3D Animation - Introduction To The Bouncing Ball

1. Introduction: In any art for mastering the fundamentals are key to growing as an artist wants, this is locked down. The canvas is yours to deliver your message. Imovie, I'm a Senior Animator in the video game industry, would have 18 years experience. I've worked on AAA titles such as heavily soiled motor storm, apocalypse, Harry Potter, the Born conspiracy, and a series of lego games. This class is very special to me as it brings back memories for me when I was first learning animation and why the bouncing ball was so important to learn. Whether you are a beginner or seasoned professional. I believe we can all pick up something from each other and learn something new. This class will cover all the ingredients needed to understand the absolute fundamentals animation is short and sweet bite-sized lessons. We will cover the importance of the bouncing ball. Simple bouncing ball exercises, weight, light in heavy bouncing ball, hips. The concept as a bouncing ball. The motion trail points as the Belgian Blue ankles concept as advancing the risk concept as about symbol, nose concept about the upper torso in arm comparison. And at the end we will conclude on our lessons. So come join me in this exciting introduction to animation journey, and I look forward to seeing you at the end of the class. 2. The Importance of The Bouncing Ball: All right guys, So welcome to the importance of the bouncing ball. Why is it important? So again, I'm going to refer to this to the hips. That's the main thing on the lessons coming. You've got the wrist, knows ankles, but the hip is the most important. And if you look at my Fundamentals course on Skillshare, it goes into more detail, but this is more of an introductory. Why, why is important? E.g. the animation here of the bouncing ball. Now, students will happens is a lot of the times we can fall victim to moving the hips a lot and not figuring out why our animation isn't smooth, why it isn't working. This is a central group. The hips, everything drives from there. So e.g. if I want, I'm going to do, it's going to copy this animation over to the hips. I'm going to select the hips of the character, set a keyframe, y translation, just paste. The same animation will be on there. Right? Now what I'll do, I'll just come in here and break the tangents. It's going to move everything down. So it starts at the same level as the ball. So it's just easier to make. Okay. So as you can see, when the hips are smooth and then moving smoothly, everything because moving smoothly. Now in student debt is what I used to do is to put keyframe here. I'll add a keyframe there. Or let's make it go higher there. And I just used to have like all these keyframes. But you can see how if the hips, this example is to show the hips are not organically moving in nice curves. It affects everything that is affecting the torso, middle torso, upper the head. Even though you've got animation on that, like I could have nice animation on the head. So I could just have a keyframe here, a keyframe there, then a keyframe back, right? But it's moving up and down, but the whole arc is like shifting, right? Like the head is moving forward, then back. Even though it's a smooth animation going up and down, it's still because their hips are messed up is affecting everything. So what I just do, what I normally do, I just delete all these extra keys so you can see all the keys are there that are making their own jaggedy. So if I delete that, you see the head stays in the same place. Everything is smooth and nothing above the hips has been affected. So that's the main, one of the main things that we need to kind of grasp as early as possible for your animation to start looking good. And the other thing could be like, if you look at the trail, if you go to Edit Mode motion trail you see is exactly going up and down. Right? Now what I could do is I could have put a keyframe. I could make go up there. And then when it comes down, it goes that way. Make it start for you. So you just got that nice arcs. That's what we're looking for. Moving the hips around even going forward. So we could, we could do going forward. Same thing. We select the hips. Again, I'll just delete the animation that we just had. Smooth arc can be exactly the same. When I just unmute this. We can meet selected. Yeah. Okay. So say like e.g. you might be doing a walk. If I just delete these animations, she could be doing a walk going forward like this animation. From here to here, we want the character to go forward. This is moving forward and up. Obviously in a walk, there is a high point, then there's a low point, then there's a high point, and there's even a higher point, right? But anyway, that's just like a trajectory we're going for. And then it goes back down. You've got a bit of a walk motion there. If you create editable motion trail, you can see right here. We could have this a bit forward. We're going to break down. And we could have this back. And then maybe that a bit forward and then down. So you're getting that arc, nice arc. That's the whole point of the bouncing ball related to the hips. Now, the other thing we'll be talking about later on is seeing the hips or the bouncing ball in CG, basically. I'll explain in more detail. But these dots that you're seeing, they are the bowel syndrome. In the old days, they would literally just put the bouncing ball here. And they were, they were just trapped the ball, the ball, the ball track newborn. But really explained in the other video, the ball is the point. That point is very crucial. This one, you can move up and down here, how you want as well. You can edit. We come back here. You can edit the curve and remove some very powerful tools that you can use. This other advanced ones on the net that you can check out too. But the actual bouncing ball is dot, dot, dot, this dot. You want to make sure it's creating smooth arcs if they're, if they're too close, sometimes that can happen. You see, depending on the animation might want that. But the general gist of this lesson is this is how you relate the ball to the hips as the bouncing ball to the hips. These dots are representing the bouncing ball. That's all you need to take from this and try and grasp that concept. And also, it's not just in that axis. And then the top axis, when you walk, your weight shift comes here. Then your weight shifts staves like that. Then it comes back and then your weight shift goes the other way, right? So ******* get there. Like that yet so that you're also looking at a top view of your trajectory as well, as well as the side view, as well as the side of you who are in that dust, dust. The main essence of this lesson, you want to take the balancing the hip to the bouncing ball. And then when you start animating stuff from the top, it won't, it won't really get affected as much. So if I just do a quick key frame like this going back, you will see that because the hips has