Especially in CG animation, the moving hold is an essential part of keeping your character alive. However, it's a tricky subject to understand, and there are some key points that you need to keep in mind in order to be successful.
Moving hold. It may seem like a contradictory term, but it just means that the overall pose and line of action is held for more than a few frames. Within this pose are continuing bits of movement that keep the character alive and feeling less mechanical, rather than having the body come to a complete and abrupt stop. Essentially, a moving hold is a settling of your character into a pose. This pose may be held for 5 frames or even 20, depending on the situation.
The clip below is an example of how a moving hold might look. In this case, I have the character ease into his final pose, where he's holding up the spoon. The hold is created by his body moving into this pose, but with the motion subtly continuing to create the ease. Notice how the head and the rotation of the spine especially continue their motion for the duration of the pose.
This is just one way to create a moving hold. In the sections below I will go into more detail about what details can be included in a moving hold and how to create this effect in your own animation.
Tips on Creating Moving Holds
The following tips are what I've learned and applied to my own work, and they address issues that I usually see in student work. You won't have to use every one of these in each moving hold that you do, but applying some of these to your animation will make your characters feel more lifelike and natural.
1. Amount of Motion
The amount of movement during a hold depends on the shot, but should always be smaller than the preceding and following movements. This contrast is what makes it a "hold". If your character is moving too much, they will begin to feel weightless and floaty because they never really come to a settle. This post from Keith Lango also has some great video examples of what it looks like when the amount of motion isn't correct vs. when it is: http://www.keithlango.com/tutorials/march05/movingHold.htm.
2. Overlap, Follow Through, and Eases
Use overlap, follow through and eases to your advantage. For example, an arm may continue to follow through from it's previous motion, with each joint overlapping until it comes to a settle. (The clip below is an example of this, where the character's arm continues to swing, even after he's reached his final pose.) You can also have the character ease into the pose, rather than coming to a halting stop. This is especially useful in slower body movements, where there isn't a ton of overlap and follow through going on. Whenever creating eases, just be sure to pay attention to tip number one, so your character doesn't feel floaty and weightless.
3. Differing Timing
It can sometimes seem like the best solution to create a moving hold is to just make everything ease slowly over the course of those frames. The character is still moving and staying alive, right? But oftentimes what beginning animators will do is make everything ease the same amount with the same timing, which creates a really even and robotic feeling. Instead, each body part should be moving at different speeds. The hips might settle into their final position before the arms do, and the head might settle last. Even the left arm might settle before the right arm. This is what I like to call "breaking it up". Breaking up the movement makes it feel more natural, since no organic creature can move with even timing, like a computer would create. This way, some parts will stop sooner and have an ease for longer.
4. Direction of Movement
As I mentioned, a moving hold is usually a continuation of the previous movement, so the direction of the body movement will continue in that same direction during the hold. It's unusual for the motion of the hold to move in the opposite direction of the previous movement, unless the body is overshooting, so be mindful of what pose your character came from and where they're moving to next when making this decision.
5. Avoiding Pose-to-Pose Animation
In your animations, you will often have several places where moving holds are appropriate. However, make sure that every place you're using a hold is necessary. Having a hold in-between every main pose, for example, will create too much of a "pose-to-pose" animation, which feels robotic and unnatural, because your character is pausing so much. This pose-to-pose feel can also result from having too many moving holds with only slow eases. Adding overlap and follow through will greatly help this problem because the continuations of larger motions will help to meld some of the different movements together.
6. Ambient Motion
Ambient motion refers to subtle moves that keep your character alive. I've found this extremely helpful in shots with longer holds. Ambient motion can include things like small rotations in the head or spine, subtle weight shifts, slight finger movements, eye darts, etc. These little moves can instantly make your character feel more alive. In the example below, I have ambient motion on the head, as the character looks at the pie. There are also slight adjustments to the other parts of his body.
Technique
Last, I'd like to talk a little bit about the techniques you can use to create a moving hold in Maya. There are many ways to do it, and over time, you might develop your own, but here are a few ways I've found helpful in my own workflow.
One of the easiest ways to create a moving hold is to copy an in-between key from just before or after the moving hold and paste it on either the front or end key of the hold, respectively. This will give you a quick, subtle movement and works especially well for creating eases. If you use this technique however, I recommend doing this for only one or two controls at a time, varying the amount of ease that you add to each, so that each body part will ease at different rates.
Another option is to manually create eases, overshoots, and overlaps. For an ease, what I do is grab each control one at a time and add a little residual movement to it, constantly paying attention to which direction it needs to move and how much it needs to move. For overshoots and overlap, I set keys for the overshoot and settle, and I move each body part into place accordingly. You can set as many keys as you need to get all of the overlap and varied timing for the different controls.
Last, you can apply these same ideas by going into the graph editor and setting/moving keys into position, until you are satisfied with the eases and follow through.
I use a combination of all three of these in my workflow, depending on the situation. Give these a try, and see what works for you!
Go Animate! These are all the tools you need to create a successful moving hold. Each moving hold is specific to the situation and the animation, but my six tips should give you an idea of where to begin. In the end, a moving hold is really just a settle into a pose. Good luck and happy animating!
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