Nommalorel's Sakuga and Life XP

How to make smooth animation - Something between POSE TO POSE and SRAIGHT AHEAD

Everyone knows the pros and cons of Pose to Pose and the pros and cons of Straight ahead. Now let's see how they can be used together.

We will start by doing straight ahead. But not in a straight ahead way that fills every frame of a 24 FPS animation. That would make the animation inconsistent and tedious. Instead we will use straight ahead as if we were doing an 8 FPS animation. We should be trying to draw as many important poses as possible while still making a smooth and fluid animation. At 24 FPS, we place our frames as if we were doing an 8 FPS animation and then we place these frames on the timeline/x-sheet. At this point, it is very important that the animation, especially the timing, feels good. After we see that the animation feels good and we are satisfied with the placement of the frames on the timeline, we can come to the Pose to Pose system. We fill in between the frames with an ordinary pose to pose approach and the system is complete. In this way, we get an animation that feels more fluid but still organic.

Now that we've explained the theory, let's show how to do it.

FOR CLIP STUDIO PAINT EX
We first draw our starting keyframe as always.
This is the way to change the existing FPS of an animation in CLIP STUDIO PAINT EX
Set it to 8FPS
I draw my second frame just like how anyone would do by doing it straight ahead

While doing this do playback the animation a lot to get the feel of the motion while animating.

After turning the FPS back to 24 i arrange my frames again in order to make it so that the frames are still comparable to 8 fps even on 24 fps timeline. Then i just arrange them by feeling out the animation while playing it back.

Now we can move onto the Pose to Pose part.
I start by adding the new inbetweens between my "KEYS" that are made by straight ahead technique

Then i move on to just adding inbetweens between all the keyframes just like how it is done in ordinary pose to pose animation.

And here is the result.

CYA!