3D Animated Lip Sync: Made Simple with After Effects

1. CourseOverview: Hi and welcome to this skill share course, 3D character animation, made simple. My name is Lucas Ridley and I'll be your instructor and together we're going to create a 3D animated version of ourselves, like you see right here. Hello. Now I have over ten years of professional animation experience working on big blockbuster movies like Ready Player One, transformers of last night, Alladin, and Adventures infinity war. I want to share that animation knowledge with you. From the pros into this simplified version of ourselves in this program. Hello. You don't need any fancy, expensive 3D software. All you need is Adobe After Effects, because Adobe After Effects comes with the cinema 4D light. That has all need to create a simplified version of ourselves. Model it, rig it animated and light and rendering. We're going to cover all of those steps in this course so that by the end, you have a fundamental knowledge of what 3D animation is and what it takes to create it. All the project files are available for download as well. You could dissect it if you get into trouble. Of course, I'm always available in the questions and the discussion. Please reach out there if you have any trouble. Don't be intimidated by 3D animation. Let's jump right in and I look forward to seeing you in class. Hello. 2. Getting Familiar: Hi. Welcome to the first class where we're going to create a simplified 3D character of ourselves and animate it. So to get started, you need to open up After Effects because that's really the only way that we can open up Cinema 4D Lite, which comes with After Effects, but we need After Effects to be able to open it. So once After Effects is open, all we have to do is right-click and go to New MAXON CINEMA 4D file. Once we click that, all we have to do is just find somewhere to save it and save. That will create a new Cinema 4D file in our project window in After Effects and it'll open up Cinema 4D Lite. You can close the Quick start dialogue for now, and let's jump in to getting familiar with Cinema 4D. This can be an intimidating interface to look at the first time if you've never worked in 3D. So let's just walk through what we're looking at. This is the viewport, the main window here. We have our timeline down here, so we can click and drag the little blue indicator. Then this little window is going to be for the materials we'll work on later in the course. The right side will continually change depending on what we have selected right now is the project settings. I'm just going to set that to 24 frames a second so that that matches what I want to do inside of After Effects. Now, as we select objects, this will change depending on what we have selected. The object manager is this window here, which will list the items that we create in our scene. Now there are some other little tabs over here that we won't get into just yet. But these are the main few windows. Now if you hit middle mouse with your cursor over the viewport, you can actually pull up multiple views and in the top-left of each one, you can see what it is. This is the top view, the front view, the right and in perspective. We're going to do a lot of work in the perspective mode, and I selected it just by hitting middle mouse button again. So if you accidentally hit your middle mouse button over one of these windows, just hit middle mouse again and then hover your mouse over that window to open that camera view. Now to navigate around, we need to hold down Alt and left mouse to tumble around, middle mouse hold to pan, and right mouse to zoom in and out. Now, there are the option to select these cursors in the top right of all the windows. So if you don't have a three button mouse, you could possibly get by with using these. So instead of holding down the Alt and middle mouse to pan, you could use the pan button up here on the top right. So the next lesson, let's create the head of our character and get started modeling. 3. Model The Head: In this lesson, let's begin modeling, now that we're familiar with the interface and we know how to navigate. So to create any kind of geometry in Cinema 4D Lite, you need to go up to the blue cube here and left click and hold, and you can get more options. I'm going to choose this sphere for our head, because it's a good starting point. Now, it's difficult to see what the construction lines of this sphere is, so let's go to Display and let's choose the shading and lines option. There's also a shortcut for this, if you hit N on your keyboard, it'll bring up all the shortcuts for the different display views. So we've chosen the B one. If I want to go back to what we were, that's the A, so I'm going to hit N again and the choose B. Now we can see how this sphere is constructed, and we also have a new little manipulator, which is the move tool here. As I hover over it you can see I'll build constrained by whichever axis I'm hovering over. If I click and drag, now I can move it up and down, side-to-side, and these in-between ones will do the constraints over two axes. So that's how you move it, and if you don't select any of them and just left-click anywhere in the view port, you can move it in all directions. That's a little bit more squarely because you're not entirely certain where you're moving it, so I recommend always using one of these two versions, either one axis, or two axes. You always know which axis you're moving in. If we look over here in the bottom right, you can also see we have the attributes of this object. We have a sphere object, and there's basically an attributes menu over here. We have basic coordinates, and object. We're basically only going to ever spend time in coordinates or object. You don't really have to worry about these other two. Let's look at coordinate, and we can see that when we move this, it'll update the x and y values because we've constrained it to the x and y axes. So I'm just going to Control Z to undo these, to get it back to zero. I'm just going pull this up in the y axis to just get it off the floor and the grid here, so we can see it a little bit better. The other two manipulators that we have, are rotation and scale. So I've hit R on the keyboard, I pull up the manipulator for rotation, and similarly it will constrain to whatever axis I'm selecting. If i hit t, I can click anywhere outside and it will globally scale this object as well, or it will globally scale it from here, because I'm still in what Cinema 4D calls model mode. If I want to scale on one axis, I need to go to object mode. That is in this little menu over here. If I left-click and hold, you can see we're in model mode. If we go to object mode and then click and drag, I can scale on one axis. The coordinate system also needs to be set to object mode. We'll talk more about the coordinate system in a minute. So that's just one little mode to be aware of, whether you're in model or object mode, and that will affect mostly scale. If I go to r, pull up the rotation again and I can select anywhere in between the axis and I can rotate on all of the axes. So that's how you move objects, and these little orange dots here, will also change the object's attributes that you can find here. Watch the radius as I click and drag this little orange cube, it will update the radius. So that's a little different than scale, and that's preferably what we want to do if we're going to make big adjustments like that at the beginning of manipulating an object. There's also segments, so if we needed more geometry, we can increase it, or decrease it, if we're going to create a low poly model. I recommend doing something in between and maybe even just going with the basic 16 segments that the default sphere comes with. You can also choose different types of sphere, so it is constructed with different types of wire frames, but for the most part, I'm going to stick with the original standard. Let's start to edit this, and you might be saying to yourself, "Well how do we do that? Because all I can do is just move the entire thing around. I can't actually affect how the sphere looks to make it into the shape of a head and skull. " What we need to do, is convert this object so that it can be editable, and the shortcut for that is C. So find C on my keyboard, I will undo that, you can watch this icon change. Now we know it is an editable object and also the name changes. It's a polygon object, so it was a sphere object, and now we convert it with C, it's a polygon object. That's what we want to be able to change the edges and vertices of this model. Now, to be able to do that, we need to change the mode we're in as well. Over here on the left-hand side you can see polygons, edges, and points. I come from a Maya background, so what I call as faces, edges and vertices are vertex. These are the three ways that we can affect the shape of a model. If I select face, now I can select the face and I still have the same manipulator tools that I can adjust this model with. If I go to edge, now I can select the edges and I can move the edges around. Same thing was points, I can also select multiple of any of these by holding down Shift, and then left clicking anywhere, or one of the manipulator handles. Now, also notice I hit W on my keyboard, and that will change the world or object mode that we're in. It's not doing anything for the points, but if we go to something like the face and I hit W, it will adjust from the normal of the face, the direction it's pointing, or the world coordinates. So that'll move in the lateral x, y, and z, or W again, it will go relative to the direction of the face normal. That is also adjusted up here with this button and W is the shortcut. What we want to do, is create a more skull like shape. I want to pull the bottom out here to create a jaw, so I'm going to look at this straight on from the z direction. So I'm looking at the grid, and I can see z is pointing this way, and that's the direction I want to model my character, just so that I'm consistent with a positive value. I want to be looking at a positive direction, metaphorically and literally. What I'm going to do is to create the jaw area and the mouth area, is I need to pull down some polygon. I'm going to select not the very bottom segments here, that is the disk, but just one up from that. So I'm going to make sure I'm looking straight down z, and I could also do that by going into the fore view mode, by hitting the middle mouse button. I could look in the front view to know that I'm looking straight on, or I'm just going to stay in the perspective mode because I can see it just as good here. I'm going to select these two faces. and instead of just pulling this out, it stretches everything, and I want a bit of a more soft selection and soft touch to all of this. So what I can do with a manipulator tool selected, I have these three options as well for my move tool. If I select "Soft Selection", I can actually enable that, and now my sphere brightens up, and that's basically representing the fall off of this tool of the soft selection. Now when I pull, it will have a much greater fall off of influence how I pull, so now it's very easy to create a jaw like area. You can start to already see the silhouette of a face here. So this is the head, the skull, the back of the head here, and this will be the front of the face. I'm going to pull up the rotation tool just to rotate this front of the face a little bit flatter, and switch back to the move tool, pull it forward, so now we have a front face area. I'm going to pull out the jaws as well, by selecting the same face on either side. I'm basically counting from one to three. I'm going to count one, 1, 2, 3, so it's the same one. I'm going to pull up the scale tool by hitting T on the keyboard, and then I'm just going to stretch this out so I have a little bit of a jaw line, and I'm going to grab these two panels, these two faces rather, on either side of the face and just scale that in. So now we have a bit more of a cylindrical head, of course you can model this to look however you'd like it to look, but that's how I'm going to go with mine. Then I'm going to select some of the front vertices here, so I'm going to switch over to points, and then I'm going to switch the move tool then hit E and select this first vertices. I'm going to turn off soft selection so that I can just get this in line. So I'm going to go over to a side view here, by hitting middle mouse button. I just want this to be slightly in front of these points. So I'm going to hit space bar to go to the selection tool, and the selection tool here, has several different options. I like the rectangle selection, so that I can click and drag and select a point here, and I know I'm getting the one on the other side as well. I just want to pull this back a little bit, and the middle mouse click, middle mouse click, and then you can see the selection I had selected through the object. Basically what I'm going for, is I want the symmetry of the face, I don't want to be selecting one side and not the other. Whenever I select anything, I want to make sure I'm doing it evenly on both sides, so that's why I might do something like use the scale tool here. If I want to go in this x direction, either negative or positive, I need to make sure they're moving at the same distance. I'm going to hit E on the keyboard to pull up the move tool, and then I'm just going to move this back slightly. I'm going to grab this point here and just bring the chin forward a little bit. We've basically created the head of our body, and I'm going to leave that to you to create the silhouette and the shape that you want. We can keep tweaking this until we have it just right, and then of course we can always come back to this and continue to adjust it. In the next lesson, we're going to create the other features of the face, so that we have something a little more interesting to look at. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 4. Model Ears And Nose: In this lesson, we're going to create the nose and the ears for this object. I'm going to go up to the blue cube again, left click and hold, and I'm going to create a capsule. Now there's another little feature of trying to scale on one direction. We are in the model mode, so if I switch to object mode, because it's not a converted object, and I scale in, if you can't scale in, it's probably because you have your world coordinate system on. Right now, this is world and then its objects, if I have world on, it's going to scale based on the world, it's going to do all axes. Make sure that you're on object mode here, and then you can scale on one direction. I'm going to do it flat like this, so we have a decent ear-shaped to start with. Then I'm going to hit the E key to pull this up in two directions, and then T, and then I'm going to just click anywhere outside to scale that down. I'm just going to keep adjusting it until I think it's in a good spot and slightly ear like. I'm going to rotate this, in this direction, and then I'm going to hit W on my keyboard, now it changed the axes in the object relative mode. Now I hope this is starting to make sense where there's two kind of coordinate systems. There's the world coordinate system we can see on the ground, which is always Z, is always pointing that way, X is always pointing that way, and Y is always pointing straight up. But if we start to rotate an object around, the object itself has axes, right? If we hit W, now we can see the axes of the object and you can see them. The Z is pointing a little off center of the world, the axis pointing off center of the world. If we had W, we can toggle between those two modes so that we can rotate them in line with themselves as opposed to the world. I'm just going to do that a little bit here, and rotate the object out to make an ear and I'm going to hit E, and then I'm going to go back to world because I wanted to go in the X direction. I don't want to be dragging it around in the X relative to the ear, I want to drag an X relative to the world. I'm going to go in towards the head a little bit, and we can always adjust this later as well. Now we have our ear, now let's create the nose, and later on we're going to create the other ear, we're going to do a mirroring effect. Once we get an eye done, we can just mirror all of it over so it's symmetrical on the other side, and we're not having to guess where to put it and how to rotate it. Now, let's create the nose. I'm going to select the blue cube again, and I think I'm going to go to a cone. You can try different things and different kinds of noses, you could try a capsule, a pyramid, experiment with whatever you want to do, may be a little clown nose, a little circle nose, who knows what kind of nose you've got. You could use multiple objects as well, so experiment and find what's best for you. The nose itself is going to be a pretty characteristic part of most people's faces. I have a bit of a generic nose I think so, I'm just going to do something like this, and I'm going to scale it down, and I'm going to scale it in a little bit, and move it in here. You also want to keep in mind the structure of the face is basically like eyes are going to be about at the top where the ear intersects, and the nose will be in line with that as well, that's the general construction of a face. You can even follow this line around where the ear intersects with the head is this construction line. You follow it around roughly to be where the top of the nose should be, and we can always adjust this later as well. Now that I have this in, before I convert it, because once you convert it, you lose these object features over here. I want to make sure I set everything I need for the object before I convert it to do more modeling and editing on it. I need some lines down here to be able to model this out. I don't want it to be a completely flat surface here, I want us to pull down a little bit. To be able to do that, I need more geometry here, and what I can do is go into the caps because this is the end of the cone, so it's considered a cap. I can increase the cap segments, and as I do, you can see that there's more geometry. That's probably more than I need, I'm just going to dial this back down and just type in maybe four right there. I can also increase the number of segments on the cone itself by going into the object and increase the height segments and do something like that. Now what I can do is convert this by hitting C, and I will lose all of those features forever. Make sure before you do that, that you've locked in what you want, otherwise you just need to delete this object and start over with the nose if you accidentally convert before you're ready. I want to go to the edges, and want to double-click the edge, one of the edges, and we'll select the whole ring around. Now I can just pull this up a little bit and help round off this nose little bit, so I'm going to hit T on the keyboard, and then scale this in a little bit so that it rounds the nose off. We're going to have a bit of a cartoony nose here, and that's what I'm going for. I'm going to double-click one of these edges to get the whole thing, and then I'm just going to E on the keyboard and then pull that up as well to help kind of continue to round this off so that it's not such a sharp edge. Now, I'm going to hit in on my keyboard, to pull up all the view options here, and then I'm going to click A, and I'm going to double-click off, and go into the model mode here. Now I can view this without seeing all the lines, and see how it's starting to take shape. In the next lesson, we're going to create the eyes, and then mirror over the eye and the ear so that we have eyes, and ears, and brows as well. Brows are very important expressive part of faces. Thanks for watching and I'll see you there. 