The Character Animation Workflow

The beginners often gets confused on how to start and complete an animation. Especially while animating the characters, they often stuck up where to begin. Let's talk little bit about this approach. While animating a character generally in the industry three approaches are followed.

• Pose to Pose
• Straight Ahead
• Hybrid

Among these the “Hybrid Method” where the characters are animated first using the key poses and then adding in the in betweens takes place is the most prominent method. The best method to do this method of animation is by doing that in passes.

• Any animator before getting into the system for animating, should have planned how his animation should look like. After visualizing in his mind, rough drawings otherwise called the thumbnail sketches has to be drawn. Any kind of scribbling just illustrating the pose of a character will do.
• Then the First Pass begins inside the workstation. The First pass is to setup the key poses based on the thumbs drawn. It is suggested that in this first pass only the character's body is animated. The key poses have to be setup only for the legs, hands and the torso.
• It is suggested to use the set key option initially as beginners than the auto key. Once you become familiar with what exactly a change in the pose will make the character, you can go on for the auto key option.
• The key poses should be viewed in almost all over the 360 degree perspectives to avoid flaws if any.
• Now it is the time to set up the in betweens. Once after a preview play, now you can decide where to fix up the in betweens. Sometimes the character may not turn out as you have expected only with the key poses. These problems have to be sorted out in this pass.
• The Second Pass continues with setting up the in betweens, smoothing out the actions and adjusting the interpolation curves(Using Graph Editor) wherever required.
• When you get satisfied with the body action after several previews, you can now step onto the third pass, where the character's facial expressions are animated. It is suggested that you finish at least 90% of body animation before stepping to this pass. Any facial expression like anger, disgust etc., can be animated in this pass. It would be good if you have a separate pass for eye darts and blinks
• Then comes the next pass of the Lip sync. Save this for the last pass. This has to be done after all the body animation and facial expression animation. Because after all this we sill be clear acting out of the body. Facial lip sync is important where the character delivers out the dialogue while the body is acting out.
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In the stage of beginner itself, if an animator starts following this work flow properly, then surely there will be a progressive development on being a professional animator.