Cartoon

    So, we have a wagon and the work on modeling, texturing, rig and a gypsy skin is finished. It is time to try it all in action, which means we will animate! 
    All of you have seen how expressive the characters of Western cartoon characters are. But not only the appearance of the hero affects this. At least half of the overall experience depends on the animation.
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    For the first tests, it was decided to reproduce the gait and the scene where the gypsy drags his wagon. In order to understand how our hero should move, we decided to first shoot live people who do these actions on video. Then the animator had to transfer the actions of a person to our gypsy. This is done as follows: with the help of the control elements, which includes the character’s rig, our hero is put into key positions, and the computer itself calculates the intermediate poses, more precisely the coordinates of the points in the space between the start and end keys (key poses).
    So, for example, for Gojo to raise his hand, it is not necessary to set the keys in each frame, but it is enough to indicate only the start and end points of the animation. This property of computer animation greatly facilitates the work in comparison with classical, i.e. hand-drawn animation.
    Here is the first animation ready ( watch the video ) : the gypsy began to move, but something in his movements looked artificial and lifeless. He was more like a puppet than a cartoon hero. After analyzing the situation, we realized that this happened due to our mistake. We tried to convey the movements of a real person to a cartoon hero, and this, it turns out, was impossible to do. I had to develop character animation on paper: draw phases of movement, i.e. giving cartoonishness.
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     After the phasing was ready and given to the animator (i.e. drawing intermediate frames between the main poses of the character), the animator adjusted the character to the phases drawn by the artist using the control elements of the rig. The result of the work has significantly changed. After all, in fact, the general principles of computer animation are practically no different from the classical. With their help, you can easily revive the hero’s movements, make them more natural and, accordingly, more disposable and sympathetic.
    One of these principles is compression and tension. Any animate, and inanimate object, when moving is stretched or compressed, for example, like a ball during flight and collision with any obstacle. The main condition of this postulate is to preserve the volume of the object, i.e. if compression occurs somewhere, then it must necessarily be compensated by stretching.

     
    Another important principle is preparation or anticipation. Each action is preceded by a preemptive action, for example, before a throw a person must first swing or crouch before a jump. This principle is used everywhere, for example, before turning the head, the character must first look in the direction of rotation, etc. 
     Almost always, secondary movements should be added to the main animation: for example, blinking, raising and lowering the chest to show the character’s breathing. The dangling lantern or teapot on the cart gives vivacity and naturalness to the animation. 

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    The list of animation principles described above is far from complete. In the following entries on our blog, we will try to supplement it and talk more about computer animation.
    Cartoon website "Gypsy"

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