moved, everything else, you can start offsetting and breaking down as you're doing the animation, which we'll go more into in the fundamentals course on Skillshare, which you can check out as well. But that's the main thing with the hips you, and really make sure the hips, those points are representing the bouncing ball and you're tracking it, making your conscious of it. Again here. E.g. this is a pose that point is oppose, that point as opposed, Opposed. Suppose that was opposed. You're posing your character out at the same time. You're checking to make sure you're conscious of the trajectory, of which way the character is going. Forward, sideways up. You want to make sure you're blocking that. That's awesome. Because when it comes to refining later is much more easier than your body. Your character will be unbalanced. You have to check it. Everything would pose as you're getting older, good poses in. At the same time, you're making sure you're conscious of the hips. Is it moving smoothly? Is the arc nice? Is the weight in the right place? Which way is the character Balanced? Left or right leg. This body mechanics are all things that you're thinking of. Slowly, slowly when you keep doing the animation, this will become second nature. Is deposed readable, is a silhouette. Good. Is it posed correctly? Like we said, is a weight on the right side of the body. The balance right between the center line. All of these things will start coming into effect when you study more and animation. When you go through, you can go through my Fundamentals course and all the other courses that go Scotia, they shared the same thing. Alright guys, so that's the bouncing ball. In a nutshell, how it's related to the hips. Remember those points are representing the housing boom. I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. The Motion Trail Points as the Bouncing Ball: So here is an example. It's a bit more of a complicated example, but not really if you break it down. So think of the hips and the previous video lesson as the bouncing ball. Like we said, this is an animation which I did when I was a student. Animation mental now are focused on the hips a lot and I'll explain to you. What I mean by it is that pantomime exercise I have to do. But what I'll do, I'll just disliking this null. Alright? Now, what do I mean? With the hips? So let's select the hips, right? And let's go to our favorite. Okay, now, what you see now, it looks very complicated, but it's really the bouncing ball. That's all it is. So if you look up, look up this the arcs in the top left, right there moving everywhere. Now this was like 12 years ago. So I can look, I can already see, I can polish a bit more like e.g. here on the character comes up here. Okay? So please see a conflict that they will look. There's loads of places here where I could add another ones like here. See this is straight. Straight. So I could basically, I could add a curve which is going more more like an arc, so little things like that. But I just like to give you this example to show you. You can see where the points are, where how the hips are working. They're all, it's all over the place, right? And then it comes up here. Because unlike arc going up here, this arc here, I wanted it to go down and then up and then come around. And then up here, you're holding the pose. So you can see the pose here being held. All this food Select, select. The hip controller. You can see right here, that's where the character has been held. C has been held like a curve. And you can reduce it as much as you want or make it high as you want. So he's always got a little movie house. So when we play it, you can see like the hip trajectory is going everywhere. Down, up does a good, a good example. So if you'd like to see at the end here, he's looking, he's looking at the telescope. And then comes, this is a big arc here. So you can see point, point, point, point, point, point here. A point here. I could, I could bring this down a bit more if I wanted to quit moving up. When I get here, maybe I could move it forward a bit. But if I moved it forward, this leg was locking out. So that's why I didn't but then I can always compensate for that by moving the leg. So I could get more smooth arc there. Sometimes you can go in-between this and create another to make it more smooth. I see this. I was learning back then. So, but again, you can create smoother arcs. And then here you could bring it down a bit. Are, you could bring that out a bit to create more arcs. And then it comes back down, and then it goes back up. Here. I know it looks a bit complicated, but it's not really, it's just like you can see. The other place. The other thing I would say is to 17. So if we go to 217, we look here sticking out so we can bring that in, bring it in, and it creates a cleaner arc. We can bring that in. The reason I didn't do it this way because my camera was fixed. So I made everything look perfect the way the camera was fixed. That's the one thing with 2D. You can just polish it exactly. Even though you should look at all the other angles as well. Which is good practice. But if you've got a fixed camera, it's good to animate to that and make sure it's polished. Maximum to that view. Because all you're gonna see, but in games is different. You have to do freely because in a 3D world, you have to make sure that poses working with all freely angles. But dust. That's how you use the motion trail. This is what the lesson is about the motion trail. And we want to use that to track the dots, which are like we said in the previous lesson, the bouncing ball and seen some scenes can be like this as complex, but what you do, you break it down into sections. First section, I want to plan the analyst idea is suppose this is going to be like this. Trajectory is going to be like this. Then you move into the next section, section, section as at a time, sorry, section at a time. And then you can go back and start polishing section at a time. You can do it, then you can redo it over all paths. So this video lesson is more to do with just showing you a more complex movement. While I will say, I wouldn't even say complex, I would say more more happening in a scene and don't let it overwhelm. You just work in little sections at a time. You block everything out. When you're blocking everything out, you're thinking about all these things. If thinking about how is the hips moving generally first, then what I did was I block this out generally, dan, I refined it more and more potent in breakdowns, more and more in-between. But this is an overall just to let you know about the motion trail to and how it's used and how it's so important when it comes to just tracking your arcs and breaking down your animation even more to get nice smooth arcs. Okay guys, I hope you enjoyed that and I'll see you in the next lesson. 