(Swashbuckling) Hands
[Grizzly Pirate RedVanbeard]: Yar, hands be tricky devil to animate. For they be subtle and expressive and complicated in oh-so-many ways.
I agree wholeheartedly with my split personality, but seeing as he has now descended into the shadowy depths of my psyche I must now go it alone with the remainder of this post. I will try to contain the dribbling to a bare minimum.
We in the field of computer animation have an easy life when it comes to keeping things on-model. We already have a puppet and when we move it about a bit in meaningful ways - whap! - animationy goodness comes out. Ace.
The problem with this is that seeing as the character turns up in the workspace with default poses for every part of the character, it can be very tempting to listen to the inner lazy and not do very much in the way of complex manipulation. After all, more curves touched = more a pain in the arse to deal with, right?
Of course, this is not the right way to be approaching things at all. Working with this mentality will just leave you with animation that looks robotic, lifeless, and unappealing! Creating performance requires you to think through all of the posing, from head to toe, and everything in between.
Of all body bits, hands are often the first victims to fall foul of the laissez-faire approach, (particularly in 3D animation). The fingers have a bazillion joints and need a lot of work to get looking right due to the complex and subtle ways in which we use them to communicate. This is all tough stuff, of course, but if the time is spent on this good stuff then it makes such a difference to how a pose is interpreted by the viewer, as all the visual cues are subconsciously assimilated.
Here a cool thing to demonstrate all of my babble - sketches of some of Jafar's hand poses from "Aladdin", drawn by Andreas Deja. Click for bigness. If you hit 'All Sizes' on Flickr you can get to Original mega-bigness. Yum!
I agree wholeheartedly with my split personality, but seeing as he has now descended into the shadowy depths of my psyche I must now go it alone with the remainder of this post. I will try to contain the dribbling to a bare minimum.
We in the field of computer animation have an easy life when it comes to keeping things on-model. We already have a puppet and when we move it about a bit in meaningful ways - whap! - animationy goodness comes out. Ace.
The problem with this is that seeing as the character turns up in the workspace with default poses for every part of the character, it can be very tempting to listen to the inner lazy and not do very much in the way of complex manipulation. After all, more curves touched = more a pain in the arse to deal with, right?
Of course, this is not the right way to be approaching things at all. Working with this mentality will just leave you with animation that looks robotic, lifeless, and unappealing! Creating performance requires you to think through all of the posing, from head to toe, and everything in between.
Of all body bits, hands are often the first victims to fall foul of the laissez-faire approach, (particularly in 3D animation). The fingers have a bazillion joints and need a lot of work to get looking right due to the complex and subtle ways in which we use them to communicate. This is all tough stuff, of course, but if the time is spent on this good stuff then it makes such a difference to how a pose is interpreted by the viewer, as all the visual cues are subconsciously assimilated.
Here a cool thing to demonstrate all of my babble - sketches of some of Jafar's hand poses from "Aladdin", drawn by Andreas Deja. Click for bigness. If you hit 'All Sizes' on Flickr you can get to Original mega-bigness. Yum!
Look at the lovely shapes these boney fingers can create. Much better than our default pose, eh? You can certainly see the rest of the body attitude just from each drawing and this just goes to show how much impact a good hand pose can have on the effectiveness of the pose as a whole. I would love to see more of this attention to detail in this new-fangled computer medium, and that is why the inner pirate had to surface.
[Grizzly Pirate RedVanbeard]: ??? Yaaaar!
*Dribble*
[Grizzly Pirate RedVanbeard]: ??? Yaaaar!
*Dribble*
posted by Kevan at
8/28/2006 09:52:00 PM
3 Comments:
Couldn't agree more!
After all, CG animators dont have to worry about being able to draw hands in a particular difficult pose, so there's really no excuse why we can't take a bit of extra time to come up with a pose that's both interesting and different, and which enhances the attitude that the rest of the body conveys.
Good post Kevan.
Mat.
By
Mathew Rees, at 1:01 AM
I also think that one of the tendancies of animators, and pirates at that, is to try to make every single pose "interesting." I put that in scare quotes because in theory, we should make every pose interesting. But in practice, too many times "interesting" translates into "unnatural." A good artist/animator/swarthy, bearded buccaneer knows when to use those really great poses and when to use a more scaled back pose that fits the moment and the attitude. By "scaled back" I don't mean "crappy." Just that not everything has to be an extreme.
Great post.
-Drew
By
Drew, at 3:35 PM
Great points, you guys!
By
Kevan, at 3:47 PM
Post a Comment
<< Home