Splining and Sushi

Dang, converting a blocked shot to splines is hard. Nothing fits, everything's possesed by weird twitchiness, and I'm losing any semblance of decent timing that I had in blocked mode. I'm so tempted to just scrap it all and animate starting with splines again (bad Irene, must get the hang of this!).

Well at least it's completely normal that this part takes so long. This week, we had a guest lecture with Rick O'Connor (ILM) on the process of creating a whole shot, from reference and planning to final tweaking. It was one of those superbly informative walkthroughs that answer or confirm all the things you've been trying to figure out over weeks (and absolutely hilarious presentation). Just for an idea on how long the various parts of the process took relative to each other, first-pass blocking took Rick about an hour whereas polishing took four hours (of course, multiply those numbers by a bajillion and that's how long it takes me).

So in yesterday's Q&A, Mark suggested a couple methods of going from stepped keys to splines. One method, which is especially popular among Ringling folks, is to convert everything in a ten-frame window at once, perfectly polish all those keys, then go onto the next ten frames. Mark's typical workflow is to hide all geometry except for the pieces directly on the main line of action (e.g. hips through shoulders), polish that, then layer on the extremities one at a time. Meanwhile, he'll often go back and forth between all the pieces he'd already work on and make adjustments as appropriate.

Mark also noted that it's standard to delete keys to get a nice arc, especially since there are often too many added for the sake of blocking. Doing so to smooth things out is particularly imperative in 3D work since 3D is much less visually accepting of jitters. Even keying on ones still leaves minute hitches. These variations are great for adding life in 2D work as well as infusing the artist's hand into the shot, but is often just 'too much life' for 3D.

So those are the pieces of advice I've been going back to over and over again this week whenever my animation gets too messy and needs simplification. Ok, yay disorganized, rambly post. I'm sleepy and here are the sushi people....


Yes, that's a non sequitur, but lack of sleep brings weird things to light (like the words 'non sequitur'). I wanted to try out this new image uploading thing on blogger and hey look what I found deep in the recesses of my hard drive. And yes, that's a kids' sing-along TV show with people dressed as various sushi and sashimi.