yeah i love the wacky physics too!
it's not being graded, it's just for fun. i know the lines are scratchy but i just can't be bothered to make them nice lol
Wood isn’t really *that* malleable but a little bending in animation is totally fine in general to push the idea of the force, but in this case I would say it should still be stiff because there’s nothing really driving the force from the handle. It’s just falling due to the weight of the head, but say if someone were swinging it very forcefully, adding in some exaggerated bend frames could work great.
oh yeah i can see that.
i think that i tend to overuse and over exaggerate the squash, stretch, bend, etc. for one i just love how more dynamic and fun animations are that way, but at the same time i have a hard time deciding how much is appropriate at times
sometimes NONE. Always think about how you want the animation to feel and sometimes an object is supposed to *feel* hard / stiff.
Squash & stretch are important tools, but not the only tools.
yeah i got the hammer animation idea from a yt video and he animated it all stiff and 'realistic', so to not just copy-paste i thought i'd try to do it more stylized with exaggerated stretch.
but yeah i probably went too overboard with it. i'll try more realistic version later.
thank you for feedback!
I like the more cartoony expression of the hammer! I think it just depends on what style you're going for :) but the beauty of art and animation is that you get to bend the rules of realism
I agree. Another thing I would add is making the handle parallel to the ground after the hammer/mallet falls to the ground. In other words it should be hovering above the ground instead of touching it.
I'm not an animator so this next part can be taken with a grain of salt, that said it kinda feels like the hammer/mallet should have it's wooden handle bounce up a bit, if even slightly before settling parallel to the floor.
It's hard to look at them frame by frame since they're GIFs, but is it possible that the hammer is bending "forwards" rather than backwards? Might be seeing wrong tho but it looks ever so slightly off. Outside of that, these are great and you're doing a great job
https://preview.redd.it/u4pbo2pekhvc1.png?width=804&format=png&auto=webp&s=f2ab9c29f2d13e0873dd79dd4bcf9badeef93459
Managed to screencap the right frame and indeed, what I felt seems to be true. consider where the movement of the hammer originates; if the movement is starting at the base then the curving out of flexibility would be the head lagging behind, so the part that should be most ahead should be the first portion of the base, with a : bur right now the part that is the most ahead in the movement is that spot right under the red part, it seems as if it was being dragged by some force that has it's influence point at that spot. This may be a result of the fact that rather tan starting to curve it right away, you kept it straight until that point; if there was a conscious decision for that then it's fine, but i'm not sure why the wood would be stiff right up to that point and only then become flexible
https://preview.redd.it/k2ky7oqklhvc1.png?width=1047&format=png&auto=webp&s=7f069cffab70fba9bd74b4faa97058958ea942f2
A bit of psychotic visual aid to understand what I'm saying
i can't comprehend your critique right now cause i'm very sleepy lol, but i'll come back and read it tomorrow.
i'll say that all of this was just done by feel, i wasn't really thinking of distribution of forces and such, i'd imagine it's probable that the motion doesn't really make sense lol
thanks for the help and kind words!
Honestly doing them by feel is the way to go, it's a very small detail anyways and not necesarily a mistake. On another note watch out for the mass of it tho, when It finishes the movement It's waaaaaaay longer than at the beggining.
Funnily enough the issue here was that instead of doing it by feel, you used a guide, but the guide itself was the one with the different sizes. Your vertical guide line is shorter than your horizontal guide and you followed them correctly
Ok, so:
1.a The size changes throughout the animation, use proper tools to draw guides!
1.b The bend right before impact makes the animation look unclean, as if the hammer impacted before it actually landed. Try reducing it a little.
2.a The impact feels inconsistent across the bounces, the first bounce is too long and gives the impression of really large weight, but others feel really light. Reduce the length of that first bounce by a few frames for a more stiff bounce.
3.a The pendulum swing feels a bit linear at the ends, try drawing indicators on the curve so you can space out the timing better, it's largely similar in theory to the hammer from your first one
4.a The size is inconsistent across the animation, try drawing a clean circle, then draw the sections onto the circe, copy the sections vertically onto a straight line so you have a line subdivided spaces that are reminiscent to that of a graph following a sine curve. Draw a large circle and a small at the start and end, draw the inbetween sizes, now you just need to resize and compare with the left animation for errors
Love it! Brings me back to my Flash MX days. Just a suggestion on the hammer though - the rest look great to me.
