3D Animation 101 - Let's Animate a Bouncing Ball!

1. Introduction: Hello, My name is Madison. I have a masters in 3D animation. Welcome to the first course in this series. In this course, you'll learn how to animate most foundational exercise, optimal bouncing ball across the screen. Because the screen is taught in every animation course. That's why we're starting with a to the bouncing ball across a discrete. It will teach you about timing, spacing, and posing, which are the essence of 3D animation. But that's not all we learn in this course. We will also learn it well, the animation principles and how to animate in Maya. And it will also learn one of the most important Maya plugins for animation called Adam bought, which is used by pro animators everywhere to speed up their workflow. But the thing is, you don't really need a degree to work as a 3D animator. All you need is skills. That's why I've created a series of courses that will take you from beginner to probe. I don't have any unique facet of this course is that I'm not the only one doing it. I'm also tutoring a total beginner to add dimension from beginner to pro, so that you can learn alongside her and notice any mistakes you make and learn from our mistakes. My promise to you is that if you go to my current Clinton, you're not only know Maya, you will also have the same animation skills or someone who graduated from school and makes them into Orion. That's my promise to you if you'd rather, it will be a lot of courses. There will be a lot of hours. But if you watch all of them, do the exercises, you will have the same skills. Or someone with a master's degree in 3D animation. How do I know I have a master's degree in 3D animation and I'll teach you everything I learned and more. Because I actually attended a lot of other courses too. So I am competent attention whether literal master's degree. So you're in good hands. I have to do is trusted can do it. You really can't do with my eyes. Easy. If you're only doing an image and just do the extra time. If you doubt your abilities to be an animator, suspend disbelief, and just do the exercises one-by-one. The first exercises will be very boring because they'll teach you a foundational animation principles. But after awhile, we'll be gotten more complex and more fun stuff. But that fun stuff, we'll build on those basic principles that you'll learn here without further ado. Let's go and play around with and balls. 2. The 3D Animation Principles: The thing you have to remember about the animation principles is that they were designed for frame-by-frame animation, and they are very foundational. There are a universal tool sets to help you think about animation and help you think about after a while. Once you learn them, you will pretty much understand them enough to go into the basic series of courses. You will essentially be able to look at movement and analyze, Oh, here's this principle in effect. And your staff, for instance, you'll be able to watch an animated movie and notice he's holding the polls. Here's a slow in and slow out. That's why therefore, it's something that always keep in mind. So they were off tool to help you observe reality has this fundamental principles and the order in which they're presented generally is pretty arbitrary because they're not presented in the order of how you should learn them. But that's actually completely not what that's going on there. The order was how they were discovered. So the 12 principles, animations where squash and stretch, which if you think about for someone who only works into different but pride frame and makes them, this is a foundational principle because they had a very real problem with emulating marginal bluer and give you a sense of weight in that location, since that's very hard to do and dry, but squash and stretch is actually not that important. Pretty animation across and stretch and 3D animation is very subdued. And 3D animation you use actually a very delicate squash. And stretch is so foundational. Shouldn't I have to squeeze it in every pose and seen in my 3D animation. I mean, it is the number one principle. Elena, for beginners, 3D animators tend to overuse, squash and stretch because it's foundational principle, literally number one, principles of courses is the most important principle. No, no, no, it's not The first discovered by frame-by-frame animators, not the most important principle. The most important principle is actually the fifth principle. So I'll actually will teach you the 12 animation principles in order of importance. And I'll say them in the original order now and explain how IoT to them, squash and stretch anticipation. Staging, straight-ahead action and post post follow through and overlapping action. Slow in and slow out. Rx, secondary reaction, timing, exaggeration, solid drawing, and appeal. To think about this list, their stock that has no relevance to treat the animators, e.g. 11, solid dry. This principle is essentially your draftsmanship. Your ability to draw. Drawing is so solid. Drawing is essentially your drawings. All the animation principles of flight ID 3D animation, to know how to draw it to be a 3D animator. Drawing and my ability to draw off to do with 3D animation. I Lao-Tzu, nothing. Just that people read items from school because their philosophy, instead of solid drawing, what you have to think about is posing. How do I pause? There is a principle that's completely irrelevant, that actually you could remove its straight ahead and pose to pose. And that is not actually a principle of animation per se. It's n, the principle of 2D animation workflow. 2d animation. You can walk straight ahead. What is working straight ahead? You let your creativity Rome, but will make them warm, dry, and feel the movement. And then draw another drawing and just let your creativity cluster. Next you create flow and just animate straight ahead. You know how rarely you actually animate straight ahead into the animation. I almost never. Why? Because it's not stopping. That's intuitive. You have to move controllers and that's cumbersome advantage of frame-by-frame animations that is intuitive and you don't have drawing ability neural finger, you can just take a pencil and draw frame by frame very quickly and let the animation flow from our heart here you cannot almost always will work post false if and then bouncing ball, you'll put post, post. Even as something as simple as a pendulum, we will work towards the poles. So it's not a principle for it, so we can cut that out right away. Another principle is number nine. And number six, slow in and slow out there, kind of synonymous because one is spacing and one this timing slow in and slow out as a team and timings times, you cannot have one without the other, because timing is if you would set a keyframe on this ball here. And if you set a keyframe on frame one and use that keyframe on frame ten, that's your timing. Spacing is how my interpolation, and that's what you modify you things or break in Maya, modify the spacing. That's rollout is acceleration and slow in is the acceleration. They're both equally important. They both make an animation seamless MCAT. That actually the most important principle, because it's actually two principles. In one, that's the foundation of animation, that's the essence of 3D animation. The essence of any animation. The reason why in the original 12 animation principles, it was separated into two separate principles is frame-by-frame animation. And you have to essentially, first time the animation and I've got a real hassle. You actually had to create physics equations to time realistic acceleration. If you had e.g. a. Car accelerating, it had to create a physical equations to calculate the exact length each moment. Be realistic. Now extra teach without physical equation. So you can appreciate what my adult for it because I complained about my other not animate for you, but I wanted you to appreciate what my adults who realized that I played by three manometer, we will have to actually do those calculations. So that's what our teachers, this first course in my curriculum that will take you where you need to be there. We'll get you to the level of a collage grad and 3D animation track will get you to the level of an atom school on animation mentor or a student track that the first lesson you have learned, timing and spacing and this course, now we'll only focus on understanding timing and spacing. I'll touch on squash and stretch, but that will not be the pocus. I'll also mentioned that this patient, but the focus will be timing and spacing. So now let's look at the principles and I would teach them in order, timing and spacing would be the first principle you need to understand. And the first principle you always have to have in mind. Second principle would be squash and stretch because you need to know it so you don't often use it, but it is something you need to know if you are creating cartoony animation or emulate motion blur. And it is something you need to learn while doing the bouncing ball. The next most important principle is anticipation, and it's very simple. It's intuitive that before you do an action, prepare for that action. And then you imagined by jumping ball and preparing for the application and usage wash. You've seen wash and then it will jump and you stretch. That's why you have to understand squash and stretch. You understand the patient because they build on top of one another. That's why the first animation principles, timing and spacing, the modified list for the 3D animation principles for treaty and matrices. This first, timing and spacing and the most foundational principle, the second is squash and stretch and also related because even if something has simple or the bouncing ball, if you want to make it a bit up healing, we need to add a bit of squash and stretch. Because although things don't squash and stretch in real life as much, they still squash and stretch. The difference is that in realistic animation, instead of squashing and stretching by deforming something, you squash and stretch by creating different poles. So e.g. then jump, even a bouncing ball, jump or false washes and then drops. If you would like to meet our human jump and he's also squash down and anticipation and then jump or bunch stretch to be good, it has to keep the same volume. This is actually less important for us to view your 3D animators because Maya handles that for us very often automatically, but sometimes the risk is not ideal and you will have to modify it themselves. But keeping the consistency of volume, It's more of a pointer of this principle for 2D animators, meaning that if you squash a ball or squash or pause, it also becomes wide. And if you stretch up all that helps become shorter. Because again, if you look at the ball, it squashes and anticipation. And while doing it, It's keeps the same volume because you have to create a realistic sense of physics. So when you squash and stretch things, you need to keep this sense of volume. This leads us to the next principle on our list. Anticipation. Anticipation is a very simple principle. You have to wash to squash interoperation for something and then it's stretched while jumping. Of course you don't always part of stress. Sometimes you just move the opposite direction we are making a part, prepare for our tangent and then dissipate. It's actually also isn't very good storytelling because it's foreshadowing, it prepares your audience Proud movement. You have to realize that that preparation happens very quick. Now as animators we deal with want a 25th of a second, because 1 s I spent four frames. And essentially an anticipation pose is like four frames at malls that poses that four frames or breakdown cost is four frames. You can copy it like that and TV animation. And sometimes it's two frames you can anticipation on, literally wanted for the thickened loops through, have to have that anticipation for it to be good. A lot of beginner animator thing that they need to have a like a minute long and spatial or 100 frame and sometimes, very often not solved. Or they might go one frame anticipation where you don't even see down to space. This brings us one other principle which is called arts. Things tend to move in arks rather than a straight lines. This makes it a realistic sense because the tendency for us as animators would be to animate straight line because it's the easiest. But in nature, things not straight because that looks mechanical. They're curved. Nature is, you see, and that's the principle. If you move your arm and moves in an arc, an arc, if it moves straight, it will be less appealing. This is actually be related also to the principle of curve against straight. If you will listen to Glenn Virchow and older artists, they would say that the curve is the rhythm. And then here, appealing things move around the curve, same as appealing character designs are very often round. Another principle that's designed to create the sense of reality plots is a follow through and overlapping action going over those principles are, and follow through and overlapping action are not great and emulate reality, their principles to create Reality Plus in animation, especially frame-by-frame animation, you don't replicate reality one-on-one. You exaggerate and you create Reality Plus improve reality. Because in reality, things don't move on and off. And things are not as simple and not as polished as a movement. Very often you do have linear spacing in real life, but this is just not appealing. Real life is ugly. Art is pretty small from captures movie called The dipolar express, that it's very uncanny. The movement is 100% realistic there it was motion captured perfectly. The movement of the muscles correspond one-on-one to the movements of the actors. But because it looks exactly like Acumen moves exactly like as humans, but it isn't exactly like a human. You see that the pigeon of difference creates the uncanny valley effect. Here, cartoony animation especially doesn't look like how things move. It uses those animation principles, especially RX follow through and overlapping action timing and spacing, squash and stretch in order to create Reality. Plus, you push those principles and uninformed way which is actually denied point exaggeration. But we won't deal in exaggeration and practices onto further on. Those principles are not something you just know about intellectually. They're just like stages of drawing, of informing your observation of movement. That you have to first create a sense of proportions and then our sense of picking in 3D, space, anatomy, et cetera. And those are just ability. Ability. Is it a list of abilities? That list of knowledge is not an intellectual. Is it Alice probability they would have to train over and over again using those foundational exercises until you get it. And that's what the bouncing ball is. Not that I couldn't like. What I understand is you train it over and over again until it's in your blood. You trained it ought to have a natural sense of timing and spacing. That's why I asked you to create at least three vowels on this simple exercise to experiment with the timing that space, you have to play around with it and see how the timing and spacing is modified to see how things move differently by how we change the spacing even though the timing is the same. Look at it and see, see how different it is. Look around it and see it. So you need to learn that ability. You see follow through and overlapping action is a very easy for this fall and we'll learn it in the next course. I think it will be deterred or four, I haven't decided yet, but I think it will be the force and the principal will be taught to you when you animate a bouncing ball with a very simple principle to understand, if you have a bouncing ball in that tail, one part of the tail will move differently than the first. One part of the tail will move in. And other than that, I also did that when you have a movement with our character moves, his torso moves first and then his arms and then got kind of hierarchy. This is not an intellectual pursuit here. This is not something you understand on an intellectual level. We will need to develop this understanding deeply in your unconscious mind. The way traditionally artists develop this sense it by doing like figure drawing while focusing on the action that character matters. Because if you go down, you just focus on the movement I was done. That's why it's kinda pointless for an animator to do figure drive from photos because you don't know what the movement will figure drawing from live-action recordings from life or better yet from animated movies. That's what my bucket Plessy teachers and Dr. Forrest Gump. We've learned a new metric. You learn that all first did this horse all moves. So that's where the vein than the NAG, There's a few things to be appealing. Don't move at the same time. Please move at the same time. It looks like cheap and low quality and that's something your animation supervisors and people that will hire you will look at. Is there enough overlapping? And you really have to understand overlap. You have to see it and feel it. And to see and feel that you have to do a lot of exercises that teach do the same thing. 3. Solid Drawing Vs. Solid Posing: The sixth principle is posing and whiteboards. And six, I mean, we set up a pause technically in the very first principle when we do timing and spacing, I mean, it's like drawing. It should be the first one. No, no, no, no. Because into the animation it wouldn't be the first solid drawing would be the first in 2D animation. What I mean by apoptosis and expressive pose that tells them ocher. And in terms of learning, you first have to grasp the previous principles. And then you can create an appealing polls that captures emotions and know your Reagan signed it out and be able to quickly pause our Reagan to post. You want to do an exercise that I can give to you even right now to practice, pose them to develop disability is this. And this is also your homework for this week, you will take a rake, take everything Maya, you learn how to manipulate Rick's. They got one of those gesture drawing photos or detrital figure drawing references and post that rig in that poles and push the poles. Here's the workflow for it. You find a photo of someone who's kneeling, new name the poles, and you pick up a motion for that name. You pick an emotion or a state like that person is kneeling, angry. It's verb plus adjective. That person is kneeling. Sadly. It doesn't have to be a motion. That person is kneeling, shaken way or that person is kneeling competency, but it's an adjective descriptor. And you pose this pose while pushing it in such a way that it shows that emotion, that it shows what we wanted to convey, that it clearly shows what you want to convey. That every thing, that gesture drawing will teach you that everything that digital drawing with deteriorations 3D animation. So you're really bad at drawing. You still have to practice gesture drawing. You just practice it like this. If you're good at drawing is actually faster to practice this on paper, gets a good draftsman are able to capture this kind of polls in 30 s. And it will not take you 30 s to pause this and Maya, it will take you a minute if you are new because the controllers are not intuitive. So you will have to present them in their mouse button to quickly move the controllers and pose to this pose, let me give you a demonstration day, e.g. I. Pose someone kneeling in an angry way and I push polls compared to the original, that it looks different. And that's the principle posing you'll learn right now, but think about it when this principle will become very important. Now come back to this principle. Remind you, when will actually animate characters? And I will animate characters having a specific emotion, the ball can squash angrily, but for now we'll not overwhelm ourselves. We'll start with opposing or flour sack lesson. Gesture drawing is used as an animation exercise where you try to understand the barebone essence of a pulse. That's what you need to dry for as an animator to do those gestures, clearly you've got those gestures or your thumbnails that are unique drawing for other 2D animator. And I'll teach you that in my course. Drawing for animators will be a series of courses, but that's what I'll teach you. 4. Composition Vs. Staging: The seventh step is staging what is stating what its composition is, nothing more than composition. That's how you orient your camera in Maya. That's how you can understand it. And nine times out of ten, if you're working on a professional production, this will be done by your storyboard here or director. Remember, those principles were for the grant animators, storyboard or a director and everyone in Disney, staging is important, but it's actually something that you might think of it a bit when you do your breakdowns and you'll keep polls. This staging, composition, and cinematography are synonymous. We have our storyboard in class that actually teaches that the moles will touch upon it into 3D animation courses. But to actually learn staging well, you have to study some storyboarding because that's where the books focus on staging. Metallography and storyboarding are skills that are all independently from animation. I got staging is the framing and essentially how the camera is positioned. Frame-by-frame animators had to be way more concerned about staging because it's perspective. You'll see if you have something framed differently. If you change the perspective, you have to redraw that movement from the beginning, everything changes. You have to do a completely different image. While in Maya, changing the staging is the easiest thing on the planet. You just move the camera around. That's it. The camera will be set by our supervisors or nine times out of ten, when I worked on a production, I had a specific camera shot and I had to animate it and I was giving it and I couldn't move the camera or the camera was set by the storyboarding and the director, I had to just make the characters move. So now we're at a stage where we know how to move characters. So that gives us two the eight point we need to understand. We developed a more sophisticated understanding of animation and we were able to stay Dustin of someone lifting something. And we're able to animate a scene of someone lifting a heavy box, for instance, the feeling of heaviness is created by timing and spacing. And you'll stage this thing like a live action film director road. That's what it is essentially staging. It's like this thing live action film director will do by choosing the right camera angle. So we're at this point. So what's the next skill we need to develop that secondary action? What is secondary action? Well, that's easy to understand. You see. 5. Overlapping Vs. Secondary Action: Secondary action is often confused with an overlapping action, but they are two completely different unrelated principles. You need to understand secondary action in the context of primary action. Primary action is the main action that's needed to describe the story. It is essentially what the character's doing. While secondary action is the body language or compliments and supports the main action, is this how the character is doing, the thing he's doing? Let's look at a few public domain animations were walking is the primary action and body language is used for secondary action to exaggerate the character's personality for appeal. Notice how the walks field different, even though they show the same main action. Now let's discuss some tips and tricks to help you create proper secondary action. You essentially have to ask yourself, how can I push this action? How can I use body language to exaggerate the character's personality? Well, not overshadowing the main action. And this brings us to a big air. Beginner animators make where they overshadow their primary action with their secondary reactions. Secondary action has to always be used to supplement the primary reaction without overshadow. Here's an exercise to help you get a hang of secondary action poses. It's called a verb plus adjective gesture drawing. You simply look at a photo showing a plane main actions such as this photo, someone kneeling, and you pick an adjective, such as sadly. Then you ask yourself, how can I add body movements, expressions, or prop interactions to make this pose match my chosen adjective. And then you just draw the toes and verb plus additive combination. Here's my quick doodle of annealing, sadly, now, find by photos are different actions and pick five random adjectives each for those five photos. Once you have drawn 25, I added two Verb combinations can progress to the next lesson. 6. How to Use the Animation Principles: So when do I apply the animation principles? I mean, surely I don't have to think about them all the time while animating. Things to remember is a lot of things to remember. He's theorists specific circumstance when I have to think of timing and spacing and a different one where I don't, if you think about it, the 12th to animation principles, that you cannot think of them as a separate thing. Once you learn them one-by-one, you will think about them in every post you make and everything you animate. When you animate a pantomime shot or enacting shots of the easing, Ease Out and timing and spacing well, think about appeal and exaggeration and all the other principles. You'll learn them, understand them one by one. But after awhile, you always think of them all together at once. This is especially the case would appeal. Pulses will have to have appeal. Your timing will have to have appeal. Pretty much everything you do an animation will have to have appeal to that principle is something that will inform everything. Everything you do will have to look nice. You always ask yourself, am I pushing the poles as much as I can? Is my timing and spacing design such a way as to create the most realistic and appealing movement. Every single thing you do love to ask yourself this question, is it appealing? 7. Why Timing and Spacing is Important: I don't want to talk more about timing and spacing because it is the essence of 3D animation, it's even described so by the nine old men, if you would ask the nine old men what the essence of animation was, grim network, a great old Disney animator would say, it's all in the timing and spacing, because that's what it is. Timing and spacing is the essence of 3D animation. If you put a keyframe and then another key frame and just let my interpellate between the two. The result is movement, but it's not a very appealing animation is technically those are have timing and spacing, but the timing and spacing isn't good. Your job as an animator is to create appealing timing and spacing for every single moment you animate. Timing and spacing is actually more important than e.g. acting or pausing for anatomy terms, timing and spacing is essentially the rhythm of the shot. Don't BLUF always said that animation is like a piece of music. And music is interesting to listen to because it has a specific rhythm in music. Just add the same note over and over again. The dot-dot-dot. It would be very boring. That's why it is the artistry of animation to create appealing rhythms, appealing. And animator is essentially a musician of movement. That's what an animator is. And that's why I really recommend you study great animation like that by Glen Keane, e.g. towers than et cetera, James Baxter, Richard Williams and her Goldberg. And look at the rhythm minute. It has a rhythm that animation has a rhythm. And where does that reside in rhythm, reside in the spacing and endure animations. You very rarely noticed even linear spacing, almost never, almost never does linear spacing. That's what makes 3D animation look flow, T, loop, or dead. It looks even spacing happens in 3D animation. Would you let my interpellate for you when you think that, Oh, I'll just set up the basic storytelling keyframes and Maya throw expensive, I guess my will made this for me because why else? It would cost all that money? Yeah, yeah, Cool. Cool, tori, that's not how it works because all that is mainly because of those models, rigs and all the other stuff. It'll be fair. It only cost that much money because it was the first, it's really no better in Blender. The reason why I use my over and blenders because it has this plug-in called uninvolved would actually does stuff that helps animators, but that's it. So you never let my interpellate for you. You have your keyframes for your polls, and then you chiseled, you chiseled a break down into something perfect, then appeal. That's what will be expected of UV every good a job as an animator. If you make something for YouTube, all of you to manometers, Hulu 3D animation. They're not masters of their crafts to be fair, you need drawing skills to be even a crappy to the frame-by-frame animators wanted to be a crappy 3D animator who don't need any skills at all. You just set up keyframes and you're golden bullet to be a good 3D animator, you actually need as much training as a 2D animator because you really need to develop a very good sense of timing and spacing, a very good sense of freedom. The only way to really develop it is to do those basic exercises that I'm teaching you and then internalized those principles so much that you observe life. You'll be able to observe a can moving or someone walking around you and you'll be able to analyze their movements on the fly. So while you live your life, while you watch movies and ever want to watch his movies. I mean, you wouldn't get into animation if you didn't like movies, if you didn't like animation. So essentially study animation while watching animation. But while watching movies, that's how you end up learning animation. You build those basics. Here, we're doing those boring exercises. And then after awhile there, so internalized that every movement you feel, every movement you see, every movement you witnessed will become your own teacher. And to do that, you need to develop this understanding of timing and spacing, the most basic way you can practice this to develop it as it's playing around with the bouncing ball. And I mean, play around with it. You'll learn things most optimally when you play around with it. There's nothing magical about the bouncing ball. The bouncing ball is there to teach you about RX, timing and spacing and squash and stretch, play around with it, do some really bad bouncing balls, does some really crappy bouncing balls. But you'll learn way more by doing like ten bouncing balls and just allow yourself to play than trying to make more perfect bouncing ball. It's all about quantity. There was the study done on parts in terms of our learning. One group had to make very perfect paths, and one group just have to make ten crappy parts. And the one that made turn crappy parts quickly learn more. So I'll just make animations. Because once you've made like 100 animations, not necessarily bouncing ball, but drug hundred total. You'll begin to see patterns of rhythm around you and you'll be able to learn from every movement. You notice every movie in every animation you will witness will be a teacher. Even a can rolling across the street will teach you about timing and spacing once you've trained your movement observation muscles. And that's how you really start to understand animation. Though, the animation principles we're learning are nothing more but tools that you have to internalize for you to intuitively sense movement. And appeal after awhile, if you do those exercises enough, this will become an Arab unconscious competence for you. It will become unconscious and then you'll be able to focus on ACT and you'll be able to focus on all the other complex stuff. But first you need to master the essentials to build on top of them. So the essence of animation is essentially good versus bad timing and spacing. The most foundational principle that timing and spacing will make the animation loop off or dead and boring. While good timing and spacing would give the character Live Paint make him or her feel alive. It's that simple. When you are Pixar quality animation, everything is happening in the perfect time. Every pulse is timed perfectly at everything just feels good and appropriate to get hired as an animator, you need to develop this movement sensibility. Sure, if you work on television, level of polish will not be that much. But to be able to make a limited animation look appealing quickly, you need to be able to polish a shot to perfection. In order to polish a shot to the extent where every frame, every element of it is optimized for appeal and entertainment, you need to develop an internalized sense of those 12 animation principles which you developed by doing those basic exercises. I had this fallacy in the beginning of that. Oh, I don't want to work for Pixar. There are only a few studios that great at high-quality animations and they animate 4 s per week. I want to animate a short film and I want to animate it lower-quality. I want to animate it using limited animation and I need to animated 1 min per week, like to be frozen to Y1. I do preschool level animation, but yeah, cool, but that limited animation, that TV quality animation is actually harder to do. You need to have a bigger grasp of those animation principles because then you have to simplify it in such a way and designed in such a way that you can do it quickly and efficiently. But the way you learn those principles is to do the few detailed shots. That's why your demo reel is only 1 min. And you hired in this industry based on your demo reel and you're not getting prompts on your demo reel by saying, Hey, I made this demo reel in an hour. No one will care because speed comes with practice to be able to simplify and do it quickly, you need to first be able to do it well, given unlimited time, that's what your demo reel is for. To prove that given our limited time, you're able to produce picture quality work. That's how you'll be judged because there are a lot of people whose demo reel looks Pixar quality. If you're a demo reel, in terms of animation quality, doesn't look, pick the quality. It's a fail. You will not get the job because there's a lot of small schools. The maria is Pixar quality and you will be competing with them. They will not care how much time you spend on that demo reel. Because the unspoken secret that this is your test, what you can do given unlimited time, this is not your crunch time test. The only time would that matter if your demo reel have a piece from an actual show where they know that you had a crunch time. Because everyone can say, I did this shot in 10 min. No arbitrary I did intern hours, but I can say other than 10 min, that's not verifiable. But if you make a shot that's perfect. Where every frame, which is at 24 frames per second, every 24th of a second, is literally designed to perfection for maximum appeal, then you're golden. Why short films are actually a really good demo reel material. If you, you're able to make a short film that got into a film festival that actually really good at a resume because short films for those festivals will also look for that. If you're able to make a short film on your own, That's also a good demo reel materials, at least the highlights, you don't want any failure in your demo reel. Your demo reel is very perfectionist. It's your best of the best work. If they notice any animation errors in your demo reel, you will not get a job. My demo reel was not that bad. I mean, people looked at it and looked cool. But oh, 1 s overlooked, floaty, no jump. That's how controlled it is. You have to really master those principles to actually get a drop in an image. So let's again repeat the basic concepts and timing and spacing. Every animation is made out of a sequence of images played in succession. 