Toolkit 2 - Maya: Lesson 3 Blocking Animation

  Moving on from doing static poses with moom, we venture into blocking animation. 

   After a quick recap about the key phases in a animation cycle (extremes, in-between and passing poses), the most important lesson was to know what these mean more then their terminology. Every work environment calls them something different, so their name is not as important as their intentions.

 Before starting the animation, we was explained the process of setting up our scenes correctly. Which involves the following steps;

 - Setting the timeline to 25fps (removing fractions)

- Changing the Graph Editor from Spline to Stepped (this means we only see the key movements and nothing in between).

- In our preferences, we need to change our animation tangents to flat and stepped. 

- Lastly, when using moom we should load up the character set. This means that when we key on our timeline, all the controls will be keyed behind the scenes. 

- Finally, turning of the cache playback will free up the graphic card more.

(We can use auto key, but this can cause more errors then good).

  With this all done, its time to animate. We have been given a video of a gentleman weightlifting with the timing outlined, and using the extreme frames (180/201/211), we will to try and recreate the poses. Once they are completed,  we will move onto the next frames(197/205).

   When creating these poses, we need to really understand the curves in the spine. Getting these right will give us the best impression of weight and movement.

Mine came out as below:

Extreme 1 (Frame 180)

Extreme 2 (Frame 197)

Extreme 3 (Frame 201)

Extreme 4 (Frame 205)

Frame 5 (Frame 211)