Have some fun shots i did on my friends’s film Kali mata (you can find it HERE), when the godess Kali appear. The “black goo” that makes Kali was a tricky FX to animate, it sure was not the kind of things i was accustomed to animate, i really struggled with Kevin and Pierre to find the correct motion. The backgrounds layouts were done by Privat Messing Fontaine Characters layouts were done by Kevin Roualland.
What is smearing? Smearing is a multitude of techniques used in animation to bridge two or more frames to create the illusion of motion through methods like blurring, warping, distortion, and a few others.
I wanted to start of with a fresh animation to demonstrate some movements.
It looks like it can definitely use some extra information to convey the motion of the sword. This is where we starting thinking about how to smear the object(s).
The most common approach that I’ve noticed that animators take, especially newer animators, is that they warp the whole object. As in they have a point A, and a point B, and then they just have a “mass” of implied motion in between those points.
Here’s a still shot
It works quite well with objects like swords. So here’s what my attempt looked like.
It definitely helped explain the movements more, but I’m not sure I liked it.
Thankfully there are other “types” of smears that we can look at to try to see if they fit in this particular animation.
The next one I wanted to try was “speedlining.” This is basically when you distort the edges or add speedlines to the edges to make the object appear in motion.
Here’s an example
and the still shot:
notices how the edges appear more sketchy. This one is really common and it can be executed in different ways.
Here’s my attempt
I really like this type of smearing, even though it still lacks some of the motion that the first iteration lacked. The speedlines really add character to the motion that would otherwise be missing in a normal warp, but I still needed that smear to bring it to the point where it needed to be.
So here’s what some call “doubling.” (and just as a side comment, I don’t think any of these have “official names” other than just smearing)
Here’s the still shot
This was a really well executed smear which I don’t think would have worked the same if you would have just warped the faces.
Here’s another slightly different execution
with the still shot
It’s like a distortion mixed with doubling, and that’s what I like about smears.. you can mix and match things you feel would work in the particular scene.
So here’s my mix n’ match smear.
Not the best execution, but for our purposes I think it works well.
Motion blurring is really powerful as well. Film uses it all the time, as does 2d animation. Notice the force of the impact being pronounced with the added blur at the head.
Here’s the still shot
There are a few other smears I thought were interesting because it just speaks to the way our brain interprets these frames without even considering the logical implications of the individual frames.
Here’s one example
I don’t know if you caught that, but here is the still shot:
The guy has a knob for a hand. It works so well, you don’t stop to think about implication of that hand’s morphology.
Here’s another one that doesn’t make too much sense.
Like what is this
That’s Imaishi. It’s part of why we love that animator so much. It’s part of his style and character. It conveys an emotion that would otherwise be absent in a “realistic” smear. Animation doesn’t have to make sense. It just has to look good.
Bambi (1942) | anatomical studies by Rico Lebrun (x)
“Within the animation community Rico Lebrun is mostly known for his teaching stint at Disney during the pre-production phase of Bambi. In the photo you can see him giving a life drawing featuring a deer as a model. Seated behind him are animators Frank Thomas and Retta Scott.
His incredibly analytical motion studies of deer became an important cornerstone in the development of realistic, but animatable characters for the film.
Lebrun shows you the immense motion range of a deer as well as possibilities for entertainment.” - Andreas Deja
My name is Max Kaufmann, Gameplay Engineer at Giant Squid. In designing the aquatic feel for ABZÛ, we endeavored to allow players to swim gesturally through full 3D environments.
Fluid control presents a challenge because smoothed movement introduces input lag. It’s frustrating when steering is not responsive: when players tilt the stick they expect the diver to move right away and when they let go they expect the diver to stop. However, that does not feel fluid. We’re trying to simulate swimming without “feeling swimmy.“
Additionally, as designers, we risk acclimating to slippery controls rather than fixing them. Several times our personal baselines diverged from the experience of new playtesters. We learned to rely on rules, not just our intuition, to rate the success of a particular game-feel tuning.
Our first rule: our controls succeed when the player intuits that the diver is going to drift a little bit after they release the thumbstick.
We began with the camera. We designed the camera yaw to be predictive. Like how bikers look into turns before entering an intersection, when the player steers we rotate the camera to extrapolate where the diver will be facing after drifting, rather than her current heading.
When a player releases the stick, the camera is already aligned correctly and the drift-direction is intuitive. Additive animations also turn her head and curve her body towards the direction of her drift to reinforce the hint.
On the downside, extrapolating camera yaw to match her predicted direction can swing wildly and induce simulation sickness when the diver is performing gestural moves, like loops and flips. Through playtesting, we identified these moves and added special detectors which hold the camera steady, dollying out to frame the acrobatics. This maintains the tranquil, underwater atmosphere.
Loops introduce another control issue: input reversing.