1 s generally ask 24 images. This creates the illusion of motion. Those images are called frames, and sometimes the frame rate does different feature film animation. The frame rate is 24 frames per second, while in American television it's 30 frames per second. In the European television and movies, it's 25 frames per second. For the purposes of this course, we will all be animating at 24 frames per second because for 1 min, less frames worry about them. For tool, we have to be consistent. Timing spacing so important is because it's used to convey weight. How heavy an object is. I discussed physics before, but you have to understand some physics. Momentum is a measure of the motion of a body equal to the product of its mass and velocity. So that's its momentum speed. Newton's first law states that an object in motion tends to stay in motion and an object at rest tends to stay at rest unless the object is acted upon by an outside force. The force that makes a bouncing ball stop rolling is inertia, essentially the resistance of the floor and the friction of the floor, etc. You probably heard the term acceleration of D, acceleration. If you have a car and it accelerates, it takes a while to start up. And the heavier the car is, the longer it takes to accelerate. That's our foundational animation principle right there. Ease in and ease out is nothing more than the acceleration. And acceleration is the acceleration and ease out is acceleration. That's why things don't move on. Even linear or spacing. They accelerate, accelerate, accelerate, accelerate. Various parts of your body accelerate in the accident rate and at different times. And that's the essence of animation to be able to convey it in unappealing way. So what is gravity? Gravity, is it a natural force of attraction because our terabyte your body up on the objects near the surface tending to draw them towards the center over the bodies, gravity in this Earth is constant. And if you think of acceleration, acceleration, of course, the force that's on a given object divided by its mass, softer, higher the mass acceleration. And that's it. That's how you conveyed the spacing. The spacing will be slower. The heavier things is because it takes longer for it to accelerate. The spacing is higher if something's lighter, so things move faster for something that's lighter or because it just takes shorter amount of time to accelerate. The most important thing you have to know about physics is that most things are fully accelerated. They have the same spacing, they have the same linear space and fully accelerated car at 60 mph will have the same exact spacing where they're not as heavy truck or a tiny light SportsCar. They're both running at 60 mph and they're both fully accelerated. They'll have the exact same spacing will be very difficult to see which car is heavier than the other. The weight will be shown actually when they start up or when they slow down, the light car will start up and down very quickly. So the acceleration will take less frames, the ease in and ease out or take less frames and will be much faster. Heavy objects will have much slower. Xin, He's out. Heavy objects move slowly because they accelerate slowly, gravity and weight something you will have to develop an intuitive sense of animating the bouncing balls with the bearing weight is a great way to do that. While animating the balls of bearing weight, how much it will bounce, have hired will bounce, and how much it will roll will be determined by the material the ball is made off because gravity is constant, It's just different materials determine how much gravity affects the lack of an object, the way that my fingers are given materials constant us now steel ball, we always have a smaller weight than a larger steel ball unless it's made of a different material, e.g. if the large ball, It's hollow inside, it will be lighter, but then it will be made of a different material because it's made amongst the areas. Well, the most important thing about timing spacing is that when things stop, they don't just stop, especially if they were very fast and heavy, they stop and then settle. E.g. a. Road runner doesn't just stop. He stops and shakes a bit and then settles into that keyframe position or golden pulse. So what differentiates the bowling ball from a beach ball is how long and hangs on top, homogenous in through a lens by air resistance, how it reacts with it hits the ground, and how long it takes. The most important thing to remember is that thinks of different materials were react differently and have different spacing. I bowling ball would roll out differently than a beach ball, e.g. timing and spacing is who should do what determines the rhythm of animation. We will look at those two jumps to character jumps. One feels different, but I actually have the same timing differences in spacing it. Following exercise, we'll be animating bouncing balls. And those balls will have different field depending on their spacing, timing. And spacing is the essence of animation, any animation, 3D, 2D, you name it, and your job as an animator is to develop an intuitive feel of diamonds. 8. How Exaggeration Creates Life Plus: Ninth point, which is actually the next last point that's exaggeration. Exaggeration not pushing the poles that I talked about in the posing section. This is just a design principle, this is just an understanding principle. Last two principles are understanding principles that pretty much Caldwell mouth of the other principles. When you're animating, you're not animating life, you're animating life plants, and you exaggerate certain movements. This is very noticeable and lunate animations where things are exaggerated for appeal and to clearly communicate the story. In real life, people's body language is not as expressive and clear. My hunger, that's exaggerated. Text. Animators do caricatures and create. Motion capture is not appealing because it's Bono one copy of real life. This brings us to our tenth point appeal. You have to realize that in the context of 2D animation and especially to the frame-by-frame animation. The drawings were not separated from the character. I mean, even the in-between had to draw the characters on model perfectly with the same appeal. So this means that every character, every frame had to have appeal, every frame had to be appealing to the animation. This is essentially a test. Every frame you made in your animation and appealing. Is it something that you would freeze frame and be like, Yeah, this looks cool. This is just a method of testing yourself. Is every part of your animation appealing because animation is live class. So that's up here. Now. Something that's appropriate, something that's reality plus, you can think of appeal as Reality Plus, and it's achieved through exaggeration and pushing the poles. So those two principles are very connected. They're not exactly the same. That's why they're not fused together, but they're very connected. Those are the ten animation principles you need to learn as an animator, you will learn them intuitively by going to the basic curriculum. Then on top of that, we learn how to plan out and animation and we learn timing and acting principles. After you have double star animation principles, learned, animation is all about acting. It's all about getting into the character's head. Why? Because that's how you find that they could pause and that's how we find the correct spacing. You record live-action reference, act out of the pose and then animate it. But to do that, you need to have those animation principles, at least the first age, drain from your mastery of the first 89.10 come up. So let's start on learning. And the very first principle is timing and spacing. 9. Timing, Spacing, and Breakdowns: We just draw out because I'm using ultra deep program here Clip Studio to show it more clearly about the difference between keys and break down the workflow. So normally when you animate your concept keys, he didn't because I was explaining content but do e.g. when the anatomy that bouncing ball, you'd start with golden pauses or key poses, which are essentially deposits, which are at the highest polls us. And to conduct polls, then you can measure all. Is this smaller than this? About lecture to 5% when you can determine the weight here, that way you can do it consistently. So now we have those balls, you have your key poses. So what do you do then? Well, you make the breakdowns for the fear that the breakdowns is that you just don't let my interpellate because Maya, if you let it interpolates the way it wants, It's kind of way of thinking and doesn't really finger just has a pre-programmed responsible do linear spacing, linear movement. The keyframe will be exactly in the middle and it will not look appealing. And we'll have linear motion path. That's not at all what you want. You want that curve multipath, the motion path of our bouncing ball is a parabolla, meaning, how about Servo? And I can think of it as a circle, half a perfect circle. So you control the spacing was your breakdowns. And specifically here you would favor the top position. Here, see, the bottom would move quickly up, and then it would favor the top position and create an alcohol print rather than a linear movement. And you do those spacings using between Michigan, e.g. so simple to make a bouncing volume. Just favorited those two positions on top, making sure the motion path would be in an arc. The principle of arcs, it's not that the thing in the graph editor has to be on August just that the motion path has to be an art because I think very rarely moving a line unless they are completely accelerated cars, they move in an arc. Similarly, they don't have even spacing. They have an ease in and ease out. See, arcs are above us. That's what it is and how you animate a bouncing ball. That's the whole point of a bouncing ball to teach you those principles that thinks moving arcs that you have to, you're golden poses first and then the breakdowns and that things move in arcs. Because if you let my interpellate, it would interpret it in a very unappealing way. Let me just get into my end, demonstrate it for you. Let me just quickly discuss the recommended Rx, the bouncing ball, 1.0, the very old rate, but still works perfectly. The cool thing about this drug is that it does squash and stretch separate from rotation, which really helps with this new one or a two or bouncing ball. And this is the ultimate Rick package which is free and it's on Behance, ultimate risks for free, all very old, but it's still good. I'll go to this URL downloaded for free and it gives you a lot of balls. It gives you a pendulum to animate, and it gives you a tail. All you need to do those exercises that even gives you a simple walk cycle character in our basic body mechanics character and just use those brakes, they're very good. There's also the basics rig here that some camera that's also good. That's it. Let's pick one and go with it though. Just sign into b hands. So click download it to your Dropbox or looking for the ball on ultimate goal. Then we open it in Maya, David and your Scenes folder, and then we reference it. 10. Squash and Stretch: The principal will explore in this lesson is squash and stretch. The purpose of this principle is to emulate motion blur, to give a feeling of weight and flexibility to an object. Most important thing you have to remember about squash and stretch is that when things squash or stretch, they keep their volume. When they don't keep their volume, what we're making is actually a smear which is used to simulate motion blur, squash, and stretch is designed to give a feeling of weight, anticipation, and character to the character. It also important to understand than in more realistic animation, the constable squash and stretch is now applied not by squashing, stretching the rig, by actually making wished squashed and stretched pose us. Here the character squashed and here the character's stretched in the scores will explore squash and stretch and how it works by animating a bouncing ball, the ball will squash when it hits the ground and stretch on it leaves the ground. When the ball hits the surface, it's cautious to intensify the impact. And it stretches right before impact and right after impact. It's used to emphasize weight and elasticity and exaggerating this question, stretch out, there's divorce overall energy and await, squash and stretch as it's used to emulate motion blur. Sometimes it's overused in more realistic animation, in a more realistic animation. So trust that done in VFX Studios, it has to be used now very subdued manner. And today's exercise, I'll actually ask you to modify this question straight off our bouncing ball to change it over weight and feeling. You will be asked to experiment with at least two different balls for your assignment in this course, you'll be asked to push or subdued intensity of this question stretched to sell the object's weight and the material that's made off you subdued is passionate stretch to sell buoyancy and push it to sell heaviness. And it's cartoon in S is important to remember that when you're doing cartoony animation and animating frame by frame, you are not emulating real life. You're creating life plus squash and stretch helps you do that. It helps you make life more appealing than it actually is. And the more cartoony your animation is, the more important this principle will be. The most important thing you have to remember in this principle is that the object retains its mass when you squash the ball, is becomes shorter and when you stretch the ball, it becomes less wide. If you don't do that, you're actually creating something called a smear, which is only good for emulating motion blur. We'll discuss this technique in character animation later on. But for now, you shouldn't concern yourself with it. It's a cartoony animation technique which will be covered separately in a different course. 11. Introduction to Maya and Animbot: When you open Maya, you'll find this. The thing about my eyes that it's not great, software is very buggy, very bloated. The interface is not great. The interfaces on intuitive, I mean, it's industry standard, but if you're an Indie developer, it doesn't matter to you because there'll be making your own animation. So why am I teaching Maya for Indiana meters? Well, there's one reason, one reason only. And there's this plug-in called Anim bought this product called uninvolved actually pass capabilities that my adult in half, Let's plug-in. It isn't free because it's actively being developed. And it's actually being developed with way more passion than myself. And that's why this plugin could not exist for Blender blender users. When they want to pay for a plugin, they would never pay monthly. They'll find themselves vary part really hurt to pay $10 for a plugin, even if the plugin will be the bee's knees. While my app people know used to pay real money for their software. And this is real money. This is $60 per year for the cheapest version and for the Providence $44. This is a service plugin for series animators because it actually has a lot of features and it actually makes my other best animation package, or by far better than Cinema 4D, better than blender and better than any other software package for animation. I haven't met 2D software package that has a plug-in that makes high-quality animation easier than antibody. Antibody was worthless, but with ADD embodies the best animation software I currently available. So what's the bee's knees about? Antibodies are locked actually, for one, it allows you to set up hotkeys for that and export them easier than in my interface. I have my own custom shortcut keys that I written here. Those shortcuts are all from Adam bought all of it is done in anime, but you don't need to use my art as vanilla shortcuts. So you can have your own shortcut set exported and added away, which I'll actually do. But I can export it and share it with you so you can follow along with me very easily. I suggest that you get a one-handed keyboard because it will make things a lot easier if gamers can use it further silly games, you can use it for professional work. And gamers know that a 100-foot keyboard actually makes things way faster and guess what? In animation, you will be expected to do things very fast. So the one on the keyboard that I recommend you get, and you can get a different keyboard, doesn't matter. Is the razor Tartarus parole the cheapest, but it's the best now that are cheaper models. I mean, you can Google reviews if there's a cheaper model with this is the model I recommend to animate my alike a proton in that computer in India, 100 keyboard shortcuts. So I'll be teaching you that not every studios to use them, but I recommend you get one because it does make fixed speed. Because in terms of learning the software, what you need to truly know the software is you need to know all the shortcuts and you learn all the shortcuts by practicing the shortcuts, by fingering, imagining you will learn a piano. You need to know where all the keys are, a lot of the magic, a lot of the skill and learning piano or touch typing is knowing where the keys are. And that's way easier on a one-handed keyboard because I don't want to have the keyboard is not associated with letters. It's only for that program. That's while I show you my 100 keyboard settings for Maya, I'm old enough, I might optimize it later. The best. I'll send you a PDF file or some kind of thing with this kind of setup. But I'll explain it on the videos on the fly. My biggest recommendations, it's called 16 as control and 11 h shifts because that's akin to how it is in a normal keyboard. And that will help you a lot in this default here, space is good. This is also okay. This kind of up down keys with this joystick and this 100 keyboard will actually make my, I feel like a game. I want Maya to feel like a game for you. This is your game controller and this is the scroll wheel. To scroll wheel does. It's very intuitive, and this is alt button and this is a very important button. And the position here is very ergonomic and you can do it all with one hand, which is very good to cosine. So this is a tool that pro gamers use to improve their workflow and their game flow. I guess they're using it to be more productive at games. I'm teaching you how to be a more effective animator by using tools that programmers use, which is this 100 keyboard. It one thing that I would want you to really learn well, and that will require a bit of fingering, a bit of finger practice, which is keyboard, to learn the shortcuts, to be able to do those things because I will not repeat myself and the other videos. Don't learn those things now, the other videos might be two over your head. And you cannot say you learn the software unless you know the keyboard shortcuts for it, because that's how you work quickly in any software. No professional animator goals right here and check select, and it will select here, no one does that. And then they click lasso tool here and move here. And they all use keyboard shortcuts. And the keyboard shortcuts here for my are very easy. I'll highlight them their 12th on my 100 keyboard shortcuts, which is W for move. It's weird, W for move, but it makes sense for my art because it's translated. The move tool is not called, the move tool is called the translate tool in Maya, and this is the most foundational tool you'll ever learn in Maya. The move tool is your animation friend. You'll have an object and you will have to middle mouse click, and you will just drag it wherever it needs to be. That's how you animate objects as if you were manipulating puppets. That's just how you animate in my IU, use this move tool and new translate. And you do that with w, which is 12, oh my 100 keyboard shortcuts 12th, and that's main keyboard shortcuts. You will always use W. And this is something I want you to practice right now is switch between the W E and R. W E and R, which is 12, 13, 141,213.14. You can notice that you don't actually use the Select tool with animating because as the select tool is primarily for modeling, because in my hour when you animate you only animated properties which are dose. You can see them here in this Inspector, w is translate property and you select w, which is 12th. We will modify in this translate property here. That's this whole maya thinks about animation because Maya is all math. Maya is a mathematical program that actually handles very complex mathematical calculations under the hood and you are just giving it to come out. You're actually doing programming here when you use Maya. That's why my eyes sometimes start in computer science degrees in Poland because they think, Oh, my eyes, Complex maps software lets teachers to programmers, but my eyes not hard to learn. My *** are to understand under the hood, you need to be really good at math to understand what's going here under the hood. So people fingers and timid software because it is taught that I can Computer Science degrees because there's, some people might say it's complex, but now it's not complex. If you understand what's happening here, what you're doing, you're changing a number called Translate, which is essentially coordinates. Map with coordinates. Because you're translating the coordinates and this object has substance such coordinates. And you are essentially changing coordinates here like if you would do on a map, because you can type in 000 and you've changed coordinates here. That's how you move acute, left and right. You're changing its coordinates in a world space. There's also objects base, but that's why you can either use objects space or walled space, because those are the coordinates relative to the workspace object to coordinate and coordinates relative to the object. And that's the difference between world space and object space. You will actually switch with them very often while animating. Sometimes it's easier to rotate an object space, sometimes it's easier to rotate in other space. What it actually does, something that comes into play later on when you will do more complex animations. For the first few weeks, we'll be dealing with relatively simple geometric animation. It's like the bouncing ball, pendulum, bouncing ball with character animations that require you to train from world space to object space. Right now we'll just have to understand this. I just want you to practice for now, open Maya create a cube and practice fingering between w, which is 12, 13, which is e, where you can remember it with the acronym. Where, where are you? Scooby-doo? We do. Where are you? Where? Where, where w translate, rotate our scale. Those are the default shortcuts in Maya. Those are not my modified shortcuts. Nine times out of ten, you'll be using w and e. Remember the acronym where w is translate, E is rotate our scale. And in my 100s keyboard shortcuts their 12th, 13, 14. You're going to remember them in a sequence, 12th, 13th, 14th. So very easy to remember, and that's how you manipulate in Maya, that's how you animate. You can middle click and then when you middle click, normally when you move, you move onto axis. So you have to kind of grab those arrows here and then move on to a specific axis. This is the y-axis, this is the x-axis, and this is the z-axis, and they're always the same consistent color. Red is always x axis, y is always green, and z is always this. And this essentially moves across only to AC side. And this awesome moves only across two oxide. And this is useful. It can rotate your camera, europe video camera by pressing Alt and left-click and you zoom in and out by Alt and right-clicking, we have a Cintiq tablet, those are buttons on your pen. Can also just use the scroll wheel. You don't have to right-click that often as an animator, you does the mostly left-click, to be honest, 90% of time you will just left-click and middle mouse-click actually got what middle mouse-click allows you to do here with movement is middle mouse-click allows you to freehand navigate like this. You move it wherever you want on the screen, but you're not constrained by the arrows here, which is useful sometimes you'll see, especially with rotation because normally you rotate across an axis. See here you rotate across this axis until they do. But when you create Why you scroll tastes across the chosen x. So there's also a lot of TV animators like to animate way. They just use the last selected object to do this with the middle mouse button, you actually have to go to settings to hear this. And remember, active handles has to be turned off and you can always modify Maya. Maya is very modifiable. So now when we rotate using the middle mouse button, it will rotate across the viewport access or Wood Movement. We can just move it whenever we want without having to be on this controller. You see, because normally you have to be on this controller to move here, you can move your mouse here. This is way easier in terms of movement and rotation. You can also do it, but you have to select the axis and then rotate. But the middle mouse button, you have to kind of teach it very wanna go and then you move left and right here. To remember for this to work, you need to manipulate her, move, rotate scale tools to address that, to view plane handle, view play handle you essentially your audit on the view plane and move this and it moves around the view plane, withdrawal date to, it rotates around this view plane, which is very useful for animators because especially in TV animation, you have to animate fast. You will be hired for how fast you work. One exercise that I suggest you do right now to really learn the shortcuts is to just create a bunch of cubes using this poly modeling workflow here, just click on this cube, click on this cube, click on this cube w, and just quickly move them. Move them next to each other, move them around the screen, smooth them out on the screen like this. So yes, I would just want you to practice switching between it and rotating desk and just play like as if you were played with blocky display, with a viewport and rotate this cube, a C Howard middle mouse click. It, rotates like across the sandals or here, or we can do it like this. Here. You can do it like this to our crust, that viewpoint handle. And now I can move it like this to left mouse click an experiment, moving it in, rotating over to the width of W and E. We, we, we, remember WE, WE, and you just, It's moving this like practice moving those cubes from side to side. And you time yourself how quickly you can move them, believe it or not. This exercise is actually an entry test for a lot of TV animation jobs. They'll give you a line of cubes like this, and they'll say 10 s, move them here. You have to really quickly move them because they want you to have mastery of the software where you can quickly manipulate, okay, and then move them 45 degrees. Great boss. And with the middle mouse button and our tablet, it actually is way faster. And a lot of proline animators, what they do is that they use authentic tablet or a tablet or some kind of order tablets to speed up the process or the manipulation boils down to two buttons, W, E, W. And we remember it as we are that scale and that's less important. It's very important for modelers, but for animators, W and W and W and W and W and V. And that's 12.13 and -100 keyboard shortcuts, 12.13 now and just practice moving things around. Just practice doing this in a video game, if you will learn how video game like Fallout four, you'd also be asked all practice walking, practicing lockdown now. So let's practice walking together. This is your assignment for now and not watch more until you do this one assignment. You don't even know how to save the file. And it doesn't have to be pretty. Just go nuts and have fun with this as if on a playground. 