Welcome to 14 to 20 February 2016.

Over the previous week I’ve been doing the last of the blocking for my 11 Second Club entry and I’ve begun splining. This week’s video is a work in progress.

In case you don’t know animation lingo: think of blocking as creating individual important moments in the animation; splining is the process of getting the computer to join those moments together.. then hating the computer for how poorly it does it.

In Blender, each of the dots in the Dope Sheet represents a moment on one particular bone, and within each of those dots you get sub-dots for scale, rotation and translation.. and each of those sub-dots has sub-sub-dots for axes.

For splining, I’m going shot to shot, bone to bone and setting the dots to interpolate using Bezier (smooth in/out) with Auto-Clamped movement. From there, I slide keys around in the Dope Sheet to get it looking about right. Then once the Dope Sheet work is as good as it can be, it’s off to the F-Curves Editor to make motion tweaks channel by channel.

Blender has a handy tool called the breakdowner. I use it to make extra keys for ease-in, ease out, anticipation and overshoot.

The breakdowner hotkey is Shift E in 3D View. Once it’s active, mousing left and right moves the currently selected bone/object towards the previous key to the left or the next key to the right. 0% means “copy the key to the left”, 100% means “copy the key to the right”, 50% means “blend halfway between the keys”.

A 50% key can be moved closer to A or B to make the transition ease out (moved towards B) or ease in (moved towards A).

For anticipation and overshoot, I can take advantage of the fact that the Breakdowner goes below 0% and above 100% – it can interpolate “backwards” from the key to the left and “forward” from the key to the right, using the opposite key as a reference. A -10% breakdown between A and B (close to A) will make an anticipation key – the motion will draw back past A before continuing to B. A 110% breakdown between A and B (close to B) will create an overshoot – the motion continues slightly past B before settling there.

Basically the breakdowner is an awesome tool.

Of all the twelve principles this week, staging is the one I’ve learnt the most about. I sat down to study specifically poppy snappy styles of animation and ended up learning about character blocking. And being reminded why I liked Kaeloo so much.

(motion analysis from the Kaeloo episde “Hide and Hunt”)

Also I decided that straight lines are probably funnier than arcs. Probably.

That’s all for now. Have a good weekend!