Keying pose bones

For the 5-second animation in this exercise, Rain will begin by standing idle. A couple of seconds later, someone off-screen will catch her attention, and Rain will peer through the distance to identify the person. When she recognizes her friend, Rain will wave at them with excitement.

Exactly who Rain sees will be left to the imagination. Rain won’t interact with anything or go anywhere. Her hands won’t touch anything, and her feet will remain planted on the ground. It’s not an ambitious scene, but even a short one like this requires careful attention.

So, where do we start? At the beginning? Perhaps, but not necessarily...

Blocking or roughing the animation

Throughout the character animation process, there are two guidelines we should keep in mind:

• Create and key the most important poses first. These are the “extreme” poses that, when seen by themselves, clearly convey the sequence of things our character feels and does. You won’t always know exactly what frame each pose should be keyed on, but that’s okay. After keying these poses, you can adjust their timing, edit their interpolation, and insert additional keyframes to refine the character’s motion as she transitions from one pose to the next.
• Animate from the center of the character outward. This means establishing the position and motion of Rain’s torso is more important than doing the same for her head, arms, and legs, which themselves should have greater priority than Rain’s fingers and face. Finally, things such as hair and clothes should be animated last. Remember that you can use the CloudRig interface to temporarily hide some parts of Rain as you work so that they don’t distract you.

In a way, these two guidelines are practical variations on the same idea; that is, we should complete a rough pass of the animation before going back and adding in any details, both in the anatomical and temporal sense. Note that “start at the beginning” is not one of the guidelines, though, in our case, there’s no reason to start anywhere else.

With that in mind, let’s have a look at the three main poses we’ll be making for this exercise. We’ll call these idle, looking, and waving:

Figure 7.10: Three key poses: idle, looking, and waving

We already finished that first pose. Let’s go ahead and key it.

Keying the “idle” pose

We can key a whole pose by selecting all the remaining bones on our four most important layers and keying their transform properties all at once:

1. Go to Frame 1.
2. Select all (A) of the visible bones.
3. Invoke the Insert Keyframe Menu (I) and choose Location, Rotation, & Scale.
4. If you plan on making Rain wave the hand that currently rests on her hip, it will need to switch from IK to FK later on. Go to the CloudRig interface and key the Right Arm FK/IK Switch value at 1.0 (IK).

With just a few clicks, we keyed the Location, Rotation, and Scale of every single bone on those four layers. You can’t see them yet, but that’s more keyframes than in all the other animations we’ve made in this book so far combined!

Why so many keyframes for so many bones at once? Hereafter, are we now obliged to consider the Location, Rotation, and Scale of each of those bones every time we insert a new keyframe? Not necessarily. Although it’s true that we did key way more than we technically needed to, the tools in this chapter will allow us to view animation channels on a per-bone basis rather than for each animated property of that bone. More on that later.

Important note

Now that so many bones’ positions are keyed, any change you make to them must be keyed as well; otherwise, the changes will be lost when you go to a different frame. Forgetting to insert keyframes for animated properties is a common cause of frustration, especially in character animation, where a great deal of time may be spent on just one pose. To prevent the accidental loss of work, there’s no harm in “saving” your pose by inserting keyframes before you’re finished with it.

Now that Rain’s initial pose is keyed on frame 1, we can move on to the next one.

The “looking” pose

Time to create a completely different pose! Before waving, Rain has to peer into the distance to see who or what has caught her attention.

One benefit of having already keyed so many bones at once is that we’ve taken the guesswork out of which bones to pose and key in this phase. The bulk of our attention for animating can be spent on just the IK, FK, Fingers, and Face Primary layers (and I don’t mind if you’re lazy with those last two).

Novice animators tend to be timid when creating the second pose in an animation, taking excessive care not to have it differ too much from the first one. Don’t be shy; key poses are meant to look different! If precise continuity between them mattered, they wouldn’t be key poses. You are encouraged to reset and re-pose any bone you see. Focus on making this new pose look as good as possible by itself. We’ll have plenty of time to obsess over the transition between poses later.

Let’s get to work:

1. Go to frame 50 and begin posing.

   In the pose for this frame, Rain should look directly at some invisible person to one side and lean strongly toward them with her whole torso.

   Arms often counterbalance the movement of the torso. In this case, Rain’s arms and shoulders should extend somewhat stiffly in the opposite direction of her lean.

2. Using the bones in the Face Primary layer, change Rain’s facial expression to one of uncertainty, squinting her eyes as she struggles in this frame to recognize the person she sees. Find a good place for Rain’s eye target, as this will mark the location of who she sees.
3. Key Location, Rotation, and Scale for all the same bones once again. Remember to key any other properties you’ve changed as well, such as FK/IK Switch.

Now we have two poses! Here they are together:

Figure 7.11: “Idle” and “Looking” poses, overlapped for contrast

The transition between these poses will look slow and awkward for now, but we’ll work on that shortly. We’ve got one final key pose left.

The “waving” pose

Our third pose is Rain’s elated reaction after she recognizes who she sees. As before, we want this key pose to look almost completely different, maintaining only the position of Rain’s feet on the ground and the direction of her gaze. This means that the only visible bone you should leave in place is the eye target.

Important note

Try using the Available keying set from the Insert Keyframe menu (I), which only keys the properties of selected bones/objects that already have keyframes. This will be useful later on if you decide to delete some animation channels and don’t want to accidentally key those properties again. Most properties you see in the CloudRig interface belong to hidden bones, so you’ll still need to key those separately.

Don’t be afraid to exaggerate here; it’s easier to relax a pose later on than to intensify it. You may even go so far as to make Rain’s limbs stretch just a tiny bit:

1. Go to frame 80.
2. For this pose, Rain should stand upright and raise one hand almost as high as she can with her fingers extended. Make sure the arm that does this is using FK.
3. Whichever arm you choose to raise, follow through with the shoulders and curve of the spine. In particular, the shoulder of the raised arm should itself be raised quite a bit.
4. After recognizing her friend, Rain’s facial expression should be one of excitement.
5. Key everything the same as you’ve been doing.

Here’s my final pose compared to the previous two:

Figure 7.12: Overlapping “idle”, “looking”, and “waving” poses

These key poses are awfully important, so let’s make sure we get them right.

Reviewing our key poses

When you’re finished, inspect your three key poses for errors. Let your judgment as an animator be your guide. If any bone’s position in a pose looks “off” to you, fix it and re-insert the keyframes for it. It’s easier to do this sooner rather than later when keyframes might get moved around. Just make sure you’re on the same frame as the existing keyframe that you wish to overwrite; otherwise, you’ll just add a new one next to it on the Timeline!

Tip

In addition to using the Left and Right arrow keys on your keyboard to increment the current frame, you can also jump between the keyframes of selected objects/bones using the Up and Down arrow keys. This is useful for focusing on key poses without being distracted by the frames in between.

Your work may look different than mine and perhaps even better! You may have Rain looking in a different direction, making a different face, or waving with a different hand. As long as the three poses make sense and look good to you, that’s all that matters at this point.

As for the actual animation, that’s a different story. It’s time to refine Rain’s motion using a new tool.