Dev Log #25 | Animation Breakdown #2

It's time for the second installment of my Animation Breakdown series. Last time we looked at the writing, reference gathering and lighting. This time we'll focus on the actual animating, cleanup and compositing.

• Writing, that's what I always start with.
• References, This might be the most important step.
• Light, or else things would look ugly.
• Animating, the bread and butter I'd say.
• Cleanup, getting rid of small errors, fixing shaders, applying physics.
• Compositing, making sure that everything looks nice.
• Rendering, we need those images after all.
• Sound, it has to be all squishy and gooey or it's no fun.
• Exporting, we want a video at the end

4. The Animation Process.

Now that the scene is well lit, I have my reference and the characters are posed into their starting frames. it's time to animate. As almost all the animations in a romantic scene have to be loopable and the movements are often rather repetitive, my first step is usually to block in those repetitive movements. Which means I roughly animate the large movements like the hips for example, not to look great, but to see how fast things are going and how they'll roughly look. Here I often use the reference to determine the right speed for the movements. Nowadays I usually animate in 30 frames per second. That means depending on how fast or slow I want a movement to be, I make it take more, or less frames. More frames means slower, less frames is faster. By looking at the reference and watching how many frames their movements take, I can get a feel for whether I need to go slower or faster with mine. In the image below you can see how the timeline for an animation looks with only the hip movements showing. The numbers at the top show you which frame I'm on and every dot is a keyframe, basically a pose for the character that morphs into the next keyframe, the next pose and that morphing between poses is the animation.

Once I've blocked in the very, very rough movements of the animation, I start working on the details. I usually do this by shrinking the timeline I'm working down to just one loop. So if it takes 30 frames for the hips to meet and go back to their default state, I only work on those exact 30 frames. Then, one by one for every moving part of the character, I animate how they'd move in that 30 second loop. How the hair waves, how the legs part, how the breast jiggle and so on. This part takes a long time, can be a bit tedious but is generally great fun. By doing this, slowly but surely the animation will start to look good. At least for those 30 isolated frames. Below you can see the view I have when working on an animation. All those colored lines on the characters are their so called "bones" and by moving them the character model moves. By adjusting these one after the other the animation comes to live.

Now that I have my 30 frame loop done, I move on to the next section of the animation. I make the timeline larger again, so that the animation goes from 30 frames to 300 for example, for a full animation loop. The more frames, the longer the animation will be, I usually aim for 200-300 frames. Now by copying the isolated loop we made to the entire timeline we have an animation that looks good, but is very repetitive. So I'm adding the parts that aren't constantly looping now. I animate the blinking of the eyes, how the eyebrows and mouth moves, how the belly contracts, movements on the arms, or the upper body, or the head or any other parts that break open the isolated 30 frames and makes it look like actual movement. Now it starts to actually look good. Of course there is still much, much more to say about animating, but I'll leave it at that because it is already unnecessarily detailed.

5. Cleaning up the Animation.

This part is rather easy, but can still be very infuriating. Now I start cleaning up parts that I don't like. Making small corrections to the animation and most often, making sure that nothing clips. Which will always happen when bodies are this close together. They will meet and squish and interact and that is extremely difficult to animate. One thing I use to make it look at least a little bit believable are so called "Shape Keys".

Shape keys are used to directly transform the 3D model you're working on, without permanently altering it. You basically change the character, like make their leg squish where the bodies meet, and then you can change that squishing action from 0% to 100%. 0% meaning no squish and 100% meaning full squish. And by doing this for all characters I can animate their bodies squishing or clothes  moving or whatever without any clipping.

But that is only one part of the cleanup, at this point I also sometimes add physics to the characters. Setting them up is easy, but can be a bit tedious and it requires some annoying shenanigans that I'm not getting into, but they can make it incredibly easy to get the breasts moving  or other parts that should bounce and jiggle. I usually do it by applying physics to two points in space that are basically supposed to move like jelly and then I make the breasts follow their movements. A way that is easy on the hardware and easy to control, but I don't always use physics, as it doesn't always look good. Sometimes animating things by hand just looks more natural.

6. Compositing the Image.

Now that the Animation is done, well lit and cleaned up I want to start rendering out the frames. But before I can do that, I need to do some compositing. Basically touchups in Photoshop, but directly inside of Blender and they'll be applied to every rendered frame. Compositing is an insanely strong tool that I'm learning to use more and more nowadays, but the composite for my animations is actually very simple and basic. Below you can roughly see how my compositing setup looks.

I could now explain every single node you can see there, but I don't really think that's necessary for you to understand my workflow. If anyone ever wants a tutorial from me on anything I do I can probably get into more detail, but I think for now just roughly explaining it is enough. Basically this setup makes the background behind the characters blurry, then applies a very faint vignette, meaning the edges are slightly darker, again to focus the eye to the middle of the image where the action is and I add a faint dispersion effect. The Dispersion effect gives the animations a slightly more cinematic look, as it is something we are used to see from cameras. It is also heavily used in many games, If I remember correctly the tutorial or opening of Destiny heavily used the effect. I'm talking about the faint red and blue lines on the edges of an image that make you think you'd need one of those oldschool 3D glasses. You can see it in the title image of this very post. And that is it already. A simple but effective setup.

Now all of that is done and I'm ready to render. Which will come in the next installment. Also for those that made it here, I'm pretty much finished with update 0.9. and it will be released in the next two days. Just so you know.

Stay safe and have fun this week, you'll hear from me soon!