Alright, I'm really excited to get into this second part of Timing and Spacing. Hopefully, I will be able to apply the principles we defined in Part 1 in such a way that helps make these concepts start to click for you. After reading this post I encourage you to keep studying this principle and read what others have to say about it because once you start to grasp it your animations move to another level.
***EXPLANATORY CAMMA***
One last note before starting, since I'm going to try and move into application vs. definition I'll define these terms as I mean them here so that I don't have to pause to define them later.
Key Drawing or Key = A drawing(2D) or frame (3D) that establishes when something will happen as well as extreme poses that help communicate the story.
Breakdown(BD) = A drawing or frame that establishes how something transitions from one key to the next
Inbetweens = The drawings or frames that guide the viewers' eye to and from Keys and BD's.
Timing Chart or Chart = A tool that helps animators plan and visually communicate the number of inbetweens (how much time) that will be needed between the Keys and BD's of an action
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Okay, let's get into it...
I feel that the idea of a key was established in my last post so I think the Breakdown(BD) needs to get introduced and explored. This is a huge building block in terms of layering personality and life into your animation, and while I want to try to keep things simple I also want to encourage, especially CG animators, to think about more than a single BD between two keys. To do that, we are going to plan and animate a head turn. I know this has been done a lot but it is still a great exercise. Below is a traditional example with 2 Keys 1 BD:
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| Eric Goldberg. In: Character Animation Crash Course! |
It is important to see that depending on how we draw/pose the BD and where we place it in time, we can communicate very different ideas. A strong BD can add a lot of character, appeal, and even story very early in the process by showing how the character moves from one pose to the next. This is the concept behind a good BD and it is important to grasp, but it is equally important to understand and remember what the BD traditionally did for spacing as well.
While these Keys and BD's are strong and working well, you'll notice one other element that is giving power to these drawings. The timing chart. This little chart and the BD is telling the other animators that will work on the action the order in which to draw and how to space their drawings to create the desired effect. While I do believe Maya and Blender (or any computer software really) are in fact the WORST inbetweeners when left to their own logic, I also feel that there are times CG animators expect too much from what they give the computer to work with.
If a traditional lead animator had a 3sec shot and handed three drawings and a timing chart to an inbetweener the results would vary greatly. Likewise, we as CG animators should not create a few poses and then expect great things by clicking a few buttons in the graph editor. It is extremely important to remember, particularly as a CG Animator, that the software we use is just a tool, we still need to plan our shots and we must be thinking about what we want to communicate while animating. When you know what you want to say and what action you want to highlight you can build your Keys and BD's to emphasize that.
So to test and apply these ideas, let's focus on creating a head turn with an eyeroll. I want this eye roll to have some personality to it and in order to get a specific or unique feeling in our action, we need to think more about the character. I'm going to say our character is a heard-it-all teen that is just about to be lectured by an adult on a topic that he has heard a million times. As discussed above, we will need to create more than 3 poses in order to communicate this personality, so I'm going to plan out the action with 3 Keys and 2 BD's. Planning that out on an X-Sheet looks something like this:
Now that I've got a plan I'll pose out the character in Maya. I've chosen to give more frames to the big gradual inhale before exhaling into the settle on the other side. Here's what the animation looks like with these poses in stepped.
Pretty good, but I've set myself up here to try and prove a point, which is the importance of being conscious of spacing and the desired feeling you want to give to the action. Here's what happens when I hit spline.
Not quite as fun to watch right. What happened? The timing was working, shouldn't it just be a smoother action now? Well, if we had a thinking inbetweener maybe, but we have Maya remember. I did say I thought it was the worst inbetweener of all time. Why is it the worst inbetweener? Because it is a literal inbetweener, just like Richard Williams points out in "The Animator's Survival Kit" literal inbetweens are never the best solution.
Plus there is one other unique factor in play here that is often overlooked. Since this is CG it is animating on 1s(every frame), not 2s(every other frame) so it is extremely easy to get even spacing even if something is working in stepped. The way to fix it, tell the computer which poses to favor and force it to only do what it does best, which is linear inbetweening. Let's look at the plan again.
What was supposed to be a contrasting quick action became more even and closer to the slow inhale at the beginning. Since we want the action at the beginning to be smooth let's keep the single breakdown, but instead of a single breakdown for the second quick action, we can create a secondary breakdown to build in our spacing. Something like this:
Making this adjustment is quick in this case. I moved the existing BD to frame 42 and only need to create 1 new BD that favors the Key on frame 27. This new BD will both establish a moving hold for the previous key and force a quick transition to a pose that favors the last Key. Here's the result.
This would still need some curve adjustments but I wanted to show how adding just one more breakdown helps keep some of the life even if you still just use auto curves. The style could also be pushed further through exaggeration of both posing and timing if desired, but this again reinforces the importance of knowing what you want to say with your animation. Once you know what you are shooting for it will be easier to start planning. Finding the balance between too many keys and not enough is where experience, as well as trial and error, comes into play. The more you animate and observe what is happening the quicker and easier it will be to find the right number of poses.
There are still a lot of other techniques and ideas in regards to timing and spacing, but I hope this has sparked your imagination and gives you a footing to better understand what other animators have written about it. I encourage you to try some exercises to experiment with timing and spacing and feel free to reach out if you have any questions or suggestions.
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