4. Simple Bouncing Ball Exercise: Welcome back to the next lesson. If you want to know more about Maya, go check out my Maya Fundamentals course. It goes into more depth about Maya and you know how to use the graph or what have you. Then you can come back to this class and then do the animations. Or you can come along with me because these are gonna be quick fire just to show you how to do about symbol. So e.g. let's check this out. We've got a bouncing ball when literally just going to select this control here. Just to show you how quickest the bouncing ball do a keyframe here, go to the end, 24 keyframe. And all you're doing, you're gonna go to middle, say 12th. Actually, let's make this 00. I will just shift, click, move this back. Go to 12, and we're just moving the ball up. And all we're gonna do now is we're going to go into the graph editor, select the Y. We can go to curves weighted, weighted. Then we can go to break, will break in them. So we've got control. And then we're just moving these handles up. We're going to create more of hang time in the air by moving this up. So spacing, we're playing with the spacing here. And now if we play the animation, there'll be like a bouncing ball animation. And it's as simple as that. And then now, if you really want to refine it more and get your graph editor, you can have, you can even move it, make it higher. Then with these, you can even have it more sharper the way it bounces down. So you can see here you're getting more of a sharper balance. You can bring it down lower, higher as well. You can give it more hang time if you want. Because it's a lighter ball. That's got more time. India was a heavier ball, will have less time in the air. So in a nutshell, that's how you do a bouncing ball, simple exercise. Next video we'll cover. We'll do a bouncing ball going forward. Heavy one and a light one will edit both of them in the same, same scene. Okay, so in a nutshell, the graph, That's how you do the bouncing ball with the gravity and keyframes. I'll see you in the next video. 5. Weight Exercise Light and Heavy Ball: All right guys, we're going to do bouncing ball. So we're gonna do, we're gonna do a light one first. Lift this ball up. We'll just have it on the edge here. Like this. You can have it rolling, but we'll just do it like this for now. Okay, quick way. I'm gonna do this to show you is come here in the graph editor. And let's say at the end we want the ball to end. Let's have this a light one. Yes, it's going to end around maybe here. Just e.g. say, so we'll just do a zero in the y here so we know it's on the ground. Okay, so now what we wanna do want to go, let's say every four frames key, key, key. Okay, every four frames, yes, I will bring that to 28. So let's have a look. Okay, now we want to make sure the forward direction is constant so we can delete everything in-between. Go to linear here, so it's going constantly, right? No 0s. Ease in, ease out. Okay? And then we're going to look at the why, what we wanna do at the start. We obviously want it at the top. Around here. Yeah, so let's check this out. Let's just put it there. Now we know the next keyframe is gonna be down. So we're going to zero that the bouncing ball exercise we did up and down. So literally just gonna get every other frame. Move it up. That dialog. Actually, we can delete that N1, so we're going to have two bounces. I reckon, 24, which is fine. For everything. Delete that back. Bring press Shift and middle button. You can bring it back so it's all straight in line like this. Actually, sorry. No, we want it on the one on 24, 20. Yeah. Okay. Let's bring it back. Shift, middle click and shift. If you do middle-class shift, it brings it back. Normally you want to go in here and do it. You should really do it in here. Let's go back. So that keyframe. So what we'll do, we'll go to 30 here. So we've got 28 there. We'll bring that back to 24. Does how we should do it. Even even to 20. Yeah, because look, it's all same timing there. Alright, so what we'll do, we'll do 20.20 here. Now let's check out the timing. Okay, that's pretty quick. So what we'll do 25 will just grab everything and move it to 25. Snap. That's better. Yeah, we'll leave it at that. Okay, 25. 25 because the light ball, now what we're doing, remember we now get the way. We'll make sure this is all zeros. We'll do, we'll select everything, go to curves, weighted tangents. And then we're going to break here. Now, this is gonna give us control. So we want our ball to have a big impact. So again, like in the bouncing ball exercise, we're bringing these curves up to give us that bounce, sharp pounds and a bit more hang time in the air because it's a lighter blue light or an object. We want to move this tip forward to hear because that's where the ball is going to fall. So we've got a little bounce happening there now, right? Okay. You're happy with it for enough what we can do, you can carry on, but I'm thinking maybe just move it up and maybe a bit more time. Okay. Okay. So you've got a bit of a light bolder and then we can come in here and just move it forward. That's all we wanna do is add axes. Want to just keep moving it forward. It doesn't intersect, which is fine. Then we get the inner control here. And all we're gonna do is just go forward. And then we'll just start rotating straight ahead. Then as the ball hits the ground, rotate has the ball comes in the air and the apex. Rotate. As it comes down, rotate, as it comes up, apex, rotate and then down, rotate. So we just want to get an idea of the rotation, see how it feels. Now we can go into our graph editor, kept that control and have a look. Now, let's see if we delete this all and make it linear. Our data's fill. See, that? Feels pretty cool. If you want to control that, all you need to do is select that end keyframe, press Shift middle button, and go up and down. Does that feel too slow? Is that like if we do it really extreme, that's really fast, that I look at that, that doesn't go with the timing, right? So what we can do, we can play around, that's a powerful thing with Maya. Then you can move it back a bit too quick too. So if we move it back, that feels good. Maybe a little bit more. So if we look at that bouncing ball, you can see that's the light board. Right? Now. We want a heavy ball. All we do. All we need to do now this is exercise on timing, right? So we select the whole ball and then we can move it back to say 20, or we can keep it. Now, what we'll do, we'll keep this the same. The only thing we'll do is recall to select. Now with the heavy ball. We know from a big drop, it's not going to bounce that much. So we've reduced the hang time because the heavy ball is not going to be in the air for a long time, right? So it makes sense that the handcuffed and then we want to make sure it's not going to bounce as much either. So we want to make sure the balance is not as high either. So let's try and make the trajectory. So that is not going to bounce too much. Hang time isn't that much. If we look now. Now the other thing we need to do is the distance is not gonna be as my