General Animation advice needed

[shadowedge]

Hi everyone,

animation isn't one of my strong points, I only understand the basics of traditional animation(anticipation, secondary action, follow through etc.)

In the past, I've used rotoscoped guides, to make animation. But right now Im going to animate (non human biped) without guides, without mocap.

So I need advice, see I have a well working rig, a biped with a center of gravity (COG), and a customized control page that lets me key and unkey all animatable controls at the same time.

Based on traditional animation, we make keyposes and draw the inbetweens right? In 3d, the computer makes those IB's for us.

So what would be a better way to do "mano mano" animation?

Is it better to manually key parts of the rig? Or should i animate them the same way in traditional animation by making straightforward keyposes?

So in essence, what Im trying to ask is, how would you go about animating a biped without guides, without mocap?

I just need general advice, nothing application specific

Many thanks!

[jimmypop]

Reference, reference, reference! You can NEVER have too much reference.

The thing about BiPed is that it has IK constraints. That means, for example, if you move your hand 30cms up, your arm will follow the hand, because it is joined.

3D animation does the same thing (suprisingly). When you make a keyframe on the hand between 50 frames, to move up, the two arm bones will key aswell to the new position.

It is true what you said, the inbetweens are done for you inbetween keyframes, it's just a matter of fixing them if they don't look right with more keyframes in the middle of the in-betweens.

Hope this helps. Just do a bit of research into IK in the 3dsmax help files.

[BiG ToE-3DT]

to answer your question, yes. Go at it like you would 2d. Put your character in a pose to start, then move on down the time line, then pose again. That should get you started. But, for like a walk, you can't just pose a guy in one place then pose him in another over time. You will have to tell him what to do on his way.