Questions to the animation experts, share your tips and tricks

Ok, so finally you found out how to use our program of choice poser, maya, blender, 3dmax, qavim or whatever. Normal simple poses work fine. Now how do you create a really nice animation, lets say 15 /20 second animation. How do you start ? Do you work your way through the animation first roughly ? Then going back through the frames ? Do you do your animation per body part ? Maybe hips and legs first.

How do you use IK ? I tend to turn it on and off a lot. Where and when do you break the spline (if you are using poser). I do it when the feet hit the ground for instance, so they stop moving.

What makes one animation look female and another one look male ? What are good head movements ? I'm always struggling between bending the head and bending the neck.

Do you resize the avatar in the program you use ? Maybe you resize certain body part to better suit the 'avarage' SL user. Have you ever tried multi-avatar animation ? Do you do one avatar first and the other ?

Do you try the poses yourself (yes! admit it if you do). Do you use videos ? Maybe importing them in poser ?

I'm sure there are more real animation questions that come as soon as you know what all buttons of your program do...

It depends. Sometimes I animate pose-to-pose, sometimes I animate per body part. There isn't a single approach that works for all movements; practice both ways so that you know how to approach any given task. I mean, in a certain sense I'm always doing both really (say, lay out all the important poses, and then work one body part at a time to tweak things) so that's just more reason to be comfortable with both approaches.

Maybe I can help with that one? A little of both! "Bounce and stretch" was developed for a reason, our bodies don't move just a single part at a time (ask any hairdresser or dentist what happens when you move your arm or leg) and physically, for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction?

(Or a mom seeing if her child is ready to ride a bike on the street, when they turn their heads to check traffic, their head turns, neck, shoulders, upper torso, upper arms, elbows, lower arms and hands end up turning the handlebars and not riding straight, which leans the bike, causing them to shift their hips, thighs, knees, upper torso to the side, shoulders, arms, etc.)

Observe... Yourself, videos, videos of yourself? Wouldn't many of your questions be answered in the mirror?

The best animators I know aren't animators at all, but puppeteers! They helped me to be a better animator more than all the animation study, trade journals and prior years of experience in 3D character animation I had!

Oh! Here's another fun one, did you know swinging a sword starts with pushing the rear foot into the ground? So were I animating that, where would I start? No, not with the sword arm...

So how do I animate? I guess I study???

It depends on the animation.

Unless it is a very simple one, I tend to plan things out on paper first. For 15 -20 seconds, I would definately have a plan showing movement against a timeline and the frame number. I tend to like to work at 24 fps - but this isn't cut and dried either. Sometimes it is possible to go pose to pose and then go back and "tweak" things. Sometimes I will find it easier to do the leg movements first and then go back and do the upper body - it just depends on the actual animation. I may need to retime animations or parts of them.

I have not yet found much use for IK - except when I needed to fix the feet - I default to having IK set off.

What makes movements male or female? Pass! I just look at people and observe where their arms and legs are etc., etc...

I have used the different body sizes available in Poser.

Multi avatar animation - yes I tend to do one avatar first and then the other and then go between them adjusting things as needed - but this approach may well change if it seems best to do so..

I do test all the animations on myself, often changing my avatar shape and I use an ALT account to test couples animations (unless a willing volunteer turns up to help me.)

Not used video yet - something for the future maybe

There is no one method or set of methods that is right - just what works best for you making a specific animation and using the software you have.

Normally make up the anim as I go along keyframe to keyframe, but have a general idea of what I want it to do before start it, still have to go back and correct all the time because spline will over-do certain parts in the frames inbetween the keyframes and you can tame it by reducing the movement in the keyframes.

I never use Inverse Kinematics, they tend to mess the legs up by twisting them, I break spline at frame 2, I rarely do it again in the same one.

If its a single animations and its a stance or something and its female I tend to keep the feet closer together and normally roll the hip more, certain ways of standing seem to look more male or female but I guess thats just my oppinion.

Both my poser models are rescaled to be like my and Yoshis ball test AVs, by using an uploaded T pose and putting both AVs together as in posers frame 1, I can adjust the poser body joints so the models have the same proportions as us, as far as I know the "average" AV in sl is ridiculously tall with men tending to slide that "muscles" slider to the max making the shoulders about 1 meter wide, my test AVs dont look like this but you can never get something right for all AVs so I make them correct for our test AVs.

The 2 AVs we test with have been the same for about 2 years, ones before that were tested with my and Jennys regular AVs, but as people change their regular AVs from time to time I thought it a better idea to keep 2 that are always the same for testing anims.

Yes all anims we try, you kinda have to, we test for hours normally with me changing a thing in poser and re-uploading and then we test again, often over 200 uploads for each so its hours and hours spent in SL using the same animation and watching it for problems.

I have never tried importing videos to poser but I have worked from watching a video before, the Tango was one, this turns out a lot harder than making something freehand, it took about 5 hours to make each esecond of that Tango so I avoid doing that unless its a strict form of dance that must be exact steps.

These are all very interesting answers. Everyone has his own style and techniques thats clear. Let me answer some of the questions myself... I do use break spline sometimes (apart from frame 2) to keep the feet firmly on the floor for instance, especially when combined with IK. I find it hard to keep the feet at one place, while the rest of the body moves.

About the head, I've been playing with this. My mistake was to move the head from position to position, which is resulted in a continously moving head. Results were much better if I kept the eyes focused on one point (even when the body moves) and then rather quickly move the head to a new focus-point.

Vent, that's a good point about the head. You don't usually have body parts continuously moving. It's sort of a stop start type of movement where you move your head, stop for a while, move it again. I find it to be true when moving the rest of the body as well.

I use avimator and my main tip for using it is to save all the time under different file names. Also put a shortcut to the avimator data folder on your desktop.