Gathering Reference
This is an extremely imortant step. I had never animated a scorpion before and I don't have 8 legs (though that would be sweet) so shooting reference of myself was out of the question. Most of the reference I gathered was from this wonderful place called the Internet, you may have heard of it..if not Google it. I would highly recommend framepool.com for finding animal reference. They have tons of videos and lots of them are with the animals against blue screens...which is very helpful for studying motion. Here's just one of the videos I gathered when doing my research.
Analyzing Reference
This step I feel is very important and is often overlooked by animators. Its easy to gather reference, or shoot reference of yourself, but what do you do with that? Where do you go from there? Gathering the reference is just the first part, you then need to take the time to analyze it. That's why I find it helpful to write out a list of things that stand out to you when watching the reference & things you want to change, leave out, or exaggerate. After gathering reference of scorpions, here's a list I made with some notes of what I discovered & a second list of things I wanted to add in/change.
- They have a lot of "stop n start" movement
- There is not much movement in the body/arms
- There's very little anticipation in their movements
- For the most part they keep their tails straight when moving
- They are creepy
- Get more tilt in the body when he's moving. Like a plane or helicopter would bank
- Loosen up the tail - have tail be in a more interesting pose while he moves & add more overlap
- Use the claws to add some visual interest when he's moving
Test Animation
After I've gathered my reference & analyzed it. The next step I take when animating a new character is to do a test animation. A test animation is usually just a "throw away" animation that helps the animator get a feel for the character and how they should move. It also lets other people (Producers, Directors, Designers) see the character in motion and give feedback. Here's some reasons for why a test animation is very important
- Helps you develop an animation workflow - Workflow is everything & sometimes you'll find, depending on the character you're animating, you need to tweak/change your workflow
- Helps define the character for other animators - For this project I was the only animator so this didn't apply as much, but if there are other animators on the project having a test animation for them to look at is helpful for them to understand how a character should move or act. As the project goes on you'll have more finaled shots to use as reference, but at the beginning having a test animation can be helpful
- Get early buy off from Directors - if you can get buy off from the Director on how the character moves or acts in a test animation this will save time when you start creating actual shots
- Tests the Rig - you can test/play with the rig without creating an animation, but sometimes until you actually do an animation with it you won't notice things that are broken/features you want
For the project I was on the main thing I wanted to answer with my test animation was how it affected my workflow. The deadlines for the animations were going to be very quick (as it was a videogame) so I wanted to make sure my workflow helped me animate as fast as possible. Here's the test animation I created
Here's what I learned from this test animation
- I found it was much easier/quicker to animate in a straight forward workflow, as opposed to the pose to pose method I use for more human characters.
- I ended up turning off the legs completely at first and treated the body as a spaceship almost, animating it through the world. Then went back and added the legs in
- Scorpions Rock!
I hope this has been insightful and remember, never jump straight into Maya when starting a new animation, be sure to spend plenty of time doing research and learning how that particular character may affect your workflow. Happy Animating!
