So does your animation look sloppy, choppy? you aim in for that glib smoothness like a buttered, baby seal
But for some reason you just can't attain it
It's just out of your reach
And you don't know why?
People tend to associate smooth animation with quality animation which is a completely false?
Equivalence as animation quality and animation smoothness aren't necessarily codependent
You can have good animation that isn't smooth and smooth animation that looks like garbage in
Auditioning to having animation that is both or neither in the quest to pursue smooth animation
I often see other animators especially newer ones make decisions and mistakes that instead of smooth a fiying their work make it look
Mechanical and choppy many of these mistakes are built on misconceptions that I will be breaking down for you
So this tutorial is 7 hot tips to make your animation not look like hot garbage
Do note that these tips will also apply to any animation program as well well
I'm using Toon Boom here the process would be almost identical in flash just for any rig stuff
You wouldn't have to worry about pegs
But this also applies to Photoshop clip studio paint
TV paint even if you're just using pen and paper these are very core essential principles they're not program specific
I'm not even gonna make this part a bullet point because it should be common sense plan your stuff out
Don't just immediately start with posing a rig or drawing a full finished character in poses without first establishing
The timings you want to use that is how you get stuff that is mechanically stiff and hugely inconsistent
Seriously, sketch your stuff first then draw and pose over top of that stop getting ahead of yourself and just be patient
By far the biggest misconception
I see is that to attain smooth animation you need to animate everything at a higher FPS or in once and
This quite frankly is not true. Well these elements can enhance already smooth animation. They will instead highlight faults with choppy animation
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
Hand-drawn animation it also makes it more tedious to patch up your work, which leads me to my next point
The second most common fault I see is people failing to prioritize
What frames they need to actually be focusing on each motion should be expressed in as few key frames as possible?
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
and consistent
Captain Underpants has amazing flipper Rama technology that gets fluid animation with just too goddamn frames
You can follow the same principle if your animation is legible without the frame. It's not a keyframe. Don't draw it yet
Recoil anticipation
overshoot if there is an element in motion especially if it's fast it has inertia that it needs to deal with
It's going to need to prepare to accelerate decelerate
Overcompensate and come to a rest not every single motion will do all four of these things every time
But most will have at least a few of these properties in my humble opinion
These should be the next frames you draw after you setup that you're establishing keys before you actually start doing any
Inbetweening inertia makes your motions a lot more organic and sometimes is even important for more mechanical objects as well
Actually put emphasis on your timing
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
important they are at this point you should be playing back your
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
Once everything actually looks good. You're ready to actually start drawing or posing your rigs around
And now that you're starting to flesh out your animation
This is where you actually have to start worrying about easing and in-betweening
Doing straight eases from point A to point B will look stiff and mechanical and stupid
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
Stop such as at the top of a jump and ease both when it's a more organic
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
By frame stuff with hand drawn you instead can attain easing an acceleration via timing charts
Which can look smoother by the way because there will be more frames present or simply by adjusting the timing on your existing frames?
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
Smearing is basically a hand drawn motion blur this can help mask fast motions or even give you the illusion of emotion in
Exceptionally fast cases such as when you need to go from point A to point B in just two frames keep this short
I won't tell you how to make your smears
But just make sure that their shape follows the path of the motion that you're going through
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
Grade a animate it II then you want to learn how deformation works as an object accelerates
It'll stretch as if the weight is being pulled behind it as it stops
It'll squash as if the weight is crashing into it in
Both cases the total volume or area should stay about the same
So stretching will mean that it gets longer in thinner while squashing gets fatter and flatter
Scrub through your frames as you work make sure it stays consistent
Constantly play back your stuff and make sure you're not getting any wobbly phenomena where something looks like it's moving
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
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
Once if you're animating a guy throwing a punch animate is fist first then the body then the arms well not
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
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
Realizing what this actually means they often will do this at the expense of timing or via trying to add subtle details?
