The 7 Workflows of Professional Animators

one of the most underrated conversations that you can have when it comes to animation is workflow one of my favorite things to discuss is one of my favorite things to learn about and any chance i get to find another animator's workflow see how they work it's different for everybody and that's a good thing there are two main reasons i want to talk about this today number one there's just like i said there's a million ways to do something and animation is such a creative medium that you should never feel stifled or put in a box like oh this is the way to animate there's so many different options so i want to talk about some of them because a lot of the questions that you and i have both had how long should this take you know when should i switch to spline why is this looking like this is there a better way all that kind of stuff workflow is super helpful in kind of deciphering that puzzle that mystery the other thing are the horror stories i keep hearing these horrible horrible stories about people who are spending tons of money to go to colleges usually not the online animation schools they're going to regular universities or colleges private and public and they're either not being taught anything about workflow then like i was talking to somebody recently on my patreon who i'm mentoring and i was explaining oh like do you kind of post a post or do maybe more straight ahead something like that she didn't know what i was talking about and that's not her fault because she's paid for this school to show her all this stuff and they failed they've also been putting students in a box and saying no this is the way you have to animate this is how you do it like it needs to look like this no absolutely not that's just if your school experience sounds like that run leave get out like don't listen to that there are so many different ways to do things so i want to talk about that today i want to talk about seven or eight different workflows that i learned about in school i've used i've seen other animators employ and just kind of show you some options that are out there and hopefully this will help you in your next shot when you're working on something to go oh that would have been so much easier or oh i didn't know i could do it that way that's that makes way more sense with the way i work or where i learned so let's list them out the workflows i'm going to talk about today and some of these are going to be different than you think that's probably because they're my names that i gave them and they may go by other names to other people the names don't matter the process is what we care about and by the way if you want to see some of these different workflows in action and see how they're different i'm going to be doing some demos on twitch i'm live twice a week on twitch link below supposed to pose is one of the most common animation workflows you've probably heard of it but if you haven't no worries generally the focus is on individual poses throughout your shot finding your key poses for all these workflows i'm going to have to make up imaginary shots to kind of show you what that workflow would look like if we were animating this so for post to pose let's imagine there's a character they're standing there they're going to receive something they're going to put in their hand they look they react and they want to get rid of it this is where in a post-post workflow often thumbnailing comes into play now i have a video on like do you need drawing skills to be an animator watch that video it's a great video it's one of my favorites that i've made i put a lot of work into it and it should hopefully be helpful but i'm going to start off with some thumbnailing just kind of roughing out some ideas with you know writing it down because it's faster to draw it than it is to pose it so you kind of have a story here but the focus is on the poses these are your main key poses you've got the the initial starting frame character waiting we have the receiving the reaction and the discarding those are the four key poses golden poses storytelling poses there's a lot of different words you've probably heard to describe what these are they're the main things that you would block out to say this is my story you can watch it in stepped and you can kind of get the gist of it so a post opposed animator in 3d would start by blocking these main poses out and then you kind of figure out everything in between how do you get from place to place this workflow usually focuses on pose appeal making sure that things are really pushed focusing on contrast line of action so if you're looking at the line of action of this shot you basically have a character who is straight up and down then they lean forward and you have kind of an inverted c curve as they look at it it reverses the other direction to show contrast a big change of emotion and therefore of everything else and then in this case um another type of reversal so that you kind of have these different moments one of the things that you'll see often in a lot of student work that you want to avoid is the character is kind of always just standing straight up and down the whole way through and there's never any contrast and you don't use all the extra screen space that you have available to you versus if you have the move through the space it's more dynamic i will want to talk about this in future episodes we'll get more in depth on like common mistakes and workflow stuff like that that's all stuff i want to do but today we're talking about workflow and the focus on these poses is obviously why postpose is so popular because with just four simple poses and pushing them and trying to make sure that everything reads properly and it's clear if this is clear chances are your animation will be clear it's just a matter of finding the way to interpolate from these poses in a believable and appealing way let me give you