TV. So we could close the distance to OK. And now we know we can bring these down a lot more to go in a bit more. Closer. Into the graph editor, you can really refine each. Press F to go in closer. And then we can really start bringing these down as well. Okay. So we bring it down, bring it down here. And it's just a matter of going back and having a look. So if we look back now and also the rotation, the rotation is not going to rotate that much either. Then it's just a matter of playing with the timing. But you can see just from, so even here, we can do is delete. Just move it forward a bit. Is it intersecting? Move it forward a bit. So it's just touching the lead. That's not what you want. Really. Want this to just be rolling off the ledge. That's me. That's fine. We could even start moving this back. I even think there's too much hang time there, so we can bring that down. I think that's too high as well. Bring that really try and make it heavy. I would even say it's more like you can bring it down more like that. If we look now, I would even what I would do is even get this timing more closer. 21. Yeah. Yeah. That feels a bit more. Maybe a little bit of hang time, not too much. Maybe that was a bit too acute angle, but let's check this. I'll also what we can do is select everything and think, alright, maybe I could bring this back a frame, this timing to 20. Yeah. It's just a matter of playing with the timing. And you can see, you can see by that it's much heavier because we made the distance shorter. And it's instant comes down and then it's a short bounce. And we've squeezed the timing as well. And we've made the hang time less as well. So this is a really quick way of editing an existing bouncing ball to a light one and a heavy one, just a little example. And then you can go into the graph editor and just refine it more and more. These exercises are really important because we're going to think of this bouncing ball as the main character. A big guy, He's jumping or big woman is jumping. You know, how's it? How's the hips can react to it? It's going to react like this. This is going to add more weight to your character. Was it gonna be liked skipping in the air? So that's why the bouncing ball is very critical to understand, very critical to just really grasp that concept because it will be the thing that we're thinking about a lot all the time when you're animating. All right guys, I'll see you in the next lesson in the next video. 6. Hips as the bouncing Ball: All right guys, welcome back to this lesson. This lesson, it pretty much goes over what we were talking about in the other lessons, the bouncing ball as the hips. But this is just going to hone in a bit more on how to use that concept in movements all over. Just not just the bouncing ball, but as in the hips, we're going to concentrate, concentrate all, and then we'll do more examples on the wrist and ankle. So this is an example of an animation that I did when I was at school, animation mentor. So it's basically a weight exercise. And you can see the hips are all moving quite smoothly. This was about 12 years ago, so I'm looking now, I could probably polish the buildings, but what I wanted to show you was when you select the hips here. And again, we go to our famous tool, visualized editable motion trail. Now you'll see a trajectory here. This is basically how the hips are moving. Now when I look now seems or I could just move a few curves are a bit more. So it's more rounded. But this is the overall trajectory. So we'll go to, and it's fixed to this camera. So this was like I was dedicated in every art to this camera. You can see how it all works. So if we come to perspective, we write the character comes out of the scene. Lands. Just get rid of everything. Show polygons or NURBS, curves. To say, get this right. Motion carries, Okay. Now if you look actually if I go back, let me just select the hips again and then get rid of NURBS surfaces. Keep that in there. Okay. So we look at the hips, how it's moving. The character comes up and we're looking at these dots. Look at the dots. You see all these dots, 23, 24. So I'm going right in and I'm trying to polish the curves. The curves don't have to be like this. There could be really small, narrow, but you're getting a nice curves inside. These are the type of details when you go in and start polishing your work. This is what's going to really refine the movement in the hips. So it's not all jittery because sometimes, like I've mentioned before, as students we can end up doing, we end up doing a lot of just random. Moving up the hips like baby, jittery, right? The zigzaggy like jittery. Then it really messes up everything. So if we look here, if we go back and we play it, there's all that movement you can see right there. You see the head going pulled back. So it's all a little jittery stuff that happens. So if I just undo that, that will happen when you start first our animation, you're wondering what's happening. That's because we really need to think about each pose clearly, what it's doing and not moving stuff for the sake of it. Really concentrate on this pose, that pose, the hip, the trajectory of the hips, how's it going? Then you will start seeing the animation get more cleaner because you're conscious about the arcs and the flow of the hips, which is really important. That's one thing to just really think about when you're even learning animation. Now, I can bring this back here. Even though this line here. If I look here and I go back, I could even add a little curve like this when you go back in just to give it a bit more of a nice transition C. And you see I've got killed on every frame, but it won't matter because the arc is nice. Going back. So it's coming up like this, up. And then maybe in-between here are couple. Alright, I want the arc to be coming back a bit. And then you go in-between that. Then you try to add another arc because look now it's getting smoother, right? So you don't have to do this to all the keys, but if it's like one area, so then you can go back when you've added the key and you can be, alright, That's a nicer arc coming in. And then this one, you could bring it down. And then here in-between, because it's linear, you might not want to linear, you might want the arc to still be a bit smoother. So now you're seeing this smooth arc and then you can move this out to quite nice arc like that coming back. And then here you've got these streets want, you could even go in the middle of this one. And you can add an arc here. And then have a look. You can go back and have a look at your animation. That's the kind of stuff you wanna do. And then obviously you've got big movements like this last subtle movements. But then you've got big movements that are here, which are showing, look at the points here. If I just wireframe, this might be there. So if you go down and look at all the points, is hitting all these points, the arcs. And then from here to here we see it