toon

TIPS & TRICKS

Our experts
this issue
ALAN SHORT
Commercials Director.
With a BAFTA Craft
Award and three RTS
awards under his belt, Alan
Tex Avery once said: In a cartoon you can do anything. Our featured experts
joined Aardman in 2003
www.aardman.com
on cartoon-style animation show you how to do precisely that, and do so well ...

F
TOM DOWNES
rom Madagascar to Open Season, increasing snap, longer holds that build anticipation, overstated
Senior Technical
Director. Formerly an cartoon-style animation continues to pull squash and stretch, and more extreme follow through. Whilst
animator at 422 Bristol
in the crowds. With its heyday in the cartoon characters can do pretty do much anything they well,
and Effectory Filmeffekte, Tom
joined Aardman in 2003 Hollywood studios of the 1930s, 1940s their creators want, this style of animation is very particular.
www.aardman.com and 1950s, the animation principles formulated by Disneys This months experts come from a range of backgrounds,
Nine Old Men and perfected by Warner Bros. are back and from commercials through to features, but they share an
SEAN MULLEN
Animation Supervisor. now informing CG cartoon-style animation. extensive knowledge of the history of animation and the
Sean previously worked While realistic animation requires exacting attention to application of its principles to 21st century production. Over the
on Open Season (see
page 32) and is now working real-world physics, cartoon-style work is all about turning those course of the next six pages, they share some of that knowledge.
on another animated lm rules on their head. The animator has artistic licence to adjust Designing and modelling cartoon characters is a craft in itself,
www.imageworks.com
physics, to get animals talking, to squash and stretch characters and one that has already been touched on in other features. So
JONATHAN TURNER out of all proportion, and to exaggerate movements way beyond here well be focusing just on cartoon-style rigging and animation.
Main image 2006 Sony Pictures Animation Inc.

Animator and Company reality. Anything, it seems, goes as long as it obeys the internal Well start with the general principles, then look at the properties
Director. Jon honed his
skills at Cosgrove Hall rules of its world. So does that make toon-style work an easier of character rigs for cartoon-style work, analysing a real-life
Films for ve years, before option than attempting photorealistic animation? example of such a rig. One of the best pieces of advice offered
setting up Kilogramme.
Absolutely not! It took Disneys nine most senior animators here is how to cheat with blend shapes, so well also be
www.kilogramme.co.uk
years of experience on some of the classics of the genre to examining how Aardman Animations puts this technique into
WARREN FEARN formulate the principles of cartoon animation that still inform practice, before going on to provide some specic animation tips.
Creative Director.
Warren spent ve years modern CG. Some actions are exaggerated for comic effect, others For the purposes of this article, well be assuming that youre
with BBC Resources minimised. Whilst realistic animation tends to involve smooth, familiar with basic terminology, and have some animation
3DFX team before setting up
his own production studio.
naturalistic transitions between poses, cartoon-style animation experience in your application of choice. So grab some reference
www.wakstudios.co.uk places more emphasis on the poses themselves. We see material, pull up a chair, and well begin.

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 Cartoon animation tips | TUTORIALS

Want to rig and animate characters

with as much personality as those
in Open Season? Our set of tips for
cartoon-style work should provide you
with the ground rules. For more details

