Power Up Your 3D Animations: Using Animation Curves in Cinema 4D

1. Class Introduction: [MUSIC] Hey everybody, my name is Stereo Stan, I'm a 3D animator and designer obsessed with the 1980s. I currently work at Emotion Design Studio in Salt Lake City, Utah. At the beginning of this video, I shared one of my favorite projects. I loved it because it forced me to learn how to animate a variety of different objects in 3D and spam the idea for this class. In this class, I'm going to teach you a few techniques that I've learned while animating those objects and I will show you how I use animation curves and cinema 4D to give the animation smooth, fun, and stylized motion by going from this to this. We will animate objects that scale, flip, flop, bounce, jump, and swing. I will explain how I planned out my animations and the parameters I animate first and last, because I have found that the order of what parameters you animate matter. In this class, we're going to talk about keyframes, animation curves, making animations smooth, basic 3D modeling, and rendering. This class is for anyone who wants to make their 3D animation smooth, stylized, and sensational. I will do my best to explain everything I do, but I recommend students having a basic understanding of the Cinema 4D interface before starting this class. By the end of this class, I hope you will feel confident in being able to tackle animating all sorts of objects of varying shape, size, and mass. I can't wait to start animating with you. See you in class. 2. Class Template Overview and Rendering: Hey everybody, I hope you're doing good. Today, I just want to go over the class template with you. I created this class template that way if you were taking this class and you want to have a similar layout to the one I'm using in the lessons, you would have something that looked very close to what I'm using to avoid any confusion. If you want to use this template, that is one benefit of the template and the other reason I created the template is just to have all of the rendering stuff set up for you. Basically, all you have to do is come in here, make your animation, name it, and then click this little play button right here, and it will render out the correct file for you. Let me show you what's happening in there, if I click on this little gear icon right next to it, you can see that there is the Save box that's checked and basically all you have to do is put in information right here. Basically, all you have to do is click these little dots right here and you can put this file anywhere you want on your computer. Basically, you can just change the name to whatever the file is that you're going to be working on and the output is already set up for you as well, we're going to be rendering at 1920 by 1080 and we're working in 24 frames a second right there, and that should be all good for you to go and just start using that way you can just jump in and start animating. The other thing is I've set up a couple of basic things for you to use, I've got a floor in the scene right here, that way we have something to use as a ground-level for our animations. I also have a camera set up and you can see that we're looking through this camera because this little icon is clicked right there and our focal length for our camera is set to 75, and then lastly, I also have a light setup in here. We are just using the standard Cinema 4D renderer in this class. Of course, you're welcome to use any type of render engine that you'd like but I just wanted to make this class as accessible as possible. This light is just the regular light that comes with Cinema 4D and I've also created a couple of materials for you, that way you can basically just come in here and you can drag them onto objects and change out the floor color right here, then, of course, you can just come in here and create your own materials by clicking on create materials and you can just use a new standard material and if you do that, it'll show up right here and you can click on it and then you can change the color right over here to any color that you want. I'm really excited to jump into this class with you, let's get started. 3. Class Project Introduction : Hey everyone. It's Stereo Stan. I hope you are doing good. [MUSIC] Today, I just want to talk about the class project. In the class project, we're going to create a 3-6 second long animation of your favorite object. Think about an object you'd like to bring to life through animation. Do you have a favorite object that comes to mind? If not, look through your room or office for an object that you might have that you'd like to bring to life. Here's a little tip. You might want to consider picking something you can easily model with the primitive shapes. The primitive shapes are these basic objects right up here, and with these basic objects, you can create a very simple version of quite a few different objects, I would imagine. As you're planning out this animation that you want to do, think about some attributes of that object to get ideas of what the object might do in an animation. Then the idea is to hopefully find a way to exaggerate that animation like we're going to do in some of the animation we're dealing in this class, especially the pizza flopping animation. That is definitely more of a cartoon style animation that wouldn't happen in real life. However, just thinking about a piece of pizza falling onto a table, you could probably stretch your imagination to imagine it actually hitting the table and flopping back up into the air and that's the idea. The step to starting this class project are, find your object, so, figure out what object you're going to animate, and then the next step is model your object with primitive shapes, and again, if you already know how to do some modeling, then you can model, of course, whatever you'd like, or if you have a model that you've purchased or downloaded for free from somewhere, you could jump right into just using that as well. Then the next step is you want to plan out your animation. Think about what you will animate first and then what you will animate last. We're going to talk a lot about that in this class and in the class projects, and so, hopefully, that will help give you some ideas on how to do that once you go through the class, but that might take some trial and error and that's fine because I do that with every project that I do. I end up learning something new and realizing that I should've done it in a different order. After you plan out your animation, thinking about what you're going to do, I would encourage you to just quickly sketch out a little storyboard or sketch out what your idea is on paper or in some file that you can reference and use that as a guide as you're animating your object, then the next step would be you'd start animating. After that, you will refine your animation, adjusting keyframes, adjusting the F curves, and then the next step is you will want to most likely add some materials to your model to give it some color, and you can also do this step before you animate, either way, would be fine. Then the last step is you want to render this out and then post it to the class project section of this class. That's about it. Hopefully, you're thinking about an object you want to animate. Hopefully, you're excited about this possibility of bringing something to life. I cannot wait to see what you guys create. [MUSIC] 4. Scale Up & Overshoot Animation: Hey everybody, I hope you're doing good, Stereo Stan. In today's class we're going to do a scale up animation and we're also going to do an overshoot. Let's jump in and get started. I am using the Cinema 4D template that I provided for the class. I would recommend using that so your layout looks similar to mine. All the settings are set up for rendering, so you should be good to go there. I've also provided some materials in this template, so you're welcome to use those or create your own or whatever you feel like would be best, so let's get started. The first thing I'm going to do is create a cylinder, so I'm going to come up to the primitive shapes and create a cylinder shape. I'm going to go to the Object tab right here, and I clicked on the cylinder. Let's change the height, let's go down to 15, and let's increase the rotation segments, so let's go up to 80. What that's going to do is just smooth this out, you can see as that's lower, it starts to get more and more low poly, and if you want to go for that, that's good luck to you. I'm going to go up to 80, and keep the radius at 50 for now, and I'm just going to move this up. I've got my move tool selected, live selection, and that's allowing me to move this object by clicking on it, you can see I've clicked on it in the object manager. Let's keep this a textured just add some color, so I'm going to grab the purple color, just drag it on there, and you can use whatever color you want. The first thing that we're going to do is, let's animate the radius. I'm going to rewind the timeline so we're back at zero, I'm going to click on the timeline down here, so we have the same timeline, but we're seeing it bigger down here, so it's nice to have both of these when we're animating. Let's start this radius at zero, so I'm going to click "Zero," for the radius, disappears obviously because there's no radius there at zero. I'm going to record that by clicking on the "Key frame" there, and right now where we've recorded zero for the radius at frame zero. I'm going to move forward in time, and the further away you go, the slower the animation is going to go of course, and the closer we put these key frames, the faster it's going to go. Usually it's just a trial and error, just find things that I think look pretty good. We're working at 24 frames a second, so if we go up to 12, that'll be half of a second. Let's try that, so I'm going to go to 12 and I'm going to crank up the radius, I'm going to go up to 70, and so what we want to do is have this scale up, we're going to overshoot. I'm going to record 70, so what we're going to do is have this scale-up, and we'll overshoot it at 70, and then we're going to scale back down. I'll go to let's say 18, and we'll go back down to 50. I'm going to record that by clicking on the "Key frame" there, and so the more dramatic you want this to look, the more different she can put in the overshoot compared to where we come down to rest. That's pretty dramatic, going from 70-50 and just adjust that whatever you think you want to go further, and it'll be obviously more subtle if we put those two numbers closer together. Let's rewind it, hit "Play", see what we got there? Right away, that's already looking pretty good. But of course we can get into the animation curves and start to adjust this, and we can fine tune our animation, and that's really going to be a big part of the class, is fine tuning our animations and easing with the curves. The way we can do that is if we come down to the timeline down here, I see the cylinder down here. If I click on the "Plus" button, we can see there's the radius, so if I click that now we'll see our animation curve. A part of it's cut off there, and so what we can do is click the "H" key, and it's going to frame up this whole animation curve right here. That is the same as clicking this button right there "Frame All", and it's a good shortcut to remember, and it'll just bring everything into view there. Right now, we are going slower at the beginning, so when this line is horizontal, it's moving slower and when it's more vertical, it's moving faster. We're starting out slow, we're going faster right here, going slow, and then we're going a little slower at the end. If you like the way this looks, you can just call it good and go with this, but we might as well come in here and adjust some of these and see what different looks we can get depending on what the object is you're trying to animate, if you want it to be more snappy, or if you want it to be more subtle. Let's say at the end, if we want this to look a little bit snappier at the very end, a couple of things we could do, you just grab that last key frame and bend this curve up so it doesn't ease at the end, it just comes to a stop pretty quickly, and you can see the difference there. That's a little subtle, if I bring it back down, see it makes a little bit of a difference there at the end, so let's keep that up, and then I'll grab this key frame and instead of easing in at the beginning, why don't we just try to see what it looks like coming in a little bit faster there. I'm going to grab that pull up, and so since we're coming in faster, we're spending more time going slow, so we have a little bit more of a hang time as it's scaling up, and I can even make that more dramatic by grabbing that middle key frame, pulling those handles way out. Whenever I adjust these handles, I'm going to click the "Zero" key, and it'll just make sure all these lines that I'm pulling out are straight. Sometimes it gets crooked like this by accident, and if you hit "Zero" while this is selected, it just zeros that out. By pulling these handles out, we have even more of a hang time there, so if that's the look you're going for, that's a nice way of doing that. At this point, you can just adjust these curves however you want to, if you like it better the other way, you can pull this handle down, have it ease back in. I like the way that looks, snap at the end, and then of course, if you don't like the timing, you can come in and move the key frames around and adjust that as well. I can start this scale up a little bit sooner, I bring in this closer to where we started. You can see becoming much quicker and then we have more time as we settle back down, and if I want to increase this as well, make it come down a little bit faster, we can move those closer, so now our whole animation just going quite a bit faster. Now the one thing about moving the key frames is it does affect the curves, and so you can see our curve is a little bit different than it was. I can make this even more dramatic if I grab this