Hey, Keyframes, Leave Them Animators Alone!

I’m happy to announce that I’ll be joining a panel at the free virtual conference The Animation Exchange, along with Richard Lico and Brad Clark. It’s called We Don’t Need No Interpolation: Character Animation With Dense Animation Data.

Richard takes an approach that’s sort of the inverse of ephemeral rigging—he uses a conventional rig that can be manipulated with the graph editor and animation layers, but periodically bakes the results down to an underlying deformation rig so that he can swap out different control rigs. I’ve started thinking of this as a “temporal” approach to interpolationless animation, whereas ephemeral rigging is a “spatial” approach: that is, I’m focused on making it very easy to pose a character, and he’s focused on making it very easy to make time-based edits. In the long run, these two approaches shouldn’t have to be separate: that’s just an artifact of trying to hack an interpolationless approach into Maya’s keyframe-based system.

Brad has been a proponent of interpolationless and interpolationless-adjacent animation for a very long time—I remember him suggesting to me way back in the mid-aughts that using the same rig for manipulation and for interpolation was possibly not the best idea, even though I didn’t really get it till years later. He’s got an interesting perspective on the history of animation tools development, and can point to much earlier examples of an interpolationless approach then I’d ever expected. Animating with dense data isn’t new: it was just murdered by it’s sibling, keyframe animation. Now it’s going to return from death and plot a complex revenge.