as a jump. And then there's a nice arc winding up. So you can see it here is the overshoot. And then it comes down and then back. So there's all that's all it is is just a arcs. Arcs. And then you got small arcs. That's all you're looking for does this is this normally comes when you're polishing right at the end, but you're thinking about this at the start as well when you're blocking or your animation. Because you're thinking, Oh, the trajectory of the whole character as well, and the arc of the character, which you'll see more of that in detail on my Fundamentals course. But this is a breakdown of a simple breakdown of when you're starting animation. It will give you a bit of a headstart to know these are aware of these things that we have to look at, the arcs of the hips, we have to make sure everything's moving correctly, smoothly. And this will help you progress more quickly. So this is very, I found this very important. I wish I'd known that when I learned animation, when I first started, I was never taught this. So that's why I would like to stress this a lot more. Because if you're styling animation journey, you can grasp this concept of the hips moving correctly. Planning to move the arcs are nice and smoothly. That will help you a lot moving forward, okay, to really try and grasp that. And we'll do an exercise for this as well, which I'll show you what you can just practice on creating arcs. So we'll talk about that as well. And I'll show you some quick exercises on that as well that you can do. And I'll show you that in the next video. 7. Arc Exercises: All right, my friends, so quick exercise. Now imagine the bouncing ball as the hips. What we're gonna do a quick exercise is figure eights, zeros round wherever. Yeah. So normally the hips, they always move up in a in a nice flow when you're walking or when you're doing a game, there's always a kind of round, nice, round little curves going on. Orders, failure rates as well. Coming back when you're doing like combat idols, there's always this kind of movement. These are known as Blue Ox. So when you get the root of the movement working correctly, then you can work from the up and the down of the body. So this is a good exercise to do just to, just to practice arcs. So while normally do is when I would start when I first add animation. So I put a keyframe here. And I put a keyframe at the end, right? And then in the middle, I'd go up. So you've got this kind of up, down, up, down like a bouncing ball right? Now you might be like, alright, When I come here to number ten, I'm just going to move it out to the left. As it comes down. Number 30, I want to move it to the right. And then you've got this nice little arc that you're working with right? Now. What we'll do here, this is just a little practice I do. I'll just go to cycle, cycle. So you're cycling on this side and recycling infinity on the other side. And then, because in video games we do this a lot where if you look when you cycle, you can see these events happening at the end. And I mentioned this on some of my courses. The video against courses is to match the tangents like this. So it's matching. So this basically what it does, it is cycle smoothly to the smooth, but it won't be like a slow if I undo this. If I can undo it, yeah. Now if you look at the animation here, when it comes down, is a bit of ease and a pause there at the bottom, isn't it? Now what you do if you just make this linear, like smooth does move. And that's okay. So we've got animation on Z and Y, That's it. Now, you notice this mover That's tasks, what that does, the cycle. So it's very important, That's my run cycles is very important to know that in run cycles and idols. Because when you come to the end of your idol in a video game, you don't want to see that jerk because that will catch the eye. Players would see that this is always good to keep everything seamless. That's a must. It's just have to do as a formality. Now, we've done this animation here. Now what should we do? Let's go back to our tool. And you can see that right now. We can do, you can just go in and edit if you want. Just have these the same. Even like the distance here. You could have that the same. So that's your typical arc. So you would have that in the hips luck expanded the last video. Now, you can also change this right? So you can deselect everything. Not sure you can scale it, but you can either. I normally do it in the graph editor. So if I come here, I believe this outcome. So if I just bring this down, if I look at the movement, side-to-side movement, where you can do is you can go to Z. You can actually select European peasant. Okay? It's selecting everything. Why is that happening? That should be happening. Because I had the curve selected as well. Okay. I had the points selected. That's why that was happening. So unselect, Select the actual main controller. What I would do if you want to scale, decide Besides bit, make it go smaller. So the semicircle smaller. All you do is you go to select all the points, go to the first bay, press Shift and middle button and scale it from that first point. If you scale it from, if I scale it from the top, it's going to scale upward from that point. So you want to go from the origin zero, but just put your cursor there and then press Shift middle button and scale. And if you look now, you see how that's changed. You can see in real time, right? So if I scale it back up, look at as changing the blue bit. So you can have subtle curves that are like this. Really thin. Idols, walk, combine ideas. What have you, whatever, wherever it is. And you can also be like, Okay, maybe you want the top bit to be scaled down. This smaller arcs like this. Then you can start doing your breathing exercises from the top or bottom down. And then you can practice all kinds of different curves. So then what we can do is we can go back here, delete everything, will go to zero. Let's delete everything. And then Explorer, you can dilute the motion trail that you've created. So it will look clean scene again. And everything is zeroed. And what you can do now is you can practice different arcs so we can do that, okay? One is there at five, I want it to be figure-eight. So we might want it up here. Keyframe nine. We want it down. So we'll just quickly do this. And then here, we'll just put in all these, let's just put in all these poses. Then we can fix it later. Coming back here. And then the end pose is here, right? So you've got this kind of messy at the moment. But what we'll do, we'll just go into the visualize tool again. And we can see here, there's this. It's not exactly a figure eight. But we can start playing with this now. We can go through all the keyframes we just went through. And go in and be like, okay, we want this to be in the middle coming up here. So we're trying to make a figure eight. Then push this back. Push this up to just trying to get a figure eight going here. This would be in the middle. And then