5. Understanding The Child Scaling Issue: Before we move on with continuing to model the head, I wanted to cover a few housekeeping issues that you may run into. For example, where do you save a project? What if you closed aftereffects before saving and cinema 4D light? Well, it's not that big of an issue as long as you save in cinema 4D light, you can bring in that file into any after-effects project. I have an untitled project here. All I have to do is go to Import File and I can bring in my Cinema 4D project. Now, I do want to make sure of course, to save my Cinema 4D projects before closing Cinema 4D light. Then you can import it into whichever project you need to. Once it's an after effects, what you have to do is hit ''Ctrl E'' on the keyboard, and that will open up Maxon Cinema 4D light, and let you edit. That's what the ''Ctrl E'' is for Edit that Cinema 4D lite file. Now that we have this open, I want to go ahead and also name everything because it's going to start to get confusing. The more items that we start to make. Want to make sure I'm going in here and double-clicking each one and changing the name. The rest of this lesson is going to be devoted to a more technical issue that you may run into as you begin modeling other features of a face. That has to do with the issue of parenting and scale. Up to this point, we've been modeling and scaling objects without regard to what we're going to be using them for. Because at the end of the day, we're going to parent all of these current items under a null. That is going to be what we're going to use for head rotation. Up to this point, it hasn't mattered. But now we're going to get into creating some more technical things that we're going to need to animate like the eyebrows, eyes, and mouth, and that's where the scaling issue comes into play. You need to be aware of that and also parenting objects and that's related to the scale issue. Let me just show you this issue, so that you understand why we are going to be doing things we're going to be doing with regard to scale from here on out. I'm going to create two cylinders and you don't have to do this. Just watch what I'm doing. Don't don't try to follow along. Because you can just, this is basically just like a demonstration to show you this technical issue, by the way, you can duplicate items by holding down control and then left clicking and dragging. So how these two items, and I'm going to scale one, and the way that we've been doing up to this point, which is making sure that where an object mode and in both of these two and the coordinate system and in this mode over here. Now when I hit t and scale down, I can flatten it in one plane, and you can see if I go over to the attributes, and click on the coordinates, you can see where I adjusted the scale here, 2.379. If I want this cylinder to now follow this cylinder, if I rotate this cylinder around and I want this to follow it or be a child of it. What I need to do is go into the object manager and click that object here or an object manager, and then just click and drag it to this object until I hit the down arrow. That means that is going to be a child of it. If I just get the side arrow, that just means I'm going to be reordering this list here, so I can move it down here, and that hasn't changed the structure of any of this. It's not going to follow the ear because it's below the ear. Any object has to be placed underneath the hierarchy of that object for it to follow it or be a child of it. If I go back to cylinder and wait until the arrow is down, meaning I have my cursor right over the word of it and then I let go. Now you can see it's created this hierarchy, where it's offset this cylinder in the list. We have this plus and minus button to show that there is something hidden underneath, and you can think of this like a folder structure, like folders and how you save documents and stuff. It's the same idea that this is the child of this and it lives inside of it, so everything looks fine right now, even if we rotate the parent object, the child will follow. We can rotate it, we can move it around. But the issue comes, when we try to rotate this child object. The scale that we've applied to the parent, will now be applied to this object. Watch what happens when I rotate this. It starts to get distorted in the scale axis that we did to the parent. That will create an issue, if you begin scaling objects at the object level. That's something just to be aware of when we're creating the rest of the rig and why we're going to be doing what we're doing in the reading section and I'll explain why we're parenting or why we're going to create a brother-sister relationship between the two objects. Now the other way that you can do this, is by scaling in component mode or the faces or the edges. Let's demonstrate that now. Want to make sure I get all of the wireframe structure the way I want it because I'm going to have to make it editable. I want to make sure I'm going to the object mode and I have all the segments that I need for this object, whatever the needs are for it. Then I'm going to hit ''C'' to make it editable. Now it's changed the icon. You can see the difference here. This is the editable polygon and this is the original parametric a cylinder. Now that it's in this mode, I can select faces and that's how I want to scale, and the easiest way to select all of these faces is hit ''Spacebar'' to get the selection mode. I like to have the rectangle selection, so I can click and drag, and now I have all of the faces and I'll hit ''T''. Now I can scale on this axis, and when I go back to object mode, when I look at this object's attributes under coordinates, you can see that the scale is still one. It doesn't think at the object level that we've made any scale changes. It's at the component level that we've made the changes on the faces. Now, if we parent this under the cylinder and then rotate it, it's going to maintain its shape and not get distorted. Basically, the idea is we want to affect things on the component level, so that children of that object will not get distorted by that scale at the object level. Because the scale is occurring at the component mode or the face, edge or vertices mode, it will not affect the child. Keep that in mind as we create the eyebrow, eyes, and mouth, and that will solve a lot of problems that you may run into later down the road. If let's say we parent the eyebrow to the eye, or a null or something that we've scaled. Then we want to rotate the eyebrow and the eyebrow will start to get distorted. So we want to avoid those issues by understanding this concept now. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson. 6. Creating The Eyebrow: In this lesson, we're going to create the eyebrow. Let's create a capsule. Click the blue cube again, go to capsule and I'm just going to drag this out a little bit, hitting east and dragging it forward. Now when I give this a lot more geometry because we're going to be deforming it with the deformer, the geometry is going to be stretching and if there's not enough wire frame or segments there to support that deformation, it's going to look very segmented. I'm going to select the object to get to the object attribute menu here and when I increase the segments, and I'm also going to increase the height or lower the rate increase the height in either way, you're basically going to want to stretch this thing out without scaling it remember like we just discussed. That's the general idea. As we get a scale of that, now we can more accurately understand how many segments we need to put in the center, because we've stretched it to the length that we want it. Because we're going to make this editable and after we do, we're not going to be able to add more segments. I might stretch this out a little bit more, we can always take segments away, but we can't put them back in. That's one limitation of Cinema 4D light that we need to be aware of while we're working. Now I can hit R on the keyboard to pull up rotation, start dragging this z-axis and as I hold down shift, it will start snapping at five degree increments until I get to 90 degrees then I can let go, then I want to create a former. We haven't talked about these yet, but these are great little tools that can help modeling as well, we can also use these in animation and key frame the attributes. What I want is the bend, so I'm going to go there and now we get this cube that isn't doing anything with this new bend attribute up here. I'm going to increase the strength of this deformer just to see which direction it's going to be bending in and it's going to be bending in a way that I don't need it to bend. I'm going to rotate this deformer holding down shift again to get 90 degrees so that when we're adjusting the strength is going to bend upward or downward, relative to our eyebrow right now. Now what I can do is create a null. Nulls are basically like empty groups and they're just a way that we can organize things together. For this deformer to affect this eyebrow, it either needs to be a child of that eyebrow or it needs to be a brother or sister of it. We need to put them both underneath this null. Once we do, now you can see that it is affecting this eyebrows. When we change the strength value, it's going to change the eyebrow shape. It's occurring all from this left side because the deformer is centered in world space, but there's a couple of attributes we can change about this to make it a little more uniform in how it deforms this eyebrow. First thing to notice is it's stretching the eyebrow and we don't want to stretch the eyebrow. So what we can do is say keep y-axis length and check that on. When we change the strength, it will maintain the length of that eyebrow. The next thing I want to do is make this more of a symmetrical deformation. I'm going to middle mouse button to pull up the four of you window here among middle mouse button on the front view and then I want to click and drag the the bend deformer over until the straight edge is near the center of the world. The reason I'm doing that is because when we turn on, I'm going to select bend again just to get the attributes to pop up. We select the mode to be unlimited, it's going to mirror that over to the other side. Now when we adjust the strength is going to be symmetrical for the eyebrow. I'll hit middle mouse button again to get back to our perspective view, and you can notice also that it doesn't really matter in z space where this is because you can imagine that this thing is going off into infinite space down the z-axis here. All that matters is its position in y and in x, those will affect it, but not in z,. Scale will also affect it because that'll change the position since it's scaling from the center, and if we scale it down and we go back to the front view, you can see now it's offset and we would need to move it back if we wanted to scale it down. But I liked where it was at, so I am going to just undo enough times until we're back to where we just had it, then I'll middle mouse button back into perspective view. The other thing that we need to think about is the thickness of this eyebrow. In this case, even though we just discussed the scaling issue in the last lesson, if you understand that concept, you can also understand why we don't necessarily need to worry about it in this instance because what we've done and the reason why I've structured it this way is because the bend is not a child of the capsules. If we were to scale this in the z direction and rotate the bend deformer, the bend deformer is not going to deform in weird ways because it's not a child of the capsule. If we did a child of the capsule and then we rotated the bend deformer, now you can see the bend deformer getting stretched in weird ways and that's affecting the deformation as well. As long as their brother or sister that's okay and that's why I created this null. I'm going to change the name of this null to bright eyebrow and I'm going to double-click that and copy it and put it in front of these so that they also have unique names. That's an easy way to stay organized. The top level is the main name and then each of the different types of objects will have that suffix of what they are. What I want to do is bring the coordinates back to zero on this so that everything is zeroed out and we can leave again that at 0.5 if we want, because the bend deformer is not a child of it. I'm just going to only move it back in the z-axis because I like where it was in the x. Now we've created the eyebrow that we can scale down from this main node and we can position it later where we want it. For now we're done with the eyebrow, let's move on to a little bit more complicated rig in the eye. 7. Creating The Eye: In this lesson, we're going to create the eye. The eye is the window to the soul. So it's important to consider for a moment how you want to model that and there's different objects we can model with. You could do something like a diamond shape. You can take a disk, pull that out, and change the segments of that by going to object and reduce the segments to three and have a little triangle eye, you can have a diamond eye. Go to four segments here, you can take a sphere and just have a round eye. You can take two spheres and make a white sclera eye with a black pupil or color the pupil different ways. So you can take two spheres, you can hold down Control to duplicate an object and then you can scale these down to flatten them or you could use two disks to create circle ones, you could create a tort, you could do anything. So take a moment to consider what design you want to use. In my example, I'm going to use a capsule because that's a consistent design element. I've decided to use in mine with the ear, the eyebrow, the eye, and even on the mouth, we're going to use a capsule. So that's what I'm choosing to use and for the eye, you can make it as simple as use this and then you could animate the scale and that's all you would need to do. What I want to show you is something a little more sophisticated and a little more advanced. So we dig deeper and kind of stretch your abilities and understanding of 3D in general as we move through the course. So up to this point, we've been doing progressively more complicated things, and so this is going to be another big step in that direction. Again, I'm not going to worry too much about scale for this because we're not going to apparent anything under this. So there will be no children of this eye, so we can scale this in this direction if we want to. So I'm going to go ahead and do that a little bit and round this out so it will eventually lay flat against the face. Then selecting it to get the attributes. I'm going to increase the segments and I'm using a tablet, so sometimes it's a little hard to get the exact number. So I'm going to type something in to bring that back down and then increase the segments here. The idea behind adding all these segments is that we're going to be deforming this in this more advanced example. Again, you don't have to follow this example, but I want to show you what's possible and how quickly you can automate certain aspects of animation through rigging techniques and rigging is where you basically take geometry or joints and you create them in a way that the animator can use them in a simple way. So in our example, what we want to do is create a blink. So we're basically going from modeling to rigging in this lesson. So now we've modeled the eye, this is our eye. I'm just going to have a simple black shader on this eventually, you could duplicate this by hitting E and then Control, dragging one out, scaling this down, and then have a pupil in the center of this and of course you could also do that later as well. But that's not what I'm going to be doing. So I just want to have a simple black cartoony eye. Now we need to move into is rigging it for animation. So that's the next stage. So let's just rename this. I'm going to copy the right eyebrow name because it has the word capsule on it. I'm just going to delete the brow part of that. So now we have right eye capsule and I want to hide everything so I can mess with this thing at the zero world space. So these two little dots here on each layer represent the visibility of the viewpoint and the render. So we just want to turn off the visibility and the viewport. So choose the top one and I'm going to hold because these have children in it. This parent layer has children, I can turn them all off at once by holding down Control and double-clicking, and it will turn red all of the visibility options her. So you don't have to hold Control to do these. You just need to double-click them to get to red and now we've hidden everything and if we want to get them back, we just need to press it again. So now that we have that hidden, let's go into the coordinates and bring that back to 0, 0, 0 and X, Y and Z, and we can work on it here. So I want to explain what I want do first. So what I want do as I scale down for a blink, I want this eye to stretch out. The concept behind squash and stretch is that as this scales down, it will also scale out. Because right now nothing is happening. It's staying within the bounds right here, and it's just getting reduced in the y axis and that's not what we want to do. The concept of squash and stretch is that imagine if this capsule had water in it and we squash this down. Well, we're reducing the volume here so the water would have to go somewhere. So we would stretch out this side to maintain the volume of that shape. So that's what we want to do and automate in our rig. So let's start to do that and what we need to do is select the capsule and we want to make the y-axis drive the x-axis. So the y is going to be the driver, is going to be driving the animation, and the x is going to be along for the ride. It's going to be driven, it's going to be along for the ride. So what we want to do is we don't want to select S here because that'll select all the axis of scale. You want to select Y and now you can see it's only Y, is orange. So if we right-click on Y we get a menu here and we want to go to expressions and that's how we're going to tie the y axis to the x axis or the driver and the driven. So we want to set the driver here and then we want to go to X and set that as driven. So we right-click here, go to expressions, set driven and absolute. So when we do that, you can see the icons here change and these are just where we can place keyframes. You can also see we've added a little icon here, which represents that there's an expression on this object. So if we double click the icon there, we get the espresso editor. Now, don't get too worried about what you're looking at because all you're looking at is what we've basically done. We've taken this scale y here and we've piped it into scale. So if we start to scale this, you can see that it's doing the exact same thing in scale x as it is doing in scale y. Well, that's the opposite, we don't want it to scale down with scale y here. Sorry and I'm just, the trouble with that is I'm selecting the orange thing. I had the scale manipulator right where the little orange dot is for adjusting the height. So if that happens to you and you can't grab scale, just adjust your view so you're not accidentally grabbing that handle as well. So when we scale down in y we're also scaling down in an x. So we want to do the opposite as we scale down in y, we want to increase x. So we need to reverse that. So if we go into what the range mapper gives us, which is kind of the default connection and middleman or middlewoman between these two attributes is we need to reverse it. So we have the option here to reverse it. Now it spazzes out because the input range and output range by default, are 0-100. But scale values are basically zero to one. If you go into the capsule attributes, you can see that, that y is at one and scale x is at 99 and that's because it's remapping the range to 100, 0 to 1 to 100 in the output. So you can just change that from 0 to 100 to 0 to 1 over here and as we do that, we flatten the whole thing down because we're also mapping the range of one to zero. So if we just bring the lower limit of the output up to one, it will come back to what we expect that to look like, before we made the expression. Let me break this down a little bit more once we set some values here so you can see what's going on. So as I scale down, let's say I'll never want to go down maybe to like 30 percent. I don't want this whole eye to disappear. I still want something there. So I want to remap the range from one where we're starting at, this is 1 down to about 0.3. So as I go down and I scale down to a third, I want the x-axis to increase by three times. If I go down by a third, I want to x to increase by three. So what we can do is just say "Output Upper to 3" so now as we scale down at scaling up the x-axis. So if we clicked that and go into the view here, you can see how it's remapping that range. So I would just want to draw this out very briefly for you, so you understand what's going on because it's a little hard to follow and how they display it here, because you have two input values and then two output value. So let me just show you what's actually occurring. So we have scale y as the input right there. The output is going into scale x. So we start with the value of zero to one for input. So scale y is going from zero to one. So instead of x just getting remapped to the exact same range, zero to one, we want it to get remapped to a bigger range. We want it to get remapped to start at one because we need the volume to be going out to one in this direction. So we needed to start at one, but we wanted to go to something like three, so it'll stretch a bigger range. So now this range is getting stretched out here. So if we were to go to 0.5 here on the y-axis, go down to 0.5. So that would be here. That is going to get remapped to the middle of this range, which would be 1.5 or half-of-three, because 0.5 is half-of-one. So that's how it's coming up with these numbers and adjusting these values and we had to do it in reverse because we wanted it to go in the opposite direction. We didn't want it to go together. So that's how we create squash and stretch automatically. So you could stop here, and that could be the extent of your cartoony eye. But in the next lesson, I want to show you one more advanced feature using those same concepts to add a little more cartoony style. Thanks for watching. 