3D Still Life Fruit Render 2/4

3D Still Life Fruit Render 1/4

Appeal in Animation

When creating an appealing pose for a character, one thing to avoid is called "twins", where both arms and both legs are in the same position, doing the same thing. This creates a stiff pose that is unappealing. Vary the parts of the body a bit, including the facial features, makes a character more appealing. Audiences like to see a quality of charm, pleasing design, simplicity, communication, or magnetism. A weak drawing or design lacks appeal. A design that is complicated or hard to read lacks appeal. Clumsy shapes and awkward moves all have low appeal. The actual word "appeal" is usually misrepresented to suggest bunnies, kittens and cuddly bears. It doesn't.  Appeal in animation means anything someone would like to see in it: quality of charm, pleasing design, simplicity, magnetism or communication.

Secondary Actions

A secondary action is an action that results directly from another action.  Secondary actions are vital in some cases as the primary action relys on the secondary, to heighten the effectiveness of the overall action.  A secondary action is always kept subordinate to the primary action.  If it conflicts with it, becomes mroe interesting, or dominates in any way, it is either the wrong choice or it has been staged incorrectly. This is a good example of a secondary action which I found on Youtube:

Arcs in Animation

In Computer Animation, motion is usually represented in a timeline view using splines(arcs). The arcs represent the values of an objects parameters at a specific moment in time. The method used for calculating interpolated keyframe values determines the characteristic of the arc(motion).  Arcs can also be seen when a ball is bouncing along a surface, as it creates curves in the air - arcs.  Although sometimes it may be slightly exaggerated.

Slow in and slow out

This refers to the spacing of the inbetween frames at maximum positions. It is the second and third order continuity of motion of the object. Rather than having a uniform velocity for an object, it is more appealing, and sometimes more realistic, to have the velocity vary at the extremes. An example of this could be a bouncing ball, as it moves faster when it approaches or leaves the ground - and it goes slower as it approaches/leaves its maximum position. The name comes from having the object or character "slow out" of one pose and "slow in" to the next pose.

Straight Ahead Action/Pose-to-Pose Action

Straight Ahead Action in hand drawn animation is when the animator starts at the first drawing in a scene and then draws all of the subsequent frames until he reaches the end of the scene. This creates very spontaneous and zany looking animation and is used for wild, scrambling action.

Pose to Pose actions is when the animator carefully plans out the animation, draws a sequence of poses, i.e., the initial, some in-between, and the final poses and then draws all the in-between frames (or another artist or the computer draws the inbetween frames). This is used when the scene requires more thought and the poses and timing are important.

This is similar to keyframing with computer graphics but it must be modified slightly since the inbetweens may be too unpredictable. For example, objects or parts of objects may intersect one another. Computer keyframing can take advantage of the hierarchical model structure of a complex object. Different parts of the hierarchy can be transformed at different keyframes. For example, in a jump, translation keyframes can be set for the entire model in the X and Z directions. Then other rotation or translation keyframes can be set for portions of the model, e.g., the legs and arms.