Follow-Thought / My Animation Notes

Stand-by : No more post for now !

2011-07-10T06:45:00.000-07:00

Hi readers,

Writing this blog has been amazing adventure. There was hundreds of hours of work behind this, but it was worth it has this blog has become successful in less time you have to close your eyes. And really, that was my goal when I began : Being able to share some of my though on animation while being read.

For this, thx to Animators Resource, Speaking of Animation and of course KennyRoy.com who have all talked of some of my post and have brought here thousand of visitors!

And about those...

KennyRoy.com have really AMAZING tutorials (hours of in-deep lectures would be a better definition of it), about workflow, cartoon animation, lipsync and more. If you already know a few things about animation, you should really check these out. He have also a really great news feed with lots of amazing links that you can found here.

Speaking of Animation is another amazing one. A podcast channel with lost of fantastic interviews with fantastic interesting animators, just there.

And finally, Animators Resource is just another amazing site where you will be able to find fantastic resources and links on animation. In short : A great news feed.

"When I was in school, it was difficult to get valuable learning materials about animation. It seemed like the teachers were continually passing on notes that were just a copy that had been around for years. There where only two or three fundamental books on this genre, including the likes of The Illusion of Life and Timing for Animation. Now there is so much to choose from - almost too much."
-Andrew Gordon, Animation Insider Workflow Edition p.7

Cheers :)

Animation Links : Animation Critique

2011-05-14T19:55:00.000-07:00

Hi there,

It's always interesting to watch a few animations, good and bad be reviewed by a good animator. So here are a few links and ressources I could think of about "animation critique". Cool stuff.

Flip Online : Flip Review by Cameron Fielding
11 Second Club Winner eCritique Review
Animation FeedBack for Spungella Online Workshops by Jean-Denis Haas

There's is also a small sample review on Ianimate.net from Jason Ryan
Then there's also the review from Keith Lango VST 41. Good stuff and the VTS are only 6 buck now (yea, believe my wallet, you had to paid 13 Euros before, which equal to like 18 buck, call that a price reduction !!!).

If you know anymore ressources tell us in the comments !
Thx.

Some (of my) Common Beginner Mistakes:

2011-05-14T08:41:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the lack of post recently... But sometime, "life" take a lot of your time and your "virtual life" is (hopefully for you and me) not as important :D As for now, I'm animating 1st person weapons animation (as Call of Duty) at our top-secret studio and guess what ? Our game is gonna be announce soon at E3 !

Say hello to my animation notes !

When Eric Scheur publish his last post on the 11 Second Club, called : The Top Five, which list some of the common mistakes beginner will make in the Club's competition. It gave me that idea of just going through all my animations notes I had take at work since the beginning of the universe ! And do a list of the mistake I would normally made (or had made). This is really personal stuff, but I think it has the merit to show that everyone make more or less the same mistakes at the beginning.

-“Glitch” of all kinds and nature! :

As when it look as the character or parts of the character are hitting an “invisible walls” or being pull by “an invisible rope” or being “teleported” from one point to the other. A glitch may also exist when some part of your body change direction two times in a few frames. As when you have an elbow or knee snapping back and forward to a full extension to a non-full extension in one frame. To fix this, you should make your elbow or knee snap a few frames so that it doesn’t look like a glitch.

-Weak pose or having a bizarre pose somewhere in our animation :

If you frame-by-frame in your animation, there shouldn’t to be any bizarre or “gay” or weak pose. Even if it “just” an in-between (a drawing that you get from the interpolation of the computer) and not a key pose there should not be any bizarre pose out there.

-Having poses in motion, paid attention to poses than should not exist :

I remember I once did a mistake when I spend around 15 minutes building a pose that did not exist in my animation. I was doing a backward step, one where the character was doing a subtle jump from one position to the next. And as I was working on my animation I spend some time building that pose where my character had still his two feet on the ground. But obviously, if I wanted my character to make a small jump as he was making that backward step, he should not had that pose where he had his two feet on the ground at the same time. By doing so, I was making a pose that did not exist (the two feet on the ground) in relation to what I wanted in my mind.

So we must think of what a pose should look like at one particular moment in the animation, so that it is representing an idea (intention) at a certain moment in time. We should not know at What Time it will be yet (on the timeline). But we know that at this moment (the moment where my character is drinking a cup of hot coffee for instance) that pose should look like that (where he just realize the coffee is super-hot).

-Not having enough change, angle change, position change, pose change : Well Contast. It's about abstraction of masses and not seing your character as different body part but as a few big Boucing Balls. Bellow are two animations I could remember showing a good examples of no contrast and contrast. The first animation is from the Spungella Online Workshops (check out the first and second critique by Jean-Denis Haas) as the second one is from Kevin Webb animation blog (seem to have been hacked !)

"Also, think of contrast, visually. How can you make this interesting without crazy poses and fast timing. Try to incorporate visual changes so that tone wise the shot doesn't feel stale." -Jean-Denis Haas

-Sometime I put too much emphasis on the feet, which is not always necessary since the audience look generally at the head.

-What to paid attention and look for when we animate the feet :

Do some little step will give more life to the character. Or as a negative way to see it, doing no little step when a character is moving/jumping around will seem too much perfect and will take away some realism.
Feet slide and rotate generally on the toes.
Because we want to conserve our energy, we don’t lift our feet high when we do a step.
Planting the feet on the ground and they stop moving 100 % on one frame will give an IK feel to them.

-Arms and legs are moving independently from the rest of body:

As if my arms were moving (more than in a subtle way) and were not affecting the rest of the body at all. Changing shape will show deployment and absorption of forces. If my torso and hip doesn’t react when my character is climbing a ladder and my arms are moving independently, I am not showing the deployment of force with changing shape that should happen in the body.

“The Integrity of Character :

The character body is an integral system so even seemingly separate movements involve the motion of other parts of the body. For example during a head turn in dependence of the situation the character will slightly move his shoulders and his centre of mass. During a walk the entire body will be involved in the animation not only the hands and the legs, even the head will have specific movements.”

-Put a key on the hip every time I’ve put a key on the arms or legs :

In reality I can move my legs and arms without affecting my torso very much or even my hips (if I was doing circles with my arms; my arms will need a lot of keys, but not my torso and hips). To finesse some part of the body, it is not necessary to key the entire body, or my blocking will become very hard to manage as I won’t know anymore where my important keys are when I look at the dopesheet. And managing the Hip rotation and translation will be hard to as there are too much keyframes of these.

-Add more Breakdowns (keyframe on the timeline) to “correct” a movement that is already wrong. If it doesn't work, do I need to add more poses ? No ! (See the end of that other text I had written on posing).

-I had the tendency to spend too much time in my first blocking pass with my keys next to each other’s, and not working on my timing until I had many keys and breakdown in my timeline. The good side of it is that you are not “distract” with your timing (more on Flip Online). But the bad side of it, is that in this “non-interpolation” blocking stage it can be difficult to see if your animation really work as you intended or to track your arc (easier to see them when things moves). More on this here :

-It should be obvious, clear what is happening in the animation when we look at our blocking (Check this post by Shawn Kelly). Or in other word, your blocking should tell a clear story (More on this here).

-Sometime when I begin to just “move things around” as the hand more there, or that feet more there without a clear goal in mind, I will then ask myself question as: what I’m doing, what I want, which pose I want… Or this “I’m just moving things around” mind-set can really be time consuming. We just don’t care if that hand is 5 cm more or less to the right, what is important is the general movement. When that happens, maybe it’s time for a break!

More common beginner’s mistake I had noted:

-As someone tell me one time: Don’t worry about the timing yet, worry about the poses, your important poses to get strong silhouette and dynamic line of action. Worry about the poses and spacing first. Not the timing.