this can be like around here. And then the start pose, we can bring that down, and then we can copy that to the stock. And then we can bring this in. Okay. Still it just refining middle. I would even say this middle one. Bring this back a bit. We've got one, we've got 123. Guess we can move this one here. So we've got, we've got five points. So maybe we need another point in here. We've got equal points both ways. Okay, So you've got a little arc there happening. We look here, put that 0040. Okay, so we'll just move this back. Just put this on on falls, right? All of these unfolds. Let's just move all these keyframes. Hit in fours. And that's hitting four is like, Yeah, okay, that's cool. Now what we can do, we can go in here. So if we delete these middle ones, will start to just make things a bit more smoother than even here. We look here. Just so I could use. So the cycling. Then we can be like, okay, we kept this value to this value. Copy, we can copy these over. We're copying this value here because at the low end to this value. So the same also with the top. If we look here, this is what, no, 0.3, we copy that, bring it here. And then slowly, slowly digested the top end, no, 0.5. So we would say this one, copy it there. Same head, this one. Copy that over here, just copying the values that all you're doing. Then you can supply in this as well by pressing this line. Makes with the tangents are smooth as well. And then slowly, slowly you will see the curve getting more smoother as well. See the circle here. And it's like a figure eight. Then you can just refine how you like. But these are just little exercises you can do. And that's how you got to think of the hips and the body. And then we move on to the upper torso. We start talking about that, how that connects to it. You can start animating that. But the main cog, central gravity is the hip. So this ball, the ball, but it's actually this point, luckily with stress is this point that you're looking at in Maya, even when you do this in the transform. So if I get rid of the handle, whenever you are transforming, you're looking at this point right in the middle when you're polishing? Not the overall ball. I used to be confused with the overall ball. You can see the hips or the overall ball. But if you can master that polishing that point, when it comes to polishing animation, you will see a lot more of your work really polished with all the good poses in. And then at the end, you start polishing orders. Alright guys, so this is just an exercise that you guys can do. Rigs in the description and everything, or you can use your own rig. You can use a character rig, just hide everything in this. Use the hips if you like. But I think the balls are good way over. And then when you make it, I was going to show you actually, when you do it. Again, when you do that, you're like, okay, I want it to be thinner. So then you select everything. Again, go to the first point here, select it, press Shift middle button and R for scale. Same, same way as you would put scale here. Prescott rotation. So again, you go back, select everything, wrote R for rotation, scale, then shift middle, mouse button. Say you can bring it, you can have your curves even smooth, subtle like this. Now what do I mean? What do I mean about like the idol here? Well, let me show you. There is an example here. Okay, guys, so does the power you have. And then when you go to this, you can scale the z2 and it will bring it sometimes you want on the spot. But it's still the same. Moving to say. So do these exercises and then go back in and scale how you'd like. Just really get used to this. And then you can start applying these to your models, which we'll see later on in the courses as well in this class. Sorry. Okay guys, I'll see you in the next lesson. 8. The Upper Torso and The Arm As The Pendulum: All right guys, welcome back. So this is an example of syrup I've animated. This is a pendulum. So we talked about the hips being the bouncing ball. And now we're going to animate the hips and then see what the upper body does. And the example we're going to use is this pendulum model we've got here. So you can see this simple model is called face on it. Really cool model. So I'm gonna play this, I've animated to it, but check out the animation on this. The roots moving first. And then when it stops, it follows right. Now what I've done, I've flipped. The pendulum is normally the other way round from the heavy from the top-down. Flipped it because I want you to think this as the hips. This is the hips. The face just turned upside down. And then this is the spline, a spine or heat splines planning. These are all the vertebrates basically there's three of them, is, most ribs are very simple. Myers-briggs will have three or four controls in the upper body, which is standard nowadays. Really think about this like the main center of gravity is moving first. And look how this is being dragged back now, right? So this graph has been dragged back and when it stops, then there's the dragon settled movement that's happening. That's basically in a nutshell. That's what you're doing with your upper body. All you're doing in the front seat. In the front, it might be going this way as well. Same thing. It's just going on a different axis. That's all it is. But this side is just an example to show you breaking it down. Now what I've done, I've applied this to the model and I'll be showing that too if I just unhide the ok. Now if you look at this now, same thing. This is the root and these areas, these bind controls here. And the head that's controlling, That's basically these controls here. Just copy the animation over an IP. Have a look. What I'll do. I need to do is unmute everyone first for Kami. Unmute selected and this one as well. Yeah. Okay. So if you look now, it's exactly the same thing I'm doing. And you've got the overlap as well because I offset the keys. So that's basically this example is just to show the root and the spine, how it's connected to the pendulum, how we can simplify the understanding of how the body works. It's really simple when you break it down. So that's what we're trying to do with these examples is breaking down how the body works. Like an animation. We talked about simple shapes also. This is very simple controls. That's all you're doing. And all I did was I animated these. If I select all of these controls here, I literally just, if you could see in the graph editor here, I animated up to the point where it's going to stop. Then there was so animated it just rotating back to the point where I'm going to stop. Where I stopped, I just animate it forward. And then going back, they were all on the same frame. All I did was go to each each of the axes and just offset by one frame to frame, see what happens one after the other. That's how you get that kind of drag an overlap, but I did it on the head as well. The head is offset as well. So then it stops lost. You can see there this