one more quick example that i'm going to use to contrast with straight ahead in a second here's a character who is kind of just sitting perched there waiting let's go with some kind of like assassin's creed type thing they jump land on the person and then you know go to punch the person or you know an assassin's creed it's much worse than that but you get the idea these roughly tell the story of what we're trying to achieve so therefore this is these are our main storytelling golden key poses that we're going to want to block in first to make sure that everything reads properly a good thing about this workflow is that if you can make sure that these poses are all clear and readable and you put them in your animation you have a good chance of making sure that everything's gonna work out the downside to this is that you have no concept of timing timing is one of the trickiest things to nail in a shot and it's one of the most important because obviously you could do this frame one frame two frame three and of course it's gonna go by in like six frames obviously that's not gonna work but you can't make it like even you can be like one ten twenty because it's just gonna be floaty and boring and it's just gonna kind of you know the computer's just gonna interpolate smoothly from all these different you know it's going to be really wishy-washy so the timing is where you take these poses you make sure they're really strong and then you figure out where you hold and how you break down and how you interp interpolate anticipate overshoot beyond them that's like all the rest of animation comes next and as you keep working you're gonna be adding more and more keys maybe you start out by blocking these first six poses then you're like cool now what well you look for the other poses like what else is missing what do you need well you don't have anticipations you don't have overshoot like so then like let's talk about that you're gonna need a frame where the character kind of squashes down right they squash down as an anticipation we need our squash we need our stretch we need the character to anticipate the jump actually physically jump then they can fly through the air but the point is that you're going to have to kind of fill in some of these gaps between things you can't just let the computer go from one to another so you have to figure out okay well if there's not a clear pose between this and this you have to think about okay well what connects first do you want the character landing with their feet on the person to get all that force and just push them down on the ground are they like diving off and they're like grabbing their neck that's the first connection is it the hands that land first is it the feet that land first are they landing like belly flopping on the person these are things you get to think about to decide what happens in between these moments this is the downside to this workflow not really a downside it's the thing to watch out for is you don't want it to feel like you have the entire body keyed on all these frames so that everything starts and stops at the same time on the same frames and it feels like you're hitting poses throughout your animation you don't want to feel like that you want it to feel organic and broken up and to hide the fact that you did this the workflow that you use should not be obvious to someone watching your shot you want them focused on your shot not on how you got there now the next method straight ahead is the easiest way to think about it is think about how a stop-motion animator has to work now stop-motion animators from how i understand it they can do a lot of planning and they kind of animate their shots ahead of time to do a test run make sure they kind of know what's going on because you have to you just have to put everything in all at once which to me is super intimidating stop-motion animators you guys are crazy the straight-ahead workflow is probably the closest thing to what they're using where you start at the beginning and you animate all the stuff going forward until you hit the end of your shot now in cg we have the luxury of kind of coming back in passes and adding more stuff to it but we'll get to that in a second so let's see you're animating a running jump and you're gonna do a straight ahead workflow with this character doing that so here's what i would do you put your initial poses and obviously with a with a post opposed we know how we would have done it we would have kind of tried to find those main key poses put them in block them in and so on but with straight ahead we're gonna do it differently basically what you're doing is you're starting at the beginning and you're trying to put in all the motion as you go you're going straight ahead you have the person plant their foot then they kind of drop their body weight and that foot has to absorb all that weight they start to anticipate the jump they so they kind of throw all the momentum that they have uh the leg starts to rise up they swing all that forward that happens kind of here-ish and they throw it and then they jump at the same time trying to push all the momentum off the ground at the same time they release off the ground everything has to kind of catch up they bunch up in the air and they start preparing for landing hopefully you get the idea obviously this isn't like this is not the guide for how to do a running jump necessarily i'm just going to draw stick figures here but this would be the process of doing straight ahead most commonly this workflow is not done in in steps it's usually done in spline the straight ahead workflow is usually focused more on motion than on poses obviously you're hitting certain poses and you're trying to build that in as you go but your focus is on the flow of the character and the flow of the motion over time and that's why you're kind of going through time putting all that detail in versus post pose it's focused