Animation Best Practices

Question

I always struggle with getting the timing of everything perfectly for my final renders when animating. Playback as I model / animate hits around 12FPS, but when I render at 24FPS, everything is moving a lot faster than I anticipated. This often makes me need to reorganize all my keyframes and it's a total pain in the ass.

What is the best way to deal with this? I figured maybe I can render at a higher frame rate and just work on the timing in post-processing.

Answer 1

There's really no single best practice; and the techniques used vary depending on the nature of the animation; but a lot can be accomplished by reducing scene complexity during animation testing, in order to get the test FPS close to the final FPS.

• Test in Solid mode, rather than Material Preview or Render
• Use the Simplify settings in the scene property to reduce the number of polygons in viewport mode
• Test with as few objects as makes sense, also to reduce the number of polygons
• Use a proxy object for testing whenever possible. That's usually a very simplified version of the mesh.

The important thing is to nail as much of the animation as possible at nearly the final speed as possible before adding complexity.

Also, study the techniques used by manual animators. Particularly pose-to-pose animation can be very good for character animation.

Answer 2

Playing with the scene frame rate and scaling keys on the timeline is the best way to make errors down the line, and you are effectively designing a slow-motion animation instead of a real time one, you will see and animate things in a way that are seen and perceived very differently in real-time.

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When it comes to handling performance:

1. Optimize the viewport and scene.

Make everything possible to lighten your viewport. Hide any unnecessary object to see your animation, disable any rendering setting that's not relevant (use your viewport in solid view, disable outline and wireframe overlays, ...), lower subdivision modifiers, disable textures, set your mesh objects to flat shading with no autosmooth, so on...

2. Optimize your rig itself.

If your animated objects are complex, make a "proxy", a low density version of it that uses no deformation. There's a nice guide by Pierrick Picaut here:
Do this to optimize your rigs' performances in Blender 👀

3. Last solution: render frequently.

If you still can't hit close to your final fps, then you need to do "playblast" to preview your animation. Playblasts are Viewport Render in Blender, it's a fast render of your viewport as is, and it's a fast way to see your animation as it will be. It's not ideal to be forced to use it, but if all the above isn't enough, it's the next best thing. Playblast often, no need for a high quality and resolution render, just one that renders fast so that you can see your animation in real time.

If you often need to playblast, there's a nice paid addon to help streamline this:
Playblast by carlosmu.

Answer 3

Turns out the solution for my issue was, and a very effective method for slowing down / speeding up the animations of multiple objects is to:

1.) Select the objects in question 2.) Navigate to the specified portion of the timeline 3.) Identify the keyframes and select them 4.) Press "S" to Scale and X to axis-lock to X axis 5.) Type in how much slower they should be spaced out (I typed 1.25 for 25% slower).

This helped me slow down areas of my scene that were going too fast without having to reposition all the keyframes.