Ah yes, the reality of juggling continuing education and work. Inevitably there comes a time when you have to play catch-up. Well, that’s me today. I fell a little behind on my course work last week so last Friday’s weekly wrap is coming to you on a Monday instead. But hey, what better way to start your work week than with some new ani-MON-tion insight, am I right?
Last week was all about bounces and follow throughs, and honestly, both principles were very similar to oscillations and decay curves. I can now see a pattern forming—a layering of animation principles if you will—and everything is finally starting to make sense. Even the concept of weight is becoming more and more clear. Remember how important it was to establish the weight of an animated object a few weeks ago? Well last week we took that question one step further and added a few more questions to our animation arsenal, including “what is the surface made out of that the object is colliding with?” and “what are the forces acting on this object?” Both very important questions on how to animate an object’s interaction with another object, and specifically, how to animate a bounce.
Let’s use a ball bounce as an example and start by talking about a ball’s weight. A light ball, something like a golf ball, when dropped on a hard wood floor will transfer some of its energy to the floor and use the remaining energy to bounce back up. Each consecutive bounce will follow the laws of physics and use whatever remaining energy is available to continue bouncing until it ultimately rolls to a stop. Now take a heavier ball, something like a bowling ball, and drop it on a hard wood floor. What happens? It bounces, but it bounces significantly less, right? That’s because more energy is transferred to the hardwood floor from the bowling ball than the golf ball and thus creating less bounces. But now consider both the golf ball and the bowling ball bouncing on a carpeted floor. What does that look like? Since there’s more friction involved, both balls have even less energy to use which means fewer bounces overall. Sure the golf ball will still bounce more than the bowling ball will, but the golf ball will bounce significantly less than it did on the hard wood floor because of this added force. Gravity, inertia and friction are just a few of the forces that make animations feel real, and when we mimic that realism we give our animations that correct feeling.
Follow through was the second principle we learned about last week, and is another way to add a sense of realism to any animation. Follow through, simply put, is overlapping motion. It’s when part of an object stops and the rest of the object settles into place relative to its center mass (this video by Alan Becker is incredibly helpful). You can find examples of follow through in everyday life—a person walking and swinging their arms, coming to a sudden stop while driving while your body continues to move forward, and waving a fly swatter in the air and having the top of it settle into place. Much like the other principles we’ve talked about over the past few weeks, the exaggeration of your follow through will affect the character of your animation. And much like bounce, the weight of an object will determine how much follow through it will have too.
Below is one of the assignments from last week involving follow through. The concept was based on a pool noodle, and although my noodles aren’t incredibly bendy, there is some follow through in their movement. There’s still so much to practice and learn, and I plan to take the lessons from last week and apply them to this week’s assignments as we begin to explore squash and stretch. To be continued!