12. Let's Do Our First Ball Animation: Let's do our first animation, maya, and learn some more keyboard shortcuts to be masters. And the first thing you have to learn is the reference editor. Why is the reference editor so important to reference the editor? So important because in normal animation production, the animator doesn't do everything. They don't model, they don't rig. And especially big studios like Pixar, there are separate people who animate separately people models have, are people who texture, because unlike 2D animation, those are completely separate skills that have no overlap. Or it can be very good at animation, very, very good and very bad at rigging. It can be very good at rigging and very bad at animation. Well, in drawing, if you have someone who's a very good 2D animator, chances are they'll be okay enough at painting, there'll be okay in alpha, drawing or creating lyrics themselves, because those are all coming from the same base scale, which is the solid drawing skill. Well here, generally you will have already created by someone else. That's why we'll all be working on rigs created by someone else. Starts regard free. They're all array created by someone else. There's this Balrog that we have, and there's other X2. And then we can always change them without getting out of Maya because that's the point. And is, Eric is actually very old, but it still works and actually even has some extra features where you can change the bulk type here, meaning you can make it football, can make it basic. You can make it simple, like this. And we will work with a simple ball for this exercise, I will just do translate tool to make an animation. How do we do it? We only use one controller. Only one. Generally an animation, you use a lot controllers, but this is too complicated for now. We're just 61 controller and we kid click S, and then we use the left and right buttons, left and right buttons to move. One, frame five, we'll make it move here. F allows you to zoom in here, zoom in to see this whole pattern up along this whole graph. And this graph depicts movement. So again, we have this ball at the top arrow here. Now we'll move again, frame ten here. And we wanted to go to the default position. There's a dedicated keyboard shortcut to do that in anime, but it's actually not in vanilla. My oldest uninvolved rules and its tree and my wholehearted keyboard shortcuts, which is reset pulse. Here, hot keys, default pose, and reset post generally would have to have a bundle of snapshot, but this is very useful. I'll see we have this very simplistic animation I wanted to cycle so we can play blast it and it just won't stop after one balanced we want it to bounce forever. And you would just highlight to this controller and click Curves post infinity cycle and now at cycles. But this looks pretty bad. Why? Because as we learned, let's make it worse. As we learned, animation is all about timing and spacing and we'll get a ball like that and has even spacing, it looks bad. And let's actually do a pro gamer move here and click Alt, Shift seven, Alt Control Shift seven on my 100 keyboard shortcuts. And seven on my 100 keyboard shortcuts is five, so it's Control Alt Shift F5. If you don't have all had a keyboard and you just see the ball, but we're still selected is just hidden so we can view the animation of wealth. And I'll throw him over this animation. Who got it as wrong? Well, the timing is even, even timing. This becomes actually way more apparent if we actually make it longer and how would we make it longer? It's easy. Just select it, select the key and we move it using the 1.2 keys, gets the 1.2 keys on my 100 keyboard shortcuts, which corresponds to the keys on the keyboard, which is 8.9. Move this left and right. And that's why I can retire with like we want to give it more time. We want to give it seven frames to move on way. We want to retain this one to see we timed it very easily here. So let's say you didn't need it the more time. It looks a bit better. Yeah. Still looks very bad. Why? Because it has even spacing. It helps them have a D acceleration and acceleration we talked about, it doesn't accelerate and D accelerate. How do we do that? Well, we've changed the tangent here. If you click the floor tangent, this tangent uninvolved will get the best tangent job done enough, it's pretty good. So as you can see here, it accelerating, D accelerates, accelerates when it goes up and D accelerates at the top. And then does the opposite here. To create this kind of more appealing about symbolic, wanted to stay in the air for longer. I'll do we do that? Well, you wouldn't do that in production because you create, break down the keys. You going essentially to cook wave tangents and essentially scale this here. See, it's stays longer hair. And if you look at this curve here, It's crazy. It's very appealing around parabola. So as you can see, it takes way more time up, it moves quickly, stays in place, and then false. And this great, appealing and more cartoony bounds. Without passion, straight or anything. But this is actually the very first exercise you would with frame-by-frame animation. And it's kind of a cartoony bonds and it's actually way easier to do in Maya because you don't need to draw. Let's see, we only used those two keys. We only use the W key for move and S key for S. And we created our knife bouncing ball. We want divided using tangents. But what would happen if I didn't want to use those tangents that I just wanted to be professional and new, something that's considered the best practices, simple you to essentially create a breakdown keys, as we mentioned in old timey Animation Productions, at the assistance that the breakdowns and the masters did the keys. But here you could evolve. So why would you do well, a nice practice that actually works very well is that you go to the middle and you open an unbarred, an antibody has a magical tool called the twin machine. What is between machine? It favors one key over the other, e.g. in the middle here, if we press here, it will favor one key over the other. You see, and as you've seen, our tangents kind of messed up because we had selected to wait it. Nano-bots thankfully has this wonderful tool called best-case tangent or cotangent, which removes this kind of chicanery. So it's best to say it twin machine, e.g. we want it to be pretty much like this. I will create this kind of breakdown here. We would also do the same breakdown in the middle, and we'd create our parabola that way instead of scoping and that in the graph editor we created breakdown keys, which are not often mathematically precise. So when the polishing phase, you'd also edit them like this. Well, that's just how you animate on stepped better than we did our lovely, more appealing animation that way with those break down keys. And you'll do them with antibodies because the Maya doesn't have this. This is all antibodies. Can even blend here. Who's the tangent type very easily. And it shows you the keyboard shortcut for it to spline tangent. And if you hover above the digitals video description of what it does, the flow tangent, that's actually a new thing and anime button, it's very useful. Slider that helps you for polishing with the keys because that's what you do on the polish phase C. And actually I described the oldest phases of animation. We animated the golden poses, which were those two keys. See 17.14 when you retire them to give them proper timing. Then we added the breakdowns and then we added the Polish, where we polish this curve or to have a very appealing mathematically precise curve. And those are the three phases of animation blocking, which is the key pose, this golden pulsars, which it was 17.14 blocking plus, which is the breakdowns and polishing, which is the training around with the graph editor and making sure that everything works out right here. Numerator first animation from blocking to polish, and we only use the keyboard shortcuts that we use. Well, we use out 11.7 on my 100 keyboard shortcuts because wonky, that you have to absolutely remember on the one-handed keyboard that I set up is that 11 is Shift and 16 is control. That's actually not the default. The default is the opposite, but this is more akin to what's on the normal keyboard that comparable is below shift. So that's how you do those keyboard combinations and a very useful key, adult you have to use now is Control Alt Shift, then is the play blast visibility mode. And Alt Shift seven is the animation visibility mode practice for our segment switching between the two using those shortcuts. Again, it's this handout given to you, so please print this handout out because I'll be referring to this all the time and I'll update it to one. They'd like keyboard shortcuts and always have the newest version. So play around with those keyboard shortcuts, please roll seven. And we just selected it with the W key, which is 12. We created this whole animation just with one. Controller won't translate. And that's all we'd also did S, the S key to make the keyframes. We didn't even have to use the S key because we have this outer key toggle, which automatically sets case when anymore with the ball. So we didn't even necessarily need to do that, although that's the best practice. Let's see, we made our finished animation and we even adjusted the timing and spacing of zinc breakdowns. And again, the way you do with the breakdowns, it says use the tween machine because what this does, it says favors one pulse over the other. Here it would favor the previous poles, which would make it near the ground of it more. So with cooling rate, what's called a slow out here, It's crazy slow in that it slows down, which is acceleration that it accelerates and slows down at the top. This is essentially the difference between acceleration. The acceleration, but you can see it as favoring one pose over the other, because that's what acceleration the acceleration is. It's a slider is what you use 90% while making poses in Maya. Like I really think that MySQL stress without uninvolved. Here you've finished your first animation. You made that first animation by addressing the frames here, retrodictions. And you also learned how to use the controllers. Because again, when you animate, you never select the mesh. In never select the mesh. You always select only the NURBS curves, because if you select the mesh, it will have problems. And this here is a filter for it where only this should be highlighted. All of it should be not highlight, that should be unselected. It should only select the nerves curves. And then you manipulate the nerves curves by using the buttons and the 13 buttons and very rarely add our button. You don't scale. If you see here even went highlights Coronation Street control, this part of the switch controllers created by and moving. We didn't use it right now, but we very rarely use scale. Well, yeah, that's it. You've finished your first animation. 13. Using the Graph Editor for Spacing: In this lesson, we'll learn about the timing and spacing, the graph editor and squash and stretch. This is the main lesson of the course. I've prepared three balls. They all have the exact same timing. By timing, in the context of 3D animation, you can understand where's the key frame located. They all have different spacing and only movement is happening on one axis. But it makes it very easy for you to visualize this spacing in terms of the graph editor. As you can see here, blue ball moves pretty quickly, meaning that it's large spacing, as we can see, this ball moves pretty rapidly then moves slower than difference between frames and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller here, what this is is that on the top, the ball either in the pose slopes and the pulse, well, here, the blue ball slows adipose and most down the spacing becomes progressively larger and which creates this nice parabola shape. This is actually the grid spacing for our bouncing ball. Bouncing ball. The bouncing ball wouldn't lap, stay in position for awhile and then move down to bounce up and position for a while. Move up. While. It will be more noticeable if we actually click Curves. Post infinity cycle declared this animation now, her full cycle, post infinity cycle would offset, will do that for both of our balls curves, post infinity cycle, curves, post infinity cycle. Now, when we play blasted will see that they feel completely different. Why is it? I'll have the same timing. The keyframes are on the exact same timing. They take about the same amount of time to move from this key to this key. The same amount of time, but what's the difference between them? The difference isn't spacing. Again, the spacing in the graph editor is shown by the curves and it's very easy to read them once you understand what means it's basic math, this one moves up, up, up. We see that this spacing here moves quicker, quicker in there, slows down, slows down, then quicker, quicker, quicker. Again. The blue ball is actually the correct spacing for a ball bounce, it eases into the top posts. And he says Alice on the green ball, the ease in and ease out. On the bottom. It eases out or slows out. The terms ease in and slow in are the same. Just ease in and ease out is using 3D animation and slow in and slow out. It's used 2D animation. So this ball slows and slows out of this ball is actually the worst timing of them all, which is linear timing. We very rarely use Linaro timing except for very limited circumstances. Because leaner timing has the exact same spacing and every ball, the spacing between every frame is the same. We just scroll through it. You can see that the spacing between every frame and the green ball is exactly the same. The ball moves and every frame, it's exactly the same. This crazy I'm very robotic movement. It's technically the most incorrect spacing. Now, when you do the bouncing ball, let us the timing and spacing to create a different field. Generally, you don't animate with weighted tangents for the purposes of the exercise, they're used to showcase how timing spacing works. Let's make it so that the first pose is favored in this bow paths. What does it mean? Favoring oppose? It means that the animation, the spacing is closer to that list posts for longer. There's Basing is smaller for long curve, meaning that the polls stays closer to the first pose for a longer period of time. Meaning is pacing favors this pose, this concept of favoring its most efficiently shown using timing charts, which is how we draw our thumbnails, and timing charts or spacing charts and 3D animation, or a way for you to plan out your animation and your spacing. Let's say we have those two keyframes, a, which is the ball on bottom, be just a ball on top. And see, this shows how close those lines are together showcases the spacing in between the keyframes. Here at the bottom would move very slowly with very little spacing like this. And all of a sudden developer would move very quickly with a very big spacing. In. There will be a lot of space. The model will move a lot between point a and point B. And those frames favoring apples means that you make a keyframe. Generally you make a keyframe that puts the spacing closer together between the posts a, and favoring pulse, which is Portland's be in. If you haven't been to plug in NMR, you can use what's called a winner between are essentially favors, one pose or the other. That's all it does. It's a magical tool because essentially you can make it so that it favors this pulse, reverse this process or that pose more. I'm enough, if you use weighted tangents, doesn't work right? So we leave it out for now. This is the reason why most animators dislike way to tangent. We will explain it. It was fantastic. We will extend the curve here. We see that this post is favored because it's almost stays more in this pose and the feeling of this ball is completely different because of it. The reason why you should avoid weighted tangents is because of workflow regions. Weighted tangents make it very hard for you to use the analog tools is most optimal to use separate keyframes, which are in between keyframes to create a pose that favors one pulse over the other. If we favor the position up, removed it Wiener more towards dispose. In anime bot, you will see this twinning bar and this twinning bad will be the most useful animation tool in Maya. It's actually a plug-in, but almost all professionals, animators have this equivalent tool and they cannot innovate without it, essentially makes an in-between frame which favors either one part or the other poles. So here we have our post and we use it to modify the spacing. So here we see the posts favoring the up pose. And let's look how this looks like. See, you modify the complete feel of animation while the timing is the same. It's just that the course is favored, meaning that this breakdown frame is closer to this frame. This is this keyframe sold moves closer. That's favoring, and we favor one key pose over another to adjust timing and spacing to make them more appealing animation, to change the feel of animation. Because if you would look at a lot of animations, they all have different rhythm. And this is what creates this rhythm. This is a different forums of timing and spacing. So let's play around with the green ball here. Modify its timing spacing to create a different rhythm. Can put essentially then it's delete this keyframe, put a keyframe or ornamental, and just use the twin machine to modify it. And this way we can favor of this pulse or that pulse, this is all between machine does. It's either favors this pulse or dad post. And thereby changing the spacing either makes it slow in, slow out of this pose or slowed into this pose here. As we have learned the rhythm of the animation, it's determined by timing and spacing. In today's exercise, you'll be asked to have to modify to bouncing balls. I have them both bound and create a different feel to them. So let's do the exercise together. Can see a lot of the feeling and the ball is determined by timing and spacing and useful cut key for playing back your animation to see all that changed is Acumen. Have to set up an ad and bought. And it's play blast visibility mode and animation of visibility node. I have it in my one-handed keyboard shortcuts as Control Alt Shift. Alt Shift Seven. Just my preference. You can set it up however you wish. Most important thing is that you have systems shortcut that you remember. I have mine written down and I always have them. Handy reference animators, maya. This makes it very clear to see the different bounds of symbols. You see that this one actually feels like a bouncing ball. This one doesn't. Let's use the green one and modify it so that it feels like a jump. How would it feel like a jumping mole? Well, at jumping ball would strongly favor the position inside here. Focus on jumping and anticipate the jump, and then jump up and then fall down very quick. And other hot key you have to sit down. Now is hotkeys, sliders pop-up. I have it under the UK. Essentially pops up. Your tween machine and other versions favor this pose on the twin machine, you just click here because this is, as we have learned, favoring is moving the keyframe closer to the previous keyframe. Those are our two main keyframes. So those are our two key poses. This image here symbolizes our previous key pose, and this image symbolizes our next pose. We put it in the middle. We'll create a keyframe that favors both equally. Well, we don't want that. We want to create a keyframe that favors the previous one more. See, how else could we make it feel like it's jumping? Well, create this feeling of weight and anticipation. We essentially have to squash and stretch. This is where this principle comes in. We have those break down towards this. How would we add squash and stretch to make the ball jump instead of bouncing? Make, well, that's simple. We'd have it squash here, and we just select this controller. Here are some social pieces as another keyboard shortcut, we have to use an Allen body. And this one is actually not in the classical shortcuts, actually in the selection tools and it's select our rig controls. This is very important to wherever keyframe to select our red controls. That will make it way easier for you to re-time it later. On this route timing. Timing, using analog, it's very easy. It's a very simple process. As we said, the key essence of animation is timing and spacing. And this allows you to adjust the timing. If you Greg keys on all the controllers are now rig. You can essentially quickly move all the keys and retirement very easily. And they do have said that Riggs on one controllers we can do here with this main translation controller. You can simply click the keyboard shortcut for selecting all the rig controls. Then use a magical anime bot feature called share our keys. It shares the keys between all the keys of the rig, meaning if there is a key on one controller and not the other, it creates a keyframe on all the controllers. Now the same keys or every controller. While those that do that does it that we can e.g. if we modify this wash here, and we then I'll select it all. And we decide, oh, I want to have a different timing for this breakdown. We use a different keyboard shortcut called hotkeys, and it's actually in the recommended shortcuts, notch left or not right. This is the biggest advantage Maya has over any frame-by-frame animation program. In frame-by-frame animation programs and then fairing by frame animation period, you have to always plan out your timing very meticulously here, adjusting the timing is the easiest thing possible. You just select every controller controlled six. This selects all the controllers of the rib. And you use your keyboard shortcuts for not left and natural. And that at least at the time. So let's adjust the spacing of the squash so that it favors this false. So slowly moves into the squash, squash. This person doesn't look right because we want it to actually, when it moves off the ground, we wanted to very quickly stretch. So we make another keyframe and half it. Please stretch. And then we wanted to very quickly bounce back. This gives us another shortcut that we have to set up for our steps is actually in between the slider. You can set up specific twin or combination like there's a combination that it's pavers, this holes in our ratio of two times seven, etc. This is useful, but for the purposes of this program and to make it easier, we'll just use this pop-up V. We made it pretty much lose this question very quickly to one frame. And using squash and stretch now can also add it here, that it's stretched on impact. And another keyboard shortcut that I suggest you do is to you, if you are using a one-handed keyboard shortcut, which I strongly recommend to do this that you create a navigation shortcuts for navigating the timeline. Up left and right keys. E.g. you can quickly move left and right and create the in-between. Largest squash. Retirement. Longer stretch. Let's play how it feels now. It feels different with the same timing, just different spacing and with squash and stretch. And then once we discussed previously needed one of animation principles, anticipation is that adult repairs to drop and then moves up. We can also make this Trump a bit more dynamic by Audra sting the timing and spacing here, how will we do it? Will favor this pulse. Again. They were disposable, just impurity, select this Controller. And let's hear. This uneven that line will create a feeling that jumps up and falls down. Let's preview it without looking at the animation. That doesn't have a feeling of about a ball bouncing. It feels like it's ball has a win-loss that's home, is anticipating the jump, jumps. And false. We did achieve this by using anticipation, which motion stretch, and by changing the spacing this barbells, we actually didn't change it. I mean, it's still on the top on the same keyframe as the other balls. But it either completely different field. We played around with the timing and spacing and completely changed the field of the ball. That we can see. The spacing is very neatly shown in the graph editor. The spacing's pretty much the same and the y axis then moves very quickly here, moves more slowly, meaning of this matrix and gets smaller. And then it moves quickly through it. Most. Generally you don't use the graph editor, but for the purposes here, we can move the curves up it higher, like this to modify the field and even move them. Let's see how this stretch to the front. This way it's a bit more and they're more and more and more. And then finally, we just see an animation just like with every art you learn by making mistakes and playing around with it and modifying it. So on your assignment, I will download the ultimate bile from BH loop animation and you just Google ultimate barbaric Maya. Then play around with three balls and create three different balls with different timing and spacing. And create a different field by modifying this question, stretch and spacing and timing spacing. We're just playing around with two properties. The timing is the same. I'm mixed starts on frame one for the bottom, frame 13 for the top, and free for a frame 24 for the bottom. And then just cycles infinity, the timing is the same. You just experimenting with squash and stretch and spacing. And you're just using those two principles, those two factors to create a different rhythm and feeling for the animation. Let's see how this bone looks like. Again. It has its own personality as a jumping ball. 14. How to Setup a Project in Maya: Just a quick video to nail down the point home that Autodesk Maya 2028, 0.1, the latest release. And Maya has interactive in-app tutorial that teachers you all the features in a pretty much a video game format. I can guarantee that this will be on times better experience than anything you can watch anywhere on YouTube or cetera. But those will not make you an animator because in animation is not the software that matters. It's the animation principle that matter. Tomatoes, proficient. It's 2D animation. Like my teacher Alex Williams was, he only started working in 3D animation last ten years, but worked for 20 years as an animator. The thing about him is that he just had to learn the software and took him like a week learn the software because it's not the software that matters is internalizing that animation principles that matters. You will not be an animator, terrible animator just by watching a software tutorial. Software tutorials are kind of useless because Maya has a great software tutorial inbuilt in this software and more software packages have their own documentation nowadays, same but unity, what you need to know for coding games, e.g. algorithms, math, to know how to code the games. And you need practice and feedback. Similarity with animation, you need to a step-by-step curriculum that will train you in the animation principles, which is what my course series is all about. It's not about teaching of the software. So I really recommend you go through this interactive tutorial that you get when you install the latest version of Maya, you probably are watching this in the future because this is a pre-recorded. So just install a version of Maya that's higher than this and install anime button. You'll be doing good. Good. Altos teach you the keyboard shortcuts I use for an unbarred with my one-handed keyboard shortcuts because an unbarred is not something that comes with the vanilla Maya. And as I mentioned before, Vanilla Maya is not that great anatomy. Especially if you're an independent producer, MIS, optimized for working that pipeline, that's why you see that project setting and Maya and let me just open up my own demonstrate what I mean by project setting. I'll open up Maya, I actually using an older version, but the only difference between this version and version that's currently out, which has only released today is that it has that interactive tutorial. But I just wanted to show you the Set Project panel, e.g. set of products in our directory. Let's call it test directory. Create default workspace. And you have a product window here, open tonight difference monitor. And all it does is organizes default folders for everything. As you see, there's a folder called scenes where all your myosin will be saved. Assets where your textures would be saved and images image textures, would it be safe? Assets is like assets like rigs are templates, images is mostly templates, etc. This is where your render output will come out. That's where my eye will generally put out when you render and it will render it out into this folder. And you can change this folder, but different folder, so you can render it out in a different folder. And this is where it should technically store your clips are here with movies. Here's the auto save folder, but they are generally the most important folders are seen and source images. Because if I were to render a picture, e.g. let's just create a ball and that basic shader I knew material, Lambert. Make it red and you click Render. Let's use my software. I will not teach you a rendering Arnold and this curriculum right now, I will do it via an ECS curriculum already talked about look death, but not I'll not talk to use a Microsoft. So we have this, right? Would we send up this folder sequence here? And this will be saved in this source image folder, stress copy this way so you can open it and explorer, say we have in this folder, this is our workspace and sorts images, 3D Paint Textures and rendered into images temp and see here actually. So yes, when you have this product pain, I made a boo-boo here. If you want to change the folder word surrendered, and sometimes you want that. I sometimes do that. I want to render it in a different folder. You just change it here. And what the advantage of mine over other software is that it has this lovely organized project pane that really helps you work in a feature film company. My eye is optimized for working in RStudio environment. When one person does rigging, one person does look death and they check in and check out that file because that's how it works in a pipeline. Let me just pause this video and I'll demonstrate it. My eyes optimized for a studio environment as an animator, here's what would happen. You are hired as an animator and you'll get a file called Shot dot NB would up foul shot and be someone else who will have done the layout. And you'll just animate you have this scene. I don't draw that well, but you will have the scene and there'll be the props setup for you. You just animate your work on your animation according to what it's supposed to be. You'll get like all animate this guy doing such and such. You'll get this kind of brief and you'll animate your job and you will do iterations. And then you'll send them file called Shot dot 123, dot NB. That's why iterating and saving is so important because they'll expect I felt like that. And then they'll have file with this animation where this guidance. Then someone else will get that file and they're responsible for the lighting for loop dev and for the effects to make sure that the textures look nice. And my art optimized for that. Mayas, optimized for this kind of pipeline where one person does the textures, one person starts the rigging because you will be given you rigs here. You're given pre-made rigs with textures and with everything. You're not doing your own models in a normal production. You're not doing everything here. Your only job is to animate and you're only judged by your animation. If you are hired as an animator and a Pixar, you can be the best model are on the planet. No one will care. You can be the best rigour on the planet. No one will care. Only thing that matters is your ability to animate it, which is not composed by your ability to know the software inside and out. No one cares about it. A 2D animator, like my teacher, Alex Williams, he only took a month to retrain them to take them too much time because it was very easy for him to do that. Because it's all about learning the animation principles, the same exact exercises that you use to learn the principles and 3D animation. You use unlearning 2D animation like a bouncing ball, pendulum bars, invalid character, those are all animation exercises. You'd have a view width to a 2D animation school. You're just doing them in 3D. Because the difference is that in 3D you don't need to draw. In this way, 3D animations, easier. Real reason why 2D animations used so often in production is because they can hire separate people. Big companies want to hire a person, does the best at only one thing. They wanted to hire a great animator, they want to hire a great quarter. They want to hire a great model. They don't want to hire people who are just mediocre up something. But on the other hand, if you are an independent freelancer and you will make music videos for people, which is kind of what I do. Niacin, not that great. It's Maya has no advantage in what? Anime, but does uninvolved does actually automate a lot of things that vanilla Maya doesn't. And in terms of software learning my courses, more of a uninvolved course, Maya course, because all you need for animation, in my eyes, the thing that, that little friendly robot will teach you in that interactive Maya tutorial. Your homework for this lesson is to go through that interactive Maya tutorial because it's interactive and it will teach you more effectively than any video course because it's interactive and it will make it feel like a game. Bare bones, basic introduction to Maya, but that tutorials the inbuilt in the software and it's the best. So please use that. This will not be just one Skillshare course. I actually calculated that this will be 50 Skillshare courses, which will be our one-year curriculum. After this one year, you'll have a good enough grasp fundamental animation principles to be able to go out there and have a read of the demo reel. And there'll be some courses might take you longer than a week. It might take you shorter than a week, but it will be 50 courses. And if you watch them once per week and do all the exercises, the vote for hours per day on doing the exercises. After watching through the curriculum of 50 courses, you'll be a great animator, but you're only be a great animator. There'll be another curriculum of maybe 25 courses to be our good modeler. And then another 25 square is going to be asked sculptor. And then at 25 week curriculum to be rigor. And then add 25 week curriculum to be screenplay writer, screenwriter. And then 25 week curriculum to be a storyboard or this is the journey I'm taking you on. And this is my dream, because my dream is for the poorest 13-year-old to be able to learn all those skills, start learning them at 14 and then add 18. When there'll be kicked up by their parents, there'll be ready to get a job, maybe not at Pixar about some other animation studio. No need to get in-depth for college. This is my dream and you can learn it in high school. I can definitely learn it with my curriculum. I'm, I'm confident that I can teach you. It takes time to grasp those principles and will require a lot of practice. But my curriculum is about giving you an animators I, that will allow you to observe movement and then replicate the movement in more appealing way. You'll be able to observe movement in live action and then you'll be able to copy it and improve upon it. That's what an animator dot. That's the