Reference - Danimation/Animation-Resources GitHub Wiki

When it comes to animation, your best friend is reference material. Nowadays we are fortunate in that most people have an easy way of filming themselves to use as a reference, while some people will find this uncomfortable at first it is one of the best ways to get an understanding of the body mechanics of an action or the subtleties within an acting piece. But video is not your only choice when it comes to reference. We can utilize other methods to get the reference we need for our shot.

Now you don't want to go into gathering your references blindly, plan out your shot before you start gathering references and if you are filming yourself, do as many takes as you can. Don't be afraid to edit multiple videos and images together to get a final reference piece to work off of.

The way I like to use reference is as a general guide. This flow chart is a good example of a reference workflow:

What do you do with your video reference?

The first thing you want to do once you have compiled your video reference is to start analysing it to find key poses, breakdowns, weight, force distribution and where the action is being driven from.

I recommend using a tool like Syncsketch, Keyframe Pro or Photoshop to do some drawovers on your reference to help with identifying poses and where the force is being driven from and so forth.

Tools like Syncsketch allow you to save your video with your drawovers, which you can then bring into Maya. When it comes to bringing video references into Maya you can convert your video to an image sequence or a .mov file.

Bringing video reference to Maya

Maya can be particular when it comes to bringing in reference videos. Maya does not support a lot of video formats and I recommend using the .mov format if you are using a video. You can also convert your video to an image sequence. I recommend using an image sequence over using a video file. You can convert a video to .mov or an image sequence using a tool like media encoder.

You can bring in the image sequence or video as an image plane.

*It is important to note that the image plane will be tied to the camera

If you bring in an image sequence you have to adjust the image plane settings to let Maya know it is an image sequence. This can be done by enabling the image sequence option in the image plane attributes.