Pendulum Test WIP

Posted by Avner Engel in Animation, Flipbook

Here are some of my thoughts when I approached this test (any crits or feedback is most welcome):

My process at animating a pendulum test:

• Creating a motion chart with key poses and rough spacing on a piece of paper.
• Thinking and deciding how I want the top part of the pendulum to move. Then I am trying to work out the arcs.
• In Flipbook, I create the key poses on 2’s to get everything rough and dirty.
• After that, I check the spacing and timing.
• Once I am happy with the slow in and slow outs, I test it to see if the overall energy has enough spark to it.

• Do a similar sketch for the way back (with slight changes in the spacing maybe).

When I created the motion charts, I assigned a half way mark between the two key poses (on frames 1 and 17). Then I started to favour the keys in order to create a slight increase in the speed when the pendulum goes down a little.

In order to change the evenness of the speed, I had to add more slow out and slow in, to make it a bit more fluid by having contrast in the spacing.

• More thoughts are on the way, stay tuned (if you are interested!)

Conclusion:

1. Spacing is damn hard!
2. Planning and thinking things through on paper will result a quicker execution at the end.
3. Texture in your spacing will result a more fluid motion.

• This is where things are at with the test so far: