Check Your Animation Silhouettes

In this tutorial, I want to talk about how to review and critique your animation using silhouette. You may have heard many times that silhouettes are extremely important in art and animation. As I mentioned before in a previous post (Which you can read HERE), silhouettes help in more than making a clear pose. It helps in the over all animation, framing and composition of you animation.

So in the animation below, I created a character doing a back flip and running towards his attackers with a spike in hand. The animation isn't 100% complete, but it looks pretty good as it is so far. I began like I normally do, by blocking out, then adding timing, and refining. Now I want to check the animation. So I make a playblast and watch it over and over again at different parts of the body. I'm looking for any mistakes or anything I can change. However, whenever you look at an animation, especially 3D animation, you might get distracted by other things. In this example, the shading and the details of the character could distract you from the over all quality of the animation. It's not a big distraction, but none the less it's a distraction. What you want to focus on is the composition of the poses. Looking at the silhouettes will allow you to view the animation undisturbed.

To do this all you have to do is.... wait for it... PRESS 7! Yes, that's it pressing 7 turns on the lights in Maya that you have created. If there are no lights in the scene then all the objects turn black. Which, look like silhouettes. So doing this makes it easier to view the action in form, shapes and more importantly, silhouettes.

I hope this helps you in refining your animation further and touch up the smallest details. Remember that in animation, the smallest details or a change on one frame make a world of difference.

Later animators!!!