Final Pass

This is the final pass of an animated back-flip sequence. In case you don't know what I mean by pass, let me take some time to explain it. I approach animation in the same way that I approach painting, drawing and sculpting. I start out with a rough sketch and eventually refine it over time. I refer to each overall increment of refinement as a pass.

In this particular sequence I produced over a dozen passes to get the final result. While animating this character, I intuitively applied the 12 principles of animation. In case you don't know what they are you can go to this link. 12 Principles of Animation

Intermediate Pass

This is an intermediate pass which obviously still has a rigid look to it. Most of the in-between poses have been filled in and some subtle arcs in various areas can be seen. Arcs are very important when animating characters because natural human movements occur in arcs. The best way to visualize this is through time-lapse photography. One of the reasons why the dance routine called "The Robot" looks so phenomenal is because it is almost a total antithesis to the way humans are supposed to move.

First Pass

The first pass is "mad rough" so to speak. The main focus or task at this stage was to establish the major action poses/ keyframes. Here I employed the pose to pose method of animating. This made things quite easy when animating actions that involved fast translating or rotating. I divided each action into thirds: start, middle and end for each translation or rotation. Incidentally this character only had an FK system for the arm chain, so it took some extra effort to get his arm movements to look fluid.

Thank you,

Emmanuel Flint