We apply steering and pitching in her local coordinate space and integrate with quaternions instead of euler angles. This allows the diver’s rotations to be freeform and not pitch-locked like flight sims and other underwater games.
This is problematic when the diver pitches upside down. In this belly-up orientation, steering reverses what players expect, and “left” becomes “right.” Through playtesting, we identified our next rule: ignore reversed input.
Instead of steering when the players rotate into this state, we apply a twisting-force to unroll her body and resume player steering when she is finishes the transition from belly-up to belly-down.
The twisting force is one of many corrective forces we apply to softly nudge the diver. We also slow down near sea creatures, steer away from geometry, and level the diver out or fix-up nearly-vertical headings when the player wants to ascend or descend.
We tried many ways to calculate these forces. For most smooth values, we use critically-damped springs, which advance a speed/value pair to a target set-point in a fixed amount of time without any discontinuities. It has a nice ease-in/ease-out character that keeps the response fluid.
The implementation of Critical Damping can be found in Game Programming Gems vol. 4.
However, critical damping doesn’t give us enough control over how we ease in the twisting force. We instead had the best results with a PID Controller. These are further generalized springs that incorporate set-point motion and lag compensation.
The constants stand for “Proportional, Integral, Derivative”
PID Controllers are frequently used in racing games to design the handling for different types of cars.
A negative derivative term, for instance, can make it feel “slippery”, and a high integral term can make it “push harder” over time. These gave us all the knobs we needed to “mix” her force, like a sound engineer mixing audio channels. When her correction forces harmonize, players hardly notice the adjustment at all.
Developing original controls is challenging but the result differentiates our game. We’re confident in the synchronicity between our fluid game feel, and the meditative themes of ABZÛ’s narrative world.
“Pencil tests for Kubo and the Two Strings by Sandro Cleuzo used to resolve some of the design issues and for inspiration before starting the stop motion process.”
“Pencil tests for Kubo and the Two Strings by Sandro Cleuzo used to resolve some of the design issues and for inspiration before starting the stop motion process.”
These are the cartoons I personally grew up on. They were fun, they were colourful. They had variety - action, mystery, comedy. But nothing really developed.
One of the main unifying cartoon formats was to use the medium to be zany, silly, and comedic by depicting impossible violence. Each episode was self-contained; an issue would be set up, hijinks would occur, and by the end everything would be exactly the same. There were some occasional new introductions when the same jokes got stale, but usually to the detriment of the show. Most of the time, a cartoon world was held in statis, an impenetrable status quo to uphold gags. Humour was the absolute name of the game. Everything had to be funny, or building up to be funny. Some of these cartoons were old enough and insecure enough in their own format, they actually had laugh tracks. And most of the gags revolved around bad things. Things you could technically label as ‘negative’ - antagonistic relationships, goofy injuries, family disputes, exploitative behaviour.
…And then along came anime.
After the 90s, anime popularity exploded. There were far, far more good examples than those pictures, these were just my personal set. No more random, contextless violence - anime gave all that physical harm a plot and a purpose, as well as weird fantasy creatures, robots, and aliens. It was still zany, but it added one thing the cartoons I’d seen as a kid never had - drama. Despite having the most absurd design choices ever to beam into our TVs, anime plunged into drama at every possible moment. Animal sidekicks helped you deal with separation and loss. Fight sequences resulted in actual deaths. Characters emoted on screen, got angry or upset, for understandable reasons. For those of us thrown into teenagerhood it was exactly what we craved - cartoons like the ones we knew, but with the wrenching, overblown drama we saw in our own lives. It didn’t matter that it was about alien robots from the past or inexplicable hair. We loved it.
And these are the cartoons I’m delighted to see currently being produced. We broke out of the idea that cartoons were all for young children who don’t follow a story. Now we have multiple shows with ongoing plots - and I don’t know how many people realise how amazing that actually is. It’s actually viable for a cartoon to hold back on detail reveals, to develop cultures for nonhumans or fantasy humans, for characters to develop and learn and change. I NEVER had this when I was young. I may not be in the age group seen as the target for cartoons any more, but I can still enjoy these and don’t feel at all bad for doing so. Cartoons are great now, and I’m so happy they’ve evolved out of what they were before and becomes stories of real characters, real personalities, with plots and not avoiding drama for the sake of comedy, with artistry in every area of the work, the designs, the environments, the music, and all the little hidden touches. It’s like the creators aren’t afraid any more to openly care about their creations, they can sincerely write something that moves them and that they want to share. 90s cartoons were fundamentally insincere and insecure by comparison, an art form that was afraid to be serious or require sustained interest after 15 minutes. I’m so glad for the way cartoons are developed now and how they can command such dignity by being sincere and dramatic, and promote messages of respect, caring, and loyalty.
