Reply To: Doing animation using curves vs Keyframing every 2 frames

[Wayne Dixon]

Hi Mauro,

In the body mechanics and workflow course, you will learn more about different workflows.
But there are 3 methods of working.

Straight ahead – start at frame 1, then key the next pose, then next pose etc
Pose-to-Pose – where you put in the most important poses first and then figure out the inbetweens
Combination – a little bit of both.

There is general way of getting from the start to the end as well.
Planning
Blocking
Splining 
and Polish
(you will learn that in the later course)

As for how you get to the end result, that is dependent on the animator.  Some animators love the graph editor, some hate it.
It doesn’t matter if your curves look beautiful or not, because at the end of the day it’s all about the pixels on the screen.
I used to do everything with nice beautiful curves – now most of the time I just throw keyframes at it and only get detailed in the GE when I need to.
(but this has taken years for me to ‘know’ when it’s ok to do this and when it will make the process harder)

Now is the time for you to learn and experiment, practice, fail, improve, have light bulb moments and figure out the best way for you to get to the end result.
That’s going to be different for me, and the next animator.
It might even be different for a different shot/exercise.

But for some general advice while you’re figuring all that out is to start with the big stuff, and then move onto the smaller stuff.
Go from simple to more complicated.  Don’t add too much detail first up because it becomes harder to edit.
Broad movement, to the small.

Hope that helps.