Don't waste time with your Animation Blocking - Full Spline-Blocking Timelapse with voiceover

foreign [Music] so in this video I want to talk about the blocking pass of the ano2 assignment the weight shift step over so here is my blocking pass which I'll just play for you now quickly and in this video instead of going through a step-by-step tutorial I wanted to film a time lapse and I will talk over the time lapse explaining my thought processes and what I'm doing as you watch the video if you want to see a full real-time speed of this video you can set your YouTube speed to 0.25 and it should be perfect real-time playback um if there's any questions please let me know but otherwise enjoy the video and I hope it helps okay so here we are in Maya and you can see that I'm really working on my first pose your first pose is really important because of course it does set the foundation for where you're going and how the shot starts so you should spend a good 30 minutes on your first pose especially if it's a really big acting shot with lots of attitude and personality in this assignment I've definitely rushed it slightly because I'm trying to get through the work and I want to just practice on the workflow but even so you'll see this is my sort of most sort of thorough pose in this very first pass now sadly my reference I didn't film my right arm or the screen left arm which was a problem so I should have filmed this reference better however luckily I do manage to find something that works now I do set up my shots so I work on eights normally so I'll spend you know every eight frames I'll spend a good time making a pose um but I do quite a quick and rough part of everything on eights and then I'll go back and break it down to fours and if needed some sections I need to go to twos which you'll see later however I do think that some shops require different workflow and this isn't the only way I work sometimes I might do a LED approach and I might focus on one curve and One controller and get it really working quite nicely and sometimes I will stick to more Straight Ahead going on twos the whole way through I have found that for my speed and being as quick as possible getting a really quick overview of the shot on eights allows me to go back and make really quick changes to the poses the timing and all of the individual curves so eight is how I set up my shots it's so fast and it's just really good to see what your shot will look like and you get it in front of the director and show them what you're doing and you get feedback early and feedback is really important especially when working with directors and people who are in control of the work above you in the in the pipeline and they can give you feedback quickly so you can make adjustments quickly now another thing you may notice is I'm working with auto spline turned on and if your PC is quick enough for this I think it's really useful because an issue I've seen is the way that people understand the term is blocking explaining and polishing and I think it's slightly confusing when I ask students if they've seen their shots in spline and they say no and I don't understand why you wouldn't use the software or use the technology to have a look at what your shot looks like in its final sort of speed I should say blocking is really very deceptive if you block out something on Falls it might look quite Snappy and quite fast but you'll be missing poses and you'll be missing the key timing information that your eyes can't quite pick up on until you see this in spline so I am constantly scrubbing through my timeline as you can see to see if the poses feel natural and if they feel like they're flowing between one another but however even if I do Block in this Auto spline mode I will always be showing my work in steps the reason for this is blocked mode is a storytelling mode you're telling the audience or your director the main poses and the main story that's going on and they can give you feedback on the actual layout for the composition and the Beats of the shot if you submit something which is in rough spline you're going to get a very confusing set of feedback notes which you say like I'll fix this leg or This Blink is wrong or maybe his eye dark is not working but really you're still focusing on the Cog and getting the body mechanics working so if you want to get actual feedback on your shot and the story always submit in stepped so you'll see me at the end of this blocking pass I go back make sure everything is keyed on every single um eights or fours so I can make a really clean and stepped and play blast so the other thing you might realize is that I'm definitely working with the Cog quite a lot from the start so in this very first pass I haven't opened the graph editor yet but you'll see very soon I open up the graph editor and really try to clean up that blocking pass this is another thing I think people get confused by they see the word blocking and they think oh that's rough animation your blocking should be pretty good your blocking should almost be polish if done correctly especially for some of those really big curves like I'm looking now at my sort of COG I'm going to see okay this looks a bit rough let's see how I can adjust this so I start adjusting some of the translate X's I I still think this is blocking I don't call this splining because I'm not really splatting the shot I'm pushing streams I'm not trying to make massive timing changes yet I'm trying to get the flow of the poses and the flow of the shot and you can see here that I also use the motion Trails quite a lot in blocking motion trials especially for arcs really help you understand the flow of the shot as I said um and it's something that people say to me is cheating or it's not you know you don't need it until polish to