Keyframe Workflow

[sdtv]

Hi all,
I can't seem to find a workable flow for cleanly animating multiple-bone-layered characters -- so I wonder if I'm missing something in my approach.

Sample scenario:
Say I'm animating a character trying to jump and reach something up high: He looks up, squats down, jumps and reaches, misses, lands and settles, then tries again a couple more times. To complicate the motion a little, pretend he has on a cape with overlapping action.

My rigging is manageable and works fine for me, but controlling the poses and movement and timing on the timeline is rough going!

The motion of all those involved body parts is so dynamic and overlapping, that keyfames end up staggered and nested and buried within so many different bones and layers and property channels. Finding and setting and managing those keyframes is (for me right now) a huge obstacle to creating fluid animation. (Mainly due to newbie user-errors, I'm sure.)

"Locking down" keyframes before a movement begins (or a change in the movement) is also a high science in itself. (I usually miss something and end up ruining my previous pose. "D'oh!")

So then I find myself relying on the "copy frame to" function with "full document" checked to stick down *all* keyframes prior to a movement, but that pumps so many unecessary keys into the timeline -- which usually ends up wreaking havoc on fine-tuning the animation later. Doesn't seem like the best way to do it either.

So... how do you Jedi Masters work? What's your best flow for laying down the poses of a complex action and then adjusting the timing? Any tips would be *most* appreciated!

Moho is such an awesome program. Hope I can get my groove going here.

Thanks a lot,
-SD

(Note: the "jumping" scenario above was merely for reference to my bigger mental block in working with Moho keyframes in general, so I don't really need to see examples of animating that specifically -- unless you think it'd reveal something about working with the timeline & layers. thanks again.)

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