-Begin to animate before we know what and how to animate something…

-Pose-to-Pose syndrome VS Overlapping Action…

-Not taking into account inertia and momentum of objects.
-Character not in balance...

Rhythmic:

-Giving a beat to your animation will add the spark that it need.

-Having too much ideas, poses (movement) for a specific period of time so that we get “readability issue”, or on the contrary not enough movement.

-Having a lack of contrast on poses and timing so that our movement seem “even”, uninteresting.

My Jump Notes

2011-03-12T16:21:00.000-08:00

Here I'm sharing some of the notes I had take on jump when I was on a working on an (unannounced yet) video game at Ubisoft Montreal. Jump are certainly one of the of the hardest thing to do in video game animation. As the hard thing isn’t (just) to make a jump, but also to make a jump that will match the situation and character.

Here are the notes I had. It cover in some sort of way the following subjects :

-Vertical Jump
-Physic of Jump
-How arms and legs could work in a horizontal jump
-Inclination / Angle change in a horizontal jump
-Few things to keep in mind while doing an horizontal jump (check list)

To get jump references, you could either check out some others video game (as I did) or go to one of these video reference web site : Getty Image, BBC Motion Gallery, FramePool

Click here to download the .doc file

Then is a compilation of jump references I did when I was working on our (yet unannounced !) video game title.

To make some fun of it, at the end of the compilation below (2:10), I've done a little evolution of the vertical jumps use in the Prince of Persia series.

It's kind of ironic that the best vertical jump in the row (2:10) is from Prince of Persia : The Forgotten Sand (the last entries in the series) as the animation in that game isn't consider particularly good. The thing is, even if the animation is not so bad compare to the others game in the series, it is just to common for our today standard as it lack any "wow" effect and is sometime not as good as it could be. It is interesting to note that these "middle class game" as this Prince of Persia the Forgotten Sand are probably going to disappear in the current ultra-competitive video game market. As only triple AAA game will be able to sell the millions copies they need to get into budget. It's mostly what Cliff Bleszinski, one of the head behind Epic Game (Gears of War), explained during the recent Games Developer's Conference in San Francisco.

Now animation-wise, if you observe each of the vertical jump from Prince of Persia series. You can see that the one from Sand of Time (2003) is to slow and the poses doesn't look so good. Then the one from Warrior Within (2004) is actually worse as the recoil from the jump is happening in two time, something that look like a jerk. Then the one form the Two Thrones (2005) look pretty much the same as the Sand of Time one, not very good in today standard. And finally, the cartoon shaded Prince of Persia (2008) is certainly the worse one as it doesn't have any recoil after the jump and the pose at the Apex is also very symmetrical and unappealing (as the others jump to). Then, because all the previous Prince of Persia vertical jump suck, the one from the not so good Forgottten Sands is ironically the "better" one! One good example would be from God of War if you ask me (see notes above).

The Ultimate Flour Sac Reference

2011-03-12T14:53:00.000-08:00

Our lives ? From Andy's Animation Blog

Here is a repost of one of the post I did on the 11 Second Club forum more than one year ago. It's basically a list of reference for a possible flour sac animation I wanted to make.

Unfortunately because I never had the time... Or more because my drawing skills aren't very good and I never had the time, I have never made my flour sac animation.

It quite amazing how animators, as in the Aladdin clip above, can give life to something as not human as a Flour Sac or a Carpet. I know they did it with vehicles in Cars or with fishes in Finding Nemo, but the carpet in Aladin doesn't have any facial features to help.

Books

From The Illusion of Life
On Flick Photo Sharing

From Simplified Drawing For Planning Animation
On Flick Photo Sharing

From Animation The Mechanics Of Motion
On Flick Photo Sharing

Blogs

From Brendan Body's Blog
On This Link

From Andy's Animation
This one Is pretty funny

From Pencils And Jam Blog (can't found the link anymore)
On Flick Photo Sharing

Video

These one from Sunny Kharbanda are pretty good.

Check also this one and that one on Youtube.

And finaly...

This is pretty much the same principle with a sheet of paper.

From All About Techniques In Animation Production
On Flick Photo Sharing

Or with the Carpet in Alladin !
On Flick Photo Sharing

"Well, It's About Poses !"

2011-02-18T19:34:00.000-08:00

Here are some though I had on posing. As always I’ve put them on (digital) paper so that I’m not forgetting them. There is no doubt this is either basic or obvious for a lot of animators! Also, this is just a mean for me to have a reflection on posing, so that it should not be taken too seriously :P

Starcraft 2 Cinematic Intro

Why does poses are important?

Well, because poses are what we will ultimately see on screen, it is what the audience will see, so that weak poses will necessarily make not so good animation, simple.

Bearing this in mind, that pose are important because it is what we see, it is now obvious that having strong poses will make strong (good) animation, while weak poses will make not so good animation.

But what is a “strong” (good) pose? Well, a strong pose is good drawing. Therefore, “principles of good drawing” apply (I don’t really know how we should really call these) and need to be bear in mind while we are posing our character. These encompass, for instance: Clear silhouette, nice lines of action, good flow lines and most important of all nailing down strong intention and clear idea within the poses.

“[…] the more experience I got in animating, the more I understood how important one pose can be. It can sell or ruin your entire scene. […]A solid pose can hold the audience's attention and tell them what your character is feeling. A mushy pose will leave the audience uncertain and uninvolved with the story.
Don't fall into the trap of believing that people will understand your animation once it starts moving [they should understand it just by seeing a few poses with clear intentions]”

– Eric Scheur; The Top Five, see also, Every Frame is a Drawing

It should be note that the “strong poses make strong animation” mantra even stays truth with a continuous movement where we would not hold any poses. So that even when everything is always moving as a walk or run, there are still some poses that are representing the most dynamic point of the action and are important, as the contact position in a walk, or the top position in a jump. And that having strong poses in these “always moving moment” are as much essential as in every others animations where poses are held longer.

Click on the Image for the Video

Now, it’s not being said that poses are the only important thing in animation, certainly not. We also need to hold these poses the right amount of time, to have a good rhythmic, good spacing and arcs and so on… But, if we exclude timing, a lot of these (as arcs for instance) are created by the poses themselves, and how they relate to each other’s. So that animation is not only about still poses but about a series of strong poses that need work together to create a strong story.

A series of strong poses working together to tell a clear, strong story

As we said, poses are important because it’s what we see on screen, so that strong poses will make strong (good) animation. However, in animation we do not see still static poses, but movement create from a series of poses that are working together to tell a story. Therefore, there need to be a logical relationship between each poses, a little bit like a comic book where a series of poses can tell a clear story.

But, what this series of poses should tell? Well firstly, from a general point of view, it should tell the placement and action of our character. That is, where our character is and what he is doing should be clear. And secondly, we should see such thing as our animation principles, contrast (in the poses, angle, spacing…), organic motion (overlapping action, follow-through, arc…), Weight and etcetera.

Now when you think about it, it is really about Blocking out a scene (or the Blocking Stage), where we will describe all of the above within our poses. But to do this, there need to be clarity in this blocking where a series of poses are representing clearly our idea and intention. If there is not, then it means that our poses are not working well together, that they are not representing what you had (or though you had) in your mind.

So in conclusion, if your animation doesn’t work, it’s because your poses don’t work; either doesn’t work together enough to tell a strong story or are not strong enough as good drawing.

Here’s is a little recap with a graph if you're in the mood : Just There

One beginner’s mistake: It doesn’t work so I need to add more poses!

Some months ago, I came to realise that when my animation doesn’t work it is generally because of my pose. As when my poses are not strong enough or are either not conveying my ideas clearly, are not working well together (as we just talked about).

