How to Start Animating Your Characters : 4 Principles

[Music] animation is a complex subject especially character animation and if you've never tried it it can start to feel like you're trying to hit a moving target or rather drawing a moving target so today we're going to break down a few motion principles and how we use them to animate this cat and if you watch this video and actually try the things we show you you too can start learning how to animate because animation is fun easy and totally not a lot of work yeah let's cut out that last part yeah we can edit that part out [Music] if you like bam animation and enjoy all the cool fun art learning that we do here consider supporting us on patreon the link will be in the description below animation is overwhelming and most artists think that since they can already draw they could probably learn to animate fairly easily and while it is true that being able to draw helps it's a completely new skill set that takes time and practice most people vastly overestimate their abilities before they even draw the first frame and that's because they lack the understanding of movement principles because animation does not equal illustration animation equals movement this book says that there are 12 principles of animation but we are youtube idiots with a camera so we don't have time for that so instead we cut it down to just four easy ones to start with easing is a fancy word for acceleration consider that a car cannot abruptly go from zero to sixty instantly it's highly unnatural cars are heavy and they take time to speed up and so do all objects or characters in motion when an object takes time to speed up we call this an ease out and when it slows down to stop we call this an ease in movement that is eased correctly is more natural looking an object that is let go in mid-air eases out from its original height but it does not ease in when it hits the ground knowing when to use eases is key as well instead it maintains its original velocity and shoots back up and then it can ease again at the top as it loses momentum because the frame rate of animation is so constant the way that we achieve easing is by adjusting the spacing between each drawing so drawings close together make slow motion and drawings far apart make fast motion notice how the drawings at the top here are close together and then become further apart as the ball falls this is dynamic spacing and this is how you create acceleration or easing let's try a hand because we are learning to animate characters of course and move it from a to b but not like that with easing okay that's pretty good but it could be better let's add our second principle overshooting which is when an object goes past its final resting point only to then snap back into place this idea might seem overly cartoony but it can add so much life to your character's movements i'm going to adjust the final frames to go past for two frames then it will move back here and then go a little bit forward and then finally settle look at the difference now you can see how adding overshooting at the ends of your animation brings even more life i mean it's not possible unless you're a robot to come to a perfect stop so unless you're going for some crazy stiff warp in even just adding one frame of overshooting can do so much characters are organic things and they change shape as they move an animation should exaggerate that squashing stretch is a principle that emphasizes elasticity let's look at these two ball bounces on the right the ball is changing shape it looks so much more malleable and elastic because i changed these frames right here to make it either look squished or stretch this helps emphasize the movement it might not seem like this is something you should do to characters but a bit of squash and stretch can go a long way in conveying movement let's go back to our hand for a second and talk about anticipation right now the hand just sort of moves forward but what if there was a tiny little hesitation as if it was getting ready to move forward sort of like a wind-up for a pitch and let's do something more subtle i'm going to have the hand ease backwards first right here in these frames and then speed forward to its final position look at the difference so anticipation is not always natural in every movement but it is a lot nicer to look at and it makes the acting clear just like alan becker said anticipation helps communicate actions to the audience by preparing them for the next action so they won't miss it oh and i forgot to add in the part where we add squash and stretch to the hand so let me replace some of the middle frames which are kind of bland with a very stretchy smeared drawing of the hand to better convey this speed now let's compare the motion of the hand which uses none of the principles we talked about no easing no anticipation no overshooting no squash and stretch and let's look at the hand where i did everything notice the difference the main difference between bad animation and good animation is that bad animation doesn't move in interesting ways so we know good motion from bad motion but does that mean everyone who watches this youtube video can suddenly animate like a 90s disney animator well no because you have to train yourself through a series of learning exercises starting with a ball bounce okay i don't know if you heard me but do not attempt any form of animation until you've done a ball bounce i'm serious and it's harder than it looks guys most people get it wrong because they just open up their animation software make a ball move it down slowly and then back up and say here i've done it this looks terrible there is no gradual spacing at all instead place the top frames really close together and then gradually space them out so that we get dynamic acceleration then you can just copy and reverse the frames until you get your first ball bounce that is the basic ball bounce but you can make it interesting by adding a little squash and stretch here an impact frame here and if you can do this you'll be strong enough to tackle other assignments a pendulum a ball falling a hand grabbing a face turning and in time build up to a walk cycle learning to tackle simple movements will hone your eyes and prepare you for complex multi-layered character movements haven sent us this cat via email spam.redrawmyheart gmail.com and you can send us your drawings too but now we're gonna get him ready for animation this cat is a little bit 80s with the 3d glasses and the colorful shoes so i just wanted to push these characters proportions a little bit and use a lot of big round shapes it's a classic look that you see in mickey felix garfield and sonic round shapes are very appealing and it's easier to animate something with organic shapes rather than something that's super rigid now let's do a turnaround and give it to brent so that we can start animating when i'm animating a complex character like this i always start with a stick figure the biggest mistake new animators make is trying to draw a complete perfect drawing of the character and then try to make that really complex drawing move it's way easier to start with a very simple rough figure that has roughly the same proportions as your character when i was animating sarah lynn in the opening of bojack horseman that's professional animator mike rocco i was really struggling animating her running down this flight of stairs and after several attempts i realized wait a minute why don't i just animate a stick figure of her first as like a guide and then i could just animate the final rigged puppet over it i want him to do a bit of an 80s pop dance so i found this clip of michael jackson doing a spin point just like any other aspect of drawing it's important to have reference for your animation just in this case we're not referencing the images themselves but the movement