Whether animating in a bedroom of a major studio, you’ll save hours of time and frustration by reading our top tips and tricks for animation.
As software and hardware improve, audiences demand more sophisticated performances. And as deadlines and budgets shrink, animators are racing against time more than ever.
It’s true that many concepts of character animation will never change: the 12 principles of Disney’s ‘old men’ are as etched in stone as any rule. On the other hand, animators need to grow with the industry and try to continue to deliver work on time and budget.
In putting together these tips, we’ve focused on concepts that are quick adjustments for animators to make, but that will also continue to benefit your work as you progress into your career.
The animator’s bag of tricks is more important than ever…
01 Animate acting shots one phrase at a time
It’s best to have clear full-body posing in your phrases at the expense of smooth transitions, especially early on. Animation follows beats and phrases, each with its own purpose. For a scene in which a store clerk is helping a customer, one phrase might be him waving as the customer enters; the next might be him putting his hands in his pockets as he listens to the customer.
Treat each phrase like its own shot. Reduce your timeline to display only the phrase you’re working on, and create a beginning, middle and end to the idea being animated.
02 Loosen up when animating contact
Avoid keying the whole body at the point contact occurs. On most actions, particularly faster ones, the instant of contact won’t be captured on 24fps film. More importantly, you’ll bias the movement towards culminating at the moment of contact, flattening your arcs. If a character picks up a glass, the arm is the stronger force.
Animate the hand going through the glass, overshooting the contact point while staying on nice arcs. Now correct the glass position and constraining of the glass, to make up for the moment of contact missed between frames.
03 Playblasting is a huge waste of time
Calm down, don’t freak out yet! Of course there’s no replacement for watching your animation at real-time speed, and you absolutely must watch your animation this way to be productive. However, hours are lost every week waiting for previews and playblasts to render. Reclaim your productive time by creating a layer or a button to hide everything in the scene except the character and proxy-resolution sets, so you can simply hit Play to watch the animation.
If you’re working with a rig that’s too heavy to do this, request a proxy version from your TD or supervisor. Most film-level rigs have a version created from ‘tin-can’ geometry parented to bones to make this possible. If this is impossible, at least take notes while watching your playblasts to avoid re-rendering constantly.
04 Facial animation is about motion, not just poses
We’re often asked whether there are certain poses that should always be built into face rigs to ensure the character can effectively express a natural range of emotion. The answer is that real emotion is expressed with the movement of the face: a lip quivering when a character is about to cry, the eyes darting around when a person is at a loss for words, or a character pressing their face tightly to avoid laughing at something.
Treat these moments like gestures of the face and observe their movement as closely as the poses they contain.
Since some poses aren’t possible with certain character designs, you’ll have to cheat sometimes. Mike Wazowski from Monsters, Inc has no nose, but he smells his armpit in the locker room scene at the beginning of the film. He does this by moving his lips up and down while making the sniffing noise. This choice clearly demonstrates that we don’t need specific poses or even anatomy to read facial animation. Without nostrils to flare, we read Mike’s sniffing action with only the mouth movement; you too can be as clear and communicative with your facial animation if you study the movement of the face and not just poses.
05 Mute your dialogue
Yes, you must listen to your dialogue over and over and over when you start a dialogue shot to get into the character, the subtext, the mood and the performance. But later on, when you work through the body mechanics and full-body gestures, it’s common to rely too heavily on the dialogue to fill in performance that’s lacking in the body.
The best dialogue shots work as well with the sound muted. Diagnose the communication in your shots by muting them before showing your colleagues. If your colleagues don’t get a strong impression of the relationship between the characters and a good gist of what is being spoken, your body language is not developed or supportive enough.
Go back into the body and reinforce your pose choices for the major points. Speak the line totally with the body language before un-muting the dialogue and working out the lip-sync.
06 A mirror is a dangerous thing
Be careful using a mirror for doing lip-sync. When speaking into the mirror, we slow down our pronunciation to copy a shape. This is misleading, because it disregards natural lip/jaw independence.
Key your lip-sync in separate passes for the lips and jaw, and use a mirror for information to help one pass at a time – either lip shape or jaw motion.
07 Mess up your physical work
Fill physical shots with all slips, falls, hitches, bumps and misses. Audiences get bored of watching perfect runs, jumps and tackles. Creating a little chaos is fun to watch, and it’s impressive to see an artist who can ‘animate their way out of’ a situation that’s gone awry.
08 Learn a little about mocap
You’re putting yourself at a serious hiring disadvantage if you’ve never worked with, or even seen, mocap data. Even if you plan to work at an all-keyframe studio, you may have to handle the stuff. There are many free mocap clips online, and 3D World’s disc includes mocap data from time to time.
Read our review of the iPi Desktop Motion Capture software, which is an affordable alternative to the full kit.
09 Bookend trouble spots
Sometimes an animation contains hitches you just can’t remove, try as you might. Bookend this section by selecting all the controls and setting keys just before and after the hitch. Now delete the offending keys, knowing that you have walled off any destructive effect on the rest of the sequence.10 Do more of less
Take on shorter shots for practice. The reason you practise is to get better for the industry, so practise the length of shot you are likely to encounter on the job, which will rarely be more than 10 seconds. You’re more likely to finish shots that are manageable, gaining skills from blocking through to final polish.
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