I remember that my Animation Lead once points me out a mistake that starting animator will sometime do. He points me out that beginner animator will sometime add more poses (breakdowns) in their animation trying to fix an animation where poses are already not working well together, as if adding more poses would “solve the problem”. It is a mistake I use to do and still do from time to time, so that when he point me this out, I recognised myself a bit.

It’s as if the animator who realise that his animation doesn’t work, would tell to himself “well, I probably need to add more poses in there since it’s not looking very good”. But obviously the problem is not that the animation need more poses, but that the poses already there are just not working well together and that adding more breakdowns to already weak poses that are probably not working together just won’t solve the problem.

So that suppose you have a short in-game animation to do, with eight poses on your timeline next to each other’s, and that when you space them in time (on the timeline) it look like complete non-sense in term of what you wanted (or thought you wanted !). Then obviously it’s not because you need to add more poses, but because the pose you already have doesn’t tell a story, they are not working together enough.

To a certain extent, this “oh my god it look like crap” feel is normal after you have spaced your keyframes in the timeline, or after you get out of stepped interpolation and goes into spline. For sure, if it looks like complete non-sense, then there’s something wrong with your poses and how they relate to each other’s, but if your poses aren’t working exactly as you intended I think it’s normal to a certain extent, as Keith Point out in one of his blog post :

I think there's a point where you can see what you see in a scene and you can't see anything more until you move on. […] until you go forward you'll never really know what you have on your hands. Scenes are like that sometimes. You do what you can do in blocking and then when you're happy with it- allowing that you've thought it through and have worked it to your satisfaction- you move on.

-Keith Lango; A question from an APT student....

Francis.

Self-Confidence in Animation

2011-02-03T20:04:00.000-08:00

Self Confidence in animation is about :

Putting his ego away to accept critiques. Being able to receive critiques (feedback) and keep your self-confidence even if your animation is “bad” because we are not criticizing our person but our animation. Also, do not think you have zero skill because someone just criticize your animation. What is important is to remember that you will generally save time when you ask for a critique because will know earlier what is not working and won’t lose time trying and moving things around. By correcting your mistake, you will also learn something through the process.

Further (must) Read :

-Carlos Buena : On Feedback
-Eric Scheur : The Compliment Sandwich

Choosing an idea and stick to it. Don’t change every two min, once you have an idea commit to it. In the same order of idea, it’s also evenly important to have a “plan of attack” for this idea. To not just move things around, to know what you are doing and where to you want to go (see workflow below).

"I commit myself to my ideas. I see a lot of animators who start a shot with one idea and change their mind half-way through. They re-key everything out, wasting precious time. I mean, there's noting wrong with letting your ideas evolve, bit if you change your mind to something completely different, you are back-tracking on yourself, and you risk being up in knots and delaying production and possibly annoying your director to."

-Jason Ryan, Animation Insider p.45

"Once you choose a plan of attack, attack that sucker ! […] Sometime animators we just get sooo insecure about our choices […] Once you're in the scene, maybe you will find something that work better, but make a plan and go for it !"

-A must watch from Keith Lango : VTS 42, 37:00 to 39:00

Even in front of people, Getting up and acting it out ! It can be embarrassing to get up and doing what you have in your head when there is people around. But doing it at least a little bit from time to time will get you desensitize and more confident about it in the long run. Because of what we can call the “muscle memory”, sometime feeling the movement with our own body is a good way to understand what is really happening in one particular motion (as a Weight Shift for example).

"Even though you can imagine it in you head, sometimes you're doing a very complex movement, so it's best to act it out, and if you can record it."
-Emile Ghorayeb, Animation Insider p.15

"So one day, tires of getting nowhere with my rough animation, I stood on top of the table and jumped to the ground to experience and feel the movement. The outcome was a painful shoulder injury and a complete understand of the whole action [...] Bottom line : if you can physically experience a movement with your own body, you will create the best animation for it."
-Pablo Navarro, Animation Insider p.31

"To many times I've been looking at some animation I did, thinking "that just doesn't look right" only to find out that when I try and act it out, my weight will be on the other foot, and my arm movement will be quite different."
-Jason Schleifer, Animation Insider p.75

Having self-confidence in our skill, to know that we can get things done. But for this we need to have some skills! We need to have the true impression (sensation) that we have the skills needed to get our animation done. If that impression isn’t there, then maybe you lack some skills and should read, watch, ask and work in one particular area (without being crazy about it). An example of skills could be being able to make good poses and being efficient at posing. Or having confidence in your technical skills as understanding the true meaning of all sort of animation terms and concepts. If you don’t understand what truly Spacing is, maybe you lack some skills in that area for instance.

Knowing your Workflow is something very important to have the capacity and self-confidence to solve an animation. Sometime having to do an animation can be intimidating, because we are in front of this blank sheet of paper having to create something from the noting.

"For most of my career, I approached every shot with an "Oh man, I really hope I don't screw this one up!" approach. Each shot was like a new experience. I would animate with different controls, jump back and forth between pose-to-pose and straight ahead animation. Playing with timing was a hit-or-miss concept where I would just look hopelessly at the animation curves and sort of smooth them out over and over until it looked right. I had no discipline and no confidence in my ability to get the shot finished to any level of satisfaction.

A few years later, the stress level and inconsistency of my shoot was starting to get to me. I was constantly worried that my work wasn't up to par, and my shots were not at a constant level of quality I could be happy with. As I approached the shot deadline, my stress level would shoot up and I would have a really hard time finishing anything I was even remotely happy with. I knew that I had to make a change, or I would either have a heart attack or be fired. Therefore, I started looking at others animators workflow and analyzed what worked and what didn't . When did I feel comfortable and when did I feel out of control ? Then I focused on areas of animation where I felt lost, and started to try to figure out what I could do to bring some order to the chaos.

After much trial and error, I came up with a workflow that I now use on every shoot. It keeps my stress level downn and allows me to manage my time in a way that gets the shots to the level I want, within the schedule."

-Jason Schleifer, see Animation Insiders Workflow Edition p.71 to read the rest of the text and to read about Jason's Workflow.

So that having a workflow that can help you solve your animation and help you to be more confident in your animation process is something that can lesser the level of stress inherent to deadline. And that “Oh my God how I’m gonna get this done” kind of normal fear.

Here are a few read & watch on Workflow :

-Kenny Roy : Advanced Workflow Video Lecture
-Animation Insiders Workflow Edition (now free !)
-Keith Lango VTS : 42 to 47
-Jason Ryan Animation Tutorial or Webinar

Over the Internet :

Chris Woods, Action Analysis
Cameron Fielding, Turok : Animation Workflow (see his Turok animaition here)
TJ Phan, How I Work

What does a Bouncing Ball can teach us about animation ?

2011-01-30T19:57:00.000-08:00

Two months ago, me and a couple of friends decided to start a little animation group (the Feedbaktor Animus) where we meet together once a week to talk about animation and show us our personal work.

During our first meeting, me and two others decided to start a bouncing ball exercise, as the Animation Mentor student would do it. In the end, it took me one month or so to complete my (actually second) Bouncing Ball. After completing it, I've decided to put together the notes I've take and some things I realized when I was doing this exercise.

I didn't really know how to divide this in a coherent text since there is a lot of stuff that aren't connected to each other’s. So I finally just happen to divide it into 12 different "Cases Study" I could think off, as I was asking myself this interesting question:

What does a Bouncing Ball can teach us about animation?

*(to be added) Case Study #9 : Weight

Basic Case Study #1 : Timing

Where is our Timing and Spacing within a Bouncing Ball ? Here is a little montage I made with two pages of the Animator's Survival Kit (p.36-37) from Richard Williams.

