Animating an Exquisite Corpse in Grease Pencil

A great advantage of animating in 2D is the audacity of what it's capable of conveying. Through a series of drawings, you can draw a person melting into an eyeball, which explodes into a flock of birds, which congregate into a hand, which has its fingers cut off, then morphs into a young girl. In 3D, that many assets would take forever, but in 2D, it's simply a few keyframes of drawing away. We'll explore these possibilities with an exquisite corpse animation. In the process, we'll also examine the traditional principles of 2D animation, and also get comfortable with the animating tools and conventions of Blender.

Exquisite corpses are a perfect game to follow this philosophy. The term "exquisite corpse" comes from poetry, in which cut-up sentences and words are put together at random to form ideas you...

Animating a bouncing ball

The bouncing ball is our first, simplest animation, and a classic beginner's exercise. We'll utilize some of the core principles of animation with this simple subject:

• Pose to pose: This is where we get the bedrock extremes keyed in first to nail the timing, then create in-between frames after.
• Arcs: A bouncing ball doesn't travel in a straight line from the high to the low poses. Instead, it will flow along a guiding arc.
• Ease in, Ease out: A bouncing ball should slow at the top of each arc for a bit, and attain quicker velocities as it slams into the ground and ricochets back up.
• Squash and Stretch: The ball will stretch out, arrow-like, as it approaches and leaves the ground. When it hits the ground, it will squash down into the ground.
• Timing: Each bounce will get shorter as the ball loses momentum. Also, we'll give the animation...

Blinking Blender eyes

For our next exquisite corpse transition, we'll use our starting circle as the blue dot in a Blender logo, then turn the logo into a blinking eye. By duplicating and modifying it slightly, we can then turn one eye into a sea of eyeballs, blinking before disappearing. In the following diagram, you can see the plan for the animation:

Blinking eyes from frames 1 to 100

See the finished project file, ch09_eyeblinks.blend, to dig through the results.

Reusing frames for the Blender blinking animation

This blinking eye animation will emphasize reusing your animation assets for maximum impact, and will capture a psychedelic sensibility that works great in an exquisite corpse. It also pays homage to our...

Building a zooming fight scene

A green circle. It's an island in the middle of the ocean. You zoom in to see two warriors, ready to fight, standing on opposite ends of the grass. One of them launches an energy blast, but the other deflects it with his spinning staff.

This dynamically shifting fight is the sort of thing you see in anime introductions and fight scenes. We can do straight-ahead animation to flow through their battles with extreme angles. A thin, contouring line style and a loose, edge-breaking color style lets us focus on the motion.

This workflow assumes you're drawing with a stylus. If you don't have stylus capabilities on your computer, use the Curve tool. As seen at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Blender-3D-By-Example-Second-Edition/blob/master/Blender3DByExample_ch09/ch09_fight.blend, these steps get through the fight's motion block...

Bringing it all together

These three animations can click together front to back using our exquisite corpse start frame, not to mention infinite other possibilities. Now to edit them together and get them out of Blender as video files that can be displayed. You can edit videos together in Blender using the Video Sequence Editor (VSE).

Editing videos together can be accomplished in a number of ways. You might open your various exquisite corpse files, render them to videos, and combine the videos in the VSE. Production wisdom recommends rendering to image sequences rather than video files, and saving video output for the last step. That way, if your computer crashes on frame 99 out of 100, you've still got 99 usable frames. Blender allows us to also combine scenes in the VSE. This will utilize linking like we used in Chapter 5, Modern Kitchen – Part 1: Kitbashing. We...

Summary

These three animations have allowed us to explore different approaches to animation. The bouncing ball showed the pose to pose approach, plus many animation principles. Animating the Blender logo employed several tricks of Grease Pencil to reuse and control animations. The fight scene took us through a straight-ahead workflow, tackling each keyframe right after the next.

This is only the start of where Grease Pencil can take you. I've got three or four other files with exquisite corpse experiments that could be polished into the next sequence of the overall animation.

Questions

1. What is the difference between pose to pose animation and straight-ahead animation?
2. How does making Grease pencil keyframes differ when using Draw, Edit, and Sculpt Modes?
3. How can you modify multiple GP keyframes at the same time?
4. Using mask layers and a second layer, see if you can animate a shadow on your bouncing ball, and also a layer for a shadow cast on the floor.
5. What modifier can you add to a grease pencil object to automatically grow your strokes over time?
6. What are the benefits of moving keyframes in the Dope Sheet to change their timing?
7. Why should you limit how much time you spend on each frame when roughing in animation?
8. Where in Blender's video editing pipeline is it good to use image sequences, scenes, and video render outputs?
9. Make a new animation that relies on pose to pose to sync up with your other exquisite corpse animations.
10. Make a new animation...

Further reading

Share your further exquisite corpse creations on Blender Artists. I've created a thread at https://blenderartists.org/t/exquisite-corpse-animation where your future exquisite corpse animations can join together with others.