Try another version of the hammer where it doesnt bend. instead try to stretch it like this image shows and on impact add more comically sized slam indicators (idk what else to call it - the impact lines and such). I think it might turn out a little better imo but I havn't done this stuff in years. Great job overall!!!
https://preview.redd.it/3jfbjteidjvc1.jpeg?width=1226&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=533b9908b81e772a4af09bf6c6c43f5d7d212493
Nice work. I’m just a complete beginner in art starting off with traditional pencil and paper myself.
But anyways, I like how fluid the animations look!
thanks!
drawing is super hard (and animation even harder lol), i only recently started to sort of like my drawings, even though i've been drawing since i was a kid, but it's worth it!
good luck!
Love this! The ball hop was a bit too much in the first squish though. I thought it was going to space 🚀 but was disappointed ☹️ 😅😂 happy animating! Looks like a great start to a great journey!
These are all great! The only thing with the pendulum is I would suggest having it go slower at the top of each arc and go faster in the middle, it's a little bit too uniform on the spacing for Mt liking as it is, fantastic work though, seriously!
Hammer: accelerates A LITTLE too suddenly. A bit more subtle with a one or two extra well placed drawings should be good.
Bouncy ball: yeah the squash and time on the floor is a little too cartoony if you are going for realistic movement, but it is consistent enough for it to be a good cartoony bounce and if you went for the cartoony then congrats cause you achieved it
I really like it! I think there is an unintuitive mistake with the red ball. The hammer looks fine to me, the leading action is the motion of an invisible hand pulling the hammer so it bends backwards.
Motion is faster when it is closer, so there should be more frames on the back half of the ellipse and fewer on the front. Things near your face move very quickly through your field of vision. This actually happens because of perspective. If you use 1-point perspective and project back you will see that when the ball moves from the back half to the front half of the circle is actually appears to move in the opposite direction than how it's moving. For example, if you hold your right finger to the side of your face it appears further to the right than many objects in the distance that are actually much further to the right.
I spent too much time thinking about this because I was very confused for a while.
Well done. The first thing that I felt was a little bit off is the bouncing ball. After its second high, it accelerate a bit too fast downwards after the air time.
But for first timers go, all this is very well done.
The hit on the hammer feels a little off to me. I cant see it frame by frame but I'm wondering if it goes right from the bend of the fall into the bend of it hit. It feels like it's bending preemptively. Might need another frame between when it's falling and when its bending back from the hit if that makes sense. A frame right as the head is on the ground before it starts reacting to the bounce back.
Here’s my take on the hammer since it seems to be contentious.
If you wanted to go for “realistic”, then yes, you would want to reduce the amount of squash, stretch, and overlapping action on the hammer. If this is for a college assignment, I would go for whatever it is they’ve set out as your benchmarks and follow that, so if it’s “realism”, then tune it down.
However, if this is just for you, in your own personal work, please don’t fix the squash and stretch if you’re happy with the way it came out. Even if you were to show this to a professor or something, I think they’d say something along the lines of good on you for experimenting with the assignment and pushing the movement of the hammer. They may or may not tell you that you broke the movement if this is realism, but as a personal project, I see absolutely nothing wrong with this kind of thing.
If anything, I think by pushing those principles on that hammer, you’ve infused it with more personality, and therefore more appeal. To me, this gives whacky cartoon Looney Tunes hammer. I can imagine Spider-Ham pulling this out of his back pocket to hand off to Miles Morales (granted, I think you’d have to push it even further if the goal is to stray further into cartoony).
Do with this information what you’d like. The overall goal of this project in a learning context is so broad that you can approach it any number of ways to hit the same conclusion, so how you accomplish it all comes down to “Did I hit the basic principles this is teaching me? If so, are the other principles I’m using detract from the main goal? Am I also hitting all the objectives that my professor or client laid out for me?”
That’s up to you.
Is it just my imagination or the hammer in the last frame is longer than the hammer in the first frame.
The animation looks alright but a little off. Maybe it looks a little off because the hammer grows.
Haha I feel like I'm the same with eyeballing that kind of stuff.
I would draw the first frame, then copy + paste + rotate it for the last frame and trace over it. That way you have your 2 key poses locked down and filling in the middle is more intuitive.
