Salty's Animation Bootcamp - Principles of Construction and Deconstruction (Patreon)

  The best place to start to learn animating, it has occurred to me, is to start animating basic shapes. There are a few reasons as to why I think that. 

The primary reason is that it's simple. When you have something simple, you can animate it easily. When you have complex shapes, you begin run into consistency issues that bleed through your animation. Easy to animate shapes just come out looking better, partly because you make less mistakes when drawing them.

Here are a few that you can practice drawing. The shapes I find most useful are squares and rectangles, so I'd like to focus on them the most.

 These were all drawn in a perspective which isn't too realistic. For simplicity's sake I drew all the shapes on parallel x, y, and z planes.

We can try now to place them in a one point perspective, perhaps the simplest of the perspectives to execute. It's called a one point perspective because all of the lines on the axis of depth (lets call it 'Z axis') converge to a point which I have circled in red.

I drew the Z axis lines in red to show that they indeed converge to a point.

OK! So you learned how to draw a square in a perspective, great! Who cares, right?

Well, here comes the second reason as to why I think starting with primitive shapes is the best route to take when learning animation.

You can fit a head in a square. 

You can fit a hand in a rectangle. 

I would even go as far to say as you can fit any complex shape in a simpler one. Let's start by constructing a head.

Note: If you feel like you are a good enough artist to make your own head, feel free to draw it and deconstruct it using the following technique.

start with two squares and split them in half.

This part is open to interpretation as to how you want a simplified head to look. Pick something that you feel comfortable redrawing in a cube. I settled on the following shape with clear markings as to where the nose, eyes, and mouth are.

Here's a generic anime boy. This is the template that we will use later when we need to reconstruct our head.

Cleaned it up to show no traces of the primitive shapes.

Lets get to Animating!

Here are three frames of a cube which have three different orientations. I think they are on 6's, which is about 1/4th of a second for each frame. The standard is 24 fps when doing animations, but for our purposes it doesn't really matter. I'm not sure what the perspective here was, it looks like it was a no-point perspective like the first drawing of the tutorial. Even though the cubes were done half-assed and not entirely perfect, you'll see how powerful this method when it comes to consistency.

Let's now fill in the intermediate shape that we settled on inside each of the three cubes conforming to the boundaries of the cubes.

Lastly lets "tie-down" the intermediate head to our final character model. This part certainly takes some time to get right, especially if you are a novice artist. Getting to know how the facial features manifest themselves on a human head is required for you to successfully render a believable head. Keep referring back to your initial guidelines that you made earlier.

Cleaned up and now we a finished head with no traces of the primitive shapes that we started with.

Making animations more fluid requires inbetweening. A process in which you get two key-frames and try to fill in what the shapes do "in between" each key. Above are the two heads onion-skinned/backlit for us to draw the new inbetween frame. You can use our method of construction to do the inbetweens, but I opted for an easier solution.

I moved both keys on top of each other and averaged out the lines.

Here's the result. Sometimes this method will give you results that are unsatisfactory, in which you would need to go back and try to reconstruct the head with your guidelines from the primitive shapes.

The result of the inbetweening is a smoother head movement. You have to make a personal choice of how you want your animation to look and feel, part of that is picking your timing and your spacing. We'll touch on that later, but if you feel the need to give it one more iteration of inbetweening, feel free.

To be continued in part 2...

Not sure how Patreon's formatting will treat this, but lets hope for the best.