Think About Mechanics From the Beginning

Something I'm learning is that it's never too soon to think about mechanics. It's tempting to think, "Oh, I'll make sure my mechanics are working once i get into breaking the poses down. I'll put the weight shifts in later. Right now I'm just 'roughing' things in."

Wrong.

I tend to think of building an shot like I would approach a sculpture, rough to smooth, general to specific, but this is an area of animation where it is very important to think THROUGH things like poses even when it's rough so you don't run into trouble down the road.

A lot of people also forget to see what their character is doing in space. They just work solely from a locked off camera view and make sure it's visually "passable" - but although 3D animation ends up being a 2 dimensional image, CG is not a 2 dimensional medium.

You must think in the round.

Of course, I still block things out and miscalculate the placement of poses. I'll take things from blocking to splines and the timing needs to be re-addressed and offset correctly and things no longer look like I had planned them, but that's the evolving nature of the beast (until I come up with a better workflow perhaps).

Judging what's going to work and knowing what's not is something that will take time.

But thinking carefully about mechanics from the beginning is a good start...