Week 4: Jumps! Digging into Secondary Action

Cycle of the week:  Jumps!

Click to view the incredible video of a fox hunting through snow

We'll take a look at some different styles of jumping, leaping, hopping, bounding characters and study live action for inspiration, and analyze the way secondary and overlapping action works.

Showing the effort characters take to move their own weight is paramount to creating believable animation of any style.

It's one thing to make the up and down motion read as 'heavy' and affected by gravity. It's quite another to master the mechanics of looping overlapping/secondary action with the character's arms, legs, and .. tail!

If ever the devil were in any details.. it's animating secondary on a looping action!

Week 4: Luxo Jump, continued

  "Secret of Nimh" by Don Bluth, master of secondary action

We've covered a lot of the Principles of Animation so far, but there's still a lot to cover in terms of secondary & overlapping action.  The Luxo character has only its head and base to drag and settle, so it's important to use them well to show gravity's effects.

Creating Image Planes From Video Reference

Thanks to both my classes for shooting some fantastic video reference in class!!

Click here to see one of you as a lamp.

It's relatively easy to bring this footage into your animation files. You can easily follow the frame-by-frame reference, ie, rotoscope, but you'll quickly see that with just a little exaggeration you can make your animation even better, heavier, and snappier than the live action footage.

While I've worked on many projects that used live action reference, this was my first experiment animating directly over live action footage in my viewport. I spent about 5 minutes on this test & I simply could not believe how easy and quick it was to get the keys down & tweak it to bring out the emphasis I wanted.

So from now on, I'll be expecting even GREATER animation from all of you, hehe..

Check out the video to see how I turned one of you into a lamp...

Here are the instructions on how to view an image sequence in your viewport: