Gesture Animation

Once we have a clear understanding of the character, we start sketching gesture ideas to visualize how the movements will align with the character’s design.

• Initial Gesture Concepts: Hand-drawn or digital sketches are created to illustrate key gestures, focusing on expressiveness, fluidity, and believability.
• Client Review: These sketches are shared with the client for feedback and approval, ensuring that the proposed gestures meet the project’s creative vision before moving forward.

In the blocking phase, we create rough versions of the gestures using keyframes to outline the major movements without worrying about the finer details.

• Keyframe Animation: This step focuses on the character’s core poses and movements, ensuring the timing and positioning of gestures are correct.
• Simplified Movements: We concentrate on creating the foundational gestures, such as hand movements, head tilts, or body posture shifts, to establish the overall flow of the animation.
• Client Feedback Loop: The rough animation is presented to the client for review. Feedback at this stage allows us to make adjustments before progressing to final animation.

After the blocking phase is approved, we refine the animation by adding more detailed motion and ensuring the gestures flow naturally.

• Polishing Movements: The rough keyframes are smoothed out, creating fluid transitions between gestures. This includes refining joint movements, facial expressions, and smaller body details.
• Secondary Actions: We add secondary actions such as hand twitches, facial micro-expressions, and shifts in weight to make the character’s gestures more lifelike.
• Facial and Finger Animation: Detailed movements, especially facial expressions and hand/finger gestures, are carefully animated to capture subtle emotions and intentions.

Once the gesture animation is refined, we add final touches to ensure the character looks and moves realistically within the scene.

• Timing Adjustments: We fine-tune the speed and timing of the gestures to match the emotional tone and pacing of the scene.
• Physics and Weight: The physicality of the gestures, including the character’s weight distribution and interaction with objects or the environment, is adjusted to enhance realism.
• Integration with Scene: We ensure that the gestures blend seamlessly with the environment, lighting, and camera angles, ensuring a cohesive final result.

In the final stage, we review the animation for any issues, ensuring that the gesture animations are smooth, expressive, and ready for delivery.

• Internal Review: Our team conducts a detailed quality check, focusing on the fluidity of the gestures, the accuracy of expressions, and overall animation quality.
• Final Client Review: The polished animation is shared with the client for a final round of feedback and approval.
• Delivery: Once approved, the completed gesture animation is rendered in the required format and delivered to the client, ready for use in the project.