Posing a character can can express so many things: a personality, an action that is happening or about to happen, a mood that can reach the audience and all this just at one glance.For instance, if a character is too rigid, in the way is drawn (for 2D animation) or posed it may lead to a lifeless body, very unnatural; on the other hand, a character posing following a line of action may be more readable and interesting, allowing a stronger force of action: it all depends on the level of the dynamics it is intended to use. It is also a valuable tool for animators to help the narrative of the story develop. Every aspect of a pose is mordant from head to toe (detailed makes the difference): when a person is under the spotlight, it is easier to pick up the details, but this can also be used at the animator adage and used to lead the attention towards what they want.

What is that make a good pose so effective?

• If the character spine follows an arc, which could generally have either an “s” or “c” shape: must be appealing to look at (rhythm and flow, straight against curve).
• Have a counter pose: when the shoulders and the pelvis are twisted and tilted the opposite way to each other.
• Presence of balance of a motion (centre of gravity, which allows a character to retain its balance) making the pose work: a character’s pose tends to have one specific power centre that pulls or pushes a character, which often causes a curve in the line of action. 
• The spine should dictate the action and distribute the weight in the body (weight and gravity /mass and effort).
• the silhouette of the body (the negative and poise space that the character occupies) must be readable and represents its attitude and qualities.
• Details such as can and feet can help the balance and the dynamic of it.
• A pose should have the attitude, the personality and emotions of a character, it is almost a way of personifying words.
• Staging and storytelling: an animator must create poses to a camera.
• It must follow a common sense: it should feel natural and is not forced.
• conveys the action that a character is doing (what is being done): if you can’t convey correct physical forces in a single image, it won’t feel right in the moving pictures. 
• conveys his motivation (why it is being done).
• leads from one pose to another and tells the story without any in-betweens and annotations.

The Animator bust be some sort of actor himself: the emotional content makes the difference between ones technical skill and real art expression, ones must be emotionally involved with them, gesture and movements must feel sincere, convincing, clear and properly motivated.

In this following tasks I tried to recreate 6 different poses in maya (3 action poses and 3 natural/drama pauses) using a basic rigged character. I have uses 6 photograph references downloaded from seance stock, which is a very useful website for finding reference pictures for anatomy drawing or make studies over body poses. I have chosen from different ranges of poses and framed them for a camera. In some of them I have also modelled additional props to make the frame more readable. The final scenes were batch rendered with a “skidome” in the scene in maya.

I firstly carried a study over the reference pictures using the Procreate app, drawing on top of them their line of action, centre of gravity, balance and additional notes to make it easies for me to create the pose in maya with the rigged character:

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Using the edited pictures reference I have then worked on the character which presented the following controls:

Diagnostics: to understand what does not work in a pose:

Root control for centre gravity:

Hips rotating or positioning movement control:

Pole vector controls prevent the knees from flipping:

Foot controls:

Spine controls:

Shoulders and clavicles(to support the movement of the shoulders) controls:

Elbow, wrist, hand and fingers:

Head and neck controls:

When posing the first aspect to work on are the line of action and the centre of gravity and after there should be added all the details from there such as head, hips and spine. It is better to work on major controls first in order to have strong foundations for the pose and edit small controls after to complete and lead the pose to be more readable and credible.

The following pictures are the final pose.

For this pose the hard element to achieve was to frame the momentum of the jump having to find the centre of gravity and applying it to the hips angle.

Other than the position itself I feel that the whole mood that this pose is communicate is important for a good output: even if it is a subtle particular, the tilt of the head is essential to express a care free feeling. Emulating the hands position was challenging as well but creating some objects for the character to hold on to, just like in the reference picture, is essential to make them look as if they are actually grabbing something.

This dramatic pose is representing a moment of distress and pain of the character which is outlined by the position of the head facing the ground and the curve of the spine. The correct weight of the pose was complicated to emulate: posing the right arm as if part of the body was leaning on it and aligning the spine controls to achieve a slight curve of the back was challenging as well.

Foe this particular pose the arms positioning was difficult to replicate: the arm have to lean onto the stick behind the character neck as if part of their weight is applied to it. I also had to pay attention to the distribution of weight on the hips since part of the body weight is applied on its left side.

One important element of this pose was the “counter pose constituted by the opposite movement of the shoulders and hips and the one of the shoulders and the legs.

Achieving the correct balance of the pose was essential to make the it as readable and credible as possible. The shoulders position has to be evident so that it shows the effort of the arms holding the two objects.