Fidget

A small restless bob on top of a lean so slow you only notice it after a while. It looks like someone waiting for a bus.

Use it in a cartoonOpen it in the block editorThe pack file (JSON)

What it is for

Fidget is the idle for a character who is waiting and would rather not be: the friend outside the shop, the pet by the door, the student at the back of the class. Use it when you want the audience to feel time passing. It is also handy in a long shot where a character must stay on screen for many seconds, because its lean is slow enough that it never seems to repeat.

The principle it shows: timing

Fidget has only two waves, and the whole effect comes from how far apart their speeds are. The bob comes about every two seconds; the lean takes about 15 seconds to go out and come back. When two rhythms are that different, the eye stops looking for a pattern, and the character reads as restless instead of mechanical. That gap between a quick small movement and a slow large one is a timing choice, not a drawing one.

The program, line by line

when it starts
  abssin wave on dy · w 1.6 · amp -4
  sin wave on rot · w 0.4 · amp 1.5

• when it starts — begins when the move is put on a character.
• abssin wave on dy · w 1.6 · amp -4 — a one-way wave on the height: the body rises 4 pixels and settles, once every 2 seconds (π divided by 1.6).
• sin wave on rot · w 0.4 · amp 1.5 — a lean of 1.5 degrees each way. At 0.4 radians per second a full lean, out and back on both sides, takes 2π ÷ 0.4, about 15.7 seconds, so in a move shown for 4 seconds you only see the start of one lean.

Try this

1. Speed the lean up from 0.4 to 2. It now rocks every 3 seconds instead of every 15, and the boredom turns into impatience.

   In the program: wave · w 0.4 → 2

2. Make the bob 12 pixels instead of 4. The little bounce becomes a jiggle, as if the character were tapping a foot.

   In the program: wave · amp -4 → -12

How it differs from Breathe, Sway and Peck

Breathe and Sway add a breath of stretch, a faster rock and movement in the hands or arms, so they look calm and alive. Fidget has none of that: just the small bob and the very slow lean, which is why it reads as bored. Peck shares the small bob but adds a quick shuffle sideways. If a character in your cartoon seems too lively while it waits, Fidget is the step down.

Works on

c4c:beh:squirrel_idle · version 1.0.0 · CC0 (public domain) · by Jabbertoon