#timing charts

[artsandstoriesandstuff]

Animation Test 22! (TEPP)

Stephie MARCH!!!

(Reblogs and comments would be incredibly appreciated!!!)

Not much to say about this piece. I’m improving with timing charts!

[acid-by-thomas]

My first animation work done with timing charts! Feel like I had some difficulty doing charts first, inbetweening later, but nevertheless I feel like I learned a lot of great stuff from this, especially the importance of doing keys and breakdowns. Look at him go!

[opashoo]

Yo what's the little graph in the top right of the bunny bite animation for?

It's a timing chart! It's a really useful tool that helps me to figure out how things are located relative to each other in time and how to plan out my frames accordingly.

The timing chart itself is sort of a little timeline that physically represents the distance something travels between frames. You can see in the example I made just now, a higher density of frames in one part of the timing chart gives the appearance that something is moving slower, while a lower density gives the appearance that it's moving faster.

All four of these examples have the same number of frames and start and and at the same time, but they each give the appearance of moving at different speeds at different times. More frames towards the start makes it look like it's starting slow and speeding up, vice versa by putting more frames towards the end.

A slow out is good if something is building up speed, really good if you're animating a hit with a windup while a slow in is good for animating something coming to a gentle stop, and all kinds of different uses for each.

I slowed down Amelie's bite so you can see how her movement correlates to the timing chart. Her movement is a little more complex than just a ball moving in a straight line, but you can see how the principles still apply. I used a slow out because I wanted to emphasize her winding up and positioning herself, and then biting very suddenly.

Speed up, it comes together as a snappy biting motion.

Another example here is animating the tail using a slow in and slow out, because the tail never comes to a hard or sudden stop. It always slows before changing directions.

There are tutorials you can look up online for how to actually make and utilize timing charts. Toniko Pantoja has a video called The Art of Inbetweening: Timing Charts which is what helped me figure it all out. Hopefully my post helps! I just get really excited explaining timing charts because they're what made animation accessible to me; before that, I was too intimidated to try meaningfully animating anything, but learning how to use timing charts made me feel like I could go in with a plan.

[micahnoss]

A little slime blob I animated in csp to try and get to grips with timing charts. I quite like how it turned out, considering I haven’t really animated before.

[animationdesk]

Any tips for timing/timing sheets? I mean, I get the concept, the idea of how many/how close the frames should be to each other, but writing one out always feels like a struggle, especially when it comes to multiple actions in one shot.

Hi there! Thank you for your question and your patience for me to get back to you on this topic:

One suggestion I can definitely recommend is practicing the bouncing ball (feel free to see the tag for bouncing ball - link). It will allow you to simplify the Timing and the use of Timing Charts, as you expand to the more complicated actions. 

There are a couple of videos that on YouTube that help talk about using the Timing Charts for your animation.

@stringbing has a great animation video insight of using Timing Charts (as well as more than one Timing Chart for the action) in this video (link) (starts around 15:00 where he mentions about the hand, and he creates a Timing Chart for that action). He really has amazing insight for animating, check out his tumblr! 

Here are a couple more on using Timing Charts: (link) (link). 

Finally, I would encourage to focus on the main action first for your shot/scene (if it’s just one character, focus on the character’s main action), then do the Timing Chart for the Secondary Action that follows the main. If there is more than one character, focus on the main character driving the scene, then have the Timing for the other character(s) to react to the main character. 

I do hope this helps you and with your animation projects! Thanks for the question! :) 

[jthepearlord]

I swear I hate doing timing charts

[valiinputoaja]

some rough homework stuff because I spent so much time on the timing chart and xsheet