job of an animator. Observed movement in real life and then animated and improve upon it. Create Reality. Plus, that's the job of an animator and that's what I'm teaching you. This course is not a software, because the software does the easiest thing to learn. Impressed if you learn blender or Maya, that's given because that's easy to learn. No one is impressed by it. That's very easy to learn. What you have to learn are the animation and art principles. And that will be an innate skill that we'll be deep in your brain. What you learned, that will not be a skill that you can very easily replicate. It will be hard to replace and the company, once you learn those skills, and that's how you'll get paid more than minimum wage because you have that skill. Few people have you put in the work and you have skills they have no one else has. And I'm giving you in microbrewery column it in an affordable way. And I know my course is not perfect. I have the visuals, I have, I have my accent, but I'm giving you a cheap solution to make your life if you're in the same situation on iOS where I was this 14-year-old who had abusive parents, wanted to escape. I'm giving you out. Now. Just follow this curriculum step-by-step. And you will have a demo reel and you will be hierarchal. Just follow this curriculum and do all the exercises, and do those exercises and do them until they're good. 15. Quick Overview of Animating in Maya: We learned a basic workflow. You'll learn the basic workflow and now let's see the workflow in action. When we have RAs are keyboard shortcuts, we have to select the right set here I have them in Maya. Arrays are black widow has a key map function here in regular synapse and us select the correct keyboard shortcuts that I sit up for him. Started up a new scene in Maya. We are fresh Miocene here and we referenced our rig. And you have multiple ballrooms to choose from because it really doesn't matter which ball rig you'll use. The same. I gave you a tree so you can have some creativity here. Just remember the workflow we learned previously. It's blocking, Blocking, blocking plots and polish. Let's say I'm on a TV production and we're doing a bouncing ball without any squash and stretch. And you have unlimited time to do so. First, you always block out on stepped. There are reasons for it, which I'll explain later, but now just trust me on this. So you have this first pose, some stepped, and we're making a loop. We're making a loop where we'll select this controller and half curves post infinity cycle C. So logic dictates that are Enter key will be the exact same as the last key. Go to frame 24, because we are animating at 24 frames per seconds and we want to make a second long animation. So here in the middle we have this keyframe and we already created a loop, c, and then the middle, we're adding another keyframe here. Why did we do? We already have our storytelling positive Z. I'll normally you'd block them out on stepped keys here. So what are stepped keys or why do we use them for blocking? You stepped key for blocking and because they allow you to not be distracted by my interpolation in professional animation production. You don't let my interpellate. That's why there's something called the fourth frame or 53 rule. It's kind of a rule of Tamar and not the actual rule. It's a principle, not a rule. Generally, you don't want my interpellate for like ten keys. Maximally, you want to let my interpellate for like four keys. That's y to the four key rule. But blocking out on stepped keys kind of prevents you from letting my interpellate because you don't see any interpolation here. You see high-quality animation is made frame-by-frame. You don't let my interpellate because my adult and have any artificial intelligence. So you just do everything manually. And again, now we set up the golden polis. Remember, state one was blocking golden pulls us than breakdowns. And then pushing up the same workflow down. Was there a 2D animation production? And this is the same workflow people using 3D animation production. So now we set up the column positive because this is such a simple animation only has three golden pause this. While you have my eye, you can essentially move between golden pauses. How do you do that? You called control, which is 16 on your one-handed keyboard shortcuts and you move left and right. And this is not a default shortcut. This is a shortcut. I set up an uninvolved two views to 100 keyboard. See, practice this for us. I can practice moving between key frames like list, so you can understand it. So you can develop muscle memory to be able to do that quickly. See, and those are the golden pauses are what are called impulse and golden portrait artist storytelling posers. The ball goes up and then it goes down, goes up, goes down. That's all it is. But if we wouldn't have unrelated right now as we watched the previous video, it would look bad because it would interpellate evenly. So the workflow is always that you use Allen Bart, but usually use by pressing F9 on my keyboard. And that will open the tween machine. This panel here, which lets you tween. And this kind of panel is where you make your breakdowns. Very often, you often modify them manually, but you always have to start from this, from this trainer. And what this does is that it favors one pose over and another. That's essentially what timing and spacing is. Either accelerate or D accelerate, whether it accelerates the framers the first fall when the D accelerators favors the last pose. And we know that the bouncing ball, it will accelerate first and then dy accelerate when it hits the air, and then start slow and then accelerate, meaning it will slow into this bound here up and we'll slow out. So this is winner. As we have learned in the previous lesson, you could set up the correct spacing by just modifying the tangents and the graph editor directly. Well, that's too slow for animation production. Generally, you just add in-between key-frames. In practice would work like this. You just make a keyframe directly in the middle between the golden pauses, the main golden frames. And you make a breakdown for timing. So you're just favor one over the other. So here e.g. between it 40 per cent, meaning it 40 per cent favors the last pose. Favorites dispose. And when we supply, neither will create a parabola. And here we put this in the middle tool. Here we all do the opposite where favored the previous pulse and he was in 1.2, you can retain those keys. Isn't our very important keyboard shortcut. 1.2 to re-time the keys. And this is pretty much done. That's all. See. We already set up our breakdowns here. We already set up our breakdowns here. And now when we supplied will just fly and using the flow tangent. Let's done. And of course we're all my post infinity cycle. And we have our lovely bouncing ball. It's done and it cycles so we can play it backwards more easily. That's the only reason we're cycling it. I kind of zoomed through it. So let me demonstrate it again. See, this is the breakdown key in the previous video, we modify this kind of curve by just clicking weight but tangents and modifying this curve in the graph editor. But in real animation production, you very rarely do it because it's not fast enough. This is way quicker workflow where you make the golden poses and then you make a key in the middle between those golden poses and that's where you favor either disposed or that post. That's how you have to think about it. This is a and this is supposed to be. And this is the in-between pose C and posterior has to either flavor dispose or that pose. And you decided to using between Machine C. As you can see when we use this twin slider, it either moves down, meaning it moves to this previous pose, the pose on frame one, or when we move it here, it favors that pose and that's how we make it. Slow out or slow in C. This is slow in, slow out. This is ease out. This is n, is out. Ease in, or ease out in slider. The funny thing is that actually there's this slider called directly ease in and ease out. And when we click it, it seems to be doing exactly the same thing. So what's the difference between this and between machine? Well, those are different things if you would select multiple keys, because if you add a key like this, the ease in, out slider makes sense if you would have a curve like this and you want it to just use both of those frames at the same time. You couldn't do that with a tween machine, that it doesn't work that way because it between machine is optimized to work on one key at a time. I'll easy, ease out. It just resets both keys. You see at the same time, it ignores the original values of the keys and creates a perfect ease in and ease out while ignoring the original key values. So they do the same thing, but a different thing at the same time. But for production will use the trainer generally because you really want to have this level of control, but that's the workflow here, allow me to demonstrate another workflow, aldosterone little animation from it, which is actually a keyboard shortcut, but you can also do it put in the menu here. It's clear animation and I have a shortcut for it. And we'll just, and I made from the altar tangents because I think it will be clearer for you at this point in time, this workflow will be repeated over and over again. But I just want you to understand that 90% of the time that's what we'll be working with everything. And this is just the workflow in Maya. So I can always set up the beginning and then two keys when you make a cycle. Here we'll just have the up key already. Technically, we have an animation, you see, we just cycle it. We already have an animation because we have the golden storytelling pause this and this story is technically told. The ball moves up and down with the problem is that it looks bad. But for it to look nice, we have to make the correct ease in and ease out the 12th animation principles. This one is the principle that gives appeal the correct spacing because we have timing correctly, we have the correct timing. The keys are the timing on breakdowns. They modify the spacing, the golden poses are the timing and the breakdowns. They are there to modify the spacing. So how we do that? Well, we use between matching and we managed to create the same kind of parabola we were after before, just with breakdown keys are my favorite tangent right now, just new and antibodies this flow tangent, it will calculate automatically in the best flow of transition between the keys. And that is actually something that's very useful that vanilla Maya doesn't have. This already works. And this was very fast to make this kind of bouncing ball animation. 16. Introduction to the Animation Pipeline: Thinking about my eyes that generally nine times out of ten you will not make polygons. This will never happen because in animation you will always be using array because there are different departments are responsible for different things. Anatomy. That's just how this industry works. And this comes from the fact that it takes a lot of time to get really good. One of those things can be mediocre at all of them, but to be really good at all of them, it's impossible. Everyone will have their strengths. So generally the way the pipeline works is that you have an idea and journey the idea has made by someone with money. And then they get a writer to write a story. And then they can an artist. Generally, people who have experienced comics or figure drawing, they become story borders. Essentially, you need to have very strong drawing skills at very strong staging and cinematography skills. You will essentially to call ours, and most of them end up a storyboard. They create an automatic, which is this intercept storyboard with audio in it. And then they use it to design the characters. Essentially created a layout of the poses, meaning, the environment, the model they figures than the texture. The figures which you can imagine us just painting the figures. Then they create the skeleton. And only then you'll be animate. Then someone after you've finished all the animation, then I'll do the special effects that do lightning, and they do the rendering capacity. Any 2D VFX and motion graphics color correction, and they'll finish it like 01:00 in the pipeline. And what you can imagine working on an assembly far alignment or factory. Honestly at glorified factory worker and us to do It's like a factory job. You can do remotely, let's say it will do this is what lets understand what rigging is and why can't we just made directly on models? For one thing, maya has some problems with that because let's say we have created a cube here and we try rotating. There's this thing called the rotation order, which essentially says that in Maya the default order is XYZ. Essentially if we rotate Z, as you can see, all the axis C rotate with it. Then with wide x axis rotates to somebody here. Does. So if you e.g. kind of mess around and create this actually way easier to see on a torus. You have this if you do a lot of rotations here and a lot of patients here, and now you try to do a Y Rotation. See, this is what's called a gimbal lock. Essentially, the values are really messed. This can happen easily if you don't have a proper summary because even help you change the rotation order. For some more advanced story. Here's how rigging work, Snyder. What rigging is four characters is just a more complicated version of this. You have puree eight. Click Control G to create a group for that object. You will always have a proper naming convention, which is like Paros, GRP. And then you essentially create a controller which is a NURBS curves, always a NURBS curve. This is a type of object in Maya which is essentially self and that will not be shown in a any rendering software. And you essentially click on the nerves curves, click on your group. And in the rigging, you got to constraint. And there's parent constraint which constraints both translation and rotation. Point, which is just, just translation and Orient, which is just rotation. And scale is scale, a parent constraint. When we move this r moves. So why don't we animate directly on geometry? It's because in every pipeline, you will have a different person doing the geometry. And often enough what happens is that sometimes in the middle of production, they'll have the bright idea of changing some details in the models while keeping the rake and topology intact, like adding a scarves or something. And because it's referenced essentially a de la la, a loss due to effortlessly changes and all scenes. It productions I worked in, they almost always did that. That's why I admire your work on the references US and the file with the rig is like a separate file that you don't touch. You're not allowed to touch that file. You just referenced it to your file. That's why MIS optimized for our studio words are interlocked, compartmentalize, and different apart. Additionally, the advantage of this is that when we have this red, right, and we move this controller can notice that the values of this model haven't changed because this model exists. On its own kind of coordinate system. So they're not related. Which really helps a lot. Who actually mostly animating those NURBS curves, meaning controllers. That's why here, there's this option to only be able to select certain things, right? You nine times out of ten only want to be selecting the nerves, curves, earaches. And it doesn't matter if it's a bouncing ball or anything else. The only animating the RIC. This assignment now is just create your own very simple. We're using a torus. And again, just create a torus. But name it. Thomas, ga. Ga. Then we group it would control G minus VRP. A naming convention is important because rigging is mostly programming technical people. Then you create a nerve score. Crick are to increase its size, which is scale. Then you select the nerves curves and the group you made a constraint and parents. Then you just animate that Rick, using the same things you learned in previous lessons. We'll select the first frame. You essentially kid, it was an S. And then the 20th frame here. They didn't have auto key on. Our turkey is very important because auto key automatically keys your values, each object you painted the values. Most people leave out a Qian So they don't have to always remember to S. This is your very simple assignment because this is animation. It's just pretty animation. What do you already terms of knowing the software? You're 90% there. Because for a nanometer, that's all the software you need to know because animators don't have to model unless they're creating their own shop. Very few animators do. Of all them and maters, I know very few ever tried to create their own short film or anything. Because it's a lot of work over diverse skills, like in drawing. You have this drawing skill and kind of everything builds on that. In 3D, those skills or more unrelated, being good at rigging doesn't really make much better at animate. The better you draw, the better add-on to the frame-by-frame animation you'll get. And the better your app to the frame-by-frame animation to get better at drawing. So those are more unrelated skill sets. So we have here this, okay, I would like you to do this active site. Clean up this pupil here. That last interface section that to be bothered when you go to Panels and you go to perspective, you go with layout. You always animate with two panes. Why? Because you have one pane for actually manipulating the controllers and won't pay inwards. Short com. What is a sharp com? Let's actually do them all. Rf, what referencing? A reference, a camera array. What is a camera rig? It's a rig that creates more realistic camera that essentially will emulate how our camera actually act. Because CGI cameras almost never go to Panels, Perspective, intercom shape. And if we create an object here, or I can move this camera or like an object rig, and it behaves like a camera. Through this, you can create normal cameras, true view and create camera from view or creating, just create camera. And they're always default cameras if you progress space. Or you just go to perspective orthographic in front and side, you will get a default cameras. Those default cameras are generally not used for animation because non-local goat and film, they're flat. So generally you will be working in like something that the layout department will sit up and they'll set it up using a camera like this. Like this. Just essentially composition and cinematography. This is the whole principle of staging rests on how you set up this rig. The camera array that I wanted to show, we didn't phrase that you generally manipulate up in one view and see how it will animate in another. That's actually a workflow that you have. Because you, I always animate to camera. You have a certain camera shot and you animate. Another thing that I want to note it, a practical thing, nine times out of ten, you will get only one scene or two scenes in a movie, like per month. Because generally the feature quality animation is done by about four frames per week. You'll get a shot that's only 100 frames. You just have to polish them in excruciating detail. In TV animation, you might get longer shots or we might just get multiple shots. Because the max, you'd be expected to animate this thirty-seconds per week. And that's the max generally it will be between 4 s to 8 s per week. So either for 100 frames, assuming it's 24 to 25 frames per seconds, or 200 frames. So a lot of people get ambitious when they do homework or when they create their demo reel. Your demo reel should only be administered 30 s to a minute because it just has to show your best animation and it has to be in everything and it has to be perfect because they want you to be able to do beautiful animation. What we did so far is pretty ugly looking animation. That's not that good. It's just animation for the sake of being to learn the software, but you will never be paid for making animations like that. You're only paying for making good animation. So another thing I want you to type into Google, Josh cam. And I'll give you all into it and reference it using the control reference. Now I want you to play around with the camera controllers in generally around the sulfur you will have to do for your job because you will get this puppet. And you will have to spend like an hour or even a day just playing around with the controllers of the puppet you've been assigned. Because they always will have their own controllers and their own way of working. Each studio has its own quirks and it's on rigging setup. It's not really standardized as much as you'd think it would be. Okay, Let's go to the homework right now. And the homework is creating a torus. Creating a torus, leaping it, renaming it correctly like chorus, GRP. Creating occur and cleaning constraint, resizing the curve. So slide naming it torus, CRT controller and selecting this and this, the controller and the group creating Australian parent. And this is basics of rigging. Basics of bringing our useful because then, you know, Oh, this is what rigging is. This is what will be provided for me. Someone spent a lot of time making a puppet for skeleton. So this will just give you an idea of what it takes to make our production. All right, I have the tourist just a little bit at today, what was I supposed to create a terrorist or using NURBS curves, I wanted you to use the polygon model. Because NURBS curves are doing nowadays for controllers. So we don't want to pile in other nerves. Yes. Alright, here it is, your distress. No, group. G, control G. Alright. Now renamed. Click on the click. I've been torus, dash here. Under porous, underscore. Grp. Naming conventions are very important. Now go to Curves, nerves, curves and surfaces. Pick a circle or a choice. I like option, double-click on it. You will get options. Angle, the radius, size, normal plot. Click our tool. Now select their nerves, curves, and the outliner. And then select the group. Select, Shift, Control, select Yes, no shift, right-click or control-click. Want to find more generally it's control. And now I'll go to constraint. Is that P has a shot. Alright, well js i now if you'd just use the controller, this one, just use the nerves. Now. Now go uncheck all the selections order down the nerves. Here. What you can select, your generally turn everything off other than the NURBS curves and everything. Rounded nerves, curves, those are on those. And get through this, yes. Those are the polygons as an animation touch. Alright, It's all net bias. Alright, if I now click somewhere else on the screen to unselect everything and select this one here. Yes. Okay. Now at frame one here, w, w, Alright? Alright, click sometimes you say v w, okay, click on frame one. Click S. Now we'll go to ten. Alright, and move it anywhere you want. Sure. Can use the channel box or the channel box because it's precise. Rewarm less. Now, pretty much automatic, heated and preview. See, you didn't touch it. The polygons are doll. You've only used the parent, it's controller and nine times out of ten, you will be using like that. They'll have their own controllers. They're all even functions. Sometimes you'll just be animating those newspapers. You can think of this as a stop-motion puppetry or just array. Actually animating my personal take on a technical level. That's what 2D animation is, just animating. Holds the puppets have the right values under Nicole level, that's all written out. Just playing, learning some staff. That's how you have to learn, play around with it. Like Jasmine does. Take some script you've learned here and just play around with mine. What happened to the keyframe and tenure? Wrong and delete an accident. Chief record it on. Yeah. I essentially, once we add those poses, you modify the timing, but I'm making a poster in between. Yeah, I didn't want to necessarily do that. That's their problem with animated. That's why generally you've gone to animate straight ahead like this. Now, you want to meet using pauses planned because it gets overwhelming quickly. Yeah, just keyframe here for some reason. I know why what happens is very common. Because if you have key using the channel box, only the channels, only the keyframes on that specific channel show on the top. So if I tried to translate x axis, you rotate and the y frame is not going to be showing up your free software. Problematic. That's why there's this shortcut in Anbar. This is specific for anabolic, which is smart keyframe, which essentially key printing all the values are on key frame on that, all the values of that controller under the General recommended workflow. Because if you tried to have different keyframes on different values, if you would just go to channel by channel, it will make it impossible to retard. Because right now we have all the key frames on one channel. Extremely easy for us to go here and every time our animation is practical reason why you would want keyframes and set value like that. You rarely honest you very rarely that you want situations. Mostly Polish in the polar stage, once you have all your key poses and you just want to not like fine tuning, fine tune. It. Shouldn't be something that you do as a noun, but you have this nice tool would keyframes left or right? Or you can do this. You will go and shifts and shift select here. And you essentially can move the keyframes. It is. Alright. Is it something that's extremely hard and traditional? Two different by frame animation, retiring Dan know for sure it is just like something that's impossible. That's why most even to the evasions bone animation. Now, generally what happens is that you block out your CEO key poses. The director tells, oh, I want this faster or slower. And then through frame-by-frame animation, that's impossible. Here you have two words. Here. You'll go like OK, boss. Just to make the corrections fairly easily. Read, timing is the easiest thing ever and you walk in a studio who will be retiring a lot because your initial time you will be wrong. Some animators actually work with this webinar. Don't worry about timing that all along the path. It only worry about posing, he Posen. Then they create the tightening from the poll from that. So that's an interesting work. I don't have a keyframe everything again, keyboard shortcuts. I sit up in live one-on-one and keyboard shortcut is Alt. See this swapping two keyframes since gloss to get really crazy, It's kind of flashing effect. It takes four frames for us to register our poles, takes our I4 frames to register our polls. And anything below four frames, registers as factory half the room. So how do I move a keyframe again? Nanobots, you can either lose those nuts buttons, okay, First, make sure to do the whole frame is selected anytime or you can shift, select and left-click and kind of move it like that. Which I prefer. When added shortcut keys on my keyboard, shortcuts, which is 1.2, I believe, for the notch. Because I use it a lot. What the shortcut keys for anime both are actually very good. They even have some recommended hotkeys to 0, meaning whole hockey does improve your workflow. In animation speed is king. If you don't have it for you to get a job in 3D animation, you really have to have this so well-trained like a video game. You know how some people are really good at Team Fortress, automatic for them. This is the level of training you'll need for this viable Java. Studies have shown that the number one reason for burnout in this industry is not having those skills that's sufficiently trade. Get the BR employer hires you 100% expect from you to have this trained, walk. Drinking in animation. They will not expect to teach you on the drop of mattress you all to the frame-by-frame animation. They did teach you about the job you started as an in-between there. And then you kind of learn to erupts from your superiors and Asia. Japan is worth that. Nothing. The West and the West did our boots teach. My course. I'm school that older by Pixar, new Sky Studios and DreamWorks. I animate at it, which is really more the M-score, a sham animal order. By that, a nation and XR. So all of those majors have their own school. Private schools have this. Just does as good to just know the best, cheapest chosen discourse. Because the best of the cheapest. See. And I know we're not even bothering with timing and spacing and all animation principles. We'll just having fun with the software. I just want you to play around with parenting, with framing and see what caused the end of the day, you will learn play. 17. Learn the Interface with Jazmine : To tie, I work, teach you some Maya. Maya is very easy. I mean, the thing is that it's intimidating because you will open up my and you see all the menus, all the shelves, and all them options. The thing is, is because Maya has every single option listed here, plus an abnormal Studio, times out of ten. Guy will only work with modeling, only work with drugging, only work with animation, only work with rendering, and so on. Like we're only work with motion graphics. It's like you're not expected to be a master in all of this. The software itself is very easy. You don't need a software tutorial, you'll need a skill tutorial. Good at job. Do anything like a nun about just learning the software worn by a walk? Not about them. Why are you watching software tutorials there? Wonder boring too. It's about projects finishing salt will learn by doing. So. You'll learn by making Earth. So I'll be making some errors deliberately and then, okay, so I open up Maya. First error is me trying to be kind of special and use the mouse for it. If you've ever played a video game, and that's what being an animator isn't just playing one video game very well. Let anyone tell you otherwise, is literally you're being paid playing one video game very well to a competitive level. You guys, all tree software is pretty much the dad artists that you have. As an animator, What are you doing actually? First you have to understand, okay, I got this animation gig and I lied on my CV that I'm competent. Well, first links there, you'll get this. This, this, this, this is both cheaper. So we have this and we want to animate will just be easy. What is I have bought? What is animation in Maya because my computer's not pay. They just have certain rules that I have to do. It only nowadays that we create AI that emulates the style doesn't have conscious. No machine has consciousness, meaning the sense of I am. So we cannot expect Maya to do anything for us. It's the slave would, he talks in it. That's why slavery ended in a lot of countries than they had computers. They didn't need to wage labor and may be called ai will be a way to communism, but that's beside. You open up Maya, then you have this gizmo here, then you Maya, which tells the top. Right, because this is important. Maya works with coordinates. This is a map. You will have to coordinate system, right? You have, this is zero-zero. There's even thinking about it here. Absolute transform. It pretty much in the corridor. That's like a map. A map, you literally just the men on a surface level in my app. Only do other nonlinear. You would just assign the correct coordinates to the correct numbers on the timeline at the end of the day, the alveolar job is the whole visual animation principles, etc. That's just the tools for you to do your job. Well, this is why 3D are hard way. Because at a certain complexity level, computers are pretty bad at creating manuals shipped with control. So we have here, the computers don't have consciousness, they can just do repetitive tasks. Don't have to be conscious for something and focus on it one-by-one than computers can make. Good art, e.g. is automatic for people and a lot of it is very mundane. All times things will get elected. Well, what's here? This is actually harder because you record systems C, x, y, z. That's why animations that pool drop that will survive AI. You have to understand a lot of the mass. Because here we have a zero, you'll see cord. You can actually animate it out of coordinates. We'll do it like that. Most visual people just use the visual editor, but some people do it mathematically. And you have here coordinate system. And essentially it's updated in real time. You move on the x axis. This is the x axis and this is the z-axis. You know, obviously this is not always left or right because you can rotate. So, but that's why you have those arrows here and you have these kind of this cube. Because actually the directions here are super important. They always rule. I always see. So as you could see, they have two blue blue, blue bead after me, blue, too low. So please, below the blue is the cost we learn. We are doing re, re, blue, the tubular member, it is blue. The blue. What letters? Access is blowing in Maya. The stuff that she got it. Hey, I'm editing a laugh track. Editor and I make choices. X, x is a, x is our big red. X is red. This red, X dot c. We kept on image here, X is red. The red stop sign shows bread. Now, remember, it's red stop