Animation Blocking in Softimage 3D
by Adam Sale
One of the first things you must do as an animator is get a feel for the scene and its effect upon your character(s). Quality Animation usually considers a characters response to external stimuli. Once you’ve identified those stimuli in your scene, play them up. Exaggerate them. Chain some of these stimuli into sequences and you start to add texture. All of these observations serve to layer your characters personality like skins of an onion, they all congeal to create a mosaic; your characters performance. How will this scene affect a characters stance, gait, timing, weight, and mood. The more ammo you can collect, the better. Small thumbnail storyboard sheets are a must, if you don’t have any, draw your own storyboard sheets and Xerox them off. Even if you aren’t a great classical artist, thumbnail sketches focussing on line of action, composition, and appeal help to clarify your business as well as serving as a guide for how the scene will play out. Read the script over and over; listen to as many audio tracks of your character and the other characters as you can. Once you’ve accumulated all of this data, you can begin animating on the computer. It is a tragedy to see individuals attempting to animate a scene, when they lack the most basic tool of all to accomplish their feats. Acquire knowledge of your subject and its perception of the space that surrounds it.
In this beginning stage of animation, I am going to teach you the foundations of what will be a flexible, sturdy process of animation from rough key pose through to cleanup and animation polish.
A SIDE NOTE FOR INSTRUCTORS: Getting a feel for good posing is just like any skill. It takes time and practice. I usually start off my animation classes with a half-hour of posing assignments. I give the class a scenario, mood and theme, and then I give them 3 minutes to craft the pose. We do about seven poses or so, stopping to look at everybody’s work along the way, pointing out what works, and what doesn’t work. I find it is something that gets the day started off on the right foot, allowing individuals to stretch their brains before getting into the meat of the day. As well as a great exercise for creating good looking poses, it also encourages students to work quicker and smarter. Ultimately, a more efficient workflow will allow for more creative animation.
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If you feel you are ready, Let us begin. Load up the READY_TO_ANIMATE-Twiggy Scene from the TWIGGY database that has been zipped for you. All of the settings we saved from the first tutorial, Preproduction with Softimage 3D are reloaded into your animation environment. If you haven’t scripted your keyboard setup and setup file to start with the SISOFT.BAT script, load the .sks file and .sts file now, from the menu cells shown below
PREFERENCES > SETUP FILE >LOAD
and
PREFERENCES > KEYBOARD SETUP >LOAD
Blocking
Here is the basic three step approach that I use to block in my animations.
Before beginning, set your camera in the perspective mode, to match the shot type and perspective of the relevant storyboard panel. You can store up to four camera positions and angles by middle clicking in one of the four square boxes that run along the top left border of the perspective window. In fact this memory camera option works for all four windows, including the schematic window, a perfect tool for framing elements that are frequently used, like the named selection groups we created in the first tutorial. We will use any tool that helps speed up our workflow.
I recommend filling in timing charts before animating a scene. The biggest stumbling blocks for many of my students is the fact that they simply detest the thought of filling them out. True, they do take a bit of time to fill out but they will save you time further on down the road… I promise. J . Sculpting a keen sense of timing is going to be one of the most important keys in determining your development as an animator in this business. It is a foundation for the entire process. You would never find a carpenter without his or her hammer.
With your exposure sheets in front of you, block in the Animation according to the key poses indicated on the storyboard panels. I prefer to animate Full screen in the Perspective window. I orbit and dolly, around the character sculpting the initial pose.
Generally, start by animating the COG and the legs into place. The way Twiggy is setup, enter MULTI mode and select the three boxes. Translate them into place, and then return to SINGLE selection mode. Remember these boxes can be rotated as well as translated, to pose the wrist, or twist the waist, as well as moving the character up and down, side to side.
At this stage of the blocking process you are only concerned with creating and keying the primary storytelling poses. These poses become the foundation for the rest of our animation, the framing that the house is going to rest upon. The Constant F-Curve Interpolation option that we selected in the Animation Preferences menu cell during the first tutorial will force your poses to be held up until the frame where the next pose is set. This will allow for maximum visual control of the timing between poses. Animation is all about timing. You can have the smoothest animation in the world, with the nicest follow through and secondary action, but if the timing is somehow off, then you will have shattered the illusion you have been trying so hard to create.
I like the Constant option because it is a blunt measuring stick as to the effectiveness of your timing decisions executed in the pre-production stage. Your eyes don’t become deceived with a SPLINE or PLATEAU F-curve default interpolation.
Pose to pose, pop, pop, pop. Do not obsess about details at this stage, but roughly block in the pose, with proper stance, balance, appeal, and composition. Like a piece of fine literature, you are going to do a rough edit of your outline after writing the first draft. You can clean up the pose at that time. At this stage in the blocking process, I look for readable silhouettes, dynamic posing, focussing a viewers attention to one part of the screen or character. Lead your viewer’s eyes. What do you want them to see? What should they see next? After that?
Remember that during this process you’ve probably been moving the camera around the character trying to get the pose looking good. Left Click on the appropriate memory camera setting that matches your storyboard layout.
When you think you’ve got your rough pose ready, do one last comparison to your storyboard sketch. It’s not the end of the world if the pose is off by a bit, but we’re trying to create good working habits, so be a little stingy with the praise you reserve for yourself. If it meets your criticism, you are ready to key the character.
Selection Groups & Keyframing
During the first tutorial, we pre-prepared a couple of things. First off, we created two selection groups. One called EXPLICITS, and one called ROTATIONS. Find them in you schematic window now. You may wish to arrange them visually, so that you can store a camera view of them in the schematic window. You will be using these selection groups continuously throughout the rough key process.
