The Ultimate Animation Workflow for Beginners

I first started learning animation I was simply overwhelmed with all of the terminology principles rules of thumb that I just did not know where to start I felt like I was wasting so much time just aimlessly moving things around without knowing what I was doing and not getting any better and I just wasn't happy with any animations I was making at that time but what if I told you the workflow I was showing you in this video completely changed all of that and allowed me to start making work that I was happy with and eventually land my first job in the animation industry in this video I'm going to teach you a six step workflow that I've been using for the last six years whilst working professionally in future films games advertisement and TV shows it is a systemic approach a beginner friendly step-by-step formula that you can follow along with to create animation which will instantly level up your work I've been teaching animation for a while now and what I've noticed from my students is that learning this workflow Bridges the gap between all of these abstract animation Concepts but it also gives them a foundation in which they can prove the animation skill set over time we're going to be enlisting the help of link from The Legend of Zelda series and create some animation examples which are going to illustrate how this workflow works and really make it simple for you step one golden poses and anticipation the first thing we're going to be looking out for is our golden poses these are our main storytelling moments imagine them like comic book panels they're the moments of best describe the storytelling beats that you're trying to tell to the audience for now let's start by keeping it super simple link can stand in a dungeon looking to the left and then turn to the right these two main beats become our golden poses so let's pose them out with link in our chosen software our golden poses is where we spend a lot of our time when animating we want to make sure that these poses convey the right weight in the right position have a strong line of action have great appeal and a bunch more animation Concepts that we won't get into in this video because otherwise it will be infinitely long he's standing there looking left and then he turns to look right since this workflow is based off hand-run animation workflows of the past we're going to make sure that we key all of the controls on the rig on all of our poses do this to make our pose stamp down on a specific key just like how a drawing would be stuck to a specific piece of paper in traditional animation for more complex movements we'll need more golden poses for example a baseball player pitching a ball has a ball in their hand as opposed they rev up ready to throw the ball as another pose and then they throw the ball as another golden pose the pose of them revving up the baseball is often referred to as an anticipation pose but there's no need it's over complicated in this workflow anticipation poses are treated the exact same as any other golden pose back to our example now we have our two main golden poses and we can move on to step two step two break down one the next thing we're going to do is create breakdowns between our poses a breakdown is a descriptive pose which tells us how we get from one pose to another when making a breakdown there are a lot of things you need to consider and sometimes that can become a bit overwhelming so to keep this super simple we're going to split up our breakdown into two separate breakdowns where we only have to consider certain steps for each one our first breakdown will bias our pose a and our second breakdown will bias pose B to give us a base for this breakdown we can use free tools like tween machine or blenders breakdown at all the amount that we buy us are pose a and pose B when creating these breakdowns is going to determine the general speed that we're going to move between our two poses this is because the fastest point of our movement is going to be placed exactly between our two breakdowns so the more we bias our poses the snappier the animation will become as it has a further distance to travel between our two breakdowns it's common that cartunia moves use more bias and thus snappier and more organic moves have less bias and are thus more continuous in their action but it's always good to vary that snappiness between each of our pose to pose moves to give it an interesting Rhythm and stop it feeling repetitive one more thing we need to think about at this stage is how many frames we hold each of our poses for I recommend holding each pose on either two frames three frames or four frames this is commonly referred to an animation as animating on twos threes or fours for beginners I recommend blocking on a set frame rate so you can easily flick between your poses and judge the spacing of each body part it also means you don't have to worry about the timing so much at this stage you can always adjust later and make things closer or further apart make them slower or faster once we've decided the general speed that we're going to move between our two poses we need to adjust two main things in that breakdown from what we machine or blenders breakdown it gives us the first thing is deciding what is leading the action we can lead the action with all kinds of things the eyes and arm the head the body whatever we want really following reference will give us the realistic approach and it'll give us an idea of what's leading and following but it's sometimes fine if you're going for a more cartoony shot to mix that up completely and lead with