In The Rough...

So here's the tricky part, especially if you've used IK arms (please see a couple posts ago for details). Going from stepped to spline*. Now, I do this in chunks, and I also go to flat** first, because true spline gives you too much junk to work out that early in the process. Going to flat and using the copied pairs method*** allows you to work a lot like you're still in stepped, maintaining your snappiness and timing and all that, but you can start working on your transitions from pose to pose and refine in a fairly orderly manner. A few things are evident when you have a look this week. You can definitely see what happens when you go from stepped to flat. Some things are definitely soupy. You can see that the golf club is not actually attatched to his hand! You can see in the take*** that the hands look separated from the body in what they're doing. Feet are sliding, motion is somewhat sloppy...all things that the animator needs to work out. That's not even getting into the more artistic decisions like, how do you get from pose to pose, you're breakdowns, as it were, offsetting parts of the body, easing or overshooting, acting...we're just talking about the mechanics and reality stuff that you don't want getting in the way of the performance. Now, you definitely are thinking about all of that stuff anyway, but you want to wait to actually execute the majority of it 'til you've locked down you're character. At least I do anyway...

Click on the image to see the movie for this week - blocking plus

* stepped to spline - refers to methods of data interpretation from one saved set of data to the next over time. Stepped method holds the value of a set of data until it reaches a new saved set of data. Spline will in one of a variety of ways try to interpret the best way to gradually become the next set of data from the first. Example: Timeline has 10 seconds. At second 1, value is 0. At second 10, value is 10. In stepped, very second from 1 to 9 has a value of 0. In spline, every second has an added value. Second 5 in spline would have 5, not 0.

** Flat - A method of spline mode, which arrives at saved sets of data by easing into them and out of them at equal amounts. Creating a wave look.

*** Copied Pairs - A computer animation technique that allows one to work in spline and still maintain holds by placing equivalent sets of saved data over the length of the hold.