Select the ROTATION group once, and it will light up. Select it again, and it will turn off again, but the objects that you originally stored under it as are now selected. Keyframe these objects using the hotkey you assigned to the
SAVEKEY>OBJECT-ROTATION>ALL command. The hotkey was the R_CONTROL key if you have forgotten.
You’ll notice that the objects that are now key-framed have turned red on TWIGGY. This is excellent visual feedback, for when you go in and tweak the rough keys later on. When an object turns red on a given key, it mans that it has a key-frame on it. This was made possible by the COLORED KEYFRAME option that we set in the ANIMATION > PREFERENCES option box during the first tutorial. Sometimes it is easy to forget which frame an object is keyed on, now we don’t have to worry. Kind of like the dummy oil light in a car I guess.
Once you’ve keyed the Rotations, make sure that you clear your selection (SPACE BAR + C). Now select the EXPLICITS group once and then select it again. The objects that you grouped earlier under the EXPLICITS named selection are activated. Key-frame them with your R_SHIFT hotkey, or do a SAVEKEY> OBJECT>EXPLICIT TRANSLATION ALL.
Repeat the process, by advancing to the next frame indicated on your exposure sheets. Start by posing the COG, L and R Legs, etc. Depending on the type of action you will require a differing amount of rough keys to get the idea across. I usually place a key every ten to thirteen frames
Save your scene often, unless you’re boldly unafraid of starting over. Try to work as fast as you can at this point. When I animate at this stage I usually always resize my windows with the W hotkey, so that the only three windows I can really see are the Perspective window, the schematic view-port with the ROTATION and EXPLICITS selection groups visible, and the dopesheet.
When setting the poses, ensure that you orbit around your character, looking at the view from different angles, to ensure that your character is balanced, or that no funny business is going on without your knowing. When moving around, checking out your characters
pose, just make sure that you return to your locked camera view to see how it would look if you were to render the scene. Ultimately, it is this view that matters 100 %.
If you’ve already forgotten, please make sure you work within the field guides. Venture outside of these boundaries at your own risk.
When you’ve gone through and keyed in your entire scene, please save your scene to the TWIGGY database. Name your scene with the prefix WIP_anim. for a work in progress.
WIP= work in progress
Scrubbing The Keys
Select the character as a TREE. Twiggy should turn white.
Along the bottom right of your mouse and timeline bar, I usually play back my animation with the K option activated. It allows you to playback your animation key by key. When I’ve keyed a few poses, its nice to hit the play button, or scrub the time-slider, and see the character pop from pose to pose. Remember to use your fast playback to achieve a 24, 25 or 30 FPS playback, or whatever frame-rate you may use. Small flipbook renders at 200 or 250 x pixels at a 1.333 aspect ratio and a .888 pixel ratio are all you need at this point. The flipbooks are the most accurate means of viewing your animation within Softimage at the proper frame rate, unless you’ve got access to a DDR which is the best method.
Scrubbing through your scene, you should see parts of the character blinking red and then white. Any time a piece turns red, remember that it has a key.
Revisions are probably in order as you examine contrast and compare one pose to another, so now’s the time to go over the scene with a more refined eye, to check for poses that you suddenly decide are too weak, too imposing, or just don’t quite cut it. Do the sequences of poses relate to the idea of the scene? Do the poses relate to one another? Scrub through to a pose highlighted in red and adjust to your liking. Move on to the next pose. Adjust, move on.. etc.
"What about re-keying the pose you ask?" Nooo problem! In the ANIMATION>PREFERENCES during our setup, we toggled the NO CONFIRMATION required option. This allows us to scrub to a rough key, readjust the pose and then move to the next frame. Softimage re-keys the pose for us, overwriting the previous keys. Of course, it only has to re-key the objects whose animation values have changed during the re-keying.
WARNING: At some point during the keying process, you will invariably key a bone with Explicit Translations. You will know if you have because some part of your character if not all of it will distort into a grotesque abomination of your original poses. In Softimage, a joint locks in place when it receives an Explicit Translation key. The solution is to isolate the joint with the bad key, and perform an F-Curve>Reset>Explicit Translation.
It can’t hurt to create a selection group composed entirely of bones. You could name it USE_IN_EMERGENCY. It saves time down the road, so I’d recommend adding it to your toolkit.
This method of animating pose to pose creates a strong foundation for the next layers of animation. We’ve now readjusted the poses, but have yet to pay attention to the timing of your piece. Have a friend critique the timing of your piece. Others usually see inconsistencies that you couldn’t hope to see being so close to your own work. Your timing will not be perfect, but this is where the fun stuff starts to begin. Since you have stored the entire characters pose on one frame, you can begin to adjust the timing of that entire pose as well. You can hold the pose for longer periods of time, shorten it, you may even decide that you need to add another pose or two to reinforce the action. All of your editing at this point will be done in the Dope-sheet editor. Your character should be selected as a Tree when you activate the Dopesheet window from your view-port pull down menu.
See the Dopesheet Tutorial on moving, cutting, pasting, and copying, frames. Look at cartoons with a frame by frame advance VCR to best study timing.
The ability to track a scene through a project is vital to a manageable production. Name your scenes according to a standard that works for all involved in the project. Your archivist will be a happy human.
Animation Blocking in Softimage 3D was written by Adam Sale. Adam is a Technical Director and co-founder of Joncrow Entertainment. He can be reached at adamsale@home.com.