12 Principles Of Animation

12 Principles Of Animation

• 1 Squash and stretch

When a ball is falling the shape appears to stretch out and then when it hits the ground, the pressure of the impact squashes the shape down.

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• 2 Anticipation
• Anticipation is the pause and wait for an action to happen to get a reaction.
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• 3 Staging
• Staging is placing your character in the correct pose that is appealing to the audience and also tests that the audience understand what your character is doing. The best way to test this is by turning the character into a silhouette, if the pose can still be identified in silhouette form then this is a good example of staging.
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• 4 Straight Ahead Action and Pose to Pose
• The main key frames or poses of the character, for example the contact or passing poses.
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• 5 Follow Through and Overlapping Action
• A follow through action is when a looser body part carries on moving after the main body part has finished moving. For example when moving your arm, the wrist will continue to move after the arm stops.
• An overlapping action is the different movement rates, for example the arm will move at a different timing rate than the head.
• This video is a good example of the different timing rates, the bag is moving at a different rate to the character and the arms and legs are moving at a different time to his head.

• 6 Slow In and Slow Out

Slow in and slow out shows how the movement slowly gains speed into an action. For example and car doesn't pull off and is straight in at full speed, it eases into the action and gains speed and this is the same when stopping, the car will slowly decrease in speed.

This best visual example is a pendulum's movement.

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• 7 Arc

• An arc is the line of movement, where there are arcs is usually showing the natural movements of the object, usually with ball joints.
• The faster the movement the straighter the arc line.

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• 8 Secondary Action
• A secondary action is a movement that accompanies the main action. For example two people talking would be the main action but the secondary action is that the person talking could be tapping their foot. The secondary action should only be subtle and not distract the viewer from the main action.
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• 9 Timing
• Timing is the number of frames between key poses to give the illusion of life.
• The the smaller the space between poses the slower the action, meaning more frames between poses. The faster the action the less frames between are needed.
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• 10 Exaggeration

Exaggeration is used to push movements further to add more appeal to an action. Exaggeration can used to create extremely cartoony movements, or incorporated with a little more restrain to more realistic actions. Whether it's for a stylised animation or realistic, exaggeration should be implemented to some degree.

If you have a realistic animation you can use exaggeration to make a more readable or fun movement while staying true to reality. For example, if a character is preparing to jump off a diving board you can push them down just a little bit further before they leap off. You can also use exaggeration in the timing as wall to enhance the different movements or help to sell the weight of a character.

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• 11 Solid drawing

Creating a solid drawing to showing weight and volume in an image. This can be created with the posing of the character, if they have their hands on their hips, have their weight transferred to the one hip and then twist them around slightly to create the illusion of being 3D.

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• 12 Appeal

This can be applied to many areas of animation, such as appeal in posing. The most obvious example would be in the character design. Making the character pleasing and relatable to the audience.

Twinning

Twinning is finding the natural movement when both halves of the body are mirroring the same movement.

For example when a ballerina is lifting both arms up at the same time, to show a natural movement an animator will have the one arm move slightly quicker or bend the arm further than the mirrored arm.

Throwing A Ball (Pose To Pose Animation)

Reference Video

After viewing the reference video, I put my character into the key poses.

Creating a silhouette of my character allows me to see how effective these key poses are to the audience. If the key pose can be recognised in silhouette form then the animation will be better illustrated for the audience. 

Taking out the step animation, Maya then filled in the gaps between the poses and after a few adjustments the animation flowed better.

Motion Trail

From my animation I created a motion trail, this can then be edited to make my animation smoother.

This image shows the motion trail of the right shoulder and wrist and these are the parts of the body that do the most movement.

In my animation I noticed that when the arm swings round it jumps up slightly and this can be seen in the motion trail.

Animating And Exagerating Movements From A Reference Video

Reference Video

My Animation From Reference

For this I made him look like his feet are sliding, because in the reference video he doesn't lift his feet far from the ground.

I then took my animation and using cinematography, created a narrative for my animation.
Storyboards

I then applied the shots from story board to my animation.
For my first try animating a camera I don't think it's too bad but I think that it
is very jumpy and this could possibly be fixed by extending the length of the timeline
and animating the camera to step from one position to the next. I think that the length of time needs to be extended for the quick movements like when the character turns his head, this way the animation will be less jumpy. 

Walk Cycle - Using The Blake Rig

Using the Blake rig from Creative Creash, I keyframed the contact and passing poses.

Then using the graph editor I have smoothed out the timing.

I still need to work on his feet to stop him from gliding for his next step. 

Side View

Front View

Two Bouncing Balls Of Different Weights

Reference

Several Different Balls

First Ball, high bounce, most likely a rubber ball.

Adding The beach ball. This ball is lighter and bounces for 

longer and stays higher longer than rubber ball. 

In the reference video the beach ball looks like it is floating and I tried to 

show this in my 3D ball but I think it just makes it look like the timing is wrong, 

this may look better after the colour and spin has been added.

I have since smoothed out the the smaller ball's end of the bounce as it started getting quicker.

I have also extended how long it takes the beach ball to reach the ground, this is to show that this ball is lighter than the smaller ball.

Bouncing Ball First Test

Using maya I created a simple NURBS sphere and used this to create a bouncing ball. 

After putting the key frames and movements in place, 

I used the graph editor to adjust the timing and the easing in and out. 

I think that because of where I set the key frames the flow of the ball is still a bit slow and I will have to change the speed of the ease in and outs to show where gravity pulls down on the ball.

Character Animation 500 Words

Character animation has been seen as early as 1834 when the Zoetrope was created by using a strip of paper mounted onto a disk with slits in. The artist would draw a sequence of images that change slightly each time. This would then be spun so the viewer could see these images change through the slit and this would give the illusion of movement.

Eaweard Muybridge used this in his earlier work to show how different mammals moved.

It was later in 1913 when Winsor McCay created the short film Gertie The Dinosaur; this character animation was shown to a wider audience for entertainment purposes. This film really showed the true prospects for characters in animation, and still stands in high regard today.

In 1923 Walt Disney Studios opened up in Los Angeles entertaining audiences with stories using characters. They started off with short animations, for example the Alice Comedies and Steamboat Willie. Then in 1937 Walt Disney created its first feature length film with Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs.

In 2D animation the principles squash and stretch and exaggeration can play a more prominent factor. A character's movements and actions can be pushed to limits, this can often be found in comedies, used to extend the humour of the character's actions further.

Whereas in 3D, especially in recent gaming animation, realism has got closer and closer to the human form. To enhance the gamers experience, the characters they are playing as are becoming more lifelike in appearance, and in some ways, gaining appeal for the audience. This way the person playing will be further emerged into the game and most likely becoming hooked to it.

References

Eadweard Muybridge: Zoetrope at Kingston Museum [Video] Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcHL7Vxh-9k [Accessed 10 March 2015].

Final Fantasty [Image] Available from http://s.pro-gmedia.com/videogamer/media/images/pub/large/ff151.jpg

Gertie The Dinosaur [Image] Available from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winsor_McCay [Accessed 10 March 2015]

Keith Stuart. Photorealism - the future of video game visuals [Online] Available from http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/12/future-of-video-gaming-visuals-nvidia-rendering [Accessed 12 May 2015]

Roadrunner [Image] Available from http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/tinytoons/images/1/11/Roadrunner.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20101114095113 [Accessed 12 May 2015]

Walt Disney Studios History [Online] Available from http://studioservices.go.com/disneystudios/history.html [Accessed 10 March 2015]. 

Wikipedia. Winsor McCay [Online] Available from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winsor_McCay [Accessed 10 March 2015]