Doc:Tutorials/Animation/BSoD/Principles of Animation/Principles/Solid Drawing

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Blender Summer of Documentation: Contents | Manual | Blender Version 2.41

[edit] Introduction

[edit] What

Solid drawings are those with interesting, well proportioned shapes and good sense of weight and volume. Just as there are principles of animation, drawing also has its own, taught at drawing art schools and books.

At the end of the silent era, beginning of the Golden Age, there came a time when animators had to be great draftsmen, able to draw every kind of pose from any needed angle and fast. So they had to learn and practice much more, which included having art classes. But there were many challenges, the old tricks for shadows and texture didn't work in cel animation and they had to discover their own ones.

[edit] Why

Why study this principle of traditional, drawn animation, when Blender is about modelling and rendering? After all, professional animators don't even have to be great at modelling, there are other artists to take care of that.

Simple. Not only modelling, but also lighting, texture, effects, composition and – specially relevant here – posing can benefit tremendously from basic knowledge about drawing principles.

The old advices given to animators back in the 1930's are just as relevant today, for any animation medium: are your drawings tridimensional, solid, interesting? Do they have weight, deepness and balance?

Let's update this to 3D CG:

Are your poses tridimensional, solid, interesting? Do they have weight, deepness and balance? What about your animation as a whole?

[edit] How

[edit] Weight

When characters make some effort, the animator needs to clearly show with posing that they seem to feel it, not only with facial expressions, but possibly with the whole pose, depending on the difficulty of the task.

A character lifting something heavy with one arm, for instance, must be posed counterbalancing to the lighter side to reflect the struggle.

[edit] Silhouettes

What makes a pose interesting? A good silhouette has a lot to do with it, for sure. And what makes an interesting silhouette?

Clarity

To clearly show an action we can and in general should use silhouettes that communicate well to the audience. That is part of good Staging. For example, placing the camera behind one of the characters in a fight is not the best way to show what is going on, we won't see the punches and kicks and whatever.

Deepness

Silhouettes should have a tridimensional quality. This involves proper posing and camera placement.

The sin

Avoid “twins.”

They are bad. Unless you want what they happily give: artificiality, two-dimensionality. Traditional animators learned to have great care in dealing with this, because it seems trivial, but once and again they would find twins in their drawings. Pay special attention to facial expression, arms, hands and feet. A tilted head can also help against twins, e.g. with the ears.

[edit] Physics

More...

[edit] Story Development

More...

[edit] Notes

[edit] Contrapposto

... or “Learning with the classical Greeks how to create interesting and realistic poses”.

A HyperGraph character animation article.

[edit] Posing

Fast: mention another activity where posing is crucial... too slow: photographing people. There are guides explaining about good poses for advertisements and so on.

Summer of documentation 2006 -- Willian 07:20, 5 July 2006 (CEST)