 Welcome back. It is Friday and that means FNA Friday and today I'm gonna talk about how to block out your animation. I know I don't know your blocking is wrong. It's absolute clickbait title, but hear me out I want to talk about blocking the process of blocking how to show blocking mostly in relationship to student work because I've been teaching for 11 years there's a certain pattern that I see in how students presents their first past their blocking past and how that can cause problems in the long term and that will kind of set them back and it will take so much more time to get the work done So today is going to be a part one about what not to do a bit more theory and a bit more of my opinions And then I'm gonna continue with more examples and it's gonna segue into workflow and then back into blocking So as I'm attacking my second block of animation tips for FNA This is going to be a bit more back-and-forth with hands-on demos and examples and theory And I think blocking is massively important because there's something about poses and all that good stuff But the thing is if you're blocking is structurally not where it's supposed to be in terms of showing information Showing the story points or the acting points or the emotions or whatever you have Then you're gonna have such a harder time to fix it later on your main structure your basis for your work has to be Absolutely clean even as a student It's super important as you work for your clients and everything But as a student already you got to get into the habit of making your blocking work correctly and by correctly I mean this blocking doesn't mean crappy animation. Oh, I know this is this is how dare you I know now Let me rephrase blocking doesn't mean super rough Animation that's probably one of the most common things that I see from student work Is that when I give the assignment and the next week blocking is due what I give back a lot of times not most of the times But a lot of times it's technically a layout pass where you have the basic camera Maybe a set the staging and some really rough animation of a character moving from left to right doing Maybe some acting choices and then that's kind of it and that is a really really difficult to critique because it's a rough There is not enough information in terms of the story the acting points the emotions your gear change or whatever You want to do in there or even if you do weight assignment to show the weight in the complexities and all that good stuff So that's already a problem even if they show something that's more advanced than layout It's still not quite there in terms of really showing every beat the story points and clear information So what do I mean by that to me subjectively? But still blocking means every story point every idea every emotional beats every choice that the character Makes and that you want to show to the audience has to be as clear as possible And here's the controversial thing blocking can also include polished animation. I know what I know that I hear me out My point is that if you have a specific move that needs more advanced animation to sell that point Then that's what you need to do if you can show Exactly what you want to portray in terms of again your acting choice Whatever it is with minimal keys and it's still clear that's even better because you're gonna be faster Provisions can be incorporated faster. That's obviously better But if you need to set more keys and be more detailed and have more advanced animation Because that's what you need to do to show that story point and that's what you have to do Obviously, you don't want to polish during blocking but then you're gonna put too much time into this and their potential changes coming in And then your workflow is gonna slow down for sure But I prefer to go full on the opposite way and say if you need to really polish something to sell an idea That's better than just keep it in layout and then have people be confused when they look at your work So as an example, for instance, if you have and my thing is always head turns, right? So if you have a character that looks at another character and it's kind of a suspicious type of look and you just do this and That turn away that moment of looking maybe some eye darts I'm a little bit of pause and then and then over that is totally different than if you do this But that's what I mean with layout style or really really rough blocking If you just have two keys and you have this What does that mean? Does the character not care or is the character sleepy or is it a robot? I think this can mean so many things, but if I do this That has a completely different meaning and if you need to set more keys to sell that then so be it Obviously with more experience and the more work that you do and you know You're adapting different workflows where you can sell that idea with minimal keys and some tweaks in your graph editor Obviously, that's the ideal thing because it'll be faster, but you still tell the story But again going back the main problem that I see with student work is that they're blocking is so rough It's almost layout style that the ideas are not there, but they consider that blocking So then when the next pass comes in which should be blocking plus where you put in all your notes and kind of refine your animation Towards you know the final stages then suddenly a gesture like this turns into something like that where the idea is completely different and that's my whole point all of your ideas all of your acting choices the timing especially the Timing has to be clear in your blocking pass if you need examples You can easily type in progression reel or there's an example of an artist on Instagram That constantly shows his work at Disney and if you look at blocking pass what they consider blocking It's all in step mode and sometimes it's not step mode, but a lot of times it's that mode You can see how much detail is already there in head turns head accents shoulder movements That's the general timing why because it shows the intention it shows