Exploring Maya's Workflows for Character Animation

SIR WADE NEISTADT: Hello, everyone and welcome to exploring Maya's workflows for character animation. I'm Sir Wade Neistadt. Let's move through to the next slide.

I'm a character animator and an industry content creator. So I create content online primarily to help make animation more accessible, to show workflows, to get people comfortable with animating tools like Maya. And that's what we're going to be talking about today.

I'm going to dive into some of the different ways that you can use Maya to create character animation, whether you are an experienced animator getting into the tool-- which I feel like most people who are experienced animators are already using Maya, but there's always cool stuff to learn. And for those of you who are brand new to it and have never used it for character animation, hopefully this gives you a good sense of some different ways you could go about it, and give you some ideas of how you can get started without necessarily needing all of the skills required by character animators. I also have a YouTube channel, which I think I mentioned. And there's the link down below.

So diving right into it. Let's just get started, right? The three major ways-- really there's two, but I want to touch on a third just for fun. There are three major ways that I want to talk about animating inside the software.

So the most common and traditional method for character animation is what we call keyframe animation. That's the thing you've probably seen on YouTube that's the most recognizable method of animating. You are posing the character rigs, 3D puppets, and you are setting individual keys.

Depending on various workflows to go about this process, you are you are essentially posing out the character and making sure to help the software to actually give you the result that you want because computers love everything to be nice and smooth to smoothly interpolate from pose to pose. And that's not usually what we want because life isn't quite so clean. And anyway, tools like the graph editor, and so on. We'll talk about some of the stuff. But anyway, keyframe animation is the traditional way of animating.

Motion capture, as you've probably also heard, is another method. It's a much more efficient workflow if you have a high volume of animation to create. If you end up with-- game animation is probably the most common and well known use of motion capture, where you've got hundreds if not thousands of individual clips needing to animate. And that can be extremely time consuming with various team sizes and so on.

So what you do is you drive character skeletons with FBX data. And you can either bake that out and mess with it, or, you can just go straight from the suit straight into your rig. And you can do that instead of Maya or various other DCCs, like the various engines that you could make games in.

What's nice is Maya has tools to directly connect to tools like Unreal Engine. And so anyway, we're not going to talk too much about that kind of stuff. But there's a lot of tools inside of Maya that a lot of industry artists really-- that we love. So we're going to talk a little bit about that.

And then finally, we'll end with just a few fun things that I'd like to show to break some of the rules, go experimental. And I like to say misuse the tool because there's a variety of tools inside of Maya that are not meant for character animators. But I like to use them anyway. And hopefully we'll have a chance at the end to show you a few ideas of just how you can misuse some of the other features in the application.

So diving right in-- starting off with some keyframe animation stuff. I want to discuss-- well first of all, actually, I'm going to be using some character rigs in this demonstration. I'm going to be using some of the Pro rigs characters. These are some really great rigs developed by some friends of mine who work in the industry.

Compatible with Maya, Arnold compatible. So I just want to call this out in case you're like, what rig is that? What is he using? They're from Pro rigs. And if you happen to sign up, I have a little-- how'd you hear about us? Sir Wade, that's me. But just to get that out of the way.

The five stages of animation. This is something that a lot of animators, even those who've been doing it for a while, there are various steps that depending on your workflow, everybody's. Going to go through and how you navigate those steps is always a mystery until it's not. And so I want to talk a little bit about that.

But before we dive too deep into the presentation, I just want to show you for anybody who has not really gotten to see what it's like to animate a character. So this is Maria. She is one of the Pro rigs characters. She's got this great little facial rig, all the body controls.

And just to go over it, as an animator, your job is to pose the character. So everything starts at the hips, starts at the root. And so these controls drive the rig. And these rigs are actually very performance super nice.

A lot of character rigs will have various levels of detail. Right now, she is a very, very high res. And if I dial this down, you can switch to a proxy version. This is a super nice feature that a lot of rigs will have. And it will speed up the performance of things like blocking out the body. I'm on a laptop right now, so in general, things are going to struggle because just how it goes. Whenever you're doing a live demo thing, you want to go a little slower than they should.

But anyways, you pose the character. There are various ways to manipulate the arms. FK and IK, a bunch of phrases that we're not really going to cover today. But you have the ability to manually place the hand, for example. You can move it around and lock it in place. And so as she moves her body, her hand is not going to move from that spot for the most part.

