Professional 2D Animation | Run Cycles

1. Intro: This is Jared with backwards animation. And today we're gonna be talking about two different kinds of run cycles profile and straight at you coming at you for the run cycle. Uh, but it's gonna be a fun course. It's the action packed sequence animation extravaganza. We're actually gonna be creating really cool animation. So by the end of it, you're gonna be a master at run cycles and compositing We're gonna be able Teoh, discuss the to run cycles in my process and how I would do it. And we're also going to discuss how to composite all of these different animations together to create one seamless, energetic, fun animation. If you don't already have the rig that I'm using, you could go back and take my professional character design bringing course, and you can get up to speed on the rig that we're using for this tutorial. If you don't want that rig or you have your own rig, that's great, too. It'll flow just the same, and we seamless and smooth. The principles are the same. You can apply the principles that any rig So it's very first top, of course. And I'm really excited to get into it and show you guys my process. So let's get into it 2. Character Update: We're going to make a very important edit to this character rig now if you haven't yet taken this course on this character and maybe you've kind of entered into this tutorial little prematurely. Go back and take my professional design and character, Regan Course where you learn how I built this character from the ground up, and it'll give you some insight as to the rig that we're using here. But before we get into our action packed animation run cycle, we have to do a few things first to give this character some more flexibility. So we're just going to improve upon the existing rig that we already have. So the way that we're gonna do that is primarily in this torso section. So where's T shirt is? So what you want to do is find where that T shirt is, where that body is again. You can see here we go. It's called Torso, and it's going to get a little tricky, so stick with me and hopefully this goes smoothly. But basically what you want to do is you want to find the body section. The rest is it's just the neck. So this is dealing with the collar of the shirt so you can go ahead and do control G and make a group out of it. You can even call it caller just to keep it. You call this one shirt? So once you have your shirt selected, what you're gonna do is you're gonna come over here in your do it, Bassel. You're gonna come over here to links and constraints and we're gonna add some bones. It's going to do a lot of stuff for us. It's gonna look pretty crazy, but we're going to clean this out. Okay, So right off the bat, right above our torso, it's going to give us three transforms. We don't need those so you can delete them. Next, What we're gonna do, we're gonna start to delete some of these control arms. Some of them were gonna keep some we're going to get rid of, and it really comes down to a matter of thinking it through what we need. So I know I don't really need these bottom ones, so I'm gonna get rid of those. I think I'm going to keep these side ones in case I have the body kind of expanded in and out for some squash and stretch. Um, and then it comes to the shoulders to I want to keep the shoulders and not and let me show you a quick what we're doing. What we're trying to achieve is actually pretty impressive. We're adding some shoulder movement to it, so we'll have the ability to lift and raise his shoulders, which is awesome. When you talk about character animation, a lot of a lot of the acting happens within the shoulders, so having the ability to move them is kind of key. It's clutch when it comes to actually creating a like a believable performance. Um, so the fact that we can add this into it is pretty cool. So I'm gonna show you how we do that. But we do have to think about what control arms we need and what we're gonna use. I'm gonna get rid of the ones around the collar just cause I don't know if I'm gonna need those or not, and I'm going to leave, I'm gonna leave the other two. All right, so that gives us a lot of stuff to work with. But that's okay. So all these yellow ones. Go and select all your orange control points and movement in the top. We're gonna surgery. Name some of this one. I'm gonna hit, enter and rename it left shoulder. We'll find the right shoulder. There it is. A move that one up. I'm gonna call this one right shoulder. I'm gonna find one more. And that's the collar. I'm gonna put the collar at the bottom and rename it collar. Okay, so I have these three controls. These three controls are going to be attached to a new control. Whatever you wanna call it a new controller. So come here. Hit the hand, and we're gonna create controller. And it's gonna be this roti and move one. Okay. And then I'm gonna move this one right up to the center of his chest right there, and what we can do is hit. Enter, and we're going to call this. See shoulders, Okay. And all three of these, the left shoulder, the right shoulder in the collar are going to be parented to the shoulders. So now if I rotate, they move with it. And if I move, they move with the next thing that we're gonna have to Dio. The next thing we'll do is we're gonna take these other three, which will be the bottom of his shirt, these air controlling the bottom of a shirt, and they're going to see we could get some pretty