—-Notes
Blocking
Stepped Key Poses
Fundamental approach
Easy to Edit
Inner Monologue Timing Tool
Arcs
Weight Check
Compare Thumbnails
Watch at Speed
Blocking is essentially the skeleton of the body!
We want to add in the bare bones of the shot which we primarily want to start off with our key poses or story telling beats.
It is always a good rule of thumb to be posing out your character in your perspective view and not your shot camera view since you can make sure it looks good from multiple angles.
• A nice quick way to get blocking done especially if you have similar poses going on throughout the animation is to copy those poses other and just give them slight translation and rotation adjustments so they are not the same.
Make sure you include the hand/fingers in your blocking on the key poses! They don’t need to look amazing but a nice rough pose especially if it helps the rest of the pose will help you a lot later down the line when it comes to spline and polish.
Don’t rely too heavily on the timing of your reference out this point just be sure to utilize the thumbnail/sketches of the poses you have and just capture those. There is no need to be super in depth about where certain things move or how long it takes this early on just trust in your drawings and create your poses off that first. Then once you have done that then you can go back and make a timing/clean up pass using your reference to help you a bit but that is only if you are having a hard time.
Be sure to use FK/IK where it is needed! If you are making a character rotate like a flip or some kind of roll and you have IK on the feet, you will have to set a key on those feet quite a lot but just as your character leaves the ground to do this flip or roll you can switch it to FK and avoid all those unnecessary keys and instead utilize the free animation you get from it. Another reason for this is that you can get something called gimble lock where you start creating multiple rotations and maya doesn’t understand the correct rotation order causing things to go crazy. You will only need to adjust these IK/FK controls when you character leaves/touches the ground.
Homework 02
Finished not perfect!
Next week I want “finished” blocking not perfect blocking of the key poses and maybe some breakdowns. If you work in spline switch it to stepped before you show me!
the assignment is….
- Block out your shot, including your main keys and breakdowns. Poses should be clear, dynamic, and appropriate for the theme you have picked.
- Frame Limit: 120 – 240 frames IN 24FPS. No moving cameras for this shot. Keep focused on the character action and make sure it reads clearly. Avoid using constraints on this first shot.
- Keep the technical aspects of your shot simpler for at least this first go.
—-Work