i like this motion right here so i started with that then i added a few more actions and connected them with a few breakdown drawings adjusting the timeline as i went within a few hours i had this rough sticky looking cat even though it's rough this blueprint will be my guide for the rest of the animation to get your animation to loop properly move the beginning frames over to the end then you can work directly on the seam i don't usually rough things out with perfect overshooting and easing at first but once i get an animated stick figure going i can go back in and add better spacing so the motion eases correctly right here i can add some secondary bouncing to the ears by adjusting these few frames adding little touches like this is very easy at this stage in the animation [Music] as i was working i added more drawings until everything was eventually on twos on twos means that each drawing is held for two frames so instead of 24 drawings per second you only have to do 12. factually it is much easier to animate this and subjectively i think it makes faster motion look better in animation you don't really want to clean up the drawings in order because you can easily end up with a series of drawings that break down over time and end up moving in the wrong direction instead you want to establish a framework for your animation by clearly defining key poses that will act as load-bearing drawings to which the rest of your drawings will be attached to i chose the strongest and most defining poses and i want these to be the best drawings and i'll do them first the secret to animation is tracing the model sheet i know that people on the internet have told you that tracing is bad but in animation tracing is a very useful tool animators do something called trace and shift in order to get my key poses on model i would sometimes start by tracing certain elements of a character's turnaround and then shifting them over and adjusting them until they fit the new pose and so with the combination of tracing and referencing this is how i'm able to ensure that the volume stays consistent take a look at where we are now i have 15 rough key poses timed out and drawn on top of the stick figure animation now i can fill in some of the more important in between poses these are called breakdown poses and they help define the movement notice how i didn't just draw a breakdown pose directly in the center of the two key poses remember most motion has easing to it like for here instance the arm wouldn't just shoot out going at full speed it's going to do a slow out so the breakdown pose will be much closer to the starting position also remember anticipation well it's happening right here before he spins around see how his hand is going back and his foot is coming up he's winding up for the spin you don't always have to make every drawing from scratch sometimes you can reuse parts of the old drawings by copying those frames and then adjusting only the parts that move although i wouldn't recommend over using this once i have all my breakdowns i can go back in and do more incremental in between drawings to smooth out the motion with onion skinning turned on i can see where the forms are about to move and i can make a line in between them to build my drawing paying extremely close attention to how the forms are moving over time with onion skinning is how you can make your motion look smooth but you can also just flip which is just going back and forth between the keys studying the drawings in motion if the motion is starting to look choppy you can draw an arc guide on a separate layer to help you track specific details look at this hand it's moving a bit weird if we align it to the arc it's much smoother remember overshooting it's sort of happening in a few places right now right here on the ears but also on the feet when he slams his feet down i have them getting squashed for one frame and then popping up there were a few frames that were too fast for the motion to track properly so i added some stylistic smears to those frames smears are how we convey super fast blurry motion sort of like how fast things appear blurry on film a well-placed smear can also add a bit of squash and stretch your movement i tell you more rules about them but there really aren't any as long as your smear matches the motion arcs it will probably look great so you do you everything i've just showed you was the rough pass which i did on top of the stick figure animation now i actually have to go back and clean it up so that it will look clean and it will have color i wish there was something important i could tell you about cleaning animation but it's honestly just very tedious rough animation can be done fairly quickly and is forgiving but clean animation involves triple checking everything to make sure that nothing is out of place and all the drawings are moving together smoothly i did it in the same order as the rough pass key poses first then the breakdowns and then the in-betweens the main difference here is that i did it in layers the torso feet and arms are all drawn on separate layers so that if something passed behind the character i would be able to track it and make sure that the motion was smooth i can't emphasize how long this part actually took the cleanup was far longer than anything else and i worked on this animation in my free time for about a year and most of that was spent on the cleanup so one question that always pops up is do you have to color every frame of the animation and the answer is yes if you're animating traditionally you have to color each frame but the difficulty pales in comparison to actually drawing the animation i just paint bucket filled each shape while pressing next frame yes i had to go through every frame but it maybe took me like a day whereas the actual animation took me months and also you can build palettes in harmony so if you need to change one specific color you can do that here and then it will change for all the drawings at once there are some weird areas that you can't paint bucket fill because the lines don't connect so for that part i just set the paint brush to paint behind and then i painted underneath the line art and then you can just fill okay and now we just pay our composer for some custom music and all right we've got a dancing caddies 126 frames of traditional animation all made by hand yeah and you can see all those movement principles in practice we've got easing on all the motions we've got overshoot on the ears a few frames of some subtle squash and stretch and just a bit of anticipation but not as much anticipation as i feel when i'm waiting for that next bam video brent okay well let's be honest there is a pretty big jump between ball bounces and fully animated dancing cat uh we just showed you some beginner tips and where you can go with that but there's all this blank space this part in the middle that you have to fill in the part that we cannot teach it's the part where you have to go and practice your own animation it's not something that we can fit into a single video this channel is meant to be more of a jumping off point for you to go out and try new things but we do have other videos you can watch and a second channel which has got time lapses and stuff like that so make sure you hit that subscribe button down below if you want to be there for all of our future videos and if you want us to redraw your art send it to bam.redrawmyart gmail.com and make sure to join our discord community if you want to connect with other artists thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: BaM Animation

Views: 257,964

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Id: ynBENQJBQbE

Length: 16min 16sec (976 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 25 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/NinjaKnight92]

Thanks for posting. These guys are great!