on those poses and only on those poses there's two different ways to work again and like if there's more to it like this is different for everybody hopefully this is helping though next i want to talk about a layered workflow now layered is interesting layered is not necessarily necessarily a workflow by itself it depends on how you're using it so layered is usually something that people combine with post oppose or straight ahead it's not always the case but let me explain what i mean if you were working on a bouncing ball i mean we all we all understand the basic mechanics of a ball bounce shot start here and do the whole thing right we all know how this is supposed to look but there are lots of different ways to achieve it now if you were to follow the more pose deposed type of workflow you're probably going to be focused on this location this location this location this location this location right and then you'll think like okay well in between that as well we have our you know our stretch squash and stretch and this is the post opposed method of doing a ball bounce the straight ahead method is probably less focused on kind of putting in those tent poles along the way and instead maybe you open the graph editor and you focus more on the motion so again it's it's pose focus or is it motion focused how do you like to work one of these is going to make more sense to you than the other so a straight ahead animator instead of you know putting those main parts throughout the process they may be focused on like one bounce at a time you know maybe they're focused on this section so you're thinking more about your spacing so maybe you have like these bigger gaps here like the ball's kind of slower up here it's got some hang time and then wham you know the spacing gets faster the distance between each frame gets longer but here's the thing when it comes to layered a layered approach allows you to split the job into smaller bite-sized pieces to get it done more efficiently if you're good at that not everyone is good at layered because you can't like separate the stuff in your head or you know in the software some people just this isn't for everybody but if this makes sense to you then let's try this a ball bounce that's gonna you know go through and do its whole thing it's divided into the up and down and the left and right this is where the graph editor comes really handy into play and that's kind of how the graphic works is dividing all the motion in your shot into individual axes into different kinds of motion translation rotation scale in x y and z start here and i'm going to animate just the balance i'm going to have it bounce here and you you figure out your timing and your spacing now whether you are post post here or if you are kind of straight ahead is up to you the straight ahead animator might be again focused on like the spacing as it kind of grows and gets longer and they're thinking about the motion where the postposed animator says okay well it's going to be here and then it's going to be that and then it's going to be that what happens is you end up with a translation y or z if you're in blender but the up and down you end up with a curve representing up and down at the beginning of your shot is here because the ball's high up in the air and then a couple frames later let's just call it frame five you have the key at the bottom bam it comes and falls into it you end up with your up and down curve which happens to look like a ball bounce we've talked about this in my graph editor video ignore the shape it's not about like it looks like a ball bounce that's not the point the point is you end up with a once you have the up and down perfect you're done with the bounce now all you have to do is add the other layer the left and the right and then you combine them if you just have the ball by itself and you have it lay on the ground and then you just animate it's very linear and it moves across the screen very evenly until it eventually comes to a stop the amount of space between each frame gets cut down i'm doing a bad job of this however you choose to do it you can do the translate x component separately and then when you put the two together you have the ball following the boom boom boom with the motion and you get boom boom boom does all the stuff that is a much more efficient way to do a ball bounce if that makes sense to you because you can probably do one thing at a time faster than trying to manage both so layered approaches can be really helpful in compartmentalizing the amount of work you have to do and keeping it very manageable and easy to understand this is very important with things like the arms for example like the arms have all kinds of rotations so if you're just focusing on the arms at one time and not worrying about the rest of the body that's how this feeds into bigger shots layered approach is usually focusing on just the torso just the arms just the legs just the neck and the head maybe just like things like that it's also doing passes like you could do a face pass you could do like a lip sync pass you could do like a browse pass there's many ways to break it up but a layered animator in a more complex shot often turns off the stuff that they don't need they're no longer focused on you know the shot as a whole they're focusing on different sections and they're doing it in layers and this is compatible with either workflow layered isn't for everybody i for a really long time couldn't understand like why would you what do you mean you turn off parts of the body why because then like don't you need to see the legs to like you don't if you can do this workflow it's fine and if this doesn't make any sense to you and you're like i don't want to turn things off then that's okay too there's many other ways to do it next i want to talk about sketch blocking and sketch blocking is if you are a 2d animator if you're someone who draws this is