Tips on timing animation?

So i’ve always been hard on myself on modeling things, which prevented me from getting to the animation stage of alot of projects.

Now i’ve made it to the animation stage of a project and i find that my modeling skills far outweigh my animation…
I think that because my viewport doesn’t play the animation at full speed, this always tricks me into rendering animations where the movements are not timed right or just way too fast in general. I can slow it down in post production but then the frame rate is too noticeable.

Does anyone have any tips on how to better plan for how many frames motions should last for? or to kind of keep it all uniform?

Any sort of metronome like techniques? anything really just lookin’ for tips :slight_smile:
(btw should i still be rendering in 24fps?)

Thankyou :slight_smile:

Here’s one i did today.
You can see in the 2nd camera angle, i had to slow down the frames by x0.5 to get the timing i wanted.

Well first, how are you animating? Straight ahead, or pose to pose? See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZHdfHJtNWc

Secondly, seeing the animation playback at the full frame rate in the 3d view is a must.

I started out using straight ahead animation. and it just doesn’t work if you are trying to sync an animation to a sound track. Pose to pose animation works best for that, hit a certain pose on cue with the audio. If I’m just doing a simple animation that isn’t sync to audio, I still go pose to pose, but my key poses are every 10 frames apart. I then adjust those keys in the time line to get the action moving at the proper speed. This is where seeing the animation in the 3d view at full speed is helpful…

Tons of tricks out there to speed up the 3d view playback. Turn off subsurf modifiers, only display objects you need to see, etc, etc… But in your case, I think the mesh you are animating is too heavy. How many verts/face is that character? You can use a lo-poly stand in mesh for the real character to improve performance of the 3d view.

Randy

Wow thanks! i really love that idea of spacing out the poses 10 frames apart and then going in and adjusting them afterwards.

The character itself is 31k Verts. And turning off the subsurf modifiers does let it play 24 fps perfectly :smiley:

I would say my animation has so far consisted of Pose to Pose animation but sometimes i would sprinkle in some straight ahead like animation for quick movements like punches or kicks that usually only take 1-3 frames to occur.

I wonder if i can make a driver in my scene that turns on and off all object’s subsurf at once so i can toggle that quicker.

Best thing I’ve found so far is to decide, first of all, approximately how long I want the sequence to run, and what “marks” (significant poses) I want the character to “hit” along the way. These are the initial keyframes. And, the character that is now being animated consists of cubes, cylinders, pyramids, and other simple things.

In the background, I put various planes and simple blocks to act as backdrops.

Everything is actually to scale. Say that “1 BU = 1 meter.” Okay, even the blocks and pyramids (and backdrops) are appropriately scaled. Ditto the backdrops. There is zero detail here, but perfect accuracy. (That’s critical.)

Using the OpenGL Preview feature exclusively now, I also consider where I want to put the camera … and, I put several cameras down, at a variety of positions and lens settings. Each camera is named. Camera positions (and those being considered) are marked with named empties. (Like the little squares of gaffer-tape on a real set.) Soon, the floor is littered with cameras. (Fortunately, this being CG, none of them are “in the way” and there’s not a cable in sight.)

Then, I “shoot film” from all those cameras, with labels including frame#, camera name, scene, file. I put it into the video editor of my choice, and try to do a rough cut. If I think of another camera angle I’d like to use, I add another camera, keeping all the old ones, shoot the strip from that camera, and continue. I use “scenes” to capture the current camera-selection and the name of the output file, so each one is distinct. (At this point, “a movie file” is just fine.)

What you ordinarily think of as “the timing of the animation” is influenced, not only by the movements of the character, as dictated by the choreographer and stage director, but also(!) by the subsequent editing decisions made in the editing room. Really, those editing decisions are where “the timing and pace of the show” are made.

This is where you use the viewer’s powers of imagination to save time and create drama:

You show the pitch … CUT TO the umpire’s point of view as … CUT TO the batter tenses … CUT TO (ECU) the bat connects “crack!” … CUT TO the ball in the air … CUT TO the batter starts to run … CUT TO he leaps against the wall … CUT TO (ECU) the ball bobbles at the top of his mitt and flips over the wall … CUT TO it plops gently into someone else’s glove … CUT TO (ECU) the face of an excited little boy … CUT TO the mixed emotions in the face of the father, whose little boy just caught the ball, but whose team (upon whom he had mortgaged his house to bet heavily) just lost the game, and who will now lose his house.

(Add a few anticipatory shots of the father and/or the little boy, season to taste.)

Basically, a direct adaptation of the “real” film-shooting and film-editing process.

OpenGL Preview can churn out “film” at near real-time speed, making it very easy to explore possibilities because footage is no longer expensive to produce. And yet, you can (and should …) get very precise about it, because: these “preview” renders will match exactly a full-on render of the same thing. OpenGL can do a very good job of lighting and so-on. (In fact, OpenGL outputs can be part of the final show! If not a complete frame, then certainly a compositing layer.)

If you “edit first, then shoot,” you’ll find yourself winding up with a completely different notion of “what film is needed and what isn’t.” So, you shoot film freely, “in case” it “makes the cut.”

When you are finally staring at a little pyramid-man putting on a cool show, you now look at your edit list, and that is what, you now know, you need to model, texture, light, and render. (Render a second or so to either side, if you can, to give you some editing-discretion in the “final final cut.”)