3D Animator
Sizzle Reel
Production Pipeline
Storyboards
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When it comes to Storyboards, I usually whip up some rough drawings on Photoshop to lay the foundation for my piece, while being flexible enough to edit midway through production, if necessary
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Boarding helps establish a sense of staging, rough key-poses, extremes, and breakdowns, that easily conveys the scenario for my scene
Animatic
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Once all the Storyboards are drawn, I organize the drawing layers through Photoshop’s timeline editor in order to space them out and set up the appropriate timing for my scene
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This ranges from timing out my poses, to camera cuts for the next shot, or to simply just line them up for sound cues
Layout
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Loading up Maya, I start to create my scene on a basic level by importing the characters I'm about to animate into a low-poly set I created, with a camera on stand-by
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Once everything is in place, I start to move/key the characters and camera according to the animatic in order to stay true to my staging. Without it, the whole project would be too disorganized to animate
References
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Finally getting into the animation side, I make separate files of my rigs to create movement cycles for my scene; whether it be the character walking, running, skipping, etc.
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In order to create such movements, reference is required, and to aid with that process, keyframes of the reference material are imported into Maya, via an Image Plane, to be further analyzed and applied to the rig itself
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This process saves time in production because instead of painstakingly animating the movement frame by frame within the Layout file, the movement can just be imported into the scene to further be cycled upon if it’s required
Blocking
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After my movements are in place, I start animating the key poses for my characters
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In this phase of production, I stack my poses on one another on the graph editor to match their holds in the animatic, before it switches to the next key pose
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Blocking is essentially the pillar that holds the animation together before finalizing anything
Polishing
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With the key poses set in place, I now get to the final portion of production, Polishing
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This step requires animating the extremes and breakdowns between key poses
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I usually approach this step through a procedure called Passes
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In layman's terms, Passes are phases in which an animator focuses on one aspect of their character at time
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I usually start animating from the hips as it dictates the character's weight shift and then work my way up to other body parts that follow through; such as the torso, legs, arms, head, etc
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Passes is an organized method to implement the 12 principles of animation as it carves out a character’s flow/personality throughout the scene