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rendering in panel, either in the Shading menu or with the X-Ray button. This mode makes all of the geometry semi-transparent so you can see joints, edges, and curves very easily.5
Now that the controls have been zeroed and the counter-animation removed, Goon is still leaving some vertices behind as he walks away. Select his chest geometry and switch to the Animation menu set. Click on Skin > Edit Smooth Skin > Normalize Weights.3
Select “Waist_FK_CTRL” and “Ribs_FK_CTRL” and open up the Graph Editor. As you can see, they have been posed in such a way that they are rotated against each other.6
Now the model should be behaving! Don’t worry what that did, as it’s a rigging issue that most animators won’t have to deal with. The point is, with CG animation, artistic choices, like posing, and some technical choices, like skin weights, can have an impact on solid drawing.HOT TIP
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Open “appeal_Start.ma”. Morpheus is a free downloadable rig, and he comes with controls to change his body and head shape. We’re going to practice appeal by making an appealing variation on him.4
Use the facial deforms to give him a large chin and cheek bones.Appeal
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T COULD BE SAID that all of the fundamentals combine to make appeal. Beautiful, organic timing is appealing to the eye.Interesting, dynamic posing is also appealing. Character designs, contrasting shapes, and rhythm are all fine tuned, worked, and re-worked to get the most appeal. Does appeal mean “good”?
Not at all; the evil villains in our most beloved animations all have appeal. From their striking silhouettes to vibrant colors, even the bad guys must be appealing. Appeal is the pinnacle of our task as animators, it is the goal. Above all else we should strive to always put images in front of our audiences that are worthy of their time.
Let’s focus on posing for our discussion of appeal. As animators our work takes place far after the characters have been designed, modeled, textured, and rigged. But even with appealing characters, bad posing can ruin the entire show. For instance, an arm pointed directly at camera loses all of its good posing from foreshortening; the animation must work well with the chosen composition. Take the camera into consideration and be sure that your staging is well thought out. The silhouette of your pose should be strong, without limbs lost within the silhouette of the body. And “maxed-out”, or hyperextended arms and legs never look very good.
Twinning is another major issue in posing. In nature, nothing is ever perfectly symmetrical. Without being careful to avoid twinning, it sneaks its way into our animation. It saves time, for instance, to set channels on both sides of a character at the same time. If this is a cheat you use, then you must remember to go back through the scene and un-twin your poses.
Arms, legs, hands, even facial poses can fall victim to twinning.
We must be mindful of the appeal of our animation by constantly critiquing our work and showing it to others.
To practice, we are going to take a look at a customizable character called Morpheus, and try to build an appealing variation using his controls.
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Let’s make Morpheus look like a superhero, with appealing superhero features; big chin, broad chest, and skinny waist. Start with the torso deforms (located in the middle of the chest in the controller object).5
When you are done using the face deforms, adjust the actual controls and positioners on the face itself.Moving them around changes the position of the facial parts.
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Select the arm deform controls as well, and move them to the right to dial them up.6
Check out our cool character. I like his wide-set eyes and how his arms are super buff but his legs are skinny. Play around with the customization options for this character and come up with your own appealing variations.HOT TIP
IT WAS YEARS into my teaching career, with hundreds of classes and thousands of hours of animation critiques under my belt, before a student suddenly asked me, “You keep on saying the word ‘Workflow’, but what does it mean?” I was stunned, because after all of my harping on the subject, it never occurred to me that the very concept of
“Workflow” itself might be unclear to beginner animators.
Simply put, a workflow is the step-by-step process you employ to create a shot from start to finish. It adapts to the project, it grows and changes slowly over time, but on a shot-to-shot basis your workflow always stays the same.
This may sound like a no-brainer, but the reality is most new animators pay little to no attention to the actual process as they learn. Instead, they animate ”by the seat of their pants”, and judge the unpredictable results on screen for indication of improvement. Let’s take a related example in another area of art to illustrate this point.
Back in school, I had a figure painting teacher who was very strict. His name was Yu Ji. In his class, students were subjected to a constant barrage of commands regarding how and when to do each step of a painting. First, you wipe the canvas with some highly thinned burnt umber or raw umber paint until the entire canvas is a nice, fleshy brown. Then do a quick sketch in pencil to define the form. Immediately go over that with a thin brush with umber paint, completely filling in all of the shadow areas.
THEN, and ONLY THEN, do you start mixing paint to try to match the colors you see. And even when it came to finally painting with color, Yu Ji sounded like a broken record as he walked through the class to correct the color choices of his students. “Is the color warmer or cooler than the color next to it?” “Is it lighter or darker?” “What is the color tendency?” (Within warm colors, was it more red, or yellow, e.g.) These same three questions were repeated at least a hundred times over the course of a three-hour class.
It would be years before I realized that what Yu Ji was doing was teaching us good workflow, above all else. Everything we were forced to do helped us avoid the major struggles that befall young painters. Most importantly, these were tried-and-true methods that produced better results. For instance, making the entire canvas brown made it so that we did not mix our colors too light just because they were competing