Blocking Spline and Polish
Blocking
- This is the most important step to get right
- It gets all the timing right and gets all your poses down - about one key every 4th frame
Stepped Blocking
- Constant interpolation
- Great for most shots - snappy and easy to understand
Splocking
- Bezier Curves
- Good for subtle movements and broad camera moves
- For example, a character just standing there and making subtle facial expression changes
- Not recommended for beginners as it’s floaty and difficult to read
- Might be okay for camera motion as it may be needed to keep character in frame
Splining
- Bezier or linear interpolation
- Fixes issues not visible in blocking
- Adjust timing
- Cleanup motion curves
- Push spacing and add eases
- Detailed lipsync work
- Getting the shot close to final
- TIP: After fixing big issues, work section by section or controller by controller
- Working from frames one to X, then X to Y
- Working from one body part to the next
Polish
- Final cleanup stage
- Push the poses, add fine details and fleshiness to the face and connectivity to the body
- Offsetting twinning animatioons (Fingers, eye blinks)
- Fixing intersections
- DO NOT make major changes in the polish stage
- Tedius frame by frame work
- The level of polish depends on one’s experience
- Tip: Get someone with more experience than you to look at your work because they can see stuff you’ve missed.