Easy Realistic Minecraft Animations – No Animation Skills Needed!

Animation to make something move at its very core animation is about telling a story describe an object through the way it moves you can use several different techniques in order to convey the properties of this object and in this video i hope that when you’re done watching you’ll either

Figured out a way to make your overhead existing animations better by applying these fundamental theories to them or get to work on your very new animations by already knowing them from the get-go hi there by the way i am kevin also known as arts by kev on the interwebs and

This video is aimed at literally anybody who works with animation for for example minecraft at this point so that you can make your animations better in this document i have a bunch of different animations here to decide and i’m going to not only show you them but also describe

Sort of the thought process behind them how they apply to animation principles but also give you an idea about exactly how closely related sound design an animation actually is because i come from the field of sound design which many people might think is a bit weird

But that is actually the way that i got into animation in the first place so let’s step ahead and see what i got to show you in order to sort of explain the different waveforms i have decided to make this little model right here that has four different layers and you can see

That i have some keyframes down below these four layers are going to show you sort of what the sound wave looks like but also give you an idea about what follow through is which we’re going to talk about quite a fair bit in this video so stick around for that because

Follow through is one of the main principles for anything that should look realistic in any way shape or form when you’re animating so if i start up this sine wave we’re going to see at the very middle here i have a block that moves up then i have other blocks after that

The edges or the rings that is located around the center you see the second and third and fourth ring if i were to close off these three from your vision right now and go look at the center and then bring down the speed of this one to

50. you’re going to see that we have an acceleration in the beginning you see there and then it has its peak speed in the middle and then it breaks as it’s about to reach top then accelerates again on its way back so this is a small sine curve motion

Because this is on just one dimension it moves along the y-axis in this case the sine does not look like a wave as we would normally think of a wave which you would get if i apply the different motions right here you can see this is the wave

But instead we get this just one dimensional movement and that is what’s really interesting about it if we were to take a look at a different type of wave we could take a look at the square wave and the square wave is a bit different because a square

Shape is completely cut by the edge of the next event so you have a maximum value and you have your bottom value in the sine curve it would accelerate from the bottom value to the maximum value by de-accelerating once it reaches the maximum value in a square wave instead we snap between

The different values you go extract from the zero to the full value and from the full value to the zero value going back to the sine wave again if we want to add more expression to the things we’re working on which is super important also in animation because expression tells

More about your object or your entity your model or your creature what not compared to just making it move with acceleration in this case i’m going to show you here if i accelerate instead of de-accelerate on the sine wave until i reach the peak and then de-accelerate from the peak

Instead of accelerating once again in order to go downwards you get a more snappy move like this one right here i’ve decided to call it accelerated inverted sine wave that makes no sense so don’t refer to that as that in any other situation and then we also have the sawtooth wave

And the sawtooth is a bit interesting and this is something that sound designers definitely would be used to seeing a sawtooth is like a if we take a look at a triangle for example this is a sawtooth shape you’ve got the edge here it follows along

The the line and then at the top it had his peak then the sawtooth starts up once again because it’s sharp it’s so it’s like a combine of a square wave and the triangle and that looks a bit like this so it goes linear to the top and then it snaps

Back to the bottom if i were to invert that we would have a snap at the middle which then linearly decreases so linear increase with a snap decrease or a linear decrease with a snap increase now it’s time to take a look at one of the most important reasons to why i made

This video i have seen so many animations recently where people seem to have no fundamental understanding for what follow-through is about so when you fail follow through this is what you get you get a motion that carries out with the same intensity from the get-go everything happens from the first frame

They don’t understand that follow-through is about how weight and muscle mass is distributed differently throughout your body it’s as if there was a rope here that pulled through nooses along the edge of these blocks and then when they were pulled it would just grab them simultaneously but follow through is not about making

Stuff simultaneously it’s about compensating for the time and duration when things would react so if this would be applied in a follow-through motion what you would get instead in this case i’m using a sine wave to kind of tell my point you would get something that looks a bit like this

This is a much more natural approach simply because things happen at their own time they have a designated position within the timeline when they’re supposed to happen now one may ask is this super expressive no it’s definitely not expressive but this is a lot better than to do this for a dog’s tale

