Flow Project

Flow from Tien Nguyen on Vimeo.

This project builds upon the successive breaking of joints project in which I had to take the idea of energy flowing through a limb from one end to the next but with a more flexible object.  I decided to animate hair flowing in the breeze that cycles.  This is my first project using Toon Boom Harmony to animate.

The new required Principle of Animation for this project was:

1. Flow

The optional Principle I used was adding a secondary object that interacts with the initial object (blinking).

Definition
-Flow: Making the animation more fluid by the use of overlapping actions and “S” curves during movement.  (In my own words: Basically successive breaking of joints but with a much more flexible object; successive breaking of "noodle.")

(http://45.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0acc2AsAM1qz53u1o1_1280.gif)

A big challenge of this project was getting used to animating with Toon Boom Harmony.  It's a lot different than Adobe Photoshop, the onion skins which I rely on a lot are different colors on Toon Boom and that made it really confusing at first.  Some of the hotkeys are also different.  Another challenging aspect was getting the flow correctly.  Unlike successive breaking of joints, there's no joints I could base some of my movements and arcs off of.  I tried a few different variations of the hair flow until I got something believable.  I also had to make sure that the hair length stayed constant, which was tricky.  In the end I think I was very successful in making believable hair flow in a new animation program.