The Power of Pyramids

First off, sorry its been so long since I posted anything. I don't intend on letting this blog sit and rot... I've just been super busy with work and my little boy. I have a small scale animation that I'm working on ( not the vampire thing right now ) and I want to post a detailed breakdown of the process - should be a cool post I hope, so keep watching.


The power of pyramids ? whats he talking about ?

I've been wanting to write a post about this for a while. Its something that I think about, and use, every day when animating - but to be completely honest I don't fully understand it, so this post will serve as an exploration of this idea, rather than a hard set 'technique'. Bear with me as I try and clarify this in my own mind too... ;) I will try and keep all observations at objective as possible.

Ok... so I'm sure we've all heard of "poses" and "lines of action" and their massive importance in animation, but something that I like to include in my thinking is the idea of creating solid shapes.
There is a very common shape that we all use often - the curve. Its nice to contrast between backwards and forwards curves in our poses, and also straight against curve. I love these tools, but really I don't so much regard them as shapes. To me they are still lines ( but not necessarily "lines of action") .

I use a particular shape over and over, and it repeatedly helps me define strong poses and dynamic shapes.... the pyramid.

So check out this image below. I'm sure you've seen it once or twice before...



Something strikes me about the pyramids. Ignoring all the stone, and the sheer scale of these things - the shape itself says a lot about weight, stability, pressure and origin ( or direction ).
the tips of the pyramids look light and are supported high by the wide bases that seem firmly planted on the ground. You can see the "direction" of the weight, i.e, it becomes heavier as it approaches the ground, and the heaviest part of the pyramid is right at the bottom. A single 2D pyramid also has two straight lines that contrast against each other in their direction of travel. They also have a built in way of naturally leading the eye to a particular point, at the tip of the pyramid.

If we look at pyramids of different proportions - it seems the same ideas still ring true, but with varying strengths (i.e the tall thin pyramid still has the same 'feeling', but the short wide pyramid feels much more weighty and planted to the ground )




If the pyramid is turned upside down... something interesting happens. It seems as if the point of contact on the ground is an area of high pressure, supporting a strong weight above it. The shape of the inverse pyramid points downwards and amplifies this pressure. There is also a strong sense of balance and equilibrium when the pyramid is seen this way around.




It also seems that the pyramid can be distorted - yet still retain the same visual ideas.




So, there seems to be a subliminal strength associated with the pyramid... and we can tap into that shape, and use it in our poses.


Application to posing characters, and its effects...

Below I have taken a number of images from around the net that I feel illustrate this idea in different ways. They all use some kind of pyramid shape, that helps to strengthen the attitude of the character ( click on the images to view them more clearly ).



The blue pyramid shows the direction of the wolfs attitude, and places his weight back behind his head, and plants his overall shape firmly on the ground. In a sense it summarises the broad pose. The red pyramid shows the pressure exerted on the small paws of the wolf, at the point at which they meet the floor - illustrating the weight of the creature, and the energy needed to counter the weight as it travels up into the chest and shoulders. The red pyramid also suggests a feeling of careful balance, inertia and poise - that lends a certain natural anticipation to this image.




I can only really see one pyramid in this image - but I think that's reflective of the power and straight forward nature of this pose. The pyramid plants the characters feet and weight firmly on the ground, and the edges lead our eye to the point of interest - the hand that is delivering the force of the blow.




The blue pyramid describes the weight of the character - and the direction of the attitude - the tip also leads our eye towards his face. The red pyramid is the interesting one in this example - the bottom tip ( at his elbow ) shows the point of pressure as the character leans his body weight to be supported by the chair. His upper arm creates one side of the pyramid - but contrasts a little oddly with the relatively straight edge that runs up his forearm.. is this why he seems a little off balance ? like hes not quite leaning on his elbow ? almost as if his pose is a little forced ? maybe I'm being too subjective now.




