Movies in my LYNDA/LINKEDIN-LEARNING ‘Tips & Tricks’ series covering secondary action (drag), assembled into a ‘virtual’ course. BTW, check out my patreon, there’s going to be a lot of animation resources posted there! NOTE: some people like to use ‘secondary’ action to refer to background action or characters not in the foreground. All well and good, but I’ve never met that usage in my career, though YMMV.
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1: FLAGS
The simplest example of drag: a hand waves a flag – the primary action is the hand, the secondary action is the flag. This creates all sorts of animation to-dos, such as overlap, overshoot and opposing actions!
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2: PRIMARY, SECONDARY & TERTIARY
In this example the red head is primary, the hat is secondary, and the feather is tertiary. It would be pointless to animate the feather, never mind the hat, until the primary action, the head, has been approved.
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3: CURVES & REVERSALS
The classic C/S curve pattern from Preston Blair’s classic book. This is an ideal, any such animation in a scene will be a weaker variant of this.
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4: HAIR (BASIC)
Examples of secondary hair animation, simple moves first.
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5: HAIR (INTERMEDIATE)
The action is made a little more interesting.
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6: HAIR (ADVANCED)
And now we add lots of magic.
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7: LONG HAIR (ADVANCED)
This is one of my few animation clips to go viral on Linkedin! I think people really liked seeing the under-the-hood techniques used to control the animation of complex hair forms.
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8: FABRIC & POINTS OF ORIGIN
Creases in clothing or skin, etc., aren’t drawn willy-nilly. We use points of origin to control their position through different positions.
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9: DRESSES & DRAG
I used to hate animating long clothing – it’s easy to end up in a tangle – but the secret is: animate the character pose to pose – THEN animate the clothing straight ahead.
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10: TAILS
Another great example of using pose to pose (on the character’s body) and straight ahead on the secondary motion of the tail (in red).
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11: ANIMATING DRESSES
More on the animation of a flowing dress. Note that the timing and overshoot/settle will vary depending on the material. Is it silk? No, it’s Taffeta, dahling. Taffeta.
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12: CAPES (BASIC)
Simple reaction animation of a cape, reacting to a L-R movement by the hero.
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13: CAPES (INTERMEDIATE)
A more complex cape animation.
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14: CAPES (ADVANCED)
And now we add a broader motion, with more wind.
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15: FIXING A DRESS
Secondary animations can create trouble spots where the clothing sticks. Let’s see how to plot the animation to diagnose the problem.
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16: UNDULATING FLAGS
How to get that organic/chaotic ‘snap’ that we often see in flags fluttering in the wind.
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17: HAIR & CLOTHING
In this scene I animated the jump first, pose to pose, than added the clothing on successive straight-ahead passes, the coat and scarf on different timing beats to make sure they had different weights.
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18: FIXING HAIR & CLOTHING
Dratto. More arc problems! These can be subtle things that you feel rather than see. Again, let’s plot some arcs and stamp them out.
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19: PLUSSING HAIR
Finally the hair! Also animated straight ahead – and also on a different timing pattern than the coat and scarf, which creates a really nice overlap of body/coat/scarf/hair. Classic.
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For more courses there’s a masterlist of classes, covering traditional principles as well as how to animate in Photoshop, Flash-AnimateCC, Harmony and After Effects. For new movies dealing with the free design/animation app KRITA, subscribe to my youtube channel and check out my patreon!