awesome flexibility and movement out of this new process that we're doing. So these guys are gonna get they're gonna be attached. Teoh. What are they gonna They're gonna attach the body. So hit it to the body. And then finally, because there's some layers within the torso that aren't being manipulated by the new control points that we created. Um, those are the collar. Okay, So what we're gonna do is we're just going to attach the torso, not to the body, but we're gonna attach it to the shoulders. So now that should fix everything. So now when we do this, everything's moving perfectly. All right. And then if we move the body that moves with it, Look, we can squash and stretch the body up and down and everything kind of deforms and compacts as it should. So now we have some really cool ability to move. His character didn't great, so I hope that was really useful we're not done yet. I'm gonna dio do one more thing for you guys. The next thing that we gotta do is we gotta find our shoulder our shoulders. So I colored my purple, which is very helpful. So since I've just I've just selected the left shoulder the left arm, I'm gonna attach this to my left shoulder and I'm going to come to this one and attach it to the right shoulder. So now when I grabbed my shoulder control and I move it our moves with it All right, then then great stuff. This might be more than what you need, but because we're doing some action stuff, he's going to be deforming pretty heavily. He's gonna He's gonna have a lot of movement, So giving yourself the ability to manipulate a character with so much deformation is gonna be pretty cool, all right? And you're gonna see it's gonna be very helpful. But what we're seeing happening is the back of his arm. He's actually breaking out from behind a shirt and we don't want that. So the way around this is not easy. Sorry, guys. There's no easy fix, but the way that we can kind of fix it for now. Go to your contents and there's something in here we don't have a name, but you're just gonna have to guess. We're gonna take this round cap off of his shoulder and for me and hopefully you it's gonna be this sleeve right in the middle. And now we're gonna go to account. That's just a but cap. And it's gonna not be able to be seen anymore, so we can lower the shoulder and functions great. Everything's working really good. We're breaks is if let's say the arms up or the shoulders up and you want to have his arm up like he's waving to somebody. You can see that Now we see the bottom of his arm. The only way to fix that has been to counter animate for the arm. Take that into account and just move it behind the body so we don't see it. That's really the only way to fix it. For now, you could potentially manipulate these guys to solve that problem on. That's definitely an option to it just depends on how accurate you want to get with it. Okay, so we're gonna go ahead and round. We're gonna make a but cap for the other arm now and let's see contents sleeve. So that should be good. Gonna lower the shoulder back into position. And there you go. So our characters should be ready to animate. He's got hip movement and his body follows along way. Might want to lower these a little bit. So it's not is not deforming the upper torso so much? There's something like that. But now we've got some really cool flexibility in his hips. Is that's great. Okay, so what we get to do now we get to animate the run cycle? Let's get into it. 3. Runcycle Pt 1: So now that we have our character rig update out of the way, we could get into the animation process. So there's pretty much three sections that we're gonna focus on. There's gonna be a sideways run, a run at the camera, and then a sideways run and jump. So we're gonna tackle these sideways run. So what we have to do is we have to start to position our character in the sideways position. All right, Cool. So what I'm going to do now is I'm gonna have the key frames. I'll put the shoulders below the head. I like everything to kind of flow from top to bottom. So head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes. So I'm gonna select the head in the body. I'm gonna animate the torso first. So hit P, we're gonna add a key frame. Um, and then I want this to be a pretty fast run cycle. So if we dio, um, let's say we do eight frames for half of a run cycle, which would be 16 frames for a full run cycle. Let's do that. So right here at frame four, his body's gonna move down. So with his layers selected person to do. Maybe I'll do down to and then right here in eight, we'll copy and paste. Okay, so now we have 1/2 of a run cycle. We have one leg down and back, and then we need to do the other leg down and back. Okay. So right here, actually, right here at eight. What we're gonna do, select our positions for the head copy and paste and will do so for the shoulders. And then so for the body. And then I know that I want to actually adjust the curves to it. So hit F nine. Once you have all your key frames selected in blue F nine on the keyboard will do Eazy e's and we're gonna come into the graph editor. Right. Click the the graph editor and make sure you have speed graph selected not value graph, but speed graph. And what we're gonna do with this speed graph is as he comes down, I know that I wanted to move slow, so we'll move this in, and maybe we'll crunch this over a little bit and so he's going to slowly start to drop, and he's gonna rapidly hit bottom, and then I