Here is an interesting quote from Timing for Animation, Second Edition p.2-3.

“Timing [and lets add Posing] gives meaning to movement. […] In nature, things do not just move. You can draw a circle and declare it to be anything from a soap bubble to a cannon ball. We the audience will only understand what it is when we see how it moves and interacts with its environment. […] So in animation the movement itself is of secondary importance; the vital factor is how the action expresses the underlying causes of the movement. With inanimate objects these causes may be natural forces, mainly gravity. With living characters the external forces can cause movement, plus the contractions of muscles but, more importantly, there are the underlying will, mood, instincts and so on of the character who is moving.”

Notice the small fast bounces inside the funnel at 3:00,

without proper timing, the meaning of this action would not have been convey.

Basic Case Study #2 : Spacing

Here are a few definitions of Spacing :

Myself : From my old notebook !

Timing : The time that something will take to go from one position to the next.
Spacing : The distribution of this time between these two positions.

Kevin Koch : The Missing Animation Principle : Spacing

Timing : Timing is how long something takes to happen [...]

Spacing : It’s the distance something moves from frame to frame [...] spacing refers to the frame by frame displacement of the moving elements. If the element is accelerating, the spacing increases from frame to frame. If it’s decelerating, the spacing decreases. Everything that is moving is either accelerating or decelerating, period.

Jason Ryan : Ramp Up Tutorial , Timing & Spacing pt2

Timing : Is the amount of time or frames that you give to each movements.
Spacing : Is the space or gap that you leave between each frame or pose.

Eric Goldberg : Character Animation Crash Course p. xx & xxii

Timing : The process of determining how long each drawing or position should be on screen on the knowledge that 24 frame equal one second of screen time.

Spacing : The process of determining how far apart the positions should be from one another, based on the knowledge that the farther apart, the faster the action, the closer together, the slower the action.

Keith Lango : Do Me a Favor...

Timing : The time it takes for any object in motion (arm, leg, ball, can of spam, etc.) to go from resting in one position to resting in another new position (pose).

Spacing : How the object in motion covers that distance incrementally from one position to the next. Each new frame shows the object in a new position in two dimensional screen space. The space between where the object was in the previous frame and where it is now in the current frame is the core of spacing. One can manipulate this element to give motion a unique flavor and style as well as the illusion of velocity.

Animation Mentor Webinar on Timing & Spacing : First Part by Aaron Hartline.

Timing : How long it takes something to happen, or to not happen.
Spacing : Frame by Frame displacement of the moving elements within a certain time.

So, as we can see, Spacing is the distance, the displacement, the space or the gap that you leave between each frame or poses. So that at a constant speed of projection, drawing space farther apart (big Spacing) will go faster and drawing space closer (small Spacing) will go slower.

Now here is an interesting case : A Bouncing Ball Spacing VS A Pendulum Spacing

Notice how the Primary Breakdown (blue) actually Favor different Keys (red) in these two example to define the Spacing of the move (and thus where the slow-out/slow-in will happens). Because the acceleration and deceleration doesn't happen at the same time in a Bouncing Ball and Pendulum, the first Breakdown (blue) isn't draw at the same place in each example.

Case Study #3 : Tangent VS Arc

Now this is something I didn't realize until someone explain it to me at work, when I was already way ahead in my Bouncing Ball animation !

Here is the thing. If you want to do a bouncing ball animation with only three keys for each bounce (two for the contacts and one at the top of the arc). You have to realize that when you want to adjust your spacing by pulling-out the tangents so that you have a fast-slow-fast motion, you are also changing the Arc of the bounce, something you may not necessarily want.

The solution for that particular Bouncing Ball case ? Just do it the "good old way" and define your motion with drawings and not with tangents, so that you can adjust your Spacing without changing your Arcs.

Case Study #4 : To be or not to be Alive

When we start animating a bouncing ball, one of the question we can ask ourself is : Do we want our ball to look like it is alive or not ? What is the "underlying causes of the movement" (see Timing for Animation quote above) ? Does the movement of the ball is only driven by "natural forces, mainly gravity", or does it seem to have some "underlying will, mood [and] instincts" ? Or maybe it could be the combination of the two; being alive in some parts and not in others.

What are the underlying causes of the movement?

Case Study #5 : Why to not define your acceleration & deceleration (slow-out & slow-in) with your timing in 3D :

Here’s a little something I realized when I was doing some rope animations at work. As I was working on this pendulum type of motion, I once did a mistake. I had all the poses of my character spaced evenly on screen. So that to define my slows-in and slow-out that is happening at each end of the swing, I had actually moved the keyframes over my timeline to define my spacing, with my timing. In other words, I had no spacing On Screen, between my Poses, but by moving my keyframes around I had still manage to define my Spacing between each frames, by playing with my “timing” (the time between each even poses I had).

As I’m explaining below, even if this can work in 3D to a certain extent because of the free in-betweens, arc and slow-out/in that we get with spline interpolation, it is just not a good way to define the spacing of an animation. Here’s why:

(1) Spacing wise it’s even, but timing wise it’s not. It is an odd way to do it, but we can manage to get our slow-in, slow-out (Spacing) between each frame by playing with our timing.
(2) Timing wise it’s even, but Spacing wise it’s not. Good

(1) It’s working because of the spline interpolation, which is giving us free in-betweens, arc and slow-in/out. As my poses are spaced evenly, it would not have work if I didn’t add in-betweens (more frames) between my poses.
(1) In stepped “2D” mode, there will be no fluidity when it’s slower because there’s not more drawing close together as it slows down.
(1) You loose control over the exact spacing you would want.
(1) Since there is no spacing on screen, you can not check it by “flipping” your timeline keyframes (poses) forward and back (unless you go frame-by-frame).
(1) Odd, the keyframes in the timeline would be positioned the exact same opposite as a spacing chart would be.

Overall, it’s not that you can’t define your spacing with your timing in 3D, but more that doing this doesn’t make that much sense !

Case Study #6 : Anticipations

Here are a few definitions of Anticipation! Don’t hesitate to take a look at the reference since these are just sentences without explanation or examples:

“An Anticipation is a sub-poses or a minor pose of varying degree of intensity […], that announce something is going to happen”
-Keith Lango, VTS 06, 12:00

“Anticipation allows the audience to forsee what the character will do next. A pitcher rearing back would be the anticipation before the pitch
[…]
So again anticipation, always go the opposite way of the main action. So the character is going screen left to screen right, screen bottom to screen top : Go ahead and do an anticipation in the opposite direction. “
–Jason Ryan, Ramp Up Tutorial , Anticipation

“So, Anticipation is the preparation for an action. Anticipation takes place in almost every action – and certainly every Big action
[…]
The rule is : “Before we go one way – First go the other way”
–Richard Williams, The Animator's Survival Kit p.274 - 275

Let’s look at a first example of an anticipation with a bouncing ball. Notice how the Bouncing Ball of Krzysztof Boyoko is doing a little anticipation going up before the main anticipation going down with his ball. It is what Keith Lango or Jason Ryan would call a “Micro-Anticipation” [Keith Lango VTS 08, 25:40] or a “Secondary Anticipation” [Jason Ryan Ramp Up tutorials; Anticipation 5:15]. These little anticipation that are happening before the main one will be feel more than seen by the audience. As they are preparing the audience for the main anticipation, which is almost like an action itself.

As a second example done by Daniel Huertas, here is a very broad anticipation followed by a super-fast action showcasing how anticipations and the timing and the size of an action are related. As you can see in the table below base on Keith Lango VTS [VTS 06, 11:10], if you have a very fast action, it generally means that you will have a long (big) anticipation as there is an inverse relationship between the timing of the action and the magnitude of (the energy store during) the anticipation needed to sell that action.

