here? Internal Silhouette to the rescue!

 

Yes, I’m being a bit indulgent in choosing scenes from two movies I’ve recently blogged about–and if you’d like to read those posts, you can find them here and here–but the point remains valid.

Let’s get back to animation.

I think that a lot of the idea of silhouette has to do with a character’s main body pose. The spine, the head, the legs and feet. Internal silhouette, it seems to me, often has a lot more to do with hands and smaller gestures.

Check out this one from the classic “One Froggy Evening”:

 

The hand is so important to the composition of that shot, it’s not only huge, but it’s bright yellow! You don’t even see anything else close to yellow in that shot. The hand practically has its own silhouette, apart from the rest of the man’s body.

Here’s one of Porky Pig demonstrating that white glove thing:

 

Here, Dean opens the door for Hogarth in The Iron Giant:

 

Even cast in shadow, that hand shows up really nicely in contrast to his dark burgundy robe.

Speaking of Hogarth, here he is in Downtown Coolsville:

 

One hand is in clear silhouette out in the open, and the other has to rely on its own contrast with Hogarth’s dark shirt. The two hands, each silhouetted in their own way, work together to read as a single pose.

Finally, from the uber-classic “What’s Opera, Doc?” we see Elmer Fudd, whose cuirass almost disappears into the background, but his hands are nice and readable as he plots to get dat wabbit:

 

So, the lesson here is that although a clear silhouette is something you should always strive to work into your poses, be aware that sometimes silhouette is more complicated than a first glance would indicate. Our eyes don’t see shapes so much as they see contrasts. The contrasts are what make the shapes.

Use those contrasts to create clear silhouettes and recognize when you can use them to create clear internal silhouettes and you’ll open up a whole new range of what you can communicate with a character’s pose.

Cheers!

This is a technique I use in absolutely every shot I do, several times an hour at least. Sometimes I can spend minutes doing it. I don’t know how I ever lived without doing it.

The technique comes courtesy of Jeff Riley, a stop-motion animator currently working on Coraline, and whose film Operation: Fish making its way through the festival circuit. I know that Jeff didn’t come up with this, and it’s a technique that’s probably been used for decades and decades in other forms of animation. I’ve just never seen too many CG animators doing it. It goes like this:

When you move from one pose to the next, nearly every single body part should move, even if it’s only a little bit. And you need to make sure each part moves naturally. So, in order to check that each body part is moving the way that it should, you’ll have to rely on your “next key” and “previous key” buttons. Just check two keys, over and over, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Watch each body part for its spacing–the amount each part moves from one frame to the next. Back and forth, back and forth. This is essentially what 2d artists do when they roll their drawings between their fingers, checking from one to the next. Stop-mo animators do it with their frame-grabbers. We have the “next key” and “previous key” buttons.

Let’s check out a simple example of what I’m talking about, shall we?

I’ve pulled a small clip from The Incredibles. This is from the scene where Mr. Huff is threatening to fire Bob. This is how the scene plays out in real time:

There are some great things going on with Huff, and I encourage you to frame through his motion. But for this example, we’re going to focus on Bob.

You can see that Bob pretty much has two poses: 1) Fuming with both arms at his side, and 2) Fuming with one arm extended outward, holding Huff by the neck.

From that description, it sounds like the only thing that changes is the screen left arm. However, if we just look at those two key poses, using the back and forth technique, we can see subtler changes as well:

You can see that when Bob’s arm goes up, his shoulder goes up, too. But that’s just the start. Look at the other changes:

1) The hips shift towards screen left just a little bit. Even though it’s a small change, it sells the idea of the body’s inertia.
2) The screen right shoulder also moves up quite a bit.
3) The screen right arm pulls in closer to the body.
4) The screen right hand clenches into a tighter fist and rotates up towards the body.
5) The head changes its angle slightly: rotating in the direction of the pose, and tilting downwards
6) The face clenches tighter and the eyes pinch shut

Every single part of Bob’s body has moved, even though the major change is only that one extended arm. And the best way to see the changes in each body part is, say it with me: back and forth.

