The art of animation: advice?

I'm slowly making progress as an SL animator, but I have a long way to go. I find it easiest to make still poses, and next-easiest to make kisses and other relatively static animations. These actually sell pretty well, to my surprise. But I find dances and other things requiring lots of movement especially challenging. And in general, I struggle to avoid making my characters look like robots. So some questions:

1. How often should one make a keyframe or otherwise change the position of body parts? Right now I make a new keyframe every second -- every 30 frames. Should I be doing it more often?

2. When you move a limb, should you always move more than one part of it? Or always move it along more than one axis? For that matter, should every keyframe adjust each and every body part, even minutely? How can you avoid the robot look?

3. Is it better practice to do the entire animation in chronological order, or should one do a bunch of keyframes 2 seconds apart and then go back to add more keyframes to fill in details?

4. Any general advice? Can you recommend good books/articles on the art of animation? Keep in mind that our animation tools are limited; e.g., we animate a hand, not fingers.

1. It depends on how you'd like to move those parts. If you want its arm to move straight forward from the default T-pose in 2 seconds, you need just three keyframes. 1st is the defaut positon on the first frame. 2nd is the start position which may be the same with the first one on the second frame. 3rd is the last forward postion on the 60th frame.

2. Imagine how it should move. It depends on how it move that you need to move multiple parts and multiple axis. And don't think the time. Think how it should move! Keyframes are like turning points of the movement. It is why your animations are robot thingy. Don't break up by the time.

3. Correspond flexibly. Basically it is natural that you make animations in chronological order but sometimes you'll have to go back to add more keyframes to fill in details.

4. It's better to accustom yourself to creating animations than to "learn" it.

If you want to learn more about movement and timing, I recomend the "Animaitontor Survival kit" (very intense) and "Timing for Animaiton"

You can see more on my site at http://www.citycafe.com/animation/

Thanks for your replies. I found that website particularly helpful. I might take a stab at a walk. You gotta walk before you run (or dance), right?

Ricky, I know where you're coming from but you are about to look for a book, "How to run" before your first running in this case. But it is good that you learn it by degree. You can run because you could walk and you could walk because you could have standed. And I admit that ppl has his own way. Good luck.

Heh, well I'm not *completely* new to this. I've been cranking out animations for the past two months, and I now have a portfolio of about 40. Moreover, a couple days ago I opened my first store, a teeny little thing called "Rickymations!", and I've been pleasantly surprised at the volume of sales I've made. My still poses and solo animations have sold the best, but I just finished a couple of couples items that I think will sell well...

Anyway, the advice in this thread has been great. Blueman's web page is really worth a visit. I learned a lot about movement from the various how-to sites he's got linked there.