Adventures in Maya.

This first week of my boot-camp I have ran into multiple hurdles. My goal with this is to push myself to complete one animation daily and continue to "exercise" that animator muscle. The animations I have been completing have been simple and straight forward until near the end of the week, in which I decided to focus on bi-pedal walk cycles. Queue the struggles and hardships.

Walk cycles sound like a simple animation, but they can be challenging to animators of all levels. A character's walk can say a lot about their personality, objective, mood etc. This is why it is vital to first understand the character's intent and persona before you sit down and start key framing away. Spending time focusing on a character's walk has also taken me back to recall the basics (or principles) for animation.
If you forgot what those principles are--you can find it here.

I will confess, throughout this week I have made a ton of mistakes and it not only resulted in bad animation, but a lot of time spent on creating bad animations. Here are some solutions to my hurdles:

1. Know your character.
Even if your character is just holding an ice cream cone, there is still a sense of personality behind it. How do they stand? What is their posture like? Do they hold it with both hands or double fist the cones? It's important to know WHO they are and what their intention is.

2. Reference! (Here is that preach again).
The internet holds so many clips and videos that we can use! If there is a video that you want to use for reference-go for it! Also keep in mind that you should also record yourself going through the motion as well. Feeling the motion of the body mechanics goes a long way. Without reference, you're making it up from you're memory bank...therefore it might not come out as believable to viewers.

3. Less is more.
Subtleties can make a huge difference! It's great to toss in some rotation into your characters shoulders, but don't have it rotate to the extreme! Sometimes just throwing in a little bit of rotation or translation here and there can make your character more believable.

4. Graph editor - take advantage of it!
In 3D animation, I often forget myself to clean up my graph editor. Eventually it's peppered with keys and ends up looking like mocap data! If your character's limbs are "popping" or things seem to be off, chances are the graph editor just needs to be tweaked. This is crucial in cyclic animations because you must make sure the tangents connect in order to have it run smoothly. This thing might seem scary when you open it, but do not worry--it will become your best friend.

5. Grease pencil.
Maya 2014 has a new feature called "grease pencil" and it is AMAZING! Why was I still using the 2013 version? Anyways--Grease pencil allows you to draw over your animations making it extremely helpful if you need to fix poses. No more screen caps being tossed in Photoshop and doodled over :).


Happy animating.