want him to rapidly balance back up. So I'm gonna pull this in this way, okay? Who? So now we have this very sharp mountain with a very deep peak. Okay, We're gonna do the same thing on the other side. I could copy and paste these frames, but I'm not gonna do it. I'm just gonna do it by hand. Okay? So let's see how this looks. This should give a nice balance to him. I love it almost like he's on a trampoline. But he's running. All right, so that looks great. That's a perfect flow. I think the speed and the timing of his balance is perfect for a run. So next, What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna animate one foot. So hit P and then hold shift in our So now that we have that one key frame, we're gonna move forward to position four right here. In this point is where the legs gonna come down. It's gonna hit bottom, Okay? And then I'm gonna rotate it upward just slightly. Adam and hit page down one key frame, and I'm gonna flatten foot out. Boom. So that's my impact. Um, and then right here at eight, we're gonna move the foot back. But we're not just gonna go back on the ground. We're actually gonna go back and up. So we're gonna have such a quick a quick little speed through as he touches the ground. He's only on the on the ground for, like, two or three frames, and then his foot's gonna come up, okay? And then right here at the last key frame, we're gonna copy and paste back to zero. But next, what we get to do is we're gonna actually edit some of these positions that his foot goes on. So I want us foot. I want us foot Teoh, when it's in the back pose to come up just a little bit. So I'm gonna pull this up, and then it's gonna dip down. I want to start to dip down right here as it comes upward into position. Okay. And then we need to do some work on this flat part. So hold Ault. We're gonna pull this, um, control point out pretty far, and we want to keep it flat. Even though my control points dipping downward, we want to make sure that our key frames that it follows are pretty much flat onto a ground plane. So let's look at what we got going on here, so he hits Boom. I'm gonna do another key frame here where his foot is kind of flat, and then he starts to arc up, okay? And then right here in the passing position for his foot. We wanted to We want the total dipped downward like it's being dragged. Okay, and then it will snap upward. Okay, So with my positions and my rotation selected, I'm gonna hit F nine on the keyboard. I'm going to start to think through some of this, some of this stuff, so I'm gonna I'm gonna select my position, and I'm gonna go into the graph editor. I want this foot to feel like it's slamming down. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna crunch this guy all the way over so that it it slowly start to slowly starts to sink down, and then it slams to the ground boom. And then as it comes up, I want Teoh. I think I want this one to kind of have a quick transition from the from one key frame. It's going to really speed up through here, and he's in right there. So let's just take a look at what we've got right now. All right? That's awesome. Alright, guys. So I think that's looking really good. Um, so what we can do now? What we can do is we're gonna select all these key frames. Go control, See? And then I want to see and make sure that nothing changes when I pay. So I go into the graph editor and I'm gonna hit V while I'm right here at my ending point frame. 16. Okay, a little bit changed. So let's see what changed specifically right here. This one changed the Actually, the rotation of that part didn't change. Let's see you. Oh, you know what? Something else changed up here. So if you see, instead of it curving down in the way that we position it before we now have this arc upward, which makes the leg look funny, we don't want that. So let's see if we can fix it, okay? And so there's a lot of, like, reverse engineering that we have to dio. So I'm gonna find this guy. I'm gonna pull it down to match. Yeah, that looks pretty good. Um, in since I've adjusted, have I adjusted this key frame? Let's see. Looks pretty good. All right. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna actually copy these the last key frame, because it has the most edited, and I'm gonna paste it at the beginning. Okay? And so that should clean up any of this weird changing of the path orientation and speed graph editor. And so now what I can do again is I can copy these key frames and drop it in place. And now I have a perfect loop, mainly because I edited this last key frame to be exactly how I needed it. And then I pasted it back at zero. So long winded explanation. What we can do now is copied all of these key frames and we're gonna paste them onto our left foot, hit you to bring up our key frames, and right here at eight. That's where this leg is going to start. So, anything before it weakened elite, then we can grab all our key frames and move them forward so that our old age positioning is now are zero key frame. So let's watch it and see how he's run. Looks okay, That's not too bad. But what we have to do with this foot, Because their their hip positioning is different. That means that they're foot position will be a little bit different. So on the left foot, because his hip is farther forward, we're gonna move the leg farther forward, maybe two. So I had held shifting. Went forward to friends. All right, that looks better. Cool. So now we have the legs