Hi. I’ve finally got a new computer, and I’m back to Blender after a few years. I missed it! But I have questions… The first of which might be stupid and caused by my slight Dyscalculia. I’m testing some stuff in an 80s anime style, and I want to match the 12fps that those films had, but I can’t get my head around how to do that.
I think what I might need is to render every other frame, but have that frame repeat once to get that 12fps look. Or do I just render in 12fps and make the animations themselves twice the speed (e.g. a single step takes 12 frames instead of 24)? It’s embarrassing that my first question here is so stupid, but I need to work it out before I get too far.
Your confusion here comes from an assumption that FPS means “number of animated frames per second”. It doesn’t, actually, as the vast majority of 2D animation is done “on twos”. This means that every other frame is animated. in your case, this would mean 6 frames per second for 12 FPS, which may not be enough. There’s a decent change what you want is 24 FPS on twos, so 12 drawn frames per second. That is to say- you set your FPS to 24 and animate every other frame.
Also, animating on twos isn’t a constant- you can animate on 1s, 2s, or 3s, and most animation switches between them as needed. For high speed action shots, 3s makes things feel faster. 2s is the safe middle ground where most shots live. 1s is slow and highly detailed.
Some productions even combine 1/2/3s in the same shot: in Across the Spider-verse, for example, SpiderPunk’s jacket and guitar is animated on 3s and his body and face on 2s
Thank you. Does this mean then that what I actually want is what I said about having every other frame render and repeat? Frame 1 & 2 are the same, then frame 3 & 4 are the same, etc? I thought I was being stupid with that idea.
This is where animation curves and keyframes come into play. The simplest and fastest way is to make animation keyframes on every other frame, then set the interpolation of those frames to constant. This will automatically make the in-between be hold frames
It also helps to understand all this to break down animation frame by frame. You can do this with VLC or other similar programs, there’s also this useful account:
Animating on 2s, you have the flexibility to drop to 1s if a shot calls for it. Animating on 1s, you’re stuck- you can’t add any more frames. 2s is a nice middle ground where if you need more or less, you can. It’s not a strict necessity, you can animate on 1s and a lot of styles do, but for the “anime 2D” look, 2s is the most faithful way to replicate that.
It’s also easier to distribute- 24 FPS or 23.997 is broadcast standard, so it makes sharing animation on TV or even YouTube a breeze. You’d have to retime a 12 FPS animation to get it on TV, which would be a pain.
I think for games, animation is almost always 1s on 30 FPS, but for “stylized” animation like this, it’s almost exclusively 24 FPS on mostly 2s
Makes sense. I rendered out a test sample, and clouds/water looked decent on 2s, but I had a turbulance on foreground grass and it still looked too smooth, so could do with being on 3s I think.