sign. That's like right and left. Right. And let stuff go. I can remember it as a stop sign. Stop, don't go. And then there's UP, which is the y axis, which is green. Why is like Yoda? Yoda levitates and goes up. Remember it's like I'm getting read. Yet. Why? You'd go to the Louis XVI. Louis XVI. Prompt. What goal? What's blue? What blue? Goes front to back and starts with can you answer me the question? I always want to know something that's blue, that's called with the Z line. This is the homework for our students here. Please come up with something below that starts with Z and use that to remember it. Yeah. Do it. Yes. No, I have it live. Extra credit. You get the best credit. Get the best credit. So we have this ball, right? What's animation? When you press Enter, you toggle this software. Remember, this is the values I want on this key frame. And if they change new pink visual individual objects, so they change the values to change values. So this is the first value, yes, this is just your first value. And then like on 4.5, it will change five times in equal increments. On default custody, you modify this in the graph editor. And you click again. You click right and you tell the software, you need to remember this position. You need to remember, please. And then it will change. You have like on out offerings because it will change as mattress, you've changed. It. Didn't change. If I moved it a bit to the right and it's changed. Problem is that it didn't change an appealing way in terms of, and that's what the animator has to do. Because generally hue does, does that break down frame which e.g. it's close. It makes it. So as you can see, animation is all about the drills manipulating those values and their time space. Essentially be creating those old, which is animation. Because generally, when you work you only focus on one thing. Because my eyes really like five software ruined one software package, like live in the same house. They generally don't only talk to each other when they lived in the same house, but we only talk to each other one we have to. As you can see, this, this here, this graph editor. And because we created this breakdown frame, breaking down frame and what happened, we made it a nice curve. C, I fix it. We made the sexy curve here. Just like a flat dressed, nice 60 curve. That's a mnemonic to remember it to create. So as you can see, we have the, we have the nice curves that move it. This is the East innocent. It slows into them. Again, those animation principles are mathematical principles. Apply or not. That would be an ease out and false are involved. We did this, move it, click. We only really used one key. To perfect. This pretty much requires a keyboard because it's really hard to do it via the interface. So you need to learn your controller here, which is your, some people believe it or not actually animate with crawlers. Yes, I actually do that. A lot of animators use at 100 keyboard. This is essentially a controller where you have your graphics tablet and you have this on your left side, and you bind each of those keys to our shortcut. You job. I animated like that. And so all I can suggest that if you are poor animator is generally don't use their own keys. Keyboard we got from Goodwill. Do our first animation. It will be alarmingly on and do our first animation. Here. I taught kids with autism this and I believe in tissue. Let's do our first assignments. Let's start with one frame, one, which brings us to this thing, magic or this is essentially how we control the timeline. Because remember animation is about values are key for it. That's all it is. This is the keyframes which showed the future. And this is number 40 is the present and this is the past, the future. Here. See the time. You can see time just goes forward and plus a. So we have here at the time. So as you can see here, you have this. What we'll do, we'll set a keyframe on zero-zero. Then we move it here and move it forward. All I have now is create a ball. Let's go through the steps again. Because studies have shown that when something's wrong three times people are more likely to remember. That's why it'll be repeating salary and concept. Least three types. Got some for generally I are some people who will not make more notes on any horse. So yeah, I'm trying to repeat certain constant of at least three times. So if you watch it on TV because some people will watch it on bread mold, they can learn something. So again, create a ball which used the modeling interface here. Because those are like shells that show the commands here and click them and they can also use the modified create them. This is not potent. Potent thing is like understand because this will change its new software created. You have to understand what animation is. 3d animation is on a deep level. Exchanging values of the solid is greater. The ball selected it and you move it with the red axis of 00. And he removes 40. Or technically your first 3D animation. Let's make it not so ugly one. So see how ban all of this to create ugly 3D animation you already created. And it's very easy. This thing, ugly, like a very automatic see Maya interpellate an uneven way, which makes it ugly. Make it pretty, they're told we do. Let's back. It goes the opposite way I met. Then it already just stop it. The timing was off. So this is this first video about the theory. And let's do this assignment. I'll have a student of mine demonstrate. Now I would like you to play around with the interface. 18. Animate a Bouncing Ball in Place: What up? So we'll learn the bouncing ball animation. I have prepared this scene for you with this rig, but I really recommend you grade your own. You will be using the tools you'll learn in basic Maya course where we will create primitives, extend them, and add materials to them, which should be something you will manage. Because you just select them, right-click and add materials. We got and then you put them on a layer. Let's go like this. Select them and add to do at, to select the layer. After adding all your environment to your layer, you make it reference that you cannot pick it. As an animator, you will have all the options to select bones, polygons, and everything else turned off. You only select NURBS curves because that's how the pipeline works. Essentially have a rigor that rigs and you animate you were a guy in a pipe? May answer the question. Yes. When you reference something is the same as say, lacking a layer in Photoshop or Illustrator. If you mean layer referencing, then yes. Well, in terms of Ricks know it's more reference photo where the photos not change no matter what you do in the program. Okay. It's like if you ever did software programming is like a function that's not separate file. Because my eyes optimized for like studio environment where everyone works on their own files and rotate asleep. When I worked on that animation and a production, I was given a shot. I animated it. And then there were dailies where we pretty much it with the director discussed it a shot. And if she didn't like something like she wanted a hat on that character, the rigor would give me a different rig and I would just replace it. So it's always the same kind of workflow. But as you can see here, we'll do the most basic exercise ever. The bouncing ball in place. It is very easy. But I really want to over-complicate it for you because I want you to really get the correct workflow. 19. Animate a Bouncing Ball with Jaz: Jasmine Illustrator, first animation. The first stage we would do after we analyzed our reference, well, key this pose, right? Yes, you block out your golden poses, which are the main storytelling poses of your shot. I think that's keyed. Yes, I click S, You keep out. And my 100 keyboard shortcuts and escape the timeline on the bridge of your animation cycle while animating, did I mess that up already? Know my eyes pretty non-destructive. You're afraid to make mistakes. You learn by making mistakes. These have fun with it. The Onion Skin is called, Is this the right where it's understanding it under visualize, make onion skin. First, you will have to select the whole rig in the Outliner, right? The outliner is here. Then on default as generally either work with the outline or what random mating, select the basic ball. It will go visualize ghost selected or open ghosting editor. It will give you more options. Already. We don't really need the ghosting editor. If you can just eyeball it. It's fine for beginners. They can use it both. The editor or not already and joy just X out of it. That's fine. Okay, Cool. Where did the keyframe? Keyframes are only visible when you have your controller selected. That's why we create a selection set which you have under 19.100 keyboard shortcuts. And you can also open this electro set from here. Because again, when you select all the controllers, you will see the keys on the timeline which is important for retirement. This is key. When did this, okay, the skin's still there. I think there's just only one keyframe. You're changing one keyframe, right? You only need one controller doctrine. All controller first, either that is Alt, S or S, two key all the channels on that point forward. Alright, that's all keyed. Key to treat controllers. The squash and stretch up was the Move controller and squash and stretch it out. I'm still on keyframe one here. I know both you have to key the upper down. Sure. Them all. Okay. You have very good. Why did Alt S I thought that would cover all of it. Hooks up to those three controllers selected all at once. Because in control shift versus silicone control, then hold shift and click on the new controller to add. Though both are selected. And when you have a selection set, which we have under 19, you can store those selection. I click ball and it will select all article. And so that's the selection preset when you click on that and it just speeds up your workflow. Yes, I'm old is important for speeding up your workflow, which is something that will make your life easier. Because you were actually paid by the shot route. Or our reason we use selection sets and animation is because they're easier, especially the useful item button, pop up. Now go to frame 18. Now, create a copy of this keyframe, perhaps aldose controller selected and others. Yes. As you do this, check all those three controllers one-by-one makes sure are key. Only keep the eye controllers we're animating who save on Maya's processing power by using selection sets. Select all the controllers, if you will, and then make if you manage to accomplish this goal of keeping your first two golden posers created the extreme in the middle of the timeline and nine, right? Yes. That now on the ground, that's more than ground. If you were to just type in zero on the controller or press the reset button in and bought, it will get you down. What I put, I put zero and that has more precise. You can notice that you are right now on non-sterile keys. Make all the keys in your shots step using an bought this year? Yes. Right-click and stepped tangents, all keys. Right-click. Do you mean look, it's Control Alt Shift, click stepped tangents of keys to hold Control Alt Shift, and click on that button. Control Alt Shift, very good. You've created your first key poses on stepped curve. Now you have to create the breakdown poses responsible for the timing and spacing. Remember, the ball will accelerate, hit the ground, and D accelerate when it leaves the ground. So we'll ease out to the ground and ease into the air. Block out the ball first without squash and stretch using only the male. Remember, you can always change your timing if you keep all of those three keys. I've showed you how to change your timing is less than very good. Removing the controller. Now, we want to have an increased spacing here, so it would move more down. This pose would favor the middle keyframe and it falls down. You can stretch out to the Graph Editor to visualize the spacing of the keyframes. Like this. Yeah, that helps a lot. You can draw a shift middle mouse click to drag on this one axis. Is this Nike? I just don't see a keyframe here. You press S while having a channel selected. All channels when you have one child selected, we will use our keyboard shortcut and anime BOD POD, smart key, which I sit up as alt S. Okay, very good. Remember who said use your selection set key, all the keys in that area, meaning including your squash and stretch keys, because this will help you with retirement. Want to have some overlap here. So there's another strobe in. Okay, Let's see how this is gonna go. How come it's not in the other view. You gotta, you have to select the viewport before. They definitely has more refinements, barrier, busters, no squash and stretch. That's the next step here. Let me check your keyframes. Select all the key about shortcuts. I'm using the selection set just here. All it all. Yes, that's how we name. Alright, let's see how you have keys on every three frames, at least. You do know at this point you can work on squash and stretch. How you would incorporate squash and stretch. And this animation we've made an okay, ease in and ease out. You can polish it out later. But first attempt, this is what is squished to squash and stretch controller, which one will use the not to just squash and stretch. And stretch controller in this rig is on top. You can use the y-axis to have an easier time squashing, stretching. Okay, there we go, but this is a bit too much. Here is, makes more sense. It seems as your key this, remember to select all keys using your selection set and Keith on all the animatable properties. So we can relate later read time with greater ease. Wait, I think it turned everything into that. But I'll Control Z because you selected all the controllers. We're only working on the tree animatable controller. That's why we're using selection set. Selection sets are important in your work as an animator or especially we'll be using island, but there are other ways to create selection set, but uninvolved is the full pack and stretch is probably not keyed on the same keyframe. That's why you have this effect. It's okay to make mistakes like that. Because it starts to show how your squash and stretch. Not on stepped keys, like your movement. While on normal interpolation keys, called item keys. You can select the uninvolved set keys and essentially right-click all keys. Yeah, that makes way more sense. That's why you have to key or keys on the same frame. If you make a change during blocking. This rule doesn't apply in the poll very last phase, the polish phase. While blocking. It's way easier too, real time, and it's a good workflow habit. This is actually a very common error and 3D software for some reason there's other keyframes missing here. Yes, because you need to keyframe getting out of the squash. And generally you need to keyframe on frame ten. You have to keep frame it along with the movement. What do you do here is you will let ironing board essentially interpolating this movement as it normally would do using either the ease in slider or between Murphy. You can use this reset button to reset the disquiet. Reset it. Not to move this to you. During the same frame. You'd have to select the Move controller and use the trainer. You will need to adjust the spacing of your bowel movement. At this stage, if your level of expertise, you have a hard time visualizing the animation. You can see like all your keys and goal, the press bed guess tangent. Because a lot of beginners find that they will have a hard time visualizing the movement on stepped in the very beginning. The graph editor on alto will help them at least understand the movement. Either though that's not up best-practice, selfing dad would be seen as an equivalent. Raining. Jasmine's animation has some errors. You will see the air she made. This should be very sad. Not necessarily erase that. It should be really sit out the controllers, you should use the tween machine. Okay, where's that? We have different interfaces, solid gold. But I don't I'm not trying to use the tween machine. I was just trying to put the tweeter will help you like interpolate between that, will help you visualize the interpolation between the keys. And then you can move between the keys leg more on or the other. So this is actually a great learning tool to see how my old interpellate, how we can favor post a or B. Remember to play less than the window, would have to click it before. Alright, here's my gosh, I need to work a bit on your timing and spacing. I figured will be helpful for you to go to the polish phase, which will allow you to better visualize some errors. In the beginning, it's actually okay to go to the polish phase a bit prematurely because the graph editor, sometimes we'll explain things to you, especially in the beginning part, symbolic violence. Select our tree controllers. You have the selection sets. And you can go and select this tangent here, right-click and click all oh keys. You'll be able to visualize the timing and spacing and how this animation will look like at once. You can notice that there are two curves, will look like an indent. We'll just look nice. And often it's an indication that something might be wrong. It's not a guarantee. But in such simple exercises like a bouncing ball, It's often the case. E.g. here we have a pretty mature squash. Squash like that. This is because the controllers, you can adjust to this question straight from Florida controllers. The ball shoots stretch four here. You are in the Polish space. Before you make any changes. We will make sure to change the interpolation of my I ask keyframes and setting, because default and the blocking phase, we use linear and step. Here we go, auto and outdoor. Costume. To costume. Remember, feel free to make mistakes and learn from them. Right side to have a bit of our linear interpolation there. Yeah, I was trying to make it more. You can modify frame 15 and make it a bit more. 18. Maybe not that much. Yeah. Yeah. To test it. I remember the first balance we would have to be the highest. Don't modify the keys, get started because then it will not stop. Also remember our preview and now cycle, you go back one key. So the last key won't repeat. Nasmyth bouncing ball. It's not ideal, but it's a good first step. You'll see errors or bowl. After you pass the assignment. Your thoughts about this? How would you improve it? Well, the thing I struggle with the most is just learning how to use the controls enough to try to get what I'm going for, that this was 2D animation. I would be able to solve this way faster. It makes sense, right? The learning curve is the software or for me on not all beginners have that Buddhist after, after Roo kind of learned a few times, there's rarely intuitive. Okay. Okay. Well, that was mostly the anxiety inducing thing. That's just like just navigating software practice. It takes awhile to get acclimated. Yeah, I do see there should be more snap for sure that this is very monotonous, so it's very boring. Bland. Yes. Yeah. There needs to be more snap, but it's a matter of RA that's more getting better with the software to really implement that. Yeah, I will do also understanding the animation principles. Do you feel like after this exercise to feel better with the software? Yeah, yeah, I definitely like I'm trying to edit this a bit more, make it very good, pop a little better. That's a very good attitude to have. Yeah, because this is fun. I'm just getting a little stressed already. Yeah, This curve is way too. It's kinda like a depth seem to be Check that out. Now. Why Battersea? Yeah. Just minor, minor tweaks. See how minor tweaks can change your whole animation, right? That's why teacher quality animation really be judged by level of polish. That the main differentiator between like TV quality animation from Pixar, all hail King Julian and beautiful quality animation is the level of polish, right? Of course, if you go to wrap your 3D animation studios like mama finger, mallet, finger, then you'll be like mediocrity. But in general, you want to earn a decent wage or the 3D animator, you are expected to be true quality animation skill, right? This is easily to hundred percent better. Just with minor tweaks that a fair assessment, do you think? Yeah, I agree. It's at least twice as good just from slight slight tweaks. Now, it feels like it'd be easy to mess this up with the same amount of tweaks. So it's really you gotta be cast surgical. Yeah. You have to be very easy to mess it up. That's why Increment and Save, Right, right. Which I should have been doing that I also made the mistake of not keying stuff because I'm just still clumsy with the software. And I wanted to give you an example where it's okay to be clumsy into software because you're still learning, right? I think this example will give you heal. How many stakes are beginners expected to make and don't feel bad about it. Because a lot of beginners are frustrated that they are not. Dreamworks animators after 10 min? No, no, it's something you just got to have patience with yourself and with the program itself to where there are some things that are a little counterintuitive at first, but then I feel pretty good about this as a first attempt for 3D animation. I'm looking forward to the next exercise. So yeah, like what other critiques would you have for this in particular? For this simple exercise, I think it's good enough. Or you already passed this exercise. And I hope the viewers will also do this exercise with their first introduction to a really nice-looking possible. Yeah, I just have patients have fun and play around with it and don't stress yourself out. You can always just hover over them. Now, Help menu will pop up like this. So have fun and understand that. And but has its own dedicated tutorials, tools. 20. Analyzing Ball Bouncing Part One: First thing you need to understand about the bouncing ball across the screen is that you will generally have to stick to one workflow. Workflow. We will be with you forever in animation. The workflow is essentially first, you do preproduction. What is reproduction? In pre-production? You essentially get her up referenced and analyze it. How do you analyze it? You will go by it frame by frame and analyze. Actually the thing about analyzing references that you have to analyze it for two things, key poses and arcs. That's because the timing, a bird, boat and spacing, but most of this is key poses, arcs and the timing and spacing. So we have here the bouncing ball. You're kind of be acquired to pick your own bouncing ball. And let's say this is the first frame. And then here we have the second one. And you can notice that it actually has. You will notice certain patterns once you analyze them. For our example is that each one of those balls moves on an arc. So let's watch this ball bounce here. And essentially, the thing about this is if you would like analyze your own reference, you would essentially market the key poses first. On the screen here, I use a program called Epic Pen to annotate on top. That's pretty good. While it is. Just annotate the middle of it. This is how you will always start with like analyzing reference. This is important for you to learn now, even though for the bouncing ball is actually not that important, because you will be required to analyze references for any kind of more complex movement. When it will be making a walk cycle, we will have to analyze one like that. When you'll be making acting shots, you'll be expected to record yourself acting it out. Pretty much extrapolate the key poses and arcs from that. Because a lot of animation is mostly pre-planning and analysis. You'll see this is kind of a demo. What you'd like, draw the arcs. They're all done. That the balls are losing both length here and height here. Radically, like not even kind of way like one-third, one-third, one-third. And the cool thing about a bouncing ball, why this should be your first, the first thing you add allies is that people already analyzed this here, e.g. in this video they analyze, did pretty well. You see it having this much length for this bounds. You can see they analyze this pretty well. This video is on YouTube. Well that's a very useful video because it's first has a section where you're able to have food edge. And then you can check if you identify the key poses here accurately. Because those are nothing more than the extreme golden poses. As you can see in a bouncing ball. The bouncing ball loses energy gradually. And so the bounds becomes smaller and smaller with each bounce. And arcs themselves become small, shorter, shorter and shorter. Routine March sporadically. And you could analyze this and pretty much have a pretty set timing for this. And that this is something if you want extra credit you would do. But luckily enough for you, I have prepared you on our outline drawing with pretty much ready-made timing. 21. Analyzing Ball Bouncing Part Two: Okay, so let's analyze the bouncing ball again. The fingers that you have a lot of references for it because it's such a foundational exercise. If you go on YouTube and Google bouncing ball, you'll have balls for days. And essentially you notice a lot of details that we analyze it, e.g. you'll notice that the spacing differs between the up and down even in real life. And that, that's actually something that was even described it animators survival kit, which I described in a different lecture. But the main thing you have to understand here is the art principle, which is that things don't move in a straight line in real life, even though Maya will interpret it that way. Things moving arcs. And they also have like timing and spacing that also arc like this. And generally, and you can see here that I also want to explain the spacing tarps. And this is important because that's how you will always draw your thumbnails, almost all thumbnails made by animators. It doesn't matter if it's an active movement or fighting shot. You will have to draw this out to plan it out before animating, where you plan out your basic space in this way. And in most animation books you will see this kind of thing. And it's essentially those lines does signify how far apart things are. Again, this is spacing the numbers on the timeline or timing. You will animate a ball bounce. And this exercise, and this exercise is actually pretty easy because it's about understanding the workflow and the basic poses. So by analyzing our reference, Let's say we draw, drew out our thumbnails and we'll now start animating. If you want to animate a specific bouncing ball, you will have to also, you start with essentially analyzing the key poses of it. So this will be a key pose, meaning Golden polls opposes that are responsible for, this would be 110. And here you can notice that there's a lot of motion blur. Each time there's motion blur in our reference, it means that there'll be squash and stretch. So e.g. this more rubbery bowel will squash a lot while a ball that we've made from a material that it's harder and it will create less motion blur will watch list. And as you can see, the motion blur gets smaller and smaller as the ball moves to the top. And we'll have to also capture that. Then as the ball goes down, the motion blur gets larger and larger progressively. And that's where squash and stretch will happen. Then there's another squash that's a bit larger or smaller, but still they're rods like that. But right now we're just planning out and noting the key poses and noting certain truths about the bouncing ball from analysis. E.g. we have noticed that this ball took ten frames, this balance to obtain ten frames. Now this one is nine frames for each side. And if we extended this, made this longer, this would also be, this will also be ten frames. And ten frames. While this, we would cut it in half, is nine frames. Nine frames. And it would get progressively smaller. It will get shorter, it will get shorter, smaller, and smaller. This way, you have to analyze movements for those kind of patterns. Analyzing references all about noticing patterns and movement and noticing that it arcs, timing and spacing and key poses. That's all. That's what you analyze, especially in the beginning where you have relatively simple movements. After we get to more complex movements such as an acting shots, you'll also be analyzing reference for like anatomy, facial expressions, etc. Which will require you to understand basic human anatomy, which we'll cover in a different course. But right now, we're mostly focusing only on arcs, that timing and spacing and keep polls. And the cool thing about keyframe prose that you can only look at your people this with the keyboard shortcuts like that. Remember to always save your projects. Well, let's do this with the rest of the bowl we see here. So this top side, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, top down. Another mobile stuff down. And another smaller balance here and down. Now just goes forward. And let's say this is the end of the timeline range for us. If we use keyframe Pro, you can essentially go range and to current and you have it all planned out for you actually. And that's how you learn. You copy real life. So we have our timing here. I actually planned out for us and our spacing all planned out too. We can also draw the dose bounces out because it bounces their time here. Here's a little tiny bounds. Then it looks like. This is essentially a workflow you'll be using for everything, walk and everything else. You have certain answers right now. You pretty much have an answer here where you do well now where I'm giving it to you. But it's even very similar to learning math in school, in high school or elementary school. I don't know how it works in America are coupled in Poland, you're given like a teacher goes through math exercises and analyzes them for you. So maybe afterwards, if you really try, you can solve a math equation on your own. And I'm giving you treating it the same way because animation is mostly observation and analysis and mass understanding the principles of movement and a principle of another principle of movement, the bouncing balls. She knew that the principle of energy, meaning that things that don't have a will of its own lose energy. As you can see here progressively the ball loses energy. So here on this frame, here you can see it in numbers like this bounds here. It's already 27 to 33, it's already six frames on each side. Here. Six. So they actually lost most energy here. And this actually really gets to you. This process of analysis itself like reveals a lot of secrets about animation to you that e.g. in real life, this parabola is uneven because it's 55.4 here. But to push it and make it more appealing. And we can just added us for four. And we can make always push the, push our plan, so to speak. Here we also have four to four. We have, here, we have four. This is 4.3, but we can essentially make it read to tree. This would be two to two. And we'd like one frame bounds here, same here. So we already have planned out all of our timing and spacing here. This is you pretty much made your thumbnail this way. You've made your plan of animation based on our reference and we pushed it, modified it in a way that makes sense and simplified it because a lot of design is about simplification. And how can I take this imperfect nature, which is all randomness and no order and make it something more appealing and more organized. It's okay. Lesson we'll take our balls. Now, take our balls and play around with them in Maya. And then remember, if you're using keyframe Pro, you can always save this image. Save, save the image. You can save your screen. And here are the settings where you can save it to Settings. You can say Michael folder, Epic Pen screenshots. You'll have your screenshots. You can even have it on our whiteboard. So it's nicer looking. And you pretty much made your thumbnails on top of your reference, which is the way easier. A lot of animators actually important those thumbnails into Maya and use them as a direct reference, which I'll show you how. And I'll also show you how to use an image overlay for this. 22. Let's Make Some Thumbnails: So after you essentially analyze live-action reference, you extrapolate the key poses, which is on the red, and breakdowns, which are responsible for the spacing. And you kind of analyze the timing, which you are essentially write down the prime numbers, will live action reference. You analyze it and write down the frame numbers. And as you can see the red ones here. First, we would plan out at arcs like this. Arcs will be planned out because that's one of the most important things that the trajectory of movement. As you can see, a bouncing ball naturally creates very pretty appealing arcs. And these arcs are defined by the key poses. As you can see, there are responsible for every direction change. Without them, the story would not make sense and would nothing else but the keyframe, key poses, and the kind of trajectory you already kind of see what's going on here. And then you would just add the breakdowns for the timing, which is liked here. These are the breakdowns. And you have yourself up pretty much ready animation. That's pretty much about the texts. For to do that, you just have to analyze your live action reference in terms of your key poses. The breakdowns you could like figure out in my eye during a break down face, but here I have them provided for you. Again, we start with analyzing the live-action reference, and then we go and pick up piece of paper or a drawing program. And we use our analysis on since getter we can draw on top or using epic pen. You can draw on top. And then you can either put it in Photoshop or PIP studio or just on paper. And it will draw out your plan of animation like it is in terms of a bouncing ball. It's kind of cool if you wanted to make a detailed one where the breakdowns too. But most people tom they only their extreme poses like here in this town name. But for you to just practice a bouncing ball, you do well to just at first, just copy this kind of template I've given you. After a while. You will be able to modify this and create your own bouncing balls. So the warfarin for animations always the same everywhere. First you do your pre-production, you analyze your live-action reference. Then you draw out your thumbnails to identify your golden poses, then your extremes. Then you plan out your arcs on paper, making sure that your arcs are correct. And then you put your key poses in Maya and then you create break down keys are responsible for timing and spacings. And then eventually wants to have a keyframe every four frames or so. To start off time, you go to this planning phase and the polish, the animation. So that's it in terms of workflow and autonomy. 