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Kigakura · Oct '16

@karidyas I would love to do them traditionally but that would require too much paper
As @JesterSeraph mentioned and cited, I'm using my iPad Pro with my Apple Pencil in Animation Desk using the free version with Onion skin on (only the 2 layers below not above).
Rough process steps:
- Creating a file -> chose how many FPS and max Frames (12fps/48frames; -> 4secs)
- Each frame is one layer so I start (obviously) with the first layer and sketch out a scene that I have roughly in mind (without a storyboard or thumbnails which I should probably start doing)
- I draw every single layer. There is a 'copy' layer button but I dont use that. Takes away the practice that I need to draw consitently
- I always press 'Play' and watch it many times after drawing some frames
- If I see a pacing error I can't really delete the frame and add other frames because I'm drawing several 'boxes' on one file -> Erase everything 'above' and draw everything again (good practice but needs patience)
- Draw until I reach frame 48. Most often I need more frames but can't add any more frames (would leave the other animations with blank 'frames' but could also extend them so I may do that in the future if needed haha )
- Export to Photoshop -> crop and everything (no drawing over only resizing) -> export as .gif and upload everywhere^^

Hope that made everything clear

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DS #557:
Just sketched something from imagination within 1 hour. Not satisfied with the quality and speed but will improve as time goes on Had some difficulties with the fabric and pose in perspective -> further study/practice needed.

Tools: PS CC, Wacom Intuos Pro M

Daily Animation Practice:
Again focussing on perspectived and an explosion test. Needed some extra frames to illustrate the impact better... Maybe next time

Tools: iPad Pro + Apple Pencil + Animation Desk/Animation+

Kigakura · Oct '16

DS #558: Sooo today I started to do a challenge of doing 250 thumbnails for a group of mine (in 1 week). Sketched for like 1hour or 2 and forgot to save haha (nooby, i know). So today I'm just gonna post a sketch that I did during a lecture in university.

When I sketch things I tend to use the 'fisheye' perspective because that's what feels most natural for me when I observe =)
Tools: Pilot ballpoint pen in my notebook

Daily Animation Practice:
Tried to do something 'ordinary' / 'everyday life'ish and failed miserably as my hand anatomy is still aweful. But was a good perspective/movement pracitce.

Tools: iPad Pro + Apple Pencil + AnimationDesk

Kigakura · Oct '16

DS #559: Did some thumbnails today and picked one out that I sketched out:
Just some fun excercise

Daily animation practice:
More of that perspective practice with the box. Not really happy with the outcome, need to get reference for the next one to improve my visual library and work on my animation basics.

Tools: iPad Pro + Apple Pencil + AnimationDesk

karidyas · Oct '16

Ah thanks, that is crystal clear, thanks for explaining all that. Man that "draw everything above again if the pacing is wrong" is nutty but if you've got the patience I can see how doing it again would be helpful. You make me want to try it haha, it looks like fun

fathomcube · Oct '16

LEGIT .
LEGIT
LEGIT
LEGIT
LEGIT
LEGIT
DAMMIT CUBEBRUSH DOESN'T LET ME TIME SHORT OR CONSISTENT COMMENTS!!!!

doesn't let me just post legit a couple times

aika · Oct '16

wowow! i love these animations they are so trippy^^ awesome studies too!!

Kigakura · Oct '16

@karidyas It is exhausting but when you see it moving it's worth every second you have put in
@fathomcube GLAD YOU LIKE IT. Thanks.
@aika Thank you very much!

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DS #560: Working on thumbnails today. Uploaded 1 page, still working on more
Tools: Pilot ballpoint pen, Moleskine sketchbook

Daily Animation Practice:
Tried to do some character stuff. Pretty hard to get the timing/flow right.

Tools: iPad Pro + Apple Pencil + AnimationDesk

karidyas · Oct '16

Wow you can tell you really understand the form of that body, it almost looks rotoscoped when it turns. Very impressive! Gets a bit sketchy towards the end but who can blame you that's a lot of frames haha

Kigakura · Oct '16

@karidyas Haha thank you very much! Yeah I overused the smiering (dont know how to write that lol) lines (for 'fast' movements). Didn't come out as I wanted to. Need to minimize that^^

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DS #561:
Another batch of Blockout-style paintings. Still fun to do
Tools: PS CC, Wacom Intuos Pro M

Daily Animation Practice:
Back to fundamentals Some bouncing (squish&squash, little bit of anticipation, timing)
Tools: iPad Pro + Apple Pencil + AnimationDesk

Kigakura · Oct '16

DS #562:
Tested colouring while studying a photo (not using 1:1 colour, trying to come up with a pallet digitally).

