The rest of the animation for this character is up to you. I’m going to keep it relatively simple and have her just continue running forward. Then I’ll have her roll and pick up the spray can here to use as a weapon. For this video, I’ll show you my time-lapse of how I animated this and discuss a few techniques that I personally use in my animation to get things done.
The first thing you’ll notice that you may have been wondering about in my previous time-lapses is that the legs are often stretched and left behind during certain parts of the process. And we did talk a little bit about this in the previous video. This is because I like to animate using a technique called layered animation.
This means animating a single part of the character completely, whether it’s a specific motion or a scene, before animating any other part of the character. Typically, this means animating the hip or cog AKA center of gravity control to get your character’s weight and balance animated first. This can be particularly helpful for running and flipping movements.
After you get the cog animated, which for our character is the torso bone, you’ll be able to start animating the legs as well as the upper body. Eventually you work your way down to the head and the fingers. This is a different process from pose to pose and is more similar to animating straight ahead.
The difference between these is a principle of animation. Pose to pose animation is a method of animation similar to what we did for the run cycle video. You choose your key poses first and then refine the animation from there with in-betweens. Straight ahead animation is a method of animation that involves a less planning and more doing.
This means instead of choosing key poses, an animator simply creates the next pose they want to make as they need them. This does have advantages. It can be faster and more flexible, but it’s also more difficult and can sometimes result in doing more work if you ever have to redo things. This is simply because straight ahead doesn’t let you preview your entire animation before you finish too many drawings, like pose to pose does. By the way, the reason why I said drawings is because pose to pose and straight ahead were techniques invented for 2D animation. Now, of course, they still apply to 3D animation, but layered animation is a bit of an in-between where you can animate a single part of the character fully first and then animate another part of the character based on the foundation of movement.
For example, if you already know how your characters torso is going to move, that makes it much easier for you to figure out how to move their chest or legs by following simple rules of balance and inertia. Hopefully this makes sense, but also don’t worry if you feel lost. Animation is a very complex topic that I won’t be able to cover in a single video.
However, I do hope that we can teach you the tools you need in this course, so you’ll be fully equipped to build upon your animation knowledge in the future. One last tip before we finish off this animation. The head bone has a property called head follow. This allows the animator to have the head inherit the rotation of the rest of the body, or to ignore it.
I typically have it off for Tabi because in the real world, people tend to stabilize their heads while they’re running. This does mean however that I have to rotate the head manually a full rotation whenever she does a flip or a role like she does here. This property is ultimately up to situational preference, and I recommend you play around with it. You can also key frame it if you want. When deciding which setting to use, keep in mind your goal for most animation tools is to save time. Now you might be wondering how much should I animate at this stage? For our purposes, we’ll be duplicating this character’s animation for the second character later. For this specific situation, you should want to animate until you reach a point where you feel like both characters will stop sharing similar animation.
For me, that’s going to be when they start fighting. Before finish up this animation, I’m going to have the character pick up a prop halfway through the sequence. I’ll show you guys how to do that in the next video.