23. Correcting My Student's Thumbnails: Okay, Jasmine, my student, because as we all know in this course, you are pretty much learning along with her. In this course series. I'm taking someone who has no knowledge of animation to a professional level and I've kinda correcting mistakes so we can notice mistakes you might be making and essentially learn from our mistakes before you make. Jasmine has an error here, see here the spacing small. This spacing, the spacing grow larger and then slow down here. That should start large. It should grow smaller. So the first spacing should be B, the largest. Same here. And here, spacing grows, so it's fine. This one should be larger. Now look at your own thumbnails and correct any errors you might have. 24. Avoid This Rookie Mistake: Here I want to tell you something that will be important while polishing your bouncing ball. You want to avoid this if you have frames like that that are so similar close together, this will create a strobe effect. So we have two ways of solving this. You can either make this transition like this, where you have bounces like this, or it can go the opposite way. Either one is actually correct and will work. You can even make the stretch touch the ground and running the following motion because that way the bowl will have this very cartoony feel to it. Tex Avery and Warner Brothers would do falls like that and jumps like that. So this is a style one solution is used primarily in Disney. One solution to this problem was used primarily in Warner Brothers. So again, you have your two solutions to the same problem. Another note I want to discuss or difference between the two studios. Generally, Warner Brothers had a more cartoony and puppy snappy feel, while Disney had a more flowy feel, this nice style animation, everything is moving. There's always overlap. While in more cartoony animation, the poses are held more. Again, the thing about animating the bouncing ball is that it's only true way to learn, to play. Learned a basic exercise which is very simple, but let's not cheat ourselves here. You have to play around with it and experiment what you can do by modifying timing and spacing and arcs. A good exercise in this experiment is that Asian stages to animate a bouncing ball to music. You pick like a rhythm or something, you put it on your Maya timeline and you essentially animate a bouncing ball to music. And actually are good practice a lot of people do for their sharps is that they pick up a piece of music that they like and they animate the shots to that music. Because one of the skills that you need to develop is to find a rhythm to each movement. Because appealing movement always have I written. And a bouncing ball especially will have a rhythm like a pump, pump. Bottles with varying weight will have a different rhythm like a bowling ball will have a ping-pong ball. 25. Why the Bouncing Ball is Important: The bouncing ball exercise, which a lot of people consider it a boring exercise, is actually one of the most fundamental exercises. Remember, learning the development of cognitive skills. You can imagine them as ignoring muscles, but the difference is it's been muscle building and learning a skill like music or animation is that you first have to create the muscle. You have to create a proper encoding your brain. That's the core of cognitive psychology. If you don't encoded properly, you cannot reconstruct it effortlessly. Remember when you learned to walk first, took one step, then another, and then you'll learn this forever. Even if you've got Alzheimer's, I can type even when I feel really sick and I feel sick often, animation should be the same way for you. The goal of this curriculum is to make this craft as easy as pooping. Remember, while there are 12 principles of animation, there are only a few cognitive skills required that you have to train to perfection extent in order to get good at it. Number one skill it will start to training from the bouncing ball is timing and spacing. Once you master that, you will be able to create a sense of rhythm. And you will see that each and every movement in the universe has our rhythm. Once you master this, you will develop a sense of rhythm. And you will see that H and every in the universe, including any bouncing ball you'll analyze, has a rhythm. And the more you analyze your bowling ball and under movements tomorrow you'll see the rhythm everywhere. Develop your animators. I, just like a musician sees that each and every sound has a rhythm. You will be able to do that. But the movement after you finish your training, there are people who can play songs intuitively, simply because they see the true rhythm of music instinctively without distortion. To animate. This is same as learning to draw. You're teaching yourself to observe the truth of the world as it is, and how to push this truth for appeal. That's why the worst thing you can do is to learn this academically and try to memorize stuff. Animation is a craft. Know that theoretical discipline, historically I'll pleasure of humans halves came from the craft, nothing else mattered. The flow state of their work was the only thing that kept them going. Timing and spacing is the first scale we'll focus on. Other skills will come later. Remember, an art class is like a gym class. Every proper sportsman will tell you that you need to train your form similar to that, you're training your form and you'll have to train it a lot. You have to integrate through seeing of movement in your brain by analyzing movement and analyzing at the animations of others. Practice it and learn how to see. That's why I'm always emphasizing analyzing live-action reference. Because by analyzing live-action reference and animation, you're slowly teach yourself to see, which takes a long time. That's why we'll do a lot of animations in this course. You'll learn this the best way through experimentation. So after you finished your first bouncing ball, remember animations, the art of cheating. Generally snappy, your timing is more appealing. So the way animators treatise that they really focused on the key poses, hold the people this for a long time. This is how you do limit it to the animation, to animate is all about that limited animation. When you hold your key poses, you can try experimenting and did with the bouncing ball. You can notice that it tends to be more appealing with the spacing isn't even what a pulse is favored in the appropriate way. It's like a rhythm to each bounce and the snappier the rhythm is, the more appealing it is achieved. Used in limited animation is to make key poses and hold them for as long as possible. And whenever there's movement, you make it really fast so that people will not see the mistake. That's the only way to make it appealing without reference. 26. Spacing Chart Secrets: Again, when analyzing your live action reference and creating your thumbnails, which is your plan for your animation. Don't worry about frame numbers. Worry about spacing, the easing in and easing out. Make spacing charts which are drawing arcs and then drawing little lines that signify the spacing. The closer the lines are together on thumbnail, this lawyer or your animation is a more spaced out. They are, the faster the movement is because less frames are given to it. Generally in a movement because we're not animating real life, but we're animating Reality. Plus, we want to push the extremes are a little bit meaning we want to make things ease in and ease out of a movement a bit more than they would in real life. That's why generally if you copy live-action reference one-by-one without pushing it, it will look bad. And this is actually a secret to very pushed cartoony animation versus more realistic animation. In cartoony animation, you will want to exaggerate the timing and spacing by making the slow ends more slow and the whitespaces more wide. So essentially, you'll have a more extreme ease in and ease out even in something as simple as a bouncing ball, you can make it more pushed by pushing the timing and spacing. As we mentioned before. In animation, there are things that are objectively bad and thinks that are subjectively good or bad. No matter how good you are, you will always get notes on things that are subjectively good or bad because you cannot read your directors might generally they have their own vision. But nine times out of ten, there are things that are objectively good or bad. E.g. even spacing in a bouncing ball is objectively bad. If you have that, it meets your lead. My interpellate, you were not doing your job as an animator. While, on the other hand, our bouncing ball and even a stationary bouncing ball, you'll want scroll spacing in the beginning and then larger spacing after it accelerates in one acceleration and the acceleration, animating the bouncing ball trains your sense of timing and spacing and teaches you how to notice, ease in and ease out and arcs. This is what this exercise is truly for. It's not about all. I've animated, a bouncing ball. I'm an animator now know it's like a push drop to train your cognitive skills. Which is the skill of identifying the rhythm of our movement and identifying the arcs of our movement, how to push acceleration and the acceleration. 27. The Importance of Feedback: Be very demanding of yourself. Really push yourself to do this exercise well, because if you do it well, you will drill into your subconscious mind is the basics of timing and spacing, which will help you with less than a standard future. Do not underestimate this assignment. You might think that I'll get it done in an hour. No, you want because you have to not only poles, those bouncing balls from my thumbnails. You also have to analyze your live action reference and make your own bouncing ball across the screen. The truth is that to develop this skill properly, you to practice this at least 3 h per day for at least over two years. Don't practice animation for 3 h per day. For at least two years, you will not get the necessary skills you require to get hired. That's the only real way to get really good at this. Ready to sit down and do the work. You have to do it a lot. If your first bouncing ball is not good, One other and then do another until you get a good one. Remember, try your best with each assignment and try to polish them up as much as possible. Because the way you learn is to recreate essentially finished art pieces and something that looks good. So while this bouncing ball, I want you to analyze the live-action movements or analyze the references and see and ask yourself how you can push the movement even if it's such a simple exercise. Remember, you want to make mistakes while animating and you want to tweak your poses. Embrace failure and fatal heart. And also you have to learn how to embrace criticism in this business. So show your shots to your friends and learn how to implement nodes. Because in RStudio you will have a shot. And during your day least you will show to a director and you show it again unless you address denotes that you are given or you're fired. So implementing denotes you're given is also very important. Now professional. Again, animation will always be an artist is unintuitive art. That's why we always work in phases. Because in a professional studio, people give you feedback every day. They show for notes and they show for feedback. No shot in a feature animated movie was ever created without feedback from your supervisor or director. There's always someone telling you how to make it better. And in a studio working for a client, It's not a place to let your personality be expressed. You're doing work for a client, you have a shot. Get notes, show that you implemented the notes. That's all. You improve it, how they want it to be improved. You give them what they want. A job in which you're essentially a server. So again, let's reiterated the pipeline. We get one shot and animation. Without defined camera angle, you animate that one shot, nothing else. You get feedback on that one shot. The things that are objectively right or wrong, like timing and spacing and arcs, you're expected to pretty much have perfectly done. But there are some things that are objectively good or bad and things that are subjectively good and bad. Most of the notes, if you're good, will be about the things that are subjectively good or bad, like your director's vision. If you're a director gives you feedback on your shot and you fail to implement it, it will be fired. So definitely learn how to implement feedback. So get in the habit of showing your animation, getting notes in implementing the notes because you need that skill in what are working. 28. Put Your Thumbnails into Maya: So we drew our thumbnails based on our animation analysis. So now we'll make our little camera view here. We'll go into the left because we will only be animating on two axes. Here. Let's create a little layout here. Meaning I'll just create a floor here. Very simple floor. We added to lay a layer, create layer from selected, referenced it so we don't have to touch it. And now let's save our file. Colored balls, bouncing ball across the screen, 01. And we're now, I now teach you a trick about the determinant yelling, It's that you have picked your camera as this. You would like it to go and go to Camera, Lock camera. And you can go to image plane, input image. And if you put your thumbnails in the product for a folder called source images, you'll be able to import your thumbnails. And bam, we have our thumbnail here, our plan of animation. You just have to zoom in or zoom it in order here the problem is in front of us. And that's makes sense. We go essentially to translate x and put it back like 500 points. We then extended move it a bit. So here we can for awhile, we'll hide our little background here. We will just stick to the plan, so to speak. You can also make a transparent. But for now I think you can actually increase that type of thing. If you zoom in with the middle, if you click to zoom in a new president, middle Lucan. A minute. And that's why I can also adjust your camera. They're not married to it for now. And our own project there. I think this is, this is a good plan of animation. But the advantage of it is that we have everything drawn out and we have no guesswork, and we locked the cameras, so don't we don't mess with it. But this is almost all of the work is done for us here. Because we took our live action referenced, analyze it, and drew a plan, and then imported a plan to Maya. Because remember, nine times out of ten it will be animating in a static camera. So you'll have utils pretty much draw on top of it. Then it's always the same resolution or the HD resolution. You make thumbnails and data resolution and you pretty much plan it out, so to speak, then you just follow the plan. That's the best way to do it because the most you have, if you have any basics of drying, it's way faster to plan and iterate on paper. That's why I'll make a different course called drawing for 3D animators without talent, but that's a future course. So here we have our thumbnails. So let's import the Rick. And again, it's always the same workflow. That's why I want you to learn gathering reference, analyzing reference, making. Thumbnails are drawing plan based on their analysis. Blocking out, keep golden poses, the most important poses. Blocking down the timing pauses and timing and spacing poses, which is the breakdowns. And then polar dressed. Remember, in terms of workflow, no matter what animation you'll do is always the same step-by-step process. One Godot reference. It can be referenced from other animations of the same movement and can be live-action reference. Or if you cannot find any reference to record it yourself using your phone. If you don't have a phone, get our camera from somewhere else, buy it on eBay. To you analyze the reference and you iterate on it. You, you analyze the arcs, you analyze the timing and spacing. You analyze the key poses. And then you put it on paper and you try to push it on paper. How can I bake the RPA is better? How can I make the timing and spacing snap here and better, more cartoony? How can I push the poses and make them more expressive than once? You've iterated on these ten times on the same thumbnail, you'll go to Maya, import your plan in an image plane and you have it in front of you while you animate. And then you follow your plan and you animate, you block out your key poses first, meaning the golden poses, which are distorting, telling poses, and then the extremes, which are any change in direction. Then you work on breakdowns. And you always to animate first on stepped curves. So you first go to animation and gold linear and stepped. And you adjust your timeline slider to have the length of your animation. And actually if you're working on a longer animation, sometimes this happens when you have a longer scene. You will still work in like 100 frame for comments to make it more manageable. Number error, beginning error. A lot of people will start with frame y is zero. And that's one error. You started with frame one. Or if you're doing some previous as you and you're making it your own shot. You can start with frame 100, because if you're doing entering a visualization work or any simulation work you need to frames for the simulation quite enough to start working, to load. But that's about it. We have our bouncing ball. So let's do the same thing as always. We can select our two controllers. Controllers, create a selection set using an unbarred. Now let's continue this in the next lesson. 29. Block Out Your Golden Poses: Okay, let's pose are extremes. Go on frame one. Because here we can make an exception and move the camera here. So you can see the frame one will be here. We will first select our tree controllers, squash down lower, and then move controller. And we create a selection set. And then bought the selection set will be this icon, bottle one. We know we can also create a selection set for the main Move controller file. Oh, maybe using just squash ball. There you go. Then we can select them like this. This makes it very easy because we can tie it to our keyboard shortcut and I can just select them, whatever. I actually have most of those things on a keyboard shortcut, but I'll be showing you when I use them. So okay. We select all can be moved. We select all controllers, heat them. And we move the ball on the first frame and its position here. Correct? Now, if we looked at the reference which is here, you know that the first balance will be ten frames. We'll put the frame. On frame ten. We put another key, laptop keys. Ball. I liked the channel box for precision. We created our first key pose. Let's create the rest. Remember, you should be on step two keys. Very often. It will be, they'll create one Alto key because that's like the default. You just select E-step, right-click stepped. And now we'll go to frame nine now. And we'll essentially take every one frame from each bounce, got to nine. We've positioned at ball key frames. Now we go to the next keyframe and so on and so on. I'll speed this up. Just simply use our thumbnails and our reference. Now reference for the numbers. Nothing could be easier. Vandalized your reference and now you know the timing on this space. You can see here we have nine frames. This bounce and the next bounce, as we can see on our reference here. Next vowel bounce. Six frames, I'll be out alive. We even have the numbers here, six or so. We can essentially do some math and add numbers when D7 plus six is two to three. That's where our top. And really most of the Java was an animators to find reference, record, reference, analyze the reference, and analyze, analyze, analyze. Analysis is key here. Remember I'm using that key when I have a channel bucks and I don't want it, I have a keyboard shortcuts for clearing the channel box. Thanks to anime, but thanks, Allan bought. Remember we wanna have a key on all the controllers as we block because that's important for retirement. So we have the ball here. Remember when you're making your own ball, tried to find our rid of a lot of people. Find a rhythm, true Sal, example, let's play this ball and hear how it sounds like dupe. Every bottle has a rhythm and you need to develop the sense of rhythm by analyzing reference. There's nothing that will teach you this other than work, our hard work an hour. Some people might be averse to that, but that's the true. Because high-quality animations made frame-by-frame and Maya will not do anything for it. Especially if you want something that will be liked for the way it looks. Because it didn't the animations specifically, to be fair, people will hate me for it. A lot of its plot is actually nothing special. It's the design and pretty much craftsmanship of the animation that attracts people. Disney has ended job of creating eye candy, which is essentially creating a reality. Plus, Without did this, they wouldn't have much. Well, for sure, we essentially have to learn how to make Reality. Plus, we want to get a job That's tries to make film 3D fills. That's just the way it is. You cannot just be able to know how to blindly copy reference would practice. You have to think about pushing it a reference. The only way to deal with this practice, you know the principles, you know the rules. But after awhile I can teach you the basics of writing e.g. but to be a great novelist and work professionally as a novelist or artist. Awhile, this will come from your working. Good novelists read aloud and write a lot. And good animators, they animate a lot. No other way. Remember, you can use the channel box if fuel kind of eyeball it for now. Just follow your thumbnails and remember sporadically, go to File Increment and Save As from here loves to crash. And when maya crashes, now part-time. And if we have keyframes on all keys, don't like good boys. Good voice. We can even retirement using uninvolved by using shortcut keys, e.g. if I have this balanced on one or two frames and I wanted to one frame, I can already retirement using shortcut keys and Mikey 100 keyboard. It is 1.2 for selected etc. But I personally use shortcut keys because I really loved my shortcut keys. Remember you can also use the graph editor. Yeah, visualize spacing and if you decide, okay, in the live action reference there, in my thumbnails and live-action reference. Now there was this additional balance here, and I don't like it, so I will not use it. I can just pretty much remove that bounds and instead make a more of a slow and can make dose rate of decisions. And this is an advantage of 3D animation versus 2D animation because you see everything visible life mathematically it can, you really polish it up To an extent due to the enemies could never handled, especially to the frame-by-frame animation. If you would watch, how about Disney gargoyles are unable to series. They called poses for a long time. They have way less acting compared to like a Pixar movie. So really, in terms of the craft of animation on its own, 3D animation is way more challenging because you need to know more, because it's more, less forgivable. I'll see you in the next lesson. 30. Block out Your Extremes: So now we're blocking out the key poses. We've blocked out proposers decided we don't want the last bounds, that we just want the small bounds and then or 100 frames. This will move here where it will slow down. So we'll just again select our piece to move. This whole be in the habit of keying out. So now we have our main keyframes done. We can incrementally save. And now we'll create the ease ends because as you can see, the ease ends here also change the direction and that's the most important thing. But we can also keep the tape timing and mind. Here. We go four frames in the future here and move this ball. Remember, you can even check the timing now and see if you like the feel of it. See the thing about a nation pushing down animations that you have to play. Blast this. Look at it. My nano house catched playback, which makes it so you don't have to play blasted. Remember play blasting. Introduce creating a video file from our animation so you can preview it and you're all bro, software catched playback. It's here is essentially makes sure that you'll be playing the frames in real time with my, I struggled with in the past. But you can just play blast and make a video file, but that takes awhile depending on how complex your animation. So I like this V0 ANOVA, cartoony feel that I'm making the ease ends now. Preview the timing, but if I press play, I have a short cut to flip between the keyframes and notice those arcs like here. You essentially have to track the arcs with your eye. So that's something that you'll be doing a lot. You'll be flipping between movies like this. It will be tracking the arcs with your eyes. That's why you're analyzing and drawing the arcs in your analysis phase. Because you'll be expected to learn to track them. It's the cognitive scale you're training your eye to see it. It's like recognizing Pokey Monitor playing a lot of Pokemon games. Do you get up you two of it. Like whatever thing, when you first learned to read, you didn't recognize words. But after awhile, I think at least 50% of Americans can now recognize words just by looking at learning to animators are a lot like learning to read this series. Of course this is not about, I'll teach you a software because that's not the important thing. The important thing is learning the animation prints appealing eigenspace. Nice arcs. And remember, don't worry about the timing as much here. Like try to guesstimated, but know that you'll be able to track it in jet and you're expected to play blast it and see if it works. Ready on the wall arms. Okay. Let's check our timing. Now. Remember increment and save and let's track our isn't Saudi look like I like the feel of what this ball see. We did here. We blocked out the ease outs because any sense, because they're responsible for direction change. Remember, extremes are responsible for direction change is that you can see this kind of modifies the RPR, so we had to plan it out, lock it out. Now, after this will block out the squash and stretch. You can do on the numerous, why isn't everyone kind of has its own way of doing it. But I like to kind of manually. It's the way I'm about to read Time something. You select all keys and either shift click and select here. Or you can select it in the graph editor and move it by pressing Shift and moving it like this. Or you can just use keyboard shortcuts like, I don't. This is a stretch. Maybe a bit too big. That's very common. Arab will have. So very common error of one to make this kind of really cartoony feel. So I'll take between machine here, like the ball. Matchmaker did the same pulse, that's this one. And now essentially add a stretch here. That's why I have those selection sets that they make. They make things a lot easier. Just District. As you can see, this stretches on auto key, so we already have to go and Bartok select all 0s, solve it on the screen because I don't like it cluttering up my interface generally I have it everything hidden, then I just look at the green. And of course here we will have a squash. Let's have the bigger squash here. Let's make it stretch here. Okay, Let's continue this in the next lesson. 31. Create Your Breakdowns Part One: Well, again, here we will use the tween machine will go ball tween. This is what it would be in the middle, and this is what Maya would automatically do if you press it tween and the middle, we're kind of seeing what would my automatically do in this kind of timeline. If you like, go to the middle of the keys, then you press the middle. Are like This. Pretty much see how Maya would interpellate naturally. Sometimes the only way to track with this tool, play blast it. Okay, this looks okay for now. Let's do another squash here. So here we have to read, reset to the squash and stretch. So we go to this ball squash controller and we use the reset pulse key, which an anime bot is this key. See it zeros out everything. Generally to do this with a more advanced read, like a character rig before animating, to select all your controllers and create a bundled snapshot. You can read more about it by all vary over n. And Barton rename this description here, which is annoying, but it is what it is. Now as you can see, Maya doesn't do the arcs well and you have to really manually control are the breakdown keys to keep the arcs. And this is what this exercise is supposed to teach you that, Oh look, Maya doesn't do anything for you. It's kind of similar to what my school taught me as a kid. That you have to count on yourself because no one will teach you anything unless you buy my course. Then I'll teach you. Struggled guy. Here we see, maybe we can move this a bit. Here. Remember it's all about tweaking. Animation is all about tweaking because you will not have to get it right the first time. The leader key, you select all and right-click and delete some time. So accidentally we'll keep things sometimes. And that's why you have to, especially with the squash and stretch, you have too much. Make sure that it's correct. Frame by frame. I'm going to go in and creating a breakdown. Polo's care will create. Remember, here we have a big splash. You can even see, no, we'll create the squash for this pose. You can see the squash. We analyze it before. The squash will get smaller with each bounce. So here we have like 0.5. So here we can even copy the Val. We can like know what value this would be. Like lower it. We can say dust. Because you can also would specifically with the bowel bounds, you can calculate The energy losses by how many frames it lost. So right now, this is a difference, 9-6 frames, we analyze this. So here with this stretch, it would be about one-third less salt want. So will essentially have at 0.3 can Avatar than equal c. So here we see that it's smaller. Similarly with the stretcher, we can get our controller and CR bigger stretch whilst 0.8 pretty much. Here. This brings me to another point in animation, especially if you want to do fast animation in the animation. Because a feature length animation you will have 1 million controllers and you'll be expected to use all of them in TV quality animation. The less you use, the better. 