Domarius's animation tips

First you should check out the Motion Builder tutorial if you haven't already.

The overall process

Here's a summary of the steps;

• Record your reference footage. Or search for it, or act it out in the mirror.
• Rough out the animation with key frames for the entire body at the main pose changes of the animation, like a slide show.
• Make the transitions less constant by inserting the extra key frame after the start key frame and before the stop key frame, for each pose. Still with the whole body selected, so your adding these key frames for each body part.
• Randomly shuffle those key frames around differently for each body part, then tweak it to look nice
• Shift the feet "landing" keyframes to some point earlier than when the mass of the body stops moving as a result of the foot landing down. This can sort of be part of the previous step.
• Apply the extra secondary movements caused by velocity, keeping balance, etc. pick them out carefully from the reference footage. You could do this on a separate layer.
• Can always add a "pose tweaks" layer if you come back and decide character is too hunched over in one part, or for the whole anim, etc.

Reference material

If possible, film yourself or someone else going through a few variations of the animation you want (exaggerated, minimalistic, theatric...) and if it's a complex motion, you may want to capture each example from a few angles. If you can't film your own footage, act it out in front of a mirror, paying particular attention to the small sub movements.

Actually I really can't stress how good it is to have reference footage. Even if you just do a rough job of the overall movement, adding in the little sub movements that you can pick up from playing the footage over and over (arms swaying due to torso movement, shifts of the legs or arms to maintain balance, etc) the "believability" of the animation will increase ten fold. The viewer's brain will pick up on these "physics" cues and tell them the animation is "real".

Rough out key poses

Rough out the key poses in your animation program.

• To get the timing right, play the empty anim, and stop it where you think the peak of the first pose should happen
• Select all body parts and pose the character roughly the way they should be at that moment, and hit KEY to set a key frame for all body parts.
• Continue on for each major pose.

This way you can "sketch out" the general movement without dealing with a lot of key frames, since all the body part key frames will line up with each other and appear as one key frame, as long as all body parts are selected.

And later if you need to tweak the overall position for the entire duration of the animation, even after you've added a lot of detail key frames, you can always make a new layer and do it there. See the Motion Builder tutorial.

Next you'll start adding all the details, to humanize it and make it less robotic.

Less consistant transitions

"Humanize" the overall movement with this technique - consider the transition from one pose to another, it takes 2 key frames; start, and then stop.

With these 2 keyframes

• Add a keyframe just after the start keyframe, and drag that forward to some point less than halfway between the start and stop.
• Add a key frame just before the stop keyframe, and drag that backward to some point more than halfway between the start and stop.

This makes for a slow suble movement at the start, and then a sharper transition into the final position, and then a small wobble as they hold the position. First big step to making it look less robotic.

Break up the perfect timings

Randomly adjust the timing of starts and ends of movements of each body part so that different movements are not starting and stopping at the same times at each other. Start random, and then use your artistic eye or reference footage to tweak it.

Changing position

Whenever the center of mass changes and the character moves its feet to another position to maintain balance, the feet must reach their destination before their center of mass reaches the end of its movement. Because the feet is what causes the center of mass to slow and then stop moving.

So drag the feet "landing" key frames to occour before the rest of the body's frames they were previously aligned with.

Subtle movements

Apply the more subtle movements, such as "secondary" movements - other indirect movements caused by the main action (eg. arms swinging gently). Refer to the original footage for this. If you have used the mirror, go back and do the action again and this time look for the subtle movements.