8. Eye Control: Welcome back. If you're feeling a little overwhelmed, that's okay. Some of these concepts take a little while to learn. I encourage you to re-watch the previous lesson and this lesson again, and make mistakes and ask me questions, and definitely always share a screenshot so I can see what you're doing if you have a question. But this is the fun of learning 3D animation and stretching your skill set in your mind a little bit to understand how to use these limited tools that we haven't seen before 4D Lite to our advantage. Remember, this is not the full package where we're creating some pretty cool stuff, very limited tool sets here. In this lesson, what I want to do is go one step further with this advanced eye. I want to create a lid shape when we blink. When this squashes down, I want the lid to also bend and make a half moon lid shape. All right, that's what we're going to do with the lid. We need the bend deformer to get started. Let's increase the strength so we can see which way it's bending so we know how to rotate this to use it. It's bending in the wrong way. We want to make that half moon lid shape. I'm holding down shift after I start rotating, so that'll snap to 90 degrees. I'll middle mouse click into the front view, hit E and then pull this towards the center. This is the same process that we did for the eyebrow. Now, it's not doing anything to the capsule yet because they're not brothers and sisters of each other and this isn't a child of it. I don't want to make to bend the child a bit because we scaled down in the z-axis on this, all right? Because if later we want to rotate the bend deformer and as a child, it will get all warped and distorted. What I need to do is create a new null. I'm going to command or control C and control V that into renaming it into right eye. I can just click and drag until I get the down arrow. It doesn't matter what order these are in. But now once we do that, you can see it's already taking effect. We need to adjust the bin controls the same way we did on the eyebrow. I want to keep the y-axis length and we want to go to unlimited. It's a symmetrical effect on the eye. What I want to do is I want the y be the driver again. It's not only going to drive the x-axis, it's going to drive the strength of this bend deformer. As we bend, I want this to bend more and more. As we scale down, I want the bend deformer strength increase more and more until we get a U-shape down around about this thickness. All right, let's go ahead and set that up. I'm going to undo this to get back to the default position of one. I'm going to go to scale y. I'm going to make that my driver again. I'm going to say set driver. I'm going to go to bend. I'm going to go over to the object attributes and I want to say I want to drive the strength. I'll right-click on strength and I'll say set driven absolute. Now, it's gone to 3.6 because the default for the range mapper, let's just open up the range mapper for bend now. Now, we have an icon for bend. This one is for the scale. You can see scale y and the scale x. We'll just click one time on this, you can see scale y into strength. That's the one we want. When we double-click that, we get a familiar view here. We get the range mapper and the input. The scale y as we expect and the strength is bend. Now if we look at the range mapper, instead of 0-100 as we had before for the output range, it's said degree. There's 360 degrees in a circle and that's why the default is 3.6 because it's remapping. I'm going to click the range mapper to get those attributes backup. It's remapping 0-100 and 0-360. But we're going to set our own values here in input and output. We just want them to be 0-100 for both. I'm going say 0-100. I can actually test this as I'm making it. I'll scale down and I can see that the strength is going down. That's the opposite of what I want to happen so then I know, "All right, I need to reverse the range mapper." I'll select the range mapper and then I'll click reverse. Now, it's passed out in a crazy direction. Now, I got to think, "What should I do? The values are too big, so we need to reduce the values." I'm just walking you through how I thought about this. With scale, that's being the input, we know we want like a 0-1 scale because that's what the scale attribute is. We're not going to go to 2,000 on scale for the eye. We have 0-1 on that. We can just drag this upper limit until we get it somewhere to where we want it to be. Maybe five, something like that. But the thickness is a little much for the eye still for me. I'm going to go down to the amount of thickness here across that I want to have to figure out how much strength I want to turn on. For me this is a little too horseshoe shape. I want to dial this down even more until it's more of a half-moon, so that it's a little bit wider. Maybe somewhere in there, let's say three, maybe 3.5, 3.7, 3.8? Just very quickly we reduced. I want to impress on you guys. I didn't know this before I started. I started creating this lesson with no idea how to do this. I just taught myself this. When I look at these attributes, I think, "All right, what do I need to change to get the effect I want? It's doing the opposite of what I wanted to do. Hey, there's a button that says Reverse. Let me reverse it. My computers not going to explode. Let me just try this stuff." As you learn these new softwares, don't just take me telling you to do x, y, and z and never touch anything else. I save a version out and then just play. You will learn more doing that than just listening to me and say step 1, 2, 3, because that's not how I learned this, so that I could teach you. I learn by experimenting. I learned by making mistakes. I learned by not knowing, but I learned by knowing what questions to ask. The opposite and reverse thing is the perfect example. When we first started doing this, the strength was going in the wrong direction. "All right, that's the opposite. I need to reverse that somehow. There's a button that says reverse, check it, done deal." I encourage you to not just listen to me, but like really think about how this stuff is built so you can do this on your own as well. You get some other crazy ideas. You need to be able to understand how to experiment and see if it's possible and go after it yourself. I mean, otherwise, what's the point you and me teaching this stuff? That's not as interesting to me is you really thinking for yourself creatively and solving problems. That's the whole point of all this stuff. That's why I find this so fascinating. I'm getting on a tangent, but this is why I teach. I don't teach just to tell you what buttons to press I teach so that hopefully you start to think more critically for yourself and create whatever that you can imagine. All right, let's move on. Let's click the capsule and then I want to go back to the default value of one. All right, so we're back to square one. Now, I want to test this. You always need to be experimenting and then testing. Let's test it out. As I scale down, it seems to be working exactly as I would expect it to. I'm pretty happy with that. Now the one problem I have with this, is that the bin value starts to take effect immediately. It starts wide in the bottom before we really get into that U-shape. Let's see if we can fix that. Let's go back in the range mapper and let's look at the spline. The spline has no values here. It's just totally blank. If this is too small, you actually right-click it and say show and separate window. Let's pull this up so it's not in the bottom corner here. There's no values right now. What I want to do is create some values. All I have to do is hold down control and left-click. Nothing happened again because it's a linear line right here. There's no value change. Let me click another time control click and let me start dragging this around. What I see is this controls the value over the range that we have defined. Let's go create a new 0-1 range and let's test this out. Now, we can see the strength of the bend deformer isn't affecting it until we get to about right here. What we can do is adjust the spline to affect it only when we want it to. I think we should change it. It's only beginning to affect that when it gets much closer to its maximum squash shape. Let's select both of these handles here. I'm going to shift click both of them. What I can do is just slide this down. I'm going to hold down shift. I'm going to slide it down until I see it's having no effect or very little effect. Let's go back to the capsule and see how that works. Now, we can see the strength is only taken into effect at the very end of the squash. Now, we've exercised even more control over how this will play out. If we scale up, you can see the strength is affecting up value. If I want to stretch the eye out up and down, now it's making it look a little wonky. Let's close this out and go back to the range mapper. What we can do is see clamp the limits. We could say, "You know what, clamp it at what I've defined here, the 0103.7, clamp that." Now, the strength won't affect anything beyond those values. The 0-1 is not going to affect that beyond 1. One is basically a 100 percent, right? As we go up, the strength value is getting clamped. It's not going to affect it. We get this nice stretchy feature here as well without the strength. Now, we have squash, stretch and bend. We can create a little eye blink on our character with one control. That's why I love this stuff. Because you get an idea and you start playing around and then you make it happen. Let's just make it back the default shape. That's how we've created this advanced little eye rig from a simple capsule and a few expressions. I hope you've learned a lot in this lesson and the previous lesson. Now in the next one, I'm going to introduce you to how to create the mouth with even more and new advanced features as well. Every lesson we take, we're taking a little more advanced step and hopefully you're following along. If not, I highly encourage you to re-watch this. Don't get down on yourself if you're like, "I didn't get it the first time." I don't expect a lot of people to get it the first time, right? You need to watch the lesson. Try it yourself. Make a mistake. Watched the lesson again, and go back and forth. Because the more you repeat it, the more you'll get it into your mind what's actually occurring, especially when you make mistakes that helps a lot. Don't get discouraged when you try new and advanced things like this. It's just part of the process that you might stumble a little bit. Definitely ask me any questions. Try to share a screenshot if you do have a question and I look forward to answering those in helping you along the way to figure this out and create your advanced eye for our nice little simple looking character, where we are going to create the mouth now. 9. Create The Mouth: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to create the mouth, which is going to introduce a few new tools and cinema 4D light. But before we do that, let me just show you how to merge back in. Let's say you're an instructor and you're teaching a class and you accidentally delete some geometry like the head. I always save in versions so that if something like this happens, I have a version before I made changes. All I did was save out a previous version that had the head in it and deleted everything else, so it was only the head. I can bring it back in by just going to "File", "Merge project", and then I named it head only and I can bring that in. Now we have the head back in. Don't get too concerned if you make mistakes in stuff like that but it's also a good example of why you need to be saving in versions. I'm going to hide all of this again by double-clicking it and hopefully not deleting a layer accidentally or an object. Now what we can do is create the mouth and we're going to do that by sweeping a circle over a curve. We have some pre-made curves that we can use. We have a curve circle, which we're going to use as the profile shape of our lips. Our lips are going to be round. Then we need the shape of our mouth. What's our mouth going to look like? Luckily we have this cool inside curve here. Now what we can do is sweep the circle around this six-sided Ingon curve. So let's do that with a sweep. So I'll take sweep and you see the icon looks like what we want to do. Let's take the sweep and then all we have to do is drop each one of these inside the sweep. The order does matter for this one. If circle was beneath inside, it would think we're trying to do the opposite but we want the circle to sweep around the inside. So we want the circle on the top. With a circle selected, I'll hit T on my keyboard to pull the scale tool and I'll just click and drag in the viewport out here. Now you can see we have the outline of a mouth. The cool thing about the inside curve as well as go over object attributes. We could actually turn on rounding and so we can get rid of those sharp edges. Now this looks much more like a mouth that's open. We can change number of sides as well so it looks more circular if we wanted to circular mouth, and we could animate this on and off if we had like an O shape or something like that. I like to turn rounding on to make the lips a little more smooth. If we were to just scale this down, we have a mouth already. It can be as simple as that. You could just start scaling wise. Just like the eye, we could control everything from one attribute and just animate the scale on top like this, "Hello." We want to do something more advanced. Let's rename this, so we're keeping track of everything. I like to do suffixes for control so I know that's going to be a control I'm going to use. Then I'll just copy the mouth prefix and then I will paste it in each one of these, so they all have a similar naming convention. Now the next thing we need to do is we need to fill this mouth hole here with something because when we put it on the head, we don't want it to be looking straight into the skin color of the head. We want it to be black, so we need to create a new face here. The way to do that would be to extrude this curve of the mouth. But the problem is to create an extrusion. We need to have the extrusion node, which is right here. I'll go ahead and create that. We need that to be a brother or sister of this, but we can't just drop it in here because it will mess up how the sweep is working. We need to duplicate this. What I can do is Control, click and drag the mouth control out and then let go. So now we've duplicated it here. So I'm going to rename this mouth hole curve, and I'm going to just make it a child of extrude. Now, when we take the mouth control and we scale this down, this one isn't following it. Can you guess how we're going to make that follow? I can bet you already have an idea. We're going to take mouth control, go to coordinate and do what we've already done. We want the set driver of the mouth control for Y and we want to set that to control the mouth hole curve here on Y as well, so we will say "Set driven." Now when we scale it's going to follow along. Cool. Now the other thing we need to consider is that the extrusion is a little thick and its position. If this is the front of the mouth, we want to push the black part back a little bit. All we have to do is just take the curve, grab E and then we can push it back. You can see how thick the default extrusion is. If we go to extrude, we actually just adjust that, an object. For movement, you can see 20 centimeters, let's say something like five, so it's much thinner and then we can just move this to the very back of the mouth. Because we need room for the teeth here in a minute, that will be there and also the tongue. Now we have the mouth hole and I can just rename the extrusion as well, copy and paste that in. Now this follows as well. Every time you do something, you want to make sure you're testing it so that it works as well. We have that step, that works. Now what we want to do is add some teeth to this so let's go and create another capsule, and then I want to increase some of the segments here. Then what I want to do is, I want to put this as the tooth on the path here. I'm going to hit E and then pull this forward and I'm going to scale this down. Again there's going to be the child of this so I'm not worried about scaling it down in this method and that going into component mode. Let's go ahead and place this on the curve. How we do that is with a new little feature. If we right-click on the object in the object manager, there's animation tags. If we go to "Align to spline", all we have to do is take the mouth control and then drag it into the spline path. Now it gets stuck to the spline path and then all we have to do is just change the position of this wherever we want it to be. We can still affect the transforms here so we could rotate this down. Let's say if we just wanted the top teeth and we wanted to move this down, we're not going to be able to. Let's rethink how we just set that up. Let's delete this aligned to spline and let's make a null here for this. I'm going to go back into coordinates and I'm going to zero this out. I'm going to zero that out. Now it's back to word space. Now if I hit Alt G, that's going to create the null and parent it in one go. We don't have to go up here, go to create null, then drag it under, do all that stuff. Now what I want do is use the null as the align to spline object. That way, when we take the teeth up to the top, we can still move them down. Because the align to spline is happening on the null and not the capsule anymore, now we can translate this around because the translates were locked to the spline so we couldn't move them. That's why I had to nest this inside of a null and the null take those constraints to the spline and now the capsule is free to move around and adjust as we need. I can do this, I can also rotate this around and have an individual big tooth and scale this down and have multiple teeth. I could duplicate Alt, Control click and drag out and then you could do something like this and do individual teeth. I'm going to leave that up to you and your design. The other thing to consider is their position as well and the mouth. Now that we've set it up this way, you can move them around. The other thing to consider is that if the top of the capsule is poking out of the lips, you can just go and convert this to editable, hit C, and then go into component mode, select faces, hit space bar to get selection tool and let's get the rectangle selection. Then you just click and drag and then just hit delete on the keyboard and now we can get rid of any of those faces that were poking out the top of the lip. But because that's not an issue with the scale that they're at, I'm just going to leave them there for now. I'm just going to turn that this way. 