polish the arcs but like I said polish animation should be done in blocking I'm polishing I think is more of a cleanup and also adding those nuggets or cherries on top it's not about making your animation work your animation should work from blocking so really make sure that when you're going through your blocking paths you're really checking those arcs checking the spacing you're checking how your sort of mechanics are working so now I've blocked out on eights mostly I'm going in and adding my poses at this stage I do slightly lose focus sometimes and I kind of so at this stage you could show this to a director and you can see that the shot does work you know there is the poses are there and it's clear what the story of the shot is so if you're looking for acting notes or composition notes this is a good time to submit your work and if you wanted to join the dailies this would be something I could definitely give feedback on um but like I said the mechanics aren't there yet the mechanics are really rough the body is moving sort of very statically so now I'm going to go in and start breaking down some of those movements so I'm still blocking here like I may be adjusting the curves but I'm still blocking because I wanted to make sure that those rotations are already kind of built into the blocking so some people they say that you must or you can take all your curves and you can just select everything and shift them two keys and shift them four keys to get overlap that does work for maybe like a tail sometimes but for the body that really doesn't work because there's so many small adjustments being made um and you want to have real control over where your overlap is so I build this overlap in from the very start of my blocking so you can see here this is why I have the The View on the left hand side for the graph editor it makes it so easy to just go in and check which curves offsetting where where the extremes are for my you know individual chest muscles so chest controllers and it's never going to be a perfect offset but it does help me get a starting point so I know where I should be sort of adjusting from but like I said this can be changed later and it can be adjusted at any time and that's another reason why I really think this workflow works because I'm still keeping things all locked down on the same key and I can make timing changes curve changes and really quickly the only downside is you can see I'm doing a lot of adjustment of Curves so it does take a little bit of time to make these curves flow whereas a layered approach if you were just keying the extremes of movement would be two keys one for the up one for the down that workflow is quicker however I really don't think you have the same level of control unless you're really really aware of what you're doing so this is why I prefer to do the spline blocking as I say because you have control you have accuracy but you also have speed um and again my setup my hotkeys and my my layout is is what this what makes this so fast for me because I really can just spend all my time blocking with no real issues with you know the UI or preferences but you can tell I really do spend a good amount of time on these curves like this is a good half an hour just on this this one set of Curves on this rotor X so the rotate Z but it's really important for this movement especially I'm moving side to side I really want to make sure that the side overlap is built in so now I'm breaking it down even further going to twos this section I feel does need a bit of care and love there's lots of moving Parts um and while I'm maybe some curves I've put way too many keys and the splining and the curves may look slightly soft at this stage again I want to have control I want to make sure that everything is working well and while I may be working in the graph editor I'm still making sure that my posing looks good I don't want my poses to look bad even if it looks smooth in the graph editor and make sure you're always checking the viewport and sometimes I'm barely looking at the graph editor I have the sort of muscle memory down I know what keys I'm on what I'm doing so I know that I can just look at the viewport and make those changes in the graph editor because I'm really focusing on the graph editor sorry I'm really focusing on the viewport so this stage I'm now moving away from the rotate Zed you don't want to get too stuck on one location because everything is related right so I've done a lot of work on the rotate Zed let's now focus on some other controllers of the Cog and I can go back and forth between them and you'll see I'm really not happy with this translate X so I'm trying new things it takes me to near the end of my blocking pass to really get something I'm happy with but I do change it a lot during this shot and my reference is also really important my reference is is there and I am definitely not following it one to one I'm not rotoscoping as much but I am using it a lot to see where the weight's going where the momentum is going in the arms the head movements as well they're really nice and especially for your like initial weight transfer blocking party do you want to see what you're doing in your reference as I keep blocking more and more I'm definitely using my reference less and less but if it wasn't there this shot would be 10 times slower and 10 times harder foreign you can see there if I don't like the curve itself I just delete the keys and let my in between for me and then I can re-key them again it is important to re-key them for me at least because again I do want to keep that control later on so as you can see I'm going back and forth and still reworking on the Cog and the chest it's really important like I said to get this working first and again I'm deleting some keys letting Maya