and bring it really close, we can see our curve is really starting to get messed up. What we can do is just come back in here and I can just adjust this, pull this back a little bit, and you can see that didn't totally fix it, so we need to come up to this curve and grab those and bring those in, and you can see that that's fixing that. Let me hit the "H" key, frame that back up, and there we go, and that fixed some of this, what's happening there. You can see that it's crooked, I'll click the "Zero" key, straighten that out, then we've got a lot more time at the end, so obviously that's coming in a little bit too fast for what I'm thinking in my mind and what this animation could look like. I'm going to pull that back out, go back out to right around 10, and I'll fix this up again, just grab this little handle, pull it in, and you can see we've lost what's happening down there so it's easy to click the "H key" you're back here. I'm going to drag these out, and by doing that our animation is going to look just a little bit more stylized. We're going to have a little bit more dynamic movement because we've got some extreme horizontal and vertical happening right there, and it just makes the movement feel a little bit more energetic and fun. I'm going to adjust that one again too and just clean that up just a little bit, pull it up, and there we go. Hopefully that was helpful, I'm just going over some really basic animations. This animation I use all of the time for when something needs to overshoot a little bit and scale up. To render this, the only thing you have to do is come up to this little gear icon with a folder, and if you're using the template I provided for the class, everything should be set up and ready to go in here. The only thing you have to do is click on this "Save" right here, give your animation a name, and then just set a path where you want it to render to. If I click these little dots right here, you can send it to wherever on your hard drive that you want to save it. When that's done, close this out and you click this little "Play" button right in the middle, and when I click that, it's going to render out our animation and then we can go and find our MP4 file and checkout our animation. In the next class we are going to do a bounce animation, so I'll see you then. Bye. 5. Bounce Animation: Hey everybody, Stereo Stan here. I hope you're doing good. In today's tutorial, we are going to make a bouncing ball animation. We're going to do bouncing ball and we're also going to do squash and stretch, so this type of animation will be helpful if you're creating any kind of object, it doesn't have to be a sphere that you want to have bounce, and so let's get started. The first thing I'm going to do is come up to the primitive shape roll out and I'm going to grab a sphere and we're going to get my move tool, and I'm just going to move that up. Let's go to the object tab and let's give this some more segments, so let's go to 80. What we want to do is we want to have this sphere fall from the sky, hit the ground, squash, pop back up and then go back up, and we'll have it bounce a few times. What we want to have happen is we want to actually have this sphere squash from the top-down. Right now we can see the axis is in the middle. In Cinema 4D R25, there's actually a way of moving this without collapsing down the shape, but we're going to just do that just in case you're using an older version. But what we want to do is we want to move this access point down to the bottom so it squashes from the top. I'm going to go to this little menu right here so we can see this sphere from different views and we're going to just look at the right view. What we can do is click on our sphere and we're going to click this little button right here, make it editable. So this made the sphere editable and what we can do is grab this, enable access and we're going to just move it down to the ground. I'm going to just scroll in my scroll wheel, down towards the bottom, and then I'm going to uncheck that. Sometimes I forget to uncheck that and then I'm moving the axis around instead of the actual objects, so just make sure you uncheck that. I'm going to click back up here to go back to our perspective view and so now our access is at the bottom of this and so this will move up and down from the bottom. Let's start this up out of the screen. I'm just going to move it up so we don't see it anymore and on the y-axis I'm going to click that keyframe. At zero, I want the spirit to start out of the frame, and then we're going to move forward in time. Depending on how fast you want your animation to go, you're going to put the keyframes closer or further apart. I'm just going to go to 12. You can choose any number that you feel like you'd like to try there if you want to go faster or slower, I mean 12 is a good starting point. Then we'll move it down and I'll have it just hit the ground there. I'm going to record that keyframe at 12, so it's going to just come and hit the ground. Here's something that I found really important is doing things in a certain order when we're planning out these animations. For instance, we want this to hit the ground and we want it to squash on the next keyframe and then pop back up and then move back up versus hitting the ground and then slowly moving back up because then we'll be squashing and moving it at the same time, which would look really weird. What we want to do is think about what we're trying to do. So hit the ground, squash, pop back up in the same y position. So I'm going to record at that same position two more times. What happens there is that basically means it will stay in the same y position for three keyframes and then we're going to go back up. Then I'll go back up. We won't go back up as high, record that and then we'll come back down, hit the ground right there, record that position, and then we'll do the same thing. We'll record that same position a couple more times. Let's start with that. We might give this a little bit more bounce in a minute. So what we want to do is let's rewind that, let's hit play. Let's just see what things are looking like, so pretty simple bounce movements. Here's a good time to adjust your timing and dial that into what you like before we get into modifying the curves and before we get into modifying or adding in the squashing. If you don't like this movement, what you could do is you can grab these keyframes here, we could also grab the keyframes there, and we can just move these around so we can dial in the speed that we want. You can try a few different things out. Of course, we can adjust these later, but this was a good stage to dial it in. It's pretty close to how you want it. I'll grab all these. I'm going to actually move it back to closer to what I had. So this is what it's looking like without any adjusting the animation curves or anything like that, so that's really going to make a big difference here. But let's jump in and let's actually also animate our squash, so let's rewind it. Let's get the sphere. What we're going to do to squash this is we're going to hit the ground and we're going to squash right there. Let's click on the sphere and what we want to do is squash it on the y and we can see since we move that anchor point to the bottom, it's going to squash from the top down, that's what we want. Let's record a keyframe here at one, that way it's not squashing as it's following through in the sky, so it's one for this whole part. Here we're going to go to 0.5 and the more or less you squash this, the more or less dramatic it's going to look. You can adjust that to whatever you think would look the best. Then I'm going to go to the next one, I'm going to put one. Now we have squash pop back up through y. Now let's just check that out. It's happening pretty fast and so we're actually going to spread out these keyframes just a little bit, but let's finish the other squashing over here. Go up, hit the ground, let's record one there, and let's squash it right there at 0.5. Now I'll go back up to one right here, so same thing. Let's rewind that and check that out. What we want to do is I'm going to just spread these out just a little bit here. We could have done this at the beginning, but I like just to start and see how things are looking right upfront. We'll give it a little bit more time there and I think that's looking a little bit better. The next thing we need to do is get in there and start adjusting our curves because that is where the magic happens. Let's adjust the curves of the sphere and we're going to open that up. Let's start with our position and then we'll go to the scale. I'm going to open up the position, click on the y. Right now we're in keyframe mode, which is right here. We're going to go to curve mode, now we can see our curves. With the curves, these are just the keyframes right here, these little orange cubes. What's happening with the curves is, it's starting out slow, so when this is horizontal, it's going slower and when it's going vertical it's going faster. We're starting slow, going faster and then it's not going at all, just completely horizontal and then we're going slow, slow, and faster at these points right here. Instead of starting slow at the beginning, I'm going to grab that keyframe and I'm just going to bend it down and I am going to just start in linear. Since it's out of the frame, we won't really notice that yet, but we're just going to start with that. If your timeline gets messed up and you can't see things, just remember you can click the H key, it'll frame everything up, it's the same as clicking this button right here. Part of the problem with our animation is a bounce animation, the curve actually doesn't really look like this when it bounces, and so what we need to do is we're going to grab that keyframe and a bounce curve should look more like this. I'm going to grab that keyframe and if I hold the Shift key, I can break this tangent. You can see these handles only the moving on one side and that's what we want. We're going to actually go up right here, so it's going the fastest right before it hits the ground. We're getting more of a curve here and it's not easing into that keyframe right there, if that makes sense. Actually, I'm going to grab this. I'm going to drag that up, we will do a little bit of easing there at the beginning, let's just see what that looks like. Let's do that to the other places where the sphere hits the ground. I'm going to hold Shift, move that up, and that little adjustment is actually going to make a pretty big difference for our bounce animation. Whenever we're doing a balance where something's hitting a solid thing like the ground, we want it to go with the fastest right before it hits it and we can do that by just holding Shift. Let's check that out. That's already looking a little bit better and so we can now come in here and we can adjust this. When it's in the air, this is where our sphere's in the air, we can make that hang a little longer and that just gives it a little bit of style. I don't know if you can notice how it's hanging longer and if I pull these out, it's getting more and more extreme because it's really horizontal right there, so it's going to just stay in that position longer so you can see it's stalling in the air. I'm going to just move down a little bit holding the one key, moving my camera. We might have to adjust the beginning there. Now since we've given this more of a hang time there, this curve is not looking as nice, and so I'm just going to grab that and I'm just going to adjust that so it looks less, like it has a little bit of a kink in there. Let's see if that one needs to be adjusted. The other thing is just by looking at this curve, we can see that it's a little bit uneven, which is totally fine, but I'm just going to grab this and move this over and just see how that affects it, making our curve a little bit more uniform, if that makes sense. I don't know if that's the right word. I'm going to grab this. I'm going to bring this up even more. I know I did the opposite at the beginning. Probably should have just left it coming out like that. Let's also pause this for a second. Let's grab this, rewind it. Let's start this so it's out of the frame like we had at the beginning. I'll just record that. I'm going to click the ''H'' key so we frame up everything in here. What we want to do now is we might come back and adjust this a little bit more, but I think that's looking pretty good. Let's go to the scale and let's adjust our animation curve on the scale. Right now it looks flat, and if I hit the ''H'' key, it's just because we're zoomed out, it'll zoom in there so we can really see what's happening. Here we can see what's happening with our squash, and as we bring this over, we see, oh, there we are, caught up with the beginning of the squash. We're easing in a little bit. On both ends, we're doing a little easing and we don't really want that with the squash because the sphere is coming from the sky and it's coming down pretty quickly, so when we do our squash and we want to make that so it's coming in pretty quick. I'm just going to drag this down. Here it's going to come in squashing very quickly, and then I'm going to exaggerate that squash by just dragging it out a little bit. I don't know if you've noticed, but sometimes when you're pulling these out, you can get this, so it's not perfectly straight and you have to get in there. One thing you could do is click the ''0" key and that just levels that out. I'll click "Each". Then for squashing out, we can actually have a little bit of that easing back out there. I think that'll look pretty good. We're just easing right there. Let's check that out. Some of these things are really subtle, but they all add up to make a pretty big difference. We need to fix this squash right there. Let's grab this. I'm going to hold the "Shift" key. It's like the opposite of our position curve. Then let's exaggerate this one a little bit more. That's looking pretty good. After this point, you can basically