moving and everything's doing parading. Good. Now we get to animate the hand. 4. Runcycle Pt 2: so hit P and hold shift and hit are We're gonna keep the position rotation. Now the hand is a little different. There's only two key frames. There's the back pose, and then right here at eight is the front pose. So I'm gonna move it forward into the front position, and this might change as we animate. I'm not sure exactly how far forward I wanted to go. Maybe all we'll move it up closer to his face. All right, so that's, um I think that will do pretty good. We also want to make sure that he has a big swoop to it. We'll see this back. I'm gonna maybe I'll extend the back a little bit more. All right. Looks pretty good. And then we're gonna copy the first key frame back there, and I'm going to move this little guy back into position so it matches the original curve. So if you just hold Ault, you can manipulate these two guys. Um, and to save us any any copy and pasting headaches, I'm gonna copy the last key frame and paste it in the front. It's just a little kind of oversight for after effects. I don't know why that happens, but it is a headache and a pain in the butt. Okay, so with my key frames selected, what I'm gonna do, I'm going to select him in the graph editor, and I'm gonna crunch these guys really far in on both sides. Okay, so now we have these two really sharp peaks that I'm gonna do one other thing, and I'm gonna offset the rotation by one frame and let's see how that looks. All right? I like it. That's pretty good. It was really fast in the middle, and his hand bends back pretty far, actually, um, it could be it might be too far. I don't know. We can always. If you select your rotation, we can adjust thes curbs. Um, not in that way. Well, I guess we have to pull it off a little bit, adjust the curve so that it's not such a steep angle. And that should fix our problem. See, that looks pretty good. I like it. Another question is just his arm. Go down for enough. Let's see if we push his arm even farther. Does it look better or does it look worse when he runs. Let's find out. So now, hit play. I like. Yeah, I kind of like it dropping. Maybe what we can do is we'll have it drop down low as it comes in and up, but we can keep it high. We'll keep it high as it comes backwards so it won't drop down as low as he comes to his back. Resting positions. Let's just see. Well, you can't tell the difference, but, you know, I like it going lower. All right, cool. So now that that is done, what we can do is we're gonna copy the key frame and the rotation, and we're gonna paste it in the back, and then I'm gonna select them all coffee, all those key frames, and we're gonna pace them to our left hand control V, get you on the keyboard. And then all we do is delete the first key frame, and we move them back into position. All right? And then this one, because of the shoulder, is farther forward. I'm gonna hold shift and move it forward. Like to keep frames. Another thing you can see is that my rotation is different on this hand than the other one . So I'm gonna select my all my rotation key frames, and I'm gonna rotate it upward so that his hand is straight. Okay, now we'll hit play and see how it looks. All right. I think his arm maybe moves back a little bit too far, so we'll move the arm forward a little bit. I want to get a good play. Come on, play good. It's like the timing feels a little bit off to me. I don't know why I see it. It passes really quick right here. I feel like maybe the key frames are different. Yeah, this one should be spiked upward, but it's not. So let's see why that happened. Does this one lose it? Oh, yeah, it does lose it. How strange. All right. So we'll spike this one back and because we adjusted that key frame, I'm going to copy it and paste it back a zero. Um, and then I'll paste it here as well. Just because So let me look at thes. Let me I'll copy this key frame here at the end of the left hand, and then I'll copy at the beginning. Let's see if this changes anything all right? Yep. Timing looks way better. The rotations doing some crazy stuff. And I think we'll fix that here. I feel like I rotated the hand in the wrong direction. I don't know. Something strange is happening. There's let me copy this key frame and see what happens. No, it's still doing. It's weird thing. I don't know. Let me delete that. And then I'll rotate it back. Maybe. Let's see. Sorry. Sometimes things just get a little out of whack, and it takes a little problem solving to figure it out. Uh, let's see if that fix it or if it made it worse. All right, so it's rotating in the wrong direction. Still. So that means if right here, we're at negative 1 55 instead of going to negative 2 88 what we'll do is we'll go to 75. Did that fix it? Now? What is going on? All right. Sorry, guys. I'm just gonna delete all the rotation on that one. I'm going to try it again, so I'm gonna grab my rotation control, see? And then I'm gonna paste it. Control V. Yeah, and that threw it down. You can delete the first key frame because we don't need it, and I'm gonna pull it back to right there. Is it still doing this weird thing? Yeah, it's spinning. Why are you spending so much? You see, Let's try adjusting it here. Does that do anything? It's still rotating. Okay, I'm just gonna do this one from scratch, because this is This is frustrating. Okay, So if this hand is up key it boom, that would come here. And I'm gonna rotate it