Q&A: Onii's Guide to Animation

I don’t have a real tutorial or anything, but I do have a couple of general tips about animation that I feel would be appreciated. I get a lot of questions about animations on Twitter and Roblox, so I hope this is a great place to talk about it. I’ve compiled a couple tweets about how I animate and how I approach animations. Feel free to ask away, I’d love to talk about it.

EDIT: My twitter got suspended so I’ll upload the animation references some other time.

EDIT2: Made a mini guide recently, forgot to add it here.

Some overarching tips:

  • Watch a lot of animation in general, and think about pacing. On what frames does the object change during its action, and how large of a change was it since the last frame? This is literally the core of animation.
  • Learn how joints work. Your body, and in turn all bodies, bend in certain ways. Consider acting out your animations in person to get a feel for it, too!
  • The illusion of life details 12 principles that all animators should adhere if they want to make crisp animations. Watch it, and apply it!
  • Find references! Animating from memory, like drawing, is pretty difficult early on. Here are some good walk cycle references, and these are really good for combat! Search on your own too! You never know what you’ll find out there.
  • Check out my livestreams! I tend to livestream development in general, a lot of which entails animation so you can drop by and watch how I make things come to life. it also keeps me from being lonely sometimes, ykno
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Q: What animation plugin are you using and where can I get it?

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Moon Animation Suite

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How would you rig a custom character such as a spider with many legs? And would you consider making Youtube tutorials?

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Humanoid:BuildRigFromAttachments() is pretty good for building custom characters. I personally don’t have a lot of experience with that, but the custom characters I’ve made were with DaMrNelson’s plugin although it is a bit outdated now.

YouTube tutorials would be cool to make, but I don’t know where I could fit them into my schedule of work and play. with play taking up a majority of my schedule

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Another great character rigging plugin is RigEdit by @Arch_Mage, It’s a very simple plugin with an easy to use UI.

All you have to do is select the first part, then the second, then you can position the Motor6D into the location where you want the part to move around.

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Wow you had to put anime as a cover. No doubt @Younite will be very intrigued.

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Anime > All

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It was the first image in the directory, sorted by most recent.

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p o p t e a m e p i c g e n e r i c a n i m e f o r m

Q: How exactly do I figure out how to construct movement (walking/running) animations?

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This man is GOAT for making this. Probably one of my favorite resources of recent, and it covers so much.

Tips when using references from YouTube:

  • Playback at x0.5 or x0.25
  • If you want frame by frame, you can pause the video and use . and , to move forward and backwards through frames, respectively
  • Setup your editor’s view angle to match the reference’s
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When did this happened? :sob:

My friend really needs this Guide!

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What happened?

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Updated with a new mini guide. And my original account got permanently suspended back in April or so.

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So now what? :joy:

There is no guide on how to animate. It’s literally a do and keep doing until something happens activity. The only way to figure out how things work is to work on it, and there’s no definitive way on how to animate. If my tips are not clear enough, please, ask specific questions. :joy::joy::joy::joy::joy::joy::joy::joy::joy:

Alright!

I am not the one working on Animations

The new Editor sucks and the old one sucks so yeah…

My friend is the one doing Animations for now, I hope that the Editor gets better so I can make some too.

If my friend or I have any questions I will DM you. :+1: