Walk-Through: Introduction to Polishing.
Polishing is not just about smoothing splines in the Graph Editor, its more about making the animation look physically correct, and adding the last bits that will make the characters feels organic and alive.
Polish is also about:
- Simplifying poses and taking things out to make it more clear.
- Adding residual energy to the characters, the kind of energy that remains in the bones & muscles after hitting a pose.
- Adding overlap to the elements attached to the character like hair, ears, cloth, etc.
The polishing phase actually starts immediately as soon as you're done with the blocking, so as a fact you're spending almost 80% of the time on polishing, polish also involve removing things, adding things, changing gestures, cleaning up contacts with objects, don't be afraid to redo a segment from scratch if you think its not working the way it should be, that is the most important thing to consider when polishing your shot.
Its always good to start polishing the root control first, then work your way up through the torso, the chest, the neck, the head, then the arms & hands.
Another advise is to use your time wisely, allow enough time to polish the parts that are most important to the shot, then get into the less important stuff if time allows. and try to spare some time to add an extra level of polish to character contacts
with other surfaces because small details like that always pays off.
Tracking arcs of the hands, legs, nose, the corners of the mouth, will give the shot an extra level of polish.
The final steps of polishing is removing knee & elbow pops, its a bit tedious because you'll have to do it frame by frame, so its better to shift this step to the bottom of your check list and start working on it when the shot is approved by the director.