The 12 Principles of Animation - Episode 7
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Welcome.
To learn about...
The Seventh Principle - Arcs
The principle of arcs describes how natural movement moves along curved lines or arcs. Our human eyes are attracted to arcs because of how natural and prevalent they are everywhere around us: our joints rotate in arcs and even "our walk cycles" have slight arcs in their dips and raises.
Arcs have a huge impact on animation:
1- feel of realism and comforting predictability: barely anything unrelated to technology moves in a perfectly straight line. Because arcs are so engraved in nature, we can predict where movement based on an arc ends up. Imagine what a leap from the edge of a cliff would look like. You probably saw the person's jump move according to some sort of arc, whether it's steep or gradual. Then they either plummeted to their deaths or managed to survive, perhaps by barely hanging on to the edge - imagination is a wonderful, powerful thing.
2- determines how animation flows: arcs tend to make animation flow smoother. If you believe your animation lags or looks robotic in some areas, you might need to add an arc somewhere to fix the problem. Carita actually mentioned this about my head turn animation for the anticipation blog here, which made me put the two together on why the animation felt so robotic all this time.
3- sprinkle interest and fun into animations: arcs are just a great way to make animation more interesting, fluid and fun to watch!
Challenges:
Arcs are fairly simple. This doesn't mean, however, that there is nothing to worry about when implementing arcs into your animations:
Creating proper arcs for the animation
- Because or the raw naturalness of arcs, any movement deviating out of an arc can confuse the audience and break their immersion as well as make the movement feel jarring or wrong. What's more, different kinds of arcs add different moods on an animation and therefore should be used appropriately: exaggerated cartoony arcs are comedic and lively, small arcs are subtle yet feel natural and smooth, whereas stiff and rigid arcs command attention and can even convey a sense of painfulness.
- To avoid rigid and painful looking arcs and movement, it is advised to always take time to track the arcs in your animation during the entire creative process. This is especially important with inverse kinematics (IK) in 3D animation because rig setups move linearly and thus require extra finesse to look natural. One way to track arcs is to draw them on a separate layer and use it as a reference path to form the animation around.
Practise exercises:
- Clock animation: the pointers could start out slow and slowly pick up speed. Then you can not only add arcs on the movement of the pointers, but as smear frames as well (what you see in animation where characters swing swords, bats, staffs you name it)
- Character playing around with a bo-staff or similar: if this sounds like a lot of work - I agree, it does - you can try it with stick figures like Alan Becker, or try tracing over a video or even adding smear frames to live-action footage. Remember, this is practise and anything goes in practise!
- Small subtle arcs: just like how a small subtle downwards arc could've breathed more life to my head turn animation, small subtle arcs - dips and raises - have an impressively drastic effect on bringing animation to life. For example, instead of looking like a maneki-neko statue, a character could lift their hand into a wave in a sideways arc
I hope you enjoyed reading or even skimming through my blog. Feel absolutely free to comment more ideas or even share your own animations! I'd love to hear and see some of what you can come up with for practising this principle! And with that...
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