Approaching Full Figure Animation and finding your shorthand style

[Music] hey guys it's Tanika Pinto and today I kind of want to talk about approaching full body or full-figured animation whether you're animating action whether it's a performance dance fight you're going to want to be able to animate the full figure there's a lot of animators that I look up to and I noticed that a lot of them have a variety of different approaches of the rough pass when animating the full body of their characters first of all what do I mean by the first pass or the short hand pass if you've gone through my 2d animation video course I talked about it more in depth but to summarize it right now it's when you're just animating a pass so you can just get the gesture and the rough performance down this means that you just focus on the animation principles the action in the acting rather than how nice the drawing looks details such as on model construction anatomy clothes and tie down can be added much later on during the process I want to be covering this right now so in this video I'll be trying out all the common shorthand and rough passes I see different animators use in our animation work the animation I'm gonna show you our done entirely straight ahead and definitely not planned at all this video is not a full figure drawing or anatomy lesson that is a whole world of its own so I would recommend going out of your way to study actual anatomy anyway let's get started just a heads up the examples I'll show you guys don't really have an official name it's just a name that I gave so I can refer back to it when I need to let's look at exhibit a the stick figure approach the stickman approach is when you use a sort of stick figure to do a first pass of the animation this is a style that I notice when beginning animators use when they're learning how to animate and it's a style that's easy to follow now that I've done it again myself I can see why it's highly beneficial for beginning animators when it comes to the stickman I don't recommend your average stickman where it's just a ball head with arms and legs just sticking out the torso this type of stickman was highly popular by the cha-cha series in the early 2000s which featured amazing fight choreography and animation therefore a lot of younger anime utilize the style when animating flash while the stickman can be great for learning animation or doing those stick fight animations there's a misconception that you can just use this shorthand or the stickman and then transform it into a full figure body animation one big reason why I don't advocate for this type of stickman is that it doesn't really describe the angles until it's the body is doing which helps give your performance a bit more life what will give you that information are the shoulders and hips so I opted out to describe those at least not only does it make it bear more resemblance to a human being but mechanics Weiss and allow the torso to twist and twisting allows them to change direction and where the body faces in a lot of physical sports so let's say I'm using Brazilian jiu-jitsu as reference if you secure your partner's hips and shoulders you prevent them from turning into or away from you which kind of screws up their range of movement another example is when someone is trying to pull off spin kicks they have to use their arms their their shoulders and their hips to create that momentum that allows them to spin so now I'm gonna put the hips and the shoulders as landmarks to the stick figure I change up the order of how I draw the full body sometimes I start with a head and work my way to the torso and then the legs or sometimes I just start with the torso first and then the legs and then add the head later on but in most cases I always add the arms last unless it's an upper body shot you kind of want to make sure the feet are planted and the characters are proportionate to the scene so that's kind of why I do the axial skeleton first and then the legs to get the primary figure planted I always want them to be visible since they're probably the most expressive parts of the body besides the face so back to why I found this type of approach really beneficial the benefit I found myself when utilizing the stick figure approach is that it forced me to train to look for those angles and tilts in the shoulders and the hips it's because you've clearly indicated the hips and shoulders in the stick figure form it's easier to see the only drawback to this approach that I can think of right now is that it doesn't really describe mass or a bit of form and that's a key factor in describing things such as weight I think this drawback in the stick figure approach is the only drawback I have that prevents me from utilizing it full-time but that stuff can be fixed out later on in fact a lot of the next approaches that we'll be talking about actually stem from this approach because of the indication of the hips and shoulders but I would totally recommend this type of approach for beginning animators getting into full-body animation next the sample B figure drawing skeleton this is one I see from animators who are using life drawing fundamentals and techniques for this type of approach this is an approach that I usually fall back to when animating more realistically proportioned or Anatomy close and correct humans if you're trying to learn how to animate while at the same time animate human figures or close to the human figure I would use this approach over the stick med most of it is pretty much the same but now I've added the ribcage