A look at how the FootRoll attribute on IK leg controls can sometimes trip us up when animating walks and runs.. and an alternative approach which can give cleaner results in some cases. I also demonstrate how I like to clean things up to remove the dreaded knee pop.
Category Archives: Tutorials
Before Ever After – Animation book review #1
My first animation book review video, this one covers the book on Disney animation published last year, Before Ever After.
Jason Ryan master class
Attended a master class with Jason Ryan here in Dublin yesterday. It was organized by Animation Skillnet and Screen Training Ireland and was a very enjoyable and educational day. Very nice to catch up with Jason again and have a chat too. 
Animation tip – A quick way to animate overlap and settle.
This is a method I like to use sometimes to animate overlap and settle, it’s very controllable, quick to do and can give a pretty subtle result. In this case I demonstrate it on Jupiter’s ears and hair but it can be used on all kinds of things to add more life to the animation.
Hope you find it useful and happy animating!
The Jupiter rig is from iAnimate.net
Jason Ryan demos bhGhost
Jason Ryan from iAnimate/Disney/Dreamworks/Cinesite made a great video showing how he uses my ghosting tool for Maya.
Tips and Tricks for Animating in Maya, great demo and awesome plugin by Brian Horgan.
Posted by iAnimate.net on Friday, March 11, 2016
A common mistake when animating walkcycles..
Looking back at some older walkcycles I’ve animated a few years back the other day, I noticed I kept seeing the same mistake and I’ve seen it in other walkcycles from beginner animators too. So I thought I’d make a video discussing it. Hope it helps!
Jason Ryan demos bh_Ghost
A very cool video from the amazing animator Jason Ryan (iAnimate, Dreamworks, Disney etc!) where he shows some ways he has implemented my ghosting tool into his animation workflow. Many thanks to Jason for taking the time to make it.
Watch the video on the ianimate.net Facebook page here.
How to Overlap a Tail – Animation Tutorial
This video explores two contrasting workflows for animating a tail with appealing overlapping motion. I guess you could say one method is more technical and the other is more artistic. Both are valid of course, the end result is what counts most!
Speed Animating a Walkcycle – Timelapse video
A little demo of how I block out a quick walk-cycle using custom mirroring tools I’ve written for Maya. Generally I don’t animate most things in such a layered fashion, but for walks and runs I find it’s a nice way to work quickly.
The main tools I’m using here are scripts that allow me to mirror different kinds of controllers, from IK feet and hands to Spine controllers and FK arms. These will work with pretty much any rig and don’t need any set-up. During the blocking section I’m also using a tool that keys the same pose on the first and last frame of the cycle so I don’t have to play that frame when animating (which would look like a hitch since it’s the same pose as frame 1). That tool is based on the ‘set prompt’ tool in Maya but automatically figures out how long the loop is so I don’t have to type it in each time (I think I’m actually using it too quickly to see clearly in the video but you’ll see it flash up now and then 🙂 )
The other thing you’ll see me doing from time to time is favoring keys using my own version of the classic ‘TweenMachine’ tool (the arrow buttons on my shelf). I wrote a TweenMachine tool for C4D a while back (available on my website) and found I preferred just having some buttons to nudge poses back and forward rather than a slider so I wrote one for Maya too.
At the end of the video I convert the walk-in-place to one that translates in world space using another tool I created called ‘bh_snapToWorldspace’.
This video is sped up 6x and it real time this was about 25 minutes in total. Hope you find it interesting!
The Sheldon rig is from the fantastic iAnimate online animation school.
Baking Alembic to Point Caches in C4D
A little trick that can allow you access to polygon selections on meshes driven by Alembic caches in Cinema4D. I also demonstrate how to bake the animation down to Point Cache tags which can help work around bugs with Net rendering Alembic in Cinema R14.042.