the timing it shows the emotion It shows all the acting choices and they're clear Especially if you work for someone and if you want to show it to your lead your super client or whatever it is You have to make sure that every story point is clear if then someone asked I don't understand what this means Then you technically failed because you didn't put in enough information to make that story point clear now I totally understand as a student as you're still learning animation You got to worry about arcs and and pops and space and everything that it's a lot to ask to not only be good from a Technical point of view, but then on top of that also put all of your animation But at the same time, I don't think it's encouraged enough just looking at other people's work from other classes Maybe other you know semesters previous semesters where this is considered. Okay This is considered blocking or later or looking at the grades that they get I don't think it's hammered in enough that you need to go further in your blocking pass But in order to do that in order to have all the information ready in terms of the timing and everything I said you also need to have a good foundation You need to have a plan damn it Valentine. You never plan ahead plan. Okay. Here's the plan Which is also super important and I highly encourage that it's better that you sit around for days doing nothing Or you just think about your animation where you shoot reference your thumbnail You just plan things out that you want the clearest idea possible for your shot Once you have that in your head or paper or you know reference Whatever you have then you can attack your shot and you know exactly which beat and you can concentrate on is this Idea the story point is emotion or whatever I want to portray coming across Correctly and in the best fashion so that everybody understands that but if your plan is too rough or you have no plan at all You just start animating without any type of you know Planning the brand then you're gonna have such a harder time and then your blocking is gonna be a model They're not clear you do kind of hesitating in the choices and just your whole process going to be so much longer and more difficult for you And going further than that if you look at what people consider polish the thing is imagine you have a car any car There's always my my favorite example And if it's a stupid example my example for the students is that imagine a car Let's take a photo back and whatever right and it's completely dirty That's your car. It's just really really dirty and then polish is the same car, but just clean It's the same idea is the same make same model the same design everything It's just you took the dirt away right but for a lot of people this might be exaggeration But for a lot of students that I see polish for them is like you have a Volkswagen that's dirty And then you have Mercedes that's dirty. It's a totally different cars It's a totally different idea, but it's still kind of dirty where they don't look at well technically you got to get to Blocking plus where you're pretty much done and polish is basically Asymmetry so we know like fine tuning of timing stuff in the fingers in the face But it's not that much different than your blocking plus pass But I think the common misconception there too of them Like I said is that blocking means very rough animation and that from whatever stage you would say Let's say blocking plus for just picking up a term from blocking plus to polish is a huge difference Not really it really should just be the final polish which takes a lot of time because it's you know The detail you want to put in but it really shouldn't be a dramatic difference So again if you need to polish your shop for blocking then so be it is it ideal of course not should you do this? No, you need to be as fast as you can and as clean and as simple While still showing all of the information but this comes with experience and practice But still when you present a shop for blocking make sure that every idea is clear Now one of the pitfalls and one of the reasons why it looks so rough It's because a lot of students do stepped mode for animation now I love steps step this fine right in terms of posing because it really forces you to think about this is the pose This is the pose and this is the pose and you're gonna look at is that pose Clear it's the silhouette. Okay, does it tell the story? That's fine But the danger is that you just set a couple keys in steps and because it's stepped It kind of looks better because you kind of pop from pose to pose and it kind of looks cool And that's it and the moment you spline this so many students freak out because then it turns into the spline You mess why because you didn't set enough breakdowns and in between you didn't take enough control over the timing and that's my biggest complaint and Hesitation when I say to zoom you should do stepped mode only because it just takes so much work in discipline to do Steps spline go back at more breakdowns spline it again need more breakdowns and not a lot of maybe that's the harsh That doesn't mean that not a lot of students that but it's something that is very common Common enough for me to make this clip and say this so for instance And that this came up yesterday in class when you have someone that sits and this is your pose in your Stepped key process right and then the next pose is the is the character standing That's not gonna work How you get up if it's a quick one if it's I'm I say this You know in previous if you watch this if it's like a slow beginning up if it's an alert thing Whatever it is There's so much information that you can show between the sitting and the standing pose same with the head like this and The head here How do you get there and in order to show that through your steps? Hey, you have to have more breakdowns and in-betweens and you correct easins and outs But it also goes back to you got to have a plan And you need to know why you're doing this and you need to know what your character is