Hey to all,

I have a quite stupid question, so please, do bear with me.

How does one go and keep about their animation smooth and organized? ...without too much hassle (please note I'm not looking for a magic bullet here, just something to make someones life easier).

For example, say I have a robot who is turning around with a sudden nudge, but yet in the scene, I want to keep his nudge (while inorganic and very rigid) also flowing in my animation. Basically, at around 24/30 FPS.

I find myself tripping back and forth alot in order to clean up my animation, certain parts of my animation look 'smooth' and natural, basically, how a robot would move in real-life (especially when gravity is involved), yet other times, I look at my animation and see I don't have enough frames to tween between two poses, so it looks like my animation is skipping frames.

The thing is, both of my problems above, wouldn't be such an issue if my animation didn't have to be so big (30 seconds tops) and had to be one in scene. So according to my calculations, I need to have between 720 and 900 frames in total to get my animation done, and well, trying to control frames at that point is hard, especially when I have to go back and forth to correct out the tweening of my frames.

As I said, what would be the best way to avoid such hassles? I'm using Max and CAT btw, although I doubt my software will make a difference.

Seeing what you're talking about would help people diagnose the problems. Seeing in a format that allows scrubbing back and forth like quicktime would be great. Making the files available (if you can) would be prefect.

I normally block in my scene pose to pose to get a sense of the timing and on what frames what motion is going to happen, I think scrap everything and animate straight away using the poses as rough guides. Not piece is going to land on the same keys so the final timeline is going to look like a mess if you have everything selected thats just how motion is, its sloppy, however you stay organized and clean on a system basis, left arm should be pretty clean, torso right arm should all make sense as well as the legs when you have just them selected.

Hope that helps... not really sure what you're asking...

Yea, basically from what I understand of what you're asking I'd agree with Mark. I'd block in the main poses by keying every control of the rig on those frames. Get the timing and the poses looking good and working together like this and then start offsetting stuff (letting it get messier) from there in order to refine the motion and get all the natural offsets in.

A lot of the feel of an animation can usually be controlled through editing the curves/TCB values rather than adding more keys.

But yea..as Mark said, it would be good to show a video or file you are working on to allow us to give more specific help.