in between for me and then I re-keying them again just to maintain that control there's lots of repetition and it does take some practice but you'll see that when possible I'm just trying to save myself time and let Maya do the work for me but even in this blocking pass I want to maintain some really smooth curves and that bouncing board assignment you do in class one those rules apply to every single controller every single sort of key and you want to maintain that ease in ease out and later on when you start to spline it and the Polish it you can start pushing these curves more and at this point the arm I wasn't happy with the arm so I'll try to fix this a bit and I went away from my reference for my first sort of arm pass and as you'll see later on I really stick to the reference more and more I wasn't happy with what I did and this is a really good example of when Maybe I try something new without referencing and without planning and it didn't work it backfired so I wasted time blocking out the arm I'm not having to redo it all completely and that's another thing I'm probably doing wrong here is my reference is completely hidden and even if I am trying to guess and work things out by myself having it visible yeah should be better and right now I realize that so I'm not moving back to the whole screen and now I'm making sure everything is key correctly going through my entire shot because sometimes when you're blocking this way there might be frames missing on certain keyframes so for example I've blocked out the Cog the chest and the neck but my shoulder and arm have not been keyed this makes it harder to sort of do a stepped play blast and you want to make sure you do check that out from time to time so I've then shortened down the timeline to just 35 frames and definitely working in sections can help you here because you want to make sure that your focusing and refining the curves on sort of small details first and moving on it's a lot more simple and a lot easier to handle if you break it down into sections I'm working on the arm again looking from the side looking from the front because they look quite good from the front but I realized from the from the side the arms are way too far forward it does make a difference and it is noticeable however I'm not really focusing on the wrists or the fingers yeah I haven't even keyed the fingers as you can tell I just set them to zero zero zero and left them with that things like the fingers and that sort of overlap I definitely wait until late spline and early polish there's no point focusing on things like fingers and Tails and hair when the mechanics aren't working so don't worry about the fingers it went on later but here I'm refining the product I want to make sure that the the hand is clear of the chest any frame where the fingers or the elbow or the arm is like tangenting with the body or the leg you want to try and avoid that sometimes it's impossible but you do want to try it when possible to keep a nice clean posing to all of your frames so add some more frames to my timelines 10 more frames to see where the arm is going through definitely a very back and forth process and I might do the arms for a bit go back to the Cog your building in layers of animation and you're building in like the structure as you go you realize things have to be you know changed so don't set yourself up for failure by sticking to just one pose and then never changing it and please also be comfortable with deleting poses especially when you're doing maybe your key poses at the start of your shot if your pose isn't reading um but you've already blocked out let's say 50 frames please go back and delete things and just redo them completely from scratch you'll save time in the long run especially when I was in class three in class four I would try to edit and change poses and it would just be a nightmare trying to fix things because it was fundamentally broken just make sure that if you do make changes don't be afraid to delete like a whole pose or even a whole section and if you get notes from your Mentor or something where they want a massive arm change or a massive head change or the accents need to be shifted differently you know if you can do it with small changes that's great but again if you have to delete 10 frames just delete these frames redo it and you'll save save yourself some time so these arms are still quite rough but I want to try and get the curve to be smoother and make sure that nothing is broken even at this stage I think looking back at this video the shoulders could do some have some work done to them but the final play Blast for this video which is my just my blocking pass I would say it's definitely very very rough like it does need a lot of Polish a lot of refinement and while the Cog may be working quite well it doesn't mean that I can just call it a Dame spline it if I hit Auto spline and then submit the work I'm not I'm selling myself short so now you see these lines are all flat which is in the um the rotation which isn't always bad like sometimes they are flat but I just want a little bit of movement there especially in the upper chest I'm trying to get a little bit of rotations in there for the back and forth because for the good first half of this blocking I wasn't happy with the way the character settled I felt like he was sort of abruptly stuffing and there's too much of a angle shift in his body he was standing upright and then he was just being stationary to hear anything I'm reducing the amount of rotation and I'm trying to make him move it easy again I'm doing this on the side this is a rotation X so this is a size of back and forth movement so looking from the side is really important and I realize the feet also in this section while I do focus on the feet more when I'm