“A lot of thing about anticipation is about energy. To make things move you need energy, and to make things moves fast or far you need more energy. And so what anticipations are is the building up of energy to make things moves. […] If you only build-up a little bit of energy you are creating then the expectation of a small movement. If you create a large build-up of energy then you are creating in the audience the expectation (or the anticipation) of a large movement. “ -Keith Lango, VTS 06, 18:15

Case Study #7 : Physique

Here are a few interesting points to remember about the physic of a bouncing ball. I extract those from the resources below, which I recommend you to read since there is interesting stuff in there.

Interesting Points:

All ballistic objects move on parabolas.

Gravity is an accelerating force. A ball that falls from 2 feet doesn't take twice as long as a ball that falls from 1 foot.

In a parabolic arc the horizontal spacing is constant and uniform while the vertical spacing is not, due to gravity.

The faster the horizontal speed, the flatter the arc, and vice-versa.

Ressources :

Here are two scan of the book Animation the Mechanics of Motion by Chris Webster. I would not especially recommend his book since the animations on the DVD kind of "suck" a little bit. I always found it bizarre when someone releases a book (or online tutorial) supposed to teach you something about animation but the animated examples don’t look very good…

Animation the Mechanics of Motion p.21

Animation the Mechanics of Motion p.20

Here is a discussion that surface on the 11 Second Club forums recently about Bouncing Balls. There are some interesting interrogations in there, as this one about the timing of successive bounces. Because the obvious isn't as obvious as we could think:

Timing is reduce after each successive bounces

The best physic papers on Bouncing Ball you can find around are probably the ones from Alejandro Garcia. The work he did on these is really amazing, everything is explain with lots of concise but clear text and interesting visual examples.

-Physics of Patch of Action
-Physic of Timing and Spacing

For instance:

Case Study #8 : Variation in Timing and Action

When a Bouncing Ball is bouncing around (being alive or not) in some sort of setting (as an obstacle course), there should be some variation in the Timing and Action of the ball, or it will be uninteresting and boring to watch. Having this variation mean there should be some slow bounce and fast bounce (Timing) and some little bounce and big bounce (Action). In addition to the bounces there could be some sliding or rolling, some little anticipation and big anticipation and maybe some slow movement with high frequency movement on top of it. At the end of the day, the idea is to get contrast in there, some variation.

Victor Navone and Aaron Hartline are talking about this in the really interesting Webinar on Timing & Spacing they did with for Animation Mentor. Also, on the exact same topic, take a look at this post on the rule of thumb of 3-Speeds and this post on Rhythm & Texture from Victor Navone own blog.

Case Study #10 : Getting Movement Within the Movement

Getting movement within the movement, getting action within the general action. This is kind of a rule of thumb I'm sometime using when things are not as interesting as they could and I'm wondering why. I had taken the general idea from Richard Williams's book (see pages 213, 222 and 224), but beside the examples he is showing, it could be apply to all sort of situation.

The basic idea is that instead of having a cube (for instance) going from one position to the next in a strait linear line, adding some acceleration or deceleration, some arc, some angle change will give movement within the movement. A video game character jumping from the fifth floor of a building with his arm and legs rotating around may be more interesting that if his arms where just moving over his head gradually (although it will depend of what you want) because we get movement within the movement, or action within the general action. The transition animation of a character holding a ledge and climbing up going to his run cycle will be more interesting if the body is going slightly to the side and tilting a bit to get some angle change instead of going up in a straight line, even if the speed is not linear.

"I call this 'putting the juice in' " -Mike Brown

See how the fourth ball has a slight arc to the side, adding the "juice", the movement within the movement to this Bouncing Ball.

Case Study #11 : Squash & Stretch

Here are list the three squash & stretch ideas that a Bouncing ball highlight in animation.

1. As with the Timing of bounces, the amount of Squash and Stretch depend of the material nature of the Bouncing Ball. For instance, rubber is flexible and therefore is subject to shape changes. If the ball was a metal cannonball, it would not be subject to shape change (squash & stretch) and this gives the animator the tool to define the nature of the ball's material.

2. As a general rule you should ensure that the volume of the object you are animating is not changed; it should neither gain or lose mass. While the shape of the characters and objects may change, they may be flattened or extended; they should not lose or gain volume.

3. When does it squash, and when does it stretch ? When a flexible rubber ball hits the solid ground, it will distort in shape. In other words, it will "squash". The higher the bounce and thus the faster the speeds of the ball, the more squash there will be when it hit the hard ground (1).

Note however, that at it's apex (upper) positions the ball do not squash, as it is not subject to any contact with a hard surface like the ground or is even being distorted by velocity. Thus, because it's coming to a halt at the top of the arc, the ball returns to its natural, circular shape (2).

But this is not true however, on the way up and on the way down. Where the ball will be stretch as it is being distort by the speed it is travelling. As the ball is going less higher and faster, the amount of distortion (stretch) will then be reduce within each successive bounce (3).

Case Study #12 : Thinking as a Bouncing Ball, Thinking High Level

An interesting motion doesn’t come from separate body parts. It doesn’t come from the movement of an eyebrow or from the movement of separate limbs. Nope, an interesting motion come from the contrast of the movement that originate from the abstracted mass of the body.

So the important movement isn’t the one that generate from separate body parts, but from the mass of the body as a whole. This is where a bouncing ball can comes handy. By imagining your character as a bouncing ball you can think more high level. You can think of your motion not in terms of limbs, but in terms of a ball, a cube, or multiples balls moving around while trying to convey an action or performance.

Here are a few examples:

A montage I did. The Vertical Jump from God of War 3 can be breakdown as a Bouncing Ball

From Preston Blair. The bottom character acts as a Bouncing Ball

See also the Brendan Body's lecture on Bouncing Ball and walks, interesting stuff.

"Let's now see how the bouncing ball applies to an animated character [walking]"

A walk with balls !

And finally, don't forget to check the Animation Mentor Webinar : Give Meaning to Movement: Timing and Spacing in Animation Explained where Aaron Hartline is presenting a lot of Bouncing Ball "high level thinking" example during the first two part of the Webinar.

That's a pretty ad

Hope that wasn't to long. No wait, It was !

Francis.

My (actually second) Bouncing Ball

2011-01-23T20:13:00.000-08:00

So here's the exercise I did which is (actually) the second Bouncing Ball I did in my life (you can see the first one at the end of the video) :

First I had searched a couple Bouncing Ball animations from Animation Mentor to get inspiration for the scene and placement of the obstacle course.

Then I did a planning. It certainly helped, even if the final animation is quite different.

The critiques I’ve got :

I’ve got a few critiques from different people (which I tried to address) about the speed of certain action, spacing, rotation of the ball, squash & stretch, etcetera. But in my opinion one of the most interesting critics I’ve got was about the actual shape of a Bouncing Ball and how it can limit you with certain actions.

The critique was about the moment where my ball screams (as Roger Rabbit) and tries to put itself into the air with his “feet” (as Yoshi would do) before not succeeding and falling into the sprite. Most of the people were confuse by this action. Why? Because as someone points me out, depending on the shape of the character, you can’t make it do everything you want.

You could not make a bouncing ball fly if you didn’t add wings to it. As with my animation, I could not really make it push with his feet into the air since it doesn’t have any feet!

The morale of this? Certain shape works (or don’t works) better with certain actions.

Because if his rigid rectangle shape, the Whomp King (yea, that's his name !) will move on the two bottom corners representing his feet.
As for a Bouncing Ball, it will move by bouncing around.
As for a Flour Sac, it could combine the two since it has the shape of a rectangle and the flexibility of a ball.

Thx.

