zoom in: an animation tip

March 13th, 2008

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. 

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.

    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? 

    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. 

    Posted in Animation, Long Post, Pictures |