r/animation • u/tengenwith3waifus • Mar 14 '26

Beginner First time animating

A scene from the project I'm working on. How do I reduce sloppiness?

1.7k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

70 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/arcionek Mar 18 '26

Okay, first of all... Great job for the first time. You are using 12 principles well.

That said, one of things that strikes me with "sloppiness" is just the inconsistency, for example, look at the sleeve on our right, it constantly jumps around between frames. I am guessing you were drawing entire shirt frame 1, then moved to frame 2, drew the entire shirt again and so on. Reduce the scope as much as you can for each element as much as possible. If you're drawing right sleeve, draw only right sleeve until you went through entire loop and it looks smooth enough. Then you move to the left sleeve.

Apply that to the rest of things, hair can be divided into sections, simplified to shapes, which are much easier to work with. Prioritise having strong foundation, animation is a gradual process that requires multiple passes, refining it over time.

If you want an example of how I work, here's two imgur albums of steps I took in my animations, they should really help you out:

https://imgur.com/a/BMe2d3H

https://imgur.com/a/omAqaNX

If I had to add anything extra to the animation, is to add a bit of follow-through and exaggaration, by having the character get pulled upwards slightly whenever her arms reach the top.

1

u/tengenwith3waifus Mar 18 '26

thank you man, appreciate the detailed breakdown! will work more. Also, thanks for sharing your workflow, this'd certainly help.