From the course: 2D Animation: Tips and Tricks

Plotting arcs and timing in a walk

From the course: 2D Animation: Tips and Tricks

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Plotting arcs and timing in a walk

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- [Instructor] In the previous movie I showed you how to create really flexible walks with attitude by breaking joints. One of the things that will happen whenever you do any animated scene is that you really have to control arcs, timing, and spacing. So what I'm going to do is to show you how I made sure that the legs on this very exaggerated walk didn't catch the eye because they're obviously, they're moving a lot. We wanted to make sure that that movement is pleasing to look at. So I've overlaid the frames here of the main drawings: the contact, the low point, the passing, and the high points so you can see them exactly as they are overlaid on top of one another. So how I plot joints is basically back in the day we would've used paper and pencil and one technique that many animators used was to get a clean sheet, place it over the animation, and plot out each body part with dots. So let me show you what this looks like if we do this on a computer. So we basically pick a point, like the tip of the nose, and we plot that throughout all of the keys. And if we've done it correctly we get these beautiful arc paths and we just continue that on as the cycle goes. So we can do this process for every body part. In this case, his physical right wrist. And as I plot each drawing through, I can see that we have a very beautiful arcing path. Notice that there is like a crescent shape here, that's okay. That's the top point of the arc path swinging and then it's not a problem for that to swing back there, but the rest is an really nice loop. It's actually beautiful to look at purely as an arc path, as a design. Same thing for the other arm, which will have a different path. And when we overlay all the paths, you get something like this. What you don't want to have is usually one frame out here creating a square line or up here creating a weird bump. Those tend to catch the eye and if you continue to plot all the body parts throughout your scene, you should be seeing roughly things like this. Also notice these dots, they also give you the timing, which is the key frames and the spacing. So you can plot out where the inbetweens are going to go. So here number two, three, and here these little dots here are inbetweens, six, or five, six I think, but if you plot these right the way through you'll see that the acceleration and deceleration is going to be good. We're not seeing clusters where there shouldn't be any. So for example here, the arm is swinging very fast and, as you would expect, these dots are further apart. If I was seeing them bunching here, here, and here, that is going to be a sudden cessation of motion and that will catch the eye. It will look really bad. So in this case, I can see I got nice gathering at the top of the arc patterns and I could go into even more detail than this, but at first glance, this is going to be a very nice looking scene. And now having seen those arc paths you can maybe have an idea for overlaying them in your imagination; on top of the tip of the nose, the near arm, the far arm, and so on. So, it's the kind of thing that's very easy to forget to do and I strongly recommend you find some way regardless of whether you're animating on paper, Flash, Animate CC, Harmony, or some other 3D program. Always watch, or make visible, your arc paths and your spacing and timing.

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