Been ages since I’ve done any keyframe animation. Brushing out the cob webs – using a scene from Tangled as reference for some animation practice. Start to finish this was about a 1 1/2 weeks of full time work broken up over 2 months while I was at my day job. Used the Mike free rig on CreativeCrash and the free Maya World Zombination Character Rig by Proletariat Inc..

Looking at reference is something animators have been doing since the 9 Old Men days – Disney’s Snow White is a perfect example.  What I do in the performance capture world is no different.  We look at reference footage of what the actor did, and make our timing and pose adjustments accordingly.   Keeping close eye on arcs, pops, etc – no different than adjusting your base layer animation.

For this keyframe example, I took the Tangled reference and got my key poses down first.  Adjusted keys in the graph editor for timing, then did all the in between fixes so I got cleaner arcs.  This isn’t perfect, but for not doing any pure keyframe in several years it’s not too bad.