From the course: 12 Principles of Animation for CG Animators

Principle 4: Pose-to-pose

From the course: 12 Principles of Animation for CG Animators

Start my 1-month free trial

Principle 4: Pose-to-pose

“

- [Narrator] The other side of Principle 4 is Pose-to-pose animation. Now this technique involves taking all of your planned poses and focusing on each one, one at a time, first, and then positioning all of your poses along the timeline. Let me show you. Now, before we begin, I like to use a little tool called Recall. It allows you to quickly select all of your controls, right away. So for example, if I just wanna select all of his top controls, I can just drag a little box and then go to New Selection. And every time I select it, it'll turn white. Now don't worry if you see a little green thing. That means that's the most active element or the last thing you have selected. This becomes important for things like parent constraints. But you don't need to worry about it right now. Okay. So let's get to the nitty gritty of actually animating. I've made a couple of poses here. He's gonna squash down, stretch out and now he's gonna really, really stretch out. So, lets' focus on that. Now while you're animating and trying to position this character, I want you to keep one thing in mind. Use as few controls as possible. How can you get the effect that you want with just a handful of controls. Now, I know there's tons in here and you wanna use all of them. But I have to stress using just a few because when you move on to the next part of the process, you're gonna spend a long time cleaning up each one. And if you only have a few to clean up, you'll speed up the entire workflow. And don't forget, you can squash, you can stretch and do whatever you want with this character and make him look great. Now, in Blender you can do a lot of the same things in Maya. First of all, to select all of his controls, just hit A and then I. If you have a little menu pop up, like this, just make sure you select LocRotScale and you can also change it down here in the keen set, so that it's by default every time you hit I. Now same like before, just go ahead and pose out our little guy. The Blender version of this rig actually has a larger main control that you can use to position everything. And just get him looking right. Just how you have him in your sketches. Okay, I think we're good for now. So now let's time out the entire character. But before we begin, remember what I said earlier, make sure everything has a KeyFrame on it, even if you haven't touched it. You don't want any sliding feet or hands when you start moving all these things around. Now in Blender, to easily time everything, I recommend hitting A and then S and just drag him on the timeline. And play it and see how it feels. And if you think you need a little bit more time with something, drag it out. And if you think you need less time, drag it in. And play it again. Now, in Maya, you can do the exact same thing by using the timeline, down here. Just highlight everything. You can drag out your keys and see what works. And of course, to test it, just do a quick play. I think he needs to jump up a little faster, so I'm gonna just drag these forward a little bit. Cool. Pose-to-pose animation seems long, methodical and meticulous. But don't worry. This will get you exactly what you want in your animation. And though it takes a lot of work up front, it'll save you a tremendous amount of work at the end.

Contents