on Open Season itself, turn to page 32

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 TUTORIALS | Cartoon animation tips
Cartoon-style work is all about
simplication and exaggeration.
To achieve the quirky, elongated
look of the characters faces for this
project, Aardman Animations lmed
live actors, recomposed the footage
in After Effects, then applied it as a
texture map to the characters faces
Be aware of the shapes your
characters form in silhouette.
To maintain the clean lines of the
characters Boog and Elliot in
Open Season, Sony Pictures
Animation used a sophisticated
system of shapers on top of
conventional rig controls
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Image Aardman Animations
LEARN FROM THE MASTERS Survival Kit by Richard Williams. For more technical discussions,
You might not have the opportunity to interview John Lasseter relating to CG techniques, join the CG-Char online forum.
in your sitting room, but you should be watching the old classics Visit http://cgchar.toonstruck.com for more information.
to understand what cartoon-style animation is all about. From
Tex Averys Bugs Bunny to Mickey Mouse and Tom and Jerry, each CONSIDER TAKING ACTING CLASSES
cartoon uses the very same principles we use today in 3D CG Nearly all the big studios, and the best of the animation courses,
cartoon-style animation, and going through the shots on DVD frame teach their animators to act. If thats an opportunity thats passed
by frame reveals a lot of tricks. you by, consider taking evening classes. As an animator its your
Another essential is to read The Illusion of Life, the industry job to get inside a character, understand its motivation, get to grips
bible by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, two of Disneys Nine with the psychology of physical movement, and work with comic
Old Men. Study the twelve principles of animation: squash and timing. Chicago-based Ed Hooks is the best known international
stretch; anticipation; staging; straight ahead action vs pose-to-pose; lecturer teaching Acting for Animators. He travels the world with his
follow through and overlapping action; slow in and slow out; arcs; seminars. Check out www.edhooks.com for more details.
secondary action; timing; exaggeration; solid drawing; and appeal.
Other recommended text books include How to Draw Film Cartoons BE AWARE OF 3D DIMENSIONALITY
by Preston Blair (invaluable for walk cycles), and The Animators Even when creating strong two-dimensional poses to camera, its
important to remember youre working in 3D. Sometimes when a
pose looks wrong in the shot camera, a quick check through another
camera will reveal the problem. A seemingly over-length torso might
just be the result of your character leaning at a funny angle.
STUDY LIFE DRAWING AND NATURE
Although actions are exaggerated in cartoon-style animation,
they should still look natural. This style of animation is after all a
caricature of real life, so its important to understand what goes on
Image 2006 Sony Pictures Animation Inc.
Image Jonathan Turner
Toon-style rigging in action. For this scene, Jonathan Turner rigged
low-poly models and added Meshsmooth to the stack above the skin
modier. One of these rigs is analysed in detail in the boxout opposite
26/9/06 13:23:03
 Cartoon animation tips | TUTORIALS

IN FOCUS | Keeping the rig simple

To create his short lm, Sure, Jonathan Turner based his rigs on a puppet-like
skeleton. Below, we examine the structure of such a rigging system in detail

The head is a low-poly morph target,
with 3ds Maxs Meshsmooth modier
applied to the top of the stack. Each eye
has been given its own look-at target,
and each target is linked to a master
The bones have been left free
to animate with forward
kinematics. Everything above
the waist is keyframed into
place with rotation and scaling.

Image Aardman Animations

target, which is then linked to the head. The bones are set up to work
For this British Gas The eyelids are scaled up versions of like those in the human body,
commercial, Aardman animated the eyes, with animated slice planes which usually just rotate.
a minimal form to stretch, twist Scaling is sometimes added for
and pop around on screen. exaggeration, but translation is
After Effects sparks and glows best done by inserting a dummy
spiced up the action between the bones

in nature before you start exaggerating it. Study the human form
and take up life drawing if it isnt already your strong point. Eliot
Goldngers Human Anatomy for Artists: The Elements of Form has
a counterpart Animal Anatomy for Artists: The Elements of Form,
both of which are essential reading for the budding animator.

ENSURE YOUR MESH IS DENSE

ENOUGH FOR THIS STYLE
Extreme deformations will entail more distortion of the meshes
you create, so plan ahead for the most extreme poses, and build
your models accordingly.

NAIL DOWN YOUR CHARACTER

Before starting to work on your character, nail down what its
going to need to do. Talk to the Animation Director; nd out what
the character can and cant do; get to know the model; and start
thinking about the characters style and how its going to move. The central pelvis dummy is a slave of Below the waist, the rig is
both foot shapes. When either moves, the animated using IK to keep the
Remember every character is an individual, and each action should pelvis dummy follows, giving the basis of a feet rmly on the ground and
be motivated. Dont be afraid to ask the Animation Director to act walk cycle. Within the pelvis dummy is to avoid sliding. Each leg has
another dummy to which the spine is linked. inverse kinematics with a foot
out the characters movement. Its all very well understanding a This dummy is then linked to the pelvis shape as the end controller. IK
style in theory, but theres nothing better than seeing it in practice. dummy. Between them, rotation, scale and can be tricky to use at rst, but
movement are added to give the character its by far the best method of
When you know the fundamentals, start thinking about ideas for roll, squash and stretch as it walks ensuring a good walk cycle
secondary action. Does your character have a wobbly stomach?
Floppy ears? Chattering teeth?