And there's other ways of doing it where you individually will say, OK, well that's how the elbow moves. This is how the upper arm moves. And you've got these different systems. And so as an animator, you have so many choices of how to do anything, whether it is animating the body, animating the face, animating the eyes. You have two or three different options of how you could do it.

So anyway, this is the basic idea of keyframe animation is that you are in control of this puppet. You're the puppeteer. And so with that in mind, I want to jump into the five stages of animation.

Starting from the beginning, planning is something that's extremely overlooked. You typically don't just want to jump into the software and say, I'm just going to start animating, because you are very likely to-- well, I mean, it could work. But you're likely to just end up with half baked, like-- OK. Well that-- the character is moving, but what's really happening in the shot?

To have a compelling and engaging piece of work, typically you want to have a goal. The character should have a mind of their own. It should feel like they're alive, that they have a history, and that they have intention with their actions and not just moving because you can move them. And so planning is extremely important.

I've heard it said that about 10% of any given shot should be spent planning that shot. So if you have a week and a half to animate something, you should spend a full day really researching and planning your shot. And that doesn't just mean I'm just going to sit here and think about it.

You actually could film reference. You could film yourself doing whatever action that you intend to animate so that you can analyze-- where is the weight? What are the hips doing? Which way do the shoulders kind of orient throughout this motion?

And there's a whole art to analyzing motion, and being able to visually decode things in life that you see and translate that into your work. So that's planning. In fact, we've got slides on the very things after that. So planning is-- planning is planning. Planning can be research. It can be reference. It can be all kinds of different things, but I think you get the idea of what planning would probably entail.

Jumping into the actual animation process, once you're actually in the computer, you're actually working on these characters. Blocking is the first official step to being inside of Maya. And blocking is, to put it simply, what happens in your shot.

The whole thing kind of seems like it would be that way. But really, blocking is the main storytelling moment of your shot. It's just the bare minimum to convey the idea. This is often referred to as key poses, golden poses.

There's a bunch of different-- there's a lot of nomenclature for how these things are defined. But the important thing is it's the main moments, the main beats that if you only saw those, you'd get it. You'd understand, like, OK. I know what's supposed to be happening.

What poses those exactly are depends on your workflow. Like I said, storytelling poses if you are going for a post to pose workflow, which is the most well known and traditional workflow where you set a landmark on this action, and then this action, and then this action. And it just kind of pops from pose to pose.

And it's you just saying, this is going to happen. Then at some point, this is going to happen. And at some point, this is going to happen. And that tells my story. As if you were drawing a comic book, basically. Or posing a comic book.

There are other workflows that take that a little bit further. Well, I mean, it's the same workflow. But it branches into various ways. I'm not going to get into the technical stuff of it too much here. But one more flow is to break that idea down to say, we'll start with those key poses. Then we'll break down things like anticipations, overshoots.

Breakdowns themselves are an actual type of pose. And it's where you are really defining how those actions are going to play on screen. Because you have pose A and pose B, the computer is going to try and bring you smoothly from one to the other.

So to show you what I mean, let me go ahead and just zero some of these controls out. Oops, I didn't want to do that with the face. You know what, I'll just go like this. And we'll bring the hand. Which one did I do? Was it this one? Anyway, there's that. And I-- rotation, that's what I'm looking for.

And so if I take, for example, this hand. And I'm just going to literally-- this is not going to be the most beautiful animation you've ever seen by any means. I'm going to take this up and I'm going to bring this down. In fact, actually I changed my mind. Let's mix it up a little bit. Let's not do the hand. She's going to now wave. Let's get rid of that keyframe.

This version of Maya is 2023. I have 2024 open with all the fancy new features, but I wanted to be able to show you the difference between what we've been using and what we have now. So things like the timeline, there's a huge-- tons of updates on the visuals and how things look. So bear with me as we look at what we had recently.

But it just was-- I just think it's fun to see different versions. I know that most people are probably showing only the most relevant one. But I like to mix it up. So for an example, I'm going to go ahead and zero her head out. I should have done this before, but that's OK. You get to see the actual workflow here

If I take her head and just spin it, right? She looks from here to there. It turns her head. If we leave that be and just say, play, it's a little robotic. That's really just not how we move as people. We don't do things in such a perfect straight line. And so arcs-- and there's all kinds of principles of animation. We'll talk about a little bit.

