POSE 2 POSING... to SPLINE (an insight)

Holidays are here!

December!
     Make sure you check out the Prep and Landing short that just came out last week. Those characters are very great and it's a very nice and sweet 20 minute short. The story telling is really has got cranked up a notch at Disney! And it only gets better with new AMAZING shorts and their new film due out next year: Wreck it Ralph.

PEOPLE TO KNOW:
     Some other updates I want to mention: I want to bring some attention to my buddy Andrew Chesworth, who is an amazing animator. He does 3D animation with me at Disney but he was brought up on 2D animation. He recently won a contest for a small piece he made. His stuff can be checked out at  ANDREW CHESWORTH

     Another artist that I'm vey exited to mention is Brittney Lee. Most might know her work already but that still does not take away from how great and unique her work really is and it's always worth mentioning again and again. I recently ran into her at work and was able to get my hands on one of her prints/painting. If you ever get the opportunity please take advantage of it. I liked this painting especially  since I've spent the last 5 years in SF.

Brittney Lee

Animation: POSE TO POSING TO SPLINE
     Animating at Disney has taught me a lot. Most importantly, the amount of information and detail pose to pose animating can have. I was always turned off to pose to pose animation because it got messy fast when you went to stepped to spline. You could not tell what was happening and it was hard to pick out what control was making what pops. But having warmed up to pose to pose for the last 3 months here at Disney, I have got a technique that I want to share and hopefully it can help you out when you are animating pose to pose.
    Before I got from stepped to spline, I always lay another set of KEYS on everything before the value change in the graph editor/timeline. I know that was confusing, let me clarify: In STEPPED, your timeline looks like this with your keys: l       l        l         l         l         l....

what I do before going to SPLINE is:  l          ll          ll         ll         ll        ll....

Why? I do this so that when I switch to spline EVERYTHING STAYS THE SAME. And then I can go and animate one control/avar at a time while everything else stays on 'stepped'. This way I can animate the root (or what ever else I want) without ANY distractions and everything else just pops or stays still while I polish what needs to be polished.

This has helped me out a lot, I still keep my layering method for polishing and I get the benefits of pose to posing.

I don't know if this is something every does and im a little behind or this is new and could start helping some people. I hope it helps you and who ever else is having trouble when transitioning out of stepped. I hope all of you guys have fun over these winter holidays and have a lot of fun, The New Year is a few weeks away!