and the pelvic bone now we've added a bit of mass to our figure in this case we have two points of mass the pelvis and the rib we can also use the hip and pelvis to later tied-down it with closer to human anatomy one key difference from the state for your approach to something like this approach is that you're going to have to describe how the spine aligns with the rib and pelvis this can be quite limiting and a bit confusing when trying to exaggerate poses if you look at a human being at a side profile in an x-ray with their skeleton their spine doesn't just go up and down it's more like an S shape again the ribs and pelvis sit on that spine and therefore making them angled this is something I always forget when I animate in other short hands therefore making some of my drawings look stiff if you want to get a better understanding of the foundation of the human figure while trying to have a short hand that's easy to recreate I recommend using this one having this short hand down can actually help you with the tie down stage instead of trying to fix anatomy there with this figure drawing approach you already have what's needed to complete the human figure so if you feel like you've have an understanding of the stick figure approach why not try this one it now adds the ribcage the pelvis and the spine that angles them now let's look at samples see the classical Disney approach alright first of all this is not the official name for the short hand this is one I just labeled but the reason why this way is because I see a lot of Disney veteran animators that I'd look up to use a variation of this shorthand this is a shorthand an approach that I see someone like James Baxter or Glenn King use before turning them into beautiful drawings other animators that utilize this are Nick Ranieri and James Lopez when I was mentored by a handful of disney-esque animators they always encouraged to have a really simple shorthand first so that you can nail the attitude the acting the animation the performance out of the way before you start solidifying and prettifying the drawing itself to me this made animation a bit more fun and easier to access if you feel like you've understood the stickman approach with the shoulders and hips you can now connect the shoulders and hips with a mess giving it a box-like or flower sack torso which describes the primary mass of your character when doing this approach I treat the torso again as a flower sack so that stuff can bend it can squash while I keep my appendages sope edges such as limps the arms legs I keep them loose expressive and sometimes noodley this is so that it allows me to become more loose when approaching acting again that stuff can be fixed on later during the tie down face hands and feet are also heavily emphasized to showcase emotions of the characters through body language I noticed that when Disney animators use the short head they also add super bold expressions on the character's face so it feels really graphic doing the style I feel like it's great for coming up with strong poses with some great pantomime it helps a lot by adding some of that cartooning element in your drawing the drawback I find myself too using this type of short head is that if you really want to have incredibly subtle acting your work so something that's close to realism it's harder to do that using a graphic style such as this also if you notice through my previous passes in this one I draw a line across the torso to indicate where the body is facing but I also draw red lines to highlight the arms and legs this is so that it just reminds me which part of the arm is facing towards me and which is away sometimes where the style that has not a lot of volumetric information that stuff or that information can get long so that's one cheat I usually like to do next is Exhibit D far sex and sausage limbs wanna short head or rough style that's not - technically detailed but it still describes weight and things such as form this is a shorthand that I primarily use but after trying out different short hands I might have to change things up this is a short hand I started using more because there's a lot of animators and friends that I look up to such as rumba Nicki and Nelson Dakota that use a short hand if I were to summarize it quickly it's kind of like the classical Disney approach but adding mass to everything which helps describe the form and wait for the torso I still treat it as a flower sack the far psych again can bend and stretch and it can describe things like a bit more weight well I still use a torso to indicate the tilts of the shoulders and the hips ie cylinders and sausages for my limbs so this allows me to figure out where all the limbs bent and foreshorten while having mess at this stage anatomy again is not a main concern but this short hand still allows me to have a bit of solid form a bit of mass so I can still describe a bit more weight if I want to I can taper these limbs so it matches that of a human being it's really all about playing with shapes if you really want to go that far now the reason why I usually fall back into this type of shorthand is because of all the characters in different styles that I've animated in the past this one seems to adapt pretty well but then again doing a lecture and an exercise like this makes me explore short hands that I might find beneficial for other purposes the drawback I find myself with this type of shorthand is something you'll notice in this test which is a lot of parallel lines this can make the drawing look a bit flat it's distracting and