probably going to be really great for you sketch blocking is interesting it does require some amount of skill when it comes to 2d animation not a lot you can do a lot with stick figures or you can go really big sketch blocking is the act of basically animating your entire shot ahead of time with a pencil and paper or stylus or whatever kind of like what i've been doing so far where i'm just kind of drawing it out and then we'd take it to 3d that's the general idea but usually it's a little bit more involved than that where you are you're figuring out the timing you are figuring out like what frames everything's happening on what are the breakdowns like you are doing a lot of that animation work up front in the planning process and you're blocking it all out by sketching it because again it's faster to draw this pose of a character like saluting i guess i don't know it's faster to draw that than it is to pose it now if you're like a great artist and you can actually like figure out like okay which way are the hips and the chest like turned and like how do we want the head to be angled maybe they're looking down this way and their hand is you can get really detailed you can do it this way the point is to get all the information in here so that you basically just copy it over to the computer i've seen some amazing sketch blocking they literally animated the entire thing in 2d and it looks incredible so if that's you you can kind of bypass struggling with the computer do your animation with drawings figure out all the stuff you want to have and then just copy it into your work you did the work you animated it now you just have to transition it into a 3d medium and for the rest of us who are not that talented if you're doing any kind of acting piece especially when you start with a rig in 3d it comes in just you know t pose a pose super blank expression just neutral right no personality no expression nothing you never want to start with a rig like this you always want to you know add some personality add some attitude like make the character not look like they're just like staring into the void in 2d even if you just draw basic stuff like if you just draw a character you know who's just like neutral at the very least like this character feels like they could just be looking off into space like now you have a character who's maybe slightly hunched over their shoulders are down and they're just kind of like that is so much better than you know like a character who's just completely blank and so even if you can't draw that all that great this gives you at least an idea of you know what to do with the face because let's talk about an expression if you do a character who's like shocked it's like oh my gosh wow their mouth opens and it's you know a big thing in the computer you could pose it out and just by default it won't look great like if you just kind of open the mouth and do what the rig will just kind of let you start with you're gonna have to do a lot more work but you may not be super familiar with that you're like okay well what kinds of things can i do to push the face like how can i how can i push that emotion you know i'll see a lot of 3d rigs that are posed kind of like this it's fine you get the idea but it's very basic it's very symmetrical everything's just kind of like ah it's very generic but if you were to draw this in 2d even if like me you can't draw all that well i like to doodle cartoons so hopefully you can see the difference where when you draw it you can just draw what you think it should probably look like and it gives you ideas of how to push your 3d because it's like okay well i drew the mouth in an interesting way can we hit that mouth shape at the very least like even if we can't do this little dip in the middle can i at least see how it's like bigger and taller and like it's smaller here and wider here at the very least maybe the mouth shape could look something more like this maybe more like kind of flat at the bottom round at the top it's asymmetrical where you've got kind of a bigger area here a smaller area here the tongue's more to the side the characters kind of looking to the side a little bit the pupils are smaller the eyebrows are higher like the lower lids are being pushed up because the bottom mouth is pushing them up there's more information and so sketch blocking on a big scale or on a small scale can be helpful to just kind of rough out ideas again and give yourself more to work with in the computer because the computer's not going to help you maya blender whatever software it's not going to help you make anything more appealing so you've got to rely on the creative stuff the stuff that's left to people to humans like mocap data ai they can't do this and like who knows maybe one day they can help us out but right now use the tools that you've got and drawing and sketch blocking is one of those tools next up is reference blocking reference blocking is it's somewhat controversial it's a very helpful workflow and you want to use it in certain situations but not in others reference blocking is one of those things that like it kind of like layered combined with either post to pose or straight ahead because if you had reference of a character doing things and they're cheering or something you can kind of go through the reference and pick your key poses and then you know where to start same as before or you can just kind of start at the beginning and more or less like not rotoscope or rotamate as i call it but you kind of block out your shot on like every every let's call it every five frames every four frames every two frames every seven frames every so often you're kind of just going to that frame looking at the reference and then kind of copying that into your animation and posing the character to match reference blocking is the act with the purpose of capturing all the organic detail this workflow will give you a much more naturalistic