Get Better At Animation QUICKLY With This Exercise

hey everyone let's improve our animation by understanding some basic fundamentals and going through a simple exercise that you can do today this video is in partnership with acer's concept d a new line for creator pcs concept d has been a great sponsor and to cap it off we are giving away not one but two concept d3 easel laptops winners are by random draw and entering is super easy check the pinned comment for details alright let's get right into this animation lesson and talk about drawing i want to take a look at some rough animation of the beast by one of my favorite animators glenn keane you can't stay in there forever yes i can fine and go ahead and start if she doesn't eat with me then she doesn't eat at all man that is beautiful but the first observation is there's a lot of drawings that make up this piece but a good animator is not thinking about doing a lot of drawings as much as they are thinking about showing energy where it's coming from and where it's going let's take a look at this piece again you can't stay in there forever beast is conducting himself aggressively and it's not just the voice that does it the entire body is contributing energy by the time he's here saying starve the beast has expelled a great amount of energy okay quick example if i want to say punch my hand and i'm starting here i'm not just going to go like this no i'm going to start here and i'm going to go up and then come down i'm going to put some heft into it if i want to make a point now when i go up this way i've created all this tension in my arm and shoulder this thing feels spring-loaded right now i am ready to bring this down the other way and of course when i do that i also have gravity at my disposal to help me further make my point so the beast is balanced here in this pose he could just stand there and say the line but of course he wants to project himself this way because that's where bell is to do that he has to generate energy so he starts going up up up spring-loading his entire body now here at the extreme there is a big time energy imbalance just like when my arm was like this the beast wants to move from this position he's loaded that energy has got to go somewhere animators call this state anticipation and when he does move he leads with his head which makes sense storytelling wise because he is screaming now when studying drawing for animation i find it really helpful to isolate the energy extremes between anticipation and payoff this is the height of his anticipation here you know where he's built up all that energy when you're drawing frames for animation it really helps to get up and feel these poses for yourself like when i'm up like this i feel all this tension in my neck and shoulders you know i want to release it this is why animators tend to shoot a lot of reference you want to experience for yourself how that energy is being transferred so you see right now as i'm drawing the beast look at how my hand is moving i'm kind of rehearsing the gesture this is another way to try and get that physical experience happening in my body you know trying to feel it by proxy it may sound hokey but it's quite a useful tool i find that if i can feel it there's often a kind of truthfulness that my drawing also inherits you don't even have to use the same character model here i'm trying to find that same pose but on a generic human character think of these studies as quick thumbnails once you can feel that pose you can move on i'm going to try the other extreme pose now where the beast has released that energy and his body is in full extension and again i'm trying to feel that extension with my hand doing these rehearsal strokes before actually continuing to draw the gesture that concept d screen is nice to draw on it's got a good amount of resistance and the stylus is responsive with no lag so with that study done i'll try it again on the simple character i should be able to capture that same energy and remember i'm only looking at the quality of energy here not necessarily the quality of drawing that'll come later for now if i can feel it i can move on alright so our animation exercise today begins with reference here's what i shot yes let's watch that again yes it's a small action but there's kind of a mini story to it it's like the character is engaged this way then something bothers him over here and he makes a big show about addressing it so while it's very short it has both action and character at first blush it might look too easy but there's quite a bit going on here for example there are two separate arcs to track let's put a dot on my chin to track the motion of the head okay let's rewind and fade out the footage so we can really pay attention to the trajectory of that dot it has a graceful arc to it which is characteristic of the way living things move the other arc we have to track is my hand let's put a dot on that we have a similar arc although this one's much wider so that's two arcs i'll lay them over each other here but there's more complexity let's look at the apex points of each arc and see when they get touched the chin hits it there but the hand doesn't hit it until several frames later and then they actually catch up with each other and land at a similar time so in this one innocent action there's a lot of mechanics to have to think about so now let's bring back the idea of energy just like i did with the beast isolating the extremes of the energy transfer i'm doing that here with my reference i picked out three main poses where the energy is in kind of three different states and i'm just thumbnailing them out getting a feel for them i'm also roughly translating them into the character design that i'll actually end up using it's my intern character which you'll remember if you've seen some of my other videos anyway this pose here is really interesting to me it's the one that mirrors this pose from the beast it's not as dramatic as that pose but functionally it's the same the body has done the work to bring that head up loading it with potential energy to come back down my first thumbnail there didn't quite hit the right distribution of weight so i'm trying it again this one feels better to me feels more in motion i went back to the first pose to see if i could add more energy to it but i don't like this because it feels too in motion when it should be at rest and of course here's that final payoff energy release pose which i quite like from the reference i'll probably use most of it i like the way the body is leaning contrasting the initial pose and i also like how the foreshortening on the arm and hand has added a bit of depth to the shot i'm trying another option here but no i had another idea for altering this pose but now the head and the hand are too much in parallel so i won't go with this one either alright let's move on and talk about spacing and timing i shot this raw material of my fist moving forward in a very mechanical kind of way you would not call this a punch though for two reasons there are too many frames so the action is too slow and the spacing between frames is too even so i'm gonna re-space and re-time this by pulling specific frames i'll be taking the frames you see outlined in purple and what i'm mapping out here is a pretty common type of movement one that has a slow in and a slow out so the fist accelerates reaches top speed and then decelerates to a stop now this looks better than my raw reference but it still doesn't quite come off as a punch so i'm going to re-space this i'll still use a slow in but then i'll emphasize the acceleration and also reduce the deceleration all right this one has more of a punch to it and all the frames are still on twos here which goes to show how much spacing impacts timing alright let's try one more and watch this a bit of a slow in then i'll skip all the way to the end of the punch and my slow out will actually come backwards here's this one now that's a punch that'll knock you out i did one special thing with the frame exposure on this the full extension of the punch this frame here is held on screen for three frames before coming back i really like this exercise because you don't have to draw anything yet you can still practice and learn about an important animation fundamental okay let's dive in and actually animate this now the animation software you use at least for this project doesn't matter the nice thing about animation is there really isn't a huge barrier to entry technology-wise you could break out a post-it notepad and a pen if you wanted to i'm using photoshop here with the help of a little plugin called animdestin2 which gives you a perfectly functional animation timeline in photoshop so i'm just working out my first key here this is frame one i'm using a light blue color to draw with which encourages me to stay rough and loose and gestural and i can go over it later with a darker line to tie things down the anim destin toolbar is at the bottom there and i'm just creating a new frame and turning on the onion skin again this is basic functionality for any animation software i'm working now on the main anticipation pose you know getting that energy up right where it needs to be to come back down you can see i drew the arc of the chin just sketch that right in there also thanks to our reference study i know where the hand should be on its arc at this frame of course when you animate you need to flip frames a lot don't just rely on your onion skin you have to watch the movement happening and see those volumes moving in space on that note i need more frames here to truly tell if this is working or not so i've made a new frame and now i'm drawing my end pose this being digital of course i can make a selection move the drawing around that head is a bit too high so let's move it down i'm trying to finish out these drawings just enough so i can track the arcs i'm also tracking the basic volumes you know making sure they stay the same volume as they move around by the way the concept d is touch screen so i can draw with the stylus and flip frames with my finger and when i am drawing the palm rejection is excellent and i am kind of heavy on my palm but i've never had a single issue anyway the frame i'm drawing now is the peak of the hand's arc notice how i'm rehearsing the arc with my stylus here much like how i rehearsed the gestures before i'm sure you've concluded this already but animation takes a lot of planning and while your drawings can be rough after all this is rough animation we're doing here the drawings do have to be precise and again you monitor that with lots of flipping this pose here is something we haven't looked at yet it's another anticipation in fact it's the anticipation to the anticipation it's a smaller move because it's a smaller energy buildup but the same principles apply so now i can see these arcs from beginning to end i've got energy buildups and payoffs this is enough to start evaluating your progress i don't have timing or spacing yet though just the energy stuff okay so i've skipped ahead a little bit in the process i've drawn six or seven more frames here and now i am starting to implement spacing i'm deciding on the spacing based on the principles we learned in the punch example so these dots will kind of give you an idea for the spacing i'm pulling from the reference so for the head we basically have two sets of slow in and slow out that way when the head is here the tight spacing is almost like a roller coaster going over that initial hill you know with a bit of lag time before it plummets down now the hand plummets down quicker than the head i was initially thinking about hitting that bottom extreme then bouncing back just like we saw with the third punch example but then i thought it doesn't need that much impact maybe a hair less so there's the extreme then i'll have a tiny cushion a slow out here before the hand will come back up which i haven't drawn yet that should give it a nice impact without it feeling like an assault now remember this is a rough animation exercise not every frame needs to be fully fleshed out glenn keane puts a lot of work into his key drawings such as this one here but you don't need entire drawings just to deliver movement information so many of these frames are half drawn and of course the parts that are drawn are communicating the most important aspects of the movement for example here i imagine it was important to glenn to make this shape very clear and he'll just trust the brain to fill in the rest in my process i start putting dark lines over the blue in areas that i feel are very important so here for example the shape of the hand as it starts moving up alright so i want something in between these two drawings so i've set up my onion skin and i start with something obvious the nose for example then i'll hint at where other lines might land but without committing to any volumes just yet so this barely qualifies as a drawing but i can use it to check the arcs i'll now flesh out the volumes without the onion skin and i'll evaluate the animation instead by flipping so at this point i've got the energy i've got the arcs i've got the spacing i'm figuring out the timing now by adjusting the frame exposures on the timeline digital tools of course make this easy to iterate add a frame here subtract a frame there push play see how it feels and don't worry if you have to hold a drawing on screen for four or five frames remember this is a rough animation exercise it's not a totally finished shot some things might not look right of course like for me the way the hand bounces and settles at the end i found myself redrawing a bunch of those frames so after about three or four hours of total work here is my animation yes yes i hope you'll give this a try yourself it's lots of fun and hey if you want to win a concept d3 easel you can enter the draw over at my instagram or on my twitter thanks to my patrons as always and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Marco Bucci

Views: 718,796

Keywords: marco bucci art tutorial, how to animate, smooth animation, 2D animation tutorial, 3D animation tutorial, how to draw, art hacks, realistic animation tutorial, character design, OC character, disney animation, 2D animation software, blender animation tutorial, how to move characters, draw hands, quick sketch drawing, draw 3D, realism art lesson, cartoon art tutorial, principles of animation, arcane animation, stylized animation, hand drawn animation, best tablet for art

Id: xNQUGUFtmpU

Length: 13min 40sec (820 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 25 2022