DYNAMICS - MASTERPOST

ALL SESSIONS

PENDULUM SWINGS

BOUNCING BALL

SECONDARY ACTION

WALK CYCLE

ITERATION

ANTICIPATION AND FOLLOW THROUGH (JUMPS)

DYNAMIC EXERCISE INTRODUCTION

DYNAMIC EXERCISE TESTING & TIMING

FINISHED DYNAMIC EXERCISE

DYNAMIC EXERCISE - FINAL ANIMATION

The Dynamic Exercise is done!

Last time (see this post), I had finished timing the exercise and started working on my inbetweens to make the animation run completely smoothly without any need for held frames or awkward timings.

The inbetweens were definitely the most labour-heavy section of this task. I had more inbetweens to do than keyframes (to be expected), but they took a lot longer than originally anticipated. At times I had to check my sheets of references and timings to make sure I wasn't doing too much, only to find out I had only just hit the halfway mark between to keyframes.

But once the inbetweens were done, I immediately went to linetest. And it came out really well! I tinkered a little bit with some held frames, but it just didn't work. With each frame being hand drawn over and over, it created a, for lack of a better term, sizzle. The lines were a little jaggedy, and it gave off a style I really liked. But when frames were held, it stuck out because the sizzle wasn't there. Because I wanted the animation to look good visually and stay consistent, I opted out of holding frames.

As mentioned in my previous post, I was thinking of changing the framerate from 24fps to 12fps. I did eventually go with that, since 24fps made everything so quick that it was difficult to read what was happening onscreen. But when I changed to 12fps, the animation ran incredibly smooth, and made it more obvious what was going on!

So here's the final animation!

I would change a couple of things for sure, if given the right amount of time. I would clean it up a lot more, going over with an ink pen to bolden the lines. The net also has a little bit of a fluctuation to it, where the right side goes in and out a little bit. It's only really noticeable if you're only focusing on the net, but if my animation was successful, then the net shouldn't be the focus point. But overall, very happy with this animation! It achieved the look and feel I was looking for. It blends my cartoony, more self taught art style with professional taught techniques, and I think they work very well together!

DYNAMIC EXERCISE - TESTING AND TIMING

In this post, I'm going to go step by step from the beginning of animation to ending of testing.

Firstly, I created my keyframes. Where others may prefer straight ahead animating, I prefer getting my main actions in first, and then building everything around it. I ended up with 12 keyframes, all of which were the extreme ends of other actions. The first few keyframes are where the most variety is held, with actions being quite grand and obvious. The middle of the animation has keyframes that only really apply to the head being thrown, since the body remains mostly, if not completely static. In the end, there's a little bit more body animation for when it slouches to the floor.

I used the tennis ball video as a reference for when the head hits the wall, but not for the direction it takes after impact. While the physics are the same for both, I wanted the head to be slightly heavier, but heavy enough so that it'd course straight down instead of veering up after crashing into the wall. 

I then line tested all 12 keyframes, leading to a half a second animation. This was to be expected; the inbetweens hadn't been drawn yet, so I had to work out how many to do and actually make them before calling the animation "finished". Retiming the keyframes in DragonFrame was simple enough, just right clicking each frame and letting it hold for a number more frames.

Once I had the timings down, I wrote down how many inbetweens were between each keyframe, and started to work on them.

In the end, my timing test ran like this:

While I was happy at the time, I may end up changing the framerate in the end, so that it's not super quick like this.