Welcome to your first lesson, learning about one of the principles of animation. But before we begin, I wanted to give a little disclaimer about these principles. I've said before, you know, these aren't the only things you need to learn to be able to animate animation. Why I love it is because it's a never ending process of learning, but these are the things you need to start with. It would be like a chef who has, is trying to cook something but doesn't know what the ingredients are or, and has never tasted them. So imagine these 12 principles as like new ingredients that you've never tasted.
So it may seem overly simple that we're breaking them down so much. Um, but that's part of it. You know, it, it's like tasting each flavor of an ingredient. So you know how when they combine what they're all gonna taste like, so that's what this is like, and making sure before we start combining things that we understand each element on their own. So let's get started learning our first animation principle called Squash and Stretch. And it's a very playful and one of my favorite principles of animation because it adds so much life to any animation, but it's exactly as it sounds.
It is the squash or the compression of an object under stress or on an impact. And it is the converse of that, the stretch or the lengthening of an object into its extreme pose. And that yin and yang of an object is what we find in nature. It's how our bodies work. It's how our muscles work. They contract and they relax, you know, they compress and they expand and stretch.
You can also see it on a macro and a micro level. So you could see squash and stretch on a macro level of the entire silhouette of something changing. So it's very obvious. And then you could see something on a micro level squash and stretch, like just the blinking of an eye or chewing of food and how the, the face even squashes and stretches. And then, you know, again, on the macro level, if someone jumps, they compress down before they jump up. And so you have this squash and stretch that you can see kind of at every level, um, once you start looking for it.
So the most important aspect of achieving the proper squash and stretch on something is to maintain volume. All right? That's the key. And I have this water balloon here, um, to help demonstrate that. So when I squash this water balloon down, the volume stays the same as when I stretch it out, right? There's no more or less water between either of these two poses of this water balloon.
It's kind of fun. So no matter what it's doing, the volume, the wa amount of water in it stays the same. And that should be true of your drawings or whatever medium of animation you're using, because that will help sell the effect more because we don't want something to be, you know, unless it's like the Hulk or something, um, changing, being Sized too rapidly Because it'll catch our eye not as a charming quality, but as an error. And because we're not used to seeing like things change volume quickly, um, we're used to things having a volume and keeping them throughout their range of motion. So that's a principle. It can be broken of course, but we are talking about sticking to the principles right now so that we understand, understand them, and we know when we can break them that we are breaking them and it's not by accident and we're making a mistake.
It's going to catch the viewer's eye in a way that we don't want it to, that'll be distracting. We don't want to distract, we want to bring them into our animation. So that's why we need to learn these principles. So we understand the rationale when someone's watching something we've made, that they're focused on what we want them to be focused on. And they're not being distracted by mistakes or errors that they can't articulate. They might not know, Hey, the volume changed too much here.
Um, when you squashed and stretched the water balloon, you know, those types of things is what you need to know as an animator to achieve appealing animation. And it may seem obvious, this may seem like an obvious thing, like, no, duh, I'm not putting water in or taking it out when I do this. But you know, when we try to translate that into drawing, like over a long period of time, you're doing mini drawings and animation, say it's a hundred frames over time, if you're doing a lot of bouncing and squashing and stretching, you can kind of lose track of what the original volume was when you're having to hand draw on the silhouette all the time. And so just to think about that when you're, you know, approaching your own animations, and that can hold true for 3D as well. It's a little easier than 3D because you can type in the actual numbers of what you want to scale or squash and stretch it to. So here's an example using Maya.
It's a 3D software that's used in the animation industry. It's name a movie that you like, or a video game you like. And probably Maya has been used on it. I've been using it for my entire career, and I have other classes on it. If you're interested in learning 3D animation or modeling or rigging or there's a lot of sides to 3D. But so I, I, you don't have to follow along with this, I just want to show you what it's like in 3D and how precise you can get to make sure that you're, you know, maintaining your volumes.
So let's take a look at that real quick. So here we are in Autodesk Maya, and if I want to squash or stretch this sphere, I can type in a specific value and ensure the opposite axis of the shape is exactly the opposite of the volume change. That way I know even though the shape change, the volume is staying the same, just like the water balloon in drawing, you have to do this visually. So that's why it's important to understand this concept. The most common way to demonstrate the squash and stretch principle is through one of the most popular and famous animation exercises in the world. The bouncing ball.
I've animated two bouncing balls, one has squash and stretch and one doesn't. Can you tell which one does? So now that you've had a chance to look at these, is it the left or the right? I'm pretty sure you can tell it's the right, even though the squash and stretch is only occurring over three frames or about one 10th of a second, you can tell a difference. So that can show you too how little frames can make a huge difference. So the same is true of the amount of squash and stretch.
In that example, I was only squashing the sphere from a scale of one to 0.8. So that's a change of only 20%, and that is still very noticeable, even only over just three frames, you could tell a difference. So one of the tendencies of once you start learning these principles is to go overboard with them and really exaggerate them. And that can be fun. But I just wanted to show you a very subtle example, which is still fairly obvious when compared to a sphere that doesn't have squash and stretch. So it shows that over just a few frames, one 10th of a second, and just a 20% difference is a huge difference in our eyes, even though, you know, you're, you're not a trained really animator yet.
Or maybe, maybe you are, I don't know. But you can tell that difference just because you are, you are a pro at this. You, you don't have to know all these animation principles to be able to tell a difference between things. So I, that's the, the way our audience is going to be too. Now, to be the artist, you have to be able to control those things to show what you wanna show. But just keep in mind your audience is going to be able to tell the difference as well, just like you were able to without bouncing ball.
So let's begin the assignment and exercise. In the next lesson, we are going to use 2D digital animation with a free online, uh, tool to animate a little bouncing water ball. So I will see you in the next lesson.