So far, we have learned about pose-to-pose and straight ahead animation, and how to work with each method to produce a 2D animation. However, there is a way to combine both and potentially speed up the process and/or have more control over what is drawn.
The Ideal Animation Workflow:
A way to blend pose-to-pose and straight ahead.
I was curious to try this method out, since I had previously thought about blending After Effects and Animate animation together, but never using AE as a reference. Evidently, it is the ideal animation workflow, because it captures and fits into each main stage of the design and work process, pre-production, production and post-production.
Animate: Reference, Expression and Curves Demo
In After Effects, import a character reference and begin blocking them out on different layers. Create a shape for the body, head, arms, legs and other parts that might be useful to animate, keeping each shape a separate colour and on a separate layer. This is so that everything is clear and visible, even if two parts are connecting.
Name the layers as well, for organisation and easier animation later on.
After completely blocking out the character, except perhaps for small details like eyes and patterns, go back through each created shape and move the anchor points to where that part of the body would naturally rotate. For example, the head moves and bends at the neck, so you would move the anchor point towards the bottom, where the neck attaches to the head.
Unfortunately, I didn’t bring in my character model sheet for this lesson. At the time, it was still unfinished and I hadn’t started the blog post for it yet, so I had to use a different character. Rather than spending a while looking for a suitable character reference, I quickly grabbed the Garfield model sheet that was used as an example for the previous lesson and used it as a base.
This is the image that I imported into After Effects. Following the demo and the notes that I took, I started on the second stage of the ‘ideal animation workflow’, which was creating a simplified version of the character.
Blocking out Garfield was simple enough since he has very clear shapes in his main build – mostly circles, except that I kept accidentally making shapes that were too big, such as the legs and feet together instead of separately. I had to go back a few times and redraw the shapes on different layers, using the pen tool, and it cost me quite a bit of time, unfortunately. Thankfully, we weren’t asked to do the details and I could instead focus on making simple shapes so it sped the process along quite a bit.
Because of those setbacks though, I didn’t have enough time to create a good animation with the blocked out character and had to go with something simple and quick, such as making the head pop off and go back down, which is what I did.
I really wish I could have added some movement to the legs and arms too, but I had to exit the room and hastily save my work. What I would do differently if I could go back is not to name the layers. I know that we were instructed to do this and that it is beneficial to the organisation aspect of the animation, but with the number of shape layers I had, the task took way too much of my time. Time, that I could have used to make a more interesting animation. I also forgot to add the loop out the expression to the animation, but I am not too worried about this since I can make it loopable in Photoshop later on. Overall, I am not too pleased with the final work in this lesson, and I am hoping that I can find the time to attempt this again with my own character, where I could go back through and carefully follow the process, not missing out on certain aspects and not making small mistakes that slow me down.