In last week's article on the Hand-to-Hand Combat pack from Reallusion, I mentioned that after some trial and error in the placement of the characters you had a functional “give and take” fighting sequence. I also mentioned that I would pass along a tip about cutting that placement time down as much as possible thereby removing the frustration of too many trial-and-error runs to get it right.

What it really boils down to is the more you try… the more keyframes you add complicating the process. In some cases, animators can overthink a solution that adds more complexity to a situation that may only require one keyframe instead of chasing your tail with correcting keyframes before and after the one in question.

It seems that one of the hardest moves for some users is a takedown that involves one character taking the other one down with a leaping head scissor type of move. This is one of those where if you overthink the placement, particularly the rotation of the leaping character you can end up with a lot of keyframes in a short span.

Wrapping a character’s legs around another character’s head can be daunting if you’ve never done it before but in the case of this takedown, we only need one keyframe to correct the placement.

The motions are from the Reallusion Hand-to-Hand Combat pack: T5_Attack_Headlock Takeover and T5_Fall_Headlock Takeover from the Takedowns and Throws folder.

I had two Dummy characters in an A-Pose standing side by side facing the camera. Dragging and dropping the motions in iClone resulted in the character facing away from each other (see below)

To put it another way, for those that have more experience in this sort of thing, you go to the closest point of contact no matter where in the timeline it is and position it properly then remove any transform keys that were before the new keyframe you just created. You may have to sort out rotation too but just remember to limit that to one keyframe for all the edits and never tweak both characters at the same time.

Sort out one character then sort out the other one if necessary. Making edits to both characters at the same time just complicates what you are trying to accomplish and may defeat the purpose of your edits. When you change both at once… you may not clearly see how those changes are working. In this case, we only had to edit one character anyway.

If you are lining up a series of punches, then select one prominent punch as your place to make the edit, again, at the closest point of contact. Once you have it sorted out everything else should fall into place without ever having to touch the other character.