forward because I know it came down and this will be my back pose, Bill. And then I'm just gonna copy and paste back to zero. Select your rotation. Hit F nine, move it forward, one frame, and then let's crunching the numbers. All right, let's watch it. Oh, my gosh. Would is what is happening that's making it so weird. Is this original one the original ones? Not weird. So wise. Why is this one doing all this weird stuff? You know what? I'm gonna solo. I'm gonna sell this arm in this hand. I want to see what's going on. And then what? Solo? This guy. So as the arm comes down, I guess the timing is just too drastic. So if I select his rotation points ended up nine. Yeah, I don't let me just let's just see if we can get this right. All right. That's feeling that's better. Sorry about that, guys. That just took way longer than I expected, but we got it done. Thanks for sticking with me. We found we found the right movement. Sometimes it takes a little finesse. All right, cool. So we got this done, and I just first safety sake, I'm gonna copy the last key frame, paste it at the beginning. We're just gonna like that. 5. Runcycle Pt 3: Okay, so next thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna add a little They will add a little bounce to his head. So it key on the keyboard key, The position right here. It four is the down position. So we'll drop. Is it down? And then right here. Eight is the up position and will copy and paste the first key frame. Now we can extend it out, select all your key frames and hit F nine, and we'll move it forward. Maybe three key frame. That's 24 This way we can actually copy. We'll copy the down position and pasted at the beginning, So let's see what happens. Um, there's some movement to it, but it's not. It doesn't look right, so his head should be down here. So maybe what I'll do you is if we hit f nine, we come in. Let's see what happens if I crunch these over. I don't know. I feel like the movements too fast for it actually read properly. Let's try pushing this over one or, you know what, Maybe what it needs to be. Maybe we need the the, um, Twin Peaks. Let's try the Twin Peaks method here. We g o We'll see if this fixes anything. All right? Now, when we watch it, Yeah, there's a little movement to it, but I don't know. I'm just gonna leave it for now, okay? And then one other thing that I want to do you is I think I want to offset the head position a little bit. Just so it it doesn't move so uniformly with the shoulders. So the way that we can do that is, if we select the key frames, I just want to find a way to stretch this neck out a little bit. Um, I don't know if we're gonna get that option, but maybe lips maybe if I just crunch this one all the way in crunch this one all the way in. I want this one to come down a little bit, so I'm gonna, you know, lighten the peak on that one. All right. Let's see if that squashes the head a little bit. Yeah, a little bit. Unfortunately, again, it's moving so fast, you can't tell, but I'm gonna leave it. All right. Cool. So now we have the run cycle. I want this run cycle to be. I'm gonna delete everything past my, um, cycle point because I want to get a perfect loop. And I think I'm gonna loop this for, like, maybe three seconds. Yeah, or maybe two. I don't know. Let's just do three seconds to be safe, at least three seconds. So just start selecting it and pasting it. Here we go. Select copy paste, select copy paste and copy paste. I think I did this one wrong. How did I do that? Never go. Yeah, make sure key frames line up perfectly. Because if they don't, your animation will not loop. We'll have a popping it once it gets to the end. Um, then we might experience that. It's not uncommon, but if you're diligent about it, that shouldn't happen. So that's just a matter of copying tastings. Boring. This is the boring part. And you're watching it. You guys are just sitting there watching. It's like watching paint dry. Right? Watch that pain try. You know what? I actually haven't finished the arm yet. I don't need these. Okay. The arm, um his his left arm needs a little more work, So when it comes back, it goes backwards. Just a little too far. So the way we're gonna fix that is we're gonna select the position. We're just gonna move it forward to the arm is not looking so weird. All right, let's see how this looks as a run cycle. You guys ready? That hand is still doing weird stuff. Why can you guys tell me why this is happening? Look at that. All right, so we got to go back in the hand. I guess moving it did something I understand now. I'm at a loss at a loss. All right, So moving that four, it helped let me move this one forward, this one for animals. Gonna copy and paste it a copy it and then paste it in the beginning. And then I'm gonna copy these three based paced I'm gonna go through. I'm replacing all the rotations so that hopefully it works and one more paste. Okay, Now let's watch it. Please work. No errors. All right. Perfect. Oh, that hand is doing some weird stuff. Why does he have doing weird stuff? Guys, I guess the, uh, spikes are a little too strange. OK, so it's It's a nice spike here, but then right here on the pushback, looked at his hands upside down. So we're gonna crunch it in. See that? Oh, and be sure that you keep it locked into this timeline. Here, see this orange line that runs across the screen? That means I'm snapped into place. If you don't see that right down here is this little snap