this is my first serious attempt at any sort of animation. not really any prior knowledge besides theoretical speculation, there are surely much better techniques/methods to accomplish what i stumbled through, but every tutorial/instructional vid i found was overproduced clickbait bullshit, so i just winged it.
making new cels is simple enough, but when you need to duplicate an older cel & move it, you cant just drag it. clipstudio animation workspace requires you manually rename the layer. you decide on the name by referencing the existing name of an empty cel you must create on the timeline ahead of time. once that empty cel has been created, you delete it, then rename your duplicated layer to whatever that deleted cel was named, then that renamed layer will become that deleted cel's replacement, automatically taking its' place on the timeline.
the deceitful alternative to this is using Alt to drag the frame to be copied & dragging to its additional placement. however this method is not a seperate duplicate, that is, a copy made with Alt cannot be edited independently of its parent frame. any edit done to any of the "alt-drag" copies will be synchronized across each parent/child frame. this may have useful applications, but for the purpose of duplicating for slightly changing or adjusting the child frame, the renaming method is more effective.
when doing normal illustration, i usually never use my keyboard or any external shortcut button device, i program the shortcut buttons i need to the buttons on the monitor tablet i draw on.
doing animation, i now need to keep the numpad handy at least while doing the initial roughs.
animation folders are also an interesting tool, each animation folder will only let you edit x1 cel per frame, so overlapping items/characters should be seperated into their own animation folders to make editing way easier. out of habit i drew the entire first frame on x1 layer, then had to seperate them later into: hair, hand, bg 1, bg 2 etc.
once you have existing drawn cels, you actually can drag those around to adjust the speed of any given motions or overall playback speed.
frustratingly, theres apparently no way to adjust the playback to simply review your work in slow motion. then if you arrange your timeline to play slower for this purpose, its not a simple button press to speed it back up to normal, so basically you are stuck reviewing your animation at regular speed.
My first inking attempt failed because i drew every frame, which looks jittery & unnatural. i learned it was better to duplicate then modify consecutive frames.
still jittery...
but i feel better about this version, & i learned alot.
i learned that bad frames & good timing can look better than good frames & bad timing.
timing placement is not the same as frame timing. even if you plan to draw lets say 5 particular frames, the perceived time of the occurrence of each frame can change drastically by separating or clustering those same frames either intentionally or unintentionally, so then should be considered carefully during the storyboard phase or notated in advance.
i really spent alot of time adjusting frame placement on the timeline for different movement speeds.
also, the idea that all the items with movement should not be synchronized, that is, offsetting frames so that some frames reach a "hold" or resting position while others move, for example: allowing the breath action to finish just after the blink action begins instead of exactly where they end/begin respectively.
theres another theory about rocking motion or bouncing motion that i incorporated into the head. its something i had read about in Timing for Animation by harold whitaker & john halas that basically talks about how an object rooted in some way that is in motion will have an opposite return motion even if almost imperceptible or may have several rebounds in both or more directions depending on the strength of the force influencing the motion & the weight of the object & manner of rooting or anchoring.
i basically noticed the head looked odd taking a bite & coming to a hard stop, so i added a bit of bobbing. it also suggests a swallowing action.
lastly, regarding gif loop animations, i found an elegant solution to the hurdle of matching the last frame to 1st frame with onion skin. simply copying the 1st frame & placing it at the end of the timeline provides you with the next onion skin required to match for a loop. you also need to adjust for this timing by shifting all other frames the same fraction of time earlier to maintain mechanical precision. since i was animating natural motions, i did not feel the need to adjust too precisely for this.
edit: i guess you could also duplicate the first frame after the end of the timeline for the same effect & avoid other accompanying edits.
No comments:
Post a Comment