This is my second attempt at using the pose-to-pose workflow outlined by Chester Sampson in his video “The Ultimate Animation Workflow for Beginners”. I wrote a bit about this workflow in my last post and I was actually kinda psyched to use it again. Much like last time, this method helped immensely with the blocking phase. Once I got my key/golden poses figured out, creating the breakdown poses was a breeze! And because you end up establishing progressive spacing early on, the splining process becomes a lot easier to clean up.

Here a little shot progression breakdown of the process:

And here’s a loop of the final animation:

I decided to add the little dodge move pretty late into the process. But I used the same pose-to-pose workflow for that too.

Workflow aside, I did have a bit of trouble figuring out how the character should hold the sword. I had the pose down, but the real question was how to constrain the sword to the hands. In my Lifting Object animation I actually had the hands, in IK mode, constrained to the box. Then I animated the box as it was “lifted” onto the other table. In that animation, the hands are very briefly in contact with the box. On top of that, the box was meant to be pretty heavy object, so having it “lead” the motion made a bit more sense. The character is basically using momentum to swing the box over. But with this animation, things are a bit different. Firstly, the sword is always in the character’s hands. Which means that I have to account for the arc of the sword throughout the whole motion. It’s also much lighter, and should feel more like it’s following the hands rather than leading.

I could have take a similar approach to the box, and animated the sword on its own, with the hands in IK. But doing so would’ve probably resulted in a very floaty animation, as the hands would have felt a bit disconnected from the body. Instead, I kept the character’s right hand in FK and constrained the sword to that. Then I set the character’s left hand to IK and constrained that control to the sword. Well…sort of!? Doing this really breaks the constraint hierarchy of the rig, so I had to make sure to use locators and groups to circumvent this. How2Animate has a great tutorial on creating this constraint system, which really helped me.

Also, while I’m shouting people out, I want to thank jdS, Andre, Nazareno Calampuca, and TalkingSkunk for all the helpful feedback they left me over on Syncsketch. If you’d like to see the earlier versions of this animation and the feedback I received, check out this Syncsketch link.

As usual, thanks for giving this a read! I really appreciate it!

Russell Rig by CharacterRigs

My Links: ArtStation  / Cara / Vimeo / YouTube / Instagram