Animation Exercises

#1: Ball bouncing in place

The most basic of the basic. Still took a bit over an hour, which made it very clear how rusty I had gotten.

#2: Ball bouncing across screen

Another pretty basic one, but these simple animations helped me get acquainted with Blender’s newly introduced ‘grease pencil’ (and it’s quirks).

#3: Brick falling from a shelf

Did this entirely on 2’s, making the impact when it hits the ground somewhat lacking. Some effects such as a camera shake or a dust cloud would have also helped sell it a bit more.

#4/5: Head turn

I got carried away with the details of this particular animation. The facial animation and a long anticipation turned this into a more difficult task than intended. I also had a tough time with with the proportions of the head as it rotated, especially the hat… simple as it may seem. I decided to roll exercise 4 & 5 into one as they basically the same.

6: Character blinking

Original intent was to make this a seamless loop of a kid trying not to fall asleep, which would include a lot of slow blinking. I cut it short though as it was taking longer than anticipated. Getting the left hand interacting well with the face taking the longest.

#7: Character thinking

The build up to the actual ‘thinking’ part of the animation went a little longer than it should have, as I really wanted the weight transfer and general body motion to look natural. I was happy enough with the details of the motion, but it lacked a little bit of overall appeal.

#8: Flour sack waving

This took a bit over an hour to create, and most of that was getting acquainted with using Krita for the first time. The simple form of the flour sack allowed me to focus on the more fundamental aspects of animation, which I found quite liberating.

#9: Flour sack jumping

I wanted to play around a little bit with some more stylized animation for this one, hence the use of smear frames. I didn’t get too crazy with it this time, but the punchiness of the result was encouraging.

#10: Flour Sack falling

I, for the umpteenth time, leapt into animating without planning out the keyframes properly. What started as a small pencil test turned into the animation itself, resulted in a massive amount of redrawn frames to try and fix the spacing. Even then I wasn’t entirely sold on how the flour sack loses it’s balance.

#11: Flour Sack kicking a ball

This was originally planned to have a more varied framerate to better optimize time spent animating, but I just couldn’t help myself. Almost all of it is 24 fps with large chunks of uninterrupted motion, comprising 215 frames total. The kick lacked the power I originally planned for, but otherwise it was an obvious improvement from my previous animations.

#1: Change in character emotion

I wanted to try my hand at some effects focused animation, and ended up rolling it into this exercises. The effects animation consumed most of my time, especially the tricky hair-to-fire transition. The motion of the fire was tricky to get right, and could definitely have benefited from some more inbetweens.

#2: Character jumping over a gap

Taking a bit more time in the planning and polishing stages gave me this. Better control of the number of frames allowed me to do a full color animated scene, including backgrounds and shading. The limited framerate also helped sell the comedy of the failed jump, and helped solidified that more frames doesn’t necessarily make a better animation.

Level 1