unappealing so if you really want to utilize a short hand like this I would resort to tapering the limbs sample II quick and loose here's a style that I resort to when I don't feel precious about how the drawing looks or better yet say I don't feel precious about the animation and honestly that's a good thing imagine going through cafe sketching or life drawing and you have to capture your figure in under 30 seconds to complete that dry under that time you're going to have to disregard technical and in solid drawing and do your best to capture the model as a whole you don't have time to measure the ribs to pelvis the proportions you have to draw fast maybe to the point of doing quick blind contour drawings and by doing that you're about to make Anatomy mistakes your figures might feel loose and proportions go way out of hand however what you're trying to capture isn't what the model looks like but what it feels like and the movement and the energy coming off from that model this is that short hand this is a short hand that I see someone like animator like you Taconic amudha uses I see a lot of sakuga first passes that utilize a pass like this when I draw my keys in this type of short head I hardly let my pen off the surface I treated the whole image as just a few continuous lines you'll see the lines of the arms connect to the opposite legs and such the purpose of the short hand is to really feel the movement rather than how the drawing itself looks again you'll notice by letting your pen glide around your surface lifting it up less you're about to get really loose drawings this short hand again is great for just capturing the flow and the rhythm of the movement something that is essential for animating great actions the only drawback I have with this type of shorthand is that your model is definitely going to break and it's going to break hard heads will grow and limbs will shrink but with good spacing and good animation those things will be very hard to actually pinpoint and nitpick also you can easily put that back on model during the tie down stage so is it really a drawback you tell me sample F the building block approach here's a short hand I see from technical draftsman while they animates imagine being Bridgman for moments stacking up blocks cubes and spheres to build your figure you see the whole world of stacks of blocks on top of each other in this short head I am using blocks boxes and other primitives so these include shapes like the sphere the pyramid cylinders and stuff like that to build my figure a short hand like this requires solid drawing skills and some figure drawing fundamentals since you're breaking down actual human anatomy into much simpler shapes it kind of looks like a boxy 3d rig as usual I always start with drawing the torso first so I can figure out my tilts and angles then I plant the feet or make sure the feet are planted so I know this figure has a base so I'm thinking about breaking the anatomy into blocks the way I think about it when I draw the short hand is that idea of the torso three boxes for example the top being where the chest is where the arms meet where the head meets the middle being the belly the abdominal muscles and the lowest one being the pelvis where the legs connect the appendages from the upper and lower limbs are separated by boxes and cylinders as far as drawing a full figure in a wide-angle shot I usually make sure I draw the feet first I mean the legs and then the arms to me it was a great exercise and it was really challenging animating in this approach as a first pass but to me it didn't feel like I had the most fun with this one since most of my concern was focused on keeping everything solid and volumetric I feel like if you really want to have pushed expressions and pushed animation or would like to improve on that I would recommend doing other short hands that are more loose the other ones that I mentioned previously however this is good for let's say subtle animation one of the reasons why I didn't really have fun animating in this approach is because I felt like I was more on animating blocks and shapes rather than the figure itself to be honest with you this is a pass that I would do on a tie down or second pass I would get all my acting my gestures all the animation stuff down first and then now that I know where all the blocks go I would just do that in the second pass where I'm aligning the blocks or the the shapes onto this loose drawing again my main focus was just trying to maintain consistency rather than trying to exaggerate and push things I would do a loose pass first it's a great challenge to draw in form but if you're going to use this as a first pass well then make sure you have a strong foundation in the animation principles and make sure you're decisive in your choices for me I like to keep experimenting explore so I usually save that step for the last sample G the human anatomy approach this one is a highly technical approach and because of that I don't really like to use it this is an approach where you define Anatomy shapes such as bones muscles flesh you have things such as the angled and where the joints meet figured out an approach like this means you need to have a grasp of a strong foundation in your human anatomy and mechanics understanding it requires you to also break down complex shapes into much more simpler shapes that can be recreated again and again this is a great draftsmanship skill as you can see I'm just doing a more simplified version of human anatomy because Anatomy is a world that's just way too big on its