But an example of what a breakdown key is, for example, is if I dip her head down a little bit, that is an example of a breakdown. To show how I want this action to happen. It's going to start here. It's going to end here. But somewhere along the way, I'd like her to dip her head down because it's a little bit more appealing.

Now still, I could make this animation a lot better. But that's an example. Another thing I could do is I could also anticipate the action. I could have her start here and go the opposite direction of where she's going to go to indicate a motion is about to happen. So now we get-- it's a little fast. I should probably move these keyframes over.

Again, not the greatest. I'll let you anticipate this up a little bit, and maybe angle the head, keep the camera angle. I'm also going to hide some of these objects. You can see her face a little bit better.

So again, not great animation. But the idea here is that by adding these various poses, we are breaking down the action further. And we are creating a flow and telling a story however we see fit.

So they can also be based on acting beats specifically, or important mechanics. These are two different ways that are-- these are going to play into those things that we've already talked about. But if you have an important acting beat, a character intensely looking at somebody in a blink.

A blink can be very important, very powerful. It can indicate a lot of things. It could be a face they make, and so on. And so you could block out those facial expressions. You could block out when the feet hit the ground, when the character's weight shifts, when they punch somebody. Could be all kinds of different things. So what those poses are are up to you. But ultimately, blocking is about getting the base idea of your shot in there.

Obviously, it's the first step, as we've said. And you always want to start with the largest motions first. I apologize if this is-- it sounds like a refresher for anybody who knows this stuff. But I want to make sure we really start at the beginning so that we can cover the full range here.

But the biggest actions as in, from the core of the body. The center of gravity, the hips, anything from there is going to emanate from that point. And so you usually start with big body action.

You don't want to start with fingers. You don't want to start with eyebrows. You want to start with whatever's moving a lot because the rest of it is going to just build from there. If you start messing with the fingers, and you're getting all this great finger work, and you start moving the hands around, well now you can't see what's happening with the fingers. So it ends up being a little bit of a waste of time if you don't do it in the order that actually suits your workflow.

And what I mean by it's easy to start noodling, a lot of animators will get caught up in those details. Because you'll start to pose the hand, and you'll say, you know what? I want to make the fingers look really nice. And you'll start working on all these little pieces, and you realize that well, you know, now's not the time. Get the broad idea in there, and add from there. Because it's not about perfection. And you just want to get the core idea clearly visible.

So when are you ready to move on? This is a big question for a lot of animation students and beginning animators. What is the true moment that you say, well, I've completed blocking. When are you done? It's when you can answer these four questions and be happy about them.

Is what's happening clear? Can you understand exactly what's going on in the scene without needing to explain it? If you have to show someone your work and go, OK, so what's happening here is da, da da, da da-- it's not clear enough yet. And you might know that. Or if somebody asks, oh, so are they angry? You go, oh well I'm kind of-- they're jealous. There's a little bit more work to do.

Is the idea strong? And that's really going to come down to is there a better way to accomplish that? If you have a character who's thinking, you don't want to go, you know, hmm. I'm thinking about that. Stay away from the cliche acting choices, things like that.

If you're angry and shame on you, it's very on the nose, very cliche choices. And so is the idea interesting, different, strong? Have you thought about a few different versions to do it? That's a big part of it.

And at this stage in the animation, you're not far enough in that making these types of changes is going to really be depressing. You still have time to course correct and adjust in really big ways without losing too much work. And so this is the stage you want to be showing your work, getting feedback, and finding out if the idea is actually strong.

The third one is sort of a mix of two things. First of all, it's can they connect emotionally to whatever you're trying to tell them? Or can they relate to it? Can they-- not just can they understand it from a clarity perspective, but does it feel believable? Does it feel genuine to the character?

And it might be hard to tell at this stage. And also depending on your animation skill level, this might be a big question and a big ask. And so part B to this is what I meant by what you want them to see. Is there so much going on the screen all at once that we know where to-- if there's too much going on, we might not know where to look.

If I'm supposed to be looking at the character's face, but the arms are waving all around, that might just be a distraction. If everything's moving all the time, it's a lot. And so you don't necessarily just want to have one thing move and then another thing move. That can also feel very disconnected.

