Divide and Conquer

One of these days I was once again presented with an everyday situation that I somehow connected to animation in my train of thoughts. I was (not so) happily typing a 50ish numbers long code to pay a bill and in the middle of it there were a bunch of zeros, have you ever tried counting repeated numbers side by side? It's sort of an eye scrambler. Take a look at these three situations (bear with me, I promise it has something to do with animation), in which one are you be able to count the zeros faster?

1. 000000000000
2. 0000 0000 0000
3. 00 00 00 00 00 00

It's clearly 2, right? On 1 with the numbers close together, it's easy to lose track of which ones you already counted, on 2 the numbers are grouped in chunks which makes it easy to lay an eye on it and figure out the total count, on 3 it's better than 1 but the chunks are too small so it takes longer to process the information.

What does this have to do with animation? Well, the same concept can be applied, animation is a cumbersome task, there's a lot of information to process in the timeline, in the viewport, on references, on the rig. I believe our brains (at least us mortals) are not great at focusing on many individual things, so when we isolate the information it's way easier to process, but, as we saw above, dividing our attention too much makes us lose some overall understanding as well.

With that mentality, here are some ideas of how you can apply this to animation, to help your brain crush it:

• Streamlined Workflow: try to stick to an organized workflow and don't skip steps, split your stages well for yourself, even if your show doesn't require you to do so. Planning, Blocking, Polishing is a neat concept, no need to reinvent the wheel much here. Focus on one task at a time, trying to always take a step back and look at the whole, it's easy to lose yourself in a detail that won't make sense in the end.

• Split a long shot in chunks: this one is very well known, to deal with longer shots, you can break them up in 2 or 3 time slider chunks so you can focus on each at a time. You need to spend some time after, making sure everything is sown together well, but the amount of time you save by splitting the chunks easily makes up for that. There are some tools that help to work this way, maya's timeslider bookmarkers, animbot as well.

• Focus on main controllers first: figure out which controllers are the most important to block your character and work on those for a long time, usually 1 to 10 controllers. In a full body shot usually COG, Spine, Head and IKs will do the bulk of the work, on a close up it could be as little as chest, head, jaw. High end rigs have a ton of controllers that you don't need to think about for a while, some of them you might not even use ever, there are some that are redundancies, just options to use in a few different situations or depending on the preference.

• Isolate Mesh and polish the Core: on polishing, it helps to isolate the character's main motion driver, generally that means the torso/hips, but each shot will have a chunk of mesh that will be the driver, sometimes it could be the head on a closer camera, sometimes a hand. The idea is to hide popping IKs and anim that is not cleaned up yet so you can focus on the main masses first. If you're able to nail the polishing of that, everything starts to fall into place, it's like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, you start from the edges and everything else start to make sense. Careful to not go to far on isolating every body part, you might lose track of the whole and lose connectivity.

• Focused references: get references for specific areas, like a foot peel of, foot landing, idle movements, facial movements, etc. It really helps to add complexity to your shot. You force yourself to create nuance to smaller parts of the body. These refs don't even need to be shot specific, I feel like it's more per character, and you'll have a pool that you can pick from, what fits and supports your shot the best.

• Isolate curves on Animation Layer: your graph editor can get pretty crazy once you started detailing or polishing your shot. It's a good idea to create animation layers to control jiggles, breathing, overall noise. It's much easier to figure out these extra motions from a zeroed out spline than a complicated one full of ups/downs.

• Changes and Iterations: when you're working on a shot it's not uncommon to get up to 30ish notes between the notes you get from sups/leads and the notes you write up for yourself, so it's easy to get lost in them. Get into the habbit of doing a quick mental triage and focus on the main ones, those that will carry the biggest impact on your shot.

• Multiple characters: this is going to sound obvious, but when working in shots with more than one character you should always try to find the hero of that shot, or if that shifts, find the moments each character has the spotlight. This will help you not only animate each one faster but also will give you clarity on which character is the audience's focus and you will be able to help direct their eyes to it.

In conclusion, you see this way of thinking lends itself to almost anything, I would go as far as saying this is a good way to be efficient in life in general. Going one step at a time is less mentally heavy, and usually helps push away procrastination.

Do you feel the same works for you? What are some of the techniques you use? Feel free to comment below.

#animation #training #focus #cgi #vfx #creature #tips #tricks