32. Create Your Breakdowns Part Two: Pretty view our animation now and see how it doesn't look bad and it looks pretty okay. Simple workflow, simple recipe, and it works. Just make a keyframe here in the middle. You are also stretch like this. Remember just kind of stretch Translate Y was about nine here. Now here it was 1.7. So here we'll have 1.6. The tweeter, too much between are all selected balls. This. Then we select the cache controller. Move it around. Yeah. And now we'll break it up, break down between those two frames. Here. Say what the tweet Here. Bad. Maybe. Stretch here a bit. Like, hey, we're a bit the previous pose. So there's more of a gap here. By bouncy. Of course, you have to always address the arcs. That's why you drew them. As they are important for this reason. Stretch here. Yeah. It's all about sculpting the movement or appeal. Let's preview this. Let's preview this MC I would place. This brings us to another option of atom, but that is actually less known. You can go to animation, timeline, extra tools, or auto play blast the visibility mode. What this does is that when you, when you select play, the controllers disappear and image planes disappears. So you'll see the animation, how you're supposed to see it. I liked the rhythm of this. Definitely has the same rhythm. Remember for an animation movement, to read like a movement and to let my interpellate without much errors, you would need a keyframe on at least every four frames. That's when you can kind of go to supply. So that's when you transition from a blocking plus phase where you create those overlaps too like car, line phase. So here we have four frames, so you go on in-between frames, select all controllers. Here we essentially use this retro controller. Controller. But here we do the same last time. Oh yeah. Make sure that the strategy wasn't stretches lower. Here. That's time it was six. Let's make it zero point 4.5. This is maximum precision, just arcs. And you really will get a feel of it by flipping between your blocking. I have controlled and arrow keys on our keyboard and you can see flipping between the keys and noticing the arcs. That's a technique that's actually from 2D frame-by-frame animation. Frame-by-frame animators have to do it too and be fair. 3d frame-by-frame animators to do it too. Because the timing is the easiest thing ever in Maya. But you have to worry about really it's deposing. That's, that's what it'll get you. I can have like 0.0, 0.4 thread. Now, also create a tween here, arcs to speak. So you really have to manually shape. Those are the specialty if you have a more complicated rate, because it's just how it is. Remember they're not rewarded for curves looking nicer rewarded for the animation itself. Okay? Like getting better and better with every block. See you in the next. 33. Let's Polish Our Animation: Okay, so let's continue adding our breakdowns. These are already on tools, so these should be fine. Squash five. So let's add a one minus zero minus two. As you can see this question straight to get smaller with every bounce because the ball loses energy. And that's a principle that's important for all bouncing balls. When you will do a bouncing ball with varying wait. There's more. Here. The squash and stretch kind of creates issues so you have to reset it. Here. It would be zero point -0.1. And that's the cool thing about Maya because it lets you to, lets you create this kind of mathematical precision. Maybe we'll add a very small squash minus zero, -0.505. Then remember here we want this ball to slow in, so definitely will favor the middle and low. However the end. And you can always use your graph editor to like teach you if the values are getting smaller and smaller. So we can select this squash or you can select our squash controller. We can look at the graph editor window. You can even go to Windows animation Editors, Graph Editor to graph editor. And we can then the, now and look at the curves here, look as load curve. And we can see that the app curves are progressively getting smaller. Essentially, this is what we want. Let's preview this animation and see how it looks like. See the timing and spacing looks pretty good. And it's all because we did a specific workflow, reference and reference, gathering reference, analyzing reference, drawing thumbnails based on the analysis, importing the thumbnails into my IVI image plane, then opposing the most important poses, the golden poses which are distorted, the tailoring poses, the extremes which are changes in directions. And then you pose the breakdowns which are responsible for timing and spacing and sometimes arcs. So you always work in phases, sometimes in a more complicated shot, you break it down further phases because you always trump your work. That's how every workflow works. Computer programmers first have a similar workflow where first write pseudocode and define what a given software has to do. And then they essentially do the red. This is not a programming course, but know that everything works this way. That's pretty much human or human progress has been made by creating a system. I'm giving you my system, which is a proven system so we can learn it. Then after you learn this one system, you can maybe learn other systems and integrate them. What for one, stick to one process. You just have to learn one process and one software and use it for the rest of your life. There's nothing else you actually need to do here. That's hard. Maybe log this out to at least some fours or fives. Again. Select all of the bulb controllers and say, Yeah. Also, if you ever want to create an ease in like that, what you can do is you can go to Windows. That's again, duplicate the graph editor window and drag it out. And if we check the Z key here, the key which is the width, just want like a very strong ease in. We can just use this slider to create almost a complete e is n because this kind of calculated automatically when you use one curve that essentially allows you to do that. In the event, preview it using octal tangents. Can of course modify the values to then use the ease. And again, we want this to be smaller. I want this movement to be really slow. Normally we would have to adjust all the keyframes, but here we can just use the Ethernet gets out slider. Let's look. Even at this point, we have frames that are around every fourth key. So we can already got two Increment and Save and go to our Polish ways. To do that. We just select, Move here and go to Auto. Customer. Doesn't matter. We only use Annenberg for this anyway. We'll use antibodies for this anyway. We'll just select ball and pick here. Best guess tangent. Tangents. Best guess that kind of guesses. What tangent to apply here and here. And the polish phase, we will essentially go through every curve and make sure it works. So let's preview our animation so far. Here. It actually has some errors in it as we can see. I'll say here. Let's look what's wrong. Floating. Again, we copied reality like one-on-one here. And essentially a thing you can do make it less flow to you is cut to the frame. And then Bob has shortcut where you can time by just taking frames away between two frames. I hope it does control one and control too. See I immediately looks better. Every frame counts here. You are expected to re-time this because timing, something that you have to correct in 3D software because you're not. Here, we just copied directly from reality. And generally what you wanna do is improve upon it and you improve upon it by well, taking timing away mostly because things need to be faster. Our attention spans are lower. In appealing things work fast. Actually. This frame away immediately looks better. Here. Actually add frames here. So I'll do the shortcut key control to, well, having all key selected and I'm essentially adding and taking away keys between key poses. I would actually also add keys. Make it slower. Remember in permanent and save my Aleks to crash. And when it crashes, want to be happy. See, we had our poses, correct. Would now at this time we modify the timing and you just have to play blasted a few times and see if parts of it look floaty to you. And you have to go frame by frame. And if you'll see, oh, I might have some stretch here or you see some errors kind of expected to correct them. Here. I would actually add that stretch right here and move it up it here. Here. Most animators say that you should really wait till you go to spline until you have a keyframe on every second frame or every third. But I've found that every term in the beginning, when you're still learning helps you visualize the action and actually understand that the movement better because you see how it all interpolates. So this shows the importance of planning and animation and in polishing and tweaking. As you can tweak this for a long, long time until it's perfect. And you can look at the curves tool here. I can rotate this out. Men like curve. Remember to pick the correct controller. This one. Again, if it looks too fast, you can add frames. Take away frames. It's like really up to play, blast it and feel it at this point in the polish phase. And this comes from experience animating and analyzing animation. Of course, move keyframes tool, e.g. this frame. When I moved here, or maybe you tweak it and play around with it at this point. Let's done. Yeah, I actually don't like those keys, so I can do an experiment to see how they would work if I try it. This is the stage that's like the worst stage when you're working on that professional animation. Because often enough you don't know how to polish it correctly. And now you would like to do this and this. E.g. here, see how anime bot will do. Now I think this looks a bit better. See you tweak the curves, use all the antibodies sliders and essentially polish the animation at this phase. Then we have our lovely bouncing ball using a pretty simple recipe. Now you try to animate a bouncing ball, fine reference, analyze the reference. But most of all, make sure to notice any errors. Samantha, e.g. here. Somehow our ball deleted the stretch here and that happens. We can also use this graph editor here as a reference. I would like to. Now we see that it's meant to be a liquid squash. Well, down in between this one and this one. It has to be, it has to be smaller, smaller than this one and larger than this one. So let's play blast now. Now Fetal sweat bat are actually would remove a frame from this balance. Now, let's see how it looks like now. Often enough you have to manually adjusted the keys in the tangents, pretty much responsible for like interpolation. So what we can do is like hold Control and Shift and middle mouse button. And you'll essentially hold shift and drag, drag only on one axis. And you can essentially this kind of curve that way. You'll play around with tangents and the polish phase, which is what we're doing right now. So let's look how it looks like now. Again, I would just looks better. Adjust the keyframes until you get them right. Speaker. Just curves to the values with the sliders where you select them on lower than I've just drawn here. And that z, Let's see how it looks like. Last curve here. We can also do something called weighted tangents. What our weighted tangents, you can essentially go to our weighted tangent and then you can extend it like this. Maybe remove this key just to illustrate a point where we have this essentially extended the tangent to create an ease in that way. You're essentially control the movement curve. Because I really want this ball to slow down for a long time and this is actually the easiest way to do, to do it. That's because we all already about golden poses made. We don't to actually stress about it. We work in status. We got our lovely slow down. Again. Maybe lower values have been less floaty. Now it looks better in my opinion. Can we polish this bouncing ball? And of course, polish at more than they were expected to follow that white marble. Well, oh yeah. If you want to add a rotation, Let's add rotate the trial adding rotation to this ball. And actually I didn't, rotation is not that hard because it would be pretty linear. So there's a separate rotation controller on this reg, this one. And it would rotate only in one axis, which we will do in the next lesson. 34. Let's Add Wheel Rotations: Now we have our bouncing ball pretty much finished. It's pretty okay, it's good enough. But now we have to calculate the bowel rotations. The bowel rotations are actually a very strict mathematical formula, which is distance travelled divided by both circumference multiplied by 360. Then you add the existing rotation if there is any here, the distance traveled. So what does the ball circumference then you would take a tape measure and wrap it around the ball. That would be the circumference. There's a very simple mathematical formula to calculate that. It's two multiplies by Pi, which is 3.14. We can simplify it because Roundup multiplied by the radius and the radius amount is very easy to see. Because when you take a ball and you put it on a grid like here. Here, e.g. you will see that it takes two spaces in degree grid, which means this one grid point is 1 cm. So we know that this ball is about 2 cm in length. So the formula would be two multiplied by 3.14, which would be 6.28 multiplied by two, which is 12th, 12th, 56. The distance traveled is very easy to identify and treat any software. You just take the value that here and copy it. So we already have all the numbers we need. We go to the rotation and we can see it here. Okay, it in the beginning. Because we want it to be zero in the beginning. Remove all the other keyframes that might be here. And we just type in RFC translate value here. We use our shortcuts that we learned, which is divide equals 12, 56. And now we multiply equals 360. We got the appropriate rotation value. The problem is that we don't have the correct ease in. So take this controller. Notice that the curves are kinda foggy. I have to add draft to the old curves. Can also use the tween machine to help us adjust it a bit. Breaking a key. Here. There we go. We finished our bow rotation. Therefore we finished the bowl. Next, our guide, my assistant Jasmine, through animating her own bouncing ball so you can follow around with her. 35. Animate With Us Part One: Reference: Jasmine, as you can see here, we have the bouncing ball. I can give you your homework with. First thing is ago, you go to YouTube and find some bouncing ball animation reference for you to base your animation because we are actually replicating the whole workflow you'll have in your job. Like watching Disney movies over and over, frame-by-frame. Google bouncing ball, right? That's step one. You will reference and then you analyze the reference to like, notice that this is like up quicker and it's a little slow. Regardless. We did that analysis previously in the case of Jasmine, so she doesn't have to do it. She just has to come sit down and animate a bouncing ball using this girl she learned in the previous graph as we know. In the next lesson, I will notice builds on top of one another. A lot of tutorials don't recognize this and kind of, and then they lose clarity here I assume you, I integrated the knowledge from the previous lesson before we go to the next lesson. As it's a series of progressive skills that you need to get in order to have a coherent whole. Animation is just being very good. Are the few very simple skills. Do you want pre-made style nails or do you want to challenge yourself and actually analyze a bowl and draw your own thumbnails. You'll have two options of difficulty for this exercise. Please pick the one that you are willing to actually do the introductions. So if you were going to draw it, I'll nail drawn it to note in our detailed way, like it's the most precious will cover whenever we make a product in Maya, we put all our thumbnails and source images folder, and we make a folder called Tom who may else. We put the top of Mel's to all their Ananda. When we go to Maya and go to Maya bounds, we go to View image plane, import image. And we'll have our little bouncy involve thinking magic and their source images folder where we saved it. We can find thumbnails, soft folder, you cannot find it. You can copy the address and get to that way. Let's see, we have created an image plane. And this image plane, we'll, we'll resize it and then we will lock the camera. Now it's your turn. I did. I left this image lane in a bad position. Can you make it a good physician so they can plan out your animation in your shot. First, let's go to View. Lock it, make sure it's locked. Camera so you don't move your shot cow. We have we'll be animating in 2D here. So we add, establish, establish that this is a metric plane, is the sharp car orthographic plane as the shot the camera, this is your camera where you use the picker. Here. You can use the picker or you can turn off the bigger. So here we have the thumbnails. These are Say's law and then put them on it. Another layer. And you know, a good job playing around to reposition this match plane. Make sure you have it in the exact position where we will animate. Then we'll put it on a layer and reference the layer so we will not move with accident. This is pretty much up also the part of the pre-planning stage, setting up your thumbnails on discrete. Very proud of you. Had to patch studio that Jasmine's do a very good job at doing this. Hope you're also doing equally good job in this course will also give you an example of how much you're expected to take on each assignment, because Jasmine's doing it in real time. One of the biggest problem online learners, according to some studies, that they do not know how much time is required for a given assignment. By giving you a recording of it in real time, I'm able to emulate it to you and provide are very comfortable with arrays to create the illusion that there's a teacher with you right here, right now. Well actually over we're back brazing you for doing a good job, like moving this up. So we can see here, Jasmine position to this in the camera does perspective cow, we want it to animate on the other camera on the left. And remember, screen space is limited, so orb an ICER or UI in a way that's very space efficient. So here we have locked camera. Here. Once we have set up our thumbnails, we got two layers. Create layer from selected, because this creates a layer which you can reference so that you don't accidentally touch it. We do not Camera. Think of it as your state D while the weighing of like welding, you do lock camera at air so you don't accidentally touch it and make a mistake. You're doing great. We've finished this one phase. Remember, always increment and save sporadically Control Alt S on my keyboard shortcut. But yours might be different. You're doing great. We always select all the controllers we're going to animate with us. We're just good practice so I can ground are you select squash and stretch one. This one from lower here to create what is called a selection set, which you can name it what you want, Ball, Ball. And now you can select all keys. Then you can create our selection set for today's main controller here. And you go with vol. Remember the artistic role, avoid needless words and making the most elegant solution. So only pick the controllers you'll be animating, we won't be animating the rotation controller in this exercise until later, so we can leave it onto later and not killed on the spot. So here we go with squash crawler. For this assignment, we only need one squash controller, so we really only need two controllers to animate the whole animation. So select the bowel all out there of them are selected. But look, we don't need this controller. What do we do? We just controller will go ball either. Go here to remove selection. We're not know we have bought all intersect x, both controllers. And then when you key clicking S will kit on both controllers. Theory, sometimes it's at the bugs out, but that's a good practice because it saves you time. You're doing great. I'm very proud of the all the all control selection is only there for making sure that before we move to the next keyframe, all of them selected and press S because then it will allow you to retain your animation better, Okay, But reanimate the first movement. You only select the doll move controller. Then you really have to move the ball without affecting daughter controllers. I really think this format, it's good. You're doing great. Now I put it on the wrong key. That's okay. That's why 3D animation is so easy. You can just move it. And if you have, say like the auto key, it will update itself. Ok, jake, No, It's illusion. It higher, which means illusion in Sanskrit, you're doing great. How many frames remaking this new pasture set this before you doing Good? 200 frames is okay, but you can analyze the most ball bounces are like 100 frames, but this will be okay. It depending on the ball, it will be longer or shorter. Remember, the first ball bounces will take the most time, then they will progressively take less time and be shorter, okay? So the whatever value you pick will determine the number of bounces. And then you have to make them different. Divided, like one-third plus one-third less, one-third less. You ready? This is actually a pretty mathematical exercise if you think about it, because they're losing energy in one-third of its energy won't hurt a little bit, Simon, etc. That's essentially the math behind us. Because for all spiritual understanding of numerology and ulnar, ancient or chemical techniques, teach you the number three is the number of appeal. So when you take one-third of something of the neutropenia, you're doing great. You're positioning the key poses. And remember that each bounce take out we were like wireframe from each bounce. So if your loan balance is ten for the keyframes, the next one should be taken about one-third of goods sold should be seven keyframes. As you take back onto the way, a lot of animators first pose their key poses and then worry about time because you will work in phases. So about the admin demonstrated is adjustment would rather work in Valence where she animates the key poses first. Yeah, now if you try and do both at the same time when you're trying to learn the software, it gets really wherever it goes downhill. So people work. Now early on live environment you'd like to iterate ten times when one pulls back with rho, the pupils is through director without styling and you like look at them and I like it isn't this. How do we move this red thing again, that a keyframe. First select our keyframes. This is what we have. They all keyframes Select button that we created, back off. And now you can essentially either select them here and Shift to drag or you can ship called a Control Shift. Press Control Shift and left breast, left mouse click. Shift drag, not a shift to drag. It's Shift. Control Shift is just ****, touch. Then you can put shift to touch. Alright, but again, we have problems because we selected only one channel. We wanted to select every keyframe on this. So we're going to select all here. Very good. You moved it already. I'm going to move it to light. That's why I moved this. Doing great Position, two key poses. Job of doing things than sequence. And you can notice that banana meetings, basketball in Maya, you might lose track. We were bouncers are How do I delete keyframes? Shifting? Delete keyframes is just selecting them, would right-click and deleting the heirs also our keyboard shortcut for that, but I forgot that so that it remembers your deleting keyframes. You have to delete them on all the controllers because then you will have a hard time with the retirement saving. We deleted them on all the controllers because they are deleting. I pose again, the proposal to do a breakout are your key poses. And I was just trying to delete these. I will delete. That's actually something that's very common there. You can also select them then graph editor and edit them right up. Then, because e.g. you select them here. We have noticed the adjustment here has been blocking out all this time on that you have to use stepped keys and your first draft and face settings are here. And you go with animation. Stepped. Where all my keyframes are. The keys, the controllers. There are seven. Someday, you'll only interpolate on the key poses so it won't distract you, is that workflow thing because you only move on when you will have the whole story depicted. Jasmine doesn't have the whole story, the Pictet yet on step because there are all the balls on the right, there are still not blocked out. Does a common mistake that beginners make. Jasmine is doing a great job. You're doing great. As you can see, high-quality animation takes a long time because you have to print out every keyframe. That's how they do this. And if you think that you got and it's way better to learn the proper way to do it. And then like cut corners as the work done, not know the proper way to do it. Wow, You're doing great. Now. Just finished the bolster your right. As you can see, Sloan, months are often more difficult to block out, even though they're by definition, slower movements are movements that I require a lot of direction change. Mib are a lot of keyframes. They're doing a good job, became blocking out the key poses like a pro. Now, see, we'll do it here. I'm sorry, realistic estimate how long it will take you to learn this because you're doing it with ducts. You can notice that a lot of effort goes into each phase because I'm teaching you this inequality animation. And the thing about these inequality animation is that in the eighties and nineties or 70s, when the Yellow Submarine got out, which was released, the height of the population, a popularity of The Beatles. They would wear like famous singers at the time, very famous like most payments in the world. They, no one wants to update yellow submarine. The movement with teaching us like intrinsic appeal. This may essentially figured out how to make movement you will better than reality. And that's essentially will want characters on a character animators are paid to do. We haven't blocked out her key poses. Where your thoughts on this. Very good. We haven't seen all of it. Looks actually very good. Now, the next thing we will do is it will block out today. Ins and outs, which will essentially follow the curve you'd previously. Dose polis here, either that one or this one. And generally here, at this point we're kind of starting to think about timing. We moved from the blocking phase to block and phase two, we first blocked out our key Boleyn poses and extremes. And now we're breaking out, blocking out our breakdowns where timing and spacing matters. So two frames. Increments safer? Yes. Very good. You remember incremental safe? Remember to increment it saves periodically. Yeah, I definitely at least once per phase. Yeah, that's probably more frequent than that because my eyes a bit unpredictable. Yes. Maybe not for something as simple as this, but if you're doing something that's going to go into a demo reel or something that is a serious project with a budget of the moving parts. Save often. I mean, this might be excessive. I would say this like every 30 min of working at least grade. I remember an Alice retired two years later. We're cool thing about 3D animations, ability to iterate and chain rule. Pretty much. It's okay to make mistakes here because mistakes are easily correctable, especially compared to rule the frame by frame animation. Where do you make a mistake? You will have to redraw everything. And retiring as hearted. You're doing great. Maybe make the 0s and poles a bit higher so that there couldn't be more bounciness products. I've said You're doing a good job. And I'm saying that we can tell your mom that you don't have to draw it in 3D animation. Practical skill sets for the future for learning the basics of entertaining movement would just push to move with a good rhythm and timing and spacing. And we work in phases. We first work in the main key poses and then we worry about the timing. Remember too, when we move to the next keyframe, make sure to set the ball all and all deaths again because then you will keyframe on all the key controllers. Right? And don't grade. Remember you can also use the tween machine, which will make the closer to the keyframe in front or back the sliders between machine. That's why there's control Z. You only see the back offering timing, but it really helps with that stage. I'm proud of you. We're really doing a great job on the 1% of people go to where you are in discourse. Than per cent of people go to get to where you are in this course are due our animator, you are making your bowls and a proud of you. You are a warrior, you are. And then later you are an animator. I'm proud of you. I'm proud. This is actually, we wrote those salts that the timing is not that great, is because we left the timing of this to the stage. Right now we're just, we're just looking at the key poses. Can move keyframes by either selecting them, muckraking this switch here is the notch switch, or it can nudge keyframes. You're all you will not use the keyframe around witness, not just switch those keyboard shortcuts. You can use the switches and try it. Now, you can move this left or right. This is the problem in 3D animations, way, less forgiving for errors. And this happens because the z translation on one of the keys, the key right here. You would take your Move controller. Can under here. To see your controllers. We go Translate Z and click the View. Normalized view controller. We'll see. Maybe schedule it that E1. Yeah, you have extraneous Y key. That often happens. So you have to pick it out. Works. Look now this K, c, Now it works. There's bounds put also some spacing, but that's an Austrian. Don't remember, increment them. Say, you're doing very good. Fabric contract. 36. Animate With Us Part Two: Blocking: Goals selection set what? You click ball all. And in an unbarred specifically, you make sure that you have before or are we timing? You'll select all and make sure that all the key is on all the animatable controllers are set like, Oh, they're animatable controllers have keys on them. That's how you every time. You essentially every time, every time using the disk, which it left or right, all the selected controllers. And I'll deselect that case. You can use a keyboard shortcut for that. We have contained to the number here. My Maya keyboard shortcuts, trials like black, my favorite, my animation. You can press button one. You can re-time your animation in Maya either by using the Nudge tool and antibodies, or by pressing the left mouse button and dragging around the timeline. Once you have blocked out your golden poses, extremes and break down pulls us. All that's left is to re-time the animation using those tools. A lot of it will be trial and error game. Where are you essentially modify the keys, play blast them, look how they feel modified. We'd play blast, modified. We play blast. And you'll do it over and over and over again until you get it wrong. This is what we'll be doing now with Jasmine. This process is sometimes especially in the beginning, it takes a long time. Another keyboard shortcut you really need to learn in Maya, specifically Nan about is insert in-between scene and remove in-between seen. What do they do? Well, they're very good tools for retirement. Inserted in-between seen inserts on empty frame between all existing keys in your scene. If you use the workflow we're using where we keep all the animatable controllers in each and every frame. This is ultimate tool for easy retiring. Again, can you come here in the official documentation, you have a tip if you want to perform other actions, are all animation curves in your scene. You can use the select all LM curves and the scene command found in the extra selection tools. To income. Minds insert or remove empty frames between keyframes, can act on selected keys or even all keys exiting the scene. So essentially, we have our key selected, all of our controllers selected, and we use those shortcuts to either in-between frames or move in-between frame. This is hands down the easiest way to retire and I can highly recommend it. Try it out for yourself. If you have uninvolved installed. After you have read timed your breakdowns, Goldratt poses and extremes enough that the ball fields, okay. You move from the knocking face to depolarization phase. We'll do that by selecting all the curves of your animation and switching them from stepped curves to auto tangent. Or in case of anime, but you'll choose best guess. Tanned. 