Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads!

Note: this was originally published in Weighted Tangents, my Substack newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.

There is no Stack Overflow for keyframes

I started learning 3D character animation in Maya in the summer of 2022, after a year of dabbling in motion design, stop motion animation, and 2D animation at various institutions. And I am consistently surprised at how challenging 3D character animation is, to the point that I cannot quite fathom how anything like a movie ever actually gets made.

When you’re animating in Maya, you essentially pose a character and set keys — little data points on a graph where the overall x-axis is time and the y-axis is position, resulting in something that looks like this:

The shape of the curve between two keys will dictate how that specific piece of the body moves between each key. Which is all well and good — even if it takes a bit of getting used to and sometimes you have to deal with hundreds of different curves at a time — but what do you do when you know you want to do a specific movement, but can’t quite figure out the curve?

There is no Stack Overflow for key frames, let alone for animation. I’ve looked everywhere for blog posts or books on general curve patterns in Maya and how they influence movement and come up empty. When I get stuck animating something, there’s no large body of crowd-sourced information for me to find answers or even leads to an answer. Instead I have to find an individual human being to help me out.

Because I’m enrolled in a school, I’m fortunate to have weekly access to accomplished animators who are actively working in the industry and are literally paid to answer my questions and give me feedback on my work. But if you’re not enrolled in classes, or you have an instructor that isn’t invested in your learning, you’ve got to try your luck in the Discord wastelands.

Discord is great for so many things, but it doesn’t scale when it comes to learning animation. Not only are you getting opinions and feedback from people who may or may not have the expertise to help you, there are limited checks and balances. Most of the requests I see for help go unanswered, but in the rare case that feedback is provided it’s three weeks after the original post and written by someone with a name like WobblyDong69. What’s more, there’s no way for the community to endorse or refute the feedback, let alone for a future someone with a similar issue to find and learn from the feedback.

Update: in January 2023 I found several supportive and helpful animation Discord groups — they’re out there!

In writing this I’ve realized that so much of animation knowledge is passed down as an oral tradition from one generation of animators to the next, and without the open source resources I’ve come to take for granted in the data science space. Seasoned animators aren’t publishing blogs, writing books, or giving talks at the scale we see in tech. And while I don’t know that the solution is a Stack Overflow for Animators, it would surely be better than the current system we’re working with.

Release the drafts!

I watch a bonkers amount of television, and am currently in the midst of a full Game of Thrones re-watch. With any given episode I have a list of random thoughts and questions I usually real-time text to my friend Josh — but why should he have all the fun? So from this past week:

• Why didn’t Brienne give Arya the wolf pie Hot Pie made?
• The stone men have an abnormally large amount of flexibility and of range of motion for being covered in greyscale.
• Jorah Mormont deserved better. I will die on this hill.
• I would absolutely watch a 30-minute video essay on how Viserys and Daenerys are the GoT version of Luke and Leia.
• HOW did Theon and Sansa survive jumping off the walls of Winterfell?
• GoT is a hell of a lot of fun but absolutely awful at conveying the passage of time. There’s no way my man Varys went from Mereen to Dorne and back to Mereen in the course of an episode.

That’s it for this week, thank you for reading, I love you!