Improving Your Work

A fellow student at AM has commented to me a few times now that I have seemed to make some big strides in Maya since the bouncing ball exercises, so I thought I'd talk a little about that.

I really don't think it has much to do with Maya at all. I think I would have floundered there at the beginning no matter what software I was using.

I think what he was seeing and responding to is a gradual understanding and application of solid animation and acting principles.

I've used Maya since it's infancy (version 1.5 to be precise), and have had a good general working knowledge of most aspects of the program. Admittedly, I never really got into the graph editor until I started with AnimationMentor, but I knew what it was and how Bezier curves worked (mostly from Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop experience) - that these curves had handles that you could push and pull and thereby change the shape of the attached curves...

I think one of the many reasons my earliest AM work sucked so bad was due to being overwhelmed and overly concerned with all the technical things.

It was as if I was looking at all the little lines in the Graph Editor representing my animation keys as if it was a scroll of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics that I somehow had to divine a meaning out of. I was racking my brain trying to make sense of it all, second guessing every step I took.

I didn't start to make significant improvements until I understood the concepts of timing and spacing better. Once you know what it's supposed to look like and a few of the tools to get you there (i.e. setting keys at the right places and having enough breakdowns) the curves don't mess up your work as much.

Towards the end of last term, my clean up was going really quick - i want to say maybe a little over an hour max for 120 frames. All of my breakdowns were in there, so I knew I wouldn't have to rely on too much curve manipulation to get arcs moving correctly.

Let me explain this a little more.

This is how I like to think of breakdowns: You want to go from point A to point B, right? So the computer is going to take the shortest route, depending on what you have your keys set to (flat tangents, spline, linear, stepped) between those two points. Now, any arc you get in between is only accidental and probably not what you want. But if you have a third point in between A and B, you suddenly have a perfectly clear idea of the general shape the curve needs to be (this comes from putting in the right breakdown in the right place). Chances are you'll have to spline these keys so that their tangents (the direction those handles are pointing) make for a smooth transition mid-curve or else you'll get jerky movement in your animation, but at least you're not shooting in the dark in terms of curve shape.

And even simpler way of visualizing this concept is to think: "2 points make a line. 3 points make a curve." You need at least 3 keys to make an arc. Otherwise you have no breakdown and the computer will inbetween it mechanically - point A to point B. (Not a very intelligent solution.)

After I started seeing things this way, the hieroglyphics actually started making some sense. I would immediately know "Okay, these tangents need to be flat", "These need to be splined", "I need to ease out of this one by pulling this handle out further", "I need another breakdown here".

I got turned on to Dave Burgess' copy pairs at the end of last quarter in Body Mechanics and that really helped me out. I was able to maintain the integrity of my poses. Just tweaking one end (enough) will give you a nice moving hold without destroying the essence of your pose.

The thing I've found you have to be careful of when it comes to this method is that it can look really pose-to-pose unless you break things up enough. There's always going to be a trade-off no matter which method you use. You can try to rein in a looser blocking style so your poses read or let the reins looser on copy pairs. Choose your own adventure.

Personally, I'm liking the structure the copy pairs method gives me. It allows me to make more creative decisions when I'm not stressing about messy keys all over the place. The further you break up your poses, the greater chance you have of getting lost in your keys, but as long as you keep things in the same general vicinity, making changes isn't too cumbersome.

However, I'm also learning that while working copy pairs with splined transitions is great for rough blocking, it's not so great further down the road when you get used to looking at splined movement with improper breakdowns and have to fix the arcs from there.

So in the future, I think that once my rough blocking is done, I'll change all my keys to stepped and plan my breakdowns and arcs from that point. I actually want less for free. That way I know my choices are deliberate and there's no auto-pilot involved.

But Mark encouraged me to try this new way for this assignment. So I have, and know what I need to change for next time.

I'm not as scared of animation anymore. And I certainly have come a long ways from where I started, but there's a long road ahead and complacency is a quick route to mediocrity.

With that said, I think I'll work on my shot now...