You can use this back and forth method to check out how each part of your character moves from one key to the next, making little adjustments where you need to and then checking them again using back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. This is what is meant when you hear people say they are “checking out how two frames animate”–they’re watching all of the differences between the two keys, large and small, to make sure that the movement makes sense.

Let’s check out an even more dramatic example. This one is from Aladdin, during the song “One Jump Ahead.” Again, to start, we have the clip in real time:

Got it? Good.

Once again, it looks like there are only two major poses going on here: 1) Leaning out from the post, and 2) Hiding behind the post. We can go back and forth and check out those two poses:

Clearly, these two keys have much bigger spacing from the first clip we watched from The Incredibles. If you were animating this scene, you might be satisfied with these two poses, confident that they’re selling the ideas in the scene that you want to get across to the audience. So, where do you move from there? You put in breakdowns. Here’s how back and forth can help.

These are the breakdowns that are in the scene:

Note: I don’t know for certain which are the exact keys and breakdowns the animator chose. I’m making my best educated guess.

You can see how nicely they work with each other. Everything is moving on nice arcs, each body part feels natural. But we’re looking at this after the fact. If you were animating this scene, you’d have to do a lot of back and forth checking to make sure that each of your breakdowns are working properly. So for the first set of breakdowns, you might find yourself looking at your keys something like this:

You’d go back and forth, over and over, forwards and backwards, over and over, just to make sure everything is working with each other. These are just the first keys and breakdowns:

Frame 1 - Leaning out from the post
Frame 32 - Leaning out further (to accentuate the song lyric)
Frame 49 - Pulling backwards to escape the flying swords and spears

Then, once you were satisfied with how those frames were working together, you might check on your next breakdown or two:

Over and over, back and forth, forwards and backwards. Over and over. From one key to the next, over and over, forwards and backwards, back and forth.

If I’m coming across as repetitive, that’s part of the point. Remember, from an earlier post when I wrote about how Every Frame Is A Drawing? Well, I use back and forth every single time I make a new drawing. My “next key” and “previous key” buttons are some of the most used keys on my keyboard. It’s the best way I know to check how your keys are working before you put in your breakdowns. And then, you can check how your breakdowns are working before you put in your inbetweens.

Back and forth is all about keeping iron-clad control over your animation, and not letting the computer put in any motion that you don’t want there.

Good luck, and happy animating!

Hey everybody! I am super excited, and super flattered, and then super excited again to tell you that one of my blog posts has been translated in Italian! No joke!

Maurizio Ramanzin, an animator who I met over at the 11 Second Club forums, asked if he could translate my post entitled Give Yourself Permission to Be a Good Animator into Italian for his own animation-centered blog.

I’m beaming with pride that someone actually wanted to share something I’d written with other animators. Grazie, Mauri!

To check out Mauri’s translation, go here: http://www.malalaca.it

Ciao!

This is a tip for anyone who runs into a situation that happens to me a lot when animating in 3d.

Have you ever scrubbed through your animation in the timeline, and everything looks pretty good… you’re happy with where your animation is going, you can see the body and everything moving like you want it to. But when you run a playblast, or a preview, your quicktime video shows your animation as choppy, confused, six kinds of weird and twice as ugly?

Me, too. Here’s why I think that happens:

When you scrub through the timeline, you’re watching your animation at the speed of your hand on the mouse. This may not be, and probably isn’t, 24 frames per second. And truth be told, it’s probably not even at a constant speed. You’re scrubbing through your animation in a way that makes it look good to your eye.

But when you play it at speed, the computer doesn’t know anything about how your hand was scrubbing.

Now, when this happens I will tend to go back into Maya (or whatever application you’re using), and start re-posing, moving limbs around, trying to get the animation to look better for the next time I run a playblast. I’ll bet that many of you do the same thing as well.

But dig this: you shouldn’t re-pose anything! Remember when you were scrubbing at your own pace and everything looked fine to you? That should tell you something very specific about why the quicktime looked so bad. What it should tell you is this:

The poses were right, but they were on the wrong frames.

