As a changer, I feel that animation can always bring me a lot of new knowledge. At the same time, as an animator who has just entered the industry, after more than half a year of study, I feel that my animation level and vision have made great progress.
Looking back at the early days when I just joined the animation industry, many of my homework/exercises need to be improved from my current perspective. I will use this blog to talk about the problems in my previous exercises and what I have learned now.
I want to start with the first exercise “Bouncing Character”. The movement law of the ball can be said to be something that every animator needs to learn. In my opinion, whether it is humans or other objects, they can make movements or movement variations similar to those of balls. Therefore, the movement law of the ball is very basic and important. My bouncing character is roughly in line with the movement law, but there is still a lot of room for improvement in details. For example, when my character jumps to the highest point, the static time should be extended to reflect the inertia of the movement, and the speed when falling should be reflected as an acceleration.
In the two exercises of “walk cycle” and “push”, I mainly trained the movement law of being a human. In my opinion, the difficulty of these exercises lies in finding the force point of the person. When walking, the swing of the thigh drives the calf to move, and then drives the foot to control the direction. When starting, the heel will exert force on the ground to generate friction and make people start walking. When a person pushes an object, the force point of the whole body is another situation. I think when drawing a person pushing an object, I need to focus more on the movement of the arms and body. In my practice, I think my control of inertia is still very good, but in terms of performance, I still rely too much on videos as a reference, and the animation is not exaggerated enough.
Finally, let’s talk about the practice of animals (four legs). The walking movement rules of four-legged animals are somewhat different from what I think of the walking movement rules of humans. When animals move, the four legs land on the ground one by one, and at least two or three legs touch the ground each time, and the speed is slow and stable. Take a puppy as an example. When it walks, the law of its legs landing is right hind leg → right front leg → left hind leg → left front leg. In my practice, I can draw the dog’s walking posture naturally, but the lack of stride between different legs is still inconsistent, and the performance is still slightly lacking. I added hair to enrich the dog’s character, but the movement of these hairs does not fit the dog’s movement well when moving.
In general, I have mastered the basic movement rules, but I still need more practice in further performance.
Leave a Reply