Follow through and Overlapping actions

FOLLOW THROUGH AND OVERLAPPING ACTION :

The termination of an action and establishing it relationship to the next action.They define ease and flexibility of the character.When the main body of the character stops all other parts continue to catch up to the main mass of the character,such as arms, long hair, clothing, coat tails or a dress, floppy ears or a long tail (these follow the path of action). Nothing stops all at once. This is follow through. Overlapping action is when the character changes direction while his clothes or hair continues forward. The character is going in a new direction, to be followed, a number of frames later, by his clothes in the new direction. "DRAG," in animation, for example, would be when Goofy starts to run, but his head, ears, upper body, and clothes do not keep up with his legs. In features, this type of action is done more subtly. Example: When Snow White starts to dance, her dress does not begin to move with her immediately but catches up a few frames later. Long hair and animal tail will also be handled in the same manner. Timing becomes critical to the effectiveness of drag and the overlapping action.

Follow through and overlap can be achieved by proper posing at breakdowns and in-betweens .And there is a great tool in maya called DOPE SHEET for adjusting the timing for each and every individual part of the character ,where we can play around and offset the keys for follow through.






BODY MECHANICS :

Body Mechanics is a vast subject where every animator should go deep and research on it.Body Mechanics is all about understanding the physicality of animation.Body mechanics deals with many interesting and important things like energy, force , weight, line of action, power centres etc.
It is a study about which part of the body to move first and which parts to follow it and about reducing stress on the characters body.














WEIGHT :


In the search of believability within animation, the weight is one important element.It modifies the way the character or object will move or interact. It is important to understand that we are animating masses and not lines or polygon meshes.The observation is once again the
key to achieve proper weighting in animation.While the character or object weight is part of the observation process alone, interacting with
weight requires weight anticipation.





BREAKDOWNS :

The center pose between the extremes is the passing pose . It define hOW you pass from one extreme to the next extreme and thus has a crucial impact onto the animation since there are infinite number of ways to do so. Breakdown is one best drawing or a best pose that defines how to get from one extreme to the other extreme.It decides the the way of animation from one key to the other.




IN-BETWEEN :


That is when the subtlety of the movement kicks in. The in-between will define the cushioning and spacing between the key and the breakdown pose. In-betweens are the drawings or poses which gives more definition to the animation.It is about how things move between poses.It is process of giving more flow and fluidity to the animation.