Spacing

This is a gif I found by Ron over at this very constructive animation thread on cgsociety.



















This little animation perfectly illustrates the results of how spacing affects your animation.

I highly recommend using the dry erase marker on your screen. Track the trajectory and spacing of your bouncing ball, or your swinging arm in a walkcycle, or the tip of a sword in a physical exercise.

Whatever you track needs to have an even and or gradual spacing from frame to frame, depending on what your intentions is in your shot. If your dots are one thumb size apart and then suddenly 3 times bigger, then back to normal, than back to big, then something is wrong and your animation will look choppy, with lots of hiccups.

I talked about arcs before and will elaborate on it later on as you get into your flower sack animation or performance animation.
Basically everything moves in arcs, no matter what, except robots. So when you track your parts of the character, then as you connect the dots with a line, it should show a line that's smooth in terms of curves. Either it's going to be flat (ball rolling from left to right on an even floor), or in a figure 8 arc, or just an arched arc. But you won't have a line that has a sudden linear change, like an L, where it goes down and then suddenly to the right, unless your object hits a solid wall. Or a ball bounces of somewhere (floor or wall or object).









Image from "The Principles of Animation"
@ www.evl.uic.edu