PHYSICSS

        In order to succeed in animation, you have to have a grasp on physics. Without physics, animations can lose their appeal because they do not look realistic. No matter how cartoony, having a realistic air to your animation is important.
        In this article, Professor Alejandro Garcia talks about the principle of weight gain and loss. To us weight is a constant, you can gain or lose some but for the most part, you stay in one area of weight. But when something is moving, their effective weight is constantly changing. This most often happens when the something is moving upward and gaining speed, moving upward and losing speed, moving downward and gaining speed, or moving downward and losing speed. When you go upward and you are gaining or losing speed, you are also gaining or losing weight. But when you go downwards you lose when you gain and gain when you lose. Essentially you are working with gravity. If you go against it, like rising and gaining or falling and slowing, you are gaining weight. When you go with it, rising and losing or falling and speeding, you lose weight.
          All this weight this and that is important because as a character moves the weight variations create overlapping actions through hair, clothing, and flesh. Losing weight makes these things seem light while gaining weight pulls them down. Poorly animated characters can look floaty because of the lack of effective weight overlapping. The important thing to remember is that it is not just the direction of the motion but whether it is going with or agaisnt gravity. Weight is related to inertia, with a distinction in perspective. When the camera moves we see the overlapping action as drag and when the eye is following the movement we see it as a weight variation.
         Weight is a very important dynamic to animation. It gives realism to imaginary characters and lets the eye follow something and process it correctly. Without weight variation animations would be floaty and low quality and would not look real to us. It is the small things in physics that aid to the appeal of animation.


        This article was informative. I knew there were principles of animation but I was unaware there were principles of physics of animation. Knowing what I know now could help future walk cycles.
        I like when we learn about physics in animation. I plan to never take physics so this gives me a very basic understanding without all the complexity. What else can physics be applied to for animation?