Animation Process

        The first stage of the animation process for me was to use my animatic to begin blocking out the keyframe poses. Although I have concerns about the timings of my animation (at exactly what point are the poses reached in the time allotted?) there is always the option to use the Graph Editor later on to shift the keyframes along the timeline. Working with 'stepped tangents' at this stage is useful as it eliminates the automatic in-betweens which Maya automatically applies, allowing me to focus on the main poses.

View of the Graph Editor, using stepped tangents

        Being relatively happy with the keyframe poses. I decided to see what the animation would look like with flattened tangents. And that's where it all went wrong. Rather than following logical paths between the poses, Moom started performing back flips, and his foot performed almost a full 360 degree rotation, although the difference between the two poses was only a matter of a few degrees.

        I thought perhaps some of the irregularities in the animation could be due to the fact not all body parts were set at every keyframe, meaning that they began moving before they were meant to. So I began the laborious process of checking each controller and adding more keyframes where necessary. Although this ironed out some of the creases, there were still a couple of instances where Moom performed unintentional backflips.

        After extensive investigation, these glitches turned out to be the result of a silly mistake on my part. When plotting out my key poses, I had failed to appreciate the importance of rotating an object in a constant direction. Depending on whether the head/hips/foot are rotated clockwise or anticlockwise, an apparently identical pose can have two completely different numerical values. It is in such instances that the glitches occurred, where Maya must incorporate a dramatic value change into a short space of time.  

        If I had noticed this problem earlier, I could have simply adjusted the rotation and carried on without too much of a problem. Unfortunately, the main mistake with the hips occurred in the middle of my animation, which had catastrophic effects on the rest of my animation. To salvage the situation, it was necessary to add a new keyframe just after the last 'correct' rotation value, and set this frame to the 'wrong', inverted rotation value used throughout the rest of the animation, so that the transition happens within the space of one frame and shouldn't be visible. There were two or three instances where this had occurred.

        The other issues in Moom's movement should be fixable through the use of intermediate keyframes (and the addition of steps), to guide Maya on the transition between two dramatically different poses.