But the core idea is with whatever actions you're doing, you want to make sure that the audience is actually looking where you intend for them to be focused. So that's sort of the third question. And that goes with clarity, but it deserves its own spot here to make sure that you're not overdoing it with what you're putting on screen.

And finally, is it entertaining? Is it fun to watch? Do you actually want to watch it twice? If you showed it to somebody, will they hit the Play button and go, oh, nice. That was great. And they're like, they're done. They don't want to see it again.

Or do they go, oh, wait. Play that again. That was cool. You hope for the second thing, right? It doesn't happen every time, but that's the goal. And so this is when you can say yes to all these things, then you're ready to move on.

Now I'm going to show you maybe not the greatest example of blocking. Well, I'll show you an example of blocking. But-- actually, let me rephrase. I'm going to show you an example of blocking which is a good example of blocking, but it's not enough to move on in ways that most people think we are. So here is blocking.

A little parkour shot here. It's not actually the greatest blocking, but it works well enough for me to get the point across to you. This is pretty rough blocking. We probably need some more anticipations or breakdowns. We need a little bit more information here, ultimately.

I'll give you a little bit of a spoiler. But the rough idea here is that you can tell that he's jumping, and he's flipping, and he's rolling on the ground. Hopefully that's what you're getting from this. And so that's the question. Is it clear? Do you get it? And so on.

But this is where you move into blocking plus. And this is something that a lot of people just starting out with character animation, they struggle a little bit. They're like, what is the difference between these two things? If blocking is what happens, blocking plus is how it happens and how quickly it happens, especially. Blocking plus is all about timing.

And so blogging plus is where you really dive into that pose and action breakdown stage. And it's more than just, I'm going to put a breakdown. It's really identifying how that breakdown and how that action is going to feel when you watch it. Does it feel quick? Does it feel sluggish? Is it meant to feel sluggish?

And, you know, animation's a lot of very feelings based language because it's so much emotion and sort of vibe. And so anyway, how you work on that is through timing, which is a difficult thing to grasp. Timing and spacing are not an easy thing to really nail down as you're learning animation.

But how quickly something moves through space, and when it moves through space. What's the delay like? Do all parts of that object move through space at the same time? If you have a character with an arm, you've got the shoulder. You've got the upper arm, lower arm, or forearm, wrist, fingers.

You don't want to move all these things as one contiguous block. You want to have organic breakup and offset between these parts of the body. If I go like this with my arm, it's going to feel very stiff. Versus if I have a wrist break, that's more interesting, which means that these two parts of my arm have different timings.

So when something happens, obviously, is the easy part of it. But there is nuance to it. When something happens on its own, just where are its keys located on the timeline, that's often referred to as rhythm.

And to be more specific, if you have an action that-- I don't have a specific action to give you. But if you had any action happening-- take a ball bounce. If you had a ball bouncing-- boom, boom, boom, boom. Evenly spaced on the timeline, right?

Every key is going to be a certain consistent number of frames from the last bounce. That has no rhythm. I mean, it has a rhythm, technically. But it has no rhythm because it's even. It's flat. It's boring. It's predictable. And so it's not the greatest choice in most cases. There are some reasons why you would want that.

But in general, you want to have rhythm. You want to have a longer period between those key frames, shorter periods. And you want to have that contrast and sort of a randomness that will feel organic. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. Right?

So you have that variation. And that's what rhythm is-- in one sense of the word-- very, very boiled down. It can be very complex. And anyway, moving on.

Texture is the other component you'll hear a lot. If you went to an animation school, rhythm and texture you'll hear thrown around. And most students have no idea what we're talking about. Rhythm? Texture?

I struggled with that for a long time because I'd hear that and I'd think I knew what it meant, but I wasn't really sure. And no one really explained it to me. And so I'm trying to make it a little easier in case you've had that experience.

But texture is the timing of an action in relation to other things that are also animated in the scene. If everything shares all the same keyframes, well that's super flat. There's no texture. Everything's just all moving together, starting and stopping all in the same frame. It feels very robotic.

Versus if you have things starting and stopping at different times, and they're moving in different directions, they're all kind of doing their own thing-- not in a way that's just total chaos. But that's how we move. That's how everything moves.

you break down any action that you observe in life, for the most part, you're going to notice certain things start and stop before other things. There's offsets. There's certain amounts of that thing you're going to move in relation to the things attached to them.

