a) In order to keep frame-updates as close to real-time as possible, make sure you have shortcuts that allow you to show/hide characters and important parts of the scenery quickly. Shelf buttons or Display Layers work best for me.

b) Have a low-res version of each character, that you can manipulate and playblast quickly. This might not be crucial during blocking, but the more breakdowns you add, the more a heavy rig will slow down your workflow. The switch between low-res and high-res model should be easy. Again I recommend a shelf-button for that.

c) The last part is the only one you can´t “do” later on in case you left it out. It´s also the most complex to grasp – Gimbal Lock. Lets not talk or try to explain the issue of Gimbal Lock here. Instead lets look at it in its practical application, or better, how to avoid it from the start. For this, we need to set a much seen but also much ignored attribute, the Rotate Order.

In the following example, lets choose the best rotation order for the head. Before you can do this however, you need to roughly know what your character will be doing during the shot. Lets say that for this example, the character is answering a couple of questions and he´s gonna shake his head “No” and “Yes”. He´s not gonna tilt his head a whole lot.

As you can see, the Rotate Order is set to “zxy”, which translate roughly to the following:

- z is gonna be trouble.

- x is gonna be ok-ish.

- y is gonna be cool.

To make a point, the rotate tool is set to “gimbal”.  This is crucial when setting the Rotate Order initialy. Later you can go back to  “local” or “global” if you want to, but for the setup, bear with this.

Lets see what´s going to happen when we rotate around y:

Everything looks good, right? That´s because Y is last in the Rotate Order and our best friend.

Onward to number two in command, X:

As you can see, nooooot perfect. Our friend Y isn´t listening to what number two is saying, and just stays where it´s at. I bet you can see how this might be problematic at times? If you wonder why you see this happen – well, because you´re in gimbal rotation mode! You see the real deal!

On to the underdog – Z:

Uh-oh! Z is doing it´s thing, and no one follows.  But since there´s no head tilting going on in the shot we planned out, this is not going to be a problem.  Someone has to be the underdog, so lets use someone we don´t need too much anyway.

Thinking about this beforehand, and setting the Rotate Order right (don´t change it once you´ve started animating!), should get you much cleaner Animation Curves, you´re less in danger of running into gimbal lock, and you´re going to have an easier time polishing your animation using the Graph Editor .

One last thing:

Number two – X (the “nod”) – can really screw things up if it´s rotated anywhere around the 90° area. Then it will be close or identical with that other curve, Y, and you run into real, genuine, costs-a-helluvatime-to-fix gimbal lock.

For the longest time I was pretty vague what my particular workflow was. Of course I knew I´d go from a rough blocking to a finer blocking, somewhen spline the whole thing (hoping that for once I wouldn´t get the spliny mess that it nevertheless always became) and then polish until my time ran out and someone came knocking on the door asking for the shot.
Basicaly, I knew what I was doing. But all too often I would ask myself if this is the right time to spline or if I should block some more, or maybe just block a little more on the arms but leave everything else alone, etc. If you don´t know what you´re doing and where in the process you´re at, there´s another problem – interpolating when the whole darn thing is going to be finished!

So, I figured it´s time to put the thinking hat on (it´s quite large and embroidered with aluminium foil stars) and put an end to this chaos aka misery. While animating shots, I´ve put my vague workflow through some trial and error procedures to find out what´s working and what´s not, and further more, why it´s working in the first place. If at all, that is. And also, how long – in proportion to the rest – each step is taking. That´d make it a lot easier to estimate if the shot´s going to be finished in time.

Here´s the outline of my workflow, after the planning is done and Maya fired up:

1) Setup the scene (S)

2) Basic Blocking (B1)
2b) Cleanup Pass (B1CUP)

3) Advanced Blocking (B2)
3b) Cleanup Pass (B2CUP)

4) Detailed Blocking (B+)
4b) Cleanup Pass (B+CUP)

5) Splining and Refining (P1)

[Optional: 6) Spline Cleanup (P2) ]

7) Polishing Pass (P3)

Each step starts at a very defined point in the process, has a clear set of tasks that the shot needs to undergo in that step, and a clear end.

In the following posts I´ll describe what each of these steps is about.

Happy animating!

In the past months I´ve learned quite a lot about my prefered workflow, and I think I actually managed to nail it down and – even more importantly – define precisely what I´m doing, when I´m doing it and how I´m moving along from setup to polish. I´d like to get this down here in a series of posts. As they say – you onlyl really understood something if you´re able to explain it. Or something like that. So, lets see.

Woohooo! It seems the blog is up and running. It´s been a while since I last posted. Merely 2 years or so – over at my old blog michaelherold.blogspot.com, back from the early animationmentor days. Anyways, I´m back and kicking, and I´m going to fill this place here with a lot of stuff that´s been flying around in the back of my mind for quite an animated while now!

Over and out (for now)