Learn Animation

[Downup]

Add all your tips here.
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1. Everything have weight

2. A human do not move like a robot, every part on a human moves when u walk.

3. When a head turn does it not move in x 0.0 everytime. If u have a turn on 20frames use 10 to mve the head down little.

[tedledz]

Hello,

Maybe:

1) overlap

2) exageration

3) timing

[daagom]

and:

Squash and Stretch
Follow Through
Successive Breaking of Joints

[B.R.Rajeev]

1. Anticipation / Antic

[zoo-prod]

Observation !
Look how everything/everyone move around you !
That's the key !

[tudor]

A silly post but still...

Practice, and don't rush it.

Too many people spend days or weeks on modeling and rigging, and then say: Now I just have to animate it....

Many animators recommend that if you want to be a good animator you should just animate. Don't model, texture, rig and animate. You will have a hard enough time to learn just to animate.

The rules of animation are great. They are not written in stone though. Look at cartoons, study them, and see that everyone does things different. There is disney timing, warner timing, cheap saturday morning cartoons with crappy timing etc. If you give your character a personality it will be much easier to animate him well. How old is he, what mood is he in, what did he do just before the animation started, is i stressed, calm, what does he do for a living. What animal would he be if he was not a human etc.

There is a common practice of producing about 25 sec a week of animation when you are working with 2 characters in a scene. That is 5 seconds a day. 120 frames a day @ 24fps. That is 15 frames per hour with an 8 hour work day.
I heard somewhere that pixar tries to keep it at 7 sec a week.. That is not many frames an hour. It takes as much time to tweak you animation as it does to tweak you textures or edgeloops.