How to Animate SMOOTHLY - 5 Steps

hey guys it's sebastian here from nobel frugal studio today i'm going to teach you how to make your animations flow more naturally [Music] in order to get the most out of this tutorial you're going to want to be familiar with the 12 principles of animation and you're going to want to know how to use animation software the program that i'm using is called open tunes i use it because it's completely full featured and best of all it's free you can use whatever software you like as long as you have the ability to draw on frames and retime and reorder them so i want to clear something up about smooth animation and natural fluid flowy good looking animation many people use the term smooth when referring to high quality animation that has a nice flow to it but i think this term can be a bit misleading because it gives the illusion that the smoothness or the amount of in-betweens that an animation has is what makes it look so good in actuality though what makes an animation look really good or move with flow is the fluidity of the animation which encompasses the arcs the movement is following the use of ease in and ease out and the spacing of the drawings in a sequence i like to use the term fluid because when you think of a fluid or a liquid you already picture a waving motion which just arcs put together i also picture easing in and easing out like when the ocean comes up to meet the shore on the beach it eases out to the shore and it eases back into the rest of the body of water therefore how smooth an animation is really doesn't lend as much to the quality as you may think your animation can be smooth with tons of in-betweens and easing in and easing out but if it doesn't have flow or doesn't follow a natural arc it's not going to look good so with that out of the way let's take a look at the components of a good animation that will lend to a very appealing result number one is strong key frames or strong key poses number two is extreme poses number three is adding breakdown poses or passing poses number four is spacing out your drawings well on the timeline and finally number five is well planned in betweens which is where you introduce easing in and easing out before we get started i want to mention that this tutorial is going to focus on character animation when it comes to animating things like water and fire these principles discussed here can still apply but in a different way that may be hard to understand at first for those types of movements there may be other techniques that can work better for you know more free-forming straight ahead animation sort of things okay the first component we need is strong key poses and don't just draw whatever comes to your mind when it comes to making your key frames or your key poses these essential drawings are what tell the audience what is happening in an animation for example the animation that i'm going to be making today is my character kimi reacting to a shocking situation to convey this to the audience in its simplest form we have kimi's neutral pose and then her shocked pose these two drawings are the most important ones of the entire sequence therefore they have to be drawn well they have to be on model they have to be interesting and they have to tell a story [Music] okay here are our key poses as you can see i infused some natural arcs within them so this is sort of an arc like this in that pose and then also this one switches into like a counter pose and introduce the introduces the opposite arc that'll add a dynamic feel to our animation that i think is definitely needed for subtle motions like this one alright so i just did some corrections on our key poses now we can move on to the next step which is our extremes extremes are the poses that come right before a change in movement or a change of motion they're best understood as the main poses of our animation but aren't the key poses the main poses of an animation yes which means that your key poses can be extremes the difference is that key poses are the drawings that tell our story extremes are the main poses of the motion itself in short keyframes can be extremes but extremes don't have to be keyframes because they may not be relevant to the story for example if we have a character running from right to left then all we need is two keyframes to convey to the audience what's happening however our extremes would be each time the runner's foot contacts the ground since the legs will be then changing direction and starting a new motion basically lifting off again the extremes we're going to be using for this animation are an anticipation and then an overshoot if you know the 12 principles of animation then you'll probably be familiar with anticipation basically it's that most actions start in the opposite direction to wind up or gain the momentum needed in order to travel in the intended direction this is best explained with a jumping motion no one jumps by just lifting off the ground they bend down first anticipating the jump and then they spring up into the air with the energy they gained overshoot is the same thing on the opposite end of the motion the motion will go further than intended and then settle into its final pose after this would be like our jumper landing and then standing up again [Music] do [Music] [Music] so here are my extremes first we have kimi's confident pose so she goes down i wanted her to go down on this anticipation because she's moving upwards in the opposite direction so i used a down pose so she can wind up that energy to go upwards then we have this pose and right before this pose is the overshoot so we have her sort of really sort of worried and then settling into sort of confused and in disbelief so we have the key frame winding up energy overshoot and then keyframe two we have a extreme extreme b and already like if they play this animation like just kind of scroll through it it already looks really good like we already have a very dynamic animation and what you'll notice is that while i was drawing i wasn't using a lot of onion skin instead i was flipping back in between my extreme the pose i wanted to be the extreme and the kipos and this allowed me because if i just did this with both onion skin on i could draw and i can make an extreme i could sort of overshoot that pose but flipping back in between allow i think it allows you to create the movement more naturally i learned the flipping in between your drawings from a youtuber named tonico pantoja he advised that people instead of using onion skin all the time and actually instead of relying on onion skin that you flip between your drawings so i tried that here and i gotta say definitely worked i didn't really know how it's going how i was going to attack these extremes and so far they look really really good now we can move on to breakdowns and breakdowns tell us how the motion got from point a to point b they're the middle pose between two key frames or extremes in our example they're going to be