From the course: 2D Animation: Tips and Tricks

Torque

From the course: 2D Animation: Tips and Tricks

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Torque

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- [Narrator] One of the problems you'll see with a lot of drawings and even scenes now on shows is what I call zero-poles disease, and that's when somebody takes a rig from a library either CGI or Flash or Harmony, and they pull it onto the stage, and so you have everybody pose like this. And it's really, really boring and kind of lazy because no scene should start like that, or really even have poker-like scenes like this very often. So, one of the tricks that we use to prevent that from happening is the very old technique used in classical art called counter pose or torque. And that's simple, to twist the weight of the character so we move the hips to one side and the shoulders to the other. It doesn't have to be a lot. These are drawings that I created for a previous course on how to draw cartoon characters. So if you want to find out how to draw some of the fine points of this, that course is an excellent one. But the amount of counter pose can increase as much as you think the design will take. So, you can have these very energetic walking poses. The only thing you've got to watch out for, of course, is how this is going to deform your character design. So if you're working with a Flash rig, it might be harder to do this, or a Harmony rig or a CGI rig, but you really should try to see if it's possible to do as much as you can with these various puppet tools and other techniques as possible. If you're drawing, of course, then the only limit is your own drawing ability. So, as you can see at the bottom row, we have the left side in red, the right in blue, and on this side, you see on the throw, both are facing the same direction, but on the overshoot, we counter pose. It's really nice. So you get these really strong, very natural-looking poses. And on this side we have the walking pose. In the walking pose, the counter pose is in constant opposition, so if one hip is facing towards you, the opposite shoulder is facing the other direction, as you can see in the two contact positions here. So there's a close-up of the top row. And you can see the nice contrast between, or the alternation between these two strong key drawings. So here's a nice little animation showing the kind of charm that you can get from simple application of counter pose or torque. So from a previous course that I've done about walking and walk cycles, here you can see the hips and the shoulders and how they're in constant opposition to one another. So, the walk cycle is almost entirely in some form or other of counter pose. So remember this cool little technique because I think it'll be very useful in helping you to break out of static poses.

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