Month: January 2024

Research notes

Lip Sync

A basic open mouth can make a lot of vowel sounds. Mainly “aw, ah, eh”… the shape of the mouth can be change depending on the emotion of the character. The “oh,ah,ooh” sounds cannot be a smile shape however. Even if the character is happy. For the “la, el ,th” sounds the tongue touches your teeth of the roof of your mouth. “Duh and Juh” sounds the mouth is open with only the teeth showings. Similarly the “ch” is teeth but more puckered and going forward and stretching out. For “F and V” sounds the top teeth will touch the lower lip. Lastly, a simple closed mouth is used for “P,B,M” sounds.

The above are the notes I got from Kuzillon on YouTube.

Body mechanics

If you don’t use Holds & Settings in animation this will lead to all the movements feeling really clunky and harsh. There should be a natural fall off to every move and also natural pauses in the action.

Strong spacing is basic, but, beginner animators will mess it up by not using the spacing. Spacing is how you create good weight, snap and fluidity in animation.

In animation you should always make sure when a character moves it feels like their entire body is connected. An arm will pull the torso. The body will move and everything else drags behind it. No body part will feel completely isolated.

As humans, we naturally move in arcs. This means we have a natural flow of an arc shape to the way we move our bodies.

When looking at animations you will never see each separate action or major key pose even if there is a hold. It never feels like it’s holding for too long or that the character has stopped completely. Each action flows into the next. Just as one pose holds settles for a moment the movement takes off somewhere else.

These are the notse I got from Rusty Animator on YouTube.

Conclusion

 

For this assignment I initially wanted to try more 3D animations but ended up deciding to stick with 2D animations for my final animations as I understand  how to do 2D better. I also find it easier to do and I feel I can get a better end result. I still find that my 3D animations are stiff and choppy. I struggle with the getting the animations to look smooth and I struggle to understand  how edit animations correctly in the graph editor. I always end up making the animation look worse. In the future I want to do more 3D animation and have a better understanding of how they work, so I intend to practice in my spare time. If I were to do this again, I would like to try to do more 3D animations.

I would also try to make the movement of the character flow more smoothly, I would do more research and spend more time practicing animations. I intend to use this as a learning experience. I will look back on my older animations to see how I can improve upon them and make sure I add more body mechanics to give life to my animation so they don’t look stiff and flow better with natural movements.

I found it easiest to do the basic movements in proceate and the secondary actions like hair clothes and even doing the mouth movements in Harmony. I am still trying to get to grasps with Harmony. I do find it much easier to use this time than in the past, so that is positive, and I was able to create one animation in my own art style that didn’t look adventure time inspired.

I am starting to like animating in Harmony much more over animating in procreate. This is mainly because  I can add in audio for lip sync or even just to make my animations more interesting and I find it easier to animate secondary actions on a separate layer. I like using a different brush for getting the rough animation which procreate allows you to do has it has a lot of different brushes to choose from. In the future I would like to try and see if I can import new brushes into Harmony to see if that will make doing the rough animation more enjoyable. I still need more practice using Harmony, especially when it comes to colouring my animations. I colour my animations by copy and pasting the line art layer onto a layer below, but If I find an animation error or what to change something in the animation I fine that the line art is easy enough to fix but the colour layer not so much as things get a little messy.

References

For this animation I animated the characters facial expression going from one expression to another. I also added a bit of a squash and stretch in the character head as she reacts. I would like to go back I do some further editing to this animation in my spare time and add some movement into the hair and also fix any errors I made.

This is a head turn animation practice. It’s not the best movement as was it is a bit stiff and doesn’t have as much character to it as I would like. She is also is not very expressive in her facial animation. In future animations,  I will make sure to work on facial expressions and movement. I do like the hair movement of the animation but the choppy face animation and lack of expression really bring this animation down over all, but as a test, it works.

This animation was done in proceate.

This is the lip sync animation we did in class. I think this turned out okay. Especially since I have only tried lip sync animation once ore twice beforehand on my own.

I did the body movement animations in procreate and then added the secondary actions and mouth movements in Harmony. Once I was happy, I did the line art and colours. I did each part of the animation one at a time so I didn’t confuse myself.

After feedback I made the first girl look back at the green girl to show she is talking to her.

If I was to redo this animation I would have the first two clips have slower movement as I think they move rather fast and then get much slower for the rest of the animation.

 

Audio clip from Rooster Teeth’s RWBY volume 3 chapter 2

Reference for lip sync

I had tried to do lip sync in the past, but I was doing it blind as procreate doesn’t have the option to import audio.

I think I now have a better understanding of how to do lip sync animations. Looking back on this old animation, I would now add more expressions to her face and also try to make her movement more smooth and less choppy, but I think it is good for my very first attempt as doing lip sync.

 

 

The animation above was done in class. It’s hard to tell at first, but because of the frame rate,  I think the character’s jump is too slow but the other movements look fine.

This was my original jump. Later on the jump got changed to a running jump so I had to change this. If I had more time I would like to have tide up this animation as I feel like I could have had a better result if I put more effort into it.

For practice I decided to follow this YouTube tutorial for a running jump animation.

After I did the tutorial I tried to do my own version. I originally wanted to do this jump in 3D but I could get the animation to look right especially the roll out of the jump so I decided to do my running jump in 2D.

The sketch animation was doing in procreate and cleaned up in Harmony.

This is my old version of the running jump but I didn’t like how it looked so I redid the line art.

I test did a 3D animation for a running jump but couldn’t get it to look right so I decided to do redo the running jump with a 2D animation which I think turned out much nicer.

For the running jump I decided to do a leap jump. After some feedback I added in a frame to help make her arm movement make more sense .

For this running jump animation I wanedt the jump to have character to it and not be a basic jump. I wanted to do a dance jump.

I ended up doing two dances jumps, a Calypso back leg bend and a centre leap.

I used this video from dancedeja on YouTube as reference for both of my 2D animations.

 

 

The animation above is one done in class. I think this looked good for a rough practice animation.

For this weight lift animation I decided to do an animation of someone picking up a cat. I liked how in the reference video the girl goes but down slightly to readjust her back arm to scoop up the cat, which I tried to get in my animation. After some feedback, I tried to make it more obvious that she’s is not struggling to pick up the cat.  I did this by adjust her shoulder movement rather than just changing her hand placement.

I did the sketch of the animation in procreate and imported the animation and did line art and colouring in Harmony.

After feedback, I made sure her dress movement and hair movement stop at different times at the end of the animation. Doing this really adds depth to an animation and makes it look more dynamic and more interesting  overall.

Weight lift

Running jump

Lip sync

 

Animation studies

Animation test

3D animations

 

These are two animation studies I did before I started this assessment.

These studies are taken from Marvels ‘The Ultimate Spider-man’ cartoons and ‘Avengers Earth’s Mightiest Heroes’ cartoon.

I used sync sketch to break down this animation so I could try and reanimate them for practice.

I was only able to do animation studies of jumps as I didn’t have the time to do a weight lift like I had hoped.