Blocking with "paired keys"

[robcat2075]

Blocking is the early step in the animation process where you get your essential storytelling poses on camera with minimal attention to the transitions between them. It lets you test out the essential look and timing of your scene before you put a lot of time into refining the motion

 

I prefer to block with "paired keys" because it's easy to edit and experiment with and gives me a bit of automatic transition between my poses and not the sudden pop that strictly"held" poses would have.

 

BlockingPairedKeysH300.mov

[markw]

Blocking is the early step in the animation process where you get your essential storytelling poses on camera with minimal attention to the transitions between them. It lets you test out the essential look and timing of your scene before you put a lot of time into refining the motion

 

I prefer to block with "paired keys" because it's easy to edit and experiment with and gives me a bit of automatic transition between my poses and not the sudden pop that strictly"held" poses would have.

 

BlockingPairedKeysH300.mov

Thanks Robert, another gem to add to the colection

[Rodney]

These are the kind of tutorials I really wish I had access to when I was first starting out with computer animation.

Of course, video tutorials were a lot harder to come by back then.

[mouseman]

Excellent concepts covered!

 

The only suggestion I could have come up with is that it might have been nice to bring up the "Hold" and "Transition" terminology as you were going through the first few poses instead of after you had gone through all of the key frames and started looking through the channels.

 

One concept that was important for me to learn in animating in general was that movement (as well as lack of movement) generally begins in one place and ends in another, and the animator must explicitly specify both the beginning and ending points. This paired keys method makes that concept explicit.

[Gerry]

Good one as usual, Robert!

[Kamikaze]

Robcat,

 

These are a really BIG help to me trying to get back into A:M , animating humans and the such, not very good at it but this gets the ball rolling .....so a Big THANKS.

 

MIke C

[robcat2075]

Blocking situations where there are not occasions to hold a pose go like this:

 

Simple IK Leg Walk (Post #20)

 

It is similar in that you are nailing down the essential landmark poses of your performance, but since there are no poses held it is a succession of unique Keyframes rather than pairs. Then you go back to refine the transistions.