From the course: Learning 2D Animation Principles

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Breaking and loosening joints

Breaking and loosening joints - Flash Professional Tutorial

From the course: Learning 2D Animation Principles

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Breaking and loosening joints

One mistake that beginners often make is that they don't treat the figure in a sufficiently flexible manner, and by this, I mean that you should be comfortable breaking their joints, like breaking their limbs. It sounds really violent, but it really isn't. So let me show you a basic rig, again, and normally what people are comfortable doing is moving within certain ranges of parameters like this, feel safe enough. Then the problem is that they can also be quite stiff. So, let me just undo all that. And I'm going to go into this symbol here where I've animated a very simple scene and this is not going to win any animation festivals, but this will show you the principle of breaking limbs. Now it's just the character going from a simple pose into a wave. Now if what's happening here, if you'll study his physical left arm or the screen right arm. Watch the angle of this arm here, these joints. As we move, they break. They go from being bending to facing the left side of the screen, to…

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