Conventions of Animation Squash & Stretch .

As an introduction for this weeks task it is best to review last week's task in order to freshen our minds. Today the entire class have to differentiate the difference between Timing & spacing as well as their importance in animation overall. 

One of the student read a book in order to gain a better understanding behind the theory of the animation  techniques .After reading page 7 from a book called  Animation The Mechanics of Motion he came across an interesting fact about the spaces between every single frame "The shorter the distance the slower the action the greater the distance the faster the action". 

A reliable source informed the class that you only need a few key frames to make an animation successful yet effective . The class were informed that the story will always be the main reason behind the success of any animation whether it is two dimensional  or three dimensional  .  

This week the main objective for the whole class was to get their heads around the idea of squash & stretch. The emphasis of the lecturer was based on the weight distribution of any movement of a character within an animation or a bird bouncing. A couple of examples could be a bird swing in it's cage continuously from days on end. Another example might be a yo yo going up & down , a basketball hitting a person in a game of dodge ball then returning back to someone else. 

To understand the concept of squash & stretch there are a number of you tube videos which displays both good/bad examples of squash & stretch mechanics in the following you tube videos .

Here are a couple of examples of 3D animations that could be considered to be successful due to the amount of time that the animator has taken time to look at some video reference of a walk cycle. Only once you have managed to achieve this you can create a successful 3D animation

  

Whereas the unsuccessful example of animation will not have any sense of resemblance to the real world. It will not take the laws of physics into consideration where a bouncing ball is concerned so it will appear to be over exaggerated . Usually the human eye is great at perceiving what is considered to be normal movement for a human being or un natural movement.

Here is a squash & stretch exercise that one of the pupils had attempted to create in Autodesk Maya. However he felt that the main success was reflected in the ball as the squash & stretch was evidently displayed. Whereas the squash & stretch appeared to be unseen in the movement of the dinosaur as it was bouncing up & down from the floor. The student who created the animation will hopefully learn from this exercise & build up on it for future exercises & projects.