You take a car. The wheels are going to turn. And when the wheels stop, the car doesn't freeze. The whole chassis of the car has suspension that's going to have a little bit extra stuff that's going on. The people inside the car are going to move around with it.

It's like on a subway, or a train, or a bus, or something. When things are moving, everything's kind of shaking with that delay. That's an example of how you could add texture instead of just having everything all move together. Hopefully that's making sense. This is very abstract things to talk about. And it's also hard to show, which is why I'm not in Maya right now trying to demonstrate it. I'm hoping that the imagination is doing it for us here.

And so the goal of blocking plus is to see everything important in your shot. You've blocked out all that stuff. You put the keys, you put all that in there. And when things start to feel right, you hit Play in Maya. And things are starting to feel right, then yes, blocking plus is working.

Blocking plus is all about feeling, and is it matching what you have in your mind? And you're not necessarily looking for a really perfect graph editor curves, or anything like that. It's just about is the motion feeling good?

When are you ready for this to move on, when you're happy with the way it plays, when you don't have to say, OK, so this is going to have this other thing-- well, now's the time to put that in. And ultimately, when you hit spline-- or if you are working with a workflow where you're working in steps-- basically, once you have the computer to help smooth things out, things shouldn't change. They should just improve.

And so an example of blocking plus-- also, actually, this is the original clip. So this is the original blocking, right? Not a whole lot of keys. So blocking plus looks like this. It's still just a bunch of poses. There's actually no smoothness in here. There's no curves. But you can see that there's a lot more information.

And so once you're at that stage, you can spline. You can refine. And to talk about spline for a second-- even just with our basic animation here, we have our little head motion in all of its glory. If we go to Windows animation editors and the graph editor-- this is a very, very common tool called the graph editor.

My settings are a little bit different than yours in that I have all these various colors. By default, you have red, green, and blue. And you'll see red, green, and blue repeat for x, y, and z across translation, rotation, and scale. And one of the tips I typically give is to change the color for translations versus rotations versus scales. Because now when I look at this, instead of having a bunch of different things of the same color, I have some variation. I know at a glance what these things are.

Anyway you can see your motion represented by these lines. So this one represents the head. Oops, a little bit over here so you can see it. This one is the head-- represents the head going up and down, forward and back. This one is going to swivel on the side. I guess swivel is the wrong word. It's going to roll side to side. And then the yellow one is the swivel.

Anyways, those keys that we put are here and here. And this one is our breakdown, right? We have our breakdown. Anyways, I'm not going to go through how to use a graph editor. But the graph editor is a very common tool.

And workflow wise, I would say-- just a piece of advice-- even if you don't like to use the graph editor, if you're not super familiar with it, keep it open. Always have the graph editor open on one of your monitors somewhere, however you need to.

If you don't have a lot of screen space, then what you can do is you can just kind of dock it over here to the side. You can collapse as much of it as you need like that. I can get rid of the outliner because I don't need it right now.

And what you can do is if you're not actively using the graph editor, you can just put it away. Pull it back out. This is how I work with it. There are various ways to adjust your layout for animation, but you always want to have the graph editor open somewhere so that you can keep it in mind as you are setting keys.

It's the best way to get familiar with it is as you're setting keys, just subconsciously taking it in your peripheral vision of, I'm going to move this thing. And you're going to see that curve get a keyframe. You're like oh, I want to change that. I don't want to go as far. There you go, right?

So anyway, the process of splining really comes into play if you're using a workflow where if I show you stepped keys, a lot of animators will do what's called stepped blocking, which looks like this. There's no interpolation. The character pops from spot to spot, right?

This is probably the most traditional keyframe workflow that's more similar to 2D, hand-drawn animation because you draw specific drawings, and that's what you have. You draw on paper, you don't have the computer giving you in-betweens. And so this will replicate that workflow.

And this is what a lot of people block. And not everybody. If it works for you, great. If it doesn't, no worries. But when someone says they're splining or they're going to start splining their shot, it means that they've taken their curves and they're going to allow the interpolation to kick in with the auto tangent.

And then you get that interpolation. The computer then starts to smooth things out for you. But you can't let it go this many keys without your input because if you count how many frames this is-- zero to 13. We got 13 frames of animation here.