type of look how to train your dragon is an example of um a lot of the animation looks more like this a fighting spirit i love it only i'm afraid you're mistaken you've never seen anything like me anything that looks a little bit more realistic is usually using some form of this workflow not always but often because you act it out you figure out what you like and then you look and you're like oh i like these little details i like these little head shakes i'm doing i like the little things in my fingers i'm adding and you can pull from all of this and it makes it really easy because you can just kind of and it makes it really easy are you serious you know you have to figure it out you have to make those choices the hard part is that you still have to push it nobody comes to the theaters i guess no one comes to the theaters right now at all no one comes to the theaters to watch hiccup act like me because i don't move all that interesting i'm not animated i can't defy physics but he can ride dragons and he can do all these cool things so you need to push it you need to make these stylized characters more stylized motion so you push the poses you exaggerate the actions you go bigger because it's animation and you want it to be appealing and entertaining and fun to watch now again like that's where this can kind of split because like what if you're doing games and you go for call of duty you don't want the if you say you're animating on call of duty you're probably not pushing poses that much maybe you're pushing things for clarity silhouette but you're not really trying to make it zany or cartoony you know visual effects uses this workflow like you could record reference and then animate really really close to it and you'll essentially get what's motion capture data because you'll be capturing all the little details like i did that once my hiccup shot that i animated i actually screwed it up once because i over animated it i rotoscoped the animation from my reference and it looked like mocap data and it didn't feel right because hiccup's supposed to move like hiccup not like me in a suit or me just from reference so you can go too far with this you can also not go far enough because maybe you just copy a few poses and that's all you get and then you you never captured any of that organic stuff totally depends because are you looking for the cartoony stuff are you trying to push your reference and try to make a zany and then kind of just go grog go rogue on it or are you trying to make it look like motion capture data because that can be helpful that can be very useful it entirely depends on the style of the shot that you're animating and what you want out of it some animators hate this because it leaves a lot of those decisions up to you in the acting room and therefore not like in your hands as a creative artist as you're in the software some people love it because they're really fast they can block in all the stuff they can get the main poses they can get all the organic details and then they can clear out what they don't need start the leading stuff start retiming things push the timing push the poses push the motion and then you end up with a lot of work really quickly there's no right or wrong answer it's completely dependent on what you need so just know that it's an option for you don't ever do this with an animated shot like don't ever pull reference from animation i have videos on how to do reference well and we talk much more about it so if you want to talk more about reference you know obviously come over to twitch or watch these videos they will help a lot but this is a workflow that you can use to pull a lot of organic detail from your performance and into your animation so there's an option let's keep going yo i'm here from the future where i have a haircut and i'm editing this video and i forgot something very important with reference blocking i want to add one more kind of part one more way to use reference i think the more commonly liked way of using reference that's good is it's about capturing the timing of when things happen and pushing as you go having the flexibility of capturing all the detail but being able to push and do more with it and so the way that a lot of people use reference is to bring it in and key the important parts oh hi um every time you know if someone's running around its body mechanics where are the feet hitting if someone jumps where are they leaving the ground where are they landing where are they like in the middle of their jump at the apex of the jump when are the blinks happening one of the eye darts happening things like that every important thing that happens in the shot it's not just about pulling out key poses i mentioned that with a post opposed workflow often it's finding the key posts it's not just that it's also finding landmarks in your reference either for postpose or for straight ahead you do want to figure out when those things are happening because that kind of stuff is going to help really utilize the reference best you are pulling the weight and the realism and the timing from real life into your animation and then you're exaggerating either how big those actions are or you can push the timing of when those actions happen but you need to first find them all to see what you're looking at and to see the rhythm of your shot through where those keys fall so just want to add that one more piece that's a good way to use reference in your workflow all right now onto the next one extremes is something that like i don't know a good name for it i learned this workflow from an animator at dreamworks it blew my mind and it was weird but it seems really cool and can be really effective if you can think this way it's kind of like layered but on another level let's say you record reference and you've got all this acting all this great stuff and you want to capture it and you want to push it and you you don't want