About Me, My Blog and Tips

2011-01-18T19:26:00.000-08:00

Merci à Vous !

Since this blog has been online, it's been pretty successful for a nonexpert animator like me (meaning : I'm not yet at Pixar, and don't really want to, but that's another story !). So I would like to thanks the few people who have talk of this blog during the past two months as Animators Resource and the blog from Kenny Roy .com :

"HUGE props to Francis Jasmin for his astoundingly in-depth notes on animation. His walk cycle tutorial alone is epic [...]"

-Tim Sormin from Kenny Roy news feed

So those links have brought a few reader to my blog, which add more sense to all of this, even if being read is not my first or only motivation.

So why a blog ?

The first reason that motivates me to make a blog was to have a space where I could put my finalized notes and though on animation. For me that was my first motivation. Because I have more than one hour in the metro to spend everyday for my transport, I just began to write a lot of stuff in my notebook during the route. And most of these notes were about animation because I had finish to animate something at work that was still fresh in my mind.

Also, I always love to write a few words when I had the chance. For instance, I've been playing a lot of video game in my spare time a few years ago (yea, a Lot To Much I would say now !), which had lead to be a "game journalist" on behalf of Zeden.net during a good ten months where I had wrote more than 150 news and articles on FPS.

All of this to say that it is my hungriness of animation notes and desire to learn combine with my interest of words that had led me to write this blog. And spend a few hundreds hours on it as it is right now, mostly because of articles as my walk cycle tutorial, which had took me a huge amount of time to put together.

The positive aspect, is that even if I spend three to seven hours a week on my blog, it really help me to consolidate my knowledge on animation with all the research I'm doing on different topics. Also, one other important aspect for me is that it help me with my self-confidence in animation as I can now say to myself : "Look Francis you've learn a few thing on animation !" (stay tunes for a post on the subject soon...).

We could also say that having a blog is a good addition to your animator CV, since it will show to your future employer that you have an interest in animation, even if the Demo always come first.

Some tips to make a blog :

Anonymous said...
"If you could e-mail me with a few suggestions on just how you made your blog look this excellent, I would be grateful."

Ahh, that is a fantastic idea anonymous ! But with all you anonymity, you didn't leave me any e-mail to reply. But I will try to answer your question if you still read this blog :P

Know want you want to talk about :

What kind of "Internet web site" do you want ? Well... you would say : I want a blog ! Good idea, but what kind of blog ? Will it be more as a news feed as Cartoon Brew (general) or Animators Resource (resources / tutorials), more personal work oriented as a few Animation Mentor student have as Krzysztof Boyoko or will it be more oriented opinion-tutorial like as Carlos Buena or Keith Lango ?

At the end of the day, you decide. But just be aware that competing with Cartoon Brew animation news feed for instance, is probably not the right way to get a few people over your blog. Because unless you are Nictor Navone and have an "internet celebrity aura", you probably won't attract much people just by writing two lines about these little fantastic movie !

Get some interesting stuff in there

When I was a news writer on Zeden.net, I was reading quite a lot of video game news site. Generally, any video game news site is compose of three simple things : News, Previews and Reviews of games. The style and arguments that compose these articles is without a doubt an important factor as a measure of the editorial quality of these sites. But there is also what we could call the "side articles". The ones that moves away from the general news, previews and reviews pattern to approach others topics and provide an editorial identity to the site, while remaining address to a general public. Since we would exclude site as Gamasutra, as this news site target a more professional audience.

So animation-wise it could be anything, from this interesting facial study, to this considered opinion or this more in-deep article. The key is just to have readable stuff that could capture interest, while keeping in mind your "what you want to talk about" objectives.

Customize your design a bit

You don't necessarily need to have a super nice design since the most important thing is what you say. But still, we don't fall madly in love with someone because of the physique, yet it help to bring interest at first. Having an interesting design which is easy on the eye and easily navigable is just the basic of web design to keep people coming over from time to time.

Then Have a bit of fun ! If you don't, why do you have a blog ?

Question is : How much do you wanna try ?

2010-12-13T14:43:00.000-08:00

Hi, this text is a little though I had from some time. It's by no mean a text to discourage people who would like to get into the field of animation :-D but more a reflexion about what it mean in term of time and effort investment to reach a highly professional level.

***

Inside the 11 Second Club competition forum there is a post call "Why you should keep trying". It's a pretty popular post, one of the sticky one that get read and read over because it's so important and inspiring. As the title says, it tell you that you should keep trying (here to draw), and that if you work hard and persevere you will get better. And really the guy in the post (Jonathan Hardesty) did get better in drawing, as I did (and do) get better in animation. So yes if we try, we will absolutely get getter.

But then the question is : How much do you want to try ?

As Shawn Kelly points out in one of his post, learning animation just takes a lot of time:

"I added all of that up, and it turns out that my animation education time before landing my dream job at ILM was 18,400 hours [...] but really we're just talking about 5 years of focused studying in order to have a reel that got me into ILM [Link]"

Animation just takes time

And because of this, as Pedro Blumenbaum points out in Animation Insider (p.87), you better love what you do :

"I have come to understand that developing your skill takes huge amounts of time and effort. So it's better to be patient, to be constant in managing the energy, and most important of all, to love what you do, because if you don't, the price of being a good animator is too high."

Love it or don't love it, that's the question

Now take someone who don't know anything about animation, who don't know what makes a good pose and can't draw and who have never touch a 3D package. Then that person will certainly have a long way to go to learn animation at a professional level, as oppose to someone who have a formation in life drawing or dance for instance (or anything helpful in the field). But in any case, learning animation is hard, it just takes time and an appreciable level of "love what you are doing" feeling.

What Is Animation ?

2010-12-06T23:14:00.000-08:00

As always, here is a little idea I've got. As Wikipedia propose more a breakdown of different animation techniques and just one definition of animation (the last one presented here), I've decided to put some others viewpoints together. Fell free to propose any definition you've read in the comments section, so that I can add them if they are relevant.

From Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas :

Animation is the Illusion of Life :
"[...] Animation that produces drawings that appear to think and make decisions and act of their own volition; it is what created the illusion of life."

-Illusion of Life : Disney Animation, Preface (Book Link)

From an art standpoint :

"Time is the essence of animation. It is what makes animation different to other visual arts where the observer controls how much time a piece of art is viewed"

-Timing For Animation, Second Edition, Foreword by John Lasseter p.ix (Book Link)

From an art standpoint in relation to contrast :

"Generally animation is made off of two different things; it's a contrast of motion again stillness. The motion is pretty interesting, but the stillness is where the story is told."

-Keith Lango VTS 03 3:10 (Video Link)

From a technical standpoint (Read more on subject on Wikipedia)

"Animation is the illusion of movement through the persistence of vision."

-DJ Nicke (Video Link)

Et Voilà !

Tools for Weight in Animation (First Pass)

2010-12-03T22:56:00.000-08:00

"Weight is one of those things [where] you need little pieces of all the various part of animation to give the illusion of weight” –Keith Lango VTS 09 1:50

Table of Content :

-Use of Poses (first pass)

-Use of Timing

-Use of Spacing

-Use of Overlapping Action

-Use of Changing Shape

-Use of Biomechanics/Physic Concepts

-Others Thoughts

Here are my thought and some articles I had read and found interesting on weight in animation. I divide the whole thing into important animation topics, which topics also happen to be important in the visual presentation of weight.

All of this certainly isn’t a recipe to get good weight in animation, but should seem more as a toolbox that can be used to show weight or to identify why there isn’t.

Weight can be observed from the first Disney movies to the last Pixar ones. Because as soon as we have good slow-out, slow-in and overlapping action for instance, there is necessarily weight. But for the purpose of this article, lets first take a look at a compilation of different animations I found and where all the points mentioned below are obvious.

