Computer Animation

Lecture 3

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 Principles of animation
(cont.)

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Designing aesthetically pleasing actions.
 Appeal.  Solid drawing

 Follow through/Overlapping action

 Appeal, solid drawing, and follow

through/overlapping action are principles that address
the aesthetic design of an action or action sequence.
 Squash and stretch can also be used in this regard.
Secondary actions and timing considerations also play
a role in designing pleasing motion.

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  Appeal
 To keep the audience’s
attention, the animator needs
to make it enjoyable to watch
(appeal).
 Artists use the Appeal
principle to create interesting
‫ مث ير لالهتم ام‬characters that
appeal to the audience.
 Appealing animation doesn't
mean making everything
fluffy ‫ رقي ق‬and cute ‫ لطي ف‬but
creating a clear visual design
that will capture the
audience's interest.
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 Solid drawing

 Solid drawing is used to

give characters and
objects more weight and
volume, making them
look more 3D and
avoids wooden, flat
looking characters.

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 Follow through/overlapping
 Follow Through and Overlapping Action refers to two closely
related techniques which help to render movement more
realistically and help to give the impression that characters
follow the laws of physics, including the principle of inertia.
 Follow Through is the idea that loosely connected parts of a
body or object will continue moving after the character has
stopped.
 Overlapping action is a similar idea in that it describes how
different parts of a body or object tend to move at different
rates.
 In addition, actions should flow into one another (follow
through/overlapping action) to make the entire shot appear to
continually evolve instead of looking like disjointed
movements.
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Effectively presenting action

Exaggeration. Anticipation.
Staging. Timing.
 Anticipation and staging concern how an action is
presented to the audience.
 Timing is also involved in effective presentation to
the extent that an action has to be given the
appropriate duration for the intended effect to reach
the audience.
 Secondary action can also be used to create an
effective presentation of an action.
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 Exaggeration
 Exaggeration is used to push movements further,
adding more appeal to an action, and should always be
implemented to some degree.
 Exaggeration can be incorporated with a little more
restraint ‫ضبط النفس‬/‫ سيطرة‬for more realistic actions.
 You can still use exaggeration to make a more readable
or fun movement while still staying true to reality.
 Often the animator needs to employ exaggeration so a
motion cannot be missed or so it makes a point.

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 Anticipation
 Anticipation is the
preparation for the action.
 Anticipation dictates ‫تملي‬
that an upcoming action is
set up so that the audience
knows it (or something)
is coming.
 An action occurs in three
parts: the preparation for
the action, the action
itself, and the termination
of the action.
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 Staging

 Staging presenting an action so that it is not missed

by the audience.
 Good staging within an animation should allow the
audience’s eye to be clearly guided to specific
aspects within a scene. This should make the
important actions easily detected and understood.
 Poor staging would allow the audience’s attention to
be captured by something other than the primary
focus in the scene.

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 Production technique
 There are two different methods used in the
production of animation:
 Straight ahead.

 Pose to pose.

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 Straight ahead

 Straight ahead refers to a

method that uses only the
first key pose of a character,
and then continues drawing
the character to create the
desired motion.
 Physically based animation
could be considered a form
of straight ahead
processing.

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  Pose to pose
 Pose to pose is a term used for creating key poses for characters
and then inbetweening them in intermediate frames to make the
character appear to move from one pose to the next.
 Pose-to-pose is used in traditional animation as well as
computer-based 3D animation.
 Pose to pose, an approach the computer is particularly good
at.

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