Animating a Cut Out Character

Now that you have added your final Rig to the Harmony Premium Library, you can now bring that rig into another new Harmony scene file.

This is how to set up and animate a Walk Cycle.

You will be animating everything as key poses and creating Key frames. This is known as pose to pose animation. The rig set up allows you to select the body part, say the Right Arm and then click on Deformation chain button to yurn on the bone controls for the right arm. Rotate the bones, Harmony automatically creates the key frames. 

DO NOT ROTATE THE BODY PART AND THEN THE BONES. Doing this throws the bone chain outside and away from the body part it is controlling. See the photos below and remember Harmony will be creating the inbetweens for you, but its up to you to set the key poses and make sure the animation working correctly.

To do a walk cycle, you need these key positions for each step. Below shows only one leg stepping forward as the other foot is going back. This is only the first step of a complete stride. (examples from Richard Williams Animator's Survival Kit (go buy your own)

Below is a timing chart showing the same animation with different timing, giving a cartoony tempo or a more realistic pace.

You should go with the On 16's chart. The first Contact pose is Key .#1, Key # 17 is the opposite of Key #1. Key # 9 is the Pass Position, showing how the back leg comes forward.

Key #1 + Key #9 = Key #5 The leg bends to take the weight making this the Lowest position of your step. Key # 9 + Key # 17 = Key #13 The leg and body's highest position of the step.

You create these 5 poses and then do the same for the other leg stepping forward and you should have the following Keys on the same frames numbers.
                       inbs
First Step K1   - - - K5  - - - K9   - - - K13 - - - K17 
2nd Step  k17  - - - k21 - - - k25 - - - k29  - - - (k33)K1 link up

Turn on the Transform tool and the Animate button first and then select the body part you want to change first. Then turn on the Deformation change button to see the bone chain and rotate the bone. As you do this, Harmony places a key frame on each bone you move. You can also select KF+ to add a keyframe down the entire frame. You can start with the body and legs, position Key #1 on frame #1.

Keep All the Keys on the same Key frames

        Contact       down      Pass        Up        Contact

First Step K1   - - - K5  - - - K9   - - - K13 - - - K17 

2nd Step  k17  - - - k21 - - - k25 - - - k29  - - - (k33)K1 link up

                        inbs       inbs      inbs       inbs
By selecting the Master layer, this selects the entire rig. You can use this to create the up and down motion throughout the 2 steps. Once the body is working, move onto keying the legs, then the arms, then hands.

Always click on the time line in the Master rig layer and then click on the body part you want to select, 

then click on the Deformation change button next to the Deformation tools.

The bone chain appears. Click on the bone then rotate it into position. 

Make sure you pose all the parts on the same key frame. Harmony automatically sets keys frames on the bones you rotate, but you have to key the Master rig layer yourself. 

The Master Rig will move the entire rig, this will help when making Key #5 & #21: the down positions and Key # 13 & #29: the up positions. When you move the Master Rig, use the arrows keys to move it up or down and then adjust the legs and feet. If you click on the Master rig, moving it up or down using the mouse, you will add more side to side motion as well.

Always remember to use your Onion Skin tool to see how the spacing for arms or legs is working. Any motion where the leg's foot moves and then slows down or pauses for several frames and then speeds up.This shows bad spacing and you will need to adjust your leg so its always moving.

Motion and Stop Motion Keys. 

Stop Motion Keys: Are useful for setting up a pose to pose test. Just showing the key poses without the inbetweens added.

Motion Keys: Show the inbetween frames in between the two key poses. 

Here is a good example of what both Motion keys look like in action. The back leg, the one away from us is set on Stop Motion keys.

To change the Stop Motion to Motion keys, go to Animation tab on the top in Harmony and click off Stop-Motion Keys and click Animate on top.

To learn about blocking out your scene, click this link.

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Organizing your Animation work: Part 1

Ok, recently, I was going over how to do a Pose Test, having my students figure out their scenes by filling out X Sheets and adding timing charts to their animation Key drawings. Then putting all this information into a Scene Folder as if they were handing off their rough animation scenes to someone else to inbetween and clean up.

I talked about the process of pose to pose animation, but unless you actually prepare a Scene folder for yourself, its all just words in the air. And so, when I got all the scene folders back from my students, I could see that I needed to go over this process by reviewing the process in a little more detail.

