I’m still on a rubber hose bent. Come for the cute dancing characters, stay for the irresistible audio-visual groove. I even started experimenting with a rubber hose rig in Blender last night. The resulting 4:30am bedtime was educational in many ways.

I’ve been analysing a couple of Foxy cartoons, specifically the weird little chicken dance he does in both Smile, Darn Ya, Smile and in this cartoon, One More Time (at around 4:40 in). Both dances are on a 12-frame beat and take two beats (24 frames) to loop.

The Smile version is on ones. The hips sway back and forth but there’s also a 6-frame rhythm as they bounce up and down. The head and elbows jiggle with a 6-frame rhythm as well – the swaying side to side is kind of visually syncopated with a little up accent between the beats hitting between the main pulse of the piece.

The One More Time version appears to be animated on what you might call “swung” frames. The elbows are at their upper and lower extremes on twos but transitioning from extreme to extreme on ones, but these six frames of action (two frames up extreme, one frame passing, two frames at down extreme, one frame passing) repeat over and over again. This extra frame of hold time means that the extremes register just that bit more powerfully and the visual rhythm of the piece is accented even more. There’s probably an important lesson there about weighting extreme frames in CG instead of letting the interpolation keep everything moving. (I wonder if professional CG animators think of frames in terms of ones and twos; I suspect this book might have something to say about it.)

I was tracing over the motions in Blender using spheres to match the position, then cleaning up the curves afterwards. The swung frame version looked crappy with the usual keyframe interpolation switched on – Bezier looked even worse than Linear; only Constant keys looked right.

So, back to thinking in terms of musical lengths again – 12 frame quarter notes mean 6 frame eighth notes and 3 frame sixteenth notes, and triplet-time eighths work out at 4 frames each. Within that 3 frames is the opportunity to hold something for a two then transition away to something else with the remaining frame.

I’m still not really any closer to building a rubber hose character rig yet, let alone animating a short with all this newfound knowledge, but this stuff is useful to know all the same.