come in here and you can continue to adjust things, you can move around the timing. But as far as a basic squash animation, I think this is looking pretty good. Sometimes on my animations, I like to just even fine-tune this last one a little bit more just to exaggerate this last scale up. I can grab this and I can move it over. Let's move it over even more. When we pop back up at the end, it's actually just a little bit of a slower pop-up, and to have this happen quicker, right when it hits down and then just slowly pops back up. I just liked the way that looks. Of course, there's all kinds of different ways you could do that. Let me click the ''Each'' key to frame everything. I'm going to just grab this last keyframe and just bring it over just a little bit more. Click the ''0'' key to straighten that out. There we go. The last little touch that we can put into this animation if we wanted to, is a little bit of stretching as it's falling. Let me pause this, rewind it. As the sphere is coming down, we can stretch it just a little bit on the same axis here, the y, and we'll just give it a little bit of a cartoon movement. As it's gaining speed, it's going to stretch just a little bit more to right there. What we can do is increase this like that and we can put that right behind there. Let's check that out and see how that looks. It just gives it a little bit of an extra fun movement, so, of course, we want to do the same thing right here. So as it's going up, hitting the ground, pop back up. Then when we get up to the top, what we can do is we can actually increase that stretch and we can actually just have that stretch hang. Let's give that a shot so right there. Let's increase that a little bit right there. We'll go to one, and as it's going back down, let's click ''One'' then right when it hits right around here, we can have it go up. Let's go right there, and we'll do a little stretching right there. Now we've got this where it's doing a stretch right there and then catching back up and then holding and then stretching as it goes down. Having this whole is really important. Without this, it does look a little weird, I've noticed. Now we can just adjust this a little bit. I think that's too quick. I think that needs to ease in right there. So we want to to into that stretching. We can try to make this stretching a little bit more abrupt right there, and it just gives it a little bit of a different look. It's almost like a jiggle look, so you can do that, I think, either way, I've found it looks pretty good. We can also try on this end and see what kind of look that gives it. I like just this bell curve right there at the best, got a little bit less. At this point, it's just fine-tuning it. But this is, I think the fun part of doing these kind of animations is just trying out different things and experimenting with getting different looks. Let's see what happens if we just bring this over just a little bit. I'm going to hold the ''Shift'' key just to make sure that it stays in this position, I'm trying to move up or down a little bit by accident. I'm just going to hold Shift and let's just see what this looks like here. I can't tell if I like it better. Eases inch a little bit, maybe a little bit less than that. Here we go. I think that looks pretty **** good. I hope this is helpful to you. One thing that you can do now is obviously, grab a material, and pause this, rewind it. Actually, let's go forward so you can see it. It's going to drag a material on there so we have some color. This should be all good to go to render. If you're using the class template, all you have to do is come up to these Render Settings here. Go to the Save, give this a name, and give it a location to where you want to save it. Everything else should be set up for you if you're using the standard render, and it should friend her out at MP4. If you're using a different kind of render, then you can render that however, you would like to, but everything else should be good to go. You can close that, click this ''Play'' button and it'll take a few minutes and render out your animation, then you can check out the MP4. In the next class, what we're going to do is do a jump up in flip animation. That's going to be a lot of fun. I will see you in that class. 6. Jump up, Flip and Squish: I hope you're having an awesome day. In today's tutorial, we are going to create a jump up and flip animation. We're going to combine a little bit of the bounce animation and we're going also to combine flipping object doing a backflip in here. Let's get started. For this animation, we want to include the squashing of an object before it jumps up to create some anticipation. But in addition, we also want to do a flip and for the squashing, if you watch the bouncing ball animation, we squashed from the top-down and we did that by moving the anchor point to the bottom of the object. But with the flip, I found that it looked the best at least for what I wanted to do, where if the object did a flip where they've rotation point was closer to the top of the object. Essentially to do that, I created a way of having two different anchor points in two different positions that we could use by using Knowles and a object. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to use a cube for my object to animate and you could use something else if you'd like to. Going to move it over, I am going to change the size of this roughly, something like that and I'm going to increase the segments three on each axis. I'm just going to move it towards the ground, so I'm also going to come down here to the materials and I'm going to give it a color. Let's do green. The first thing I wanted to do is create a null and then I'm going to create one more null. These two nulls are going to be the position. We're going to use this for an access point again, to animate one of them for the squash and then the other one for our flipping pivot position. What I'm going to do is I'm going to move one to the bottom. It looks like one is pretty close to the bottom already. I'm going to go over here to my right view, increase that right view by clicking on that little button right there. I'm going to move this actually, I'll probably just move this cubed right down to the ground and then that null should be there. Let's move down just a little bit more. This null right here is our bottom null. I'm going to call this the squash position. We're going to use this null to squash this cube from the top and then we're going to get this other null, scroll out and use my scroll wheel hold the number 1 key to pan and I'm clicking holding number 1 key. I'm going to grab that null and I'm just going to move it up to towards the top, so I've tried this a couple of different ways. I tried where it was at the very top and it felt a little weird and I thought somewhere in this position seemed about right and so the reason for that is, I was thinking that it's like if a person was doing a backflip, they're going to be leading with their head or this area right here seemed to look pretty good for this animation. Of course, you can change this later if you really wanted to, if you don't like the way it looks or just depending on the shape of your object, you can move this around and try different things. I found I liked this area the best for this animation. I'm going to call this one that null, the backflip position. This is really important, the order of how we parent and child this chain here, I'm going to go back to the perspective mode is important. We need to put the squash position on the top and then the backflip position underneath that, and then the cube underneath that. Your hierarchy should look like this, so we don't want any of these right next to each other, so it's a parent-child relationship, so the backflip is a child of the squash and the cube is a child of the backflip. What this should allow us to do is if I go to my squash and I go to the coordinates in the scale parameters right over here in the coordinates tab. I want to squash this down on the Y, so that should squash it from the top and go up, so we can get that squash and stretch motions. I'm going to put that back to one and then the backflip, we're going to rotate it on the P rotation right there. That should be doing a backflip from that position. Hopefully you can just see that backflip where that position is and you can even just rotate this and just test it and see if that's rotating from the area you would like and who knows, we might even get into this and maybe want to adjust it a little bit more, but that's that. I'm going to go back to zero for that. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to animate our Y position of the cube and then we're going to get into squashing and then we'll get into rotating. We're going to animate the Y position first. What we're going to do is we're just going to grab this top null, so it grabs everything that's in there. We don't want to animate the Y on one of these other objects because it'll move the position of it outside of this main parent. We're going to animate the squash position for our Y and also for squashing. I'm going to start this on the ground. I'm going to rewind this. I am going to go to, I'm in standard mode, I'm going to go over to animate and I should mention that I'm using the old layout system, not the new Cinema_4D, R_25 layouts.. The next thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to adjust this over a little bit, so it should be pretty good and now we should have our timeline here and you may have already been there. But if not, let's say you can get to it, you can load that up right here. We've got two timelines, and I'm going to rewind this and so I'm going to click on this. At zero, we're going to start on the ground and then we're going to anticipate jumping up. If you followed along with the bouncing ball tutorial, we're going to do a similar thing. We move forward and we're going to record three key-frames with the same position on the Y. That's so we can do a squash, pop back up and go back up. But what we're going to do is have those three key-frames and then after that, we're going to go up into the air, so we're jumping up and I'll record that Y position. I'm on 12, and you can adjust that to different key-frame if you want it to go faster or slower and then we'll come back down to the ground like that, and actually, I could probably just put zero. Then we'll do the same thing. We'll record three key frames for that Y. We could do this a few more times if we wanted. We're just going to start with just doing one jumping up and then coming back down. You could do it obviously more times than that. Let's just take a look at this. This is our basic movement that we've got going on. Nothing too exciting, but at this point, a good idea is to check out the timing between your key frames and see if this basic movement, that basic speed of this animation seems right. This is always a good point to make those adjustments versus doing it later when we dial in our curves. One of the reasons for that is once we start to dial in our curves, if we start weaving key frames around, the curves do you get a little bit messed up. It's really not a huge deal to modify it, but it's just a little bit of a better workflow, I've found, if we do that basic blocking in of the main movements first, then continue to fine tune later on. The next thing we want to do is we want to do our little squash, so I'm going to come to this next key frame. I'm on the squash right here. Let's open this up so we can see this. I'm on the squash position in the coordinates. There's our Y animation. Let's go over and let's do a little squash. I'm going to squash this on the Y. I'm going to record a key frame there. Actually, I should have done that on the very first one. I've recorded a key frame there, but come to the next one, and I'm going to do 0.5. You could do more or less depending on how much you want to squash the object, then it's going to pop back up right there. Put it back to one and then it'll go back up. Hopefully, this makes sense why we're doing it this way. Because if we didn't have these three key frames, we don't want this squashing on its way up. We want this movement that's separate from the actually moving up into the air, the squashing part. It just looks pretty weird if it's squashing in the air. We're going to record that one in that position. Go to the next key frame. I'm going to put 0.5 again. Click that, restore that key frame, go to the next one, turn it back to one, and record that key frame. Let's rewind that, check that out. We've got that little pop going on, our little squash. I think the squash is happening just a little bit too quick. What I'm going to do is I am going to grab these key frames. I'm going to move them out just a little bit, give them a little bit of breathing room. I could have just done it this way at the beginning, but I'd like just to dial in some of that first movement, and then go through and do that later. At this point, before we get into doing any back flip, we can see that obviously this animation is not looking that good. The biggest reason for that is our curves. I'm going to go make sure I'm clicked on the squash position. I'm going to look down on our timeline and I am going to just open up this null that we called squash position and I'm just going to dial on the position and then I'll dial on the scale. If I click on the position Y and I don't see my curves here, and if I click the H key, that's going to frame that up for me. That's the same as clicking this button right there. If you don't see curves and you're just looking at keys, it may be because you are in key-frame mode right there. You can go to that next button right over there and go to the curves. This is what our curve currently looks like. We can make this look a lot better. One thing with a jumping type animation, right here, we've got this horizontal, which means there's absolutely no movement. Then the more vertical it goes, the faster it's going. If you can