AM Tutoring Tips and Tricks part 5 - Animate from inside out, physically.

For a human character, in most of cases, animating from root, through body to the finger tips makes character alive. Even though we probably heard of "Animate from inside out" thousand times, I ask myself all the time, "what the heck is that means?" and how to apply it to my animation?

Let's take a simple example to explain, rise a resting arm up and pointing forward. I bet you can do this in real live without even think about it, but as an animator, we need to analyse how exactly this action happened. The order was sent from our brain, go through bunch of muscles and bones, then the action happens (forgive me can't be accurate about the exact process, otherwise I'll be a doctor instead of animator.)

The word "believable" is actually from the library we build in our mind, by watching this kind of action over and over again. If we see a human moves his/her wrist without any tiny movement from forearm, upper arm or shoulder, he/she gotta be either an outstanding break dancer or a terminator. We will catch it instantly because it against the library of our brain. So if we didn't animate our character from inside out, it will take away the believability from audiences instantly as well.

How to apply it to animation? I did a little demo to show my understanding here:

So the left one is what computer gives me after I set 2 poses, which looks ok, but it's lifeless and doesn't feel organic at all. What I did for the right one, which is more polished version, I made the shoulder move first, and then bring the upper arm, fore arm and the hand follows. You might notice this is the classic principle of overlapping action and follow through, and you're right indeed. This is more about knowing why exactly we need to apply animation principles. If we only apply it without knowing why, for this clip for example, it's very easy to fall in the "noodle-y arm" trap.

In sum, Instead of making a rule like "everything needs to move from root!" I prefer to analyse where is the force come from before I start a shot. If my character is sitting and rising his head, then the force will go internally from root, chest to the head. On the other hand, if he got a ball hit on his head very hard(external force), then his head will go forward without any anticipation from root. Figuring out where is the force come from will help you to create believable animation.