Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook

Chapter 7. Easy to Say, Hard to Do: Mastering the Basics

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Adjusting and tracking the timing
• Spacing: favoring and easing poses
• Anticipating an action
• Using squash and stretch
• Breaking the symmetry

Introduction

The most difficult thing in animation is, quite ironically, mastering the basics. Young animators often have an urge to do "complicated" things such as complex dialogues and action scenes, but fail to understand aspects such as timing, spacing, asymmetry, or squash and stretch.

Following the principle of working in layers of refinement, covered in the previous chapter we must take care to make the basic underlying layers first, and make them well. Before attempting the fancy stuff, we need to make ...