Summary

Because they were so numerous, the keyframes we worked with in this exercise needed to be viewed in the Dope Sheet, where they took on a completely different appearance than in the Graph Editor. Moreover, while learning this new tool, we still had to simultaneously grapple with all the peculiarities of posing and keying the bones in a complex character rig. This might give someone the notion that character animation is an essentially different process from, say, cube animation, but this is an illusion. Keyframes are still keyframes, and bones are just weird little objects that pull on invisible puppet strings.

Another illusion I hope you won’t fall for is to think that this exercise was a formal protocol for character animation instead of a crash course on the Dope Sheet and a handful of operators specific to pose bones. There are no hard rules in this chapter, only guidelines. Every character animation (and character) that you work on will be different and present...