My next animation is following the Pose To Pose workflow of animation rather than just using straight ahead.
I had originally mentioned I wanted to hand draw my animations but because I joined the course a month late I had to think through my options of what would allow me to work more faster and efficiently since I had a week to get the remaining 6 animations done. I opted to change my mind and use 2D rigs in Toon Boom even if I had no idea how to use them. For this animation I used the Jammy Rig uploaded by Stylus Rumble. I had a look online at some references of a wave.
Before I even attempted to use the rig I just quickly sketched out the main poses I wanted to use to work out my lines of action and dynamic posing.
From here I opened up the Jammy rig and came across my first problem. Learning the correct order to use the different nodes and deformers in the rigs. I had previously learned rigging on Live2D in my undergrad which utalised what Toon Boom would call 'Master Controllers'. For rigs on Toon Boom I was understanding there were two types, basic cut-out rigs and cut-out rigs that utalised Master Controllers. The Jammy rig used a mixture of Master Controllers and Deformers on a cut-out so I felt a little bit at ease but still found it quite difficult to get the poses I wanted. Going from designinging, rigging and animating my own models to using a rig made by someone else and having to understand their rigging style was making my brain work on overdrive.
Despite this I tried my best attempt at making my keyframes (Above).
To get an idea of my breakdowns and inbetweens I tried following the animators survival kit where they use the arcs and guides (like I did in my bouncing ball), to get a sense of the timing and amount of frames I would need to make for my animation.
After I did these quick sketches I made my breakdowns for the motion.
I will admit, I was having a hard time trying to wrap my head around what the difference was in breakdowns and inbetweens. What makes a pose a breakdown compared to an inbetween? I had to go onto Youtube and view the pose-to-pose tutorial done by Draw with Jazza (or now Jazza). His tutorial was a good visual help for understanding my breakdowns better. I think I was taking pose-to-pose too literally and realised I work with a mixture of pose-to-pose and straight ahead with my animations.
After watching Jazzas video I went back to my animation and started to tweak my breakdowns and add inbetweens.
Once I was satisfied I added more inbetweens to the arms to create a dragging effect to the arms. By this stage I hadn't really considered my timing properly. I knew my animation was running too fast so I sat down and just started pulling my frames around till I thought the weight of the character was better displayed with the timing. I also asked some of my peers for some extra advice on where I could go from here. With their help I realised what was also bugging me was how stiff Jammy looked. I needed to do something with the other arm to offset the waving arm. I also wanted to move the little leaf on Jammys head too attempt further offsetting. I was running out of time for this animation so I made some quick changes and rendered out the final animation, below.
Reflections
Looking back on this animation theres quite a few little things I could've worked on more. I could of definately pushed the poses further but because Jammy was a giant squishy ball I felt a bit restricted and in my head of 'believability'. I could of squashed and stretched them a little more to get that squishy effect. The acting also could've been pushed to add more weight like making Jammy sway to the left or push back on the first wave more before settling on one foot. The animation was also a little too fast still and I could've held the wave for longer before Jammy comes back down. When Jammy comes back down I could've done more squash before coming back up too. I think I was too concered with learning how to use the software with this animation and trying to wrap my head around all the key-terms of animating again. When I did my keyposes I was doing them one after the other then just dragging them one by one to add inbetweens and breakdowns. I should've made my keyframes, breakdowns THEN moved them to the timing I wanted rather than just immediately jumping into the inbetweens THEN shuffling them around to get the timing. Overall, I think its a nice attempt but I know if I had more time I could've really pushed myself more and gotten a better sense of timing and weight.
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