I’m going to say that again, to make sure you got it:

The poses were right, but they were on the wrong frames!

It’s the timing!

Imagine you are a 2d animator. You have all of your drawings stacked up in your hand. But now you know that some of your poses are in the wrong place in the stack. You have to figure out which drawings to re-arrange, and you’ll probably have to remove some drawings to get rid of to make room for the drawings that will be inserted in the correct place.

Remember, Every Frame Is a Drawing. So figure out which drawings are the ones you want to move around, set a key on every control in your character, then move that drawing to where it’s supposed to be.

Don’t change your poses if you don’t need to–you worked hard on those. And if it looked right at a slower, or faster, or varied speed… then that should be all of the information you need to tell you that it’s not the posing, it’s not the spacing, it’s not the acting… it’s the timing!

I’ve been watching a lot of animation over at The 11 Second Club, and I’ve noticed that there seems to be a common weakness running through a lot of the clips I see. Specifically, I notice it in how characters interact with objects with their hands.

I see a lot of characters bending their fingers around an object that they’re “holding” or placing their hands down loosely on a table, in ways that look very much like all the animator has done is to rotate the fingers around from the original default positions.

I’ve decided to take the LowMan Rig and try just a few quick sketches by way of an example. Hopefully, this will help to illustrate what i’m talking about, and even better, help some beginning animators step up their use of hands–they’re so important!

To start off, here’s a picture of a hand grabbing a pole (or it could be a spear, or bars in a jail cell, or whatever you wish):

Looks alright, doesn’t it? I mean, when you see it, you definitely get the idea that the hand is supposed to be holding onto the pole. But all I’ve done is rotate the fingers in one axis, making them all wrap around the pole. This isn’t really what our fingers do, and thus isn’t what our hands really look like when we actually grab on to something. With a few minor tweaks, rotating some of the fingers in a few more axes, you can come up with this:

See? Now doesn’t that feel a little more solid and natural? I’m not saying it’s the greatest hand pose in the world, but I think it’s definitely an improvement on the first picture.

To make it even more clear, I’ve put together a small .mov of the two poses switching back and forth:

One thing to really take note of is that I had to cheat things a bit because of how the hand’s and fingers’ proportions are:

You can see where the pole is more in the fingers, where it should actually be firmly rooted in the palm. Also, the thumb will tend to be locked to what it’s grabbing, instead of having this bit of empty space in there. But since I am posing to the camera, these little cheats are allowable, and help me build a believable pose. You’ll never notice them unless you see them from the wrong angle–and if I’m a good animator, I’ll make sure you don’t see them from the wrong angle.

Let’s take another example. Here is something like what I typically see when a character places their hand on a table:

The fingers are all bent slightly, again only in one axis. Everything is posed taking very special care that nothing is penetrating the tabletop.

But I notice that when I put my own hand down on a table, and I’m relaxed, I get something a little more like this:

Some of my fingers curl in underneath my hand, and one finger stretches out. Most importantly, the palm is actually resting on the table, taking most of the weight from the body. In the previous hand pose, the palm is hovering above the table–not very believable. This pose took a little longer to get right, since there was a lot of counter-animating of the wrist and the fingers to make sure they all looked like they were in the right place and not penetrating the table. But the time it takes to get a good hand pose will pay off immeasurably in your scene, even if that hand doesn’t move at all.

Here again is a quicktime for comparison:

I’ll restate that I don’t claim these are spectacular poses or anything… but I hope that these samples illustrated that with a little effort, and a little attention to detail, you can add a lot more believability to your scene just by tweaking your hand poses.

I’ve heard that the hands are the second place we look for personality after the face/eyes. So make sure that your hands aren’t just set in the default position, or even slightly rotated versions of the default position. Make them do what you need them to do. Your rig is a computer model, and will feel no pain, discomfort, or anger if you start bending the fingers and wrists all over the place.

Good luck, and happy animating!