'm also going to just push it back just a little bit so it's not in the front, it's coming out of the back a little bit more. Now the other thing to look at is the fact that the extrusion has no geometry, the caps are one entire face. Let's go to the extrude and go to caps. Let's turn on a different caps type, something like a regular grid. Now we have some geometry that we can deform because what we're going to have to do here in a little bit, we place all of this stuff on the head like a Mr Potato head, we need to curve this to the face because the front of the face has a slight curve to it. But all this is being created on a flat plane. Towards the end when we're placing all this, we need to have enough geometry here so that it can curve and not just go in a straight line like on the back there. Also to that point, we need to adjust the increments and the segments on the curve. We can go into the mouth control and do that as well, instead of intermediate points being adaptive, all we have to do is just say uniform and now we have an even distribution. We might need to crank that up just to get the resolution looking okay on the corners, or you could try one of these other ones and adjust those settings. But I like how this looks for now and of course afterwards, if we get into scaling the mouth control up and down, and we see that, that, I'm in world so I need to get off of world to be able to scale up and down correctly. No, what am I doing? Oh, I'm in face mode still, so I need to go back to object mode and now I can scale up and down. There's just little got to moments like that and why had to show you all of that stuff upfront. The teeth are little offset, so I'm going to go to the align to spline here and I can just adjust this position. I'll click and drag this down and get that centered a little better. Then I go back to mouth control and I can scale this up and down and the teeth don't go through the bottom of the lip. The backside doesn't really matter what it looks like because that'll be pressed up against the face. Now we have created our cool little looking mouth. And I'm going to hit the coordinates here and just get that back to one. In the next lesson we're going to start wrapping this up and connecting all the dots for the separate pieces of the face. Thanks for watching. 10. Assemble The Head: Now that we've created all the components of the face, let's put them all together and place them where they need to be and mirror the right side, the left side, and then make them wrap around the head correctly. So first, I'm going to rename the teeth that we create in the last lesson. Then I'm going to toggle everything down so I can get a better look of what we have and I need to rename that year to be the right ear, and I need to put the mouth and its own null. So I'm going to create a new null and take all of the mouth components, including the teeth and drop them into a new null, I'm going to rename that mouth null. Then we create a new null for everything on the right side of the face, we're going to mirror. We're just going to go to create new null and select all of the right components and drop them there. Now, the reason why I'm not using Alt G, which is the shortcut for grouping, is because Alt G will put the pivot point in the center of all the selected objects and because I want to mirror, I want the center of the null group to be here so that when we mirror it over, it will be a perfect mirror on the correct axis. So now I'm going to unhide everything we have hidden and then place it on the face correctly. So I'm going to take the top nulls and use those as my movers and scalers spin the teeth scaled the mouth down and then move it into place. I'm going to rotate it down so it's in line with the profile of the face. So I can go to the side of you to get a better look of that and just rotate this down so it's line with the angle and slope of the face and then push that in just a little bit. No mouse clicking to get back and now I'm going to just turn the bend object down on the eyebrow so we can see it flattened. Then I'm going to just grab those nulls and I'm going to put them above each other here. So they are in the neighborhood and I'm just going to scale the eyebrow null down. I'm going to Control click the eye and now I can move them together to where they need to be. For the eye position I'm looking at the top of the nose is where the middle eye should be. Of course, you could have more caricatured proportions than I have in your placement, but that's what I'm going to go with and then I'm just going to take and rotate everything to be in line with the top of the head. So if I look here, because the head is rounded, it should be pointing in the direction of that plane. So in this direction that was on the front of the face would be pointing forward and when it's over here, it's going to be pointing out to the right. So that looks about right and now what I want to do is create bend deformers that will wrap these around the head better. So I'm going to first just hit "Spacebar", select this bend deformer and hide it because that is going to be controlled by the squash and stretch. So we don't really need to see that bend deformer there and then I'm going to get a bend deformer for the eyebrow. So it's not just straight across the forehead there. So let's create a bend deformer and then I'm going to just parent it under the eyebrow capsule just so that we can do a fit to parent so that it can get in the neighborhood of where it needs to be. So we go to object, fit to parent. Then I'll turn up the strength to see if it's oriented correctly. It needs to be rotated towards the head, so it will bend toward the head. When I rotate this in holding down shift to get to 90 degrees, then I'm going to move this down because I'm going to turn on the uniform and actually I can see the curve. It needs to be rotated 90 degrees this way as well. Now I can push that towards the middle of the eyebrow and then I can also reset the fit to parent now that I haven't rotated correctly and I'm just going to move that down one more time. Now increase the strength and turn on unlimited and then turn on keep y-axis links so it doesn't stretch the eyebrow and that wraps around the forehead pretty well. Now I can take this out and put it at the top level here and it'll still affect it. I'm going to rename this head bend and I'm going to hide that visibility so don't get confused with the other bend deformer. Now let's take a look at the eye. I'm going to select it hit "T" and scale down. Then take a look at the profile and I'm happy with that. I think that's okay that it's coming off a little bit. We can adjust that later when we're doing lighting and rendering and we change our mind, we can always push that back in a little bit. So that looks good. Now let's just do the mouth. So we toggle this down and I'm going to create a new bend deformer. I'm going to increase the strength and get it rotated before we move it this time. So holding down shift after clicking the axis, get it to 90, and then get it to 90 this way. I want it to bend towards the face. Then now we can just parent it under, really any of these, I guess the mouth sweep might be the best and then we can fit it to the parent and it looks all messed up because its bend right now. So I'm just going to pop this out of the mouth sweep to the top null here and then I'm going to go to the front view and then just move this over, this bend over. So it is over towards the center because we're going to turn on uniform, so it's even symmetrical on both sides. So we click it one more time to get up the attributes. Hit unlimited and then turn on keep y-axis so it's not stretching the mouth. Then we can see what else we need to do strength-wise and bring it forward or not. So let's just increase the bend after I rename it Head_Bend so we don't get confused and increase strength so wraps around a little bit more. Then we can bring the whole mouth null forward so that the black part isn't penetrating or intersecting with the head and that looks pretty good. We can hide that as well, double-clicking the top dot and now we can test at everyone's somehow like to test and make sure everything is still working every time I make a big change. So that looks like it's working, the mouth is working. The teeth are following. Let's do the scale, on the eye, that's still working. Let's do the bend on the eyebrow and of course you could think of creative ways to do a driven and driver on the eye eyebrow bend if you wanted to. I didn't do that initially because that was the first time we were introducing the idea to this and doing the spin down might be a good way to position the eyebrows well. So I'll grab the null of it and hit "W". Take the object so I can just drag it in line. Doesn't have to be that way. That's already pretty closely there. It looks like it's rotated a little odd. So let's see what that's about. Maybe something like that. Might be the bend deformer on the head, we can always adjust these things again in lighting and you start to see shadows and that type of thing you might want to adjust, a just that thing. So I'm going to zero on that. Yeah I think it was the bend deformer possibly on that. So you have you rotate the bend former around the head bend. You can see it adjust that position on the head a little bit. But for the most part, I think this is really good and all we need to do now is mirror the right null over for the left null. So what we can do to mirror things or to copy them first is just hold down Control, left-click on the item and the object manager and drag down until we get this error and then we'd like, oh, and now we have a duplicate which we can rename. I'm first just going to scale this with the coordinate selected here and if we hit "T", we can get it the axes and we can see we want to scale an x. So I'm going to go ahead and scale over and I'm going to select the null and make sure that's negative one, so it's exactly mirrored over. Then I'm going to go through, and I want to test each one of these as well. Anytime I do anything, I want to make sure everything is still working the way I expect it to be working. So all that seems to be working okay, and now all we have to do is just go through these and rename each one with an L prefix instead of an R. So I'll let you do to do that and then we can maybe do a little hair modeling and start to build out the rest of the bust and neck and that area and we'll get the rig ready for animation. So thanks for watching. 11. Add To Lips: Before we move on to creating the body and the hair, I wanted to show you two more things I want to add to the mouth. That's a control to make it smile or frown and a tongue. Let's add the smile or frown first by creating a bend deformer, increasing the strength so we see which direction it bends in. We're going to rotate it down in 90 degrees so it's in a smile-frown direction. Then I'm going to parent it under the null sweep. But before I do, I want to reduce the mouth so I can see the effect a little bit better and enclose the mouth. I'm going to scale this down, and if I'm scaling down and it's not working, make sure your object mode and world mode is off and you don't have your pivot on or something weird. Now I can scale it down and it works just fine. Just be mindful of that because I run into that when I'm doing this. Now that we have that scale down, we can drag the bend deformer under the sweep and then say, "Fit to Parent" so that it's closer in the neighborhood and oriented correctly. I'm going to drag that back out into the mouth null main spot. I'm just going to rename that smilefrown_bend so that we can recognize it. I'm just going to scale this end so we can get a better look and then move this out to the side. I'm going to middle mouse button into the front view, and then just make sure it's right at the middle line of the grid and the face, and on mouse button back into perspective. Click the "Bend Deformer", go to unlimited so that it will be symmetrical and then keep y axis length so it doesn't stretch it too much. Now I'm going to crank up the strength and see how well it's working. That is the smile control, and let me just make sure it's working while the mouth is open as well. Let's open the mouth back up. We see it's working a little bit. I'm going to maybe reduce the scale way down and then drag this back end just to see if that works a little bit better. That might be what we need to do is have a small scale so that when the mouth is open it works as well. Now let's check that it works and we have the mouth closed, and it does. That's the idea. You want to have your scale values of your bend deformer somewhere in this neighborhood. That way that we can control and create a nice smile or a nice frown just by the bend deformer here. Now that we have that, let's turn off the strength here. I'm going to also just hide this for now from the display so it's not distracting and I'm going to turn the mouth control coordinate for scale back to one, and I'm going create a new capsule. We're going to add the tongue now. I'm going to go to capsule and I'm going to crank up some of the segments here so we have a little more rounding to the tongue, and then I'm going to make this editable but in C and go into face mode here, and I'm going to get the rectangle selection and just click in "Drag' from a side view all of the faces about halfway up. I'm going to delete those. Then I'm going to go back to the perspective view, grab all the faces again, and then just scale in this direction to make it a little bit more of a tongue shape and then maybe just scale it up a little bit. Now, I think I am going to add a bend deformer to this. I'm going to add a bend deformer, I'm going to rotate the bend deformer in a direction that will be good for the tongue. So I'm going to rotate it here. Now let's drag the bend deformer under the capsule and then fit it to parent. We could keep the axis length on just so it does stretch. We might actually need that for the tongue, but we haven't needed it in the other ones. Let's leave that for now, and let's turn off the strength for a moment. Let's create a null so that we can parent all of this under the null. I'm going to rename it tongue, then just copy paste this as a prefix to all of these. I'm going to right-click and add the aligned as spline tag and now I'm going to drag the mouth control on the spine path. I'll snap it there, and I can just scale down the null to have the tongue be the right size that I want it to be. I could also scale up the tongue itself, so it's a little bit taller if I wanted. Then I just need to move it into position here. This is at the bottom of the mouth. Now with the capsule in the right position, we need to get out of the face mode and go into object mode. Now that we're on object mode, if we click the capsule polygon here, we can just push that back into the mouth or into the head to make it disappear for now. Then when we need it, we could actually just leave it there and use the strength of the bend deformer to have it pop out of the mouth. We can also just animate the rotation here from the tongue. There's a lot of different options and it's whatever you need. Typically when I'm using the tongue, it's only for certain words like this or that or Lucas or words that need an L or a th sound. I'm not going to worry about how many I use it yet too much. It's there and that's enough for me. I'm just going to drop the tongue null under the mouth null now so that those will all move together as well. Now we have a deformer for the mouth to smile and frown, and we've added a tongue. Let's add the hair and the body in the next lesson. Thanks for watching. 