Because if i saw somebody make a dog’s tail that looks like this i might question that a bit but if i see something that makes the dog state looks like this even of course i would like to have downwards moving as well just the idea that it’s smooth that it has

The segregation of the events makes it so much more interesting and also so much more alive now i’m going to show you an even more increased version of this and that is when you try to apply muscle mass and expression and i decided to call that one follow through sine muscle pole

So on the way down in this new animation i decided to add a bit of muscle mass that pulls the animation downwards and you’re going to see what that looks like see it has to slow increase but it also pulls back this is expressive in this motion you could feel anger frustration intensity

There is something more going on that describes the motion even further completely descriptionless realistic but not completely descriptional this is maybe how something would potentially move in water if you wanted to do that but this has intensity it has expression it has a purpose it reasons with the viewer

About why it’s behaving in such a fashion and it’s also telling you something more about the rest of the object or the entity that this is connected to in such a way that you understand it further because motion is so important to how we fundamentally see the world around us

Continuing on the topic of follow through let’s go back to acceleration a bit in this case i am once again applying a sine wave motion this is a half sine wave it has the increase in acceleration and it has to decrease in acceleration and when it reaches the top it stops so

It’s a half sine wave now i wanted this to be more expressive i would remove the top of the sine wave a bit like i did in the beginning when i showed you the wave shapes and what i would also do is to apply some

Well in this case i decided to call it a bump and you’ll see what i mean when i play this animation it’s very very subtle you might not even see it but let’s bring this down to 50. did you see that it continued slightly further than we were supposed to stop

This is also a way of showing follow-through in your motion because you’re over stepping your current motion path you know where you’re supposed to go but adding this little extra junk at the end gives a better idea of how the character that maybe holds the sword is trying to

Break that sword and bring it back to the position where they’re supposed to have it in general this idea of making an animation end with a small increase to the motion before going back just lets the viewer understand the motion that goes into breaking that object like not breaking that s and destroying

It but breaking it as in breaking the acceleration and then if we go even further we can start apply one of the other things that i see many people still having to work a bit on and that is scaling which of course can only do in bedrock minecraft at this point if

You’re animating for minecraft and with squash and stretch two of the absolutely most fundamental parts of animation practices you get this type of motion let me play that in high speed for you so squash and stretch is a way to even further increase the expressiveness this is very cartoony in a sense

But it increases the expressiveness of a block or emotion if you have for example a sword a way to squash and stretch that sword is maybe to increase the size of it when it goes through the most heavy part of the swing where all of the force is gathered in the blade

If you increase the scale of that sword through that motion that sword is going to feel so much heavier and more impactful if it hits something on its way through that is just one of the different examples for how to apply squash and stretch in order to make your animations more fluid

If we bring this down again to 50 if we play that from the beginning you can see how i scale it down inwards and i stretch it remember this squash and stretch is an animation principle that still forces you to keep a good eye on the volume

Of your object so i can’t break the volume of how big this cube is so if i’m shrinking it i also have to increase its height then in certain frames i’m definitely stretching it as you can see i’m stretching but also increasing or decreasing the overall size of it

The surrounding and then up to the top i of course come to that breaking point we spoke about before in the previous animation where i squash it so this is where all the force stops and then it brings it back to its original shape take a look at that again see

Full speed you could even increase it to 200 smack like that you see how much that adds a difference and this is for example how water driplet or yeah if if it were to come from the other way around now this is going to be an upwards dripping water

How that would behave in this natural environment now let’s talk a bit about properties of an object i may take a dragon for example just to make this example a bit clearer on a dragon if we broke the dragon apart in different pieces the teeth the bones and the claws would

All be considered high density they are hard they would not deform when you move them around with an animation even if you want to try to make it expressive however the hand the skin the muscle areas around the body they are soft and thus more keen to showing a different motion

And they would also apply more so into squash and stretch principles wings for example they have the other part about follow through when i spoke about the distribution of different events along the axis of an object inner we would have the main muscle mass and the further out we got the less

Muscle mass we would have affecting the object thus we’ll have to compensate for how much air we’re forcing to push with the smaller muscle mass at the end which is also a good reason to why wings in general when they flap they don’t have so much motion going on on

The end that actually adds extra weight or extra wing force it’s more so just there to catch the remainder of that it goes through there’s small muscle masses there that brings that together but you could of course have different types of masses as well in this case let’s talk about magnetic gravity

