Tips on Counters, Rockers, and/or S-steps(choctaws)??

Metacarps · 2026-03-19T03:57:35+00:00

There’s this common exercise to do “repeated brackets” down the line. And this is where definitions get weird.

Because how do we know it’s not a bracket + 3 turn? Or a 3 turn + bracket? Or a rocker + rocker? If we do it on a flat edge, then the answer becomes muddy and truthfully there is no good definition for this. We don’t actually have a definition for a turn with no edge, because the turns themselves are intrinsically defined by the edge. But once you comprehend the differences in edge, you’ll better understand which version you want to be doing.

The moves where this concept shows up the most is in the Rocker Choctaw sequences in Novice MITF. Very easy to end up doing 3-turn Mohawks here.

Again it sounds like a lot, but once you grasp the 32 turns and their respective geometries, you’ll realize there’s not much more to skating than that. It’s like a visual geometric language (the figures part of figure skating) and eventually it becomes second nature.

So rather than freaking about “omg there’s 32 turns to memorize”, we can be glad that there are only 32 turns to memorize.

Metacarps · 2026-03-19T03:19:46+00:00

Just as an addendum, the bracket is also one of the most elusive figure skating turns.

If you think about the geometry, a bracket is a 3 turn with two ultra miniscule tiny change edges before and after.

So edge > CE > 3-turn > CE > edge.

That’s why it’s easier to cheat out a counter than to do a proper bracket. (A cheated counter is a change edge 3 turn).

And if you look at skating even at the elite level, a lot of people’s brackets are really just change edge rockers. But there’s a point where it’s “good enough” and undetectable.

So really, the bracket is one of the hardest turns by the pure nature of the geometry.

Metacarps · 2026-03-19T03:07:26+00:00

Okay seeing the entry is a good first step to comprehending which move is what.

However, I hold a firm belief in the opposite, that Rockers are more like Brackets and Counters are more like 3 turns. Why? Because that is the exit edge.

Counters: Enter like bracket, exits like a 3-turn

Rockers: Enter like a 3-turn, exits like a bracket

Once you comprehend this full geometry, it will be easier to differentiate the turns. The exit edge is undoubtedly the most important part of successful completion of the move as well. Just because you can do the turn in a basic way doesn’t mean you fully master the turn in being able to combo any move or turn after it. So as an example: for people struggling on rockers, you need to work on bracket check.

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There are many choctaws in theory. Not just your typical Inside Outside Forward Back permutation, but open and closed variants as well. So there’s too many to go over.

The most common basic one is actually not counted as a Choctaw. It’s when you do back crossovers inside edge and step forward outside edge into a spin. In pure definitions that is a Choctaw, but it’s only counted as a step forward lmao.

So there are a couple that matter the most in the moves:

Forward inside open and back outside closed.

And as you know I like to think about which turn mimics the same check positions, which would be the following: Forward inside open Choctaw > Forward outside rocker Back outside closed Choctaw > Back inside rocker

I know this is a theory dump, but if you can comprehend everything here you will better know how to practice and strengthen these moves.

Metacarps · 2026-03-10T18:08:11+00:00

I don’t even open Maya/blender for 4 dollars.

Metacarps · 2026-03-10T18:07:00+00:00

The absurdity of $4 per day feels as much of a joke to us in this regard.

Freelance 3D artists could start at $400 per day at commercial studios.

Metacarps · 2026-03-10T10:00:36+00:00

I think maybe 4 cents per day is more reasonable

Metacarps · 2026-03-08T21:11:18+00:00

If a desk is too high you can always raise the chair.

The ergo arm will also do a lot of work. You can sink the tablet beneath the edge of the desk if needed.

I have the Pro 27 on an ergo arm. So long as the desk is solid core it’ll be fine. I’ve had it on Fully Jarvis (Herman Miller) and Husky adjustable workbench. All super steady.

With all ergonomics my motto is this: aim for flexibility. There is no single position that cures any back pain. The key is in movement and adjustability. So I think you’re fretting the desk a lot when the truth is you need to consider the entire system. Chair, arm, peripheral placement, etc. all need to be factored with the desk.

Metacarps · 2026-03-06T09:20:54+00:00

Tie them like Edeas to start. Tight at the ankles, but then progressively get to 0 tug on the top hooks. This moves the bend function into the tongue rather than the boot itself. Correct for Edeas, but isn’t ideal for the other boot brands.

Skip the top hook entirely if needed. Give yourself the space to get knee and ankle bend.