In this instance the red pyramid describes the broad attitude, and leads the viewer towards the left foot, which is also the point of pressure as the character bears down her weight to take the next step. On its own, the red pyramid is a little off balance, and by itself it would seem as if she might fall backwards. The blue pyramid solves this problem by grounding her weight between both legs, and providing support for the tall pose.




These images are interesting in comparison because the top red pyramid seems to describe a pose that is off balance. Despite the fact that the character's feet are firmly planted on the chair, all the pressure is concentrated in the small area of her feet, and there seems to be no blue pyramid to provide any grounded support. The red pyramid also seems to be off balance - making the overall pose seem tall, un-centered and looks almost as if she may fall at any moment.
In contrast, the second set of images has a strong blue pyramid. despite the fact that we can't even see the characters feet, we have enough of a strong shape there to show that the pose is firm and stable.




As a last example - this pose is interesting because it seems to have a blue and red pyramid working directly together. The red pyramid shows the downward forces of the body, coming to a high pressure point at the feet, taking all the weight from the hips. This alone could possibly seem off balance, but the upper body pose can be summarized with a blue pyramid that works to produce a harmony. Together the two shapes seem to describe an eloquent balance of forces, that could be used to nicely describe the attitude of the female character.

So I hope its not just me, and these things really are going on in these images. I find it useful to think of these shapes when I animate, because above everything else - they seem to provide a certain approach to the aesthetic stability of the character - but can also add that extra uncertainty or anticipation when the shapes are not balanced, or deliberately jarring.

Keep your eyes open and maybe you'll see some of these... Drop me a mail if you know of any more!

( oh yeah .. and I did realise after a while... they're triangles not pyramids.. but then where would the catchy title be ? ;) )

Quick Trick: A Simple Approach to Overlap

Once we have good story, good poses and all the basics down nice and strong - some good overlapping action ( or "follow-through" or some people occasionally confuse this with"secondary action" ) can really add that beautiful organic movement to our animation. When its easy to animate, it can be a lot of fun, but sometimes it can cause real headaches when we have complex movement, or varying timing.

There is a quick trick that helps you to think about overlap in a structured way. I'm not saying when or where to use it, I just mean the technicalities of where body parts should be at what time, depending on movement. Its only a quick trick and so doesn't by any means create beautifully complex ( or accurate ) overlap, but it does give you a good starting point to work more detail into.

Ok so here's the tip:

This a simple chain of cubes animated with joints ( only the first joint is animated ). There is translation and rotation movement that we will need to figure out the overlap shapes for. ( note this is just a chain of cubes to show the idea clearly, normally we would be doing this on a spine, a head, an arm, a tentacle, a limp body part... anything! you get the idea ):



The basic idea of this tip, and the foundation that makes it all work, is to set keys on the whole chain when it changes direction. So if you look at the video below, I added a motion trail to show you the path of the boxes, and you can clearly see the places where the direction of movement changes. So at these points, I am not setting any poses or changing anything - just simply keying all the joints in the chain in a relativley straight pose. On the section where the chain is "flapping", I am doing the same thing - keying the whole thing when it starts to flap in the other direction. These are the "marker" keys:



Now to start the overlap, all I have to do is to set "drag" poses between the keys I already set. So I am thinking about how much the chain will bend depending on the force, thats all really, and putting this pose half way between the marker keys I set already. You can see that pretty much straight away the effect is starting to look good ( note that in these poses, the whole chain is keyed too, just like a marker pose ):


For the final part we now go and alter our marker keys. The idea is that really they would not be straight at this point, the last few joints in the chain would still be dragging a little. So all I did in this example was added a bit of lag to the last two boxes in the chain, on the marker keys. This adds the final bit of polish. Note that I am not adding any extra keys, all we are working
with are our original marker keys, and any keys we set halfway between each marker key:





A few extra points:

So the best thing about this is the workflow. I spent no more that 10 minutes on this example, and the overlap is clean, fluid and the keys are simple and organized. I also didn't have to get too confused thinking about force and drag, because the marker keys serve as a "reset" point to stop things getting jumbled. Its good to note that what makes this work well is good "halfway drag poses", and careful reposing of the last few joints on the marker keys for the final pass.