If you count-- how many keyframes did I do? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Five out of 13 is less than half. I've animated, what, 30% to 40% of my shot, technically? I've had no impact on the rest. Maya is the animator right now. And I need to add more information to blocking plus to fill that out and to describe the motion that I'd like.

Now I don't have to put keys on every frame, but I can use these tangent handles. I can adjust how that interpolation is going to come about. And that's the workflow with splining. And it's a matter of just getting the specific shapes, and actions, and timing, and motion that you want. It's not about having, I want these as smooth as possible. That's not the goal. It's having the animation look the way that you want.

Now there is a tip here that I want to give for anyone who wants to animate in Maya because Autodesk implemented a feature a couple of years ago. It's not a default, so you may not know it's here. But it's very, very handy.

If I select-- I'll just do this. If I select this curve and I hit S to set a key, notice what happened with this spline. I'm going to undo-- Control Z. All right, so if I hit S, it adds a curve. But it actually makes my spline weird, right? It kind of makes it ugly. And that's going to require some adjustment.

Now I did say you don't need the smoothest curves. But I didn't do that on purpose. That's just a behavior. And that is not really Maya's fault. That is a pretty common thing across all 3D applications.

And as far as I'm aware, Autodesk-- I don't know if they were the first to fix this. But they were the first one I noticed who had a fix. Other applications-- blender in Unreal Engine-- have added this since. But Maya's had it for a couple of years. And it's been really nice. You can fix that. You can stop that from happening.

A couple options-- you can right click and say Insert key. That's been there forever. You can also hold I and then just go boop, boop, boop, and insert keys like that. But that was never necessarily a fix, that's just a workaround. And that's how I'm used to setting keys because I've been animating in Maya since before they fix this.

But in case you struggle with this, you can actually go up to the animation-- if you're on the animation menu set, drop down. And you go to key, and you go to set key and hit the option box, it'll pull up a little option menu. And in here is something called set key preserves curve shape.

If you hit that-- and just go ahead and set key, and that'll apply that change. I'll go ahead and undo this. Now you can see that if I hit S, it sets a key along the curve, and it does not affect the shape of the curve. So it uses the same operation as if I were entering a key. And it just uses it with the traditional hot key. And so that will work across all channels.

Let me see why that was happening. Feel like something's going on here because that looks like it's setting a key on a weird value. We're not sure what's going on there. Oh, OK. It was just a bug. Interesting. I just needed to refresh by moving the playhead. Never seen that before. But hey, it happens. Everything's going to happen in a live demo.

But anyways, you can see that I can now hit S across all these, and it's not going to break anything. I'm getting some interesting display artifacts happening, but that's not a big deal. That's some parallel evaluation stuff, won't affect anything.

So anyway, that's a really handy tip. And in fact, there are a couple other little Maya tips I want to give you. One of them workflow wise, this is super, super important. And I want everybody to know this because it's great.

I have a setting inside this little menu here-- sync selection, and graph editor, and sync timeline display. I think one or two of them come on by default when you first launch Maya. And so my recommendation is turn them both on, turn them both off, then turn them both on just so it gets the full cycle. Once you've done that once, you don't really need to worry about it again.

But that preference, what that's going to allow you to do is if I have a key-- because as you saw, we had a key specifically on the head, right? We had the head keyed here and here. And then guess I have other keys over here now. And then I have that breakdown key.

So I've got a few keys on the head. But I had, I think, what? Just one key on the hand, right? And so what's cool about this is if I select my whole character and I look in my timeline, I can see all those keys. If I select just the head, I can still see all those keys.

And that's pretty normal. When you select a specific control, you can see, oh, that one only has keys here. The head has keys all across. That's pretty normal. But when you have these refreshed and both selected, what you're able to do-- and the reason I can collapse this menu that's very, very common to use a lot is I can select rotate y, for example. And it'll isolate that curve in the graph editor as well as isolating the keyframes in the timeline. So if I go to rotate x, which is the up and down, I'm going to get that breakdown key visible.

And what's great about this is if I have this hand control-- and I'll go ahead and just spin it a little bit in all three axes and move it over here. Just add a bunch of animation data, so now it does some weird stuff. What I can do is I can select multiple controls. You can see all kinds of graphs over here. Curves doing their thing.

