How to polish animation with an ephemeral rig

Here’s Tuesday’s stream:

I want to call attention to how much more time I spent conceptualizing the motion via key poses then I did polishing and inbetweening. Taking a shot from blocking to final using the ephemeral approach can be extraordinarily quick! This keeps the animators focus where it belongs, on the big questions (like acting and appeal) not the little ones that don’t actually matter (like why is my elbow bobbling around on frame 23?).

I get a lot of questions around how polish works in an ephemeral/interpolationless approach. The idea of polishing motion when your motion is just a dense stream of poses, with no curves or graph editor, is a pretty alien one to lots of animators! Reflexively, people often assume is must be more difficult, and that you pay for ease of posing with difficulty of polish.

Nothing could be further from the truth! In fact, I’ve found polish to be far easier. I used to have to go through a lengthy process of splining and cleaning up curves—now I just fix any problem I see whenever it comes up, directly and without any fuss. It’s a lot more like a digital painter or zBrush sculptor, who can just go in with a brush and correct any little issues without disturbing the rest of the piece. The ephemeral system’s multi-pose editing tools make that easy, and those tools are still evolving.

I’ve put together an excerpt with just some of the polish bits from the stream:

The ephemeral system can process motion in ways conventional tools cannot,. In this case, for instance, the “smooth over time” tool can “filter” the motion by looking at the entire pose or any section of it, not just a specific anim curve.