own and requires a lifetime studying as usual I focus on the axial skeleton group so I can get the torso the hips and head down then I work my way to the legs defining legs the muscles shapes from there at the overall shape as for the upper body I'm already defining muscle shape such as the arms the chest the ABS the forearms etc to me I find this similar to the previous one I showed which is the building block approach but just a bit more elegant because of the more organic shapes I did find it a bit more fun to do and it allowed me to push and stretch some of these shapes however this doesn't mean that it's any much easier than the building blocks approach because I'm filling in details such as anatomy shapes I found myself way more focused on making the drawing look good and clean rather than pushing me acting in the actual animation and because of that I was spending most of the time just on the drawing aspect making sure everything remains somewhat consistent doing this approach made me feel a bit restricted in terms of exaggeration so the end results of the animation I did ended up being and feeling floating after doing this approach myself I can only recommend it to a few considerations number one you want to challenge yourself in doing more close to accurate Anatomy correct pass on the first go second your animation emphasizes the muscles itself but honestly that stuff can be added on later on and third is that you're an excellent justement so the animation aspect of it comes second nature for you however like the building block approach again I would just do a much simpler and looser pass and then use an approach like this on the second pass next is sampled H the concert and uniform body pass in this approach I am treating the body as a single entity I'm not using shapes to break down the torso the arms and the legs they all just kind of merge into each other this isn't an unusual style but this isn't something that I would really do unless I'm doing quick in-betweens this is an approach that I see a lot of websocket style animators that I look up to utilize I like to think of this as a stacked stickman but approaching it it was harder than how I made it sound like I still had to think about the angles of my hips and shoulders the limbs and the other body parts I drew ended up looking more like blobs as for me I found this approach really hard for me to comprehend because I personally like to feel through the form of my drawings drawing around and through the figure here I'm only thinking about the negative space which is just you know very 2d which can be good for training the human eye to see clear silhouettes when I was doing this approach I did go much slower to make sure all the shapes are still readable through the negative space something like this did force me to be a bit more decisive and where I put my lines but because of the elegant nature of doing contours or single bodied figures I had to be a little more slow and precise I'm not sure how I feel about using this approach or maybe it's because I'm not quite getting it correctly but it is an approach where I had to kind of train another part of my brain to see if I were to change it up I'd resort to breaking each body part into its own shape so I can figure out the mass and weight of each part and I can feel through my figure that's just me but I'm sure others will benefit from this type of shorthand sample I bowled straights vs. curves this will be the last approach I'll be talking about in this video this one's similar to the last or the previous approach I talked about where you're treating the body as a single entity however this approach is a little more bold decisive and hard which is kind of the opposite of the last approach I actually see this shorthand mostly in TV storyboards this is a shorthand I noticed a lot of my friends in TV utilised especially when dealing with the human figure although I do see this mostly in storyboards I kind of want to point out that storyboards for television have become ridiculously animated for their own good because of the hard nature of storyboarding for action TV shows you need a shorthand that allows you to draw quick while fleshing out so many different shots and hundreds of panels if you know my opinion on the matter I don't think storyboards should be over animated to the point where you're seeing ones and twos in them and this is storyboards we're talking about but this happens in the industry and I think this type of practice kind of alienates the type of work storyboard artists do I've seen many hard-working story artists who animate their storyboards put down other hard-working story artists because they don't animate their boards or enemy like they do which is by adding ones and twos and that's something I can't really you know advocate for sorry for the little wreck anyways the short hand the short head basically stylized is the last short hand like I said with lives I just taper and have a lot more strong straights versus curves this is a type of shorthand that allows me to be more bold and direct rather than worry about the elegance of how the drawing looks I noticed I drew heavier on my pen which allowed me to highly stylize and exaggerated poses this short head is great if you are looking to stylize and I keep saying that where it's stylized but this is a great shorthand to use and we just want really graphic elements to your poses and allows you to see the overall strong shape of the whole drawing now that we've explored each of these short hands you may be wondering which one is the