Animation Tips

There are various useful tips and techniques that may help you in creating world class animations with the effective tools and creative imagination. Some of the tips mentioned below are intended for the artists that create the drawings and others are aimed at the programmers that develop the code around it.
(1) Using shadows for making the characters appear on the ground – A character without shadows tends to float above the ground level. Thus, it is recommended to use the shadows as they offer a visual clue of when a character or object touches the ground. Moreover, by using shadows, you can add more depth to perspective drawings.
(2) Use15 frames per second for computer animation – A normal film reel makes use of 24 frames per second (fps). In order to reduce the number of drawings, conventional cartoon animators often uses the effective rate of 12 fps. There is no limit of a hardware based frame rate on computer and you can select any frame rate. Using the 15 fps offers a good balance between fluency and the number of images you need to draw or render.
(3) Drawing facial expressions on a separate layer – For creating the animation, there is requirement of large number of drawings.  Traditional animators draw on cel (acetate foil) for reducing the number of drawings required. While drawing a cartoon character on a PC, you should draw the facial expression including the eyes, mouth, nose and etc, on a separate layer. Therefore you have one layer of cartoon character with an empty face and another separate layer fills in the face. It helps you in changing the facial expression quickly of the character without the need of drawing the entire corps again.
(4)Using the motion blur – The “motion blur” which is inherent to photo and video cameras provides a clue about the speed as well as the direction of the motion. The human eye possesses a latency that causes moving objects to blur. This property of the human eye along with the camera blur, suggests that movie shot at 20 fps produces fluid motion. The images generated on computer does not have any exposure limit, thus moving objects appear too crisp when generated on computers. For this, you need higher frame rate, say 30 fps, for keeping the animation fluid. By using the Motion blur, you can perceive the sharpness of a moving object along with reducing the minimum frame rate for keeping the motion fluid.
(5) Lip synchronization – It takes a lot of effort to synchronize lips movement with words. In case of high quality animation, the character’s mouth is drawn with accuracy in the correct shape, for every phoneme for handling the proper lip synchronization. If your 2d Character does not display much detail, then you can apply this trick. You can draw only a few basic mouth shapes: “A”, “E”, “I”, “O”, “U”, and so on. It should be just enough for covering the major mouth forms. You require a matrix of frames for transitions from one form to any other form. Thus, using these you can fix the Lip Synchronization issue.
(6) Make ‘moving holds’   -  In case of a hand drawn animation, it happens quite often that you need to animate an action, then slow into a pose by holding the drawing of specific pose for many frames, and then again move into action. The animation keeps alive with the held drawings also. However, in case of computer animation, your animation will die, the moment you hold the pose. In order to overcome this, you need to use a “moving hold” that allows you to continuous move some part slightly instead of stopping the every part of the character.  By making even the slightest movement, your character will remain alive.
(7) Using anti-aliased sprites for fluent animations – In case of sprite animation, the usage of Motion blur is very costly. You can use a mask with softened edges and use alpha-blending for combining the sprite along with the background. Apart from reducing the roughness of the edges of a sprite, this trick also blurs the motion around the edges. AniSprite refers to a library for Microsoft Windows which supports alpha-blending. A paper on algorithms is also available for feathering a mask for anti-aliased sprites.
(8) Loops and transitions – An animated character shows a few repeatable movements like walking. Once a complete step is drawn using the set of frames, you can repeat those frames again for the next step. In some cases the character also has non-repeatable movements like standing up from a seating position. You need to draw a few frames for this non-repeatable movement and also add few more frames to show transition from standing position to a walking. The repeatable movements are termed as “loops” and non-repeatable movements are “transitions”.  If you have cautiously made out at what frame a loop end, you can easily link poses and loops to one another through transitions. After drawing a complete loop, you can select any frame as the start point and end point. It is better to draw the loops first and later on checking what transitions would be required.
The ending frame for a loop should be selected as it also makes up for the starting frame of a transition from that loop to others. Thus, you can make it a key-frame and using it proves to be advantageous.
(9) Improving the illusion of depth by changing the sharpness and the saturation of colours. By using perspective drawing, you can create an illusion of depth in the image. In order to improve the illusion of depth, you should paint objects on the foreground in complete and strong (saturated) colours and background objects should be painted in pastel (or unsaturated) colours. Also, the photographic and video cameras usually focus on a particular distance. Thus, the object that stays in focus is pictured sharply, while others object are blurred.  You can depict the same effect in your drawings by blurring the background objects.
(9) Using a single timer for all animations and timed events – You can use a single timer as the time base for animations and other time-related events. When you are using the two timers then you need to keep the timers synchronized. For that, you must use one of the timers as the master and add code to the other timer for monitoring the master constantly. It is called as the “chasing” of a timer.