12. Create Body 1: In this lesson, we're going to create the rest of the body and connect it altogether. The first thing I want to do is to create a new null that I can group all of the head objects underneath. So I'm going to call This the Head_Null. Now that I have the Head_Null, I want to position it. That's where it's going to be the best for the pivot of the neck. You need to think about where do you want to pivot the neck from? You don't want to pivot way below where the top spine joint is going to be. We need to move this to where the actual pivot of the head is going to be, which is going to be inside the head and maybe a little bit back. It's going to be in set. You just got to think we're the last spine joint is on a skull. It's going to be in here somewhere. Now we can select the top null here beneath the ahead, shift select the bottom one so we get everything and then just click and drag them inside the head null. Now we have one controller that we will be able to rotate the head by and animate all of the head rotations. I'm also going to just drag this up and begin working on the rest of the body. The typical human body is about 7-8 heads tall. What I can do is grab the head polygon here and then just hold down "Ctrl" or "Command" if you're on a Mac and click and drag this down and make 3,4,5, 6, 7. Now I can just pull the head up until I can see that on a side view or a front view, the last head is on the ground. If I want to do a full body rig, then I know that that's about the right proportion. But of course you could make a cartoon features or caricature proportions for your character, but I'm just going to try to keep mine fairly normal. I'm going to grab the Selection Tool and then just delete those heads we only just used for measuring. Now, be careful you didn't grab the null and deleted the null and then you lost everything there. Look out for those little black dots right here, that's the representation of these nulls. Now we have the right head height. Now that we have the body in the right position, let's go ahead and create some hair for it. I'm going to create a new sphere, and I'm going to drag it up to be on top of the head, and I don't really like this geometry here. The topology is what this is called, where there's this disk in the center creates a pinching point at the top, so I'm going create a different type of sphere that won't cause us problems. You could do really anything that doesn't have that one. I don't the triangles as much, I think I'm going to use the hexes drawn. With that, I'm going to move it towards just above the top of the skull. Then I'm just going to simply start modeling this in and not worry too much about symmetry. But it's here on my keyboard so now that it's editable, I can go into the specific edges here and start pulling things around. Of course, with the Move Tool selected, I can turn on Soft Selection, and that way at the early stages, it's a lot easier and better to globally move things with the Soft Selection on, it's just a lot easier. Even though I can't see it, I can just click in there and now I'm going to grabs something of that sphere. Because since we're on edge mode, and this is the only thing that we have selected and editable right now, I'm going to select one of those edges and add something else on the head. I'm going to select something else in here, and that's fine. I was thinking maybe I might need to reduce the influence of the fall off but that looked okay. Maybe rotate this and then move it in so it tucks in under the back of the head. For the most part, I think that's looking pretty good. It's a bit of a sphere on top. What I'm going do is create a little bit of a part, so I going to turn off the self-selection and then just shift select this edge right here. It's a nice natural flow of the topology to create a little bit of a part into the hair, so I'm going to do that. Now we have that, and I might just going to Face Mode turn Soft Selection on. Just so that this isn't so nice and neat, I might just adjust a few things here as well. Go into vertices mode, and then just move this in. We have a little bit of asymmetry in our hair. I'm just inspect it from all angles, and I think for now that looks good enough. If we wanted to make this look a little bit smoother and we didn't want it to look as low poly, what we could do is grab a subdivision surface and drop the sphere underneath it. If we get back into Object Mode, we can see it's created a lot more geometry here. You can see the halo of the low poly around it, but what will render is this look. I'm going to hit "N" and then "A" and then now we can see it's a lot smoother hair, and we could continue to adjust it. If we turned off the subdivision surface here with this check mark, we can go back and forth between these two modes and adjust the hair as needed. That is the hair for me. You can actually turn down the subdivision surfaces, so I'm just going to turn it to one instead of two so it's not as soft. If I hit "N" and "B", you can see it will reduce the amount of topology there. Instead of two, which is the default, I just set it to one so it's not as soft. Now we can create the body. I'm Then create a new capsule. This is going to be the torso. I'm just going to drag this up and I'm going to increase the radius and the height. I'm going to just make sure I'm naming things correctly. I'm going to call the Hair Sphere, and then I'm going to copy paste that under the Subdivision Surface here. I'm going to put that all under the Head_Null because that needs to follow the head like a minimize the head, and now we have the torso. I'm going to Ctrl Shift up to get another one, I'm going to call this neck. Do whatever you want. Maybe you can just have like a floating head, you don't even have a neck on yours. It's really up to you. I'm just going to not scale that down. I want to adjust it with the height and the radius since we still have these parametric controls. I want to take advantage of those and move that up. The neck, it will be important to see where we're rotating from. The neck is going to rotate from about the base of the torso, so we need to have that correctly in line there. Then we also need to either, I say we move the head for just a touch so that it's inserting in the back of the head there as it would, so we still have a defined chin area. We want to make sure that that's going straight up there. Now what we can do is create the arms, and there's a couple different ways we could do it. We could maybe make spheres for the shoulders. Let's drag the sphere up and put it over here, and then just take down the radius, and maybe increase the segments a little bit so that it matches the style of the amount of segments that the torso has. Then what I want to do is create a spline. I'm going to go to the front view here, and I'm going to draw out a spline with the Spline Tool, the Spline Pen. I'm going to click and drag where the shoulder is. I'm just going to click and drag about where the bottom of the torso is here. I'll click and drag again, and then let go. I'll hit, "Escape" then I'm going to make a circle here and then grab a Sweep, and then put both of those underneath and make sure that the circle is on top. Then we can just take the circle and reduce its size by hitting "T" and the scaling down, I'm going to middle mouse click back into this view. We can just reduce that and then increase the segments here. Let's maybe do something like the uniform and then increase those a little bit. For the sweep, we could taper the scale down, if we toggle down details, we could make the tip of bit more scaled down, or we could leave it where it is. I'm going to maybe just scale it down just a touch. You could also Ctrl click and add more points here and maybe make the elbow thicker. We could really go in and model this thing if we wanted. You can even drag the tangent handles to go past the one mark here. You could do something like that. You can have big pop forearms, whatever. The more we make adjustments there, the more we may need to go in and increase the subdivisions here so it's a little bit smoother. I'm just going to delete all of these because I'm just going to keep it. Well, that actually looks cool. I'm down for the more simplified versions. It'll also might be good to help keep track of where the elbow is, at the midpoint of this. Maybe increase that a little bit, but I'm not that jacked so I'm going to take this down a little bit. We want to name the sphere, the shoulder underscore, then we can just drag the Sweep in under the shoulder. When we rotate the shoulder, we can actually adjust the arm as well here. Then we'll be able to adjust the spline if we go into the Point Mode here and we hit the little endpoint, we'll be able to move this arm around. If we adjust these tangent handles, we can move the arm that way as well. Now we could grab the arm up here and then we could rotate from the shoulder to do a little wave. I'm going to break up this lesson into two parts, because it is quite a lot to cover. In the next lesson, we will finish up the body, starting with creating the hand. Thanks for watching. 13. Create Body 2: Now, I'm going to create the hand for the arm. I'm going to add another sphere, increase the segments, and then I'm going to make it editable by hitting C. Then go on to face mode, select all the faces and scale them down a little bit. Maybe scale up the palm of the hand. Then I'm going to hit the Pivot Tool here, go into object mode, and then E. Now I can move the pivot down a touch, get out of pivot mode, and then we can go back up. What I want to do is create the fingers now so I can go to capsule, then increase the segments on this a little bit and increase the height. I can scale that down on the radius and now we have a little finger. I want to do the same thing with the pivot point. So I'm going to go into pivot mode, turn off world, and get out of object mode. I need to make this editable to move the pivot, so I'm going to hit C, and then I can move the pivot down. Then I'm going to get out of pivot mode, get back into object mode and I can move this around again. Now I have this pivot that I can move the finger around. I wanted to create a bended format for this, so it'll be a little easier to bend the finger. Put it under the capsule, say fit to parent and hit the Strength. Then we just need to rotate the bend format in the direction that we want to be able to affect the finger, which should be forward and back. I'll turn on keep y-axis link, and now I'm going to create a few more of these. I'm just going to rotate this out, I'm going to hit E and then Control. Then just drag another one over, rotate it, get into position and just adjust these so they have a little room and maybe insert them inside of the hand a little more and then create one more. We're going to have three finger hand, which is a more cartoony hand and proportion. So we have three big sausage fingers. I might move one more in than the others, so that the middle one is a bit taller than the others. Then I need the thumb. I'm going to make one more, holding Control, I'm just going to rotate this one down. Then I'm just going to move it into the hand a little bit more, maybe rotate it up, so it's going towards the top of the fingers a little bit more. Now we have a hand. I can always go in and delete those faces as well if they're getting in the way too much. That's the rough idea of a hand and now I just need to rename this finger. Then once they're all renamed, I'm going to grab all the capsule fingers and put them under the hand so they'll follow the hand. Then I'm going to create a new null and put the hand under, and I'll call that hand null. Now what we'll do is say, align to spline and then we'll just add these spline of the arm to the spine path. Now it's going to pop up to the arm and we can change the position to be at the end and then we'll be able to adjust the hand rotation here, as well as the scale. We can just scale everything down to fit. Now we have a hand for our arm. Then what we need to do is just put this under an arm null so that we can flip it over. So add null, drag the hand and the shoulder in, hit Control, click that down. Then I'm just going to mirror everything over negative one on this new null. Now we have left arm null and we have right arm. Now that we've created the body, if you wanted to create legs, you could do that just by creating another spline here. I can go into the front view and just show you real quickly how you could do one. You would want to make sure that's pretty close to the ground and just do another lofted sweep, a circle on a spline. We can just drop that in and make sure the circle is on top and then reduce the circle size so it makes sense for the leg. Then we can just increase the spline uniform divisions there, the segments. The only issue with this is if we parent this to the torso and we start to, let's say, walk our character. We move him forward and we haven't parented everything else yet, so nothing else is moving. We move our character up and down, well the legs are just going straight to the floor. On every frame, we're going to have to adjust the spline vertices of the leg. We'd have to go in here, select this, and then move it up and adjust it for the knee bend as well. That's how you would need to do that. It's pretty tedious, one way that can help us turning on snapping for the grid. If I show you where that is, it's the work plane snap. So I could adjust this to snap to the plane so I know it's on the ground every time. Then we key frame that by turning on this little button right here. Then we'll be able to do point level animation. For my purposes, I'm not going to include the legs because I'm animating a shot of just above the torso. But just know that if you want to try that, you can go for it. It's going to be a little tedious to have to reanimate the legs on every frame, but that is definitely possible. I'm going to just undo that a few times to get the torso back to where I want it. I'm going to delete that leg for now. What I want to do is create the hierarchy for our bodies so that everything follows the torso correctly. I'm going to go back into object mode here. I want to move the pivot down so that it's going to be pivoting closer to the hips. I'm going to turn on the pivot point and if I move it, it's going to move the whole thing. What we need to do is make it editable, by hitting C and now I can move it down. I still have snapping on, so it's snapping to whatever options I've enabled here. Vertex snapping, work plane all the grid point. I'm just going to turn that off for now, it's not necessary for it to snap. I want it to be able to rotate, to go back off of pivot point mode now. This will be able to rotate from the more hip area is the idea. Same thing for the neck, I'm going to make sure that the neck is going to be pivoting where the neck should be pivoting from, which maybe is a little bit lower down. So I'm going to make that editable. I'm going to turn on pivot, hit E, and then just move the pivot maybe a little further down into the torso. Then to be able to test it, I'd need to turn pivot off again over here and then I can test that. I want to put the head null underneath the neck, because the head bone is connected to the neck bone. So now when I rotate the neck the head will move, and the head still has its own independent motion as well. Then the neck should follow the torso, so I'm going to drag the neck under the torso. Now everything will follow the torso up to the head. Now I'm just going to do the same thing for the shoulders to the torso. So I'm going to grab the two nulls of the arm and drop them in. Now everything is going to follow the torso and I have my body rigged and if I had legs, I would just add them to that as well and parent them under the torso capsule as well, just like the arms. I also want to just touch on one part of the arm. If we go to the spline, if we toggle this all the way down, go into the point mode so we can see where the points are. We need to hit N and then G, to get to the wireframe so we can see inside where the point is, there it is. If we start to drag one of the tangents around and change the orientation of where the wrist is, you can see the hand doesn't follow. If we want the hand to follow, we need to just go to the align the spline icon here next to the hand null and turn on tangential. Now it will align to the tangent handles, but it will flip once it gets to a certain point. So you just need to decide if you want to counter-animate that every time you're doing that. Of course you can just reposition this now in object mode. I'll switch back to that so I can grab the hand. Then you can just get this back into position wherever you want it. From here on out it will follow the tangent of the handle here of the arm. If I go back into point mode, that'll become visible. Again select it, and then now we can see it will follow, but it's going to flip. That's just a decision you need to make, which one. You're going to have to counter-animate the hand one way or another. But turning on tangential might be the best way because you're not having to animate it over a very long range. It's only over short range that you would need to compensate for the flip. Even then it could be beneficial sometimes you might want that flip. I'm going to turn them on for the other one. I'm going to toggle down the left arm, go to the align to spline, hit Tangential, grab the hand in object mode, and then just reposition it. I'm going to go back to this mode, so it's a little easier to see how all that is intersecting and where I need to move this to. One last thing I want to touch on about the rig is something called freeze transformations. I'm just going to go in A, to get the wire frame off. If I select this object, you can see the rotation is a little weird. We have these values. If it were to zero, this rig out, it will mess up what we've done so far. I don't want that. What I want is everything to be nice and clean and zero, for this not to be at whatever value that is. It's just all these random values. Now, the quickest way to clean that up is go to freeze transformation, freeze all. It will basically move all those transformations and recount to this hidden parent node so that all that will be hidden. If we zeroed out in the transforms here, it will be what we expect it to be. To fix this alignment issue, so the axis is more straight and not at this odd angle. We need to go to Mesh, Axis, open up axis center and we need to make sure that alignment is turned on. We can turn off center here because we like the position of it, we just want to change the alignment. So I want to make sure that it's not to normals or selected edge. I wanted to make it to the world. I want this to mirror this nice clean axis here. I'm going to say Execute, and now we'll flip that around. Now all we have to do is just freeze the transformations one more time, so it's corrected over here. Then it will put them down there and clean that all up. Now we have this nice clean rotation, whether we're in world or we are in object mode, it'll be nice and clean. In object mode we'll be able to maintain the view of what the axis orientation is. That's how you fix an axis misalignment. In this lesson, we learned how to create the rest of the body. Thanks for watching. 14. Create Picker: Now that we've created the rig, let's create a picker. Now that when we move in the animation, that's a lot easier to select the items that we want to animate. The example of this is basically I'm going to use Alt left-click to drag all the attributes and all the objects that I want to animate into the viewport. I can hold down control and left-click to reposition it. Then if I right-click on it, I get all these different options that will help adjust how this is displayed, or what it does when I select it. So I can increase the size of it to be large, but it's maybe something I'm going to click a lot, maybe I want it to be large. Then when I select this, I want it to only adjust the rotation. I could do that, or the scale for example. If we find the mouth, let's start at the mouth level and then work our way out. Instead of having to go through and toggle all this stuff down and find what you want animate, you just drag it all out here. Some hold down Alt, left-click mouth control, and let go there. Now, when I select this, I'm probably not going to be moving at much. I want to go to action enable scale. Every time now when I touch it, it's going to automatically change my manipulator to scale. Of course, I want to make sure I'm not in the world mode here. Now I can animate the mouth very quickly just with one click and go from animating the torso to animate the mouth. For the torso, I want to change that to rotate. When I select that, it's going to go to rotate, when I select the mouth, it's going to go to scale. It'll just speed up the workflow a great deal, you can also change orientation of it. If we wanted it to be vertical, we can make it vertical. Experiment with the different options here, and of course, if you accidentally pull one out, you can say remove. For the example of the hands or the fingers, I'm going to rename all of these to represent each name of the finger. But if we grabbed all the bend controls by holding down Control, left clicking, and then holding Alt, we can drag them on. They'll be in a little group that we can toggle down and keep them nice and organized as well. What I'm going to do now is hold on Control and get some of this organized. I'm going to remake the face here and have each part of the face be represented. The right eye will be here, the left eye will be over here. So that when I'm animating, I'm very quickly go through the different controls that I need and not have to deal with the object manager and all this messy hierarchy over here. I'm going to do that very quickly and I'm going to speed this up. Now that I have the picker created, you can see that I've also added some of the effects where we did the actions. Now the appropriate control pops up when I select it. The Move tool or the scale tool for the eyes. All that is appropriately added. Now I get the rotation for the arm, all that stuff. It's much more convenient this way, I prefer it over the object manager. I'll see you in the next lesson where we will create a few simple shaders for a character, so it'll be easier to animate. Thanks for watching. 