 Welcome back to another FNA and today is part 6 of the most common animation mistakes and today I'm going to talk about one axis. All right, one axis. A very common thing for students is to engage only one axis on your character. Be it on heads, on the chest, on the body, all kinds of things. And the tricky thing about that is that it's going to look very mechanical, very CG because it's not very organic. Now there's going to be a range of style depending on what you're doing. You might get away with it. But if you pretend you do a nod, let's say this character, you take the head con and if you just engage one axis, it's going to look like this. It's just going to be very robotic and mechanical versus here going down, going up into another spot, going down into another spot with arcs. All that is going to help to make it more organic and less computer-y. That being said, depending on your style, you can have head nods like this. They're mostly engaging one axis like this. And that's fine. Again, it depends on the style. You have something very stylized and potentially limited time budget. You can get away with it. But if something that really goes towards more, I won't say for real, but it's a bit more advanced in terms of mechanics and the look and the style. You have to make things a bit more complicated, a bit more complex in all your axes. So even let's say someone is hunching over. So going back to this Rick, again, if you would select just the chest controls and the head and move her down, this is what a lot of people would do. It would just be one axis. But you have to think about, could it be going down like this with a slight twist? It's going to be a slight twist in the body and then potentially in the head with a different twist. Also think of it in terms of is the character left-handed, right-handed. I know this is very specific, but you just want asymmetry at all times, not just in the face. For lip sync, it's always said you want asymmetry in the face, but it's in the body as well. And if it helps you to think about the left-handed or right-handed person or character or whatever, that might give you the extra incentive when you do have a lean forward to have with a slight twist. Same thing for body parts. If you have someone wave, you wouldn't just engage one axis to rotate the wrist like this. It would have some complexities in there, again, depending on your style. But even in a simple style, going back to this previous example, you can see when that happens, you still have a complexity of changing where the head is going. It's not just in one axis. It has changes of where it starts, where it goes. It goes higher and higher and higher. There are many reasons for that to give you that squeeze appeal so that you don't just have that. You're just kind of more like into that. The main reason is also performance-wise. And of course, it goes hand-in-hand with arcs. If you just engage one axis, especially if you're like on the head, if you say no, that's going to feel very mechanical and robotic because it has no arc. Your head doesn't do this. Now it's up to you again in terms of the style and the performance. How much of an arc on the arc up arc do you want to have? Because then it gets very stylized and cartoony, exaggerated and all that good stuff. At the same time, it's understandable that you only do one axis, especially when you do walks. With walk cycles, you will drag a character left to right or whatever. But it's usually one axis because you animate it either on a treadmill or from A to B. The moment you have to animate a walk that has a curve or actually a turnaround, that is extremely difficult. It's completely understandable why you would want to avoid it. That being said, to make it a bit more complex and organic and again, depending on the style, it will help you to change the curvatures. It's not as straight as a slight curve to it. And that's not just in terms of mechanics. I'm just going to do this because straight is boring and curvatures are interesting. It can also be in terms of storytelling and to portray how a character feels. So if you look at this example by Alexis Vanaroy. Vanaroy, I'm always butchering names. I apologize. So if you have this, this would be a cycle, but it's a nicely broken up cycle with a change, as you can see here in the close-up. But this is still on one axis, but it's completely understandable because it's tricky to do. It's very complicated. But now if you look at this as the shock continues, you can see that is more interesting and dynamic to get out of that standing towards camera with that type of movement towards camera with my fantastic arrow. It's not just straight towards it. You can have a nicer line of action. It's just more dynamic. Same thing with the frog. As the frog runs away, it's more panicky. It doesn't feel like, ah, and I'm running straight away. Which would be okay too, because if you're just freaking out, it would just be, I got to get out of there A to B. This is not something that needs to be entertaining. I need to get out of there. So a straight path is, of course, also valid depending on the choice and depending on the energy I want to have. Going back to this, if you look at what the frog is doing, there's like every frame on the shot is so good, especially here. But anyway, let's go back. You have a pretty crazy path that is much more complex. But even when she comes back through here, there is a slight curve also because she is following where the frog is going. But it just adds a bit more complexity to it, a bit more of an organic feel. Just getting away from that CG, clean one axis, the computer did it all feel. And speaking of example, when I play this here, this is a shot by Leonardo Fernandez. He's one of my animation mentors soon. And you can see in the shot how she gets closer to what she wants to grab. And then technically there's cold water coming in. He will add that water later. And then she freaks out and runs away. So my comment to that was, it makes sense that this is A to B. She goes from here to here because that's her goal. She wants to go straight towards that. If she would start walking around like this, this would be slightly weird. I mean, you could do it. But to me, it felt like this is more logical. It would make more sense for the character, for her to go straight towards that object. That being said, when she freaks out, you could do this. So my suggestion was what if you mix up the path as she goes back. So again, straight towards the object. But now the cold water comes in and panic sets in. It's more like, ah, ah, and it's that type of path. Again, you don't have to do it. It would make sense to go, I want to get away from this cold water as fast as I can. And I want it to be a straight path. But subjectively to me, this seems a bit more entertaining. A, because of the complexity of the shot, you can emphasize the panic, also massively, awesomely referenced by him and also animated. And at the same time, it adds contrast. You have a straight walk with that type of mechanic. And then you have a curved walk with a different body mechanic. And all of that adds to the contrast so that your energy of the shot is not constantly still. So if you animate shots, of course, again, the complexity is going to play a big role in this. Can you do a straight walk? Can you do a curved walk? That's going to be a lot more work, a lot more time. Does that work for your schedule? If you're student, do you have enough time to do this until the homework is due? So there are many, many factors to consider. But on a smaller scale, when you do something like a head, yes or no, or smaller things like with hands, it has applications in many other things. Mechanics, the organic feel of it, the complexity, also the contrast. Is it more entertaining to then switch to something that's more complex? So everything that I say there's always a counterargument straight is fine. You don't need the curved path. But generally, I would just think about that. Would it be appropriate to make this not a one axis move in terms of a general move, a general mechanic, a general walk? But generally, I would just get away from that computer feel of it where you just do one axis where just the whole body moves down or one arm moves up in one axis, especially on organic creatures, characters, because it's going to be more complex. It's going to be more random because it is a character, a person or whatever it is that thing. That reacts, that moves where things are not repetitive like a computer. Speaking of repetitive, you know what I want to say. If you feel like this is helpful and you want to incorporate that into your shots, but you want to work with me so I can work with you to make your shots awesome. I have workshops you can sign up at any time. Link in description with all the information. And if you don't want to miss anything that I upload, you can of course subscribe if you want to hit that bell button to get all the notifications. And if you're still watching after all this time, as always, thank you so much for your patience and I will see you in my next clip.