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Animation Tips from Cuphead and God of War



A small list of useful tips from experienced animators to help improve and simplify your work with animations.

Jake Clark , Sophie Evans and Raul Ibarra shared tricks for creating animation: how to use cameras, build poses, rely on simpler movements and much more.



Jake Clark of Studio MDHR emphasizes that you can always use chips from traditional animation in 3D. First, you need to identify the main poses as quickly as possible. Selecting key points at the beginning will prevent many problems at the end. It will also give confidence that the animation will work or not. Make poses first - then move on to the movement.



Each individual element must be taken into account, which means that you need to think about the movements of each part before moving on to the full picture. A smart decision is to think separately about the character’s hands, hair, legs, and all other parts. And then you need to check if they work together.



Making the animation natural is much more important than filling it with entertaining motives. Sometimes a simpler animation with fewer actions is much better than a crazy sequence of frames. People should believe in your characters, as in real ones - do not forget about it.

But most importantly, remember the contrast. Mix fast and slow movements so your audience doesn't get bored.





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Sophie Evans from The Molasses Flood believes the animator’s job is to identify the tools and use them effectively. When you open Maya for the first time, you go to hell, where there is too much of everything that you do not know. Learn to use them effectively and become a valuable animator. In fact, your job is to repeat some actions over and over again - if you can save time on this, you will become much more productive.

But do not forget to discover new tools. It is worth taking a look at the tools of Aaron Koressel from Pixar, who shared a bunch of cool scripts for various tasks.


Another important thing is to master the cameras. Even if we know something about the future, then when it comes to depth of field and focal length, it appears where to grow. The right setting can emphasize the mood and add more color to the whole scene.



You can also add action using camera movement (remember those epic fights in God of War?).




Are you working on a new sequence of actions with a new character? Not sure how to get started? Try using motion paths, ”Raoul Ibarra suggests. They will help you limit your character and understand body deformations. It's all about the context.



Break the animation: deform, scale and move the bones, do everything you need to get the best pose. Ready animation looks boring? Try adding the right noise and extra frames - this will make the animation cooler and believable.



After all, the way you work with tools is not that important. Animation is music. You listen to music every day, so try to catch and use your favorite pace.

Physics for animators



This book tells how to apply physics to the movement of characters, the placement of light and shadows, explosions, the movement of the ocean and scenes from space. The concepts of physics are explained in terms of the animator, so we will only talk about the movement and appearance of the animation.

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