15. Apply Materials: In this lesson, let's quickly add a few materials so it'll be a little easier to visualize while we're animating. I'm going to double-click down here on this little window and it's going to create a new material. What I'm going to do is just click and drag that on to the teeth. You can see a little highlight happen when it shows what I'm actually hovering over. I'm going to make sure that highlight is happening over the teeth when I let go. I'm going to double-click again and get a new material. I can click and drag this over the empty part of the mouth here. I can double-click the actual material and then just change the value to black. Now, we have a black inside of the mouth. Then we can just kind of keep doing that for all of the rest of the body here. That black material I'm going to use on the eyes probably, later on we can tweak these or change them. But just for animation purposes, this is going to be the easiest way to quickly get a few values in so it's easier to visualize what we're doing. I'm going to take the brownish hair and put that on the eyebrows and the hair and then get a skin color, double-clicking, going in, double-clicking again. Then just something generic here. Also if you notice when I drag and drop this material onto the neck, watch what happens because all of this is a child of the neck, the ears and the nose, and the lips. All that's going to be assigned the shader. That's not that big a deal to me. What I can do is just assign new shaders to those individual pieces as well. Then I may also hold down Control left-click and drag that one. Now, we have another material. I'm just going to go dark in and increase the saturation for the ears and the nose. Then what we can do is separate one for the for the lips. I'm going to grab these and drop them right on these objects. I might actually tweak that to be a little more red as well. I actually like that for the lips for now as well. Then I have Photoshop open so I can just hexadecimal values here, just copy this. Then I can get to hexadecimal values. Let me just make a new material for the shirt and double-clicking then double-clicking the material. I can change to the hexadecimal value here, and then just paste it in right here and hit enter. Now, I have the tilt color that I want, and I can drag and drop that on the shirt and it'll add it to everything. I need to fix that for the hands. I'm going to grab the skin and I'll just put on the top. Because the fingers are children of the hand, it will apply to all the children as well. Now, we have the character slightly shaded so we can actually do some animation now. Thanks for watching. 16. Import Audio: Let's begin in the animation section of this course. To begin animation, especially lip-sync, we need some audio, so let's figure out how to add some audio. Let's go to Window and open up one of the timeline editors, it doesn't really matter which one. We're just going to go with the F-Curve. F-curve is basically the graph editor of Cinema 4D. I'm going to select Mouth Control because you need something selected to be able to right click and get these Add Special Tracks options. We want to add a sound specials track and I'm just going to expand this out so we can see, and with the sound selected, we can see over here and the attribute manager, we have the option to add a sound file right here. I'm going to click the three dots and I'm going to navigate to where my audio is. I'm going to say hello audio, hit "Open" and this audio file is also available in the course files, if you need an example, it's just me saying hello and that's what we're going to use to do this a little bit of animation. Now that we have the hello audio, we can go over to the Timeline editor and if we toggle this down, we can actually see the wave form if we want to. If we want to retime this, we just need to go to the start time and adjust the start time here. I'm going to give it 100 frames because I like to start most of my animation at either 100 or 1,000 frames. The reason behind that is because, especially at most animation studios, if they need to run simulation of some kind on your animation, you need to have Pre-Roll. They need to be able to get close, to settle in place couple 100 frames before you get started. In our case, I just need like 100 frames just in case we animate the mouth moving and I want to do a little animation before the actual word is spoken. It's just a lot easier than to having to move all the keys in the scene and deal with that. That's why I like to work with the start frame at 100. Now that we have the sound, we can begin our animation. Thanks for watching. 17. Begin Animation: Welcome to the first animation lesson of the course. I just want to start by saying everyone animates in a slightly different way. This is going to be more of a demonstration of how I animate personally. I'm going to be animating and basically talking through my decisions as I do it. That's not to say there are different ways to do this. I'm going to approach a hybrid style, meaning there's basically pose to pose and straight ahead. I'm probably going to do a bit of a mix in between those two with a bit of layering on there. So let's think about what we want to do. First, we have this character saying hello. In general, when you're animating lip-sync, you want to be able to read the accent delivery without the lips having to move. Meaning, we need to start with the body first and we will do the lips and the face at the very end. But we want to get the body working at the very beginning because we don't want to be lulled into a false sense of performance by getting the lips done at the very beginning and then we are distracted by the lips moving accurately. We haven't have given a lot of thought to the body motion. So I like to do that at the beginning before we worry about the lips and the facial and all the details and that's typically how you approach most art in general. You start with the rough outline, the biggest shapes and sculpting and painting, whatever it is and the same is true in animation. So when I'm thinking about this delivery as well, it is just a character saying hello. If you have clicked the timeline, the shortcut for playing is spacebar, but if you haven't, it's going to be F8. So if you hit spacebar, that's like the shortcut to switch to the Selection tool. But if you've selected the timeline, that's the shortcut there, so it's contextual. But F8 will always play and stop the timeline if you don't have to worry about whether or not you're swapping between these tools by hitting spacebar up here. So anyway, the line that we're doing is very simple hello. So the way I'm going to approach this is that the head is driving most of the motion. I want it to have a bit of a deep down into the side hello almost like a J-shaped, so it'll anticipate down and then come across in maybe let's say left to right. So I want to start with the head rotation and then I'll worry about the body. Sometimes people will start with the center of gravity because that's the root control, the root of all motion. But because we're doing something that's like a medium shot, something that's going to be just the bust and the head, the head is going to be the main driver to me. So that is why I am going to start with the head null. There's a couple different ways you can set key frames. If I wanted to set a key frame at the very beginning, I could just hit this and it will select a key frame on position, rotation and scale. I can also turn off which ones it's going to record to. So in this case, all I would want is rotation, but it's a little tedious when you're switching between things to turn this on and off. What I like to do is let's get the head null to pull up the coordinates here. I want to key just manually by selecting these rotation values. Now if I move forward in time and I move the rotation here, it's not going to set a key frame. You can see there's a little white tick down here and that's the key frame. But it's currently yellow, meaning you have made a change but you haven't said a key frame. So it'd have to physically select these again every time. Now a way around that is, let's move down a little further and make another adjustment. Let's just undo that and you can see it's red with an empty circle. That means it's an attribute that's been key framed, but there is no key frame on the frame that you're on. Again, you can tell that by there's no white tick here. So if I move this, it's going to turn to yellow to say, "Hey, warning. This has been changed, but you've not set a key frame". Now to get around that is you could turn on the auto keying. I'm going to select that and it's not going to take until I make the next change. So as soon as I do make any change, it's going to set another key frame. So I'm going to undo all those key frames so that we can get back to default and begin animating. So I'm going to just pull up the Timeline Editor here, the dope sheet and then toggle this down so we can see the wave form. I'm holding down alt and middle mouse dragging. So we can see the audio is going to start around frame 120. I need to have my antic for the head begin before frame 120. All right, so let's get to a default pose here. Let's say maybe around 120-ish. Let's say 118 is where I want the head to be down. So I'm going to go ahead and set a key frame here on those attributes like I was discussing so we have an anchor point of where we know we're going to want to key frame, remove back. I might do two antic situation where that goes up slightly before it goes down further into a bigger antic. So I'm going to lift the head up and I'm going to turn off the world rotation because I want to see the change of the manipulator here. So as I go up, it's going to change the axis orientation. So now, we have the head goes up and then it comes down and I want it to come down really far and then maybe to the side because we are going to swing it to the right here during the delivery of the line. So now, I'm going to set the end pose. I still want him facing forward a little bit since we're imagining him delivering the line to someone looking forward. I mean, that's another thing to point out. Typically, you would want to set up your camera before you get started. But because I don't really know where I want my camera yet, I'm just going to get the basic stuff in there and then we can discuss camera a little later on. So I'm going to get the head null back and just play this back. I can see that's already pretty slow, so when I grab this key frame just by selecting the white rectangle here. I can just drag that down to speed that up. The other thing I want to do is keep the head down longer. So there's two ways that I could do that. I could set another key frame here, or I could go to the Graph Editor which they call the Timeline F Curve. Now, we can see all of the rotation values changing. This is also why I like to limit what I'm affecting in the translation value. So I have no translation keys, I have no scale keys, so I'm not having to mess with a lot of other key frames that are zero key. So if I click drag, select something, I'm not actually grabbing scale and then I'm scaling it accidentally. So that's why I like to keep the amount of keys limited to exactly what I want. So the other way to do this instead of setting other key frame, if I want it to stay low, meaning I want the x rotation to be closer to what this key has been set at, I can just drag this out. I can also just hold the shift key and it will break the tangent handle. So I can just drag that side out. So let's say I like the speed that is coming in here. So now that I've broken the tangent handle, I can just bring that back in. So now we can try that. This is still pretty slow. So I'm going to grab that key frame and just bring it way back. We want to have a settle pose here. So the settle posts for me is going to be bring the head back basically closer to its default values here. We can see zero is right here. We're going away from that and then we're going to try to settle back closer to the default values. I want the head to rotate back later. So what I can do is also just grab this and hold down shift to slide it at that same value, but just later in time. So now, we can offset the rotations from each other and have offsets that way. I also just want to settle some of these or ease these key frames a little more. So I'm just going to drag some of these tangent handles and then offset some of them so let's see which one. I think I want to delay the z rotation so that he's not tilting his head until later. I'm also looking at this arc, you could pick somewhere on his face, so maybe it's nose or the manipulator cross hairs here and then just follow that through. I want this to keep going up and round over. I'm looking at this intersection of the cross hairs and the path of motion that takes, goes down, across, up. I wanted to circle around again. I accidentally selected off, so I'm going to grab the head null again. So what we need to do is to delay and have the x rotation still translating up while it's already starting to rotate back in the y translation here. I'm going to select both of these and hold down shift. I actually have the z selected as well. I'm just going to double-click off and then re-click and then I'm going to bring that back. We can see how that stays up and arcs higher now while still coming over. I want his head not to be tilted so much towards the end. So let's bring that all the way down here. Let's also bring the rotation down a little bit. Then I think his head should settle back up one more time. So let's just bring this up. I'm just going to delete the key frames from these other attributes because I want to isolate the motion just in that one axis. So we can see that. We can see that this motion here, if I'm trying to get to zero, I don't want the settle to be a greater value change to zero than where it's coming from, meaning we're at negative 1.2. So I should be less than negative 1.2 up here. So to me this defeats the purpose of the settle when things should stop moving, that we're moving a greater distance here. So that's why I'm going to pull this down past 1.2 so it's almost half of the difference. So that helps the settle of the motion a little bit more. Again from the beginning, we could also do similar offsets in the key frames to make sure that we're getting unique motion that everything's not moving together. I'm going to start pulling it over and hold down shift. So now, he's going down first and then to the side and then across and he stays up. So we can have this nice arc occurring with his nose, which I think we can maybe go down later. I think this could be later because his nose, it's straight across through here. So what we could do is maintain this for longer and then maybe bring this over. We can also dial this back. So that's more of an arc at the bottom and not so flat. So that is a good start and how to set key frames and begin animating and get into the graph editor and make some adjustments. Basically you're looking for creating appealing motion through arcs. So you can track points on the face and you can create offsets and the rotations so that the face doesn't move altogether and the key frames aren't all on the same key frame. We can create a little bit of appealing motion through creating arcs and the rotations of the face. So we can keep adjusting this and I like where it's headed. In the next lesson, we're going to get into adding some more motion on the body itself now that we have the driver and timing of the head. So thanks for watching. 18. Body Animation: Now that we've created some animation on the head, which is really driving the animation, we can use that to carry through to the animation and the body. We can do this pretty quickly add more complex animation in two ways. The first way is to copy and paste what we have on lower joints. Let's do that now with the neck. I'm going to first click "Drag" and select everything. You can see if I click drag up here, that I'm actually in this F-curve Mode window, what I want is just the curves themselves. Let's click "Drag" those and I'm going to Control C copy, or you can go to edit copy here. Then I want to go to the next. I'm going to select the neck capsule here. I need to be able to paste animation to the neck. I need some key frames to start with. I'm going to go up to the arrow to go back to the polygon object attributes. I'm going to set a key frame on all of these. Then I'm going to find this again in the net capsule area. I'm just going to solo these by just selecting them and then shifts selecting the bottom one. I'm going to click "Drag", select all the key frames and it Control V to paste that in. Now, if we play this back, it's going to be basically twice the motion that we're looking for. We'll need to scale back these curves. First let's offset some animations so that the neck is going before the head, so that will be anticipating the motion from the head. Now we've offset it to the left to key frames. Hello. We have this nice bit of breakup there between the neck and the head. It has a little more fluidity to the animation. We did it for free because we already set the key frames on the head and we just pasted them on the neck. Let's just dial back some of this animation by describing the key frames and dragging them toward the zero axis there in the center, so that the value change is much smaller on the neck. Because we have a lot of motion. We want to keep a lot of motion in the head for our purposes. I'm just going to drag all this down and then we can play it back and test. Hello. I think everything is looking pretty good except for maybe the x rotation here. Hello. Now that I like that, I'm going to copy these then I'm going to paste it on the torso. I'm going to hit "Control C", go to the torso here, then I'm going to need to go back to the attributes of it, set a key frame. Then I'm going to solo those up here by just selecting only those and then click dragging, selecting the key frames on those attributes. Control V to paste in. Then we can see the whole body moving. Again, that's only from having key frame, just the rotation values on the head. So if you need to animate something quickly or simply, or do a lot of characters in a crowd, this would be one way to go through very quickly and animate them. So I'm going to offset the torso from the neck, which is also offset from the head. I'm gonna go to left two key frames, I'm going to click drag them. Hello. I think that's a little too much offset from the head. So I'm just going to hold down shift once I start moving to make sure that they're staying in a line. Hello. I think I can dial back the b here. I think this is too much of an antic down. So let's just dial that way back and then bring both of these closer to zero then this one way closer. Hello. So the only other reasons why I might want to keep a lot of this rotation here is if I want to actually wave with my arm. So let's see. Hello. Let's revisit that once we get the arm up. So the next thing I wanted to discuss briefly is a really cool animation tag that can add a lot of animation for free as well. So what we can do is go to the torso capsule, right-click on Animation tab and click on vibrate. Now that we've clicked on vibrate, we have these new attributes down below. There's also another way I can get rid of this window so it's not really in the way I can actually just change the layout to animate. So that will give me the dope sheet down here. I can just switch to the f curve timeline by selecting this button. So now that helps organize everything a little bit better. I'm just going to slide that down for now. So everything's a little bit compressed on our picker. So because it was made with a window that was a lot wider, so I'm just going to drag this back out a little bit and then compress this down because we're using the picker more than the object manager over here except we do need the vibrate tag to be selected and then we can check out all of these properties. Now because it's the torso, I'm only interested in rotation, but you can check out these other ones as well. Because I have the auto key frame on, it's going to set a key frame if I change these values here. So as soon as I change something, you're going to see this turn to red. So if you don't want to extra key frames for no reason because we're not actually going to be making key frames on this. You can turn the auto key frame off first. Then I'm just going to set very small values in the X, Y, and Z rotations here. I'm going to turn down the frequency to something a lot smaller. So it's making these degree of changes this many times per second. So I want it to be very minimal and a very subtle change here. So let's play this back. Hello. We can see right now, even though we haven't set any key frames in the second half of this animation, we have still some motion here, so it's a quick way to add some noise and variability in a character so they're just not staying totally still. So that's another really cool trick to add some nice free animation and animate very quickly. So in the next lesson, let's get the arm up and do a little bit of a wave. Then we can move on into doing the facial animation. Thanks for watching. 