And this is when something more or less moves stuck on its surface this is not very unusual to see but this is also really good motion to keep in mind if you want to make a very heavy robot for example where it wouldn’t necessarily move anywhere when the feet has impacted the ground

So i’m stuck here now i am heavier than the ground the ground is going to squash a stretch underneath my feet i don’t want to move any further on the other hand though you might have something that is a bit bouncy like this one for example when it falls down

But it would of course react differently with the ground now in this case the surface underneath or the properties of this object is more bouncy thus it would balance mainly when we’re working with different games we might have a surface that we assigned to be more balanced to certain materials and

In this case i would assume that this cube is the one that is the balancing material and the surface underneath would be quite flat or hard then we could for example take a look at the pudding then once again i apply squash and stretch this was also the

Cube that you saw in the beginning of this video as you can see it accelerates from the main pointer if we bring that down to let’s say 30 we can take a good look at it so it accelerates and then it comes in impact and it lifts up because

It’s putting like it’s sheer weight the idea of it bringing it being brought up to the sides or being squashed would add new force on the way back as you can see here it goes down but it also brings itself back up by forcing itself with the force of

This is physics so maybe i shouldn’t go too much into that but just imagine that the impact force that goes downward is now distributed to these sides in this cube and when that can’t go any further it goes back to the middle and tries to shove it in another direction thus applying the

Motion to the height of the object which gives it the bounciness that then brings it up in the air before it goes back down and scales to its position let’s bring that down up to 100 again so that is some over or extensive information but also good to have in mind

And when we’re talking about something that is balanced in general this is not necessarily how anything would bounce normally like it’s very unlikely that this object would actually land on its surface like that like fall straight flat it’s not very unusual though that i see this happen around but one way to get

Around that is to try to make it land on one of the edges now that may be for some people if i just as you see there i’m leaning this object slightly with a new animation now i’m forcing myself to make this animation very much differently compared

To the other one this one will just fall flat down this animation on the other hand is going to move slightly different so if i play that you can see there now it’s bouncing on its edges how am i calculating for that how am i making sense with that well

This is more so on the physics side this is when you’re trying to make something look realistic once again and you start thinking about how it would impact itself with the environment and it’s also very good to know this when you’re working with uh limps like feet and hand on a on a

Monster or something that is walking around the environment that sometimes the head may lean in a weird angle in order for it to maybe put some weight on the thumb for that next motion which is going to look like that attack animations especially is a really good area to apply this skill in

So let’s bring this down to 30. with a good look at the bounce as you can see here what i’m essentially doing is that i’m applying new motion to the other side of the impact so this is the first impact now this edge is on the ground

As you can see it’s lifted now i know this has to move in its opposite direction so first on it it didn’t just tilt here it would now have to tilt to the opposite it would have to tilt backwards but it would also have to tilt

To this side and more so more to this side than backwards because it’s a smaller motion here and it’s a bigger motion here so i’m bringing it up i’m tilting it very much the descent but only slightly backwards as you can see here now it’s going to bounce up again

And once more i’m applying the most motion on this axis and some less here i could have brought it forward though but there is nothing that forced me to do that i could think of this as a way for it to balance it bounces on this peak right here

It could maybe continue or thumb bell over here but it loses so much motion that it tries to fumble over on this edge right here but it can’t so it goes back and now it would bounce on the upper corner that corner up there not the

Forward corner as you can see it tries to at least but i managed to get both of the edges down and then brought into this position so now a more natural way of getting an impact of your object so if we go through all of these if you apply the different principles i’ve

Given you here in this video and try to just make your motions or your animations or all of this function in the ways that animation would actually be carried out to express to explain to inform the user to inform the player of your game how exactly this object behaves what its

Behavior is in terms of not only its properties but also how it would react to the world around it what expression it has what it means with the way it moves then your animation is going to look glorious in no time i hope you enjoyed the video and if you

Did leave a like and subscribe and i’ll be around once again next time with something else to look at and that might be some bosses from the halloween map and if you haven’t seen how i made the armor skeleton for halloween map you can check

That out on this channel i leave a link down in the description but also here up on the screen to the left i think it is yeah probably the left so yeah take a look at that and take care till next time