Principles of Animation - Page 4

We are on the last page! If you arrived here without having completed the previous page, you should go back or else find yourself missing a lot of key steps.

Squash and Stretch
Squash and stretch is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It squashing and stretching and object to show how it reacts to an outside force. You'll be surprised at how much life this can add to animation. The trick to using it is to know when to use it and knowing to what degree to use it.

In our timeline lets go back to our 2nd keyframe. As gravity begins to pull our ball down, we can exaggerate this idea by SLIGHTLY stretching our ball. We go this by first selecting the ball. Hit Q to get the transform tool. Zoom in a little, and on the y axis, just stretch the ball slightly. Mine looks like this:

[ stretch your ball slightly towards the top ]

You can barely even tell, but when its finally animated, your eye will subconsciously see it. We continue in the fashion before, on the 3rd keyframe, we'll stretch it a little bit more. Be sure to keep your onionskin on at all times so you can see how your current drawing relates to the previous ones. As you can see, by keyframe 11 we've stretched our ball out quite a bit:

[ a long-range view of the stretching ]

As your stretching the ball, you may wish to squeeze it a little on the x axis in order to keep the volume looking consistent. One thing that can ruin squash and stretch is squashing or stretching too much and in so doing, having the volumes of your object become in-consistent. In any case, by frame 13 we're ready to squash this sucker because it's hitting the ground.

Select the ball on frame 13, hit Q for the transform tool, and we're going to move our pivot point so its resting right on top of the ground plane. This will force to ball to squash where we want it to. If you don't believe me, go ahead and see what happens if you don't re-position the pivot. babbabooey. In any case, once you reposition the pivot, squash the ball down on the y axis and stretch it a bit on the x axis. Kinda fun ain't it? It should look like this:

[ stretch the ball horizontally to signify the collision ]

Tweaking
Now, just to give the animation one last little tweak, lets allow this squashed drawing to last 3 frames instead of just 2. That way the viewer really gets the feeling that this ball is hitting the ground and squashing down. Just go to the timeline, select all the keyframes after this one and drag them all 1 frame to the right. The timeline should look like this when your done:

[ extended the squashed drawing by one frame ]

The only thing left to do is to go back and finish the last half of the cycle by replacing the old frames with the newly stretched ones, just like you did at the end of the Animating the Ball section.

If you are interested in seeing my FLA for this animation, click on the link below:

Your finished animation with lots of life and energy:

Hope you enjoyed the tutorial. If you have any questions, feel free to email me at [email protected] or post on the forums. If there's demand, I'd be happy to continue the series with a new principle each lesson.

Thank you.

Daniel Bodinof aka Danielthelion creativeJUGGERNAUTS

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