[26/2/10] The Importance of Technique

Posts : 2822 Joined : 2010-02-16

The first thing I'd recommend to a fullbody animator is to practice keying.

That is, to practice drawing the first and last images of a single motion then proceed to fill the drawings in between those.
When you hone this technique, you'll break out of a nasty resizing habit shown in frame by frame animating.
It's important to be skillful at both methods, but using them both is even more important.

To illustrate this point, here's me using the FBF [frame by frame] method to animate the same shape for 25 frames [1 second long animation in this case].
The rule was to only see the first previous frame, and draw exactly what you see there, no matter how faulty the lines are, you have to copy it as well as you can. Here's the result.

FBF Method
[26/2/10] The Importance of Technique 2ujjvhz

[26/2/10] The Importance of Technique 2ujjvhz

This works like a ballistics test, too. It's a good measurement of your level of consistency. I recommend it.

Now, using the same amount of focus and skill, I did this over again using the keying method, drawing while looking at the previous and next frames at once.

Keying Method
[26/2/10] The Importance of Technique M8ohsh

[26/2/10] The Importance of Technique M8ohsh

Undeniably, you can conclude from this little experiment that the keying technique is an essential one to take advantage of.

So get in the habit, artists!

PS-
I'm not saying get rid of FBF style. You should never stop developing your skill in the FBF technique, since it relies completely on your visual intelligence, so it's good practice to use it. But when you're making a serious, well-done animation, use the skill you've developed FBF with the skill you've developed in Keying, to combine the two in harmony and pull of very dynamic movements in the animation.

Conclusion: Use your ability to animate frame by frame to amplify your basic key-pose style animation.

Guest

Great tutorial

Posts : 32 Joined : 2010-04-11

now... i understand... lol you are a pretty great teacher O_O and the proof is undeniable...

Posts : 18 Joined : 2011-08-14

that could be useful !

Posts : 23 Joined : 2010-06-03

Both have their advantages and disadvantages... although you have consistency with this method, you usually lose flow in movement as well. So being good at both would be pretty cool beans.

Subject: Re: [26/2/10] The Importance of Technique