August Update: Unrusting for Animations

Decided to do a thing to start unrusting for any animation I plan to do for the month! Just went through the motions with no real planning in this one, but I do think I finally have a brush proper for weighted lines at the very least so there's that!

These are done with Clip Studio Paint EX with binary brushes, or [pixel/dot-precise brushes with no anti-aliasing].

Let's go over the versions real quick (The post versions are just basically quick access versions)

6 FPS Version: The "basics"

It's a doozy because every single error can stand out at such low speeds. When animating on the fly I just go and draw on "fours" on a 24 FPS timeline. 

6 FPS is what i like to call the "Pose/Basic FPS" since usually, the human brain can interpret as much as 6 distinct poses in a second. Chances are, if you see me do an animation in this frame rate, there's a real chance I am elaborating on the early stages of a sakuga*-style animation.

Not really much to this one other than to enforce at least some decency to the exercise.

What is Sakuga?

[According to liveabout.com] Sakuga (作画) (lit., "drawing pictures") is a term used in anime to describe moments in a show or movie when the quality of the animation improves drastically, typically for the sake of making a dramatic point or enlivening the action.

For the mere purposes of this blog, we will refer to any frame-heavy animation with little to no shortcuts as "sakuga animation".

12 FPS Version:  The standard one

This is more or less where I make the animation flow to see if it works.  I usually animate in 12 FPS proper, which is fairly normal. This is about a good way to smooth out  the aforementioned "basics/pose" frames. 

Most typical frame-by-frame animation in anime are drawn in this frame rate (thus the header's name). It is a pretty good speed for pretty much about most things in non-interactive animation.

(Purely) 24 FPS: Smooth Moves

NOTE: For the purpose of this exercise, I decided to be superfluous for training purposes, adding more frames than it is practically necessary. This would not fly in proper animations.

This is pretty much the speed companies like Disney is known for, but it not uncommon for anime to suddenly bump up to such speed for the really fast animations.

As you can probably already tell, however, it is very easy to overdo it, and it is sometimes just plain unnecessary to draw 24 frames a second all the time. Quite frankly pretty darn expensive too.

There's usually a misconception that Sakugas are always at 24 FPS, when that's not necessarily true. However, more often than not, this frame rate is usually preserved for them. Most computer-tweened animations, as well, rely on this frame rate.

 Pretty impressed with the brush consistency; it's definitely a keeper. Let's adjust the quirks.

Final Adjustments

I decided to leave out some frames to properly ease out the last bit of the animation. It is pretty much a good idea to plan things out accordingly so that you have a proper balanace between frames and their timing.

Not every frame has to have a consistent amount of time. One of the big problems I keep finding in most animations, even in the industry, is the insistence that all frames are spaced out evenly.

This might work with some animations, sure, but sometimes I feel like the results are just mechanical at best, and unnatural at worst.  It might seem like an extra step that isn't necessary, but it is the ONE thing that truly can make an okay animation into a fantastic one. 

 In my cases, I finalize the animations proper by expanding into a 24 FPS timeline, which gives me enough room to play with the timing of the frames. 

While this sounds ungodly difficult or tedious, sometimes it's just a matter of simply removing some frames. That's pretty much all I did with this ball exercise.

Remember, just a small bit of quality checking and tweaking can go a long way~

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That is all for this update, I hope in some way this was oddly educational even if it was quite a read. Hopefully soon enough, I will have other samples as well for patrons and non-patrons, so stay tuned!