Daily Animation Practice:
More of the basics
Tools: iPad Pro + Apple Pencil + AnimationDesk

JesterSeraph · Oct '16

Back to ovals I see The roll could still use some work. Right now, it's more like it rolls onto its other point, then moves itself again, rather than being carried by some momentum. You could have also shown a little more force in it initially tossing itself into the first roll, to show the power needed to make it back up onto the other point.

As the the diving board, awesome! Great weight, great emphasis, I really like the mid-air hang (gotta build that anticipation!) and the slight pause as the board bends down. The following quick 2-3 frames of squiggles to represent it flying off the screen are also well done to show the speed the oval has flown away at, whereas in your previous animation with the bouncing ball, the ball stays on the ground a lot more.

In the previous animation, you had the mid-air emphasis right, but you spent too many frames with the ball touching the ground and shifting in momentum. It makes the resulting bounce back up feel like it should be much, much higher, since it takes a significant amount of force to squish a solid object, and that force is then transferred back. If you want a good example of how balls react to impact, watch some videos of tennis balls bouncing and being hit in slow motion. If it doesn't have much force, it won't deform much. If it has a lot of force being applied to it (speed, getting hit by a racket, etc.), it will flatten and stretch.

Kigakura · Nov '16

@JesterSeraph Thank you so much for writing all these detailed and insightful replies! Seems like you really now your animation stuff
Yes I wanted to get the basics right before jumping really into characters and your advice really helps a lot. After today's animation practice and after reading your reply I really noticed that I do not indicate any material/weight in my ovals haha and I'm going to study some real life stuff tomorrow

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DS #563: Today I kinda studied fundamentals only.
Watched a recent video that Kim Jung Gi recorded and posted on his FB and tried to learn from it. Here's the result.
Tools: Pilot ballpoint pen on paper + some polychromo pencil sketching

Daily animation practice:
Here also some fundamentals. Oval jump and camera movement.
Tools: iPad Pro + Apple Pencil + AnimationDesk

Kigakura · Nov '16

DS #564: Didn't have the time to study real life balls for animation because I had to do 250 thumbnails haha^^
Mostly character stuff. This really helped me getting back my confidence in drawing and improved my strength in visualizing images before I draw them.
(hope you can see everything :D)
Tools: Pilot ballpoint pen, Moleskine sketchbook

(rightclick -> open in new window let's you see a bigger version)

Daily animation practice:
Tried to do the some bouncing balls with weight in mind from imagination. I hope to get more time tomorrow to do some real studying haha
Tools: iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, Animation Desk

mar_cynwer · Nov '16

Your are doing great with your animation studies! One thing though about the ball jumping of a ledge. I get the feeling that when the ball hits the edge, it should just fall off (or do a gradual fall a bit further forward). This is because it ends up a bit too much off the edge, causing the center of mass to be on thin air.
I took a closer look at one of your animations and noticed that it is about 40 - 50 frames. How long does it take you to make one?
And also, are all those thumbnails done from imagination? They look really great for having been done in a short time, I should probably try to do something like that myself sometime

Kigakura · Nov '16

@mar_cynwer Thanks, mate! Yeah I thought that too but I wanted to think of the oval as some kind of character so that it pushes its two ends on the side to push him to the other sides and just lands and rolls haha just for practice^^
Yeah I animate in 48frames normally with 12fps. The last days I added about 10 frames to the file so I had to do a bit more^^
I always give myself like one hour, sometimes less and do them just from scratch without thumbnailing first (bad habit, need to fix that if I really want to do little stories )
Currently I only do this to improve my imagination and draughtsmanship. If I wouldn't be in university right now I would do a lot more haha Since I have only like 3-5hours a day to work on art stuff I have to limit myself though and split the time in studying, painting and drawing (animations).
If you want a quick advice: For me to be able to do them so 'fast' I really just studied perspective a lot and tried to master it (like Kim Jung Gi does) but this will take another couple of years probably

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DS #565:
Trying to get back into rendering

Daily animation practice:
Quick oval rolling in my 'free time' to not lose the flow of animating.
Tools: iPad Pro + Apple Pencil + Animation Desk

JesterSeraph · Nov '16

Another good improvement with the ovals and balls. One warning I'd give you with the three bouncing balls is to watch the height of each successive bounce. The initial bounce gives the viewer an idea of the material based on how much of the height the ball drops from is regained, and the percentage then can remain pretty stable.

