Blockout Animation

The first task for animating the rig was to create a 'blockout' of the animation. A blockout is a rough outline of how the animation will flow from keyframe to keyframe. This allows us to see whether a certain part will need more work and whether our timing is correct.

Shown below is a GIF of several major blockout keyframes in the animation.

The major stages are sitting, leaning back, standing up and gestures.

I could see from one point the hand movements were not correctly moving with the axis of the elbow. I corrected this later by changing the anchor point to a different joint.

Also, the flow between sitting and standing needed more work. The blockout helped me to realise this and saved me time as I knew the areas I needed to work on before starting the final animation.