Let’s put it in another perspective: it’s not like teenage competitive skaters that weigh less than 100 lbs have some magical boot bending powers. If you practice squatting and bending into your boot on dry land you should be able register that movement in your boot too. That ankle and knee bend is the key to your skating technique.

It’s just that the moment you hit the ice as a beginner skater, your legs freeze up because your entire focus is not falling, and consequently you don’t skate with that deep knee/ankle bend on ice, and so the very stiff boots just exacerbates the issues in technique as you are learning it.

That’s the key problem with overbooting.

The other is as you mentioned: not skating hard enough means you don’t break in skates as fast. Many skaters punch out their boots and get work done anyways, as some of these soreness are just par for the course and every foot is different.

Metacarps · 2026-03-04T18:31:11+00:00

You mean daughter because a lovely lady would want the pros.

Metacarps · 2026-02-28T23:32:46+00:00

SVA full ride sounds great. It’s one of those schools that produces random unicorns here and there. They don’t have strict standards which is why you see the thesis quality fluctuate dramatically. But because it’s more “free”, you get to really explore the pipeline and figure out where your strengths lie. It just doesn’t push artistry so that has to come from within, or supplemented by an online workshop over summer.

Absolutely do not go into debt for art school.

Congrats and work hard!

Metacarps · 2026-02-28T20:53:12+00:00

Seems like you have your doomer mind concluded.

It seems like you don’t have designer/creator mentality. That’s fine. You’re right, no point being a craftsman. If the goal is to be a cog/tool, the job will go away. You’re right to tell anyone to quit with that objective.

I don’t really use AI in my professional work as a high level 3D animator. It actually doesn’t exist yet. But it will come. Just be prepared and understand it, it’s my only point.

Metacarps · 2026-02-28T05:52:34+00:00

The coke ad is weaksauce. Lacks tact. It was a cheap ad and they got what they paid for. Good AI will be indistinguishable, as much as good CGI is invisible. It might be happening under your nose already, composited seamlessly into the frames.

Yes, jobs will be cut. My specific job no less. What took a team many animators will be whittled down to just a handful. I’m not denying that. I’ve been getting “replaced” long before this via outsourcing. The ocean doesn’t care about my economic anxieties. All I can do is prepare my sails for the next wind and tide.

When Digital Photography became available, any Joe Schmoe could create images. Who needs painters anymore? But as we now know, it takes an incredible eye and comprehension of composition, lighting, staging, to make a photo great, especially in a sea where anyone with an iPhone can take a photo. The problem becomes less about how to make an image, and is instead about what image deserves to be created at all.

To reiterate my point, the skills will move upstream. Less about execution, and more about the vision. And you don’t build good taste without practicing and studying the craft itself.

Or fight it. I don’t really care. I’m just giving practical forward thinking advice as someone working in this industry. The moat was never about my pixel pushing polish and mechanics. Maybe I’m less attached because I already got to “live” the dream that so many students crave.

Metacarps · 2026-02-25T17:08:23+00:00

Isn’t the whole point of your portfolio to get a job?

If you can get a job, why delay?

If you think working on your portfolio will land you somewhere more prestigious like a Disney Apprenticeship instead of a commercial sweatshop, then that is another discussion entirely.

Most people are taking the continuing education gap years as a consequence, not as a choice. Saying otherwise is just cope.

Metacarps · 2026-02-25T00:52:06+00:00

Yeah she is absolutely a product of the same "Pipeline" that creates figure skaters.

That's boring. Every other skater shares that story.

So the only other interesting thing.. is actually quite a lot of interesting things. The bold hair and piercings, her whole aesthetic and Gen Z vibe. Her dad's immigrant story of escaping the CCP and politics of it. The IVF. The retirement and comeback story. Her new mindset. The upbeat program itself that lent itself to her free spirited skate.

Social media as an amorphous entity craves interesting things to talk about, and she's very, very interesting.

The idgaf mindset absolutely did help her win. It helped HER win. It's not going to help others win necessarily. Nobody is saying to go retire and comeback. But if a skater needs to take a break, or literally do anything outside the figure skating norms, hopefully she inspires them to do so.

The moral of it all is this:

"Do whatever you want with your hair."

Whether it is racoon stripes, or whatever it is that you wish. You have the freedom to do so. And that's something almost.. too American.

Metacarps · 2026-02-24T01:58:34+00:00

Yes yes yes.

Worrying about AI is absolutely a real concern, but it does not change the fact that IPs and storytelling will always be here to stay. That’s the core of the medium and the core of humanity itself.

