I'd be careful to not change camera angles too much. I like how this looks, but for future shots I'd lock down the camera early on because you will animate and adjust the poses of your character(s) depending on the camera (you might even cheat certain poses to camera). So once you change the perspective or height or whatever, you might have to adjust the animation. Just something to think about.
In terms of applying changes to a shot, that's a tricky one and to me all comes down to your workflow.
It can take a day to implement changes, or even longer, it all depends on the complexity of the shot. And practice helps a lot. If you would go back to this shot and implement the same changes a year from now, you'll find yourself being a lot faster.
It helps though to be organized in your blocking. I tend to key all the controllers for main poses every 5 frames or so in my first blocking. The timing might be off, but the poses are there. Then I adjust the keys, which is easy to do because it's all so clean and organized, until the timing feels right. You might have to adjust some poses for overlap and stuff like that, but I try to not put in new keys and instead fix the pose on the frame that I have the key set. Or if a pose needs to be on a certain frame, I key the whole character again, so that everything is organized.
So when it's time to show it to the client and there are changes, I can easily delete a whole section and it won't affect the anim or poses before and after that section. Once blocking has been approved, then I go in there controller by controller and fix things until it looks right and I'll end up with keys everywhere.
Sometimes you have to make changes again. That's a bit trickier and usually I try to adjust the poses again on the keys that I already have, with little tweaks here and there, or I set a key on all the controllers to set a certain range, so that I can delete all the keys between that range (and by setting keys on all the controllers, deleting a chunk out won't affect the anim before and after that range).
I hope this makes sense at all! :)
Your shot looks a lot better though! The only things that stood out to me in terms of bigger areas that I would tweak, are:
- I wouldn't bend her head down so low around x31. It looks like she's inspecting what's below the chair. :)
- I would delay her root movement screen right around x51, so that she's still leaning towards her right around x54; then she puts down her foot and leans over to her left with her root, until around x64
- her chest move out from around x62 to 68 feels to isolated; it just moves and stops at 68, then there's a little pause and then she sits down; if that's your anticipation, then I would delay it by 4 frames and reduce it by 50%.
- I like the impact at x88, I would just reduce the linear curve on her head down rotation a bit, so that the impact is a little bit softer and not have her head go down as far; and right now her head goes down and stops abruptly at x91 (track her nose tip), so make sure that your spacing and arcs are fully fleshed out
- the last chest rotation after x104 until 109 also feels too isolated and linear; smooth out the transitions and slow it down a tiny bit; you want it to be less pose to pose and a bit more organic
- watch out for your elbows, they seem to pop around a bit throughout the clip; especially the screen right one from x68 to 71; the arms feel a bit IK, like from x52 to 58 on the screen right arm (I'm tracking her wrist, how it's moving horizontally with no curve and arc)
- I would reduce the screen right wrist rotation in that last pose, so that around 95 until the end it doesn't look so broken (rotate it more like the screen left one, with the fingers following the thigh, but a bit less than the screen left one, otherwise it's too mirrored)
Alrighty, hope that helps!
Cheers
JD
