Rapid posing skills in Maya

Bader Badruddin encourages you to stop over-analysing your character animation work and try to get a pose done in as little time as possible!

Bader Badruddin encourages you to stop over-analysing your character animation work and get a pose done ASAP!

I’ve been a lead and director for the past couple of years and have worked with many animators, helping them hone their skills to become faster and more efficient.

Initially, I found that the animators were taking too long fiddling with their keys in the graph editor, trying to fix a fundamentally flawed animation. The best thing to do was to start again with a new foundation for them to follow.

So we thought it would be best to put these steps into an easy-tofollow list. This has developed into the foundations of AnimDojo’s approach to animating.

There are many things I can cover here, but I want to share with you something practical so you can get a sense of how our approach is different. This is an exercise that’s recommended to be done at least half an hour before animating, just like a warm-up exercise. Doing so will help you to build muscle memory, enabling you to break free from viewing the computer or Maya as an obstacle. Instead, you’ll embrace it as part of your time and work effortlessly. In time this will free you to focus on posing and animating without feeling “slow or stuck”.

You’ll have five minutes per pose, and you can use the rig provided with this workshop and follow along in one of our pre-recorded live sessions. However, before you do that you need to follow a few simple steps to know how to do it correctly…

1 Configuring the Viewport in Maya

One of the things that helped me improve my speed and efficiency in Maya was when I used the three-port view instead of having dual monitors. On the left would be my perspective (A), on the right my camera view (B), and below is the graph editor (C). The reason for this is so I don’t keep turning my head between two screens, constantly checking both for every step I make. I work 90 per cent of the time directly in the camera view, and only use perspective if I can’t get the pose to work because of awkward positioning of body parts to the camera.

2 Let’s middle mouse it!

This is a term I use a lot with my animators. I’ve seen so many people control the rig by selecting the actual manipulators and moving them axis by axis. This is such a time waster! Grab the character’s arm, then anywhere on the screen just use your middle mouse button and drag it wherever you need it to be. This is much faster, and over time you’ll see the benefits of this approach. Note that this is only possible with translation, not rotation.

4 Quickly assess your line of action 3 Less is definitely more

The idea that the more complex a rig is the better it’ll perform, is a pet peeve of mine. Keep things simple. Set your arms to IK mode and set their space to either hips or chest. That way, when you move the hips the entire upper body moves along with it. You want to be able to move the character with as few controllers as possible.

The amount of time wasted when posing a character sometimes boils down to one little thing animators forget about, and that’s the line of action. Grab the hips, the chest and the head if need be, and together move them into position. This will give you a quick glance at what your line of action will look like, without spending a long time moving each body part – only to realise you haven’t pushed the pose enough.