The Midnight Diaries of Catty Wampus

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.