This is meant to be a quick method, and is not really applicable for very soft things like cartoony tails or hair - or things that have a lot of drag. However even for these situations it serves as a great starting point. I tend to use this method on torso overlap, head overlap and generally for showing weight across the board. Of course, the amount of softness or overlap is decided by you, and will depend on how carefully you pose your halfway keys and how you modify those marker poses at the end.

Just to mention quickly - the "marker" poses that were straight in this example do not have to be straight in animation. Your character will often be doing an underlying action, and your marker poses will not be straight. The key thing to remember is to key the objects at the point at which they change direction... thats the basis of this idea.

Quick Trick: Moving Holds.

Whats a Moving Hold ?

Well.. moving holds are something you should never underestimate.

A great place to see moving holds ( and the first place I ever noticed them ) is in 2D animation, particularly disney stuff. Its pretty simple:

A moving hold is a slight and slow change in pose over a number of frames. They are mostly used to keep a character alive slightly when the pose is essentially "static". Imagine a movement like a head turn - its sometimes best to let the head keep moving in the same direction just a small amount after it "stops"... this is good to avoid any completely still body motion that always looks dead in 3D - but also to serve as a nice soothing contrast to the relatively fast movement before it.

Moving holds work particularly well on full-body poses. They can really set off an attitude, or soothe the eye after a quick pose change, and give the audience time to read a gesture. They also make the character feel a lot more organic. Unfortunately full-body moving holds are some of the hardest to do because there are a lot of controllers that you must animate very subtlety, and each controller must be a slight continuation of its own unique direction of movement. This quick tip offers a few solutions to this problem.


So here's where the quick tip comes in ..

• First off... try and use moving holds wherever you can. I don't mean use full body poses all the time, or your characters actions will seem way too pose-to-pose, but rather just try and use the concept down to a micro level on body movements. So if those fingers spread out quickly, just let them bounce back a bit - then drift very slightly with a nice moving hold. If a character blinks, put a tiny moving hold for a few frames just to cushion the eye lid back into its "rest" pose after it opens again. We're tyring to avoid things looking "mathematical" or "mechanical" and moving holds can really help with this.
  

Quick and easy way to make moving holds ..

• First off, here's a simple hand gesture. Very basic, but a good medium to show how a moving hold can help your animation, and a good example to show how to do it! So the hand is simply going from one pose at the start to another pose at the end. There is no inbetween right now, but we can use a moving hold to make even this basic movement seem a little more organic:
  
  
  
  
  

• So one way we can start to make a moving hold is by duplicating all the keys of the last pose say 20 or 30 frames later. With spline interpolation, you will get an "overshoot" of the pose, then a small bounce back, we can use this as a starting point for a moving hold, because we are getting a pose "for free" that already includes all the continued movement of the controllers without us having to do much:
  
  

• So if we look at one of the curves in the graph editor, we can see that a good pose to use is the pose at "the top of the curve", just before the curve begins to bounce back. This is the point at which the controller has continued its momentum, but then come to rest. We can now set an inserted key ( setKeyframe -i; ) on all our controllers at this point. This will give us a pretty basic, but passable moving hold - without much work! You can vary how extreme, or how long the moving hold takes by experimenting with where you set that duplicate key ( a duplicate key 5 frames later will produce a different hold to one 50 frames later ). This isn't a great moving hold by any means, but the video below shows how we can very quickly soften that final pose, making it a little more organic. Essentially what we are doing is "easing-in" to a final extreme pose.
  
