Many people are inspired by animation from favorite cartoon shows, movies, and games, but only a few have ventured into character animation as a career path. Character animation is not rocket science when you know the fundamentals and the operational principles of how it works. This book will help allay any fears of complexity you have about animation techniques and help you begin the journey of bringing your 3D characters to life.
Animation is a form of art and is mastered by practice. In other words, you’ll get better at it by repeatedly handling the tools and trying the techniques. For example, everyone has arms and legs, but not everyone can dance. What makes someone a great dancer is that they master the art of moving their body in a rhythmic pace, which is acquired by practicing over time.
In the early days of animation, when the animators at Disney were trying to create lifelike animations, they came up with The 12 Principles of Animation. These principles were developed by Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas, in their book, The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation. The book won several awards and serves as a base for anyone willing to learn animation.
This first chapter focuses on the core principles of animation, with examples. It explains why and how a principle makes a difference in an animation. Note that the principles are not mentioned in any particular order.
Let’s begin!
The Principles of Animation
This section looks at the principles of animation, with images, and explains how each principle can be applied in the further sections of this chapter.
Squash and Stretch
The first principle we discuss is the squash and stretch principle. A classic example is a ball-bouncing animation. Take the time to analyze Figures 1-1 through 1-3. The images are also available in your contents folder for each chapter that can be downloaded from the github location provided in the Introduction part of the book.
No squash and stretch applied to the animation of a ball
Squash and stretch applied to the animation of a ball
Squash and stretch applied to a cartoon character
(a): The character is standing idle before the jump. This is the idle phase, before any form of squash is applied to prepare for a jump. By the same token, (i) shows the idle phase after recovering from the jump.
(b): This is the phase when the character goes into a sit-up pose and squashes itself to gain momentum for the leap. This is the first squash for the jump cycle, while (h) shows the phase where the character squashes itself to soften the landing.
(c): During this phase, the character begins to release itself from the squash pose and gain momentum for the jump. At phase (g), the character prepares itself for the squash landing.
(d): During this phase, the character stretches itself to gain maximum momentum to attain the desired height. Phase (f) is where the character begins stretching itself to align its legs and body to the landing spot.
(e): During this phase, the character has reached the peak zone, also known as the transition zone, which is from the jump to land phase. The character has reached the desired/anticipated jump height.
Other examples of squashing are when a character shows surprise, disappointment, or a freaking out moment. This technique is often seen in cartoons, such as in the Tom and Jerry cartoon, when you see Jerry surprised by Tom. He freaks out and elongates before he makes a run for his life. The same technique can be seen with the Roadrunner cartoon, where the coyote squashes after falling down the cliff.
Key principles to keep in mind when using squash and stretch for animation is to maintain the volume of the animated object and keep the duration of the squash/stretch short, often within a span of a few frames.
Squash and stretch can be used in conjunction with other animation principles, such as anticipation and follow-through, which are explained in the upcoming sections.
Note
The amount of squash and stretch should be used wisely, depending on the animation type. For example, the squash and stretch can be more evidently seen or overdone in cartoon animations but should be very subtle in lifelike animations.
Anticipation
Anticipation and action
Anticipation is often used to direct the viewer’s attention toward an imminent animation and convey the intensity of the shot before the action happens.
A boxer punching: A character punching someone is a typical example, with the punch being the action and the arms pulling back/winding up to show how intense the punch is going to be. In this case, it allows the viewer to anticipate of the force of the punch.
Wood chopping: In this case, the animation is chopping wood, but when the woodcutter swings his axe, he draws the axe back above his head and slams it down on the piece of wood. How much he pulls the axe back determines the attack speed, which is our anticipated motion here.
Throwing a ball: We have all done this at some point while playing with a kid or a friend. The intensity of the throw is based on how much you pull your arm back. The pull-back here is the anticipated motion.
Note
To preserve realism, try to follow human movements based on joint rotations and limitations when animating a character. In real life, people cannot twist their bodies like rope to unwind and punch someone, as is often seen in cartoons. Anticipation, when it’s overdone, is called exaggeration. Refer to the exaggeration examples to get a better idea of that technique.
Exaggeration
A boxer punching: Exaggeration can be shown by having the character wind up more than once around his body, which is unnatural for the human body.
Wood chopping: In order to exaggerate this action, we can have our woodcutter bend too much backward as he pulls back the axe and jump in the air as the axe chops the wood.
- Throwing a ball: Exaggeration can be shown by elongating arms and legs to gain momentum and force. This is often seen in cartoon animations. Another typical example seen in cartoons is a character running in place for a second and two and then moving off at incredible speeds (often a puff of smoke is shown).
Figure 1-5Exaggeration of action
Exaggeration can also be done by adding more assets/props and giving the character more appeal to suit the need. For example, if you want to show your character as a sad/depressed person, you could just show this by the way he dresses and his facial expression, but it can be exaggerated by adding elements/props that showcase his current state. We will explore this further when we introduce the principle of staging and appeal.
Note
In real life, a person cannot twist his body like a rope to unwind and punch someone, as is often seen in cartoons. Anticipation, when overdone, is called exaggeration.
Follow-Through Animation and Overlapping Action
Follow-through and overlapping actions are based on real-world physics and emulate real-world motion. Let’s consider an example of moving in a bus. Our bodies move along within the bus, but when the bus makes a sudden stop, our bodies continue to move forward or are dragged forward due to what is called inertia. They take a moment to stop. This is an example of follow-through.
