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Kind: captions
Language: en

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So does your animation look sloppy, choppy? you aim in for that glib smoothness like a buttered, baby seal

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But for some reason you just can't attain it

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It's just out of your reach

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And you don't know why?

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People tend to associate smooth animation with quality animation which is a completely false?

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Equivalence as animation quality and animation smoothness aren't necessarily codependent

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You can have good animation that isn't smooth and smooth animation that looks like garbage in

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Auditioning to having animation that is both or neither in the quest to pursue smooth animation

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I often see other animators especially newer ones make decisions and mistakes that instead of smooth a fiying their work make it look

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Mechanical and choppy many of these mistakes are built on misconceptions that I will be breaking down for you

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So this tutorial is 7 hot tips to make your animation not look like hot garbage

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Do note that these tips will also apply to any animation program as well well

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I'm using Toon Boom here the process would be almost identical in flash just for any rig stuff

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You wouldn't have to worry about pegs

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But this also applies to Photoshop clip studio paint

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TV paint even if you're just using pen and paper these are very core essential principles they're not program specific

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I'm not even gonna make this part a bullet point because it should be common sense plan your stuff out

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Don't just immediately start with posing a rig or drawing a full finished character in poses without first establishing

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The timings you want to use that is how you get stuff that is mechanically stiff and hugely inconsistent

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Seriously, sketch your stuff first then draw and pose over top of that stop getting ahead of yourself and just be patient

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By far the biggest misconception

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I see is that to attain smooth animation you need to animate everything at a higher FPS or in once and

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This quite frankly is not true. Well these elements can enhance already smooth animation. They will instead highlight faults with choppy animation

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Additionally faster frame rates and smaller frame resolutions greatly amplify the amount of work you have to do which is an exceptional pain for frame-by-frame

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Hand-drawn animation it also makes it more tedious to patch up your work, which leads me to my next point

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The second most common fault I see is people failing to prioritize

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What frames they need to actually be focusing on each motion should be expressed in as few key frames as possible?

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Don't worry about the space you have to cover to go from pose a to b just make sure pose a and B are strong

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and consistent

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Captain Underpants has amazing flipper Rama technology that gets fluid animation with just too goddamn frames

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You can follow the same principle if your animation is legible without the frame. It's not a keyframe. Don't draw it yet

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Recoil anticipation

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overshoot if there is an element in motion especially if it's fast it has inertia that it needs to deal with

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It's going to need to prepare to accelerate decelerate

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Overcompensate and come to a rest not every single motion will do all four of these things every time

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But most will have at least a few of these properties in my humble opinion

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These should be the next frames you draw after you setup that you're establishing keys before you actually start doing any

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Inbetweening inertia makes your motions a lot more organic and sometimes is even important for more mechanical objects as well

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Actually put emphasis on your timing

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You don't need each key action to be eight frames apart from each other give different poses different emphasis in the timeline depending on how

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important they are at this point you should be playing back your

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Animation a few times to make sure that everything looks good and makes sense even though it doesn't have any in-betweens or anything

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Once everything actually looks good. You're ready to actually start drawing or posing your rigs around

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And now that you're starting to flesh out your animation

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This is where you actually have to start worrying about easing and in-betweening

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Doing straight eases from point A to point B will look stiff and mechanical and stupid

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ease in whenever something needs to accelerate or move such as when falling or punching ease out when something is going to slow to a

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Stop such as at the top of a jump and ease both when it's a more organic

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Translation from point A to point B such as repositioning or shifting and posture the supplies went weaning as well as with hand drawn frame

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By frame stuff with hand drawn you instead can attain easing an acceleration via timing charts

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Which can look smoother by the way because there will be more frames present or simply by adjusting the timing on your existing frames?

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Distortion is especially helpful whenever you have something that's moving quickly and it can come in a few varieties such as smearing and deformation

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Smearing is basically a hand drawn motion blur this can help mask fast motions or even give you the illusion of emotion in

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Exceptionally fast cases such as when you need to go from point A to point B in just two frames keep this short

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I won't tell you how to make your smears

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But just make sure that their shape follows the path of the motion that you're going through

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Deformation is a little bit more like squash and stretch and can work in tandem with smearing or by itself you want to animate some

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Grade a animate it II then you want to learn how deformation works as an object accelerates

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It'll stretch as if the weight is being pulled behind it as it stops

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It'll squash as if the weight is crashing into it in

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Both cases the total volume or area should stay about the same

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So stretching will mean that it gets longer in thinner while squashing gets fatter and flatter

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Scrub through your frames as you work make sure it stays consistent

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Constantly play back your stuff and make sure you're not getting any wobbly phenomena where something looks like it's moving

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Inconsistently or a shaking where it shouldn't be or as randomly pausing where it shouldn't as you draw more frames make sure they stay

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Consistent using onion skinning as a checking tool it can also help to take things part by part instead of trying to do everything at

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Once if you're animating a guy throwing a punch animate is fist first then the body then the arms well not

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Necessary this can sometimes help with preventing wobble as you're focusing on a much smaller area at a time making sure that it stays consistent

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One other thing that I often see and this ties into the timing bullet people tend to want to constantly have everything in motion without

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Realizing what this actually means they often will do this at the expense of timing or via trying to add subtle details?