to like get all the data you don't want to get all the organic stuff you just want to get like the main you know body stuff and kind of that organic motion where things don't feel posed to pose you want it to feel all broken up and nice so what do you do in extreme it's not because it's so extreme like wow it's crazy i i just don't know what else to call it what you're doing is you're looking for the extremes in each axis of motion if i go like this and i move my body just over to the left and back over here what you have is you have an x a y and a z in translation rotation and scale now i'm not really scaling so we're going to ignore that one i am rotating but we're going to not focus on it for a second we're just going to think about translation if i go like this there's a left and a right component same with the ball bounce right then you can do the up and down you can do the left and right put them together you get the bounce same thing here you just split everything and you look for you know there's a lot of motion there's a lot going on it's much more complex than a ball bounce so you say okay what's the most extreme left i ever get you put a key on the x what's the most extreme right i ever get it's on this frame it's about this far all right let's put that in on this frame this far the computer's gonna do a a pretty you know smooth curve but you have to look and say okay how do you get from each each extreme now this workflow is usually you turn off everything you turn off everything except the thing you're working on so it's just the torso like literally just the hips and you're only looking at the x and the y and you figure out okay where does it where's the minimum where's the maximum those are the extremes okay at what time did the midpoint happen did i go really quick and then ease did i slowly go and then go really fast that's going to determine like okay well you then get to figure all that out you do that for the x you do that for the y you do that for the z which is why some of my reference tips are really helpful for recording all that data all that information for yourself you just do the x y and z then you do it for rotation x y z all the same stuff and then you do it for the next part of the body and the next part of the body and it's this really kind of granular weird process where you're just doing little bits at a time in very specific ways and for a long time your shot's going to look weird and just wrong but eventually once you've added it all in there you basically and you can push it as you go because if you say like i want to go to the right whoosh not mar not enough like let's push it higher let's go really to the right whoosh then you can push your animation like this is a way that you can kind of i mean you can do it post to post because again you can just kind of it's there's so many ways to do all this stuff it's almost overwhelming to try and explain it all in a video but hopefully you're getting the gist of what extremes does you split translation rotation scale x y z on every body part on every every major body part you don't want to put control like keys on everything you're no longer putting all your keys on your main key poses you're now focused on each part of the body's motion so you might have the arm keyed here keyed here and keyed there but then you have the leg keyed here here there and then maybe another key over here the torso's keyed here here here and here you end up with keys all over your timeline it's extremely messy so if that freaks you out then just know that but you don't run into the situation where you have a key on this on this on this a key on this on this on this a key on this on this on this and it feels post opposed because all three poses it doesn't feel like you know your keys are posed to pose where then you have to kind of go in and add the other stuff here to make it feel broken up later the extremes method kind of starts off with a minimal approach across the whole timeline with a lot of organics broken up and you have to stay organized because your timeline will not be it's a really cool workflow if it makes no sense to you and you're like what the heck are you trying to say we'll do a demo sometime don't worry about it but if you're like whoa that sounds great try it see if it works for you last but not least i want to talk about key categories this is another dumb name i came up with i don't know what you would actually call this but to come back to this example remember how earlier we kind of had the poses we had like the main key poses and i mentioned how like well you need to also add anticipations and like you know things like that the key categories workflow i'm sure there's a better name for this it's where you go through your shot whether you're using reference whether you're using drawings whether you're just kind of winging it regardless the point of this one is to make sure that you don't miss anything with your blocking one pro tip one of the things that like when you're like when do i go from like splined or step to spline if you're doing that workflow it's like when you have enough keys blocking is all about getting enough information and the timing in there so when it comes to key categories you have your key poses your golden poses your storytelling poses your main right like the things that post-suppose is focused on you have those we're just going to call them your main keys anticipations antics overlap or follow through basically anytime something overshoots and has to come back because sometimes your motion go whoa and it comes coming back over you have key pose and you have key pose but you might have key anticipation overshoot and then key one thing missing break down there may be more but these are kind of the main four components to key categories and you have to assign everything to these four things if your main key in anticipation the breakdown happens in between