best ones I would recommend and if I had any further advice for it I only have two words to give it depends there are factors that you need to consider that may change the way you approach this animation shot these factors include character design is it close to human being or is it something else are they playing with proportions there's a shot is that a close-up is it angled what do you need to emphasize acting is it subtle broad pantomime animation style is the animation style pushed subtle cartoony realistic drawing style does it call for more graphic shapes or volumetric realism context what is happening in what's going on each different scene that I've animated in the past have always required me to try a different approach when I wanted to animate something close to a human being I would probably resort to the figure drawing approach liking exhibit b and tie it down with the building block or the human anatomy approach in the second pass if I had to animate on something like keepo then I would resort to something like exhibit I which is actually really close to how the creator rad secrets boards I would advise trying them all or combining them to see what works for you now for my opinions on each of the approaches that I've showed let's talk about it exhibit a you know I found it great to begin with and learn animation with however it doesn't show mess no worries that stuff can be added much later on Exhibit B it's great for drawing and animating the human figure since it feels close to the skeletal figure drawing adds mass utilizes landmarks such as ribs and hips to describe human anatomy Exhibit C if exhibit a has training to emphasize the angles of hips and shoulders this is one that's great for having the mass on the torso and having expressive limbs this one makes animation a bit more easy and fun may be easy isn't the right word but I'd say accessible to many people Exhibit D I usually use this one because I like the mass on everything but not having to worry about anatomy and construction I would use this one if your giant sensibilities have loosened up and you're not overly sketchy and scratchy with your line work exhibit e loose and just don't drawing is a great one where you feel the movement of your drawings if you're okay with not having to worry about proportions on the first pass and know that that stuff can be fixed on later on then I would highly recommend this one this is something that I like to fall back to sometimes exhibit F good for training the human eye in building and moving building blocks around but I felt like it did take the fun away from animating wood Yesus in the second pass instead which means tie down or solidifying the drawing exhibit G you know I have the same sentiments as f and it requires strong craftsmanship maybe it's good for close-up or subtle acting but then again I would probably just use this pass on the second pass or the tie down pass exhibit H good for training the human eye to see negative space coming from me I would probably advise other shorthands for beginners but for anyone has a good eye for contour silhouettes and mass then yeah go for it exhibit I great for having more graphic shapes and just being bold and heavy I enjoyed this one than the previous one us for skill level that's hard for me to judge and remember these are just my opinions exhibit a BNC are good starters since it's simple enough to follow the animation fundamentals for more novice animators who have a grasp of their principles and mechanics and a bit of drawing exhibit D and E since it emphasizes more on the rhythm the feeling of the movement for a more technical approach so I would say this is more advanced here F and G but be careful this can stiffen up the animation aspect of your drawing and honestly I would probably not use this on a first pass if you're looking for more decisive and probably more graphic approaches agent i1 is elegant and the other one is bold but you also have to remember that even more advanced animators will fall back to more simpler approaches so even the short hands I found hard and difficult to comprehend it might be easier for you use the shorthand that you're most comfortable with and it gives you a Tata me when you do animate I would also recommend to do life drawing an observational sketches fast wants to get more looser and just to build that muscle memory on drawing study human anatomy what it's made out of and how it looks like and how it works animation mechanics how to do a walk or run a jump body action stuff with all your studies and with all your drawing practices and you may even come up with a shorthand of your own anyways that was my lecture on approaching full figure or full body animation and the many different approaches that you can do with it I hope you guys enjoyed this lecture and I'll see you guys soon interested in learning hand-drawn animation or learning how to finish an animated shot from beginning to end have a look at the store where you'll find the complete introduction to 2d animation video course tutorials and other resources learn classical animation approaches drawing lectures techniques and other process videos visit the store through the link in the description below

Channel: Toniko Pantoja

Views: 202,735

Keywords: Toniko Pantoja, Youtube, Animation, Tutorial, Advice, Lesson, Vlog, Adobe, Photoshop, Animate, Flash, After Effetcts, Premiere, Video, Film, Fullbody, fullfigure

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Length: 26min 24sec (1584 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 26 2020