Creating an animation short, do you have some tips for animating ?.

hi,
I’ve been rigging human models before, but so far only to render them in stills.
As i like to experiment with blender, this time i created a more simple model (ea no fingers), and a more simple body shape.
But now i wonder where do i go from here ?.

Is it common then to go for a walk cycle, or for animation shorts is everything animated p frame individually
(like stop motion animations). Are there some general tips maybe ?.
I never really tried character animation before so i’m curious this part maybe is not technical (like rigging) but i could use some tips.

It’s entirely up to you.

My advice to you is learn Rigify+Pitchipoy or BlenRig. Blenrig is more complicated to setup and it’s far less customizable but it gives a more friendly rig (but also lower frame rate). Pitchipoy’s rig is (IMO) better than the default metarig and it comes with a face but you can remove that if you don’t need to animate the face.

I suggest you do pose-to-pose for the core motions (feet+pelvis+hands), then pose-to-pose for the in-between motions such as the feet in the air before touching the ground or the hand on the side of the body (instead of going through it), then do frame-by-frame for secondary motion (torso rotation/ shoulder movement/ breathing/ etc) and using [Alt]+[mouse-wheel] to cycle through the frames making sure they’re transitioning to each other correctly.

At the pose-to-pose steps, you should play the animation (Alt+A) and adjust the keyframes in the Dopesheet Editor to adjust the timing and switch the sync-mode to AC-Sync so that the animation always play with the correct timing (even if it doesn’t run at the correct fps).

This videois about pose-to-pose vs straight-ahead animation from the 12 Principles of Animation.
It’s easier to tweak a rig than it is to tweak a 3D animation than it is for a 2D drawing but it’s up to you to decide how you go about making your frames.

I have an 11-button mouse (with two extra middle-mouse-button clicks) and what I did with Blender was add a bunch of hotkeys to them for timeline navigation and keyframing (and other stuff). I mention that because by default, it’s more difficult to jump around frames, whereas I’ve set it up for me to easily jump around the animation to tweak whatever.

When you get a good handle on how animation works, I suggest you look into bone-constraints.
I found that animating with constraints by adding them for whatever and whenever you want on/with your control bones (the bones you animate with, not the deformation bones) allows you to automate some actions for only the frames you want them to, like locking the bone to an object/location or vice-versa, or limiting the distance so the bone can’t collide with something (pseudo collision).

Before you start animating, you need to have a proper animation rig set up.
By proper, I don’t mean advanced with all the little doohickeys like Rigify/BlenRig, I mean something comfortable to animate with; an FK-only rig is terrible for animation but there was this guy I spoke to that said he uses only the default-FK bones and that learning IK would be too much effort/hassle/complicated for him (I forget which) and so he breaks the rig a bit to get his animation working.

Point is, you need IK.
Rigify/BlenRig gives you a more automated setup so you can start animating faster, rather than learning all the rigging and constraints stuff

ok hm i made the armature myself, its not that hard for me, but i’m going to dive into IK as well, and setting some bone constrains.
BTW i added a few shapekeys to do facial and hand animations (hands are easey only grab and stretch (as he has no fingers).

The problem to me more where do i go from here i have a model…so whats next :wink: beeing new to thinking about this subject.

But i think you made it allready clear that walk cycles is usually not a part of what i want to do, thats more the gaming area; its stop motion from here. so i got to make a small simple story line easy enough to render in a short time

Like yourself, I wanted to get into animation, and the first animation I did was a walkcycle. Why? Because that’s what the tutorial taught. Anyway, I did a couple more animations for the Blender Animation Challenge, (BAC) here on the forum. It was a member ran contest, like the weekend challenge, but was for animation. I even won one of them, but to be honest, at that point in time, interest & participation in the challenges was dropping off. It’s easy to win when there’s no one to compete with…

I entered the 11 second club monthly animation contest a few times, and always did poorly at it. I always posted on their forum my WIP, and posted it here. Got good feedback over there, not so much here, During the voting period, you can leave feedback on the clips you vote for. Some comments on my work was that I needed to get the basics down better.

Animation is easy, but good animation requires a bit of work. I just wanted to animate a character and didn’t want to waste my time learning how to make bouncing ball animation. Animating a ball bouncing is easy, right? Why would I want to do that?

