spacing breakdowns

[seasterling]

Hey Tony, I'm just starting out, trying to get a handle on spacing my breakdowns, and have a couple of questions. I understand how to break things down in halves, but have heard of breaking down on thirds or quarters. When might you use thirds or quarters?

What do you do when your timing does not allow for breaking things down evenly in halves? I have a feeling both of these questions may have a single answer.

I'm working 3d but have been working with stepped keys on 2s, so each key is like a single drawing. This approach seems to help keep me focused on my character rather than on the fcurves, which I like, and once I get my keys and extremes blocked out I can breakdown pretty quickly unless I run into the roadblock mentioned above, then I completely get pulled out of any creative mindset and back into a technical one.

Thanks.

[Daniel Poeira]

While Tony doesn't answer properly, which he always do, I think I can shed a little light on the second question. Usually when the number of breakdowns is not odd, you just have to do a little straight-forward animation. In fact, if you use Richard William's system (creating key frames and then straight-forwarding between them) you can solve this. I particularly like this system, and I'm trying to stick to it while I learn actual paper pencil animation (got tired of the old timeline, decided to learn the ""real thing"").

On 3d you can experiment doing this... create the keyframes, then open the lines who show them in graphical view. You'll see those good old boring splines who create those "computer movements" most people notice. Now, how about mannually drawing the lines, based on the shapes created by the software, but letting the points in places a little different? I mean, like, manually drawing them. With a tablet it would be even better.

I never really did this, but I think it could work out pretty interestingly.

[Daniel Poeira]

Forgoet to say something else... I think doing this process (straight forwarding some parts) is extremely important, because if you keep using always the same numbers for the breakdowns (5, 9, 17...) your animation will end up with a very very limited timing... :)

That's what I like about animating in MoHo. You can animate almost "online", very quickly, and then tweak the key frames to adjust the timings. It's very experimental and can deliver very interesting effective results.