between two extremes the down pose and that pose breakdowns are really really important because they tell us what happens during the transition from point a to point b so we're putting our breakdown between the extremes before a and b so we can call this a this is the a pose this and this is b right extremes will be a one i'll put a little pow effect called because they're extremes they're they're extreme and this will be b1 what happens during the transition between a1 and b1 does the head turn to the left does it turn to the right or is it exactly in the middle between a1 and b1 something like this does it favor the first extreme say it's closer to a1 than it is to b1 that's the is the middle position closer to a1 like something like this and lastly does it favor b1 does it favor this extreme over here is it closer to that one does it look more like it this is purposefully not putting it in the middle to achieve a certain effect breakdowns are also where we introduce the arc of our animation so we have kimmy going down and then going back up i plan to make my breakdown cause an arc going this direction so somewhere around here we're probably going to end up putting it in the exact middle so flipping in between these drawings you can kind of see the arc laid out so kind of like round like this you definitely see it with the eyes to keep the in-betweening simple we should probably just make it right in the middle basically what you want to do when you're making a breakdown is maintain that arc so if we take this corner of kinney's face right here we want to track it so we have it's here then the breakdown and then here so it makes an arc formation kind of like that we want to make sure we maintain arcs on each of our features too so our eye will probably will probably be drawn somewhere around here so we can maintain the arc between all three drawings we also want to make sure that we maintain the same amount of volume when we do this i think that's one of the problems about using onion skin is that sometimes you don't get all the the the same amount of volume in a drawing so we have a nice arc going i think with the top of this shape so her shape is sort of like a cylinder like this and then i add the sides after and that's really important when you're animating your characters to break them down into primitives like that right now i have kimi she sort of just cylinder and she has the same sort of inverted thing for her body then her head's kind of like this and she has big old eyes like that um definitely important to break down your characters like that so it makes them easy to animate [Music] yeah i'm going to restart on this breakdown i think i need to make it a better middle position so we're going to use no onion skin this time i think using that kind of sabotaged me a little bit and so i just put little dots to trace my arcs and that's definitely working i do want a middle position so let's do that let's see i think putting the dots really helps because it helps you to see the arc and it helps you kind of see where the in between would be so let's do the same for the top corners of the head i don't think i definitely think that's better than last time um yeah i don't recommend using onion skin on there in order to maintain your arcs it's better if you just flip between your drawings if you guys like drawing demos like this one then definitely let me know because i'm already having a lot of fun making it and i would love to make more if you guys enjoy it also for your anticipation and overshoot i forgot to mention this during the extremes um if your character is more cartoony don't be afraid to add some squash and stretch like we could easily squash kimi's head into something like this make this really exaggerated but i don't really want this to have that cartoony effect we can do the same here we can just just stretch it a ton like that something like that um i don't want this to have that effect so but you can do that if you want if you have like a more cartoony character then i recommend doing that i don't know if i do it a lot in pi probably just um subtly because castle arc is a cartoon but it's not like super cartoony if you know what i mean [Music] i kind of want these arms to spring up to this extreme so i'm gonna have them lag behind just to add some weight to the animation see so the hand goes from down here to up there so i can want this sort of arc motion i'm gonna have them drag behind just a little bit so it's not gonna be a middle position it's gonna it's gonna drag [Music] all right so as you can see we got a really nice arc going with the hand it kind of swoops up it's kind of delayed it's not really in the middle it kind of swoops up and then tucks here but we want to just make sure that we're maintaining arcs so parts of the body move before others usually for arm movements for our movements at least your elbow is moving first so as you can see the elbow is kind of leading the arm back into this pocket and we can even do some more of that when we do the in-betweening so watching it now that looks really really good with just our keys our extremes and our breakdown adding in-betweens is just going to give the animation the rest it's going to give it all that it needs we already have the arcs figured out we already have our breakdown all we need to do now is time our animation and then add our slow in and slow out via in betweens i hope you guys enjoyed this first part of how to make fluid animation next week i'm going to post the second part which goes over how to time and in between your animation so you can achieve a very natural and appealing result if you like these types of videos don't forget to leave me a like that'll help this video get out to more people and also leave a comment you can also check out my patreon page where i posted another animation breakdown exclusive to the hog tier overall this project has produced the best tutorials i've ever made on this channel so stay tuned for part two and i'll see you guys next time peace special thanks to omar for supporting this channel on patreon if you want to see sneak peeks in the latest news about my upcoming short film castle dark you can gain access to all patreon exclusives behind the scenes posts for just one dollar a month all you gotta do is follow the on-screen link to my patreon page thank you in advance

Channel: NobleFrugal Studio

Views: 120,933

Keywords: Noble frugal Studio, smooth animation, how to make smooth animations, fluid animation, how to animate, how to, flow, animate, smooth, natural, fluid, how to make natural animation, how to make fluid animation, how to animate smoothly, how to animate smooth movement, keyframe, breakdowns in animation, extremes in animation, 2d animation tutorial, 2d animation, smooth 2d animation, fluid 2d animation, animation explained, how to improve your animation, how to make smooth 2d animation

Id: TxC0H3FINqg

Length: 16min 46sec (1006 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 13 2020