Tips and Tricks for Animating. Animating on ones or twos or both.

Hello fans and welcome to another edition of animations on HypefroActive. It's been quite a while and a very busy one i'ld say. Now on a quick review, i produced two animation shots this month of October. One been a spill over from September and the other which i started right after that. As usual, i've been testing out stuffs and seeing what works, what doesnt, how things are put together and generally improving on the quality of my animations. The pictures attached to this posts are extracted from my current animation shot that would be ready say, next week. So lets get to it then.

Yeah, in this Awesome episode i'ld be talking about some tricks to the trade that may come as tips for you while animating. Now, some time not too long ago when i was getting started with learning from scratch i went about looking for video tutorials. I managed to get some or lets say very few and honestly very few was what i needed at the time because watching a bulky monster piled video from a rack and all on animations would be troublesome. You might say the more the merrier but the truth is if you are considering things like time, money and other parameters all tied to learning then you'd see that this type of "the more the merrier" is not where you want to go especially if you want to have an all round knowledge of everything relating to animations from modelling, texturing, rigging animating bla bla bla the whole nine yards, or maybe again you could do that with time as opposed to trying to learn and store everything in your head all at once. OK so back to the matter, i got about two videos or there about, with one been a Jeff Lew video animation tutorial and in one of the videos Jeff was talking about interpolation which is same as "tweening or in-betweening". As you know, Jeff is a 3D animator and a very good one at that and he was saying something about people animating on ones "i.e, frame by frame animation" that it was a bad way to animate and reason been that the computer already sets the tweening for you and that there was no reason to animate on ones. And instead of animating on ones, you could do it on twos threes and maybe fours. And when you think about it, it does make alot of sense not animating on ones especially when the computer willingly handles the tweenings for you ultimately saving you plenty of time and energy wether blood or money or both, you could use the saves as reserves. Now for a long time, i put this in my head and is still is. Animating on threes and fours especially when the actions are linear and are very simple moves. This saved me plenty and i had a lot less to worry about at the time. But when you start talking about very complex type animations especially the cartoony types then this rule may cease to apply but not in all situations.

The computer tries to create animations in-between extreme poses and it does this as it deems fit. Now while creating a pose say on a particular frame that serves as part of the in-between of two extreme poses, there might be need for you to do so on ones if its a cartoony type or you are trying to constrain poses to a frame because that is what you want seen on that frame. There are different ways to animate which is evident from the variety of animation films you see on television. Some relating to Epic Story telling, Games or Super hero comics that do not have the same feel like the squashy "Tom and Jerry" Cartoony type of Animations. While the first type may agree with what was said about how Jeff teaches or advices to animate and would work very very well because they are life-like in nature just like you'ld see in "The Matrix" and "Transformers". The Tom and Jerry Cartoony type would frown at this type of method and will tend to favour a lot of "squash and stretch" making it funny bouncy and humanly unrealistic and that's why people love it and alot of frame by frame abides here as you could set extreme poses on fours, eights, twelves or any frames you want.

The Animation principles were carved out for Animations by 2D Animation Legends and a lot of mistakes 3D Artist do is that we get lazy wanting the computer to do everything for us which is not a bad thing at all, but has it ever occured to you that these things could be done in many other ways other than what the computer offers? Yeah, you could choose to do it however you want, constraining your animations to every frame or maybe two, three or four frames. But the thing to put in mind is that, the more constrained it is, the more work for you to do but it does come out better though.

So, in conclusion animation whether 2 or 3D could be done on ones, two's or however you want them animated but please resist the urge to go beyond four. Unless it's in a kind of hold or somewhat passive action that would require say sixteen frames or so. See you guys next time and keep animating.