So the ball will (roughly) always reach the same percentage of its previous drop height. your first ball shows this enough, getting back less than 10% of the initial drop height in the first bounce, and then barely even getting off the ground again after. Your second ball, however, breaks this rule. It bounces to 60% of its starting height, then to about 80-90% of the new drop height, then repeating some amount closer to 70%.

then your final ball loses a tiny bit of height, loses a bit more, then regains some height. Losing a very small amount of height is no problem, since rubber balls maintain most of their height each bounce, but regaining some height is impossible without intervention (such as it not actually being a bounce, but a character jumping repeatedly, at which point the inconsistency is welcomed).

As for your latest oval, I love everything about it up until the end when it eventually bounces straight up into the air after face planting. The issue I have with it is that if it's a character controlling itself, then it's bouncing itself back up after falling (which is fine), but it does so very quickly after falling, which means that it wouldn't actually lose all of that momentum. When jumping back up, it should have continued in a small arc towards the right of the screen, thanks to the force in that direction from throwing itself beyond the threshold of the oval tip.

I really love animation, and between studying it and physics I got a really solid understanding of how to make something animated look and feel realistic enough. I was never a fantastic animator back when I practiced, but boy could I make balls bounce and move around. They're the best practice, I find, for learning weight, momentum, pacing, and emphasis. These are the essentials which allow you to make an animation look real, but also push that realism into the epic. If you have one character jumping onto another, the "real" would technically be a very straight forward jump. If you wanted to stylize and make the jump important, you could have the character jump up, slow mid-air, then fall down atop the other. I wish I could pull up the old tutorials I used to learn all this stuff for you, but the website they were once on has long since been destroyed.

Kigakura · Nov '16

@JesterSeraph Daaammnn, another epic analyzation of my animations and great advice! Thank you so much
Never thought about the consistency of the dropoff, that's a really good advice! That last ball bouncing back above/higher at the end was not intended, didn't check good enough but I tried to implement your advice into today's animation practice. I hope I did everything right today. (need to study the deformations of balls more, I dont feel like today was right. It's finally the weekend so I can study as much as I want )

Another great advice! Continuous force into that rolling direction, didnt think about that! Ha, animation is so difficult and hard, but also the most rewarding (what I feel at least).

Yeah I also want to master the balls and fundamentals first before jumping back into character animation (might throw in 1 or 2 occasionally just to try to use the basics).
Wish I could read and learn from all those tutorials but, oh well, haha just gotta observer reality a bit better and it will work out

Thanks again for your input! Really helps me a LOT.

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DS #566:
Tried to do something with shapes only but ended up giving into the habbit of rendering here and there... Haha need to fix that.

Tools: PS CC, Wacom Intuos Pro M

Daily Animation Practice:
Another day of basics and fundamentals. Bouncing balls.
Tools: iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, AnimationDesk

JesterSeraph · Nov '16

A ball only deforms if it's travelling/hitting something at a very high speed, and is also a material capable of deforming (such as a tennis ball, because tennis balls are hollow).

Anyway, if you're wondering why they look off, it's because of two factors. One is a misunderstanding of how an object reacts when it hits something (deformation is one way an object reacts, but it's not the most common. It's mostly when two forces are fighting against each other and compression is possible that you find deformation occur). Your balls hit the ground, but then they're sticking there for a number of frames. when a ball hits the ground, all of its force goes into the ground, and the ground then returns an equal, opposite force (Newton's 3rd law). So when it collides with the ground, it loses all of its force, thus there's nothing making it push down anymore, and it also receives the force from the ground, so it begins immediately shooting back up. Even with a deformation, the compression and expansion (squish and return to normal shape) is very fast. So your 4th ball down the line makes sense. It has a ton of speed, but notice how you also made it only compress for a single frame, and after that it shot back up with high speed. That's proper! The others spend a lot of time squishing against the ground, when they don't even actually need the actions.

The other issue is your spacing. How you've spaced out the motion of the ball doesn't fit nature properly, specifically the force of gravity on a ball. Gravity is a constant force, and it's the only reason a ball slowly loses speed as it travels upwards, and the only reason the ball then falls back down. What this means is that the rate at which the ball decelerates while flying upwards is about the same as how quickly it accelerates downwards.

Because the spacing of your balls is uneven, where they suddenly start picking up speed and flying downwards after a slow deceleration to a rest mid-air, it makes the tempo very hard to read.

I dug around a bunch through videos and tutorials on the community site of where all the animators I used to follow moved to, and although I didn't find the series I was talking about previously, I did find a great TED video on animation, specifically timing and spacing (the time you give something and how you move an object across frames). It covers a lot of what I've tried to teach you, though it doesn't focus on the more stylistic lessons like time spent as a way of showing effort or importance, and I think you'd really get a lot out of it. It especially helps since it's all visual, and I haven't provided you with any images throughout all my posts. Enjoy.

Animation basics: The art of timing and spacing - TED-Ed