One of the nice things about being an animator is the chance to bring the illusion of life to different characters. These characters often don't have similarities with your own personality, but you have to study them and create appropriate movements in order to tell a story and make the audience believe what they see on the screen.

You don't need (although it may help if you are) to be a skilled martial artist to create a fight scene, or be a tennis player in order to animate a character playing tennis. What you really need is to look for good references and study the movements you need to create.

In this recipe we're going to animate our character making a tennis serve. Nowadays it's just a matter of browsing through a website to see lots of good references on almost every subject imaginable, so a quick search for "tennis serve lesson" on YouTube offers you a long list of detailed video lessons intended to teach you how to perform a tennis serve with your own body. The difference is just that you'll transpose the principles behind that lesson to your character's body. Pick the video lesson you like best and pay attention to the timing, weight, anticipation, position of hands, feet, and torso.

A bonus of using this kind of reference is that you'll not only be able to animate your character, but you'll also know what to do when you're in a tennis court with a racket and a yellow ball in your hands!

How to do it...

1. Open the file 008-Tennis.blend. It has our character Otto properly dressed in a tennis court with a ball and racket near his hands, as seen in the next screenshot:
   
2. The first thing you should do after the planning phase and studying visual references is to place the racket and the ball in his hands. The racket will be attached to the hand for the complete duration of the shot, while the ball will be thrown in the air for the serve. Both situations can be solved with a Child Of constraint, with the difference that only the ball will have an Influence value for the constraint animated. Chapter 6, Blending With the Animation Workflow has a recipe called Grasping and throwing objects, which talks about this kind of situation.
3. With our character rig still at its resting position, select, move (G), and rotate (R) the Tennis_Racket and Tennis_Ball objects so they stand near the palm of the right and left hands of the character, respectively.
4. After you're happy with these objects' positioning, select and rotate the fingers' controllers so that the hands look like they're holding the racket and ball. Make sure you're at frame 1, insert a rotation keyframe (I) for the fingers' controllers, and add a Child Of constraint so they follow the hands' controllers. The next screenshot shows both the racket and ball being held after these steps:
   

   With the objects in place, we're going to the blocking phase. By watching the references we'll define the Extreme positions over which we're building our animation. Don't worry about timing yet, just make sure you have Extreme poses that tell the visual story of this action.

   When making these Extreme positions, set only the Location and Rotation keyframes (I | LocRot) for the head, torso, and limb bones for now. The squash-and-stretch effect should be added later. In our case, we can define the following Extreme positions:

   • The character starts leaning forward and looks to the other side of the court.
   • The body swings back, with his weight over the right leg, while the left leg is totally straight.
   • He swings towards the front, while both arms go down and behind his torso.
   • The character throws the ball up, having the left arm totally straight up and forming an imaginary straight line with his torso; the right arm holds the racket behind his head to a strong serve and both legs bend in anticipation to the jump.
   • He jumps towards the front with the body to hit the falling ball.
   • After the serve, his body touches the ground with the left foot in a follow through action. The right arm with the racket goes down in front of the torso, while the left arm goes back to give balance. This pose is a good example of the Follow Through animation principle in action.
   • His body goes again to a straight up position, getting ready to attack the ball again (if the opponent succeeds in his defense).
5. After you're happy with the Extreme poses, make a basic timing adjustment in the DopeSheet window. Make sure you have the DopeSheet Summary enabled to make it easier to adjust the saved positions, as you can see in the next screenshot:
   

   The following screenshot shows the Extremes along with the frame number where they were set for your reference:

   

   Tip

   Remember that these frames are just for guiding you, and you may find that a different timing gives a more pleasing result for your eyes. Another thing is that these poses presented here are in side view only for clarity's sake.

   The most important view for your blocking process is the Camera view (Numpad 0). That is the only one your audience will actually see, and this is where you must focus your efforts. You should use all orthographic views to help you build your poses, but the poses must only look good in Camera View. For example, it's OK to have a pose that doesn't look perfect in Side view if it looks good in the Camera view. The next screenshot shows how the pose at frame 33 looks very different in the Side and Camera views:

   
6. Once you're happy with the Extreme poses and the timing, make the remaining Breakdown positions and set keyframes wherever you need to achieve better arcs and overlapping action.

   Tip

   To make it easier to distinguish Extremes, Breakdowns, and extra keyframes in the DopeSheet window, you can use the shortcut (R); this will make the selected saved positions in a different color (pink for Extremes, blue for Breakdowns, and white for other keyframes).

   Note

   Chapter 7, Easy to Say, Hard to Do: Mastering the Basics has a recipe on Breaking the symmetry, which is about creating uneven and natural poses and overlapping action. The principle of overlapping action says that different parts of an organic body move at different speeds.

7. After you make these adjustments and are pleased with the overall movement, it's time to animate the tennis ball. Since it has a Child Of constraint, you should animate this constraint's influence along with the position of the ball in the 3D space. First, go to the last frame where the ball is still held by the left hand, open the constraints tab on the Properties window, locate the Child Of constraint, right-click on the Influence slider at value of 1, and choose Insert Keyframe.
8. Go up one frame, change the slider value to 0 and add another keyframe. Position the ball a bit over the hand, as if it had been just released and then add another keyframe for its location. Then you animate it over the next few frames to make it go up, fall, and be hit by the racket.
9. After animating the ball and making any necessary timing adjustments on the character, it's time to clean up the animation curves and tweak the Eases. As most things in animation, this takes some time to do. The next screenshot shows an adjusted curve where (1) an unnecessary control point was removed to achieve a softer curve and (2) the easing was changed:

• After you're done with the curve editing, it's time to work on facial expressions and details such as fingers and squash and stretch. Since this shot is a Full Shot, where we can see our entire character and its surroundings, the audience cannot see much detail in the eyes and facial expressions. Also, this is a physical action, with no dialogue. Although the audience tends to look at the face of our characters most of the time, this scene focuses on the body movement. Nevertheless, we need to create some expressions in order to make our action more believable:
  • Before the serve, make the character look to the other side of the court as if he is deciding where the ball should go.
  • While throwing the ball up, he must follow it with his eyes to know the time and place to hit it. Eyebrows should go up, and the mouth is possibly opened.
  • During the hit, make his facial expression exhibit the physical strength needed to make the serve. Possibly a blink just after the hit, so the eyes change their focus from the sky to the other side of the court.
  • After the serve, you can choose what his face should look like; happy after making an "ace", sad after missing the field, or worried because the other player successfully hit the ball back to his court.

  Always remember to go back and forth to Camera view and check that everything looks as expected. If it does, call it Final!

The file 008-Tennis-complete.blend has an example of this shot for your reference.