If I select rotate y and rotate x or whatever, it's going to isolate that channel on any curve I have selected. Which any character animators here will know that's a really big deal because typically, what we used to do is you'd have to come in here and you'd have to manually go looking and say, OK, translate-- you'd select all these various controls. And I don't have keyframe data on any of these, so let me go to frame one then do this.

But anyways, what you'd end up doing is you'd select all the various controls and you'd go translate x, translate x, translate x, translate-- and then you'd miss one inevitably. And you'd have to undo and start over. This way, you don't have to do that. I just don't bother with that. I can just hit translate x, and it'll grab all of them. So that's super helpful. Love that tip. Hope it helps.

But anyway, these types of things are really, really essential while you're blocking, while you're doing your blocking plus. When you're early out-- early on in the process, you're dealing with your keys, it can get overwhelming as you start to add more and more data in here. These will help you manage that.

So this splining/refining process, the first thing is if you smooth out your shot and it breaks, go back. You're not ready. You didn't have enough keys. Things were too smooth because the computer was doing too much. And so if you're like, what do you mean if the shot breaks? What does that mean? I'll show you.

So you remember this, right? The original blocking, the one that I said is not enough. Well, the reason I say it's not enough is because if we watch this, if we take this blocking and we switch it into spline, this is what we get. Not ideal, you know? Not quite what we're looking for here.

And so that's where the extra data that you have in here is going to help nail down exactly how you want that motion to go. So when you smooth that out it's still not perfect, still not done. We still need to polish and clean it up, keep working on it. But it's a lot better, obviously. Right?

And so that's the splining and refining process. And so this terminology applies when you're working in pose to pose and you have those stepped keys without interpolation. Spline-- well, stepped and spline is how that comes into play. But you don't call it that if you work in something called layered.

If you're always working with the interpolation going on, and you're just building the animation up using that method, it's a different workflow. You're not actually smoothing anything. It's already smooth.

But it's a matter of just making the curves, and making your animation a little bit more polished and refined at this point. It's the same workflow, it's just different terminology depending on the way you get there. It's not super important, but this is that animation data visualized through its keys.

At this point, you're not really adding anything. You've already added that in blocking plus. You're cleaning what you've already done. It's time to make your animation look good.

You want to treat each part of the body as a unique piece so that it can do what it needs to do and not feel like it's attached, everything's all stuck together and stiff. And you can do that by having printables of animation pass where you can look at all these various principles of animation and try to make sure you have the ones you need. It becomes second nature over time, but there you go.

Spline hygiene is something where you can look at your graph editor curves and you can find red flags. Things like jagged curves, something where it changes direction, or if something is moving and it flattens all of a sudden. Doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong, but it's a red flag and you should check it out, make sure that behavior is doing what you expect because often, the computer will do those kinds of things. And you have to just guide it a little bit more.

And it's always good to remember that you're not looking to just constantly smooth your animation curves and make that graph editor-- I want the curves to look super-- you don't always want that. So just because a red flag is there doesn't mean it's a bad thing. You just-- it takes a minute to look at it.

You're done with this when the shot starts to feel complete, everything's working, all the issues are solved. When everything is working and nothing really needs to be readjusted, you're probably tired of it. You probably don't want to work on it anymore. But that's when it's time to polish.

And polishing is something that's technically optional, but it's really what makes your shot stand out. And that's the stuff that's going to make people go, wow, that feels really nice, you know? And people may not notice it, but they'll feel it.

And this-- is I'm just going to mention-- you've probably heard of the 12 principles of animation. And these are the types of things you want to have in mind as you do this whole process. And every step of the way is going to manifest in a different way.

And these are your principles. You can Google this. You can find tons of resources on this. There's plenty of videos on it. But these are the things that exist in the natural world that-- well, at least most of them are things that exist in the natural world that are physics based. And we push them and exaggerate them for entertainment value. It's what makes animation fun to watch. Squash and stretch, anticipation, arcs, and so on.

Now motion capture is a different way of looking at things, obviously. It's more based on real life. It's based on physics and the motion that we do. And I'm going to say there's five-- in my recommended workflow, my personal experience-- you can, again, do all this stuff in different ways-- motion capture is going to come in five steps. There's planning again, but it can mean choreography in this case. And the rest-- let's just break them down.