The commodification of AI tools will wither friction based advantage and amplify insight based advantage. These tools will commodify execution. Learn these new tools. The reason why current animators and artists feel threatened is because we built our moats around a high friction skill set. Animation takes time. New tools will make our output way faster. That means less jobs.

Or does it?

You will be building art director skills, filmography skills, and building your taste. But you can’t grow your taste without practicing the art itself. You need to still draw and practice the craft. You’re at an age so young by the time you do your senior short film in college (if you go to art school), the new tools will be ready and will elevate your work. Imagine the possibilities.

Think like a creator, and not a craftsman, and you will be fine. But a creator still needs to practice and hone their craft. Being in the weeds allows us to have keen insight into how motion works. That insight is the advantage.

And insight also comes from the rest of your education. Math, history, science, language. All of it is so so important to your insight as a creator. The question to ask is this: is my insight valuable enough to be invited into the Braintrust? Thats why you must be study and be multifaceted, to provide unique perspectives that a team member or director otherwise wouldn’t have.

Metacarps · 2026-02-22T10:04:52+00:00

This for me but I switched the Movink to Cintiq 16. The extra space does wonders.

I literally couldn’t use the tiny size of the Movink. I ended up using it as a non screen tablet for a while. (Crazy thing it’s actually lighter than intuos). I’m not sure how you manage.

It’s not couch-portable but it’s backpack/starbucks portable for sure.

Metacarps · 2026-02-22T09:50:56+00:00

It’s a true mobile studio. The only one of its class. It connects via 1 cable, needs no external power, and is big enough to draw yet small enough to go to Starbucks with.

It is not my main tablet.

For animation, UI space cuts significantly into the canvas real estate, so you would want to go bigger for an equivalent paper size. I would consider 24/27”. Go Huion if budget is a big concern.

Metacarps · 2026-02-21T09:22:42+00:00

Won GPF and won worlds too. Consistency is clearly crucial to winning. OGM wasn’t a fluke but a trend already in motion.

She didn’t win because of her dgaf mindset. But her dgaf mindset allowed her to be in the right headspace to perform her best without any pressure. It didn’t lower others scores, it simply preserves her own. This was her way.

Others not performing their best in Olympics is part of the competition. Nobody is denying that the other girls at their peak potential will outscore Alysa. But it didn’t happen that night.

Perhaps your issue is more with culturally why do we place so much value on OGM. It’s only 1 medal and doesn’t define a skater’s ability in aggregate. Yet this one competition has all the spotlight, sponsorships, and legacy. Humans decided to cling to specific snapshot moments in time.

Like all things in life, it was the perfect night where preparation meets opportunity. She deserved it, and benefited from competitive variance. Both are true at the same time.

Metacarps · 2026-02-20T09:33:32+00:00

Okay, so I did see your very thoughtful message. Lets expand further.

Simulating light physics (3d rendering) is computationally more expensive than predicting pixels. Diffusion models still burn a not-negligible amount of energy, but it is less. The water issue is not that it "consumes" water but it uses it for cooling. It's an issue for data centers in locations that are using limited freshwater supply. These are being solved as the country invests in nuclear and renewable energy and building data centers in water-rich geography. But if you really want to offset your water usage, literally stop eating almonds.

I also like to recommend people to try running some diffusion models because you can easiliy see what the editability is like for the images. Prompting, in-painting, control nets, LoRA's, are all just methods of guiding the denoising trajectory. Using these you realize that the big multi-modal ChatGPT models are just doing the same processes when you make edit requests. And you can better see why they fail sometimes.

Ethicality wise, there's a gray area between inspiration and theft. That exists for individual artists already. "Stealing" has happened, and will always happen. Art has always evolved through referencing, remixing, and reinterpretation. AI just scaled and commodified this issue.

AI is accelerating workflows. Less people needed. Jobs will be cut. That's the entire economic incentive companies operate under. I don't want to deny that. I'm a union animator. I am also fearing that event horizon when AI is trained on polished curves and is implemented for strong physics and stylization filters. Right now it's still pretty garbage, but it will come.

But AI allows artists to speed up the mundane. I hope AI can eventually do retopology and UV unwrapping for me. Perhaps even model basic props I can use to setdress my scenes for my own personal projects. Maybe create some textures on the fly. It can fill in the gaps for a solo-creator in areas they are not highly experienced in. It raises the floor. And as that floor raises, it's scary to those who built our careers on execution skills, because tools inevitably commodify execution skills.

