Animating with a grin

I´ve learned the hard way to go through each of the following steps before I start animating on a scene. Whenever I forget one or choose to leave on out, I regret it down the road.

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.