By Adam Sale

Objective: Using the Step By Step Method of Animating a character, you will block in your animation, and then utilize the powerful Softimage Dope Sheet to tweak the timing of the actors in your scenes.

Synopsis: You will block in your characters movements throughout a scene, and then use scale, copy and move functions within the dopesheet to perfect the timing of individual actions.

If your character has been built, weighted and rigged, you are now ready to begin animating. If not, go back through previous tutorials, such as the Character Rig to set up a character. You may also use the character "Twiggy" I have included in the Twiggy Database provided with these tutorials.

This lesson is written assuming that you are following the basic theory of Step By Step Animation. The first step following this method was to block in your character’s movements. If you’ve been following these tutorials from the beginning, your scene should be blocked in. At this point you’re going to want to be able to adjust the timing of holds, timing between poses, speed up animation, slow down sequences, slow in, slow out, remove poses, add poses etc.

The benefit to animating in this manner is that you are able to lock down the timing of the overall performance before proceeding to the next step, which is the breakdown posing and in-betweening of the various Joints and Constraint Boxes.

I find that traditional animators excel using this step by step methodology because it is the way that 2D studios have been running for close to 60 years. Without a reliable production process in place, you could very well animate an involved 20 second piece, only to realize that while the animation is very good, the timing is too slow, or the director was looking for something else. All your hard work will be for naught, and you’ll have to start over, assuming of course your budget provides for re-takes.

Scrolling through your keys, and playing back your animation via the flip-book, you’ll definitely notice areas that need editing. If you don’t see any problems, I can guarantee that your supervising animator will. This is the stage of the animation process where you will finalize timing issues and strengthen key poses through a crafty blend of composition, appeal and silhouette.

It is imperative that your key storytelling poses be clear and readable. When performing gestures with a character’s hands, try working the pose outside the mass of the character’s body. One method I use to determine a successful pose is to view the actor as a solid white matte color against a solid black background. The solid matte shape is a great measuring stick for readability. If you have a hard time reading the pose when viewed as a matte, you will definitely need to re-sculpt your pose.

Keep in mind that these are general guidelines I’m laying out for you. They are not going to apply to every situation you come across. Animation, like any art form allows you to begin breaking rules once you’ve mastered them.

I use the Dopesheet to perfect the timing of my character, before moving on to the F-curve editor.

 

From a pull down menu in any view port, activate the dope-sheet by selecting it from the menu offered. Selecting your character as a Tree in single selection mode forces the dope-sheet to display a track for the top node of the characters Hierarchy. In the case of Twiggy, that node will show up as the name PUPPET. To the right of track name, you will see a series of rectangular boxes, some of the boxes may be colored blue, some may be empty. Each box refers to a frame of animation. Any frame that consists of a solid blue rectangle means that there is a key stored on that frame.

Since we have been keying every part of the character for each pose using the Named Selection groups, each key visible in the dopesheet represents the entire pose for our character at the given frame.

The Dope Sheet is very useful in that it allows you to scale or move entire sections of animation. It is also the area within which you can cut, copy and paste keyframes.

The Dopesheet is also the area where you will activate and deactivate constraints. This is covered in the Interacting with Scene Objects Tutorial.

There is one thing that you should be aware of when blocking in your animation. You will likely key many poses twice. For example, when blocking in the action for a jump, I will most definitely want to key a giant squash pose as the anticipation for a character about to leap off a cliff. I will need to hold the squash pose for a time before transitioning to the stretch pose of the characters leap into the air. If I neglect to add a copy of the squash pose, the animation will simply drift from the squash pose right into the stretched pose. The exception to this rule is to simply animate on Constant F-Curve Interpolation Mode found under the Preferences>Animation menu cell.

Saving Beginning and End Key-frames for an action allow you to select that action as a whole using the Selection Marquee in the Dopesheet and scale or move it without it affecting the timing of the rest of your actions. The actions become compact self-contained units that you can manipulate to your hearts content.

The beauty of the dopesheet is that as you scale or move a particular action, you can decide whether or not you wish that action to push or pull keys from outside of your selection box along with it.

First, you need to make a selection. To do so, you must left click with the mouse and drag a selection box around the frames that you wish to edit

When you are going to scale a section of animation, you have two options;

The first option is to scale the animation inside of the selection box and push or pull all keys outside of the box along with the result of your scaling. This is what you will most often end up using the Dopesheet for. To do this, drag a selection box around the animation action with which you are unhappy, and then middle click with your mouse button on the left or right end of your selection box. If you look down at your mouse line, it will prompt you to "scale keys and drop". With the middle button held down, you can now drag the selection box to speed up or slow down your animated action.

The second option is to hold down your shift key and the middle mouse button when scaling an animation. The mouse line will read "Scale Keys and Drop". Essentially, this option will scale your keys in the selection box, but will overwrite any keys that the selection box has been dragged over top of.

The Dopesheet can also move a section of keys. Using the above two examples, you use the same commands, that is, the middle mouse button to scale and push keys, and the shift key with the middle mouse button to scale and drop keys. The only difference in the two operations is that you middle click on the crosshairs in the middle of the selection box instead of the left or right handles.

Go ahead and apply the knowledge from this article, and cleanup the rough pass of your animation. When you think you are done, Save your scene giving it the prefix WIP-blocked, and the scene name Twiggy-Anim. We are ready to begin adding breakdowns and initiate the in-between process.

*Note: Much of character animation involves some level of character / prop interaction. There are, of course, many ways to achieve this, however, the most common method will involve the activation and deactivation of position and orientation constraints. This is accomplished through the dope-sheet. It should be pointed out that when the time comes to begin editing your timing, or moving sections of animation around, constraint information will not scale, copy or move along with your overall editing decisions. You must first, alter the timing of your poses, and then open up the constraint tracks within the dope-sheet editor, and align their timing with your editing changes. As mentioned earlier, this technique is explored in greater depth with the Interacting with Scene Objects tutorial.

The Dopesheet in Aid of Step by Step animation was written by Adam Sale. Adam is a Technical Director and co-founder of Joncrow Entertainment. He can be reached at adamsale@home.com.