is just a video to show the understanding of the spine and the pendulum. And then now we will also show you the arm. I'll show you the arm as well how that relates. But we're going to rotate the pendulum around. So what we'll do, we'll just rotate this around. So we'll just go ahead and zero that also zero the y, so we're bringing it down. That's how the pendulum normally is, right. And we're rotating it the wrong way, so we'll just flip it the other way. So what I'll do, I'll get these. All I'm gonna do here now, you'll see a select all the y's. I'm literally just slacker. I finish pass. All. Again, go to the store here and just flip it the other way round. Like that. Hopefully this should work now. So you see, that's how quickly you can edit it. What we'll do here is we'll just delete everything here. Again, we'll come in here. We'll just delete everything. And then keyframe at the start. And then what I'll do here, I'll get rid of the head. Okay, so now what we're doing here, again, we just copy this. So we'll copy all this animation. Edit, copy. And we're going to do the same thing for the arms. So we'll come in and just edit, paste. So we've got the animation. Well, we should have had the animation, but it's not on there. What happened there? Is it muted? It's not muted, is it will do. Okay. We'll do that again because I know I'll copy this. Copy. Go to this and paste it there, okay, but we need to bring it back here as well we wanted. Alright, so this arm is moving now to right. You can see now why is this 124? That's why. And I know we're going to do same as last time. We don't really need that one actually. We can hide that. So if we select all of these controls, again, go to the rotation y here. Select everything. Go to Copy, make sure your time is at zero copy. And then literally just going to select these controls here. Keep keyframe at the start. We just want to see the axis here like what axis? Okay, So we know is y. That's cool. So if we go to y, it should copy and paste the animations and then we'll just cycle this. Yet see is again the same example we're using. Then you can obviously animate right down to the fingers if you'd like. But that's overall. The difference in this one is the armies. The root is at the top. So imagine that as the hips and this is the spine. And this is the lowest point. Exactly the same concept, but with the hips going up, the pendulum was reversed going up. So this is, these are the key things. And the same thing with legs. You've got your legs up here. When you didn't IK normally, sorry, when you didn't f k, you will have those. It will be like this bleeding. Ik obviously it's like you're pulling or pushing. Legs are normal IK you will use inverse kinematics and forward kinematics. You can learn a lot more about that on my foundation's course, the different types of ways we can switch our controls, the inverse and forward kinematics. It goes into much more depth, but it's exactly the same thing. So these are the main key. So if we break the body down into simple bits like this, easier to understand. So that's, that's in a nutshell. How you need to think about was one way of helping you think about the body parts in simple forms. The shoulder top areas that work in this way down. This is going to drive the motion than the elbow is going to follow than the rest. It will make your animation more organic as well and natural. That's what you're looking for. And always come back to the pendulum for that and for the hips is just reversing the pendulum from the bottom-up. You can keep it this way for the bottom down to the legs. Are our guys a simple get your models. You can find the links for these models and just practice this stuff. Just get the pendulum, move it around. Move the controls will below around and just enjoy practicing these kinds of things, even this exercise that you can practice. Okay guys, I'll see you in the next lesson. 9. Ankles as the Bouncing Ball: Okay guys, in this simple example, I'm going to show you how to track the ankles. Ok, So quickly what we'll do, we'll just set this to zero. Select the foot, go back, say, go back to units, keyframe that go to 24, go to minus two keyframe that will Turkey. And in the middle, we'll just bring it up. So now we'll bring it up. But then at the end, we need to make that zero. Okay, so if we look now, we've got this happening. Now with the control selected. Go to animation, great editable motion trail. And there you go. You see the track is a track in the ankle. If you notice, remember we talked about the vowel symbol is not literally, you're not literally going go decibel. Decibel, decibel is these points. That's all. We'll look at that. I mean, that looks like a ball, right? Dot, dot, dot. That's the bouncing ball. And thus what it's tracking, that's what you need to make sure the curves are really fine tuned. Even a top view, top view here. The leg but becoming out there. So you might want to move it out the leg. And then obviously at the end, not one to zero that back in. So as you walk in as arc, an arc that happens as well. But those are kind of is a simple example. I mean, these arcs could be crazy. There could be going all over the place. I mean, we could have we could have like an in-between a where the art comes up here. And then here, it goes down. And then it comes. You've got, but you still got a nice arc, but it's going up and down. Let them it forward a bit. So these could be everywhere and it could be going in different directions. So it could be more like this. And then out more. Then coming in. We will now we could add another in-between hair to smooth things out. So as you can see in all freely, these nice arcs. Obviously it's an example of an animation, but this just to show the different angles, you can look at the arcs as well. And that's just a simple we'll just wait. Let you know what spot you need to track and start ankle. Okay. That's a quick way of how you can track your ankles. Will move on to the next one, which is the arms. 10. Wrist as the Bouncing Ball: This is the same example, but we're using the arm. So we'll just go in here. So e.g. at zero, I'll just bring it out here, which is what? -35 is two minus five. Then we go to 24 and then we'll go to the E5. So we just got the arm moving. Actually that will make that here and then we'll get acid. You've got the arm moving like this. Now, all we normally do is we select the slip, the risk control. I didn't go to the same thing. Visualize. And there you go. You can see you can see the motion trail. So that's how you track the arc of the wrist. And then obviously, we know this can be it can be coming up like this. I mean, it doesn't have to stay like this. And kind of on the same path. It might come back on a different path and then come back like that. But this is just one example, just to show you what spot you're looking at. Because again, when you look, when you select the spot, is that middle bit there, right there. Oops. So