[video]

Use of Poses

In this section I won’t try to (re)explain things, but will point directly toward resources after a few words and images.

1. It may seem obvious to those who can draw, but for those who can’t (like me :P) this article by Keith Lango is probably one of the most interesting I’ve read about the importance of good posing and weight :

“See how much better that is? [Second drawing compare to the first one] It has a sense of internal weight. The body feels organic, alive. You can sense the right arm and shoulder holding up the body weight. The chest is rotated a bit on its Y (up) axis to build some inner tension in the body. [...] The shoulders, ribs and hips are all showing the effect of gravity [...]”

2. As you may know, Keith Lango had done quite a lot of video tutorial (with his Video Tutorial Service). Within these he is talking about weight in posing in his VTS two and three. And because he is such a gentlemen, his first two VTS are free to watch on Youtube, as for the third one (which also interest us) it can be buy here for a few buck.

3. Then Richard Williams have some interesting pages on weight and pressure (as touching a desk, pressing on a desk) in his Animator’s Survival Kit at page 262-263. So don’t hesitate to take a look at them.

4. Now here is an interesting quote and idea from Wayne Gilbert:

For those who don’t know him, Wayne Gilbert has written this book and is a mentor at Animation Mentor.

“Weight is described through the visual presentation of opposing forces. That’s it. Stop here or continue reading for accompanying babble and random thoughts.”

What he’s saying above is in relation to the third law of Newton postulating this: “To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”.

What it means is that if you push on the ground or the wall, the wall or ground pushes on you with an equal and opposite force. Therefore, if an object weights one hundred kilo and that your character would like to make it moves. Then the pose of the character will need to represent the application of an opposite force greater than the friction force exert on the ground by the one hundred kilos object (which is pretty big). So in other words, he must appear to force quite a lot!

"Weight is described through the visual presentation of opposing forces."

5. And last but not least, if a character seem off balance within a pose, (Center of Gravity not over his base of support), we would have the impression that he's defying gravity, that he floats into the air and thus that he is having no weight/mass (unless he is in dynamic balance, see tutorial).

On the subject of balance, here’s an interesting site about physic in animation by Alejandro Garcia. In the tutorial section I suggest you to check the Physic of Balance tutorial at page fifteen where's talking on the relationship between the Centre of Gravity and Weight.

In the same vein, here is a little montage of two tutorials I found to relate well to each others. The poses are from Richard William's Animated DVD Disk 9 and the two little texts from the Alejandro Garcia tutorial cite above.

Because there is a Hierarchy of Dependencies

2010-11-27T01:14:00.000-08:00

From Keith Lango's VTS 19

Here is a little text (in form of a PDF) that I had wrote a few months ago. It's about what Keith Lango would call the "Hierarchy of Dependencies"; where one thing needs another one, because there is a dependencies within the keys in an animation.

I have classified this under the blocking stage because it is in this stage that we start to draw all our poses on the screen or paper, whatever the methodology use (Pose-to-Pose, Straight-Ahead or Layered); meaning that Blocking isn’t necessarily referring to a Pose-to-Pose method. Although most of the time it will because it is the safest way to get good result. Even if in the end, it depends on the animator workflow, scene and character…

To give a few example of a Pose-to-pose, Straight-Ahead and Layered methodology I have link some video and text at the bottom of this post. Of course, these three ways of working blend together in an animation workflow, as we could refine in a layered fashion different section of the body (starting with the hips, torso, limbs...), or go straight-ahead after we've got most of our important poses blocked out for instance.

Pose-to-Pose Example

From Kevin Webb Animation Blog

Layered Example

From Daniel Huertas Animation Blog. Below is the final animation, see the link for the video.

And from Firat Can Kiral Animation Blog.

Straight-Ahead Example

From Rune Brandt Bennicke Animation Blog.

Some Talk on Organic Motion

2010-11-21T10:32:00.000-08:00

The Organic Graph

What is an Organic Motion, Movement ? The simple way to describe it would be in opposition to a very robotic or mechanical movement. A movement that would not contain any Overlapping Action, Slow-In / Slow-Out, Arc and Opposite Actions as the video example below. So that Organic Motion refer to a natural movements, a movements from living things as human who are generally moving in an organic way.

Overlapping Action

The principle of Overlapping Action is the decomposition of the movement so that not everything in or on a character starts and arrives at the same time. It could be understood in opposition to a basic interpolation, where everything would move at the same time between poses.

In a character, two possibilities:

First, Overlapping Action means varying the timing within a hierarchy of connected parts as the arm, forearm, and hand for instance to get some follow-through (so that something is leading and some things are dragging).

Secondly, Overlapping Action means advancing and delaying various body parts as they arrive at their final position, as long as these parts work organically and logically.

Eric Goldberg p.101

On a character: Inanimate objects that are usually slave of the primary action. Things like earing, hair, clothes, appendage or a cartoony tail for instance, won’t hit the same timing as what is leading them.

In other words, it means that thing move in part. That one section of the body goes first, and another section of the body goes after until all part of the body has come to the next pose. Each parts overlapping their timing or doing a little pause before the other parts start to move (or the combination of the two).

*See Richard William, The Animator’s Survival Kit p.226 to 230 and The Animator's Survival Kit – Animated; disk 9

It’s this overlap of different section of the body between poses that will give the illusion that a second action is starting before the first action has completely finished, thus creating more organic and believable actions by establishing relationship between them.

Follow-Through (or Lead & Drag / Lead & Follow)

Follow-Through, which is a subtext of Overlapping Action, simply means that some parts of the body will Lead an action and some parts will Follow an action, as these parts were listening to what’s pulling them, but with a delay. It happens because we are not a rigid figurine, but a body compose of mobile parts with their own inertia.
To understand Follow-Through it is important to understand what it encompasses:
What it encompass:

•    One part Lead. And that part will lead in a certain direction: Direction of Thrust.
•    Some parts Drag, which will be delay behind the leading part because of their Inertia.
•    The Follow-Through happen when what’s leading stop or change direction, the parts that drag will continue to move due to their momentum.
•    Overlap : The zone where 2 drawing will make contact, will be over the top of each other, will overlap each other’s. So that the more your drawings overlap, the smoother your action will look. When a hierarchy of joint unfold with leading and dragging parts, the overlap in the drawing will make the action smoother and easily understandable.

Also, are we leading with the top or the bottom ?

• Progressive : If you are leading with the top of the hierarchy (see the video examples below, a snake for instance would lead progressively with his head)
• Digressive: If you are leading with the bottom of a hierarchy, which is what we are normally doing.

Sometime, follow-through is seen and explains in term of D, S, C (or C minus) shape, or in term of section of a wave that represent these three shape. For instance, suppose that you have a moving block with a pendulum attach to it (as with the Animation Mentor exercise). As the block move right the pendulum drag and form a D shape. When the block stops or change direction, the pendulum’s D shape becomes an S shape because the upper section of the chain lead and the bottom drag. And finally, the pendulum’s follow-though will transform the S shape in a C shape before coming back and repeating the pattern until it stop. If the “S” wasn’t here, there would be no sensation of weight, of thing being dragged.

Sorry for the Dirt !

So really, follow-through simply means that things won’t move at the same time within a hierarchy as one part is leading and others parts are dragging behind. And because it encompasses the concept of timing, that thing doesn’t move at the same time, it can be viewed as a subtext of Overlapping Action.

Follow-Through: A subtext of Overlapping Action

As we said, Follow-Through is as a subtext of Overlapping Action, because as in Overlapping Action, in Follow-Through things won’t move at the same time as one part lead and others parts drags. But Overlapping Action is not necessarily Follow-Through. Because Follow-Through apply to one hierarchy of joints where something lead and some things drag as Overlapping action encompass body part that are not necessarily connected to each other’s (not in the same hierarchy).