37. Animate With Us Part Three: Retime: Okay, So we'll be finishing the bouncing ball. Well, okay, let me check on that chicken actually. And then you can move the keyframes by selecting the selection set, select all controllers. This one, okay, lets see you are on a keyframe because you have to be on a keyframe for that, right, you can click this left, right to nudge it to two frames around frames. There's a keyboard shortcut for that too, but let's just see how that also click Control and left and right to just move keyframes. Let me just see how it looks so far. Yeah, you're right. The timing needs to be adjusted. Floating is happening. Remember that's to be expected. We focus on polling first and now we're adjusting the timing. A very common workflow and TV quality animation. Where do you just focus on the key poses and extremes and worry about the timing and breakdowns later. No, definitely going to need a chunk. Chunk your activities handle things in phases. If you're trying to do too much, in one phase, you're going to end up goof and something up and calling yourself a lot of unnecessary stress. Because noses fun, don't get me wrong. There's a lot of fun, but just learning the controls, learning how to navigate things. And you're trying to throw a bunch of stuff out on top, like just just too overwhelming. It is looking floating. It is a matter of adjusting the timing and spacing here. So let's give that a go. And ball all you said, ball. All right. Then you select all the controllers and you can essentially not drunk keyframe left or right. I personally liked doing that sometimes, but you can also select keyframe by using Shift left-click. Select them. All right, I'll try the Shift Left click. There we go. Actually they, and you can drag it. Drag it dumped out. Okay, interesting. You're doing you're doing it. I'm proud of it. Shifts the leg, move the keyframes. Remember to block out the ease ends like these poses here and here, because they also control the curve direction. Okay? Okay, well I still just adjusting timing or do well, because here's your top poles, right? So it would be better to put like move this where it was and put out 0s in here. You did a mistake here, but it shifts, seller, shift click. In this particular scenario, nudging it would be way easier. Napster Ron control, another tool that you can use, which is a tool that lets increment and save because it's buggy, is this creates essentially a trail for you to track. If you're arcs are wrong. As you can see here. We need to create an E then pose a greater good arc c. So we'll move this key. Press will not do it. So they would all fall and will not drink it in the middle. Here, like two frames before. We use the Move controller. Arc healing way. We'll do the same thing on the other side. This is a good way to visualize arcs. I think that should go to the right of the more, well, now the altar click button, move and adjust it. You can visualize the arc very well using the motion trail, a tool that 2D animators, especially to the frame moody, frame-by-frame animators. And select all controllers and all that good practice. Here you also have to block and the ethers because the ethos about bounds know the positions at the top are responsible for the arcs. So some people could consider them extreme. A good way to block them out is to essentially blocked out two frames before and after the main up position of the top of the doubts. Please do that. We're working in stages and know right now we're only focusing on ease in and ease out because they define the arcs. Extremes define the arcs. We go here, frames back. We'll go here to France back, and we'll create an event, adhere to Fred back and cretinism. Same here on the top position, here. Two frames back isn't, isn't, right? Let me think here. Let me get let me get them there. Doing good. You're doing it. Thank you. If you're watching at home and doing it, I'm proud of you too. I'm proud of you. You add the E. Oh, you gotta watch out when you're shooting for the stars and making arcs and stuff. Remember to make arcs like one or two frames after domain. Yes, that's what it's doing. You can use a keyboard, mouse click right and left keys. Navigate better. Remember to select the Move control. That's why you made this electron says, Man and bought, make your life easy. Very good. I'm proud of you. I'm proud of the student. We're making the arcs now. Frames before, and he's very good. Sure it's a nice, lovely Park. You can adjust this key in the future to, to make the arc of her. Remember, it has to be a nice, lovely, very good. In this stage, you focusing on creating arcs. Retiring will come later because retiring in my eyes, one of the easiest things to do there are keyboard shortcuts that will make it very, very easy. Also will have to make up, back down to make it more appealing arc like one frame and a small bounce like that. You can make it one frame. Before. Jasmine's animation will learn keyboard shortcut, which is an antibody specific keyboard shortcut. Vanilla Maya doesn't have it, which is removing frames between keyframes, which will allow us to very easily read time our animation. So let's go over again the steps. One, priest work. We will draw our storyboard, draw our plan, then, put the plan. Tomorrow. After that, we'll gout are golden pose this and after that. Lockout are extremes which are changes in direction due to then who will make or break downs, which are responsible for the timing, spacing. And we'll use our hands to make timing work. You're doing good, you're arcs look better. I might add a keyframe here to make this arc around, but that's small bumps is like that. The difference is negligible, was trying to figure out the timing here. And the smaller ones insurgency. Yes. Admittedly enough, you are taking your timing is a bit slow. So in some bounces, you will have to take away keyframes. And there's a shortcut for that if I can show it to right now. Well, I thought maybe I'd have to push these keyframes closer. Yes, and I wanted to show you how, okay, Matt and anime, but there's Here, Jasmine has a lot of keyframes between this little small bounce, which is way too much and creates, makes the animation very slow. So what do we do? We island but has a tool for that. It's removed in-betweens theme, which removes all the in-betweens in that scene. I have it at Control. Alt. On my keyboard. Shortcuts are optimized. For 100 keyboards. I have one that's controlled aid, which removes in-betweens of the selected controllers or Control Alt eight, which makes sure that it's in-between theme. I also have another one that's insert in-between, seen just control nine and Control Alt nine. So which correspond to mind not left and right keys. You of course, can set up your own keyboard shortcuts if you don't, don't like mine. But this is what you're gonna get. Isn't that awesome? We'll just go. So how do we do it? Control Alt. And then you go. You see how the how easy it is to retire and to add, you just press nine. Let's repeat this. You know how easy it is to retire and to add, you just press nine. This is a very good workflow because you can use keyboard shortcuts to really speed up your retirement process. I hadn't brought, allows you to jet ski through your animation and really do it fast. Well. So remember, set up your keyboard shortcuts and use them. Fast workflow is I put workflow. How Jasmine is retiring, it would speed of a tree top. I'm proud of her overall blocking of deposits. It's okay. It's snappier. A lot of in-between frames to make it snap here. Remember, appealing to the animation is always snappy. Appealing. 3d animation, especially the cartoony card is snappy. Additionally, in terms of posting, Jasmine has no squash and stretch, which makes the ball very sad. First at this question is stretched and dentist justice hiring. That's why we work in face. Do you think Jasmine, this stretch and how should this look like? This is yeah, that's a pretty lengthy gap exactly. In between these two frames. Right? Let's shave that. So here, e.g. we create an appealing squatter still has to follow the path of action, the curve. So we can create something like that. I think of like the middle of the arc, skewering, like the exact center of the bowl. You want the arm to follow to be parallel to the axes like, yes, go along math tests. Like a bead and timeless, cool thing about this bowl is that it has separate squash and stretch controller. So we can really read good quality rigs will have that, which we'll lose our alt S here. Yes, I was asked to key off. Okay. You select all the controllers and then OwlTest. Okay. You're doing great Increment and Save to not lose your work? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, every time I did safe. Thank you. Because actually Control Alt S. Go ahead and say, cool, That's already looking pretty good. Solid. We did some changes in other already looking good. C, do it with us. And you also get a good result. If we come up with arrive at about that. No, no, no, please, No, No, nobody's asking for that. You know, will ask a survey after discourse if they lacked my rhyme. So not already do I just wrote it the rotate tool. Now. I now know working on rotations would squash and stretch tool. You can translate it into the correct position. Like that? Yes. Okay. Okay. Cool thing about this rig is that the rotations are independent from the squash and stretch so it can worry about them. Last, everything is in place. That's already looking better. Well, I need to remove frames and sends its ball all, then go for it. If it's electron on ball, EM can do it. Alright, cool. Control. All eight. Yes, you are doing it. Great. Look up all the keyframes moved to the left when you press Control, I'll do all. This might be a bit too little. Grapes. Add one more. Yeah. Nine. This stretch. Suggestion. Thank you. You're doing great. You remember you didn't add the squash yet. The squadron also dissipate with each bounce. So the first class will be big and did. The next one will be a bit smaller and smaller until the room won't be any squashing and stretching those moral bounds. Okay, For some reason, it's staying squash, okay, I guess that's what it does. I don't know if there's an error, it's not. But that means there's we haven't keyed like squash and stretch and the app controller if we create bought all. And here go on the down pose here, right? We didn't have a key here in this controller and we need, well, we had it in the Move controller and that's why we call Paul and key all. Because that's what happens when you don't do that though. Let's add some nice wash. This from Vienna. It's not totally vertical, shouldn't, because next we will go to that post. Okay? E.g. here, we also need to add some lovely to see. And here, the epsilon, lovely. That's a bit much of that work. You're doing great Increment and Save. Remember laying around it, making mistakes with increment is easy and safe. And that's how you learn or make a mistake. They pay increment and save. Done extraneous key here. I was trying to adjust something. You always do adjustments of the keyboard. But it's like crooked I was trying to fix. And that's because it's one of the squash and stretch controller. We can move the squash and stretch controller a bit. On this keyframe up, down, make it less crooked here on this screw card because these questions Read Controllers. Yeah, Yeah, we'll just click on the squash button, is clicked. Okay. But I'll key. Alright. Great. Blocking out on all your controllers. Animatable controllers is required for easy retiring. If you don't do that, retirement is almost impossible. So please do that. Save yourself some headache in the future. I'm not giving you many formulas in this course because I want you to learn via playing in experimentation and giving you tools, not rules. As Glenn said, You made an extraneous key. Here. I would suggest you delete this keyframe before this one. This one, the new one or the other one. I can just do undo this one because it's like the other does. Rigs the arc. You can add a one in the middle here. We have this bill. Or we can use the trigonometry, select all, Use the tween, click tween are in the middle to see how it would interpolate. Push it towards here. As you can see, that's how you can also create nicer timing and spacing. Okay, I see. Okay. I think given sieve can play it to see the timing, then at the time, the third and the fourth bounds seem to flow T will have to adjust the timing, making them less so the outflow to the third, the fourth and fifth bounce feel Oh, no. Yeah, there's this gap here. You want to create an in-between. If you want to block out the in-between frames used to tween machine, select our controllers and use between her. I was just trying to do the Control Alt eight option where it deletes the in-between. That's fine. That could have just some timing there. Yes. Let's see if that reads a little bit better. Yeah. There's more snap there. Yes, exactly right. Timing is a good thing to practice. This ring blocking. Blocking equals with timing. Blocky equals retirement. Use the shortcuts for them. But why were these keyframes green? Sometimes unimportant, like it's key phrase made it using its twin machine as breakdown keys. Okay. This is a keyframe I made use in between machines and bought automatically tints them. Green. Men. You have finished blocking base or do you have a key frame? Or at least every four? Jasmine key poses are okay with her tiny lacking. Do you know how do you get timing? This in this bow, but this ball bounce, the timing is way too slow. To be snappier. Jasmine can also remove some keyframes everyday normal work. Yeah. That one's not working much. Yes. So you can remove that did not remember to be when you remove keyframes. Remember, go to the frame where our keyframes use control and left and right navigates to the case where our keyframes. You can select both right-click and delete. Now it works better because we removed the fat keyframe. Now we can adjust the time. You're doing great. Useful Allan bought keyboard shortcut, this is vanilla. Maya doesn't have it. That's what uninvolved is the most popular tool in all my animation. The allows you to play around with the timing. Remember kids, it's not healthy to stay on the front of the computer all the time. They copper egg and dance. Sometimes Bradley stretch. It's better for the bouncer. Still seem a bit slower, floaty. Mostly last month, right? Yeah. Yeah. The fourth and fifth month. Again, if you can always go to snap your route, it's more appealing. And you can always say, is that cartoony style. One thing you want to avoid is bloated or loyalty and weightless animation. Floating weightless animation can throw your potential employer, you don't know what you're doing. And that will prevent you from getting a job which will be staffed. See how easy retiring is when you use digital animation. Retiring like WP, very hard at traditional frame by frame animation. But here it's super easy. Jasmine's bounces are better, but there's still a bit floaty. Remember, make sure that the time of your bounces decreases with IQ bounds, like one frame less. That's one of the dangers of this work for where you lose count. That's why sometimes you have to read count. How many frames each cow is still floating here, because these have very few frames in between. Because I've met laying off pretty much your Oliver poses blocked out. So. Remember, play around adding and subtracting those frames. It's pretty easy. This one for bounces way too slow. Once you have all your poses and break down poles is made. Make sure to polish up the timing by using those two keyboard shortcuts. This is a very cool workflow to explore and get a sense of rhythm and timing and time. Another good way to get your sense of freedom and time spray is to say, listen to music, animate to music. Remember you're blocking. Blocking is not finished until you have a like polls every two frames. Jasmine has some bowel bounces in the beginning that still needs to be made on extra key poses using between machine. What do you think about this current? We're at currently here with us. This bullet bounces through slow already. I can fix Nashville to floaty. All right. Bye play blasting and then analyzing your mistakes. You're learning. To the issue here, this one. Maybe she may keyframes here. Like key-frame really slows it down. Again, select all followers. Lou, you've got like five of them and it should be like two of them. Yeah, this is excessive. I would let go of this one. So now the Euro deep, you want to remove this thing here. It's way too long. Because remember the ball is losing energy progressively. So this bounce would be very short. So as to frame bounce at most. Yeah, this will make more sense because I couldn't The other ones like mess with the shape of the arc then. Whereas this one, this one gets removed, the arc is still don't remove key, or I know we're not moving keyframes. We're removing in-betweens that don't affect the arc. Okay. Okay. And then my God, that's why you blocked out your extremes and pulls us know. Alright, alright. You created the shape of the arc and movements and I can retire. Alright, the top, I want to remove this. Now. Here. Here, yes, here, yes. Control Alt seven. Okay. Control, I'll eat. Nausea. Better now. Yeah. Again, remember in blocking you have not finished until you are at four. Or at least in some cases where you are in such a simple exercise on to your app tools, Jasmine has, still has to create a lot of use the twin machine to create the in-between poses between her extremes here. Between this, this, there should be a pause because this is a longer bound. Now we can push the falling by creating this kind of conduct polls one goes up. But do you think the timing is it list where it shouldn't be? How much we're fine? What do you think we need to refine your It's a bit slow but like one Frameworks. Okay. Yeah, you're right, I see that. See how easy retiring use in Maya terms of tools. You look all the tools to succeed. Oh yeah, this is, I feel I'm pretty okay for this first attempt. You can create like in the end where the ball like the accelerates and moves up it forward and then. Slows down. That makes sense. It rolls away, but yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I give him without the rotation, just with one yeah, I get what you mean. Just another. On the end. That's pretty yes. It should actually take longer. So we have to add some in-betweens too dark, right? Remember, if you add, after adding the in-betweens, what Jasmine should do, it's greater. Break that down key responsible for timings. Go back two frames before the end frame and use the twin machine to like go 90%. So it favors the movement 90 per cent to create a slow in C, it's favored the future keyframe by 90%. And as such, it created a nice slow it, well that's 80 to just put it in 1996. Here we can even extend iteration of it here to really make it like slowing. Again, we can break down. Remember your animation will only read if there's a keyframe like every three or four frames, because then you, then r i registers movement. E.g. here. Figure as fine. This movement might be a bit, so to speak. A good thing here. What if you'd rather than could do is like right before this frame, select all and use the tween machine to favor this last pose. And use the squash controller to create a stretch that will be due longer stretch. And do Hall. Really pushed this cartoony, this kind of thing. It has been described it before and it creates this nice cartoony feel. Let's see how it looks like now. Lookup bounds. Well, yeah, I do agree it's a better look in bounds, but that end bit there still looks a little like it speeds up. It accelerates into that. Yes. We'd have to fix it. All right. We'll have to fix it. Adding more frames here that control down. Here for a few more frames. It's the slow movements that take the most frames. Bizarre movements took on raw, wild, slow down. Well, let's play it and see what happens. Yeah, still looks like. Because this particular exercise, what we can do actually here is use a tool in anime bought because we will be translating on the x axis and we can use this slider called 0s. So here we can select all those keys, right here. This one, this one, this one. We can just key more Keith here. To give some to work in. We can essentially go from here. Here. We can select all the keys on this x axis, x. And we can essentially select them all and use the Eden one to create a nice straight if it's played all the way through into. Hello, I read a lot better. Very nice. Yeah, it's definitely say that incremental today. Thank you. Alright, now what's next? Well, now we blocked out most of our timing and spacing. Let's just turn that kinda have planned out our of our animation and we kind of settled on the correct bounce, bounce. So what you do in a professional production now is moved from stepped curves into right. Now. Didn't we need Admiral keepers reasonably good. We can add more key poses. So there's a key pose like every four frames. Let's check it. 123, because my alkyne, okay, interpellate between three frames. More than that and it will not ***. So we'll see how many reps. So that's here. This ball bounce. Good use. Because this is like No, this is 333 is also fine. There's a keyframe every three frames, then we're good. There's less than that. You don't go to supply. And yet that's the rule of thumb. You can kind of trust Maya to interpellate every three frames. So we can train the system like this is like, yeah, I think we can interpellate us. We have our frame. We have a keyframe every three frames. So what we do, we actually go to Settings and go to animation. We pick out mix, mix, and then we select, we can actually save a new version of our fault call bouncing ball. Bouncing ball polish. Because this is the polar stationary, it is scariest, face. Select bought all. And you essentially go to best guess tangent. Numbers should have here. Let's just add it here. Sometimes they don't have it. Best guess that. Go with it. Or keys. Now we'll see how this animation looks at once. Almost all, feature quality animation is on one's. Stylistically, I would, if you were making something for YouTube, I would recommend it to do long twos or threes. But you will need to know how to polish your animation on once. Because once all the errors will be very visible and you will need to read time, any floaty animation. Another thing you can do to make sure that your animation is correct is to do something called a play blast. Right-click here. Click play blast. And New to create a video file of your animation, which you can preview in any video player. Here at the end, it's a bit floaty. In this state, you can work a lot in the graph editor. So let's just first fix this last float movement of the ball move. But we'll do that in the next lesson. 38. Animate With Us Part Four: Polish: First in your thumbnails and I have them drawn here actually on discord because I sent to you. You have some spacing errors. This polish phase, you essentially will show your director and I would give you critiques. And if the people skills are also send me their assignment, I'll make a video to critique them and put it on Skillshare for other people to see and what you need. That's how my coursework grow. As you can see, the spacing here started up small and then grew, but we want to start with larger and then progressively get smaller. So here there's also an error like that. This is a common error in more of a stylistic thing, but that's the note I would give is that Director and Jasmine. And another note I should give is actually something that people, I want people to keep in mind. That the awesome thing about the bowl, that, because I took a photo of our graph editor of goods ball bounces, is that they'll have a nice shape of a parabola. So viel balls don't have that. You might kind of thing that Okay, there's something wrong. My timing is wrong and ask to either take away keyframes are at them. Jasmine will now select all her keys and all my head. She will now adjust the timing. While doing that, she'll look at the up and down, up and down curve as like a cheat to see where her timing is bad. And that's where I use the Twitter. Know that's where you take away some keys. E.g. jazz. Let's help out Jasmine out here, e.g. we see that here the curve is kind of math. And we shut the doors so that we see that the curve here is kind of math. And it's because there's like one or a frame that too much here. Because remember we want it even on one side and the other ear. It's like 123. And here should be also 1234. Jasmine had 1234 and then 12345, which is just bad because it makes it sold, is facing does increase. Similarly here. We want it to be 123-12-3456, and then 123456. And Jasmine has seven. So we can also take it one keyframe away here. This one's lag in terms of boss and that's like a 1234567. It should be also 12345678. So also take this key frame over. Here. It should be 61 234-512-3456. Here. We don't hire. Here, we can adjust the poles, it he, and add some squash. We still have here. A tool Jasmine can use to visualize our graph. It's called a molt from trail. Motion trail is accessed by clicking here. This creates a motion trail to contract your curves, how they look like. Jasmine can play blasted and see how she can improve our animation or her own now, using the tools below, so far, this stage, punishing status and most intuitive stage, the only real way. But the polish is watch this animation over and over again. In policy, the brave. One of the major differences between feature quality of the nation that cool animation is how much people spend time on the stage. At the very end, it feels a bit too smooth, floaty that I'm saying. Like I'm trying to figure out where to go in the timeline to fix that. I can help. Well, no, no. I'm just saying you would choose the move tool and the x-axis. Do you know which one? Well, no. I'm just right now. I'm just trying to figure out where it gets floaty. And I also had the something that a lot of dropping the ball. Right? This last this last one here, just as stilted flow. Take away some time from it. Yeah. That's just the easiest to either sitting here trying to figure out what to address the upset. Very good work. Remember, origins state, you have to watch it over and over and over and over until you get it perfect. Especially if you're working. We are featured quality animation. To pay that job better picture quality studio really need to have some experience before or your belt. That's why most animal for your bell, for you or even applied. That's why we'll animate or start out either on TV or video game. Your demo reel, you need to solve animation because your employer needs to know that it was an amazing shot with unlimited time. Then it might convince that I can do a mediocre shot under a lot of restraint that because you have unlimited time for your bandwidth at every single employer, doesn't even look at your work history. Only evil God, you're a bit more like moles. The medial craft. Your first job will only look for the more. It'll be very demanding for a demo reel, I once read a story about a guy who was a graduate of animation mentor. A lot of money. He said, How has the Morrill two are very low ball. It was dismissed because there was an error in his animation. Because the way we look at your demo reel is the first 5 s. And they're like What they're an error and my wow. And then they will watch dress. But if they are not wild in the first 5 s, you can put it into the no pile because that's why even get away without demo reel that's thirty-seconds because there's no or minimal length of it can even go with like 15 s, maybe you could get away with that. But I just heard of people haven't had way better to connect 30 s. Now it's very, very well-polished than a minute. It's not. You want to have thirty-seconds? Have I made shortly after I made the knowledge of body mechanics, feature quality, level of polish and old possess. If you're interested in that, please share my course and by get more viewers this course, I'll continue doing this until I get you the whole curriculum we need to succeed. This is only the first week here. So if you like this and you'd like my course, please share it. Brings to walk. Hey guys, Then I'll be motivated to make more. Because I don't know that solos watch it. Because I really am motivated to help you learn animation because I really think that people need to invest in skills that are degree independent. No one cares about your degree here or piece of paper. My master's degree in 3D animation only helped me teach, didn't really increase my job opportunities. You can do is add a new kind of curves and we'll add some breakdown keys to fine tune the curves at the end. Maybe you can increase or decrease the length of the last. Just trying to zoom in. Graph editor can also isolate a curve. But you can do is to translate the work on translate isolate curve, and you'll see how it changes over time. So you can use tool to navigate distance and then see, okay, this is how changes might notice that this might just be too big change so we can put them all out, put the academic, this font. Enter a bit better, isn't it? There's also a slider, Ferdinand and Bob's kept from default. Let's see what it says. The ISA and this slider is useful. This allows you to cut it and analyze it for this recording. You say there's modified at play around with it. And that's the way I did polishing stage over, go for it, my intuition. And develop that intuition by analyzing animations and by essentially analyzing lilacs is referenced. Ray, That's the animation equivalent of drawing from life. Have to really learn the grammar and shape language of movement. So this is something that just takes a long time. Think of it as fitness. You have to do it daily for the muscle to grow. There's lovely websites that I've shared with you in the resources document where people aren't alive, animation strength by frame and where they really didn't go into a for look like an animations. And later on I'll make a course specifically on how to analyze animation. Learn from. 39. Animate With Us Part Five: Refine: Let's ask yourself, how can I improve this ball animation and explore Maya, just play around with it. You have it saved, increment unsafe. There's no way. Remember, try breaking things and fixing them because it can always go back to the previous version and the maze and you are learning. So I want you to around, oh, that's very good at science. There are sliders or uninvolved and read the documentation to help. Well, you can read the documentation, just hover over them and you'll get a description of what each Snyder does. So if we can go through slider and essentially read the description, if that makes sense. Adjustments I made read a bit. And it's just something that starts to rot row the last or I get scared, I'm I missing? There's no worry of that because you can always refer back to the viewers at home. You also can sometimes what works in real live where there's a direct loss of energy doesn't have work in animation because animation is exaggeration. But was before was closer actually to real-life would be alive is appealing to dot PL by adjusting the timing and pushing, adding like bus. Yes. Yasmin finished her thymine for listening. Okay, So we pretty much finished this section of this course. If you're watching this on Skillshare, it will be the first week. And please finish your homework and post it in the projects on Skillshare and attach a video. And if you can attach a scene sketch link and I'll comment on it when I have the time. So I really am happy that you've finished this course. I hope you are able to follow along with Jasmine, see what the mistake she made and made your own bouncing ball. I hope these tips and tricks that I gave you, we'll help you with animating your own bouncing ball. See you in the next lesson and please leave a review on Skillshare or Udemy wherever you're watching this. Thank you. And let's see you soon. 40. Here's Your Homework Assignment: Your homework for this assignment will be first to draw. Your thumbnails are either on paper or on top of your live-action reference, but essentially either draw them digitally or on paper and show them to me. You're expected to plan out. Your eye will not pass you if it goes over 200 frames because in our real life studio production you will have a frame limit if you ever went to college or to school. Think of it as a word limit for your report. You will have a frame limit in your shots in a professional production and it's a good practice to stick to it. Now, think of it like writing an essay for school. In school, you have a word limit for ethane. This is the same thing. So step one, find live-action that reference and analyze it. Look for arcs. The key poses, golden poses and extremes. And if you can, and the breakdowns step to make thumbnail drawings based on your planning, your thumbnail drawings to show the trajectory of movement in your extreme poses. You can use Photoshop, Clip, Studio, or even pen and paper and take a photo of them. And you'll import your thumbnails into Maya. I'll show you how you pose that you're golden poses and extremes according to your thumbnails. Then you will use the twin machine and older tools and Maya or allowed to break down. Then after you post out all the oldest you need polls, you'll be tiny around the nation using Dannon bought, polish it up. And then finally, you'll move from stepped keys to blind and polish out the rest of the animation. After you're done with all of that, you will upload your finished animation. Since sketch, the animation along with this sketch link to either SkillShare, Udemy, depending on where you're watching this course. And then I'll give you a critique. And I feel like this critique, please leave a review so I can continue making more courses. 41. You Did It! Congratulations!: You've done your bouncing ball. Now, all that's left is to play blasted and submitted to scale sooner for me to run you. And if you want extra credit, you'll first submitted same sketch. And then up now both your play blast and the same scheduling through Skillshare. Please do that. By the way, I was very grateful of your reading, review. Making those courses takes a lot of time. And if you've shared this course and Levi review the hunt, give me more resources to make the next course of this series even better. Thank you for doing that and see you the next scopes.