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I've already covered timing so on the note of subtle details

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These are things that you should do last do not make them part of your core animation

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They are more earth addressing on top novice animators will tend to often over exaggerate them

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Which defeats the purpose of them being subtle or they'll try to incorporate them into keys?

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Which is not what you should be doing and too often?

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I see animators and non animators alike who thinks smooth means it's constantly moving which is completely bogus

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Constant motion has nothing to do with smoothness

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This is something that is planned for from the start for certain

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Nation's only do it if your animation actually calls for it such as like a walk cycle or something

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And if you do need to do it make sure that the movement speed is consistent

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And it doesn't fluctuate randomly just like you should be doing for all your motions and animations anyway, honestly

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It's best not to worry about subtleties and animation until you're happy with the overall thing

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Some examples of subtle animation might include things like a slight rise in the chest for breathing. That'll said many animations on TV

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We'll still rarely use constant subtle animations

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They aren't as necessary as you think don't worry about them. Unless you actually want to deliberately do them

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So to help demonstrate these points

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I've had a few people send me animations that they feel need some critique

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This first one is by the loving fool, and it's a good example of timing and priority the frames here are consistently drawn

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But their timing isn't giving a sense of weight to certain motions and actions

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There are also parts where it feels like there's too much of a pause between the motions and there's a little reaction from the body

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A simple halfway fix for this is to adjust the timings here

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I've identified what I feel to be the main keyframes and have given them a little bit more time

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Well the rest have been sped up a little bit

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This next animation is by Beason is a bit more polished and finalized

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this is another good example to talk about timing and

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Priority the thing that sticks out to me is the way the arm comes out and the anticipation for the jump these feel a little

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Drawn-out and kind of blended into one another they feel a little slow

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And also remove a little bit of the impact from the jump which by comparison comes out quick

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This doesn't feel as smooth as it could because some of the motions feel extra sluggish will others feel extra fast

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It's kind of hard to pick out exactly what the keyframes are for this animation, but I think I've determined here

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What would be essential here is the new timing that aims to put a bit more emphasis on the jump?

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Here it is compared to the original

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Well the keys don't show the hand out stretching stuff like that can be added as a secondary motion well in-betweening

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Getting your timing a salvage with your keys first will control the overall flow of your animation

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Working around these frames will allow you to slim down on your work and focus on ensuring each movement has the desired impact

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Which efficiency is highly important for an animation like this especially considering it contains a hundred and twenty frames?

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This last animation is by my patrons soul fire and shows how the concept of wobble can come into play and why also looking at

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Things in pieces helps and also why playing a sketch. Also is really important

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I have to report this live so that way can scrub through these frames manually, but here's the animation

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As you can see it's a little bit rough, it's an attempt at making a dragon walk cycle

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First off there are a few parts that are actually missing to this overall because it's a walk cycle

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It's needs to go through four major steps

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Contact down pass and up if you look at the front legs for instance

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You can see that. There is no context step. We've got ears out stretching there should be a contact right here that there's not

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Then it goes down, and it passes through and then it goes up

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Additionally this is also why it helps to look at things individually if you look at this back leg right here

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just watch what happens, it's frozen here, and it's frozen there for like a full 1 2 3 4

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3 frames and then suddenly it jumps forward

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So looking at this frame by frame. You can really see that

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This movement is very inconsistent. It's frozen here, and it skips and

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That's frozen, and then it skips

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So yeah, that's why it's very important to sketch out what you're doing first

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because if you have a I can tell that this animation didn't have a

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Sketch to kind of go off of initially to kind of help it stay

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Evenly timed and to basically be planned out it was kind of just rigged straight from the get-go

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Plan out your stuff first especially if doing it rigged and stuff you will thank yourself for it

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There are a host of other tips in the light that I could give you or you could discover on your own when?

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Practicing, but I feel that these seven tips are the most important and most essential. I guess technically it's eight, but whatever

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In all honesty, maybe you were expecting some major secret technique to unlock the ability to make fluid animations

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And maybe it's underwhelming that the secret smoother work is just like

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Don't try to do everything at once or organize your workflow, or don't get a stiffy over animating on ones

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But in all honesty these tips have a drastic impact and are often forgotten

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Anyway as usual

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Thank you to my patreon supporters for supporting my work if you want to be included in the credits of videos like these my patreon

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Is linked in the description?

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Just do note that it is 18 plus only as I do a lot of adult content in the mix

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I'm planning to hopefully start doing tutorials like these again

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Potentially some Toon Boom specific ones as well as art tutorials for programs like that studio pain

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But that will all be for another time. I don't have anything more to say okay. Bye