Animating Animation

First, I've fallen behind on my blog posts, so hopefully for the rest of the semester I can keep reporting. So over the past few weeks I have been animating so many scenes. I find that completing animations is a very long and arduous task. It takes precise placement of keyframes and many instance of trial and error. When you place a keyframe with an arm in one position, and then move forward in frames on the timeline and place another keyframe you must watch it back before continuing. Sometimes it's too fast, other times it's too slow or maybe it doesn't look natural so you must try something else or add another keyframe between the two original keyframes.

This highlights why animation takes so long to animate. While you may get the positioning of the keyframe exactly right, you must also keyframe other bones (at least in 3D animation) as well which, in an armature consisting of many bones, can take a long time. Not only this, but some of the bones in an inverse kinematics have influence on other bones. For example, my box person when you grab it's hip bone and move it, does not move the feet, which is great because then I do not have to worry about the feet pushing through the floor drastically or floating off into space. But, by not moving the feet you must move them manually and sometimes when moving the hip bone the feet my start to point downwards and thus a keyframe is needed to hold its rotation in place. This also happens for the hands as well, but I can't complain too much as the inverse kinematics is definitely better than the forward kinematics where each bone has an effect on the next within it's chain.

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