Animation - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 204

Anticipation and Follow Through

As shown earlier in this example, these two can be built in from the beginning. You don't have to do so, but
you will probably fi nd that as you continue to animate you will start to think of these sorts of things ahead of
time, giving you an opportunity to create a stronger launching point for the rest of your work. You may be
tempted to try little tricks to save time by creating follow through and anticipation keys by extracting points
from within the interpolation of the main action, but I advise you to avoid it. Both anticipation and follow
through are valuable cues to your audience in that what's happening is believable and dynamic, and each
deserves its own carefully crafted pose.

In the case of the Beast grabbing the rattle, the follow through to the main motion is that the hand comes
up toward his face, and his head inclines toward his hand. Each motion is keyed and given the same respect
regarding timing and overlap as a “normal” pose.

Once again, generating and watching a real-time preview will be the only reliable way to tell if what you are
doing is really working.

Fine Tuning Your Animation

After you've really worked on the basics of a shot's animation, it's time to take a step back. Seeing the pre-
views of the same actions over and over again can quickly destroy your ability to objectively evaluate what
you're looking at.

There will be physical problems to deal with. A good example is the arm motion of the Beast in the rattle
grabbing shot. When he fi nally really goes for it, the interpolated motion of the arm between keyframes
actually carries the arm down into the fl oor. This sort of physical intersection that cannot happen in real life
is one of the sorts of things you will have to watch out for. Figure 11.32 shows the bottom of the arm dip-
ping into the carpet.

The best way to fi x something like this is to simply position the frame marker in the middle of motion during
which the two objects intersect and make an adjustment. In Figure 11.33, the arm has been moved up and a

Figure 11.32 The arm passing through the fl oor Figure 11.33 The arm, moved up and keyed