  
  
  

• So as a final example, I worked some better poses and a few inbetweens to this hand gesture. Here is the animation without a moving hold. Notice how when it reaches the final pose it becomes very static and appears pretty lifeless:
  
  
  

• By using the previous method as a starting point, I created a pose to cushion into, that will create the moving hold. Now the final pose has a little drift, and feels more organic:
  
  
  

A problem with this method:

This technique is great for making holds quickly. If you like to work straight ahead or layered - you may find this pretty useful. If however you like to block all your poses, this technique will fail slightly because you are using a pose that is made for you by the computer. A different way to make a moving hold where you set precisely the pose you want at the end of the moving hold is like this:

• Set your start pose ( in this example on frame 1 )
• Set your end pose ( the pose that will be the extreme at the end of the moving hold - say frame 20 )
• Set an inserted key on all your controllers on frame 17
• Take the pose on frame 20 and shift it all the way back to frame 40
• You should now get a gentle drift from frame 17 all the way into frame 40
• Set your curves to "plateau" on all controllers on frame 40, this should soften the drift a little
  
• Experiment with where you set keys ( eg 17 ) and where you move them to ( eg 40 ) for different results.
  
  
  

There are many ways to make moving holds. These are simple quick tricks, and most of the time they work pretty well for me. Moving holds are actually pretty difficult to do well, because getting that soft gentle drift into the extreme pose can involve a lot of tweaking curves. Hopefully these methods will give you something to chew on if you've been wondering about how to do this.

In the Works 1

Here's a few grabs of something I'm working on at home. It's a situational micro short about one guy teaching another inexperienced guy how to stake a vampire. Theres no dialogue, just facial expression and body language to tell the story.

This is gonna be the first real thing I create by working with a properly planned approach. I usually just dive into my animation, working layered and just letting stuff evolve from a loose idea in my mind. This is different. I've planned this thing out pretty detailed with thumbs, and I'm going through blocking my story poses now. To be honest - because I've never really blocked before - it taking me bloody ages. Can't wait to finish the blocking and get stuff moving. With hindsight though, I can't imagine how I would ever do something like this without blocking poses - its too complex otherwise.

It's super proxy right now - the background is totally temp, and the characters are deliberately low detail ( they're actually the same rig ). The grabs below don't really tell the full story at all - I`ve left a fair few chunks out - including the ending, but you a get a rough idea.

I really want to go for subtle animation in nervous versus confident body language, and the contrast between teacher and student. I`ll keep it comedic with broad and quick actions to spice things up a bit, and add some flair.

I plan to fully animate, render and audio track this little monster.. as well as set it all in a nice environment, so if you are reading this keep watching as I work towards finishing it.

Hands

Look at how well drawn these hands are. They're all by the legendary Milt Kahl. These images are from three Disney features - Robin Hood, the Jungle Book and The Sword in the Stone, with the latter being one of the best films for hand drawing and animation I think I have ever seen. 2D or 3D, we should all be trying to push for shapes and poses in our hands like these masterpieces below:


( I compiled these from screen captures over at Animation Archive... they have some great resources there )

Something seems to be getting lost today in CG animated hands. They seem too constrained by the rigging or the models, and just don't seem to be able to deliver the contrast of curves and angles that you see in these pictures. I'm sure this will be something that improves dramatically over the next few years as more processes for "shaping" and sculpting rigs rather than just posing them becomes more commonplace. I saw a frame from Disney's new "Meet the Robinsons" and it had a pretty good hand pose in it...

Little box of tricks

Here's something I really recommend. I've been building a book of images that inspire my animation... mostly images of dynamic and well crafted poses, or characters that emote certain attitudes or ideas. I've found it hugely useful when planning the animation I`m currently working on at home.. so much so that I intend to fill the whole book and take it with me as ammo whenever I need to animate anything.

All of the images are from the Internet. I built a template page in photoshop that's set to the size of the pages in the book, then all I have to do is fill it with clippings from stuff I find, print them out, and stick them in.

One of the best things about this process is the exploration. You get to see some of the mind blowing talent that lies almost anonymously on the Internet, and you get to learn a little from these great artists, and capture it.

My plan is to fill another book with my own drawings... but that's for another day.


( note: this work isn't my own. As I add to this blog, I will update my links to where these little gems were discovered )