Well, last time I played with animation, I was doing bouncing ball exercises. And I’ve learned some things along the way. So don’t put off the basics, like a walkcycle.

If you want to do a walkcycle where the character walks forward, you need IK legs. If it’s walking in place, like on a treadmill, you don’t need IK on the legs.

I think a walkcycle is a great place to start, it’s basic.

Here’s the best animation I’ve done: http://vimeo.com/117460959
And I’m learning how to make balls bounce…

Start simple… and have fun with it…

Randy

Some Pointers for Animating

Plan your scenes ahead of time:

  • What sequences of actions will you keyframe?
  • What props will you need?
  • What camera angles will you use?

Break down each scene into shorter action sequences.

Animate each action sequence separately.

Animate main actions first, add secondary actions later - e.g. body movements before facial expressions.

Keyframe the start and end points of an action first, then add in-between keyframes to refine the movement further.

Pay special attention to timing. Make sure movements look realistic. Use timing for effect.

Check the timing of actions by running short test animations, and adjust keyframes as needed.

Keep the scenes for your test animations as short and simple as possible to speed up their render times. Put unneeded props on a separate layer to temporarily hide them during rendering.

Add background actions to long scenes that have little foreground action.

@Razorblade and anyone else new:
To clarify what Anthony Forwood was saying, by action, he means motion.
You can create multiple actions but for that kind of animation, you would need to learn about the NLA Editor to put them together.

The method he’s describing is animating in passes/layers, with the same [blender] action, not animating with multiple [blender] actions.
If you learned the NLA Editor, you could do either (one action or multiple), it’d just become a matter of personal preference.

Sorry I used confusing terminology. @Edtion is right about what I meant by “action”.

I’m still learning… :eyebrowlift:

I haven’t figured out how to use Blender actions for animating. I think they’re more useful for the BGE.

Bone poses are useful for marking start/end points of action sequences (particularly when they repeat), but the most realistic looking movements come from just manually moving and keyframing things. If you use poses, you should alter the keyframes a bit after setting them, so the poses aren’t always identical.

I’m not sure what the difference is between animating in passes and animating in layers. I guess a pass refers to a run through the frames being worked on, while a layer refers the transform channels being worked on?

Planning ahead is very important. I get all these ideas of what I want to animate, but I don’t have the necessary props, so I can’t try them out until I get the props. I end up spending a lot of time creating props.

Animations can be pretty boring to watch when there’s not a lot going on, so I like to add little details and background activity to keep the audience entertained or at least have something to look at. The more there is to look at, the more likely they’ll watch again.

Creating short scenes is best to start with. If you plan them properly, you can incorporate them into a larger animation later on. A lack of background props can be got around by strategic camera placement.

No, passes are…it’s what you were trying to say and what I said in the initial post.
You animate important things, then go back and continually add secondary/less import things (that still improve the animation).
Layers is a more literal example (though passes is kind of a literal wording too, like passing through, dropping off things during each run through).

Layers are what people use in 2D images. They create some effect that either adds to or completely replaces things from the previous layers (but not everything), while always leaving the option to go back and modify any of the layers.
This is more literal because like in 2D, the NLA editor starts from the bottom then overlays the layers above.

You can use it for reusing older animation if you want, or you could use it the way I intend to, which is by create animation on the fly and overlay the motions.

In case you’re not getting what I keep saying by overlay the animation, here’s an example.
[Walk Cycle] [Run Cycle] [Jumping] [Punch]

You could combine these motions in any order you want while also looping them and changing their speed. If you separate them into multiple actions like torso/upper-body and legs/lower-body, you could make [running punch] / [running jump] / [walking stretch] animations and more if you get creative with them.

Since you don’t use it, I’ll tell you this: when animating, you’re always using the NLA Editor, it’s just going on in the background.
If you open it, you’ll see that all your animated objects are already in it. They all have an orange strip (if using default color theme) and there’s two arrows pointing down in the panel; if you click it, it will store the animation action you currently had loaded in the object. If you try to animate it again (without selecting that block that was created), it will create a new action above the previous action.

The orange strip is the currently used action and is an auto-created temp version of the darker blocks.