My buddy Bryan Wynia is a character artist at Naughty Dog and he was kind enough to show my Squirrel Run to some of the animators in the office. The feedback I got was that I need to work on my principles more. So I’m doing just that. For the next few projects I’ll be working with mostly balls and tails and things. Just to get my principles down. So we start at the beginning, Squash and Stretch.
Paraphrased from “Illusion of Life” by Ollie and Frank:
This action gives the illusion of weight and volume to a character as it moves. Also squash and stretch is useful in animating dialogue and doing facial expressions. How extreme the use of squash and stretch is, depends on what is required in animating the scene. Usually it’s broader in a short style of picture and subtler in a feature. It is used in all forms of character animation from a bouncing ball to the body weight of a person walking. This is the most important element you will be required to master and will be used often.
My attempt here is to show weight from two different balls. One heavy, and one light. Its an exercise I’ve done before on paper but not very much in CG. So it was nice to try and use the different tangent weights to get the right amount of spring and such. Arcs, Timing, and a bit of Slow In and Out are all represented here, but I’ll also do other excersies that focus on those aspects more heavily.
