There comes a time in any project, large or small, where you have to cut your losses and move forward. This is especially true when it comes to the “polishing phase” of any work. There’s a feeling of freedom and joy you can experience when the bulk of the hard work is done and all that’s left to do is make things look nice. You’re no longer creating the foundation or solely focused on structure. Now you can loosen up and add all the fun little details you’ve been hoping to add since you started. In painting or drawing, this is when you’re adding the final touches; creating small details, cleaning up edges, adding highlights, etc. In character animation, this is when you’re adding secondary motion, refining expressions, and generally tightening things up.

But as fun as this phase of a project is, there’s an important question that always pops up; When can I consider this finished? In many situations, strict deadlines answer this question for you. You’re done when you run out of time. But when you haven’t established a deadline, the answer can be way more evasive than you expect. And I experienced this in a big way with this next animation exercise.

After practicing the character weight shift, I moved on to creating a character idle animation. This would once again combine many of the things I learned from the previous exercises into one motion. There are head turns, expression changes, weight shifts, blinks, etc. On top of that, a typical idle animation will loop. Meaning the animation must seamlessly end back where it started. Unlike a more action oriented animation, most idles are all about subtlety. Typically your character is at a place of rest. They’re just standing there, maybe shifting their weight from one leg to another or looking around. So those are the elements I decided to include, and here’s the final result:

While I don’t think this is a bad animation, I’m not very proud of it. And through doing this, I’ve definitely learned that subtlety can be a tricky thing to achieve in animation. There are so many little details to keep track of. And all those little details kept me from finishing this before I should have.

A lot of my issues happened during the polishing phase. Even after establishing the primary motion (the motion of the torso, hips, and legs) and moving on to secondary motion (face, arms, and feet), I kept finding myself jumping back to tweak the former. I was perpetrating the dreaded animation sin: Noodling. This is basically when you repeatedly, and often needlessly, tweak and modify your animation into oblivion. You’ll complete a part of the motion, move on, and then hours later notice something was off with that motion you previously considered complete. Or find a million new mistakes you didn’t see before. Rinse and repeat over and over again, and you’ll never feel like the animation is finished. And with so many little subtle details to change, this animation took me waaay longer than it should have. Like I mentioned earlier, I even went back to tweak the primary motion, which I should’ve just considered complete by the time I started polishing.

Noodling has gotten me into a lot of productivity trouble in the past. But these days I’ve managed to avoid noodling with a couple strategies. One is that I’ll jot down a specific checklist of fixes that I want to make to my animation. Then I follow that checklist pretty strictly, and avoid adding or addressing any other issues until I get to the bottom of that list. Typically I’ll create a checklist for each major body part, or focus in on a few principles of animation. I’ll also make a mental list of compromises I’m willing to making to get the animation finished in a reasonable time. I consider “What’s a must have feature?” and “What can I afford to abandon?”. With these two things in mind, I’m usually able to find a finishing point with an animation, and avoid tweaking things endlessly. After “faffing about” for much longer than I should have, I eventually got back into these anti-noodling strategies with this idle animation. Even though I should’ve done that at the start! I guess old habits do die hard. But this ended up being a great learning experience and an important reminder of the strategies I should keep using to avoid the noodling loop.

As a fun little aside, here’s the original “idle animation” I made several years ago before remaking it more recently:

I might’ve taken subtlety to an extreme with this first attempt! But I did end up adding motion to things like the hair and waist armor. These are two elements I had to abandon in my remake. Regardless, I feel like I improved in a lot of ways!

Mulan Rig by CharacterRigs.com

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