something completely random and have some fun with it the second thing we need to consider when adjusting our first breakdown is our arcs arcs are the way natural things move in almost all situations however when used toy machine or blenders break down it's going to put everything in a straight line you can easily see this by following the translation Gizmo with your eye whilst flicking between your frames so it's up to us to put this into an arc in whichever direction we see fit but it's not only the translations on our controllers that are put into straight lines it's also our rotations the way I visualize this is by looking at the intersecting points of our axes on the Gizmo it's a lot harder to see and track than the translation Gizmo but trust me it's there and we need to put that into an arc also another thing you can do is track parts of the mesh that controller is moving so on the head you can track the arc by looking at the nose and for the arm you can track the elbow position and the higher position sometimes you have to be a little bit creative to track these rotation arcs here's a quick time lapse of me creating our first breakdown starting off by choosing the general spacing and twin machine then determining what's leading here I chose the eyes and the head and even the closer arm then I put everything into arcs since this rig is mostly rotation based because it's all set up in FK we mostly just need to put our rotations into Arc as there's only a few controls that really need to be translated here once we've created our first breakdown with all those things in mind we can move on to step three breakdown two our breakdown two is kind of a mirror of our breakdown one but this time we're biasing pose B with Twee machine or blender's breakdowner I almost always use a similar percentage bias on my breakdown 2 towards pose B that I used on my breakdown one towards pose a it's a general rule of thumb when creating our breakdown 2 there are once again two things we need to consider number one decide what is dragging much like how we decided what was leading in our breakdown one we now need to choose something to drag behind when creating our breakdown too make sure that you drag something that isn't the thing you were leading with when you're creating your breakdown one otherwise things can end up being a bit weird and Confused in the directionality that's taking the second main thing we need to think about when creating our breakdown two is once again our arcs we need to put things into arcs as tween machine or blenders breakdowner has put things in straight lines this goes again for translation and rotation on all of our main controls this time we can go past our pose B with some of these body parts to create what's called an overshoot so the arc is going past the final pose but then coming back to it and that's it for breakdown number two with our two main breakdowns completed we can now move on to our next step step four the midpoint pose the next thing we're going to do is create a pose which defines the midpoint between our breakdown one and break down two our breakdown one defines how we get out of our pose a and I'll break down two to find how we get into our pose B what the midpoint is doing is defining the fastest point in the movement to create a base for our midpoint we're going to once again use tween machine but this time we're going to make sure it's bang smack in the middle of our breakdown one and two and make it fifty percent on twin machine or blender's breakdown when adjusting our midpoint from what we machine has given us we're going to once again think about two main things number one lead and drag now that we've done all the heavy lifting in our breakdown one and two by making all the decisions on what's leading and dragging we now just need to continue that in our midpoint so we can push the lead and drag even further here the second thing we need to think about in our midpoint is once again our friendly neighborhood arcs as we've used we machine to create a base for this pose it is in a straight line again between breakdown one and two so we need to put everything into an arc in both translation and rotation you're going to get used to this this is what you do most of the time went in between step five ease in and ease out what we're going to do now is pad out our animation with more poses which help Define lead and follow and the arcs of the motion the order in which we make these poses is very important however and that comes down to a core principle we haven't talked too much on today which is spacing to oversimplify the concept of spacing it's the amount that each body part moves between each pose if you're paying attention you'll realize that we've already been using the concept of spacing when creating our breakdowns but we're going to continue to use it here in regards to spacing the most important thing to keep in mind whilst using this workflow is that our spacing is Progressive and not linear what that means is between each of our poses our body parts need to be moving and getting bigger and bigger spacing and then slower and slower spacing as we get to our next pose so now that we understand this concept of spacing we can add more poses and poor animation we're first going to be creating ease outs of our first pose which are placed between our pose a and our break down one when creating the base for these pose using tween machine or blender's breakdowner we need to make sure that we are biasing pose a then just like we did with our midpoint need to follow along with the lead and follow and add arcs to each of our body parts