It’s been a little while! I decided to take a mini social-media break at the end of the year. Since June of 2023, I’ve been posting on a nearly weekly basis both here and on Instagram, ArtStation and YouTube (Well sort of…November and December were a bit of a lull). And while this isn’t a particularly time-consuming habit as a whole, it does take a bit of time to prep the videos, write the blogs, and finally post. Plus the social media numbers game can be tricky to completely ignore. I’ve tried to approach this whole thing as casually as possible. Even still, it was nice to step away for a little while. But now I’m back, well rested, and genuinely excited to share more animation!

We last left off with a throwing animation, which I created in order to practice the animation principle of anticipation. But this next exercise connects more closely with the drinking animation I practiced right before that. In that exercise, I focused in on contacts and constraints between a character and a prop. Having your character interact with the environment is really important for believability and realism. You want the viewer to believe that character exists within the scene, so why not have them interact with it?

In the case of the drinking animation, the character pops up, grabs the juice box, takes a sip, and settles. This straightforward interaction was a great way to practice these ideas. So let’s add another layer of complexity!

What if the character has an object….but then lets go of it? What if it returns to their hand? What if, instead of the character moving an object, an object causes the character to move? And what if I kept asking hypothetical questions!?

Anyway, those were the “layers of complexity” I wanted to add when I started working on this next animation. Without further ado, here it is:

We’ve got both of those not-so-hypothetical interaction scenarios included here. Efi tosses the hammer up in the air and then catches it. Then the laser cannon zips past and causes her to spin around. These aren’t particularly intricate prop interactions, but they add just enough interest to place the character within the environment around her.

While the cannon spinning Efi around was pretty simple to animate, the spinning hammer toss was slightly more complicated. In my Arms Crossed post, I wrote a bit about how constraints work. The same ideas apply here. But this time I needed to de-activate and then re-activate the parent constraint (between the hand and the hammer) at the beginning and end of the spin. And during that unconstrained section in the middle, I animated the hammer spinning separately. Then I had to make sure it landed in the same position in her hand as it was at the start the throw. Then I could re-activated the constraint and it locked back in. I’m making it sound a little more complicated than it was. It’s straightforward in practice, I swear!

Having characters come in and out of contact with props and the environment really broadens what a character can do in a scene. With props at your disposal, you can make a lot more acting choices that you wouldn’t be able to make otherwise.

I’m genuinely really proud of this acting animation. Especially since I created it three years ago. This was back when I was first getting the hang of constraints. I put a lot of work into this animation at the time, and it came a long way from where it started. If you’d like to see the initial blocking pass of this exercise, check out this SycSketch link. A huge thank you to Sankeerna Yaduguru and Rosh for providing me with extremely helpful feedback, it helped a lot!

Anyway, thanks for reading!

Efi Oladele Rig by Christoph (The Stoff) Schoch

Samus Rig by Julien Desroy and Perry Leijten

My Links: ArtStation / Instagram / Vimeo / YouTube