supposed to do and what you Want to show to the audience it's really a multi-step thing But before you start anything you got to have a clear idea Then you got to have a clear representation of that idea Be it just in your head because I can't draw it's mostly my head or reference or thumbnails And once you have that plan here's the plan Then you attack that plan with clear blocking and again if you need to set more keys to make that blocking clear Then so be it and just practice to set less keys to be faster and then you can make more changes But again the biggest thing is that blocking doesn't mean rough animation blocking means every idea is Presented in the clearest fashion for whoever watches this now that being said your blocking can Be rough if you're showing it to someone who has seen your final animation who knows how you polish and this is sometimes easier at Work when you show something really rough and you show it to your lead or your co-worker and you say listen This is kind of my idea. They don't have to go. Well, this is really rough I don't know if you can actually polish this that's one of the concerns as a teacher is that when you see work from students And it's rough and the ideas are kind of there like I don't know if it's a new students It's not a repeat students. I don't know how fast they work I don't know how I mean, I can look at the previous reel, but you never quite know how long it took them So it's kind of a thing of it looks cool, but this might take you two months to finish I don't know if it's gonna take you two months or three weeks. I'm not sure So that's why you want to encourage your students to keep things simple So they have enough time to go through the whole process and polish and so on and so on My point is work, you know people's work. You've seen your co-workers final shots You know what they can do with something so I would say at work It's a bit easier to show internally rough work because they know well I know that this person can take this so much further and I can I can see the ideas there and I can say okay Well, that's a good idea I'm not sure about that follow this and pursue that and you know flesh that out But you can't show something super rough and not clear to a client and again I can't talk too much about work because you know permission and blah blah blah But it's not uncommon to show blocking plus to clients because aid has to work with a life action plate Which is you know full motion and real time and everything and your animation has to kind of fit that So if you do super rough step blocking something that pops in front of a live action play I'm a big problem But mainly again you want to show things as clearly as you can and sometimes you also just want to sell it You just want to make a good impression like this is cool This I want to sell the shop which also means that sometimes you got to go further than blocking and maybe it's blocking plus And maybe that's not what the client wanted They got to delete the whole thing and start from scratch and that's okay Because that's the job your job is to just present something in a clearest fashion and Have it be kickass so that the client likes it and then you move on it's not about I mean Hopefully it can be economical because of money shoes and budget in Thailand So I know but that's a whole different FNA job at work It's okay to be rougher because people know how you work and they've seen your final work at school It's different so if a student shows me very very rough blocking It's usually an indication that's gonna take a long time to get there and the revisions are gonna be tricky And then also depends how the student takes in the notes do they understand the notes in terms of I gotta do this and then they Absorb the notes so that the next pass already has those notes in mind for the next week and so on and so on So you got to be very careful what you tell the students and the thing is for me The biggest thing as always is to skip things short and simple enough So you can go through the whole process and you can practice to go through blocking to polish and so on and so on And then just have the muscle memory of doing that So what could you do to practice that like one of the things you can do that I mentioned yesterday in class It's kind of a tricky thing and it's not it's not a long term It's not something that you can use for your reel But what you could do is again look for progression reels look out There's so many reels out there where people show their layouts. They're blocking maybe already polished Maybe just skipping blocking plus but they show their final animation then final animation rendered But a lot of times you see blocking a lot of times it's stepped and you can see the amount of detail That's in there if you can find something that is stepped maybe a bit more on the rougher side Not super detailed what you could do technically take that footage into Maya take any rig that you have that somewhat matches that rig Right and then rotoscope. I know it's horrible to say about rotoscope the step poses Not because that's what you want to present or keep but you can have that pose and then look at when does it pop into the next pose And then copy that copy that and then you look at the curves because to me It's also important that you look at this is the animation Well, what does that look like in the graph editor like my process has been again It's very subjective is as I go through my my work and as I practice and as I see other people's work When you take someone else's shot to fix it or change something or if I see mocap and I see the mocap curves I learn from seeing the curves. I know that well if this curve looks like this I know that this is going to do this to the animation So sometimes you can tweak the graph editor the curves in graph editor and you know what the result is going to be And sometimes you make this change. You know that how it's going to affect the curve and so on and so on It's back and forth. So to me, there's a lot of value at