The InFamous Five - animation style

I guess it’s time to create a more serious type of blog, that’s right, a blog without any random pictures or references to ninjas. So for this entry, I will share with all those amazing animators out there, five tools that helps me create and refine animation.

The FFD

FFD’s can be very rewarding if used in the proper situation. FFD stands for “Free Form Deformation”, basically at is core it is a 3D lattice that allows you translate specific regions of a volume in different ways. You can use it to play with the mesh shape of a character or object while not affecting the rig animation. Using a FFD is particularly affective when you have a finalised rig animation that can’t be touched (of whatever reason), but you want to add that extra bit to make the animation really sing. I find it works wonders for added personality to inanimate objects like a brick or ball - because the objects lack of limbs, and FDD will allow for the body movement so it can express itself. It’s basically ideal for creating cartoonish type motions, since a majority of 2d cartoons animate with a lot of squashing/stretching (volume deformation). Using a FFD on a character has the added benefit of deforming local sections of the mesh without having to worry about the individual verts in the area.

MORPHS

Morphs is the most common tool for lip syncing on characters, although it can sometimes be time consuming, it works great when done right. But it has millions of other uses, like morphing plains into mountains, create muscle bulges on characters, turn a car into a tree, in fact the only limitation it has, is your imagination! Although, the only thing is, it can be very tedious. Because it needs two meshes with the same amount of polygons, turning a car into a tree would be a time consuming task to do.

LINK CONSTRAINTS

I use these mostly when I have a character interact with something. Link constraints are the best way to have your animation interact with one another, under your control. They are very helpful for scenes that have a lot of moving objects changing their “parent” object, like a dozen of arrows landing on a moving vehicle. Or a ball thrown from a person and caught by another. Link constraints are better for smaller scenes because they can get pretty messy to set-up, having a war scene with hundreds of arrows flying and hitting soldiers wouldn’t be advisable.

BONES TO MESH

When creating a highly detailed character, in most cases you’ll get to a point where the computer wont be able to handle the level of detail the character has (particularly if there is a complex skin setup). It will chug - which makes creating smooth animation next to impossible. The trick here is to hide the mesh before animating the character so playback is smooth - the problem with this is then you don’t know how the character shape/weight is changing because most rig set-ups are by default boxes. However if you altering the rig bone geometry to match the size and shape of the corresponding mesh portion of the character this will not only allow you to see what parts are going through objects, but get a real-time feedback on how your character looks while your animating.

MANUALLY ANIMATED PHYSICS

Over the years dynamic simulators have become a increasing part of adding to the animated scene. Depending on the system you are using (i.e. Reactor, Physix or whatever ), your basically play around with settings to get the look you want it to. An animator can have a lot of fun using simulated physics in a scene, but it can sometimes be a hassle getting the right type of settings to work right with a particular scene - and the results can be unpredictable and aesthetically distracting. Because of this it is sometimes better to manually animate the physics of an object or character. You then have full control of it’s movements, allowing you to apply the some rules of good animation to the fake simulation that you would apply to a character - often resulting in a more artistically pleasing result. Only drawback is if the animated physics don’t look real, the scene will look crap - so you better make sure you’re good!