don't be afraid to make your arcs more interesting by having them travel behind our first pose before traveling forward to our next pose after making our first ease out pose it's mostly rinse and repeat making more we just need to move those keys up to allow more space between our most recently created ease out and our pose this is where we put in more easers this way we are following the principle of progressive spacing the amount of poses we add here give us the opportunities to add more breakup between the different body parts and give us more information of how we get out of this first pose once we've made enough ease out poses we can move on to making ease in poses these are placed between our breakdown 2 and our pose B when making the base for these poses using twin machine or blender's breakdowner we need to make sure we're biasing pose B this way we're getting slower and slower the closer to pose B we get again following our principle of progressive spacing once again when creating each of these ease in poses we need to make sure we push the lead and follow and the arcs just like we did on every other step make sure to overshoot some of the control on different poses to give an organic breakup to the motion again the more poses we add here the more information we are adding into how we are settling into this final pose the way I like to view it is that we're kind of magneting into each pose and things are settling at different race we're moving between each pose we're kind of magneting into them and then we find ways to add breakup and leave and follow and all of these things it's me dancing around with all of those ease in poses created we can now move on to our final step the moving home the last thing we need to create is one final ease in pose this is going to serve as our moving hold what we then need to do is move our pose B up for however long we're going to hold in this pose for and it'll allow our final easing that we've just created to serve as our moving hold pose what that means is that when we let the computer interpolate between our poses it's going to have a slight drift so that it doesn't feel completely stuck and stiff for most animation Styles outside of extremely cartoony ones we want at least a little bit of drift in our character when holding in a pose so they don't feel completely dead with all of those steps completed we have now created a pose to pose movement between our pose a and our pose B if we play it through you can see that we have something semi-decent we've added a ton of information and break up between our two poses and hopefully you can see how the more information we add the more organic and interesting emotion can become because we've added all of that information now if we allow the computer to interpolate and put it into spline on ones you can see the motion mostly holds up from here if you want to take it further you can clean up curves add breathing and pull infinitely this is why animation can take forever but for the purposes of things like TV shows this is how far you would get and you would send that off to be finaled and it would be aired on TV so for the purpose of this video we're not going to go any further with any more of those details the main thing we need to consider now for each of our golden poses and anticipations we made at the start we need to use this workflow to bridge the gap between them so we have Jose workflow pose B our workflow post C our workflow and so on and so on the interesting part then comes in creating interesting rhythms by having them move at different speeds having things continue through one motion and then lead into another and a bunch of other tips that really can juice up and make those animation really interesting I know that's a lot of information but I hope it helps demystify a lot of the animation process for you there are a bunch of other animation workflows that you can follow and different people have varying success with them but I truly believe that following this specific workflow is best for beginners as it follows 2D principles that have existed for the last 100 years and it means you can read things like the animated survival kit and have context to where you would put all of these different things he's talking about into your work I hope this gives a solid foundation beginner animators can now use to create animations and continue to develop their skill set it's definitely worth re-watching this video and taking notes and also following along making your own animations using all the steps we've gone over here if you have any questions make sure to drop a comment and I will do my best to respond if you found this useful make sure to share this and subscribe to help the channel out stick around we've got more videos on animation Concepts and other things like that and we'd like to have a bit of fun here you know do you want it's a bit loose it's a bit of fun you know [Music] all right until next time peace

Channel: Chester Sampson

Views: 150,839

Keywords: #autodeskmaya, #blender, #animationworkflow, #timemanagement, #animationtips, #speedupanimation, #mayaanimation, #blenderanimation, #productivityhacks, #timemanagementtips, #maya, #blender3d, #animatinginmaya, #animatinginblender, #animationtechniques, #workflowspeed, #efficientanimation, #animationsoftware, twitch, maya, how to, tutorial, animbot, animation, guide, chester, Sampson, animates, chesteranimates, workflow, lesson, blender, blender tutorial, blender animation, beginners, begginers, step by step

Id: v71G6TCw_0M

Length: 12min 58sec (778 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 25 2023