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they are around frame 18. This makes the arm hold its position for the first 18 frames, then execute the
move to the wave anticipation pose in only 10 frames. Pushing Alt-A to watch shows that it's not bad. It
might be better just a touch faster, so slide those same three keys one more frame to the right.
That second set of keys that produce the hold are not natural though. No one can hold their limbs per-
fectly still. To break it up, set the current frame to the location of the “hold” keys (frame 19 in this case).
Grab the hand bone and move it just the tiniest amount. It shouldn't even be noticeable as a move without
close analysis. We're just looking to give a little bit of life to it. In animation terms, this is called a moving
hold .
Even though the semi-saluting pose is the one anticipatory to the wave, we can build some anticipation
into the movement up to that pose. Just before the arm pulls up into that pose, it would be nice to give
it a few frames of backward motion. Place the current frame midway between frame 1 and the new key-
frames you just created, around frame 10. Grab the hand bone in a side view and pull it backwards an
“inch” or two. Because of Auto IK, this should create new keys for each of the arm bones. The result is
that the arm pulls back slightly before moving into the actual pose.
Now, we proceed through the rest of the wave, adding holds between the original keyed columns. I
duplicated the salute pose and moved it to within three frames of the wave's extreme on frame 45. This
executes the actual wave in just three frames, making it very snappy. The end of the wave is duplicated
and held until the middle point of the next two columns, around frame 55. On each of these duplicated
hold frames, we've also pulled the arm the smallest bit out of position to give it some life. Playing this
back with Alt-A shows that there are some other obvious problems. Namely, the rest of the animation
during this time period still floats like crazy because we haven't touched it. That's right. We need to do
this same breakdown to the left arm, the spine, the head, and the fingers. It's a lot of work, but it's the
way it needs to be. You can watch a brief video of this first section before adding holds to the rest of the
limbs, in the Web Bucket file holds_for_the_wave.mpeg . Also, Figure 11.22 shows the Dope Sheet after
adding the holds.
We're not going to go step-
by-step for adding the moving
holds for the rest of the body
during the wave. You know
what to do, so go ahead and
do it. You can compare your
result to the next video:
holds_for_everything.mpeg .
Figure 11.22   Moving  holds  added  to  adjust  transition  times  between  poses.
As you go about adding holds for the other parts of the character here, keep in mind a corollary to our
principle of asymmetry. When a person moves, nothing syncs up perfectly. For example, if you reach out
to grab something with both hands at once, your hands will not move in perfect concert. It might be close,
but only a robot is able to coordinate their movements with absolute precision. This means that one hand
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