see, I'm going to scroll in, I'm just using my scroll wheel, that this handle right here, there's just a little bit of ease in before it goes up. It's pretty small. I'm going to click "H" to frame that up again, but one thing that will really help this is if I hold the Shift key while this key frame right there is selected, hold Shift, and I just grab this, it breaks that tangent right there. What that does is it allows us to go, instead of any easing like that, we're going to just go straight up. Any jump animation like jumping up or jumping down, hitting the ground, we want this to be like a broken curve right hear. We don't want it to have any easing. It looks a lot better if we just break that because then we're hitting something hard like the ground or bending down and then jumping up with force. It creates that movement that we're going for. The more I pull this up, if I pull this up pretty far, we're going to shoot off the ground really fast, versus if we do something more like that. It's going to be slower because this line is going more vertical, which makes it go faster. Let's just try something like that. This is at the beginning right here. Let's grab this. You can see this is this point of the animation. I'm just letting it play through. That's looking pretty good. The weird thing that we have is it looks like it's hitting something in the air instead of floating through the air. I like doing these animations that are a little bit more like a cartoon style, but that seems a little weird, but before I adjust that, I'm going to grab this key frame, hold Shift, and bend that one up too. We have that when it hits the ground over there, we're doing that same curve. It's that jumping type curve. There we go. That's looking a little bit better there. One thing that we can do now is grab this middle key frame, I'm just going to pause this, and this part just so we're on the same page as the key frame where the cube is up in the air. What we can do is we can create a hanging in the air for a second type of animation by extending this part right here. I grab that key frame. I'm grabbing this handle and I'm just pulling these out. The more we pull these handles out, the longer this part of the curve stays horizontal in which basically means that it's staying almost still for just a few seconds there before it comes back down. Let's rewind that, see what that looks like. We've got that little bit of a hang time up there now too. I like the way something like that looks. I don't like the way this curve looks right here. It's got a little bit of a weird shape there. I guess I'm just weird like that too, but I just want to try to fix that if I can. I'm just going to adjust this handle. I might just pull this in just a little bit. There's really nothing necessarily wrong with that, but I have found that the cleaner these curves look, the less weird kinks and less dramatic shapes in there. Actually, the animation just looks a little bit smoother, but again, it really does depend on what you're going for. Now I could just come in and I can just fine tune these and get a curve that looks pretty good. Hopefully, you can already see how much better that's looking. One other thing we could try is sometimes if we adjust the timing of where this key frame is, it can add a cool effect and just change things a little bit. I'm just going to grab that key frame. I'm going to hold the Shift key and it'll just keep it at that same position while I drag it this way. I can't drag it up and down, which is nice. I'm going to drag it over so it reaches that point later. I'm just going to see what that looks like just for the heck of it. I like how it takes a little bit longer to get up there. It really, again, just depends on what type of animation you're doing, but a lot of times I like to come in and just try moving these things around and see what they look like. If I hold the Shift key again, maybe I'll try the other way and just see what that looks like, bring that so it goes up a lot quicker. That's jumping up much quicker. It is messing up our curve right here. We could fix this by trying to adjust this one, but at a certain point, we have to actually adjust this one as well, and that will smooth that out. I like the way it looked the other way personally. I'm just going to grab that key frame, hold Shift, move it over, something like that. I'm going to pull that handle out again. Something like that. If I hit the 0 key, that it wall this key frame is selected, it will zero this out. I hit the wrong key. Try that again. Hit the 0 key. You might not have even noticed that was probably really subtle, but if I have a handle that's just a little bit crooked right there, and it's messing up my animation, if I just click the 0 key, it just zeros that out. Let's see, I think it's this one right there. Yeah. The next thing we want to do is go to our scale and click on the scale. We see the curve, but it's all flat. All we have to do is click the H key and that will frame that up. It just was zoomed out too far. This is what our scale is looking like. Let's think through this really quick. I'm going to rewind that. As we're scaling going down, we probably want to ease into this how it is right now, but when we go up, we're going to have this force pushing this up. We want it instead of it easing right here, we want to have that as a sharp curve too. If I hold Shift, I'm going to drag that. That way we're easing as this object is bending down and then as it starts to go up, we're gaining more and more momentum going up, which should make this curve go up quicker. If we want to exaggerate things, I can pull this one in a little bit more and we can also grab this one. Just extend that out. This will just give us just a little bit more of a dramatic movement. This may or may not be what you're going for or even when I'm going for, just give it a shot. It's one of these subtle things, but I feel like sometimes these little subtle things do make a difference. For instance, if I just grab this and we don't have any easing there, we can check out what that looks like. It's just going down quicker, but it is holding just a little bit on this part right here. I do like how it eases in a little bit. Something like that. Let's go over here. I'm going to hold the 1 key just to click and pan over. I'm going to fix these curves up. This is the opposite. As it's coming from the area, there's a lot of force pushing it down. We don't want any easing right here. I'm going to hold the Shift key, break that tangent, pull that down. The force from coming from the air, we want that to go fast, and then it's going to come down. I'm going to just pull that out a little bit. Hit the 0 key just to make sure that's level. I've moved down so I can hold the H key and pan back over. Here, we do want some of that ease in. Right now pulling this and you can see it's not making a difference. It's because we've reached our maximum right here. One other thing that I can do is I can actually hold the Shift key here. This breaks the tangent, just like we were doing this kind of movement, but instead of moving up, I'm going to just try to move it horizontally so we get a little bit more slack right here, so we can pull that out more, and just extend that more. I might even also just move that over a couple more. Just keep this a little bit more breathing room at the very end of our animation. Let's try that. There we go. I might even exaggerate this even more. This is just a personal preference. Just stylize this thing even more where it just pops up even slower at the very end there. I just like the way that looks. I'll give it maybe a little more room there. I like the way that looks and maybe we'll set up coming down, but so quickly right there. Let's just try to go in more of a linear type movement. That just softens that last part. I don't know if you can see that there, if you noticed it. That will allow me to drag this out and so it'll hold as we squash down. Fix that again. The last thing we want to do is we want to do a back flip. I'm going to click on my back flip position. I think that it may look pretty good if we start the back flip somewhere right around that area and we flip. Then maybe we're still flipped over and we're coming back down. Let's give that a shot. I'm going to say something like that. We may move this around. I'm on the back flip position not on the squash. Let's just see which one. Yes. We want to rotate the P, so I'm going to record 0 right there. Then I'm going to flip over lets say backwards 360 degrees. I can just type in minus 360 and I'll record that. Let's just see what that looks like. I'm not sure. I just eyeballed these where I thought that would maybe look good, but I think I could be wrong. Let's see. Maybe we can try giving this a little bit more key frames and just see what that looks like. Let's just see if we move this around. Just like to see what looks better or worse or different. This is a different kind of flip right here than the one we had before. I think this one looks less natural. I should probably pause this, but let me go back to somewhere like that. You can see that also gives it a little bit of a different look. Let's pause that and see the point in which we flip is right about there. That seems, to me, about right for maybe this type of object. Maybe I'll even pull this over a little more and just see what that looks like. I think that's getting a little too close. That's where if this was maybe gymnastics, they might lose some points there. I think let's go back. Let's go to the back flip position rotation. Click the H key. This is what our back flip curve looks like. Let's think through this. If this was going to be a flip, the momentum right here, I think, would most likely ease in and ease out like it is. However, I think that there would probably be more force right here as we're coming into that. Let's try that. I'm going to grab that key frame. I'm going to bend this up. Let me hit the H key so we can frame this up. We're going to ease into this movement. It could actually be wrong here. Maybe it's the other way around where it shouldn't be easing in, but I think we're gaining speed, gaining speed, and then we hit. It seems right. Let's just see. I think we could probably do it a couple of different ways. Some curve like that. There we go. I like the way that looks. It might be a little too close to the end. I'm going to pull it over just a little more. One more. There we go. I like the way that looks. That is about it for this tutorial. If you're using my template and you're using the standard renderer, you basically should be good to go to render. All you have to do is come up to this little gear icon right here, I'll pause this, and you could do a render. All of this should be set up. The only thing you have to do is make sure you're in the Save tab right here and you can give this the name, so call it jump up, whatever you want to call it. Give it a name and you click these little three dots right there and you send it to somewhere on your computer or hard drive, wherever you want this to save to. You choose that location, close it, and you click this middle button. It should start rendering your MP4 file. If you're using a different render engine or you already have something else set up, you can just use that as well. In the next tutorial, we are going to go a little bit further into this whole bouncing type of an idea and we're going to do a bounce and a bend. It's a floppy type animation, so we're going to use a bend deformer to add some floppiness to an object that's hitting the ground. I will see you. 7. Model a Simple Piece of Pizza: Hello everybody. Stereo Stan here. We're going to model a very simple piece of pizza for our next tutorial, which will be pizza following hitting the ground, bouncing up into the air, and flopping and doing a flopping animation. Though in this tutorial, we are going to just model the pizza and then the next tutorial, we are going to animate the pizza. We are going to make a piece of pizza using these two primitive right there. So I'm going to click on the tube. Let me get my move tool and just click on that and what we're going to do is we're going to slice this tube and we're going to slice it to 45 degrees. Hold the Alt key to rotate around. Let's go back to the tube and go to the Object tab and let's change the height down to, let's try 10. Let's click up to 20. We're starting to build this basic shape of the pizza crust essentially. Let's go. The inner radius, we'll keep that to 50 and we will change this to 56 and so we've got this basic little bit of crust right there. If we turn on this flat right here, we can get this crust shape that we're going for. This is going to be the crust and so what I'm going to do is make a copy of this and I am going to just hold the Control key down, click on the tube and drag, and that will just make a copy. Now I'm going to do this one more time and so we're going to have this one, is first one that we just made the crust. I'm going to name that, spell crust and then the second one will be pizza and then the third one we're going to use as the cheese. I'm going to go to this pizza and what we want to do is decrease the inner radius to zero. We're going to change the height of this. Let's try this one at 10. Then for the cheese, move this up a little bit. Let's go to the object, take the inner radius down to zero, and then the height, let's go down to, let's try five and just move this down. I might even take the height down to two. Put the yellow on cheese, not the pizza. Let's go and I can just move this onto the cheese right there. Let's see. Let's go for a very weird piece of pizza, purple for that part and then I'll the purple for the crust as well. For the actual pizza, let's bring in the outer radius just a little bit there and let's bring this outer radius down. Yes, something like that and then let's do the same for the cheese. Let's turn this off. So we don't have this little rounding at the end there. Let's take the outer