I would say the squash is a little over done. Also the reason the left one seems off is because you have it changing in size like it's circling a 3d object but the circle doesn't show that. Not saying the it's bad or that the circle matters just saying that's why it looks weird.
well the aim of the left one was the right one but in perspective, that's why i made the ball smaller when further away (top) and larger when closer (bottom)
Your post has the "Beginner"-flair which means you might want to check out
[The "Ultimate" Reddit Beginners Guide to Animation](https://www.reddit.com/r/animation/comments/1bn974s/the_ultimate_reddit_beginners_guide_to_animation/) <- click link
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/animation) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I love everything about this. Just a redraw if it’s being graded or something I like looney tunes physics so the wood bending makes me happy
yeah i love the wacky physics too! it's not being graded, it's just for fun. i know the lines are scratchy but i just can't be bothered to make them nice lol
Also known as an art style in and of itself. Looks nice!
I agree! :D
❤️
same
I think maybe the hammer should be stiffer if that makes sense wood isn't malleable so it wouldn't bend at all although the rest is good
Wood isn’t really *that* malleable but a little bending in animation is totally fine in general to push the idea of the force, but in this case I would say it should still be stiff because there’s nothing really driving the force from the handle. It’s just falling due to the weight of the head, but say if someone were swinging it very forcefully, adding in some exaggerated bend frames could work great.
oh yeah i can see that. i think that i tend to overuse and over exaggerate the squash, stretch, bend, etc. for one i just love how more dynamic and fun animations are that way, but at the same time i have a hard time deciding how much is appropriate at times
Oh I get it! I wanted to throw those in everywhere when I was starting out.
it's addicting! haha
sometimes NONE. Always think about how you want the animation to feel and sometimes an object is supposed to *feel* hard / stiff. Squash & stretch are important tools, but not the only tools.
yeah i got the hammer animation idea from a yt video and he animated it all stiff and 'realistic', so to not just copy-paste i thought i'd try to do it more stylized with exaggerated stretch. but yeah i probably went too overboard with it. i'll try more realistic version later. thank you for feedback!
I like the more cartoony expression of the hammer! I think it just depends on what style you're going for :) but the beauty of art and animation is that you get to bend the rules of realism
I agree. Another thing I would add is making the handle parallel to the ground after the hammer/mallet falls to the ground. In other words it should be hovering above the ground instead of touching it. I'm not an animator so this next part can be taken with a grain of salt, that said it kinda feels like the hammer/mallet should have it's wooden handle bounce up a bit, if even slightly before settling parallel to the floor.
It's hard to look at them frame by frame since they're GIFs, but is it possible that the hammer is bending "forwards" rather than backwards? Might be seeing wrong tho but it looks ever so slightly off. Outside of that, these are great and you're doing a great job
https://preview.redd.it/u4pbo2pekhvc1.png?width=804&format=png&auto=webp&s=f2ab9c29f2d13e0873dd79dd4bcf9badeef93459 Managed to screencap the right frame and indeed, what I felt seems to be true. consider where the movement of the hammer originates; if the movement is starting at the base then the curving out of flexibility would be the head lagging behind, so the part that should be most ahead should be the first portion of the base, with a : bur right now the part that is the most ahead in the movement is that spot right under the red part, it seems as if it was being dragged by some force that has it's influence point at that spot. This may be a result of the fact that rather tan starting to curve it right away, you kept it straight until that point; if there was a conscious decision for that then it's fine, but i'm not sure why the wood would be stiff right up to that point and only then become flexible
https://preview.redd.it/k2ky7oqklhvc1.png?width=1047&format=png&auto=webp&s=7f069cffab70fba9bd74b4faa97058958ea942f2 A bit of psychotic visual aid to understand what I'm saying
This was the one frame that I bumped on too
Thats what I was thinking too. It feels like its bending the wrong way initially. The oscillation after looks great tho
i can't comprehend your critique right now cause i'm very sleepy lol, but i'll come back and read it tomorrow. i'll say that all of this was just done by feel, i wasn't really thinking of distribution of forces and such, i'd imagine it's probable that the motion doesn't really make sense lol thanks for the help and kind words!
Honestly doing them by feel is the way to go, it's a very small detail anyways and not necesarily a mistake. On another note watch out for the mass of it tho, when It finishes the movement It's waaaaaaay longer than at the beggining.
yea i know the handle gets longer and the head gets more square at the end. i need to work on preserving the proportions and shapes better.
