How To Animate Faster?

[phredrek-phredrek]

Hey everyone!

I was wondering if anyone has any good tips or suggestions on how to be a faster animator?
your suggestions are greatly apreciated!
thanks!

Frederic

[gmask]

don't animate with everything turned on.. I see alot of newbie animators expecting their low budget display card to allow them to animate in realtime with a million polygons on screen and hardware textures turned on.

If you are working with a character use segmented low res geometry to start with instead of trying tow ork with defomring hi-rez geometry.

[ptb]

... and never begin to add detail too early.
Start the process with blocking out the entire animation (perhaps using stepped tangents). Just in case there's a director or animation supervisor it would be a waste of time to do detailed stuff which you have to do again because the overall action isn't accepted.

In addition, check out this dvd:
Maya Techniques | Fast Animation Rigs, by Jason Schleifer (Senior Animator and Creature Technical Director at Weta Digital)

(Alias Learning DVD)

[mrfahrenheit]

I found Keith Lango's tutorials helped me speed up.

You could also experiment with non-linear animation using Trax, which is what I'm doing right now. This can potentially allow you to create a lot of animation very quickly just be reusing and blending various clips together.