It’s not a rule, it’s just a suggestion. In this digital age frame rate has become almost arbitrary. I suggest 24fps because it’s the frame rate I use in the videos. I chose it because it’s the one used for feature films, and consequently most animation books you’ll find talk about timing in terms of 24fps.
The reason for this is that I was demonstrating the pose to pose workflow. With this method, you deal with whole poses all at once, and think of your animation as a collection of drawings rather than a series of separate moving parts. This workflow has its roots in traditional 2d animation and is a tried and true method for producing a coherent performance.
When doing pose to pose animation, if a controller doesn’t move at a given pose you still want to record that fact by setting a keyframe for it. In fact, I advocate setting keys for controllers even if you aren’t intending to animate them at all, just to record their properties (for example: IK/FK sliders, head/kneck follow, etc.)
This approach can appear time consuming at first, but you get faster with practice. Sometimes the best way to save time is just to have plenty of practice under your belt.
Q2: since we only have an upper stretch controller, what was your thought process in compensating ball position when adding stretch in the tweens? do you try to keep the center of the ball on the arc or go for the top of the ball following the arc?
I try to have the whole shape of the body following the arc. It’s not really a technical thing for me. I just go by what feels best.
One request: I see you with nicely layed out and totally planned grease pencil sketches. … (snip) … Do you do trial and error animations and then draw over the keys you find are best?
Yup. I just sit down and start drawing. This is another thing that just takes patience and practice. By the way, the grease pencil sketches are just a rough plan that you do for your own purposes. They are not to be followed too closely. It’s good to leave room for better ideas to occur to you as you animate.
Once again, if you practice doing sketches, eventually you get faster and it can end up saving you a lot of time in the long run.
Thanks for the great tuts and feedback btw. I also appreciate you putting the rig up for general use, animation is its own study and art form. For some reason rigging seems to get way more discussion.
Maybe that’s because although rigging does have some general principles, as a topic it’s a lot more technical and application specific. Meanwhile once you learn the basic animation tools of a given software package, animation becomes a more general art form, with its own principles that are independent of the software. Also, animation involves a lot of intuition and that’s hard to teach. It comes with practice.
Regarding your blocking pass, I would suggest not adding air resistance. It’s an added complication that might be best saved for later. This exercise is more about learning how to achieve overlapping motion using pose to pose. That’s plenty to deal with without having to think about another force such as wind. Apart from that, it looks like a decent start. I would vary the squash and stretch with the size of the jumps.
Also, as you progress, it might be an idea to start a thread in the artwork/animations section, where you’re more likely to get comments from others.