splining you need to have the the rough spacing of the feet correct so this placement is way too soft so I'm making sure that I do have a little bit more of a impact on the feet and then also having this translate X sort of rotate back and overshoot which doesn't happen in my assignment but I think sometimes you have to make sacrifices and make changes and I think to sell the weight shift I have to have an overshoot and settle so these are these animation principles that you know are really important again back to the Cog making adjustments I'm never happy with the Cog in all my shots always for the Cog could be improved but if the Cog is slightly wrong you'll find problems down the line I think in a second I that should change or I do undo yeah undo everything here I didn't like any of it so I went back to the original one thing I always felt that other people do which I was really jealous of is they block up their shots they hit spline they refine their curves and then they polish and that isn't really how things work though because as you can see I'm always having to make changes and fighting the curves I'm really like struggling to get something I like and I I assume that I was a bad animator for having to redo things and make changes but that's just the case of every animator you're always making changes always refining and you always find issues with your animation but as you can see I really haven't done much to like the fingers the feet the toes even the neck and header kind of slightly um neglected here and it's really fast to get this sort of blocking done but the one thing also to remember through this whole thing is I'm always aware of where the weight is so where the force is coming from and where the the weight is going to which really helps with blocking out and animating because if you can just understand that everything has Force and inertia and how that affects the things around it it'll really help you understand how things move so for my class 2 assignment I did a man blowing in the wind or the Stella blowing in the wind and that was a really hard shot but it really had to make me think about the way forces affect things and I think that single shot was the biggest benefit and help to my animation Journey because by understanding where things are going and how things are affected by the Wind by Gravity by any Force um you can then understand body mechanics to a deeper level finally this left arm or screen left arm was really annoying me I had to fix this it was catching my eye too much and I had to sort of make some changes so again I tried to stick to my reference here for the end because this is where the arm is visible so I'm kind of working backwards in a way trying to guess where the arm would be which is the wrong thing I should have filmed a better reference and changed my camera um and I this ending I felt really was really confusing because there was a nice little bounce on the hips with my hand and I couldn't quite capture that and it was a little bit frustrating but um again in Polish I can definitely work on it more when I was Finding I can sort of play with those kinds more but even the initial blocking Parts I want to get pretty pretty far close to perfect but I think this took me a good 20 minutes just this one little 15 20 frame section then make sure the right arm and left arm all in sync so I'm adding in my drag you see that they left the left or the screen left arm is dragging um a little bit you want to try and offset things with their spacing so the chest is obviously dragging behind the hips the arm drags behind the chest and the head also drags behind the chest slightly in this movement but some movements of course it can be inverted and sometimes the head is the first movement sometimes the um the hands move first it does depend on the action but in this action the hips are very clearly the driving force so that's what I'm using as my initial point of reference again fixing curves again this is definitely blocking I would not consider the splining for my workflow this is my blocking pass so these flat these flat curves this is bad this is what I've basically keyed things on the fee the relevant keto on four so frame 21 frame 25 29 Etc I haven't done movement on those curves which is bad especially for the arms or for the limbs unless they're stuck to something like stuck down on a table if there's any movement in the hips like you're walking or jumping or anything there will always be movement on other body parts so whenever you make a key or make a blocking pose you always want to make sure everything has some movement now don't over animate and make everything you know run around or flail around like a crazy person but if it's completely still then the audience will definitely notice that so you want to make sure there's something even if they can't see it they can feel it that's the thing we're going for here now you may see that there's alanbot at the bottom of my screen put the plugin Please be aware I'm not using animot though anything I've done in this video it's been all with the default Maya and even right now I've used none of my plugins even the ones I talked about in my previous video at this stage I don't need any of them I'm just using default Maya and default sort of default work okay that was the play the block pass um hopefully it made sense and it's useful if you have any questions please feel free to ask me on the campus or on the YouTube comments and I'll be getting back to the Polish pass and the spine pass in the next couple of days thank you and see you next time bye foreign [Music]

Channel: Fergus_3D

Views: 15,540

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Id: krBewln1FU8

Length: 29min 51sec (1791 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 11 2023