Natural Character Animation: Common Problems

Most beginner 3D artists have a hard time with character animation. Animation in general is not a skill you pick up easily. The best thing to do? Practice, just like anything.

A few common mistakes that are seen among amateurs:

• Timing
• Flow
• Natural poses
• Sliding
• Ambient motion

Timing

Many rookies make the accidental mistake of fast animation when rendered, caused by lagging 3D view animation. An easy fix for this is opening a timeline, and checking Playback > Frame Dropping. This will play frames at the frame-rate required skipping them when needed. If you do run into this problem, you can easily change the speed of an animation later, by scaling the curves in the Graph Editor.

The other problem is mixed speeds. Animating a walk cycle that is very fast, then animating the next section too slow, will make changing speeds later much harder. The only answer to this is a painstakingly slow process of selecting chunks of the animation and scaling them to match a natural speed. You can avoid this is if you make sure that the last section of animation matches the current section.

Timing also effects...

Flow

Flow is another important element in animation. Sections of an animation that do not flow into each other, will  look choppy and unnatural. There is no easy fix for this, the best thing to do, is to watch the transition between the two motions and try to make it as clean as possible.

Natural Poses

Natural poses are important to animation, but it is more important to great poses when you are doing stills:

(It took 10 minutes to find this pose!)

Its not great, but its better than this:

(This pose took about 10 seconds to do)

One thing you can do that sometimes helps is to look at images and videos as pose references.

Sliding

A huge problem with most walk/run cycles is sliding. So many animations have walkers and runners that slide, and its not even hard to fix!!! As long as you are using a path(which makes animation easier anyway) you can easily prevent sliding by adjusting frames slider.

Ambient Motion

What I mean by ambient motion is subtle natural motion such as scratch, stretching, looking around, etc.

Good animation is full of ambient motion, and makes the character feel more real.

And that's it. If you have animating tips, post them in the comments below. Thanks!

10 Blender Tricks that Will Save You Time

Blender has so many features that you probably don't know all of them. Some are hidden away in menus that you rarely click, and others you can only access by searching the commands.


The following are some useful things I've found:

Edit Mode

1) Remove Doubles
I'm sure you've used this before, but you probably never looked in the toolbar to see what settings there are. The default setting usually works for doubled up vertices, but you can also use it to merge vertices that are close together:

Before

(press F6) After

2) Separate
Most of us have separated object an single object into multiple objects by selection. Not many people use the other two options. Separate by material and separate by loose parts. Separate by material will split objects up based upon which material they have. Separate by loose parts will separate all parts that are not connected to anything into there own individual objects. For example:

A simple array

In edit mode after applying the modifier

After separation by loose parts

3) Select Nth
Select every nth number of (i.e every other). Useful for saving time when doing repetitive selecting.


4) Select loose Vertices/Edges
Selects vertices/edges that are not connected to anything. Good for deleting hard to find (and non-usable) geometry


5) Select More/Less
Shortcut key is CTRL-+(for selecting more) and CTRL-- (for selecting less).
Selecting more will grow the selection by one vertex. Likewise select less, will shrink the selection by one vertex.

Object Mode

1) ALT-RIGHTCLICK
Few people know of this hidden tool. When you press ALT-RIGHTCLICK, a menu will pop up naming all the objects near the cursor.

This tool is immensely useful in highly populated scenes or scenes with tiny objects.
























2) Randomize Transform
This one is in the menu (Object > Transform > Randomize Transform), it's the next best thing after the grease scatter. As it's name suggests, it randomly places the selected objects throughout the scene.


You have to set the (location/rotation/scale) limits using F6, otherwise nothing will change.


3) Select Random
Another great randomization tool. It's position is Select > Random.


4) Zoom Border
Helpful when you run out of zooming with your scroll wheel. Shift-B.


5) Quad View
Pressing CTRL-ALT-Q will toggle quad view:

Notice that quid view will lock all of its views, except for the camera view. This is sometimes useful if you find yourself setting up side and front views, and continually changing them the angle views, out of habit.


Quad view also helps save space, you only need one toolbar or properties bar, instead of one per view.




Do you know of any good hidden shortcuts? Post them in the comments below!