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Animation resources

https://animatorsresourcekit.blog

12 Principles of animation

https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/animation/discover/principles-of-animation.html https://youtu.be/uDqjIdI4bF4?si=7TgPwlNj9Ddrlzh9

Animation exercises

Here are the typical animation exercises to practice fundamentals. Exercises are listed in order of complexity. I’ve included examples of some of these in the folder.

  1. A flying Dot
    • Animate a dot or circle moving along a path to learn spacing and timing. Its also useful for learning smears.
  2. Pendulum Swing
    • Animate a pendulum swinging with easing in and out. The focus here is on easing and momentum.
  3. Bouncing Ball (in place and then across the screen)
    • Animate a ball bouncing. This helps you understand weight, squash and stretch, and strengthens your fundamentals of timing. Weight plays a big role in how quickly something moves and at which parts of the arc.
  4. Swinging Arm
  5. Walk Cycle (simple, straight ahead)
    • Create a basic walk cycle focusing on rhythm, stride, and weight distribution. This will be one of your big milestones because you’ll also learn a lot of important basics like ensuring that your object doesn’t glide and instead looks like it is believably interacting with the ground.
  6. Jumping Over an Obstacle
    • Animate a jump including anticipation, launch, flight, and landing.

Blender-specific information:

Blender is really flexible. You can do fully 2D animation, or 2D animation in 3D space. This makes it much easier to build out environments and work with things like perspective etc because you’re not forced to fake it. You can just move a drawing further back. Its sort of like placing paper cut outs on a puppet stage. The 2nd and 3rd tutorials below show some of this in practice.

Blender tutorials

These tutorials explain how to use Blender as a beginner. It goes over everything from controls to navigation and setup. You don’t need to know Blender to get started.

Easy Blender Tutorial: Animate a 2D Bouncing Ball with Grease Pencil (2020) Blender for 2D artists Blender Videos by Marco Bucci

Animation projects completed in Blender

Blender Grease Pencil Reel - YouTube Wire - YouTube Animation Reel 2023 | Blender Grease Pencil - YouTube Tutorial: Grease Pencil Jets & Enviro in Blender 2.83 - YouTube I Can Draw Without Drawing in Blender 3.0 Grease Pencil #Shorts - YouTube Blender Grease Pencil works | Blender 2.8 / 2.9 - YouTube

Anime in Blender - Tutorial - YouTube

Addition

https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1q9wlpo/comment/nyzca7n/?context=1

Do I need a drawing tablet?

Not at all. That's why I say animation is so diverse. I struggle with drawing freehand and there are a number of approaches:

You can do puppet animation where you draw, photograph, model, [insert your preferred method here] to get a basic character and then simply transform those pieces in the software of your choice. Here's are some examples: https://youtube.com/shorts/PBetIJiKz5Y?si=DuEvx23z8C44Wyp6

You can also create super simple 3D models to animate. 3D doesn't have to be complex and you can get away with a lot by doing limited animation. An artist I really enjoy is Louie Zong. Here are some examples: https://youtu.be/proM3Sj6boQ?si=GiFD6nridx-hXHbU https://youtu.be/V7KjHLRGdrc?si=jMlvTratIYaJnfLM https://youtube.com/shorts/0ECEWuZcdPg?si=KoPEB6vGcc87aD8l

Here's a video on how he approaches "illustration" in blender: https://youtu.be/V7KjHLRGdrc?si=2Ai2otdxWeegBxKU

You can also animate non human characters. Things like jets, cars, oddly shaped robots. Objects that don't require deformation or rigging and you can animate purely by placing keyframes. Its almost like stop motion but the computer inserts in between frames so you don't have to frame every individual frame. You just need the beginning and end motions.You can make a car out of blocks and use keyframes to make it go around a track. Make a racing animation. 3D gives you the greatest camera you could ask for. It can be positioned anywhere, you can set any focal length, depth of field, filter, or other configuration which makes it super easy to make something technically simple look epic. Think of the types of shots you see in racing movies. Those where the camera is right by the wheel and you get a sense of the speed just by the vibration and other objects passing. Here's an example. You can go even simpler than this: https://youtu.be/eXldgzeuj1k?si=B0sHNPDOWRGEAMGv

Here's an animation with a few simple subjects. You could download models if you don't know how to model them yourself: https://youtu.be/S5EseCwAgUA?si=n7MpqpFfHAy5Tp2e You could totally do this with a mouse. Most of the animation comes from rotating the jet and slowly moving the camera. You just need a little creativity (free).