Going further into animating this character
Animation can make seconds feel like days. During the frames when Rain holds her poses—not the intervals of movement between our key poses, but the long gray intervals between those intervals—Rain’s body is statuesque. Our animation is still a simple sequence of discrete, whole-character poses, with each one encoded in a column of keyframes. As such, Rain’s resulting motion is not yet very good, but we’ll keep chipping away at it like a sculptor to stone. As we give form to our work, we’ll get to witness Rain becoming all the more life-like.
Our next phase involves keying particular bones rather than the whole character all at once; carrying out the poses that require more attention as to how they relate to the poses that come before and after. This middle phase of animation is more detailed than blocking-out, but we’re far from anything we’d call detailing. Some might call it the...