radius down a little bit where we don't have any intersections there. I'm going to put some pepperoni on there. So we can have an object that can have some secondary animation that's way too big. Let's change the height down to five and the radius down to 10. Move this up, move this over. It's still way too thick, so let's go down to one. Let's see how that looks and the radius down to, let's say three, maybe five. There we go. Five looks good. I'm going to move this over and so this will be a piece of pepperoni right here and I'll give this pink color. You can see that our segments are really low. We've got this low poly look. Let's crank up the segments unless you're going for a low poly pizza, which this does look like a low poly pizza. Let's go up to, 80 is usually a pretty good rotation segment to use, a number to use for some nice surrounding. What we want to do is I'm going to call this pepperoni and I'm going to hold the Control key down and then click and drag to make a copy and that copy is right on top of the other copies. So if I move this over, you can see that now we've got two. I'm going to move this one. I'm going to go for having three and then I can also hold the Control key and click and drag right here. So if I hold Control, click drag and make a copy right there, I'm going to grab all those and a shortcut to put these into a group which is just a null, is Alt G. If I hold the Alt and then click G, it automatically puts anything I had selected into a null. You can also come up here and grab a null and it'll make a null and you could just drag the objects in there as children and so I'm going to call this pep and then what we want to do is we want to put all of these, I'm going to hold Shift, grab all those Alt G, puts all those into a null and we'll call this pizza and then we're going to do this one more time. We're going to get that one and that one to Alt G. We're going to put all these into a null. Then I am going to put the pepperoni inside of the pizza. The reason I put these all into its own group right here, the pepperoni versus just having everything just in the pizza is that way we can control these pepperonis separately and we will animate them a little bit one-on-one but it's nice just to have this one main control for all the pepperoni but we can go in here and animate these separately as well. Then the reason we put this pizza inside of its own group is because what we want to do is we want to add something called the bend deformer. If I come up here, you can see all these deformers and these are really awesome to use in your animations and especially the bend. I'm going to get the bend deformer and the reason I put this pizza inside of its own group is because if we put the bend deformer in this group and these are the same level, they're both children of this one parent. There's not another level. This is not a child of this. This is the way we can use this bend to deform everything that's in this group and name this pizza with bend. When I go to the bend, we can just scale this down. Something like that. Just go around the pizza. The bend deformer usually takes a minute to get this to bend in the right direction. So right now there's nothing happening. It's because our strength on the bend deformer is at zero. Let's just see what happens when we try to bend this, it's bending. It could actually be bending in the right way. Now that I'm looking at this but the problem is we don't have enough segments I believe, in these three things right here, especially the pizza and the cheese. Let's go to the cheese, since we can see that on the top and I'm going to scroll in hold Alt to rotate. You we can see we have segments going in this direction, but no segments going in this direction. So that's the easy fix. Give this some cap segments right here and you can see we're getting segments going in the other direction. Let's go up to 20 and let's just do the same for the pizza. Well, the band doesn't seem like it's still going in the right direction here. It's not bending the way we wanted to. I'm going to keep this bend something like this. What we need to do is rotate this bend deformer. So I'm going to go to the coordinates, I've just know this from trial and error. We want to go to 90, right around 90 on this and usually this is just a little bit of a trial error. Then you have to rotate this bend to bend the direction that you want it to and so you can see that's bending right there in the right direction. It looks weird and we will fix that. Let's go to around 24 on each, something like that. Again, I just knew that from messing around with this a few times, but I had to just rotate this thing around until I found it bending the right way. It is a little frustrating sometimes honestly, to get this to work exactly the way you want depending on the shape of your object and all that. I'm going to grab this whole pizza with the bend, pull out of the ground. One thing we can do is check this keep length. This keep length will keep it from getting stretched like that. What we can do is we can see this bending and flopping right here and then we can come in here and adjust the size to get this to bend the way we want it to. If I grab this and make this longer, you can see that it bends not as precise, I guess I should say it's bending like the whole thing, but we don't have any folds or anything in there and if we pull this a little bit tighter, it's going to bend on one area. For this animation, we want it to bend a little bit more in one area. I want to go from limited to unlimited and I'm just going to pull this bend deformer back just a little bi t and you can see as we pull it, it's changing where it's spending. So I'm going to pull it back because what we want to do is have this pizza as the crust is a little bit heavier. We want to have the crust hit the ground and then this part is the floppy part. So this is the floppy control that we want to have for this particular animation. One thing about the crust right now, and actually the whole thing, I think it's just a little bit too thick, so I'm going to take the pizza down to five. I think that's looking a little bit better and move that up. I could even see that going down to maybe even three. I think that would look a little better. It was just way too thick and then the crust, five. They'll move that up, move this back, something like that. This is our model that we're going to use and so in the next class what we're going to do is we're going to animate this pizza and use that bend deformer to flop things around. It should be a lot of fun. So I will see you in that tutorial. 8. Flop Animation with Pizza: Hello everyone. Hope you're having a great day. In today's tutorial, we are going to create a flopping piece pizza animation. If you do not have a piece of pizza that you want to use, you can follow along with my last tutorial that shows how I've modeled. It is a very simple piece of pizza. All I did was use primitive shapes. Actually, most of it was done with a cylinder and just move some stuff around, and then what I did was I also added a bend deformer. That's a big part of this tutorial. We're going to use this bend deformer to basically bend this piece of pizza. That's going to give us are a little bit of a floppy type of animation. I'll put that back down to zero. If you don't want to model this, I have provided this model for the class but first thing we're going to do is we're going to move this piece of pizza, so I've got this in a group. It's got all these pieces in there. I'm going to move this down to the ground. Hold the number 1 key pen out. Move this down to the ground. This piece of pizza is going to be following from basically been our mind thinking someone's dropping this onto the ground and it hits the ground and it flops up into the air. What I'm going to do is go to the coordinate tab, I'm going to open up my timeline here, and I'm just using the template that I've provided for the class. I am going to start this out of frame. I'm going to move this up. I'm going to click a keyframe for the whole group of this pizza on the Y, and it's going to come down and it is going to hit the ground. This one's going to hit the ground and it's going to go back up into the air. That's going to come back down and hit the ground again. Something like that. Let's rewind that. This is the part again where we want to dial in the speed of our main animation. Sometimes it is a little hard to tell if this needs to be faster or slower but what we can do is just dial this in a little bit more and get our main feel for what we want this to look like. You can think about how an object might fall. Now, again, I do want to say this is a cartoon-style animation. Obviously, a piece of pizza wouldn't bounce off the ground and it definitely probably wouldn't flop in the air, but that's what makes this whole thing about animating fun. I'm going to pull this one back a little bit. Maybe just this. Just thinking in my mind, what should this look like? I have this hit the ground, go up into the air, it's going to flop a little bit, and then come back down. The first thing we wanted to do is adjust the F-curves of this Y animation because it's just not looking that good. If I go to the F-curve tab right there and I open up the pizza, we can see we've got an animation on the Y, and let's pull this up a little bit and I can hit the H key, it'll frame this whole thing up. What we'll do is grab this keyframe and I'm going to hold the Shift key and we're going to do our typical bounce animation. When I hold the Shift key, breaks the tangent there. That's what we're going for. This is what a jump-type curve should look like. An animation curve comes in, hits, goes back up and the same thing over here, I'm going to hold the Shift key. The reason for that is we want it to be going fast and then an abrupt stop and then an abrupt going back up. We don't want any easing for this type of animation when it hits something solid like a table. We want this to be pretty abrupt as it's coming down and going up into the sky. Remember that the steeper these curves look, the faster it's going to go. Let's start this slower, and we won't really see the pizza right here, but we'll catch the effect of it right here and that automatically. Hopefully, you can see that looks a lot more like something hitting the ground and bouncing just by adjusting that little keyframe right there. That piece of pizza looks very stiff, and I think it would look so much better if this piece of pizza had a little bit of a floppy and it wasn't like a board but it's something that has a little bit more life to it. This is where the bend deformer comes in and I can see my pizza right there. I'm going to grab the wire. I'm going to just start it up a little higher. I'm at frame zero. In my mind, I was imagining, as this thing is catching speed, this pizza is bending a little bit. I'm going to open up, click on the bend deformer, go to the object tab, and the strength is what it's going to give us that bend. Before we record anything, let's just see how that's looking and I might grab that bend and adjust this a little bit. We can adjust the size a little bit too if we need to. That's not really making a difference. However, in my own eyes, that's making differentials to see that a little cleaner. I'm going to move that down over a little bit. Then this one's really going to make a pretty big difference. I'm going to decrease that just a little bit, and this is all just personal preference. You could adjust this however you want, but as you're adjusting this, what's happened is it's adjusting how this is bending, as it's picking up speed, it's bending like that just a little bit. I undid that, I'm going to go back and click a keyframe at zero. When it's up in the air, there's no bending, and right about here as it's gaining speed, we might start to see some bending. It's going to be bending up. The air is going up and it's pushing that flap up just a little bit. It might have to go down a little bit more, so something like it's at the most bent position, probably right there when it hits the ground and then it'll flop back down. As we're coming down, it's bending more and more. See, it's subtle and we can bend it maybe even a little bit more. That might be a little too extreme but let's try it. Then when it hits, what we want to do is have this flop to zero. Actually, I'm going to move that one back. When it hits, it should hit the ground like that. It smacks the ground and that smacking the ground will cause it to go back up into the air, and as it's going up into the air, it will bend the other way. Instead of bending down will have it bent like that. Then in the air, it's going to hit the ground. We see it's bending back up and then at a certain point we're going to have almost the secondary type of motion where it's going to flip the other way. At least that's what I think might look fun to do something like that. Flips up the other way. We want it to be more extreme rate before it hits down here again, so maybe something like that and then here, when it hits the ground again, like we did, we're going to turn that to zero. It might have to adjust that, so it needs to be right there when it hits the ground. Rewind this. There we go so here's our little floppy piece of pizza and I think we need to adjust some curves on that as well. But I think we've got a basic movement going. We can move these key frames around and get different looks and so let's try it. Try to move this one around a little bit and you can see it gives it more of a stall. I don't think that's looking the best. Let's try something like that. Yeah, I like how it has that secondary movement right there. Let's move that over a little bit more. It's so funny to me how you can, move these around and get such different types of works by adjusting some of these key frames. See what it looks like to go even more extreme on some of these, it might not look good, but we might as well give it a shot like that's way too extreme, but maybe