19. Spline Wave: Welcome back. In this lesson we're going to animate the arm waving. Before we get started, I just also wanted to call attention that I went back to the standard layout just so we have a little more screen real estate for the viewport. Before we get started animating, I also wanted to call out the fact that we could have rigged these arms up for forward kinematics, meaning basically we could just take a couple of capsules and we could have made them the upper arm and the forearm and just parented one to the other. That's also an option here where we just grab something like this and we get it to be the right lengthish, and then we can just parent it to the shoulder. If I was to rotate this into position here, and then I'm also going to create a copy of it by holding down Control and just sliding this down. We could also make this editable and change the pivot points so that they all rotate from the correct position where the joints are. I also need to make this editable. I'm going to hit "C" and then just pull the pivot up to the top. Then I'm going to get out of pivot mode, select the upper arm polygon here, and I go to Pivot and hit "C" to make it editable, and then just pull it into the shoulder area. Now, the only thing we have left to do is just make this capsule a child of this one, and then put this capsule under the right shoulder. We can just drag that right there. I'm just going to hide this sweep for now. Now you can see that we could actually just animate these by rotating the capsule. I need to turn off pivot mode here. Now we can animate the arm, like so. We could animate this way, just move this into the shoulder a little bit more. We could also, of course, rotate the shoulder. We could attach the hand to this arm as well. This might be a better and easier method if you're having trouble with this spine and selecting it because it's a little tedious to select the spine. I'm just going to move forward with that because that's the one we have already built with the hand. But again, you can always just duplicate the hand out and attach it to the end, parented underneath the forearm bone or the forearm polygon there. Let's get started animating the wave. Let's basically create two key frames so that we can have the start and end position. The way I've modeled these arms make him look a little bit bowed out like his elbows are a little far behind him. I'm just going to rotate this into a better position. I'm going to rotate this hand around just because I'm OCD, not because we're going to see this. We're going to wave with this arm. I'm going to get this into a little better position by clicking the shoulder. Again, we could do that over here as well, that's the same difference. Just rotate this in so that the hand and the arm is in a little better alignment with the body. Let's just play this back. I'm going to set a keyframe here, let's just say on 120. I'm doing that so that if I need to move all the keyframes of everything, they're all going to start on the same keyframe. I'm going to hit "N" on the keyboard and then hit "G". I'm going to select the right arm spline. Then I'm going to go into point mode here. Now we can get the points of the arm. I want to set a keyframe here. I'm going to set a keyframe by selecting the little key icon here. Then I'm going to move forward in time to frame 130, so 10 frames later. I want to move this up and rotate it into position. By rotating, I need to adjust the tangent handle. Because I made this little indention in the geometry of the arm, I know that's about where the elbow needs to be or about halfway through the arm. Then wherever that needs to bend, I can just keep moving the tangent handles to make that fit where the elbow should be bending from. Now that this is in a wavy position, let's also take advantage of the fact that we're in three dimensions. Let's have the hand come forward a little bit so that we can wave toward the camera. Then because I had Auto key off, I didn't set a key, so I'm going to set one manually there. I'm going to turn on Auto key again. Also as an indication, you can see this red line shop around the viewport, which indicates that Auto key is on. Now I'm going to get back to the normal mode here, "N" and then "B", or "N" and "A" to turn off wireframe. I'm going to turn the hand around here, so I need to get out of the vertex mode, go back into object mode. Now we have the hand, and I know I'm on a frame 130 and 120 for keyframes, so I'm going to set a keyframe here. Instead of doing that, I might actually just leave just the rotations key framed and then move to 120 and then just make a slight adjustment and that'll set a keyframe for me. Now I need to correct for the tangents moving the hand around. Now when the hand comes up, it will stay in a decent spot. Now I can move the shoulder as well on frame 130 to bring the arm up a little bit. Again, that's going to adjust the arm or the tangent, and also the hand will move just slightly. Now we can play this back. Now I'm going to grab the shoulder and the hand and I'm going to move their keyframes back in time a little bit. You can click, drag and select on the timeline to select multiple keyframes. We can see that now we need to go back in the vertex mode and we need to get the spline and go "N" and then "G". Then with the move tool, we can select this point. Now we can select those keyframes and move them to frame 115. Now everything's moved down together. Now we have a waving hand. I think we could adjust a few things. Maybe the offset of the spline could happen a little bit later than the shoulder rotation. I'll have a little bit of easing in. I'm going to select the arm spline, hit "E", go back into the wireframe here so we can select that point. I'm hitting "N" and "G" to get into this mode. I'll hit "N" and "A" to go back. I'm just going to move this up a little bit. I'm going to make sure the shoulder's working before I deal with anything else. I'm going to get back into object mode, go to Rotate, grab the shoulder, and I'm going to rotate the arm in because I want a little bit of a wave happening. I'll rotate it back out, and then rotate it back in a few frames later. It's very small and I'm doing smaller and smaller rotations here. Let's take a look at the shoulder rotation. We can play this back. It's just going a little slow through here, so I'm going to select all of these keyframes, click and start dragging and then hold down Shift so that they don't move up and down, I just want them to go left and right. I'm also looking at this curve. I want the same speed going through here. Now all we need to do is adjust the spline a little bit. Now we're going to go back to the spline, hit "N" and "G". Then we're going to go to the vertex mode, select the point. Now we can just adjust some of this animation here. In this in-between, between these two keyframes, we need to fix some of this so that it's not mashing in on itself here. I'm going to hit "E", and then pull the arm out. It maintains the length that we would expect it to be at. Maybe adjust this position of that a little bit and maybe pull it out to the side. Then we can fix the hand later on. We're going to adjust this and then we could also come into this one, and adjust this one so that the elbow is a little sharper. If you don't want such a rubber hose looking arm, you could just pull the tangent handles until that elbow is a bit sharp. Hello. I'm going to delete this keyframe. Hello. I'm going to pull this one back because I like the definition of that elbow a little bit. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. I just want it to happen a few frames afterward and then I want it to also come back out, so I'm just adjusting two things here, just the position and the tangent. Hello. Hello. The hand and the wrist will have a bit of a settle to it. Hello. Hello. Hello. Then we can pull the shoulder back down. Before we deal with the shoulder, let's get a little bit of a hand working. I'll go to the right-hand sphere and go back into object mode and then hit N and A and then now we can animate the hand a little bit. I'm just going to have it in a natural position here as it comes up. I just need to fix this rotation of the spline handle affecting it. Hello. I'm going to delete this first keyframe. Just have it waving at the wrist here. We're just kind of bouncing back and forth. Hello. Then we can bring the arm back down. Hello. I'm just going to set a keyframe here before I move the arm down because I wanted it to hang here for a second and then we can bring the arm back down. I'm going to grab all of those keyframes, hit "Control C," "Control V" and then we can grab the keyframes from the spline. Let's go to the spline. Let's grab the keyframe here and hit "Copy" and then over here hit "Paste." Now once we start scrubbing, it'll update and the arm will go back down. Hello. We might need to drag this out a little bit so it's not such an abrupt change there. Now let's also grab the bend controls here on the fingers and we can do a little finger animation on the wave as well. Let's go ahead and keyframe a N position here on the wave. I'll go to this position and then I'll set a keyframe on strength and go to each one of these fingers. We can animate the strength here, and then let's move forward in time so we were earlier in time here. Just bend some of these down a little bit more so it's a bit more natural. Like the hand is a little bit closed and then it's going to open up when it is getting into the wave position. Let's give that a shot. Hello. Hello. Just bend this back towards, so it settles a little more bent. Hello. Now the one thing that's bothering me is, of course this spline is being difficult. Lets just grab this by going to NG and then the vertex mode and hit "E," and then we can just scrub through here and just have this be up higher for longer so it doesn't pop down as soon. We can maybe even move that further away, sorry, move this keyframe out. Then set an in-between here to help that curve and also keep the definition and the elbow. We can also create an overshoot and settle on the shoulder, so when it comes down it can also go back. Let's go to these coordinate attributes on the shoulder and then we can just go past it here and the shoulder finishes rotating. You could just have it go a little bit past and we could just move these out a little bit so it happens after the spline is done. I'll go to N and A. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Now we have our little wave occurring. Hello. If this is a little too complicated for you to animate with the spline, I encourage you to create an arm that's just two capsules and as I demonstrated at the beginning of the lesson. If this is taking too long or you're getting frustrated with this method, there's a secondary method that you can try. The reason why I showed the spline method to begin with is because that's what you will need for the legs if you wanted to make the full body. The FK is very straightforward, whereas the spline takes a little bit more attention and so I would just encourage you to give that a shot and make your own arm here and move the pivots so they rotate and then just parent one under the other. Then you can just copy paste, of course, the hand to attach to the end of this forearm. That's just another way to do it and in the next lesson, let's get into the facial animation. Thanks for watching. 20. Face Animation: Now that we have the wave done, let's get into animating the face. I want to create a blink to start with. Let's grab the left eye capsule and let's make sure that we're on object mode. We have the world axis turned off and we have the scale tool. Now, I want to set a key-frame on scale, so I want to back up to the object. I'm going to set a key-frame on the y scale and I'm going to do that for both the left and the right eye. Now we have key-frames on both and we have auto key-frame on. Now when we move forward, we'll be able to set key-frames. Let's go a few frames forward and set another key-frame and we're going to create an antic for the eyes. The eyes are going to actually stretch it up before it goes down. Someone just stretch both of these up and then three frames forward, they're going to be closed. I don't want to go all the way with them because I want at least one more frame. I want one more frame for them to be closed and get a little extra squash out of that blink. Then let's move for maybe six frames and then open that all the way back up. So we can just go type in one over here and do the same thing for the right eye. I'll just play that back and see if we have a blink. The only thing that I'm seeing and that I might want to change is the fact that, these eye lids when they're closed, are high on the face. So we could even counter animate, so as they close, they go lower. We can start on frame 103 and then grab both of the nulls for the eyes. So we'll go to the right eye null here and then let's drop down a left null and then go to the left eye by holding down Control and clicking that. Now, let's set a key-frame on the positions. But before we do, I noticed these aren't frozen, so let's freeze all and then let's add a key-frame to these just on the position. Then let's select the eye capsule, go forward in time to where we see we need two key-frames where they are down. Let's select both of those again, control clicking them, hitting E on the keyboard and then just dragging these down where we think they need to be on the face. Then we'll set another key-frame on these attributes because we know they're going to be held and there we can go to the zero up here once the animation is done playing on the blink. Let's play that back. I'll just hit the timeline, hit space and now we have a nice little blink. Hello. Now we can do the eyebrows. Let's go with the Move tool and let's grab the left eyebrow. It looks like at some point we missed the right eyebrow. So I'm just going to bring that back in. Going to the right eyebrow capsule, alt left-click. I think what's happened is only when it's active, if we right-click on this, I may have accidentally shown object at active and instead I want it on always, so we can just select that and then now it'll always be on. Now I'll select both of these. We can actually animate them down on the blink. I've also noticed that I put the wrong attribute up here. We don't want the left eye capsule, we want the null because when we move the capsule, the bend deformer is not going to move with it. Let's delete those from this view and bring in the nulls. We've got the left eyebrow here. Let's alt left-click that in and then let's grab the right eyebrow and alt left-click that in. Now, we can animate these brows to go down during the blink as well. Let's select the eyebrows and make sure that the coordinates are frozen. They're not yet, so let's freeze those out on both of those. So we know we can get back to zero here and let's just bring these down for now. Maybe even rotate them and we can also add a little bend if we wanted. But for right now, I don't want to deal with too many key frames. So I'm going to only just translate. A lot of times it's better to not have as many key frames than you want to deal with. Now we have those, and because we had auto key-frame on, we actually had a key-frame set on the default value. So I want the starting value to start a little different. I want them to be up a little bit so there's more room for them to move and then we can just delay these key-frames a little bit. I don't want them to look angry. So when the blink is done, we need to rotate these backup. Let's go to the right eyebrow and then just zero this out and left eyebrow do the same and now let's crank up the eyebrows. We'll bend them and bring them up a little bit. So let's bring them up and then we'll bend them. We need to set a key-frame on bend to start with. So let's go to Object, set a Strength here. Object, then set strength here and let's go and match the eyebrows we have there. We need to set another key-frame so they have a starting point and now we can crank up the strength. Let's go this way. As the head comes down, I want the eyebrows to go down as well. Because we want to maintain that momentum of the head being transferred on the features on the face and then we can grab the bend and then bring the bend in as well and then we can bring the eyebrows backup on the Hello. I want to make sure I'm not in world when I'm rotating, I want that to rotate relative to the object position. Now let's watch what we've done. Hello. I have a little bit of animation of browse. Hello. Once the dialogue is done, I think we can bring these down. So let's set a key-frame to hold this position while the word is being said and then we can just go forward a little bit and then bring them down just to touch. I will just bring them down, hit W to get off of world and make sure that it's still close to the face and let's grab this other eyebrow and bring that down as well. Hello. Hello. I think that can go a little faster. So I'm just going to bring both of these and I'm going to do the same thing on this side. They don't have to match perfectly. Hello. Hello. Hello. I'm also going to turn down the vibrate a little bit. Let's go to that and then down here, I just want to turn this down to maybe 0.8 so that the rest of the animation it's not too busy. Hello. Hello. Now let's add animation for the mouth. Let's go to open up the mouth. But first we need to set a start position for it, so let's set a key-frame here, and if we're not seeing it, let's go to the timeline and make sure that we have this selected. So now we can see that key-frame up here in the timeline. Now let's go forward and open the mouth up. We can also expand that out and you can see where the x scale isn't tied to the interior mouth. We can fix that real quick. We'll undo the scale there and then we can go to the mouth null and