One of the key Principles of Animation that animators study is that of Posing and Staging. Without going into a dissertation about what that is, basically, it means that we have to pay attention to how a character is positioned within the frame in order to communicate the action, thought, or mood of that particular scene. Where the character is in the frame and how it is posed directly affects how the viewer sees and reacts to the animation.
An important part of posing characters is looking at their silhouettes. This means that a character’s pose can be interpreted even if it is in a black and white outline or silhouette. If you cannot read the pose as a silhouette, it is probably a weak pose and should be changed.
Animators working in TV, film, and other pre-rendered applications always have to think about staging, because the final frame is what matters. It’s a little different for game animators, though. In an interactive environment with character and cameras that change frequently, we don’t really have any control over what the frame is and how characters are situated within the frame. However, that doesn’t mean that we cannot use silhouettes in our work.
As an example, for 3rd person chase camera views, we know that we’ll be spending most of the time look at the character from behind. We can use this knowledge when animating the character to make the actions look best from that perspective. We can give a walk cycle a bit more side to side motion, add diagonal arcs across the body for sword slashes, exaggerate the twisting of the spine in idle standing poses, and swing out the arms and legs to the side for big jumping motions. Even though we may not be able to control the exact staging in game (user-controllable cameras, scripted cameras, etc.), we can still use silhouettes to help get better poses as we animate the character.
Looking at silhouettes in 3D is a cinch. All we have to do is change the lighting, turn shading on or off, or replace textures. There are a couple of ways to view silhouettes in Maya depending on the scene setup.
If you have no lights in the scene, all you have to do is set the lighting to Use All Lights (press 7 on the keyboard or choose Lighting > Use All Lights from the viewpanel menu). All geometry turns black, since there are no lights to shade the meshes.
If you do have lights in the scene, then you can choose Lighting > Use Selected Lights from the viewpanel menu. As long as no light is selected, the model will remain black.
If you have lights in the scene and you choose Use No Lights, then the shader’s base color will be used instead of black. This is handy for getting colored silhouettes, but these can be difficult to view depending on the actual color. Toggling the viewpanel background color (alt-b/option-b) between black, dark gray, and light gray can make it easier to look at light-colored silhouettes. Toggling Hardware Texturing off (Shading > Hardware Texturing in the viewpanel menu or 5 and 6 on the keyboard) will help if you have textures applied to the mesh.
Here are a couple of MEL scripts to speed things up:
Use No Lights:
$thePanel = `getPanel -withFocus`;
modelEditor -e -dl none $thePanel;
Use Selected Light:
$thePanel = `getPanel -withFocus`;
modelEditor -e -dl active $thePanel;
I recommend assigning these to hotkeys or add them to marking menus, since they work based on the viewpanel that has focus. I use shift-6 for No Lights and shift-7 for Selected Lights. This works for me since I already use 5, 6, and 7 to changing lighting and shading in the viewpanels.
As with anything else, there are probably a million different ways to do this, but these are the ones that I actually use day-to-day. Play around with the different lighting and shading options and find one that works best for you. The important thing here, of course, is to look at the silhouettes to get better poses. How you do that is entirely up to you.
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