something like 45. Let's see what this looks like. That's going pretty extreme. Maybe we got to go minus 35, minus 40. Split it in half. I like that. That is pretty extreme there, but it's fun so and then what about here? We do the same thing we go. This one's at minus 40, let's try minus 45 on that one. Then we really get it smacking so it depends on what you want to go for there. We could try to adjust this move, this over one frame. Let's see what that looks like. Let's go too, this is the fun part, it's experimenting with stuff to see what looks we get. So if we move that key frame over, we're getting that last part is less dramatic. It folds down a little softer so depending on what you're going for, you could go either way. I like how it's pretty abrupt. It makes it feel a little bit heavier when I move these closer together. All right, Let's open up the bend curves, so I'm going to go to the strength because that's what we're animating right here. Because that strength and there it is, I'm going to click the H key, let's think through this one as it's coming down, it should ease into that bend. That's what I would think if it's coming from the sky, it should ease and that's what's happening. We can make that a little bit more extreme, pull that out so it should ease into that, and then right here, it's like the more strength and so we can enhance that by pulling that out a little bit. Let's see how that looks, so it hangs there and then right here when it flips down, we need to fix this so this should be our jump hitting the ground shape of animation curves, so I'm going to hold shift, pull that down and I don't know if you noticed it didn't really change something and that's because this might be too dramatic. There we go, so I'm going to click that one again, hold shift so you can see now we can get that hitting the ground curve where it's broken on one side. Let's see if that looks right. I think it should and let's see where we right here so this is hitting the ground and then here it's starting to come back up so as it's coming back up, I would imagine it will ease into this a little bit. Let's try that, let's see, hits the ground and then here eases in and I think this could work right here and then here, and then you can enhance this one just a little bit, so it gives it a little bit more of a hang right here so it just hangs in that position longer because this is horizontal, and then right here when it hits the ground hold shift, we want to make that go down and I did that again, it probably should have pulled it that far. We can fix that [inaudible] , fixes that curve, let me move that up so now we've got that jump hitting the ground curve there. Let's see how that looks. I'm a little concerned about that one, so the last thing that we can do is we can animate the pepperoni. We could, a simple way of doing this is we could animate all three of those together by animating this pepperoni group on the y-axis so we can move those up and so it's nice to have control over being able to do all of them and individually, and that's why I put those in that group. I'm going to grab all three of these and I'm going to animate them together and then I'm going to adjust them a little bit separately so I'm going to rewind this. It's coming down and so this pepperoni is, at this point should probably be flying off the pizza a little bit and then the land again. Let's go to the beginning. At the beginning they should be at zero right on top of the pizza and then when it comes down, they should be up in the air. Of course, this is like cartoon and not that much, maybe just a little bit, something like that and then when they hit, they could come back down to zero. I've still got all three selected and that's important because I'm animating all three at the same time and then I'm going to adjust them separately, so I've got all three when I'm doing this selected, so they're all getting these key frames that I'm doing and then as it comes back up, we'll see they'll go up into the air probably right around here and maybe I'll make this one even more extreme for the fun of it. In their highest point should be maybe over a little more. It's almost a secondary type animation where this pizza reaches the top point and then these will reach that a second later and they should hit at zero and if you see this and you don't see this anymore, what you can do is Control-click on all three of these again, make sure you got all three. I'm going to pull this back up. I'm going to turn this to zero because that was the coordinate for the top of where they were on the top of the pizza, record that, and then what they could do is I could see them bouncing up just a little bit at the very end one more time , then coming back down. I think that could add a little bit to the end there. Let's check that out. That's looking a little weird, but we can fix that. Let's go to these. Control-click on all three of them again. Open these up. Let's click on Control-click on the Y position for all three and by doing this, we're going to select all the curves and this is important. You don't have to do it individually. Hit the H key. We're going to frame this up so again, let's think about what's happening here. Let me pause this. Let's think about what's happening. It's following, so it's easing into this part and then here like everything else, it's hitting the ground so we want to hold shift and get our jump curve happening and then they're going to go up into the air and we can hang little longer in the air so I'm going to drag that out a little bit so they're going to hang in the air and then should hit the ground there so grab that hold Shift and then at the end, we want to grab those because it's hitting the ground there, and we can hold that in the air a little bit and so I think one of the things that's happening here, which is messing things up is this might be flying up too high into the air right here for the hitting, it should be a little bit more subtle, even though this is still a cartoon style. I felt it was maybe a little abrupt and put this in. Let's look at that and then so lastly, what we can do if we want to have these pepperonis have a little bit of variance in their position and speed and all that. It could add a little bit to the animation so what I can do is grab randomly one of these. Now I've only got, let's say one of these selected so let's see the part right here. Maybe one of them comes up a little bit quicker and maybe it doesn't go up this high. Maybe just a little, it doesn't bounce as high so I'm going to pull it down and I'll record that and that will just give us a little bit of variety there and grab another one and move one of these key frames around so maybe it falls a second later, not even a second, a frame later. To see how that looks. This was a long one and in the next tutorial we are going to do a swing animation, so we're going to have something swinging on a little rope and swinging to a stop. I will see you in there. 9. Paper Falling and Bending: Hello everybody. I hope you're having a great day. [MUSIC] In today's tutorial, we are going to go over doing a paper falling through the air animation. Basically, the paper's going to be dropping from out of the frame in the top, and it's just going to fall slowly down to the ground and just land on the floor. To do that, we're going to go over animating an object on a spline. We are also going to use the bend deformer again. Let's get started. The first thing I'm going to do is come in here and I'm going to create a piece of paper. I am going to create a plane, and there it is, right there. I'm going to scroll into this thing. I hold the number 1 key dependent going pull it up above the ground. What I want to do is for this piece of paper, I'm going to go to the object tab, and I'm going to make the width smaller than the height, something like that. I'm going to make it a little bit extreme, just so we can make sure to see which way it's facing as random meeting. Then the next thing I'm going to do is come to the materials and I'm going to give this a color. I will color yellows, we have some nice contrast there. I should also mention that I've got my display settings right now on constant shading. That just makes things a little easier to see. Yours might be on the shading with the lines here, and a lot of times I like to have it on that as well, just so I can see this segment. What I want to do is before we get started, I'm going to put the bend deformer on at the very beginning. Right up here we're going to grab the bend deformer, and I found that it's easiest to start with having the bend deformer already on the paper even though we're not animating it first. Just because it gets a little bit more difficult to line it up the correct way, once we start animating. So I'm going to grab the bend deformer, drag it as a child of a plane. Once I do that, I'm going to click fit to parent and it fits that bend deformer right around our plane, and so you can't really see it, but if I increase this just a little bit on the y-axis here, then we should be able to see, I'm going to scroll in to rotate around, so you can see that bend deformer is like a box right around this. I'm going to just try to do a little bend and right away we can see it's not bending in the right direction, and that's usually the case. To fix that, come to the coordinates tab, and then what we want to do is just rotate this. Let's see, minus 90. The only reason I know this is because I've done this a few times. Sometimes I have to come in here and mess around with this minus 90 degrees on h and then 90 degrees on b, depending in the direction that I want it to bend this way. But we can see there's a few issues and actually I'll go back to the line so we can see. We don't have enough segments. Let me grab the plane, pull this up. That's why we're getting this low poly look. To fix that, just go to the plain object, and let's increase the height segments. We get that nice and smooth, something right around there should do. Then the other issue that we're having is it's stretching. So the way to fix that is to go to the bend deformer and click on keep length. That will stop the stretching. The bend deformer is just too short right here, so it's doing a sharp bend. This is actually cool if you want it to bend like really sharply right here. This is a cool way of actually end up doing this a lot. But for this we don't want it to. We can fix that by, if I clicked on the bend deformer right here on the size, I can increase the size of the Y even more and that will just give more of like an even bend right there. I'm just going to take this down. I don't really need to, but just visually, I think it's nice to see that a little shorter and then bring that in a little bit. We've got the bend deformer, should be bending in the right way. We can see, this is how we can bend our piece of paper, and the paper does feel pretty long. I'm going to go back to the plane and actually just widen that out. Just fix the proportion just a little bit. I'm going to put the bend deformer back to zero. What we want to do now is we want to draw our spline, and so thinking about the animation is going to come down and fall like that until it hits the ground. I was doing some research on some other paper following animations, and sometimes I noticed that the paper would fall down and it would do like a little flip and then come down. I thought it'd be fun to start with doing a little flip on the first one and then the other ones, we'll just keep it following back-and-forth. To do that, we're going to draw a spline, and then we're going to have this piece of paper follow that spline. I'm going to go up to the different views here. I'm going to go to the right view, and scroll out a little bit. It's always easier to draw the splines in a 2D view. I'm going to grab my pen, tool, spline pen, and I'm just going to draw this like it's coming down from the sky, so I'm going to click. Then what I want to do is click and drag and it will make that spline a soft edge right there. Then I'm going to click right here and drag. This is the part where it's going to flip upside down. I'm going to have a little curve there, and then we'll click and drag something like that, and then we'll come up. Then the rest of these, I'm just going to have the paper not flip, so I'm going to make this a corner edge. Then click up the other corner edge, and then we'll come down to the ground right here. I'll need to bring that down a little bit more. Something like that, I'm going to click the Escape key to get out of drawing the spline. Then I'll get the live selection tool, and I'm in point mode right here. I can just grab that point, bring it down to the ground, and this should be down on the ground as well. There is our little path and maybe I'll grab this and move this up higher so we don't see it as it's coming down, it'd be pretty steep right there. Move that over a little bit. Maybe we can adjust these if I grab this tool right here. To grab the handle, we can't actually use this one, we have to use the Move tool. I'm just going to move this out. If you want to adjust any of these, now's a good time to do it, you can grab these handles and adjust them if you need to you. Go back to this live selection tool. Then what we want to do is we're going to click on our plane. What we want to do is add this tag. I'm going to right-click animation tags and we're going to do a line displaying. When I do that, it puts a little tag on the plane, so it's right there and make sure it's right on the plane. If I click on this, it gives me access to some of these parameters here. What we want to do is put a spline in there. That's our spline, spline path drop it in. What will happen is this piece of paper, which is our plane, will automatically just shoot up to the top of this spline and it's right there, and, so it'll be at the starting position. If we look here, I clicked on this, align to spline tag. There's the position and so this is what we're going to animate. You