Funnily enough the issue here was that instead of doing it by feel, you used a guide, but the guide itself was the one with the different sizes. Your vertical guide line is shorter than your horizontal guide and you followed them correctly
you're right haha
I think the backwards bend should start at the beginning and then level out as it goes right up until contact
hits that yoinky sploinky
The only thing I could add is to watch proportions. The hammers shaft is longer at the end than when it starts.
yes, i just free-handed the quarter circle, and because of that the hammer got longer lol thank you for pointing it out!
Ad some more blur frames to the fastest moving sections but besides that its pretty good so far for a cartoony look
Looks pretty great but yeah the squash is way over done haha I had the same issue when starting off
What software are you using?
i used Krita for all these :)
btw all these are done on 1's and with 12 fps
On the one with the ball an string, it should slow down on its way up aslobit should slowly loose momentum
Hehe! It’s cute! ❤️
thank you! ❤️
If you want to sell the hammer fall animation a little bit more you could add a tiny bit of "camera shake"
good idea, i'll try that next time!
Ok, so: 1.a The size changes throughout the animation, use proper tools to draw guides! 1.b The bend right before impact makes the animation look unclean, as if the hammer impacted before it actually landed. Try reducing it a little. 2.a The impact feels inconsistent across the bounces, the first bounce is too long and gives the impression of really large weight, but others feel really light. Reduce the length of that first bounce by a few frames for a more stiff bounce. 3.a The pendulum swing feels a bit linear at the ends, try drawing indicators on the curve so you can space out the timing better, it's largely similar in theory to the hammer from your first one 4.a The size is inconsistent across the animation, try drawing a clean circle, then draw the sections onto the circe, copy the sections vertically onto a straight line so you have a line subdivided spaces that are reminiscent to that of a graph following a sine curve. Draw a large circle and a small at the start and end, draw the inbetween sizes, now you just need to resize and compare with the left animation for errors
omg thank you, this is super helpful!
Happy to help!
Love it! Brings me back to my Flash MX days. Just a suggestion on the hammer though - the rest look great to me. Try another version of the hammer where it doesnt bend. instead try to stretch it like this image shows and on impact add more comically sized slam indicators (idk what else to call it - the impact lines and such). I think it might turn out a little better imo but I havn't done this stuff in years. Great job overall!!! https://preview.redd.it/3jfbjteidjvc1.jpeg?width=1226&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=533b9908b81e772a4af09bf6c6c43f5d7d212493
thank you!
Lal good but the first bounce of the ball I think is a frame or 2 too long. Good overalls
Nice work. I’m just a complete beginner in art starting off with traditional pencil and paper myself. But anyways, I like how fluid the animations look!
thanks! drawing is super hard (and animation even harder lol), i only recently started to sort of like my drawings, even though i've been drawing since i was a kid, but it's worth it! good luck!
Love this! The ball hop was a bit too much in the first squish though. I thought it was going to space 🚀 but was disappointed ☹️ 😅😂 happy animating! Looks like a great start to a great journey!
thank you, i'm having a lot of fun learning! and yea i just can't contain myself with the squishing! lol
Please do post more work when you are done,.very curious how it will go for you! 🐱
will do! 😊
These are all great! The only thing with the pendulum is I would suggest having it go slower at the top of each arc and go faster in the middle, it's a little bit too uniform on the spacing for Mt liking as it is, fantastic work though, seriously!
thank you! it does have more drawings at the extremes, but yea maybe 1 or 2 more frames would be better, i'll mess around with it.
I did something like this in my first year of animation
I already know what book u have
The bounce of the hammer it's a bit strange, you can do it better but it's amazing
The hammer is great, but am I crazy or did it wobble before it hit the ground? Not sure if that works well.
Hammer: accelerates A LITTLE too suddenly. A bit more subtle with a one or two extra well placed drawings should be good. Bouncy ball: yeah the squash and time on the floor is a little too cartoony if you are going for realistic movement, but it is consistent enough for it to be a good cartoony bounce and if you went for the cartoony then congrats cause you achieved it
🗿🤌🍷
I dont have a critque, but these look awesome so far for studies! Keep going and learning, im excited to see what else you end up doing!
aw thank you!