looking at curves to see what that means So if you have some rough blocking in terms of steps that still shows every idea It might be beneficial to bring that in do the poses and look at well How how does that affect the timing? What are the curves? But you don't want to get caught up into Cleaning your curves a lot of times people do again. I'm saying a lot of times I'm exaggerating But you might have an animation and it's okay And then you start cleaning the graph editor because for some reason someone told you that your curves have to be clean I don't know not to me not really I mean it's your animation looks good and your curves are super messy and it's not cheating It doesn't destroy things downstream like sim or hair or cloth and it's fine if it looks great It looks great But sometimes if you go back in there and you clean your curves You start to kind of file down and send down the accents the nice little moments where everything gets kind of too clean And then it loses that edge It just becomes all kind of swimmy and spliny and kind of and I think one of the benefits would be to see Something that's well animated and see what the curves are doing now It's hard to get someone's professional shot and then get that Maya scene and look at the curves But again, maybe one of the ways could be that you look at something that's Again, not super super detailed in step mode But just rough enough that it's clear enough and cool put that into my copy it so you can see what happens between each poses What the curves do this might be time consuming. I'm not saying do this all the time But this could be a way for you to understand some like my point is also you have to find different ways of learning You got to adopt different workflows and different methods because there's not one workflow that's going to work for everybody So maybe that might be a step for you to where something clicks and you understand a process better and so on and so on I mean, I don't know again try different things, but as a whole that's my rant now I'm going to show more example part two is going to be more of a it's still blocking related But it dips into workflow What can you do to make sure that your blocking is good that your timing is still there that your what you blocked out Kind of resembles your reference or what you hide in mind There are a couple steps kind of like a hit list that I tell my students that they should pay attention to In order to make their blocking work But still the main thing that I wanted to communicate in this first clip in this part one is that rough animation is not blocking That it's basically layout. You got to flesh this out more. I have more acting beats This is a bit too even like the body might just do a turn like this I don't know what that means is that because the character is really stressed out and stiff Or is it because he didn't set enough keys and then you ask specific acting questions And then they don't know I don't know what I wanted to do here, which then goes back to planning So the big thing is gotta have a plan looks to me like they're coming up with a plan I have to change that plan. We've got a plan and you got to have a clear plan in however way you get there Again thumbnails reference, whatever you need then with that clear plan You attack your blocking and your blocking has to present every idea that you have and every acting choice in the clearest fashion So whatever you can do to minimize the steps that your workflow gets faster This is super important. This is another thing about workflow and being fast at work That's a whole different fna But it's okay for blocking to have advanced animation in there as long as every idea is presented in the clearest fashion And sometimes I think is that really too exaggerated and then I look at those examples and I go no their blocking pass is pretty advanced I mean it's still in step mode, but there's so much information how shoulders can move or the head moves I think it's a good thing to strive towards. I know it again This is difficult to do as a student was you have so much to learn still But if this should be on your horizon, this should be your end goal that when I block something out I'm going to put in as much information as I can It doesn't mean again that you need to do like crazy offsets and you know and your fingers and everything Of course, there are things you will simplify But the current danger is that you simplify too much and one of the ways to to make that mistake Is to do step mode and just have your golden poses and that's it So for anybody any student that does step mode blocking Make sure that you put in enough breakdowns in between and you take control of those easins and outs And how your character goes from pose to pose what body part leads so that every intention is clear Okay, I think I've beaten that horse to death But I will explain that again and I will repeat that again in future FNAs Because it's a really really important thing that your basic structure You main thing that you start with animation is as solid as you can Otherwise it's going to take forever to fix it and again your workflow will suffer and so on and so on Next week part two. There are more examples. There again workflow tips It's going to be a bit of a back and forth between workflow and just blocking theory But that's it if you have concerns about anything I just said like wait a minute, but that makes any sense Please comment Let me know because I think this part the the step of blocking things out is so important So if you have tips or other examples or anything that you use that you want to share that other people Can see and learn from it It would be awesome to comment and share that if this was as always helpful like and subscribe All my whole thing, you know how it goes and it's obviously helpful to me And I will continue next week with more info about blocking with potentially less click baity titles Maybe or I'll keep the title to say part two. All right. So thank you for watching and I will see you next week