can see the pizza paper animating down to the ground and it should reach the end at 100 percent. That's the way that works. Let's go back out to perspective mode. Scroll out, see if we can see what's happening here. I'm not too worried about the camera viewer. We'll set that up later, but we'll just be looking at this from some different angles at first. I'm going to go back to Display and do constant shading. There we go. I'm going to click a keyframe for the position so we're at zero. Click a "Keyframe." We want this to be at zero percent. That's the starting point. Then I'm going to go up to close to a 100 frames here and then I'm going to put that to 100. I'm just randomly picking this number. I thought that this was a pretty good distance. If your timeline doesn't go up to a 100, you can change it right here. If it's at 50, if you just type in 100 there, you can go up to a 100. You can even make this go longer. If you want it to go slower, pull it back to right around 95, rewind it and let's just hit play and see the general speed for this. This is a good time to adjust this speed because once we start getting in here and animating a lot of other things, it gets harder and harder to adjust things because we've got a lot of key frames all over the place. We want to put some keyframes at different points along this paper's traveling journey here. We want to do at each point there so we can control the timing between each point. What I'm going to do is go to the line displaying tag and I'm going to click and just record the current position when the piece of paper is on the corner. Then I'm going to do the same for all the corners. Click that. Then the last one we already have that one key frame. What that's going to allow us to do is if we want to change the time it takes from getting from here to here, make this go faster, we could adjust these keyframes. Let's just look at this. If I move this over, it's going to go really fast to get to there and then slow down right there and go faster. I'm going to undo that because I liked that general speed but what we can do instead of moving the keyframes, there's nothing wrong with moving the keyframes. But I think it might be just as efficient and even better is if we go and adjust the curves. I'm going to rewind it and I'll show you what I mean. I'm going to open up the line to spline down here on the timeline, click on the "Position." Make sure that I'm in F curve mode. If I'm in key frame mode, I can just click on that to go to F curve mode. If you don't see your spline, just click "H" and it'll frame everything up. Just click in here and click "H." Then here's our key frames that we just set. What I want to do is this is going from 0-100 percent. What I can do is I'm just going to grab these and just slow down the parts where it's on the corners because if we think about this piece of paper, it's going to go fast and if you've watched some of these animations of paper falling, seems like a lot of the times it's going fast right here and then it slows down and then goes fast, slows down fast. We can slow it down on these points when we're hitting those edges right there. I'm going to grab that, can just slow it down just a little bit. Now, one thing that's really important for this as we're doing this is if this line starts going in the opposite direction, that means it's going backwards on the spline because as we're going to 100 percent, if we're at higher percentage right here, and then we go lower, then it's going to start going backwards and we don't want that. What I want to make sure and do is grab all these and hit the "Zero key" and that will just zero that out. Because even just a little bit of it going the other direction is just going to look weird on our animation. It'll make it stagger and go backwards, which would be really weird for paper to do. Now we have some more dynamic movement happening here. What we want to do is have this paper rotated down so I'm going to click on the "Plane" go to the coordinates. What we want to do is we want to start by animating this rotation. We want this paper to be going down at the beginning like that. I'm going to click a "Keyframe" at the beginning like that. We start facing down. Then we're going to just flatten this out right here. The cool thing about having this spline is we can use that as a guide for how this paper should probably be turned. I'm just going to go through this. We will have a lot of keyframes on this rotation and the bending, especially the rotation, but that's looking pretty good. Right here, I think it could bend up just a little bit. Let's scroll in a little bit so you can see that. I'm also going to just rotate the paper just slightly like that and I may keep it like that or I might animate that. But I think that's a little easier to see, especially for the tutorial and for the viewer of the animation. We come down, go up. This is the trickiest part of our animation here. What I want to do is have this do a flip. It's going to come up and I'd say right around here, let's go probably to keyframe. We want to have that going around like that. Then it's going to flip under so I've to go like that. There we go. Then it's a little hard to see what's happening there, but let me rotate so you can see. That's falling pretty good but I think we need to go up a little bit like that and then somewhere in there. Follow that along. Follow that up and then we'll come back down. We'll rotate this down right there and the papers turned a little weird. I think we'll fix that a little later. I don't like the way it's facing now rotating in the other direction since we flipped. But let's just keep on this one first off, It's following that curve like a piece of paper might fall. It's following that curve right there yet and then right here, it should be bending up as it's going up. Just thinking about how would a piece of paper fall, it probably wouldn't be a bad idea and I actually have done this. Just drop a piece of paper in your room, see what it does. It would probably do stuff that's different than what we're seeing here, where this is a cartoon style in a way paper falling. Let me see how that's looking there. I think this needs to go down, yeah, like that. Something like that. We will be readjusting all these unfortunately as we continue this. This is definitely the more of the challenging part right here is this rotation and the bending. Then it'll slide in. We have to fix some of those other rotational issues, but we'll fix those. Once we add the bend, we will be adjusting that team, Let's click "Play." Overall, that's looking pretty decent I would say. Let's add our bend and then we'll come in and fix some of our other rotation along the way. Let's say it's cruising down. What we want to do. Let's click on the "Bend." Go to the object. Let's rewind this and get the strength at zero at the beginning. When we're up there at zero it's flat. Then as we gain speed, the paper can start to bend. We have two ways of bending it. This way or that way. I know that neither of those actually look correct yet. But if we bend it this way, bend it back right there. Though we could do is fix the rotation so let's click on the plane. Let's get the coordinate and then what we can do is just bend this back like this. I know we just did the rotation, but now we can adjust it to fit with our bend. Real you could have done to the bend first and then the rotation. But sometimes it's nice to see the way that it rotates first and just get that dialed in and then just adjust as we're going like this. Something like that. Looks pretty good. Right here, I think we could slow down that bend and bend it back down to zero. Then have it fall over and then start the bend as it reaches this point. Open it up this way again and then we'll rotate it. Hopefully you can see, just need to rotate that to fix that. Go to the plane coordinates and we'll rotate that up. Now we've got two bends right here rotation keyframes and so what I can do is, I'm just going to grab this one we just made and replace the other one by dragging it right on top and will come up here. It's needs to be rotated the right way so I'll click on the "Plane" and I'll see okay, there's our rotation key frame, so this is actually a good place to adjust our bends. We're on the same keyframe as the rotation. We don't have to replace them. Sometimes you just have to either way. What we want to do here is our coordinate, yeah, and rotate up. I'll record that key frame. Let's just check that out, so rewind this. We see we have one area where we may need to fix that right there. It goes up right there, the bend might be a little extreme and actually, right here we might want to straighten this out, so let's go to the bend object and let's turn this to zero right there. It goes flat for a second and then starts to bend again as we reach around this point. At that time, it's bending in the right direction. Then right here, we can flatten it back out again, click key frame there, and then come down, and then right around when it's gaining speed again, we can bend it and we're going to have to rotate it looks like. I'll click the strength there, click on the plane, and we can just rotate it on the key frame right there. That's rotating in the right direction. Click that. Then right here, it's bending in the wrong direction. Let's see if we just delete that key frame. There we go. Maybe we don't need that one. Then as it hits the ground, it should not be bent anymore, and so I'll grab on the bend again, object, turn that to zero. It looks like the paper is, let's see, going through the ground, and that's just our other rotation, so we need to fix that anyway. Let's hit ''Play'' and let's see what this is looking like. I'm holding the Alt key just to rotate here. If it's doing this and it's all weird, a little trick is if I click on the object I'm trying to rotate around, it'll allow me to rotate around the object. To rewind it, let's click whatever it was in there for the beginning unless you want to adjust it in a different angle at the beginning. I think that's fine for this one. Right here, let's see what happens if we rotate this a little bit back to zero. This really is just depends on what the style that you want to go for, you can adjust these. However you think would work, but I think something like that looks pretty good. It's right here. I think we can fix that way, rotate it back that way. Let me actually display lines. Let me turn those lines back on so we can have a little bit of a better idea of how this is rotated. Let's say right there. Let's just click a key frame for that. Let's say it's going over, so we want it to go over right there, and that seems about right. Let's see if we can adjust this a little more. Right here, we've got a weird little issue where it's rotating weird, so I think what we need to do is to click on the plane. Let's open up this plane and let's go to the key frame mode. We can see a little bit better what's happening here. There's our P, there's our B rotation, so let's click on the P. I think we've got too really close to each other right there and I think we could delete one. Let's start by just deleting that one and see what happens. You don't get that weird rotation there. It's pretty flat there, I think. Let's click on the plane. What would help this? I think it still needs to be facing up right there. I'm going to click key frame for that one. That's our first time of using that rotation. Let's actually go back a few frames and click a key frame. That way we lock in zero so it's not changing this whole time. It just changes right around here. Let's just see if this looks good or bad. It could be bad for sure. Then just rotate that a little bit and then we'll go down like that. For some reason, that seems better to me. When we watch this, we can adjust it, and then maybe we'll rotate it back to something like that, right around that point. Then right there, it seems to approach it. I think it should still be facing back a little bit. It may need to rotate back even more right there. In a way, this animation is almost getting to be frame-by-frame. We're doing a lot of key frames. Let's see how bad if I mess this up. By the way, I just want to mention that this spline won't show up in the final animation, just in case you were wondering that. Play. We need to fix the end. It needs to be at minus 180, so we'll click that because we don't want it to do a flip right there on the ground. Minus 180 and then our other problem is, let's see if it is it this one. That one needs to be at zero also so it's not going through the ground. I'm going to click a key frame for this other one. I can see it's not filled in, which that means that I didn't record it, so I don't want it to be animating all the way because I'm going to record a key frame at the end. I don't want it animating all from there. I want it to be right around there at this point, at least for now. Then right here, it'll go to zero and that'll flatten that out. [BACKGROUND] There we go. I think that's looking pretty fun. What we want to do now is adjust some of our animation curves. Let's just see where we can make some adjustments if needed. I'm going to click on the F curve mode. Just take a look at these rotational curves here. I'm going to click on those and then I'm going to click the each key and what we could try is instead of easing right at that point, since we already have a lot of speed happening, let's just make that linear. Click H right before it hits that point. Instead of easing there, I think just moving right into it, and then actually we can maybe extend to that part there and do some easing right there instead. We could, just for fun, pull this out a little bit. Click H. I think all that looks pretty good. Let's just increase our easing just here and there like I was doing a minute ago, just to make things a little bit more dramatic. Click Zero. To grab that one, let's just extend that a little bit. Click Zero. Let's see what's happening at the end there. That's that last one. We definitely want some easing there. Let's just see if there's anything else here. Our bend strength. Click H. Let's see if we can do some animation curve adjustments here as we're bending. I think we can do our general rule of giving this a little more. I didn't mess that curve up, so I can just grab that, pull that in. What I'm doing here is, again, just adding that dynamic movement. We can increase this at the very end so we have a nice ease at the very end. At this point, it just comes down to some fine-tuning, framing up your shot so you can come in here and figure out what you want your shot to look like. I'm going to pause this and click on this paper and click the Alt key to rotate. If you want it to be shot like this where you're looking down or straight from the side, I think that I like something like this and I might zoom in a little bit more. Well, I like the way that looks. I hope that has been helpful to you. If you're using the template I provided for the class, you can of course, just come up to this gear icon and you can click Save tab, give it a name, right there and you can set the path right there to wherever you want to save this file. Everything else should be set up using my template MP4 files what you'll go get and all the other settings here should be good for rendering with the standard render. I will see you in the next class. Thanks. Bye. 10. Swing on a String : [MUSIC] Hey everybody, I hope you're having a good day. In today's tutorial, we are going to do a swing animation. Basically what we're going to have is a sphere hanging off of either a rope or some wire. Basically, the idea is we're going to act like somebody is holding that up and they're letting go and then it just swings to a rest. I'm using the template that I've provided for the class. