Animating with a grin

Or: How to get from A to B in an efficient manner.

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!