For this assignment I wanted to try and improve my 2D animation skills so I decided to do these 3 short animations in 2D rather than 3D. I found this to be quite difficult but overall I am happy with the work I managed to achieve. I used clip studio paint to animate these 3 pieces as I had some very basic experience with using that program for animation beforehand.
The first piece I started work on was the run cycle. I started working on this by looking online at clear videos of people running and at other running animations. I took note of the key poses and began to sketch out a rough layer of just those poses. Once I was finished this, I went back over all the frames and made slight adjustments to make the proportions of each drawing match the previous more accurately. At this point I had one step complete however I still needed to do the next step to make the animation loop properly. I was having difficulty keeping in mind what leg was meant to be in front or behind and which one was visible when they passed each other. To deal with this issue I decided to just make this layer a silhouette and focus on the finer details on the cleaner line art layer. I filled in the in between poses of this layer and then moved onto the next part.
Once I had this finished I moved onto the final layer. My goal here was just to make a much clearer less sketchy layer and make any final adjustments. I also had to keep in mind what position I needed to draw the legs in but I found this part much easier now since I was not also worrying about poses and timing and in betweens. I also put some light shadows on the characters left arm and leg to more clearly demonstrate the fact they are further away and also make it easier to understand the animation in motion. Overall this step was relatively simple but somewhat tedious. Once I had finished the final layer, I took a step back to review my work. I wanted to ensure that the animation was clear and easy to understand, and that all of the elements were well-balanced and cohesive.
The next part I worked on was the walk cycle. I found this part to be much easier than the run cycle as the process was mostly similar. To start this piece I drew a very simple skeleton to get the key poses right. I also put a white line above and below the character to get a clearer view of how his head is moving as hes walking. I tried to get most of the timing and poses right in this skeleton form as it was very easy to make adjustments to and mistakes weren’t punished by needing to re draw more detailed images.
Once this step was over I started drawing a rough layer on top of it made to look more humanlike. This was mostly the same process as the run cycle where I was mostly just cleaning things up and making slight changes here and there where I saw issues. After this layer was complete I just added my line art layer on top and did some shadows on his left arm and leg. I felt that hard black shadows for some reason looked much nicer for the walk cycle.
The last thing I had to do was the body Mechanics animation. I found this one to be the most challenging of the 3. It took me quite a while to figure out what kind of movement I wanted to animate for this. I was doing research and looking for reference images of various types of movements and I found that there was a lot of useful reference videos for fighting moves and martial arts. I decided animating a kick of some sort would be a good idea to try. I spent a decent amount of time looking at videos and took a few screenshots of key poses to use as references for the actual animation poses. I then followed roughly the same process as I did for the other two animated pieces. I started with a rough sketchy skeleton type of body, I then drew over it with a more humanoid shape, and finally did my last layer to clean up issues and do a less sketchy line art layer. I found that getting the timing for this piece right was by far the most difficult of the 3. I struggled with exactly how long to hold the anticipation poses for and the speed of the kick. Overall I don’t think the animation itself is bad but I do think that in future I would like to be able to create a better and smoother piece.
Evaluation
I am quite happy with the work I have done on this assignment. I was slightly worried my lack of experience in 2D would make these animations much harder to do compared to 3D but overall despite the challenge I think I was reasonably successful in my attempts. I did find the process of using 2D software to be much easier than 3D since there is significantly less technical difficulty issues when working in 2D. The difficulty came more so in the form of making sure the fundamentals were right and the drawings were consistent. Although I did find this difficult I was still very happy to work in 2D because any problems are much clearer and dont rely so much on fixing random technical issues. Overall I am pleased with the work I have done on this project and I plan to incorporate more 2D work into my pieces in future.