Nathaniel Seymour, a 2009 graduate of the Animation Mentor Character Animation Program whose credits include Dune: Part 1, Godzilla vs. Kong, Pokémon Detective Pikachu, and the TV shows Silicon Valley and Key and Peele, walks through how to animate a character showing caution. In this tutorial you will learn how to plan the acting with video reference, block the performance in stepped key poses, adjust the overall timing, and sell the emotion with a character that only has eyes to work with.
Start With Reference
Nathaniel begins by shooting video reference of himself. The acting exercise is simple: take something very ordinary and react as if you have never seen it before. People often pick a chair, but Nathaniel used a coffee mug as a stand-in for the rock his character will meet.
To make the moment believable, the performer has to show caution. Is it going to hurt me? Is it going to move? When the mug rises and then drops, the reaction gets bigger each time. That chain of questions is what drives the whole animation.
Scene Setup
The shot picks up right where Nathaniel’s earlier tutorial on walking over uneven terrain left off. A four-legged character named Fuzbot has just finished his walk and now discovers a rock that he finds very curious. Nathaniel keeps one Maya scene open for the work in progress and a second one for the finished, polished version.
He adds an extra animation layer for the new work. In the animation preferences he uses weighted tangents, keeps the in tangent on auto, and sets the out tangent to stepped. Stepped mode is perfect for the early stage because it lets you focus on key poses without any in-between motion getting in the way.
Blocking the Key Poses
The first pose lands around frame 120, where Fuzbot starts reaching toward the rock with his claw. Nathaniel nudges the claw so it does not penetrate the rock, extends the arm, and moves the body along with it.
- On this rig the legs do not follow the body automatically, so they need to be moved by hand to keep the pose balanced.
- The reaching arm should keep some distance from the leg so nothing passes through it.
- Nathaniel selects controls from the list rather than in the viewport, which avoids grabbing the wrong control by accident.
About 14 frames later, the claw comes up and the body leans forward a little more. The other arm moves back to help keep the balance, so one arm shows the caution while the other holds the pose steady. The legs shift forward a bit to keep the momentum going.
The rock is a co-star and gets its own keys. Nathaniel moves its pivot point with the D key so it can tilt up from the right spot to follow the claw. If a control still has old keys that were set before switching modes, it may not be stepped. In that case, select the keys in the graph editor and click the step tangents button at the bottom left.
Acting With Partial Expressions
Fuzbot has eyes and nothing else, no nose, no ears, no mouth. Nathaniel calls this working with partial expressions, and he finds it more fun and more challenging because you have to push what you do have to its full potential.
To keep the eyes consistent, he keeps the same distance between the pupil and the edge of the eye as much as possible, and he moves the eye control out to a spot where that is easy to maintain. He also checks everything through the camera view, since the eyes carry so much of the performance. When the rock rises and then falls, the eyes follow it first, which is the earliest sign that Fuzbot has noticed what happened.
Adjusting Overall Timing
Once the key poses are in, the first playback looks a bit fast. That is the benefit of working pose to pose, because timing is easy to change. Nathaniel selects everything and shifts the keys in the graph editor, though he notes that adjusting in the timeline works just as well.
He keeps frame 120 as the start, slows down the rise of the rock, and then slows it a few more frames. He sets the rock’s dramatic fall at around frame 160, and the reaction is built around that beat.
Reflex and Recoil
When the rock falls, Fuzbot does not react right away. He is still curious and still leaning forward, so his arm and claw continue the flip-up motion, and the top and bottom pincers open and close slightly differently for variety. His eyes are the first thing to register what happened.
Then comes the recoil, roughly 10 frames later. Fuzbot moves back, the legs go with him, and one arm shoots slightly forward as a reflex. The pincers open again to suggest shock. Nathaniel also reminds us that the character is thinking about his escape route, such as whether he can back up, turn, and run. He finishes with a pose where Fuzbot stays on guard, rises slightly as he settles, and makes a small arc on the way back. A leg that almost tips over adds to the reflex before he recovers his balance.
Polish Preview
At this stage Nathaniel has not added any secondary motion, since the goal is to get the key poses and the timing right first. To show where it ends up, he opens his second scene, which has been smoothed out and polished. It includes blinking lids, brows, a final look around for the best retreat spot, and pupils that dilate as the shock sets in.
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