then tie the mouth control these two curves together. Let's go to this one. We can say this is the driver. We'll go to expressions Set Driver, and then go to the hole here and then say Animation and Expressions are set driven. Now, when you choose the mouth control, this will also follow, so we can fix that real quick. I just want to spread out the mouth a little bit. I want the start position to be at one or even less maybe, let's go down a little bit. Then I want to create an O shape. Hello. I want this to snap open a little bit more. So I'm going to set another key frame. Hello. I'm going to grab the tongue as well. Let's just see where we need to rotate this end. Let's set a key frame for the position where we want it. So let's go to object here, maybe bend this a little bit and then rotate the tongue back down hence move it into position as well because I think it's maybe a little too far out there. So I think we're right about in there might be a good place to have the tongue and the bend. Now I'm just going to delete the other key frames that I had created. So when I go to the bend and do the same thing and make sure the bend is selected here. So that's the key frames will appear and we can just delete the first one. All right. Now let's go forward and turn basically this off. So let's bring this back into the head, not the mouth itself but the tongue capsule. So let's rotate that in and then move it in and then we can rotate this and then bring it back into the head. W to turn off the world, transform and now, let's grab the tongue. It looks like we've missed a few key frames there, so let's delete those and now, that won't be protruding through the head. Hello. We can finish this out with a bit of a smile, maybe. Hello. Let's hold the O shape a little bit longer. So I'll copy this key frame and then I'll paste it. Then maybe drag this out to have a little more time. I'm going to drag this key frame and this one, let's see, I just want the O to happen a little quicker. Typically you can pop between mouth shapes pretty quickly. Let's move this even closer. Hello. All right, so now we have the mouth animating and we can also just ease this down a little bit, so doesn't just come to a complete stop and then bring it all the way down for a smile. Then once it gets down to that point, we can also drag it out that way. So let's go to the mouth control, go to scale X and then I'll select this and hit H. Then we can see what we've created here in the Curve Editor. So I'm just going to delete these key frames and just have this slow ease out and then also grab scale Y, hit H. Then let's also just ease this a little bit so it doesn't come to a complete stop right here, so I'll just drag this down, maybe adjust this a little bit. All right and then we can deal with the smile. So let's just crank that up and we can just have this on the whole time probably. So because we have auto key on and set a key frame and the first key frame over here has it off. So let's just select it and delete it, hitting delete on the keyboard. Now the other thing I want to do is put some scale on the head, now that we have the lips and lip-sync done. So let's hit T on the keyboard and let's actually just scale the entire head. So when it's coming down, I want it to stretch a little bit. So I'm going to go to the head control here and I want to set a key frame on scale because we don't have any yet on scale. So let's grab the head null and go to coordinates and let's just key frame the scale right around in here. Let's move forward and you might set another key frame and not start scaling until we're moving a little bit more. So I'm just going to scale this and I'm going to manually do the squash and stretch. You could set a driver and a driven here if you wanted, but I'm not going to do that and then let's select the scale here to make sure that that's what's showing up in the timeline. So I have a bit of scale and it's probably a little too much but we can always dial it down afterward. So I'm going to grab that, hit H over here and then we can just dial this in as we want and then we can control copy paste, those back ends. So we get a baseline of where that is. Then we can scale the head backup. So let's key frame scale, so we can hold this moment and the scale position. Then we could've just copy pasted those key frames and then I'm going to copy paste the stretch key frames and then copy paste the squash key frames and then I'm going to go to zero here. So we settle back down to zero. I'm going to select those, copy paste. So I'm just going to copy paste these here and then move those down. Just to touch, holding down shift. I'm holding out Alt on right-clicking to zoom in here and then I'm going to just hold on shift when I pop these over. Now there's a lot more you could do with this animation but I just want show you the kind of preliminary steps that I take to make a little bit of an appealing animation and the things I think about when I'm just starting out creating a character and an animation. Let's create a little more blink at the end, so let's just copy paste those. I'll grab the left eye here and then we can just copy paste those key frames for the left eye. Let's go to left eye capsule. Hit H to zoom in on the left eye capsule and it looks like all we have to do is just go to where in time we want to have the blink again, maybe at the end, here. So we can just go to the end and then we can click drag and select from the bottom so we don't accidentally drag up here at the top and hit Control C, Control V. Then we want to make sure we do the same thing for the right eye. So let's grab the right eye and then select all of these Control C, Control V. So let's get a little blink again. Now we need to do the same thing for the null. If you remember, we counter animated the right eye null going down. So we've got that, we've got the capsule and let's grab the positions here. So I'm going to hit H and then select all of these, Control C, Control V. Then do the same thing for the left eye. So Iets select that, toggle that down, shift, click all of those just so we're isolating that and I'm going to hit Control C, Control V and then we can hit play. So it looks like the animation as a little offset. So what we can do is just line this up, make sure everything is on the right key frames. So let's go to the left eye capsule and then go to 140 and then where we need the eye nulls to go down is actually right here. So those are happening a little too soon. So we can just go to left eye position and then just click and drag all of these over. I'm clicking it over and then I'm holding Shift and then we just need to do that for the right eye as well. So I'm going to shift to select just those and then I'm going to click and drag these over holding down shift, so now, that should work. So in the next lesson we're going to render this out and get it in lighting and bring it into After Effects to finish this course out. Thanks for watching. 21. Light & Render: So now that we've completed our animation, we can create the render settings that we want to export and the After Effects, and that includes adding lighting, if we choose to do that, we can choose not to do it and it will render much faster. So let's go to the Render Settings and just choose the resolution here that you want to make sure that you get inside of After Effects. I'm going to change this to 1920 by 1080, which is full HD, and then I'm going to also make sure for Anti-aliasing that this is set to geometry. This is the fastest setting. If you want better anti-aliasing and better quality in general, choose best and then turn up the minimum and maximum levels here. All right. So for now I'm going to leave that on geometry, so those are the two main things you need to adjust. Let's close on that and let's jump back into After Effects. Since I still haven't saved an After Effects Project yet, since we've been working so much in Cinema 4D light, all I have to do is just import that file into After Effects. That is the latest here, and I import my latest Cinema 4D file and After Effects, because we haven't saved the cinema 4D file, it hasn't saved the changes to the Render settings, you can see this still says 1280 by 720. We need to go back to the cinema 4D, and we need to save. Now when we save the project and go back to After Effects, you can see it's updated 1920 by 1080. Now we click and drag this into a new composition, and After Effects, we have our animation. Now be aware we have the Cineware, affects settings here, which are very important, we need to go to the software render. If we want to see it in final rendered version, we need to choose standard final. Now if this is sufficient for your needs. You can add a background to this and you could be done. But if you want to have a little more control over the lighting, then you need to add lights and the render times are going to increase, we can do that now and we can also adjust the materials if we need to change the color like the tongue itself is still skin color, so we could add a different shader to that. Let's go to the point in time where the tongue is out, and then we can just drag a new material onto that, and we can also add lights by going to the light icon here and clicking and dragging and choose a light of our choosing. Typically people like Area lights or the Infinite Light, or a combination of all of the above, so I'm going to choose an area light, and this is one of the more expensive rendering lights, meaning this is going to take longer to render, but it has a very nice soft quality to it. Now because I have Auto key on, it has already keyframe the first frame here, and that's the trouble of auto key. I'm going to turn that off and we want to delete that keyframe here and delete this one because we don't want to animate the light. All right. So now I'm just going to move this at a quarter angle here, rotate it towards the character and we can preview renders inside of Cinema 4D by selecting one of these two options. We could also have a render region in the viewport, if we click and hold this and go down to interactive render region. As we change the light settings here, we can affect the render itself. We can also increase the Render Settings here by clicking and dragging this tiny little white triangle up to the top. The other thing we can do is turn on the shadows for the light, let's scroll up to the Light, get to its settings and go to General, and turn on Shadow Area Light. Now you can see it's a much more realistic lighting scenario, and we can add multiple lights in to help complement that. I'm also going to give the light a little bit of color in the orange range, and I'm going to control click it and move it to the left and then rotate it, so it's pointing back at the character. Then I'm going to reduce the intensity of the second light, I just want to lift the shadows a little bit so it's not as dark around here, so I might move this down a little bit and shoot it up at a different angle, and then go back to light settings and then change the color to something, maybe in the blue range. We have a little color contrast between the light and the dark areas, and I'm going to bring up the saturation rather, so it's a little bit more blue, then we can just bring the intensity way down and dial in I'm looking at the shadows around his jaw line. The other thing that we can do if we get at this stage and we see like there's maybe some odd shadows happenings. We can go in and adjust the animation itself. We can also, for example, the chin is sharp here. If I don't like the chin being sharp, I could add a subdivision surface from here and then parent the head underneath it. For example, let's just go ahead and do that, and it's going to be under the neck. There's the head null. So the head is going to be around here, somewhere right there, we can grab a subdivision surface and then we can just put it under here and then drag the head underneath it. Now, watch it update and the head gets much more smooth there. I like the definition of the chin, so I'm going to undo that, and now we have that segment and definition again. The other thing that we can do is add some ambient occlusion in the Render Settings, so I'm going to click the Render Settings and add an Effect and go to Ambient Occlusion. Now you can see the contact shadows around the geometry are little stronger and I can turn that on and off to compare. You can also go in and adjust the materials settings and change the reflectance values, if you don't want something like the shirt being very reflective, you could even remove it right here, and now the shirt is no longer reflective. You could also increase the reflectance on the lips or any of these materials that have this material. We could control, click, and drag this out to duplicate this material, to have it just for the lips. Let's try that now, I'm going to click and drag this on the lips, and then now we can change the color to maybe something a bit more red, I'm going to go back to RGB or HSV and increase the saturation and increase the brightness, and maybe dial that back in a little bit. Now we can also add some more reflectance to this. Now a lot of people using Cinema 4D don't like the default specular values or the default specular attributes. You can actually just remove that and add a new one that people tend to like more because it's more photo-realistic. It's called the Beckman, and you can tell it's completely reflective, it's going to reflect everything off the shirt, so what we can do is just dial down the overall effect here, to something fairly small. But you can see it has a much different specular highlight around it than all the other materials. You can add the wetness of the lips a little bit there, and you can also increase the roughness if that's a little too sharp of a reflection for you, you can just keep cranking up the roughness until it softens out those reflections there. Now, let's jump back into creating the eyes. I'm going to control click the material over here, and I'm going to update both of these because I want the mouth to have no reflectance. I'm going to click and drag this one into the mouth and let go. Then I'm going to double-click it and then just turn off reflectance here. Now it's a darker area. Now let's go back to the eyes, and do the same thing for the specular here or the reflectance. I'm going to remove the default. I'm going to add in the Beckman, and you can dial this in as you want. I mean, I think that looks cool. I'm just going to increase the roughness a little bit. The other thing to keep in mind is it's black as well in the reflectance values here because there's no environment around. We could actually add in an environment by going over to the sky option here. Now you can see it's reflecting the gray sky values. We can also pipe in a material for the sky. If we had an image or an HGRI, we could just create a material for that HGRI and under texture, bring in the HGRI under texture and then apply that material to the sky. Let's make a new material here. I'm going to make it a little bit blue. We can put this on the sky. It has a sky color. Now you can see that reflected in the eyes. Now we can go back to the eye material and just bring back the reflectance so it's not as strong. We are getting a bit of the black back in here. We can increase the roughness as well. Or we can dial this back down so it's a bit sharper. Then we can bring on the reflection strength and just dial that down and bring up the roughness. Just keep dialing these in until we get the highlight that we want to see. What I'm looking at is this white area on the eye. Then we can increase that specular strength. We also get a pretty accurate preview here. It's pretty easy to just keep adjusting these values until you get what you're expecting in the view port here. I don't like how much color is coming through. What I can do is just turn off the sky color or even go back into the material on the sky color and reduce the saturation, and reduce the value here. Through controlling the environment, we can affect the reflection values as well. You can spend plenty of time obviously playing with this. Let's jump back over in After Effects and see how this looks in After Effects. You can see that none of the changes we've made have taken effect inside of After Effects because we haven't saved the file yet. I'm going to go over to Cinema 4D light. I'm going to hit Control Shift S. I'm going to save actually a new version because I want to make sure that you guys have the correct project files to download and use for each course lesson that we're creating. I'm going to go back to After Effects, and then I'm going to bring in this new file that we've created., and make a new composition for that. I'm going to turn on the standard final. Now you can see the lighting updates occur. Now, if you have multiple cameras, which if we want to create a new camera, we can do that as well. Go to camera,camera. It creates the new camera, right where our perspective camera is. Let's back up a little bit. I'm going to middle mouse click and then bring both of these two lower windows down, go to cameras, and then use camera, camera. Now we can see if I hit N and then A, we can see this view. Now we have the perspective view where we can adjust the camera here by translating it and moving it around in this view. We can bring it a little bit closer. Let's see where the wave is. I want to make sure the wave is in-frame. I'm going to move this camera over a little bit. That looks a lot better, and maybe move it down. Now I'll hit save, go back to After Effects. You can tell that the camera is messing up. We're not seeing what we're seeing in cinema 4D light. When you go to Cinema 4D camera and select Cinema 4D camera. Then say set camera, camera and hit okay. Now when we scrub, it's going to update to the new camera view. It's taking longer to render because of the lighting that we've chosen. But this does add a nice little effect that you might not get if you just use the default lighting setup, which is basically no lights. That's how you create lights. You bring it into After Effects. You can export this just like you normally would in After Effects. I'm going to hit Control M and add it to the render queue. Then we set the different render settings here. I could say make a QuickTime movie, set my Kodak here. Then I can export this after I name it and select where to render this out. You could click render here and it will render out your movie file. That is how you create a 3D character animated and bring it inside of After Effects to use and use all the tools that After Effects has on your new 3D character that you've made. I'm signing off and saying, thank you for watching this course. I can't wait to see what you make. Please share it in the course projects area, and please leave a review for the course. Give me your feedback and check out the other advanced classes I have. Especially if you're into 3D animation now and then you maybe want to pursue this as a career. I have a course about breaking into the animation industry. Then I have more technical courses about Autodesk Maya, which is the industry leading 3D software that I've used at every movie studio I've worked at. It's several courses, modeling, texturing, rigging, animation. They're divided up into different categories and basically the different departments that you'll find at animation studios. If you want to take the next step in your journey with 3D animation, and you want to start to use the software that the professionals use and the software I've used on every major motion movie I've worked on and game. Please check out my Maya For Beginners Course Series. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next course. Bye.