Hello, you just received an assign or an exercice that you have to animate
Think your animation before you make it. Visualize it using your layout, various drawings and references
Shoot your reference and analyze it to figure out the key poses.
Edit it to upgrade its timing and draw annotations for you bkd and mouvements you want to emphasize
Import it on Maya as an ImagePlane in your camera view and verify its conformity with what you want to do
Check your Rig, position the General Ctrl in the right orientation and put the feet in contact to the ground, be sure to have FK on arms and IKs on legs ( unless your shot demands something else )
Make your KeyPoses (and ONLY your key poses !) Remember, Key poses are Extremes, changes of directions and Contacts. Always Use and Key All the ctrls ( don't forget rotations, translations or entire body parts )
Read your step Animation. You'll see if there are important poses missing to read the action and/or emotion
Make sure there are no Completely still body parts that shouldn't be.
Adjust the Posings of your key poses to maximize visual impact and lisibility. You need strong dynamic lines and easy to read silhouettes.
Read it again to make sure your brain can interpolate the step poses and it reads as you wanted ( Timing is optional but must be thought too )
Make your Breakdowns. These are the poses between 2 KP that will show HOW the mouvement will be read. These is the core of you creativity.
Make sure those poses answer the 12 principles of animations (staging, stretch/squash, overlap, follow etc.)
Read your animation. Your eyes should not have any difficulty interpolating the informations that they see.
Check the arcs
Build the Slow Ins and Slow Outs in the inbetween to give your rythm.
Make sure mouvement starts with a Slow In as nothing can come into life at full speed.
Make sure the slow in and out are Tying the actions. The action has inertia and the rest of the body parts follow after.
Read your animation. It should gives a sense of continuity and rythm.
You can retime parts of your actions to give more key in certain slow in and out to give the audience some time to read your important KP
Spline your animation. Use Auto Tangent
Read your animation to see the flaws of Maya
Fix your Root by adding a Motion Trail to it, Make sure you don't have Stills and that The bounces and follows are Physically Acurate
Adjust the overlaps of the hips to make sure the COG region of your body moves as it should and has proper weight shifts and rotations
Complete footrolls by manually adding the inbetweens that will make the feet look alive and "springy"
Make sure the Knees aren't "popping"
Check this box if you completed the lower half of the body (hurray !)
Using the informations of translations and rotations of the COG, overlap the spines and the head accordingly.
Make sure that the spines and chest rotations are timed correctly and are not floaty
Using the key poses, Bkd and SI/SO, add a motion trail to the nose to make sure that we can follow the head with proper spacing
Repeat that process for the wrist and make sure the arms have Good overlap in the BKDs and are exaggerated but not too much in the elbows and wrists rotations.
Watch carefully the spacings to make nice SI/SO in the arms.
Chech this box to know you completed your spline
Polish the micro rotations and overlap of the feet and fingers.
Animate in straight ahead the clothes or hair or any other part that would need this kind of treatment
Polish the deformer to get quick and subtle stretches and squashes
You can check your Graph editor and curves for different body part to see if you can squeewe a key to adjust the "texture" of a SI/SO or add a micro overshoot in a tangent.
Look for Tangent that could get smoothed and look for its effect at every changes to make sure you don't make your animation worse by fidgeting haphazardly in GE
Adjust Look at positions and EyeDarts
Time your Blinks and your brows to get good Stretch / Squash in your Facial mask.
Cushion the curves that make too visible a mouvement if need be
Add your animation layer of Breath or other if needed
Lipsync
The list could go on and on to make sure everything is perfect but at this point you should have a good animation.
Playblast it and make sure it looks good as it is. Mirror your playblast and look closely for errors
Penetrations or Contacts etc.
Playblast Final
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