Follow-through animation principle
Note that the character doesn’t stop once he releases the ball. The momentum developed while throwing has to decelerate before the character can stop his movement. This follow-up animation is depicted in the third image. This kind of dynamic movement happens all the time in real life. Try to throw a ball or an object and observe how your motion does not stop immediately once the object leaves your hand.
Overlapping animation principle
Notice that the character’s right arm is punching while the left arm is moving back as the punch progresses. This is a typical example of overlapping action. To summarize, overlapping action is action that happens simultaneous to the main action, whereas follow-through is action that happens after the main action. It is important and necessary to use these techniques in animation.
Secondary Action
Secondary action is often related to follow-through and overlapping action; the only difference being that secondary action carries more dynamic realism. It is a logical follow-up to some previous action that set the mood or added complexity to the situation. Let’s look at an example.
Option 1: We can have the character check his watch repeatedly to show a sense of urgency. Just by adding this simple gesture of looking at his watch over and over, we achieve a sense of impatience and maybe lateness.
Option 2: We can have the character take out a newspaper and read it by flipping pages repeatedly until the bus arrives. This changes the mood of the shot completely. Now our character seems to enjoy waiting for the bus.
Secondary action used to alter the mood
Arc
Waving goodbye: Your arm waves around your elbow joint in an arc fashion.
Slamming your fist on a table: Your arms arc to hit the table with your fist.
Nodding yes or no: Your head arcs left to right to say no and up and down to say yes from your neck.
- Walking animation:
Your arms swing in the form of an arch back and forth.
Your body sways left and right to compensate and balance as you walk.
Arcs
Appeal
Facial expression and body language
Clothes they are wearing
The space they live in
Appeal
Timing and Spacing
Timing and spacing are critical for achieving the expected animation effect. If these are off, you will not get the result you desire. We will be going over the tools to use in Chapter 2, but for now let’s look at the basics.
Animation is derived from the interpolation of keyframes. Keyframes are containers/holders that stores an object’s position/rotation and scale in the timeline. Note that they are not limited to these properties only, many more can be stored. Interpolation is the process where the software calculates the current position/rotation/scale of an object based on the immediate before and after keyframe. In order to create an animation, you need at least two keyframes. Let’s consider a scenario of a ball animation.
Case 1: Ball A starts at frame 0 and reaches destination B at frame 100. If you play it back, you will notice that the ball takes four seconds to reach the destination.
Case 2: Let’s alter the ball’s position so that it reaches destination B at frame 50. Now the ball will reach its destination in two seconds.
- A quick formula to calculate:
Time = Total frames/frames per sec
Timing
We will look at this with a practical exercise about the Track Editor in Chapter 2.
Case 1: Ball A starts at 0 and reaches B (which is midway) at frame 50 and its destination C at frame 100. The result is the same as in case 1 of the timing example.
Case 2: Ball A starts at 0 and reaches B at frame 20 and its destination C at frame 100. In this result, the ball accelerates to B quickly and slows down on its way to C.
Case 3: Ball A starts at 0 and reaches B at frame 80 and its destination C at frame 100.
Spacing
If you analyze all the cases, in case 1, the ball goes at a steady speed all the way. In case 2, the ball speeds up to B and then slows down to C. In case 3, the ball is very slow to reach B, but gains speed to reach C. The middle keyframe controls the variations in animation. We will work more on this as an exercise in Chapter 2.
Note
We altered the speed of the ball by using an in-between keyframe to determine the position of the ball in cases 1, 2, and 3.
Slow In and Slow Out
This topic assumes that you know and have ridden a vehicle. It doesn’t matter what sort, any vehicle that moves. So when you begin driving a vehicle, it picks up at ever-increasing speed until you reach the desired constant speed. This is called acceleration and it is reproduced between two keyframes by applying a non-linear interpolation function, also more generally called easing of keyframes . This can also be done by using in-between keyframes that we used in the spacing example or by using graph editor controls. Slow in and slow out are related to acceleration and deceleration as well.
We will focus on and discuss this in depth when we get into Chapter 2 and discuss the Track Editor.
Straight Ahead and Pose to Pose
Straight ahead and pose to pose are two different forms of animation techniques that we can employ to animate a character.
Straight ahead animation is when you animate in a linear way along the timeline and move ahead. At frame 1 you set a position, move to frame 5, do the changes, and then move to frame 10, and so on and so forth.
Pose to pose animation is when you draw the first frame and move ahead in the timeline to animate another frame, then draw in-between frames to fill the required animation between these two frames. This is better illustrated when we begin using the software. I’ll hold on to this one until Chapter 2.
Staging
Staging is a mix of many techniques, such as timing, spacing, composition, and framing, rather than just animation. Without proper staging, your animations aren’t going to be effective.
One point to keep in mind in relation to animation is to not have too many actions happening at the same time. Take the time to research composition and framing techniques as applied to photography or cinematography. You are going to be framing and animating a virtual camera that has controls and emulates real-world cameras.
I have omitted solid drawing for the sole reason that it applies to 2D animation and not 3D. Again, I would like to reiterate that these principles are not ordered in any fashion. With all these principles revisited, we’ve had enough of the theoretical. Let’s get into the software and bring things to life!
Summary
Let’s summarize what we have learned so far. We learned about the principles of animation, with examples in a theoretical manner. These serve as a foundation and are must-knows for anyone who is venturing into animation. We will be applying these principles in the upcoming exercises using 3ds Max animation tools.
In the next chapter, you learn about keyframing tools and techniques. You will also learn how to use the Curve Editor, the Dope Editor, and the graph controls to refine your animations. As an animator, you will be spending much of your time here, so it is imperative that you become familiarized with them before going in depth with other techniques.