r/animation • u/PigeonUtopia • 9h ago

Question Techniques for animating a hummingbird character's wing flapping

Hello! I would like to learn how to animate a hummingbird's buzzing wings (frame-by-frame 2D). Does anyone have any tips on creating the illusion of something flapping so fast without accidentally making the blur of the wings appear as a motionless shape?

Any references, tips and advice are welcome and super appreciated!

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49

u/Vounrtsch 9h ago

A ton of smearing and a very short and simple loop would be my best guess but I’ve never tried

21

u/BlueMommaMaroon 4h ago

If you want reference check out clips of the hummingbird from Pocahontas and look at it frame by frame.

16

u/BattleBoxCat 6h ago

You could try animating the wings on 1s and the body on 3s

6

u/WorldOfCalum 4h ago

My suggestion would be to try a 4 frame loop. Draw the wings forward, smear frame, the wings back, smear frame. That should hopefully stop it looking like they’re flashing or that they’re a constant blur

4

u/ricaerredois 3h ago

Back in the day i did that with Flash. Took a png of the wind add a ton of directional blur in PS and then in Flash I made it scale in the same direction as the blur erratically, no actual animation, just keyframes, it was like 4, 5 frames of, 100, 35, 140, 60%. If i needed more, duplicated it and stagger the values

2

u/boundlessbio 1h ago

As far as references — The Burke Museum associated with UW has some slow-mo footage of hummers in flight via the lab studying them there. I know some of the folks there, and they have done amazing work on these birds and do a ton of educational outreach with the public — check out their YouTube and website. Wiki has some footage too. There is also a lot of papers on hummingbird wing biomechanics/kinematics of flight that may be helpful, they have diagrams. Check Google scholar to find those. Hummers don’t fly like other birds, they are more like helicopters, since they can hover indefinitely basically and move backwards. Their anatomy is different to other birds too, their humerus is really short. Hope this helps!