Lexicon

Here is a lexicon I will update regularly where I store the keywords that I am using in my articles. These are not really proper definitions of these words but mainly how I understand them. Contact me if anything seems unclear! I divided the lexicon in two parts: one for animation, the other for sciences.

ANIMATION

Blocking: (or Step Animation) an animation composed only of a few frames without interpolation or inbetweens that already gives a rough idea of the movement. here

Breakdown: a type of pose, less crucial than keyposes, but which gives more information about the dynamics of the motion. here

Keyframe: An important frame to describe the action, it is ‘key’ to understand the movement (basically Keypose+Timing). here

Keypose: An important pose that describe well a part of the action. here

Inbetween: a filler frame, less important than keypose or breakdown, that is here to get some fluidity. In computer animation, obtained via interpolation. here

Modeling: the step of creating 3D models that will be used as assets or will be rigged to be animated. 3D models are huge meshes constituted of plenty of polygons. here

Overlap: (whole post about it here) animation technique that consists of engaging the joints at different timing to prduce an organic motion.

Polish: the step in the animation process to make everything perfect (improve poses, clean contacts etc.). here

Rig: skeleton that is created for the 3D model. The rig will control the deformation of the mesh to provide an intuitive control of the model. here

Spacing: animation principle, it corresponds to the dynamics of the motion, how you go from A to B (accelerating? decelerating? constant speed?) here

Spline: refers to the step of the animation process where the animator lets the computer interpolate between the keyframes and breakdowns and adjust those interpolations. here

Straight ahead: a workflow in animation where the animator crafts each frame one directly after another. here

Timing: animation principle, it corresponds to the moments the main events occur. Timing+Spacing makes the overall rythm of the animation. here

TECHNICAL

Animation curve: the value of an ‘attribute’ over time. Most of the time it is constituted of keyvalues and the interpolations between them. here

Attributes: variables associated to a node of the rig (e.g the translation/rotation attributes of a controller). When evaluating, the rig will read those attributes and use them to compute how to deform the geometry. here

Interpolation: mathematical version of inbetweening. It boils down to go smoothly from one value to the other. When doing that for all attributes of a rig, we can interpolate from one pose to the other. here