I've already covered timing so on the note of subtle details
These are things that you should do last do not make them part of your core animation
They are more earth addressing on top novice animators will tend to often over exaggerate them
Which defeats the purpose of them being subtle or they'll try to incorporate them into keys?
Which is not what you should be doing and too often?
I see animators and non animators alike who thinks smooth means it's constantly moving which is completely bogus
Constant motion has nothing to do with smoothness
This is something that is planned for from the start for certain
Nation's only do it if your animation actually calls for it such as like a walk cycle or something
And if you do need to do it make sure that the movement speed is consistent
And it doesn't fluctuate randomly just like you should be doing for all your motions and animations anyway, honestly
It's best not to worry about subtleties and animation until you're happy with the overall thing
Some examples of subtle animation might include things like a slight rise in the chest for breathing. That'll said many animations on TV
We'll still rarely use constant subtle animations
They aren't as necessary as you think don't worry about them. Unless you actually want to deliberately do them
So to help demonstrate these points
I've had a few people send me animations that they feel need some critique
This first one is by the loving fool, and it's a good example of timing and priority the frames here are consistently drawn
But their timing isn't giving a sense of weight to certain motions and actions
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
A simple halfway fix for this is to adjust the timings here
I've identified what I feel to be the main keyframes and have given them a little bit more time
Well the rest have been sped up a little bit
This next animation is by Beason is a bit more polished and finalized
this is another good example to talk about timing and
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
Drawn-out and kind of blended into one another they feel a little slow
And also remove a little bit of the impact from the jump which by comparison comes out quick
This doesn't feel as smooth as it could because some of the motions feel extra sluggish will others feel extra fast
It's kind of hard to pick out exactly what the keyframes are for this animation, but I think I've determined here
What would be essential here is the new timing that aims to put a bit more emphasis on the jump?
Here it is compared to the original
Well the keys don't show the hand out stretching stuff like that can be added as a secondary motion well in-betweening
Getting your timing a salvage with your keys first will control the overall flow of your animation
Working around these frames will allow you to slim down on your work and focus on ensuring each movement has the desired impact
Which efficiency is highly important for an animation like this especially considering it contains a hundred and twenty frames?
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
Things in pieces helps and also why playing a sketch. Also is really important
I have to report this live so that way can scrub through these frames manually, but here's the animation
As you can see it's a little bit rough, it's an attempt at making a dragon walk cycle
First off there are a few parts that are actually missing to this overall because it's a walk cycle
It's needs to go through four major steps
Contact down pass and up if you look at the front legs for instance
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
Then it goes down, and it passes through and then it goes up
Additionally this is also why it helps to look at things individually if you look at this back leg right here
just watch what happens, it's frozen here, and it's frozen there for like a full 1 2 3 4
3 frames and then suddenly it jumps forward
So looking at this frame by frame. You can really see that
This movement is very inconsistent. It's frozen here, and it skips and
That's frozen, and then it skips
So yeah, that's why it's very important to sketch out what you're doing first
because if you have a I can tell that this animation didn't have a
Sketch to kind of go off of initially to kind of help it stay
Evenly timed and to basically be planned out it was kind of just rigged straight from the get-go
Plan out your stuff first especially if doing it rigged and stuff you will thank yourself for it
There are a host of other tips in the light that I could give you or you could discover on your own when?
Practicing, but I feel that these seven tips are the most important and most essential. I guess technically it's eight, but whatever
In all honesty, maybe you were expecting some major secret technique to unlock the ability to make fluid animations
And maybe it's underwhelming that the secret smoother work is just like
Don't try to do everything at once or organize your workflow, or don't get a stiffy over animating on ones
But in all honesty these tips have a drastic impact and are often forgotten
Anyway as usual
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
Is linked in the description?
Just do note that it is 18 plus only as I do a lot of adult content in the mix
I'm planning to hopefully start doing tutorials like these again
Potentially some Toon Boom specific ones as well as art tutorials for programs like that studio pain
But that will all be for another time. I don't have anything more to say okay. Bye