Learning drawing animation takes time, patience and practice as well as learning from ones mistakes. And we work towards learning the animation principles to create a story that our audience will eventually see. However, there is another part of the animation process that Animators must learn in order to keep the process organized and moving toward to the final product.

This production work is the behind the scenes stuff that your audience will not see or even care about. The kind of stuff, 2D animation studios invented long ago to keep the work moving forward and under control as it went through the different production stages of Layout, Rough Animation, Clean Up and finally as the final Render. 

Here are a few things that you can do to keep the 2D Animation production processes alive and well. 

The Pose Test

As simple as this sounds, its very important that every Animator label their drawings in the same way to help keep everything consistent. Often Animators will do their rough posing to figure out the motion in the scene, jot down drawing numbers in the corner and then shoot a pose test to figure out the best timing. 

Shooting the Keys along with the missing inbetweens will show the Key poses popping from one pose to the next. This is a preview to the final action and an experienced Animator can tell how the scene will look once all the missing inbetweens have been added later.

The Animator will show his work to the Director who may have him revise something or approve it. The goal is to keep the Animator working on the animation as quickly as possible and the Animator's assistant is to help refine the Animator's roughs and figure out the Inbetweens. The Assistant will also fix up the drawing numbering, refine the timing charts and keep the character(s) on model throughout the scene.

Labelling Drawings

Let's start with a sheet of animation bond. After you have worked out some Key poses on several sheets, all Keys need to be circled to show they are the Key poses and not Breakdowns or the Inbetween drawings. Breakdowns should be underlined and you don't have to do anything to the Inbetweens.

As a team of 2D artists, everyone must keep their characters looking as if one person has drawn them, this is known keeping the drawings "on model", something that doesn't happen in 3D animation.

Here's a Milt Kalh drawing. You can see he has a timing chart in the upper right and a # 4 in the lower right corner. 

This is the animator's key frame which has been cleaned up by an assistant animator, notice cross register lines and the line across the bottom of the drawing. This might be the camera framing.

All animation drawings must be labeled with a letter and a number. So, if you draw a glass of water in your scene, don't write it as Glassofwater 1, rather shorten it a one letter; G1.
Sometimes you might have a scene that has a series of G drawings for other objects or the first letter of character's name in the scene. If you have a character named Gary who has to pick up a Glass of water which sits on a Glass table, you need to relabel each layer with a   second letter to show the difference, so G for Gary, W for Glass of water and T for Table.

Again as I write this, I think, isn't this obvious. Do I have to really write all this out? But as an animation instructor, I want my students to learn the right way to produce their animation and learn the process that makes sense. 

I've noticed that students will label their drawings as tiny as possible, some in the lower right hand corner of the paper as requested. But others, will lable in the lower left, upper right or upper left hand corner of the paper as well. If it was possible, they would label the edges of their paper.  

Back when the world was black and white, the drawings were labelled in the lower right for the cameraman see what drawings he was going to shoot on his Oxberry animation stand.
All the drawings were labelled the same to allow the cameraman to shoot them quickly and accurately in a dark room, under two hot movie lights aimed at the artwork below.
 
ALL DRAWINGS, even its only one, MUST BE LABELED IN THE LOWER RIGHT HAND CORNER OF THE PAPER. Big enough to view from a distance. Many students think this info will be seen on screen and either draw it very lightly or very, very small. These same students are in shock when it comes to drawing timing charts on their Keys.

Timing Charts

Timing Charts are the Animator's notes to the Inbetweener explaining how the inbetween drawings should be drawn from the Keys. Each Key has a timing chart on it with that Key number circled on top of the chart. Here are a few examples of the various timing charts and what they do.

The timing chart below shows the inbetween action as an "Ease In " or slowing down to stop at B9.

Here are two Timing charts, the first shows an "Ease Out" where B9's inbetweens are speeding up as it gets to B13. The second chart shows "Constant Motion" of B9 moving into B 25 position. Below are Keys B13 and B25. X1 is the arms holding the bat on a separate layer.

Notice the T/B B1 beside the character's left foot. This indicates a "Trace Back" where the assistant animator needs to redraw that foot exactly, so it doesn't slide around during the scene. Little notations like this are all over an Animator's drawings and are removed during the cleanup process.

Timing Charts need to make sense and are not sloppy.





But Wait, there's more!
Visit: Organizing your Animation work: Part 2!


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