that's a simple, the simplest form how you can control the wrist. Okay, guys, I'll see you in the next video. We will be tracking the notes for the head. 11. Nose as the Bouncing Ball: All right guys, so this model I've loaded, I'll put a link in the course so you can get this model. So what I've done is I created a locator, or as you can see here, I've gone into the explorer and I've put it in inside the head controller, so parented inside the day. So whenever the head moves, the law code is going to move with it. See, we use that to track it. You create the low located from a locator. And then what it does, it creates the origin here. Just bring it up. And he just place it on the nose wherever you want and use apparently under their control and will always stay with that. Now let's take this for an example. Okay, So this is a character. And let's do a term from this, from this pose. It's gonna be this way. So what's that? -40 as an example, and then we'll go the other way. 40. So it's looking for one way or the other right in the middle, there's going to be eroded or hide less to Glasgow for a dip. And then it comes back up. Okay. What we'll do is we'll select the locator. We'll just hide everything. I'll select the locator here, which I've got, as you can see is they're all I'm doing is the same thing. Visualize editable motion trail and show. Motion trail right there you can see and is create a nice arc in the nose. And that's literally what you're doing. Now when the character is looking up, moving around the nose, most professional animators use the nodes. You can track with our zero. But the nose is really good because you can use the chin area. But because it's moving a lot, it's not really that accurate. But the nose is always going to be, you're probably your best bet because you can track the arc squaring nicely on that point. And you can hold a pose with their nose and come back and do all kinds of gestures, like for lip-sync animation. So in a nutshell, that's how you track the notes. So just normally you put located under it, turned it to a head control and it will always stay with it. Then you can just move the head around. So then you can go back in here. So say e.g. I want to move the head up. See that nice arc created there, then you come back down. You might want to have it really down. And then maybe here it comes back up. And then you can start, see, you can start adding some imitability. But the Kleenex that you can clean more, maybe you can move the time and a bit more. But that's basically how you create arcs and track the head animation head pose. Even when doing body mechanics. So it's a very useful tool to know. All right guys, I'll see you in the next video. 12. Conclusion: Congratulations, you have made it to the end of the class. You now have a full understanding of the fundamentals of the bouncing ball and why it's so important. So if we sum up the areas that we have learned, we have learned the importance of the bouncing ball. We have learned simple balancing will exercise the heavy and light bouncing ball the way the hips as a concept of the bouncing ball, the motion trail of the points. We've learned that critical analysis of those points that represent the bouncing ball, which is so important that you can edit as well. We also learned about the ankles and how you can track that as a bouncing ball. All the curves and arcs. We also learned about the wrist, will also learn about the nose. So the same points we're using to track everything, and the upper torso and the arm and how that's related when we think about the root of the arm and the root of the body, the central gravity, and how that works all the way up and how it works all the way down, which is essentially the same thing, but it's just opposing this way up. And in this way, for more of an in-depth look at these topics, head over to my Fundamentals class. We'll be going more deeper into these concepts. And along with that, there are some fun exercises to do with that. Work at your own pace, take your time and really try and grasp that concept of the bouncing ball. And also this isn't the end at Skillshare. You can connect with me here. You can connect with me on YouTube or Instagram, just typing the fitness anime or on YouTube. I talk a lot about my fitness journey. Analyzing films, analyzing games. I do walk through or games or do review on books, even give tips on animation as well, short and sweet little videos. So there's more classes income folks, but in the meantime, happy animating and stay healthy. 13. Maya Animation Mastery: Hi, everyone. Congratulations. This is just something after the conclusion that I just wanted to put into all my courses. If you're really serious about leveling up your animations, I have a brand new course that you can enroll in. It's called Maya Animation Master. This course, I've redone it with four K Good Audio, came out in January 2024. And this course is designed in a way how I would have liked to be taught animation when I started. So It basically gets rid of all the pain pain pressure points that I had when I started animation. So I want to get rid of those frustrations and give you a direct line to what that aha moment was for me when my mentor Steve Gagnon Kati taught me about animation. Something just clicked, and I teach that in the course. So if you're interested in enrolling, you can go to the about me page where I'll have a link there called My Animation Mastery, and you can go through the webinar. Then the course breakdown. You can check that out. And then if you decide, you can enroll, if not, that's fine. There's a private Facebook group. There's a link in there about me for that as well. You can join that where we get feedback, and there's a nice community there. And also, when you enroll, there's a private Myers Mya animation Mastery inner circle group where it's just exclusive for students where we give feedback. So, have a look at that webinar and let me know your thoughts as well. If not, you can join the Facebook group to the private group. Obviously, the inner Coco group is for people who have enrolled, students who have enrolled, but check it out, and it's just for leveling up, and really, it's got all the theory and practical, heavy on the practical stuff, video game stuff. If you want to learn about how to get a shot from reference to blocking to splinding, to polished, show real level. It goes through all of that. And also, I talk a lot about networking and how to get jobs and context that I have within the industry that I can ph your work out there so at least it's in the right hands and people can see and at least consider you for applications. F of my students who have already got jobs in the industry going through the course, so have a look at it. And yeah, let me know your thoughts. So enjoy your animation journey, stay healthy, and I'll see you around. I'll be around on the Internet on YouTube and a giving tutorials as usual. I'll see you later.