it’s the timing! (an animation tip)
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Strict Standards: date(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'America/New_York' for 'EDT/-4.0/DST' instead in /homepages/8/d91492417/htdocs/cattywampus/wp-includes/functions.php on line 52
Strict Standards: date(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'America/New_York' for 'EDT/-4.0/DST' instead in /homepages/8/d91492417/htdocs/cattywampus/wp-includes/functions.php on line 54
Strict Standards: date(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'America/New_York' for 'EDT/-4.0/DST' instead in /homepages/8/d91492417/htdocs/cattywampus/wp-includes/functions.php on line 55
October 12th, 2007
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!