For instance, for Overlapping Action you could have the front foot during a baseball pitch that starts to move before the body or one foot leading during a jump as the other foot lag behind. But in these two examples, because one foot is not “connected” to the other foot there is nothing really leading or dragging (as in Follow-Through), it is just that one foot move on a different timing, even if in the jump the foot that goes last, come last so that we kept a logical order in the movement.

Successive Breaking of Joints:

“The term first coined by animator Art Babbit to describe how a character move fluidly based on anatomy.” –Eric Goldberg p.XXI

Successive Breaking of Joints means that instead of having the joints in a hierarchies move at the same time from one position to the next. Having the joints break successively from the source of the action or force will show flexibility, weight and deployment of force.

In animation, the concept of Successive Breaking of Joints is use to describe how a character move fluidly based on anatomy, as Eric Goldberg points out. It could be seen in opposition to rubber hose animation where limb of the character had fluid movement, but with no bone structure.

Eric Goldberg p.43

It’s interesting to note that in Biomechanics, the concept of “breaking the joints successively” haves a specific use in physical skills that require high linear velocity on the end of the segmental link system (i.e. high baseball speed in a baseball pitch (can attain up to 170 km/h), contact foot in kicking, tip of the sword in a sword strike). It’s known as the Kinetic Link Principle, where there is a sequencing segmental rotation of the joints. Just as the tip of the whip can be made to travel so fast that it has a supersonic speed (hence the sonic boom heard as the crack), the small segments of the hand or foot can be made to travel extremely fast by sequential rotation of the body segments, because the rotational inertia of the system become progressively less through the body’s segment.

Successive Breaking of Joints: A subtext of Follow-Through

Successive Breaking of Joints is an essential idea in creating nice follow-through, if you are animating something with joints. It can be apply to broad action as in a baseball pitch or someone riding a horse bucking, or it can be apply in subtle action like in a hand clap. So whenever you have some follow-though where something is leading and dragging, the idea of breaking the joints successively will be underneath it if you animate something with joints.

Tools for weight in animation: Follow-Through and S.B of Joints

If a force is applied to an object, it will accelerate progressively by slowing-out in the direction of the force, because it has inertia. That’s where we feel the weight. If some parts attach to this object lag behind, it will do so because it has inertia, and will continue to move (will follow-through) if the object stop because it has momentum. Again, that’s where we feel the weight, when something with or without joints is being drag and then follow-through.

We should note that Timing and Posing are the most important thing to show weight, as timing gives meaning to movement. If your timing is not correct, your animation could feel “floaty”, “watery”, “swimmy”, as it is submerged in an invisible pool of water. If you don’t have any Overlapping Action, your animation will certainly feel stiff, but without proper timing, adding whatever amount of follow-through/S.B of Joints won’t solve the problem.

On this subject, here is a little quote from Keith Lango that I had found interesting (from this article):

"We can see forces in a second hand fashion- by the force's effect against resistance. What kinds of resistance are there? The primary types of resistance are inertia and momentum"

Slow-Out / Slow-In

Every objects have inertia, which is the tendency of an object to resist any change in it's motion. Inertia if proportinal to the mass of an object. So that every objects needs to slow-out (accelerate) and slow-in (decelerate) when they move or change direction. If they don't slow-out and slow-in it will look mechanical, unatural, inorganic.

Arc :

*Here I have just copy paste the text from this page.

Arcs bring life to a movement, thus avoiding a mechanical look. Almost everything in the natural world moves in arcs. There are two major reasons for this:

1: Rotational Joints

Your body is made up of a series of rotational joints, so when you move your body, it’s actually the result of your various limbs rotating around your joints. Because of this, our movements tend to follow arcs. A human walk cycle is full of arcs. The body moves up and down, as well as moving forward, tracing an arc through the air:

2: Gravity

Gravity also causes objects to move along Arcs. Take the example of the bouncing ball. If you throw it forward, it is also pushed down by gravity, making it move in an arc.
The main lesson to learn from "Arcs" is to try and avoid having any truly linear motion in your animation unless it is mechanical.

Opposite Action:

Here's the thing, during one of the Jason Ryan Webinar, I had lift my hand off and ask him this question : “How does opposite action are related to an organic feel in our animation”. If you would like to hear his interesting answer, you need to buy the webinar series 2 on IAnimate (it’s only 100 $ for 12 video), and check the one from July at 1:59:10…

"Just that simple idea, of moving thing in two different directions make it feel better, that's why I say it make it feel more organic"

And here it ends

To conclude, Organic Motion can be understood in oposition to a mechanical or robotic motion and emcompass a few different things. First off, we have seen that Overlapping Action really mean that things move at different time, that things start and stop at different time. We have seen that Follow-Through (or Lead & Drag) means that some parts of the body will Lead an action and some parts will Follow an action and that it can be seen as a subtext of Overlapping Action since what’s leading and dragging won’t move at the same time. We have also seen that S.B of Joints is a subtext of Follow-Through as it encompass the same notion that something is leading and some things are dragging, but now with joints. Then we have seen how Follow-Through and S.B of Joints contribute to the visual presentation of weight by showing inertia and momentum of objects. And finally we have seen that Slow-In / Slow-Out, Arc and Opposite Action also contribute to give an organic feel to our animation.

A Walk Cycle Tutorial

2010-10-23T15:41:00.000-07:00

Walks (and runs) are parts of some basic animations exercises as are the pendulum, the bouncing balls or the weight shift. Despite this, walks are not an easy subject and require some research before we start diving into them, as Shawn Kelly points out in one of his post.

So walks are hard, and I personally animated a lot of them before making good ones. Some in school for sure... Then some at work for our video game, and then some walks at home for my personal interest and for a contest that appears at the Spline Doctor animation blog.

Slide Example

As I was animating walks and made many mistakes (resulting in strange looking walks), I took some notes and read tutorials to learn more stuff on the subject.

As I was learning, I decided I could probably do a little tutorial on the subject, planning to put six hours into it and post this on the Internet. But as I realized there was more things to say, I ended up writing more stuff and then that little tutorial become more detailed than I had initially expected.

VIEW WALK TUTORIAL HERE

Here I try to do things a little bit differently than the others walk tutorials you will find around. So that It's not a one hour video, nor the 5 basic poses of a step explain again.

Hope this help.

The Animation Concept Graph

2010-10-22T10:49:00.000-07:00

From the time I’m animating (It’s been two years and a bit now) and reading book, blogs and tutorials; I have learn new animation concepts (terms) from time to time.

Graph Example

Since I realize there was more important terms out there that the 12 Animation Principles, I decided some months ago to start a little conceptual map for fun and try to organize these terms under larger concept. The organization of these terms, although logical, is certainly subjective because I didn't sat down with 12 amazing animators to do this.

VIEW THE CONCEPT GRAPH HERE

So even if I hope you found this interesting, don’t take this to seriously since this is just an excuse to do some research about animation terms.

*software used is the free yEd - Graph Editor

the Big Bang post

1983-10-13T17:02:00.000-07:00

It seems that I love to take notes. It’s true, but I’m also sit more than one hour in the metro every day, so that I’m not really lacking any time to write some stuff in my notebook!

So here is my animation blog called Follow-Thought. I’m certainly not Jason Ryan or Keith Lango and I’m not pretending to close any discussions or to have an “expert” view of these subjects. These are just some of my thought and an opportunity to write my ideas on animation. If you found any of these interesting, fell free to let me a comment so that the discussion can continues.

Thx for reading.