DONT DO ANYTHING UNTIL YOU

DISCUSS THE RIG WITH THE ANIMATOR
Before starting any development work, talk with the key animators Keep rigs simple. These characters,
about how they plan to work with the rig. Theres no point building created by Warren Fearn for a pilot
TV show, used a simple skeleton with
in complexities if the animator prefers to work in a different way. around 12 joints, and an FK setup

KEEP THE RIG SIMPLE

As a rule of thumb, ensure the rig is intuitive, and keep it as simple
as possible. This style of animation is more about hitting strong
poses, and automation in a rig isnt necessarily a good thing. Joint
limitations and built-in constraints are unlikely to be helpful. Think
Image I Love Dust

about it: how constrained is a 2D drawing? If you build in constraints,

more often than not animators will simply want to know how to

break them. For analysis of a real rig, see the boxout above.

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 TUTORIALS | Cartoon animation tips

STEP BY STEP | Cheating cartoon-style animation with blend shapes

For this internal piece created by Aardman
01 Animations, Smokester the hamster was to be
comped into a live-action background. He enters
frame on all fours and walks pretty realistically at this point,
so the rig was designed to accommodate this.
Smokester has a cluster-driven stretchy spine and
02 IK forearms. The stretchy spine helped replicate
the seeming stretchiness of a real hamster. Alan
Shorts team lmed reference footage capturing the way
hamsters sometimes stretch out their noses, move their front
legs (but not their hind legs), then hunch back and appear
shorter again.
Smokesters performance segues from realistic to
03 anthropomorphic, cartoon-style action when he
picks up the cigarette and takes a puff. In order
to allow the rotate and constraint points of the cigarette to
be quickly changed, two swap-out cigarette models were
created and swapped seamlessly. This allowed the cigarette
be picked up and bounced convincingly to rest in the ashtray.

The rig was great when Smokester was walking,
04 but late changes to the action added a couple of
problems when sitting down, since his bottom stuck
out at an odd angle. The mesh was complex enough to form
the folds of his back-end, and to allow his haunches to spread
slightly as he rests back on them. But the rig around his hips
wasnt sophisticated enough to do this convincingly.
With limited time to re-rig, the x was a simple
05 blend shape. Spare blend shapes can always be
usefully accommodated within your character
set-up. The corrective blend shape in Smokesters bottom
was simply animated into place as part of the action.
With the blend slider animated into place,
06 Smokesters wayward bottom is now xed. In this
nal shot, it forms a believable sitting shape and
convincing contact points with the table. Unfortunately,
Smokester is now smoking about forty a day. Alans team
has subsequently been forced to model nicotine patches to
add to the set-up ...

START ANIMATING
Cartoon-style principles can be
Put together a rst incarnation of the rig and have a go. Using
applied to very stylised characters. a proxy model, start working on animation tests at the earliest
Jonathan Turner attached particle
emitters to this rig, generating owers
stage you possibly can. Dont worry about perfecting the rig before
as the character walked. Movement and you start animating: this should be an iterative process whereby
rotation helped keep the owers alive
the animation requirements inform its development. By using le
referencing, youll ensure the animator will always be able to pull
in the latest version of the rig. In that way, rig development and
animation tests can go on in tandem.

KEEP A MIRROR BY YOUR DESK

Even the most experienced animators keep mirrors by their desks.
Image Jonathan Turner

If you cant get the Animation Director or person at the next desk
to perform the actions youre going to animate, act it out yourself
in your mirror, particularly watching mouth movement for lip-sync.
And guys, dont use this asking-for-a-performance-for-animation-
reference thing as an excuse to meet girls its not on!

