Kolio

Curious pebble (3/?)

Part 1 / Part 2

hey don't worry? completely unrelated giant dump of heartwarming PHM doodles ok??

Curious pebble (2/?)

Sound on.

HOW the hell do you keep track of everything in view while keeping weights/volume/objects interacting consistent Oh My God

i do the first pass on vibes only, its used to figure out acting, gesture, how long the animation is and just generally whats happening, but in the second pass im trying to think of it almost like a physics diagram (i think they are called free body diagrams? the ones where you mark all the forces acting on an object)

starting with the most important body part, the one thats doing the most action, and imagining how its pulling or pushing on a second object. if its something heavy, it will take some time to start moving. and, once its moving, if the force suddenly stops or changes direction, the heavy thing will take some time to stop or start moving in a different direction. so yea newtons laws are also animation principles ig

(im a stem dropout and i dislike maths as much as the next guy, but trying to run a physics simulation in my head is lowk pretty fun lol)

i go through the entire length of the animation just focusing on these two masses.

once im happy with the way these two move, i start adding less important, lighter things, also one at a time

oh also, if its a full body action, even if cropped, it helps to draw the entire body, in the roughs of my hug animation i drew grace's legs too, just to know how his weight would be shifting (hes kneeling on the ground). no need to inbetween the parts that you know will be offscreen

its kind of the opposite for me, my roughs look so ass😭 but i learned that its okay because each new pass is an opportunity to improve things and fix mistakes

its always best not to overthink things and just plow through the work, at least for me bc i know if i stop to plan, nothing will ever get finished

also if youre worried with about your cleanup being too stiff, the solution ive found for myself is to have a bigger gap between it and tiedown, so youre not just tracing over the same lines. its more tricky tho because you have to figure out a lot of things like perspective and volume while also drawing clean, but this way your linework will be more intentional

to make it easier to maintain consistency and good spacing, animate body parts (or even parts of body parts) separately, like go through the entire movement of the bottom side of the elbow, then return to frame one and do the top side, etc (you can kind of see it in the video)

also, if something is bothering you, like if a drawing seems kinda off, or you feel like the animation is jittery in some spot, my advice is to get in there and fix it! even if it seems like its gonna be too much unnecessary work. at least for me, i know if something is bothering me, it will bother me every time i watch the animation, so its better to fix it than to have an artwork i cant look at.