where it's like are we going down and up are we going over and down are we going just straight across am i going to like do something weird in the middle break down that motion that's a big jump from like the anticipation to let's call it the overshoot or maybe you just kind of go key anticipation and you do you break down somewhere and then you just kind of ease into your key maybe you don't have an overshoot or a follow-through that might not be the thing like that's optional anticipations are also sort of optional like you could just go and like go really fast if you're doing games and a character has to jump they might just jump on the frame that the player pushes the button there's no time for a whole wind up because you want the game to feel responsive until it depends these two are somewhat optional but for most people watching they're not um just figure out where they f where they fall and so when you're blocking out your animation you have you know your main keys golden pose or something i don't know storytelling pose whatever they are all the stuff it's all the same you can do post a pose where again you're focusing on these main things and then you do the poses for anticipation we're on our key and then we anticipate and then maybe here yeah like maybe we do go like follow through and then back to the key so then that's our that's our overlap and then you need a breakdown in between the two because you got to figure out like how are you going to get from there are you going over going under and then you have another key and then maybe you hold that for a while and so oh i should do that that's another one sorry i forgot one hold where it's very close where you don't actually want motion like maybe you have the character go here participate break breakdown overshoot and key and then they kind of hold it in place for a bit and then they move again because it shouldn't just go here and then drift away and drift over here and there's just constant motion all the time to be exhausting you need to have holes it needs to kind of get somewhere and stay there act in the pose give it give the audience time to breathe and then do the next action totally depends on your shot but these are kind of your five things your main key your anticipation your overlap follow through your breakdowns and your holds there's not a set rule on like how they work but hopefully this gives you an idea this is the way we're post to pose it's almost like layered for pose to pose i mean layered is just splitting things into different pieces where you're focusing on the motion kind of like how straight ahead you're focused on motion where this i would key categories this is almost like pose to pose in a layered way sort of thing where like you're splitting your keys into layers you have like a layer of your main keys and then do a layer of your anticipations and a layer of your overlaps and and so on that's why like some of these aren't standalone workflows or sometimes they are or you see them combined sometimes you don't do it this way like there's a million ways to do this there's so many different ways to animate any shot and you probably will not use the same workflow on every shot most people don't i don't know a single animator who like never changes their workflow different problems require different solutions sort of thing right hopefully this video kind of arms you with some knowledge of like oh like there's a lot of ways to do it maybe you got some ideas maybe you got some different like thoughts of how you could tackle a shot but really think about it like try different things the only way to know what's right for you is to give it a shot you'll try one maybe it doesn't work at all maybe you tweak it maybe it's great or maybe you just stay away from that method because that's just not how your brain works and you go over here there's never a right way or a wrong way and don't let anyone tell you that you have to animate a certain way unless you're doing like dumb stuff and your mentors trying to look out for you like oh maybe don't do that that's a bad habit or something but especially if you like pay for a school like if you pay for like thousands of dollars to go to some school and they're like everyone has to follow this workflow why like people do all kinds of different things at all kinds of different studios and sometimes there are reasons to have a specific one for a certain show absolutely but use your judgment you know so yeah hopefully this was helpful if you have any questions i'll be live on twitch this week we're doing some demos so you know link for that uh this all came from a conversation i had with someone in my patreon mentorship program so if you want to have some more like direct questions or stuff like that like check out my patreon we have a lot of cool stuff there and i think that's it follow all the other socials while you're at it give this video a thumbs up subscribe if you haven't already all that youtube stuff but um thanks for watching and i hope this was helpful let me know if you have any questions in the comments below if you have other workflows we should talk about what kind of demos you want to see um i want to do more on this topic so with that thank you for watching and i'll see you in the next one [Music] uh

Channel: Sir Wade Neistadt

Views: 120,928

Keywords: animation, animation workflow, workflows, 3d workflow, blender animation, maya animation, animation tutorial, animation guide, how to animate, guide to animation, animation for beginners, advanced animation, professional animation, 2d animation, 3d animation, video reference, animation reference, sketch blocking, how to block animation, animation blocking, blocking pass, spline, stepped, pose to pose, layered animation, straight ahead, animate better, animation class, faster

Id: GMTet6nd_iM

Length: 34min 42sec (2082 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 17 2021