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 Cartoon animation tips | TUTORIALS

Rig your characters to allow

stretching. For this energy
sweet ad, created by Aardman
Animations for German TV, the rig
incorporated two opposing body
SWAP RIGS IF IT HELPS controls stretching a cluster-
driven lattice between them
This tends to be a trick used more in shorts and commercials than
in features. In short-form animation, rigs are often built to solve a
particular problem posed by a single shot, then swapped out for
another rig when necessary. If objects are difcult to constrain to
several other objects, duplicate them and animate the visibility.

CORRECTIVE BLEND SHAPES CAN BE

USEFUL CHEATS
Think of blend shapes and pose-based deformers like rigging
assistants. Theyll give the rig an impromptu helping hand without
major re-rigging. See the boxout on the facing page for details.

Image Aardman Animations

WORK TO CAMERA
Dont worry about tweaking animation that wont be seen by the
camera. But do watch out for cheating character positions between
shots. Its not a problem when thought through, but just watch out
for characters appearing to slide around the scene between shots.
If youre cutting a render camera around in a scene, as is often the
case in commercials, watch out for shadows of off-screen characters
which can give away cheated positions. If in doubt, let the Lighting
Technical Directors know.

HIT STRONG KEY POSES, AND DONT BE
SHY OF HOLDS
2D animators use holds unashamedly, and the same principles
apply equally to 3D. The equivalent of the traditional cel animators
boiling of the drawing of a held pose to keep the image alive, is
trickier to achieve in 3D, but blinks and twitches will help. If you
freeze-frame through DVDs of some the animation classics youll
see that just a couple of keyframes are held either side of an
extreme pose, with very little on the in-betweens. Snap into a pose,
then hold. Then snap into the next pose.
THE GRAPH EDITOR IS YOUR FRIEND ...
... and if it isnt, its time to get on good terms. Dont leave it to the
software to in-between your key poses it will often default
to symmetrical splits and cushioning. Its much better to push for
asymmetrical splits.
DONT OVER-ANIMATE
Cartoon-style animation doesnt mean exaggerating every action.
Think carefully about which actions should be emphasised and
which shouldnt. Exaggeration should be used with care, and only for
comic effect, or to emphasise character. When animating dialogue,
consider which words should have emphasis, then exaggerate the
poses and actions that coincide with those spoken words.
CREATE NON-SYMMETRICAL POSES
AND PERFORMANCES
In real life people arent symmetrical, and they dont carry
themselves in a symmetrical fashion. Use non-symmetry in both
your poses and performances to make your characters more
individual. Avoid instances where both limbs reach their extreme
poses on the same keyframe.
CHECKLIST | Cartoon-style animation workow
As a summary of the principles set out in this article, we break down the
process of creating a cartoon-style shot, from initial concept to nal delivery
First, examine the storyboards and discuss the character(s) with the Director
until you understand them inside out
Talk to the modellers about the extreme poses youd like to use, blend shapes
for the face, and any lip-sync shapes that may be needed. Mention any
deformations that might require the mesh to be denser in sections
Start building a rst iteration of the rig. Keep it simple and intuitive
Figure out the characters motivation for each shot, and their primary action
Rehearse the action in front of your mirror, or ask the person at the next desk
to act it out for you. Take extra care over lip-sync for any dialogue
Working to the shot camera, start your rst animation tests of the characters
primary motion. Ensure youre building strong poses with good silhouettes
Tweak the animation curves to enable snap in between the held poses
Let the Lighting Technical Directors know if youre planning any cheats of the
characters position in shot
Get client approval on your rst animation tests of the primary motion. Make
any changes necessary before embarking on the next stage
Rene the rig, adding deformers for secondary animation
Add secondary animation like wobbling stomachs, and uttering scarves
Add interest on the holds with details like blinks of the eyes
Render out a test animation for the client
Make any changes necessary as per the clients request
Tidy up your scene le, removing any unused channels
Finally, hand over the scene to the Technical Director to render

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