Animating long scenes
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Hey guys,
As an aspiring animator, I'm still learning a hell of a lot every day, but one thing thing that has puzzled me is how to approach the animation of characters in longer shots or scenes?
What I mean is, up until now, I've primarily practised with cyclic animation, bouncing balls, and very short shots, so everything is blocked in and then progressively animated.
What I wanted to know though is let's say I wanted to animate a character starting from standing, running along, then into a jump, then walking a bit, into a climb, etc etc. Or even just walking along, stopping to talk, then walking off again, how would you animate this kind of sequence? Do you copy/paste the cyclic parts like the run, or do you block it all out as one progressive shot, or is there another way?
I know it's a bit of an elementary question but I feel I should move on from cycles at some point and I'm not sure how this is done.
Also, does anyone have any good books/tutorials/training that covers the concepts explained above?
As an aspiring animator, I'm still learning a hell of a lot every day, but one thing thing that has puzzled me is how to approach the animation of characters in longer shots or scenes?
What I mean is, up until now, I've primarily practised with cyclic animation, bouncing balls, and very short shots, so everything is blocked in and then progressively animated.
What I wanted to know though is let's say I wanted to animate a character starting from standing, running along, then into a jump, then walking a bit, into a climb, etc etc. Or even just walking along, stopping to talk, then walking off again, how would you animate this kind of sequence? Do you copy/paste the cyclic parts like the run, or do you block it all out as one progressive shot, or is there another way?
I know it's a bit of an elementary question but I feel I should move on from cycles at some point and I'm not sure how this is done.
Also, does anyone have any good books/tutorials/training that covers the concepts explained above?
Replies
If you know you're going to have a longer sequence of cycles (running, walking), you could make a cycle and use it with a mixing sequencer like Trax in Maya or equivalent of other software. You can of course just copy-paste like you mentioned. Sequencers are good if you know you're going to reuse similar animations often. Another suggestion would be to take a look at for example animation layers to create variations and offsets for your cycles or to emphasize some part of a scene.
After you have your scene blocked out make it beautiful with your animation magic.
I recommend this approach because you get a good overview of the scene and can spot things that doesn't flow well, before you start doing heavy animation work.
This is what I was looking for, thanks. I've never touched the Trax editor, and not really sure what it does. It's the 'switching' between different movements that I was curious about. I wasn't sure if you should animate the whole scene in one long phrase if you know what I mean, like if the character needs to run 'x' steps forwards, do you just paste in 10 cycles of run, or do you animate it as one long run.
I'll look into the Trax editor, it seems like it's exactly what I need.
I suppose this only relates to non-game workflows because if I remember correctly, game engines just 'call' different cycles when the relevant button is pressed and then blend between each animation. This is why I wasn't sure how it was done in 'pre-animated' scenes.
Normally I block things in with poses, animating the root node with the character in a static pose, just to get the timing roughly figured out.
Then I start stitching cycles together.
Then clean it up and polish it.