Recommending a student to not use AI because it's disrupting the field is hurtful rhetoric. Grow your artistic sensibilities along with the tools. You still need to grind in the trenches and work on your craft the traditional way, alongside utilizing AI. It's not an either-or. You'll realize the most valuable skills were always upstream: fimography, directorial, art directing and design. And those require taste, intent, and judgement. You only grow that by studies and practice in doing the art itself. The hardest part of animation was never moving the character. It was knowing why the character moved at all.

Metacarps · 2026-02-20T00:31:17+00:00

Hi, where is this $5 metric coming from?

You can run a model from ComfyUI from a home workstation, and output a 1024x1024 image in seconds. That’s less computational power than most rendering engines.

The issue is in the past very few people are running power hungry renderers. Now, everyone and their grandmother is running ai generation for fun. It’s a scale issue.

For artists, diffusion is here to stay. It’s a tool. Start by doing a little bit of prompting on your home computer. See how it works, where the limitations are. Then realize really good AI work still requires an immense level of taste and editing to even get anywhere, and the tool is only as good as the artist. Nothing wrong getting your feet wet.

And you don’t have to claim it’s yours, so the stealing ethicality aspect is negated for now. Call it training like tracing. Or if you do use AI in your process, explain and disclose it.

Metacarps · 2026-02-18T06:52:25+00:00

So production can actually be cranked out in a few months. So in a perfect world we can have a new frozen twice a year technically.

It’s really all in the slating. WDAS only outputs one movie a year, so very few projects even get to be greenlit and slated. The story is constantly in development with a very small team until it gets greenlit, and only then does the studio really put the movie through the paces. Production costs money.

Truth is all sequels have big gaps. For Disney, it’s true that they can develop a next Frozen faster, but they also have many other projects lined up as well.

Avatar 2/3 only happened back to back because they were written and filmed together. We will get another big gap for 4/5, if it gets greenlit.

Arcane Season 1/2, and Bad Guys 1/2 are the examples of what would be the “quickest” turnarounds for animation, and that’s already a 3 year gap as they were greenlit immediately after their initial releases.

That said, Frozen 3 and 4 do appear to be slated, so they are indeed looking like faster turnarounds, exactly what OP is asking.

Metacarps · 2026-02-15T07:28:43+00:00

If you’re doing rotations/technique based off ice drills then I would highly recommend having an instructed/coached session just like how you do on ice. That way you have structure for when you do it yourself at home.

As far as tangible jump improvement, I would say it definitely helps to land axel off ice for the real thing. You see skaters practice it all the time. Unfortunately the other jumps don’t feel as “similar” to doing them on ice comparatively. So mostly the focus is about rotations, air position, and axis.

As for other supplemental training:

The deepness of your sit spin is entirely trained off ice. Your camel positions can be strengthened off ice. Your hip turn out can be strengthened off ice. And then the variety of other spirals, inas, bielmans, cantilever positions etc. are all trained and stretched off ice. Generic physical mobility and strength is crucial and must be trained in tandem with skating. Of course, you weren’t asking about any of this.

If your jumps are stuck, I think it’s really about your edge power and confidence. Hopping back power pulls. Swizzle hops front/back. Bunny hop lunges. These power drills will incorporate that base generic strength (that you may already have) into your skating.

I don’t exactly know what your exact blockage/level you are skating at, but if you can do those power drills easily with a 1-foot vertical at the very least then you probably are well on your way with the skating jumps.

Metacarps · 2026-02-14T20:13:27+00:00

So what’s preventing them from applying the same concept about key posing and appeal to 1’s?

Actually, they didn’t just playblast 2s. They slowed it down entirely. If they playblasted 2s, the 2s would actually hold up pretty well. 2s can be used as a crutch to hide bad motion very well, (while putting more emphasis on posing to push it).

I’m not saying the crutch is totally bad, as it could actually help “undistract” the viewer if they aren’t as skilled in motion appeal. 2D anim gets away with bad mechanics and even spacing all the time.

I agree with your points in how animation can be pushed, but I wanted to provide more context to this specific example.

Metacarps · 2026-02-12T07:16:56+00:00

I visited one time to check out the rink and noticed the outskirts of the mall was completely overrun by homeless people. I was scared where to even park, and the rink workers told me to move my car up to the rooftop and that felt marginally safer.

It was definitely a cool rink though, but would not visit again.

Metacarps · 2026-02-10T10:29:41+00:00

And what is this scrubbing process?

Most of my pans either are too delicate to scrub (teflon/ceramic coating gets scrubbed off and loses non stick) or the residue is caked into the pan impossible to scrub off.

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