I've been meaning to write this post for a very long time. But changing jobs, moving city, moving house (twice), seeing family, friends and general bus-i-ness it's been a little delayed. But, here it goes...
My first animation gig at The Charactershop wrapped up at the beginning of March 2011 and I moved straight onto my second gig straight after it and i'm still there. I got very lucky, both The Charactershop and Ragdoll are fantastic places to work.
The Charactershop was the first time I got to work on pure character animation. In the scene were two characters; Rory and Ned, both rigged from 3ds Max's Biped system - not much of a joy to animate but gave me lots of questions to ask about animation. I tried to make a note of all the comments and feedback I was given and now I hope to be able to embellish on them here a little bit.
In the following clip I did the animation, adjusted Rory's whiskers with morph targets, rendering, compositing and editing. The title cards before and after were added in by The Charactershop.
Review:
- The first problem I see in the animation is the result of the process I underwent... I should've blocked (stepped) each line of dialogue before splining and then refining the animation. Instead, I blocked (splined) chunks of 250f/2.5 seconds dialogue and then refined the splining in one pass.
- I didn't know what twinning was until half way through - it was one of the feedback I got - and although it doesn't happen very often now, there are many other acting choices I could've made that would've avoided twinning. Twinning is where the character does a symmetrical poses/action e.g. shrugs shoulders and raises both hands at the same time.
- I did make a conscious effort to keep strong poses and good silhouette, but what I forgot to do a lot of the time was check my poses in different viewports. I only started to do that half way through and realised that the characters were way out of line from each other. Animating to one static camera wouldn't make it much of a problem as you can see, but it's bad practice and could've got some stronger poses if I had checked the animation in other viewports.
- There were a few moments where the characters feel uber robotic. The cause of which came from not knowing how to create anticipation and moving holds.
- This was the first time I got a storyboard to follow. I wasn't sure how much of it I should follow so I tried to keep as close as I could to what I saw, but there were many instances where I had nothing to follow and this was a great test to see how well I knew the characters and if I could keep their action choices 'in character'.
- A great lesson I learnt was that happy accidents can occur when you start from scratch - try to avoid polishing turd!
- An important lesson I learnt only through doing this - as I had already heard it from a Digital Tutors guy - was to leave the facial animation right until the very end. It's important that the body can tell the story and 'speak' the dialogue before any facial animation and lip sync has begun. I knew this in principle, but now in practice!
- Hitting walls is often I find myself doing... not literally... but in my animation! This is where a characters movement suddenly stops, as if it has hit a wall, or is still in the blocking (stepped) phase. At the same time, I can see my animation floating a lot here. I have to say though, on this occasion, this was more something that was a result of the rig and the program I was using. If 3ds Max gave easier control I probably would've done it less.
- Hitting the accents was often in the feedback I got. What had to do more was find the accents in the dialogue and hit those fluctuations by emphasising parts of the animation.
- Watch your arcs! Heard that one before, right? But that was something I wasn't doing enough here. A lot of the movements were very linear and lifeless. I only had enough time to go back and work on the arc of the head turns.
- Blink. The blink timing I used was something like this: |..||...| (| = Open . = Close) Everyone prefers different blinks but this way seemed to work well.
- When a character needs to interact with an object, or another character, it's good practice to link them to an IK Dummy (3ds Max) or Locator (Maya) with a parent constraint. This gives you loads of flexibility and it's what I did when Rory pulls Ned back at the start and when Ned pats Rory on the shoulder.
So that just about wraps up all the notes I had for this. If you would like to bring up any other points that I haven't included please leave a comment or contact me directly.
Here are some pictures I took while I was living in Birmingham and work at The Charactershop.
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