For the animators out there, beginners or not: I CHALLENGE YOU, YES YOU. I challenge you to animate a character. No transitions, no backgrounds, no over-detailed character design. Animate to something simple and predictable, like the song "Happy" or "levitating" or "Happier" or something, or nothing at all and just make the character /move/ . Make it nod its head, shrug its shoulders, blink its eyes, wave its hands, lean to the side, clap its hands, ANYTHING. Maybe it only ends up being five seconds or so, who knows? You pick. Just... give the character presence. Pack the character full with life. Try as hard as you can, *you can do it*. If you're struggling to animate characters, this sort of practice helps infinitely. [I guarantee that avoiding character animation won't get you anywhere with it.] Here are the tools in my animating arsenal, my "hints" if you will: 1) the more parts of the character that are moving at once, the more alive it feels (but don't overdo it). We as people are never really still, so your character shouldn't be either [unless for dramatic effect]. 2) make your character out of simple shapes. For the design, reshape only when necessary. You might want to use more shapes rather than reshape into something complicated for stuff like fingers or arms or bodies. This makes animating things sooo much easier. [stuff like hands and arms become 110% easier when you start using multiple basic shapes]. Simplicity doesn't always equate to bad animation. People like @ObviouslyNot and @asavage-code may not have the most complicated characters ever, but since they're absolutely gods at animating their animation is godly anyways [better, I'd say, than people who overcomplicate things before they know the skills]. 3) you don't need a mouth or eyebrows to be expressive. Think about how you move your head or hands when you're angry, when you're happy. Maybe act it out yourself. It pays off. 4) think about VOLUME. Like, arms don't flatten when they bend, they have real volume. [this project might help you visualize that idea: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/521844536/ ] 5) ¡¡¡ e a s i n g !!! Easing is really helpful to make smooth movements, especially with characters! Here's some extra information about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQBFsTqbKhY 6) Keyboard shortcuts: • Hold SHIFT while making a shape to make a perfect square or circle. THIS WILL REALLY HELP WITH making heads, eyes, and bodies. Infinitely useful. (depends on a character design, though.) • Ctrl+Z (or command+z, depending on computer) to undo and Ctrl/command + shift + Z to redo. [alternatively use the pre-made buttons] THIS WILL REALLY HELP WITH speed. You don't have to find the button and move your mouse every time. I'm just picky though haha- • Holding down shift when you are selecting vertexes to reshape OR when you are selecting shapes to move will allow you to select multiple shapes at once specifically. If you have a whole section selected and you want to deselect a shape, click on the shape you want deselected while holding shift. The rest of your shapes will stay selected. THIS WILL REALLY HELP WITH eye movement and reshaping the arm, if you're doing the nub version. • In select/reshape tabs, hold OPTION while clicking a shape to duplicate the shape. The duplicate of the shape will be in the same spot as and the layer above the shape you clicked. THIS WILL REALLY HELP WITH making a character design and just in general haha- it's a good thing to know. • Holding shift while moving things manually makes it move in a straight line. Holding shift while moving things with the arrow keys will move it faster/farther than the arrows usually do. THIS WILL REALLY HELP WITH moving anything smoothly/quickly across the screen • hold CTRL/COMMAND (depending on device) while scrolling to manually zoom in. THIS WILL REALLY HELP WITH getting small details, you can zoom in much faster than with the actually zoom buttons Feel free to try to add on to my own animation, I barely animated much :P And that's about it haha-