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to draw out the rope or the wire. What I'm going to do is I'm going to use a spline and so I'm going to draw a spline and then we're going to use a sweep to give it some geometries. I'm going to go to this little button right up here at the top and I'm going to click that to go to our different views, and I'm going to maximize the front view by clicking right there. It's a little easier to draw a spline in a 2D view since it's a 2D object. I'm going to grab this spline pen tool. I have the pen tool. I'm going to come up there and click, and I'm going to come right down here and I'm going to click, and then I'm going to click this arrow to get out of drawing spline mode. I could also click "Escape" there. Right now we've got this simple spline. It's got two points. What we're going to do next is we're going to give this spline a little bit more subdivisions here so that way when this spline is swinging, it'll bend a little bit because right now it just doesn't have enough resolution so what I can do is go to Spline, Add. There's the sub-divide. If I click on this little gear, I can pop that out and we can give it a number here. I'm going to go up to eight. Click "Okay". If I click off of this, we can see we have some more points there, so that'll give us a little bit more subdivision. Then so to give this some geometry, because right now this isn't going to render just as this spline. It's not an actual 3D object yet. What we need to do is we're going to come into this spline section right here and grab a circle. This circle is going to be the radius of this spline right here, and that's what a sweep does. I'm going to come up here and I'm going to grab a sweep. There's the sweep, there's my circle and my spline. All I have to do is drag the circle in and the spline in. Once I drag these in, this circle is now like I said, the radius of this spline and it's really big, it's way too big. Just one thing I want to point out here is that it needs to be in this order with a circle at the top and the spline at the bottom and it needs to be with both of these being children of this object not like this or any other way. If it looks like that, just pull it out and then just make sure they're on the same level. Then what I can do is go to the circle and I'm going to take the radius down. I'm going to go down to, let's say one. Hopefully, you can see that right now that's the radius of our rope that we're going to be using. I'm going to go back out and I'm going to go back to the perspective mode. Now we can see, I'm going to scroll in, this is basically our rope right here. I'm going to go to the circle. I'll make it a little bit thicker so it's easier to see. I'll go up to three. What we want to do is we want to create a sphere. I'm going to get the sphere and this is going to be the object that's swinging at the end of this rope, so click on the Sphere, we will go up to 80 segments, so it smooths out our sphere. It's not low poly and then I'm going to get the Scale tool and just scale the stamp, maybe something like that and we'll move that down to the bottom. Then let's grab this sweep object and just pull this up, sphere pull that up. We can make that sphere maybe a little bit bigger. Maybe we'll go up to say 35. I'm going to go to the materials and give this a color. I'll give it a yellow color and then let's give our rope a color. I'll give that green color, doing some crazy colors here. Put both of these into the same group. What I'm going to do is grab the sphere, Control click, Control or Command, and then what I can do is Alt G and it's going to put both of these objects into a null, which is basically just like a group. If I open this up, we can see they're both in there. Then what I'm going to do is Control click or Command click both of those, Alt G and put those into a group. The reason I'm putting this inside of a group is if you've remembered from some of the other tutorials, what we did was to do a bend deformer, one of our deformers, these things right here. For this to work with multiple objects, these need to be in one group, inside of another group. What we're going to use as this bend deformer, we've used this before. I'm going to click that and if I drop that into that group, and they're both children in the same hierarchy right there, this band will basically bend everything that's in there. What we want to do is we want to bend this and swing this rope like it's stuck at the top and swing the bottom part. We just need to click on the band and we need to just adjust this so it's basically covering this whole rope here. Scale it down and we can see that this is working, but it's just working in the opposite direction because we basically want this top part to be like it's stuck on the ceiling and this bottom part is swing. I'm just going to bend this a little bit just so we can see what's happening. Go to the coordinates and then I'm going to try minus 180 here. Great. Now if I click on the bend, click on the object, there's our strength. Now we've got the type of animation that we want right here. We can see that our rope is still a little bit low poly so what we can do is come in here and grab a subdivision surface. Now, drag that into the null. What I want to do is put this whole sweep object in there. The subdivision surface, if you've never used one of these, basically it does what it says, it just subdivides whatever is inside of it. It's just giving us some more subdivision. It's smoothing out this object. I'm going to go up to the display and what I did was go from lines so just the regular shading and it just gets rid of our segments so we can see what's happening here a little bit easier. Let me click on this subdivision. Let's crank that up one more time. This subdivision right here is for the editor and this is for the render. I typically would want those to be the same so when we render, it looks the way we're seeing it here. We can see that this sweep right here is our rope, and so we should probably call this rope. Let's frame up our shot how we want it. I'm going to click keep length on this bend deformer. You can see if I uncheck this, things start to get a little bit stretched. If I click that, it'll keep everything in its original proportion, specifically the sphere right here. I'm going to change the background color of this plane right here. It's our floor. I'm going to change it to this darker color. Let's get into our animation. This animation is actually going to be pretty simple. I'm going to start it right around there, and I'm at zero. I'm going to click on the timeline. There's our keyframe at zero for this bend position and I'm going to go forward in time to 12 and then I'm going to go swing back. I'm just guessing about how far I want this to go. We'll most likely have to adjust this. Then we'll come back the other way and we'll go a little bit less. We'll go a little bit less each time. Come this way a little less. Come back this way, even less. I think we need to add some more frames here, so instead of going to 50, I'm going to go up to 100. We'll come forward a little bit more, something like that. Then we'll end it right there and let's go to zero.I have a feeling we're going to need to adjust these. I was just throwing some keyframes out there so I'm going to hit play. Now I'm just watching this and I'm just seeing what needs to be adjusted. I think at the end, it's going to take a little longer there to settle down. I'm going to just spread these keyframes out a little bit more towards the end and also adjust that one. I think there should be a little bit closer towards the beginning because we're going faster and then slowly spread out a little bit. I'm going to even push this one all the way to the end of there. Maybe I'll increase this up to 125 to pull this back a little bit more. I just wanted to dial in the basic animation and then we'll get into the curves and that will tell us quite a bit too about how this should look here. What we're going to do is go to the bend, open that up, and since we're animating the strength, that's the parameter that we're looking for. We're in keyframe mode, so I will go to f curve mode. By clicking on that button, we can see our f curve and so just thinking through how something like this would work. If someone was basically letting go of holding onto this sphere that's on a rope, it would start slower and gain speed and would do some easing right there, gain speed, easing, so basically these curves actually look pretty good. But I think we can enhance these a little bit so I'm going to do that. Hit the H key, frame everything up. I had all of them selected. I'm just going to grab that one, pull that out. We'll make this maybe just a little bit more dramatic on all of these and just see what that looks like. The cool thing about the f curve mode too, you can see even just the rhythm here and I could see that this might need to be moved over. It's just a little bit off, so I'm just going to move that over. It's a nice visual cue just to see what these look like. Then I can also see how far this is swinging. At the beginning, it's swinging way more. Here's our zero right here, that's our zero line. On this one, eventually, we should be coming to a rest right there. Something like that looks about right as we're slowing down. Let's grab this. Pull that out. That'll just give us a little bit more of a dramatic swing, but let's see if that looks good or if it looks horrible. I'm just going to move this over. I'm just looking at things here and obviously looking at it right here too and seeing what might need to be adjusted. I honestly think we could probably come to a rest or we can go maybe one more keyframe there, so maybe we'll add that in too. Instead of it coming to a complete rest right here, click on the bend and go just maybe like five, just a little bit. Then we'll come to a rest right there, so I'll click zero right there. Just added one more. If I click the H key, it'll frame all of that up. Let's see what that looks like. I think overall, it's looking pretty good. I think that there's a part right here that's not looking right. I think what it is, it seems like it's these two are too close together, possibly. I don't know if you noticed that right here. It just swings a little bit too fast, I think for what seems natural. I think it's because they're a little close together. I'm going to pull those across and maybe even have it swing just a little less. Actually, maybe it needs to swing a little bit more so it matches this one a little bit better, and then we'll pull this one over a little more. I wonder if we can pull this one down just a little bit. Let's see what that looks like. I'm going to pull this one over just a little bit and pull this one out even just a little bit more. Click H, frame everything up. I think that we can go a little bit higher there. Let's really have this come to a more of a dramatic end there by just making that ease out a little bit more and I am actually going to pull this back in a little bit. I think it's just a little too dramatic for my taste there. I'm going to click H. As you can see, you're just fine-tuning, looking at what's happening in the animation and just looking at the curves and just adjusting things, and really at this point, it just comes down to your own preferences of what you think looks better. Obviously, if you start this up higher right here, pause that, we're going to want more force. It feels [MUSIC] like that's not going far enough there, we can adjust those things, so just making those decisions. In the next tutorial, we are going to talk about our class project. I will see you in there. Bye. [MUSIC] 11. Conclusion Video: [MUSIC] Well, congratulations on making it through the class. I really hope that you've enjoyed taking this class with me. If there's one that you take away from this class, I hope it's the understanding that you can animate almost any type of object with basic animation principles using animation curves. Please upload your project to the project gallery. If you enjoyed this class, please consider giving me a review and following me here on Skillshare. Until next time, I hope you have an awesome day. [MUSIC]