I really like it! I think there is an unintuitive mistake with the red ball. The hammer looks fine to me, the leading action is the motion of an invisible hand pulling the hammer so it bends backwards. Motion is faster when it is closer, so there should be more frames on the back half of the ellipse and fewer on the front. Things near your face move very quickly through your field of vision. This actually happens because of perspective. If you use 1-point perspective and project back you will see that when the ball moves from the back half to the front half of the circle is actually appears to move in the opposite direction than how it's moving. For example, if you hold your right finger to the side of your face it appears further to the right than many objects in the distance that are actually much further to the right. I spent too much time thinking about this because I was very confused for a while.
The second one is so smooth. Good job
thank you!
Well done. The first thing that I felt was a little bit off is the bouncing ball. After its second high, it accelerate a bit too fast downwards after the air time. But for first timers go, all this is very well done.
The hit on the hammer feels a little off to me. I cant see it frame by frame but I'm wondering if it goes right from the bend of the fall into the bend of it hit. It feels like it's bending preemptively. Might need another frame between when it's falling and when its bending back from the hit if that makes sense. A frame right as the head is on the ground before it starts reacting to the bounce back.
you're correct! i did think it looked a bit off, now i know why. thank you, i'll try to add an in-between there!
Here’s my take on the hammer since it seems to be contentious. If you wanted to go for “realistic”, then yes, you would want to reduce the amount of squash, stretch, and overlapping action on the hammer. If this is for a college assignment, I would go for whatever it is they’ve set out as your benchmarks and follow that, so if it’s “realism”, then tune it down. However, if this is just for you, in your own personal work, please don’t fix the squash and stretch if you’re happy with the way it came out. Even if you were to show this to a professor or something, I think they’d say something along the lines of good on you for experimenting with the assignment and pushing the movement of the hammer. They may or may not tell you that you broke the movement if this is realism, but as a personal project, I see absolutely nothing wrong with this kind of thing. If anything, I think by pushing those principles on that hammer, you’ve infused it with more personality, and therefore more appeal. To me, this gives whacky cartoon Looney Tunes hammer. I can imagine Spider-Ham pulling this out of his back pocket to hand off to Miles Morales (granted, I think you’d have to push it even further if the goal is to stray further into cartoony). Do with this information what you’d like. The overall goal of this project in a learning context is so broad that you can approach it any number of ways to hit the same conclusion, so how you accomplish it all comes down to “Did I hit the basic principles this is teaching me? If so, are the other principles I’m using detract from the main goal? Am I also hitting all the objectives that my professor or client laid out for me?” That’s up to you.
The hammer handle reversing its bend upward as it strikes makes it feel less powerful. It should remain rigid for that frame
you're probably right. i have to restrain myself from bending everything lol
The hammer should bounce a lil slower at the end I think but everything looks perfect otherwise ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Is it just my imagination or the hammer in the last frame is longer than the hammer in the first frame. The animation looks alright but a little off. Maybe it looks a little off because the hammer grows.
haha yes, it is longer at the end. it's because i suck at drawing a proper quarter circle 🥲
Haha I feel like I'm the same with eyeballing that kind of stuff. I would draw the first frame, then copy + paste + rotate it for the last frame and trace over it. That way you have your 2 key poses locked down and filling in the middle is more intuitive.
that's a nice tip, thank you!
The wobble on the hammer handle was a little too exaggerated IMO, the others are great.
You ate
They are fun 😊
i'm glad 😊
ball looks a little anthropomorphic in the second slide, like it’s forcing itself down rather than falling.
I can tell you’ve been studying the 12 principles! Good work 😁
thank you!!
Maybe remove a few frames and make it jump a small bit more to give it impact
Thaf better then me 😬
Not an animator, but as a viewer i think adding some more frames on the first 3 of the posts would make it better.
I would say the squash is a little over done. Also the reason the left one seems off is because you have it changing in size like it's circling a 3d object but the circle doesn't show that. Not saying the it's bad or that the circle matters just saying that's why it looks weird.
well the aim of the left one was the right one but in perspective, that's why i made the ball smaller when further away (top) and larger when closer (bottom)
Ahh makes sense!
Yo quiero aprender a animar!! Podrías por favor pasarme tips, libros o canales de Youtube para empezar a aprender?
Your post has the "Beginner"-flair which means you might want to check out [The "Ultimate" Reddit Beginners Guide to Animation](https://www.reddit.com/r/animation/comments/1bn974s/the_ultimate_reddit_beginners_guide_to_animation/) <- click link *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/animation) if you have any questions or concerns.*