tool. Make sure it's blue selected. Okay? And that's gonna keep everything locked into place. So now that I've adjusted this one, I'm gonna copy it, and I'm gonna paste it at the beginning. Next, we'll copy all three, and then I'm just going to run through and paste him. Okay, so that should fix it, all right. Sorry, guys, but we finally got there. All right, cool. So the next thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna work on a front perspective. We're going to do things like for shortening or the arms and legs kind of get bigger and smaller as he runs closer to the camera lens. Um, this will be the more challenging of the two run cycles because we're dealing with things like perspective and depending on the kind of camera you want to replicate, um could really change the way that the limbs work, so let's get into that and see how it comes out. 6. Runcycle Pt 4: So now that we have our first run cycle done, I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna I'm gonna name it, um, run side. You know, I'm gonna distinguish it as the run side, and I'm actually going to duplicate that layer, and then I'm gonna call this one run front and then going inside of this one, I'm gonna close down some of these guys. We're gonna use the key frames to kind of mimic the same timing that we had with the other run cycle. But we're gonna change the perspective. So we're gonna do some stuff like well, for starters will change the head position. Okay, so we'll select that. We're going to start to put things just in the center. So our character will be looking forward. We're gonna do some other things with head. So we're gonna go through and just select things that are off of the centerline and move them to the center. You can use things like this. A line tool. Never mind. So I guess what we'll do is we'll just moved by hand, and I'm gonna change the rotation of this 12 straight, up and down. And then I'm gonna move those shoulders to align with the body and the head so you can see that's a line with body. I'm gonna move the head over one more frame. Okay? That looks pretty good. And then another thing we gotta do is I'm going to turn off my arms and legs because the arms and legs are going to be scaling and getting bigger and smaller. We, unfortunately, cannot use what we have. We're going to remake the limbs, but it'll be fun. And hopefully easy and painless because we have everything kind of animated to uses. A timing, uh, like a reference for our timing. So the next we've got to get rid of this arm. Where is this arm? Uh, your How did I miss that? Okay, so let's just take a look. See how our bodies moving. All right? Cool. It's moving pretty good. I'm relatively happy with that. So So now that that's kind of done this hopefully should go pretty easy. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna animate one leg first, just like we did before. Um, but what we gotta do is I'm gonna actually turn one. They gone and one foot on and using the shape layers, we're gonna create its own custom shape. And this is what we're gonna use to draw the leg. Okay, so we'll go like this. Pull this out a little bit, then we'll make a bottom part for the pant leg. I'll come up to the knee, and this will be Let's hop in the thigh. Okay? And then I'm gonna actually change the color to the pants color, okay? And I'm gonna rename this one. Let's call it, uh, what is that? His left leg left leg and I will attach it to the body. Okay, then there's gonna be Move this around on top of it. We're gonna add the ankle. So I'm gonna add some things to it, like, um, these round curves and that will give us some good perspective as the as the leg comes through. Okay, We ve Then I'll change this color to you. My skin tone hit. Okay, so with these two things ready to go, I'm just gonna start animating these two things. Um, so I'll select the path for both of them, And what I can do is select my layer and just hit you And that brings up my path for both the leg and the ankle. The next I have Teoh, I'm gonna try to keep it in line with my points of reference for the other foot. So if this is where the knee is, I'll put the knee around there and then the ankle will come up a little bit, maybe crunch in and then this will be looks lower down. Maybe I'll put it on Teoh the pant leg. Okay, Another thing, the as it goes backward, which is where it's at, is probably going to scale down a little bit. Because, remember, we want to add for shortening to your body. Okay, so I'm gonna pull in these guys a little bit, see if we could get some four shortening happening. So begins to Taper office. It goes backwards. Maybe I can pull this into so it's really all about just kind of exploring what it's gonna look like. Um, pull this down. All right, we'll try that. We'll see how that looks. I don't know if it's gonna work or not, but let's find out. So then we'll go forward to, um, we'll do four frames. So the knee. Was the knees gonna come forward? Quite a bit. Does it come upward at all? It doesn't really come up. It just comes forward. So pull the knee out. We'll pull these guys up. What's Yeah? Pull this up. Start to disappear. All right, that's looking good. Looks like the knees coming forward. And then right here. Eight. The knees going to really come up. Look at that. Um, to be honest, I haven't really I didn't really think this part through. The question now is what happens when this comes all the way up. We need to have We need to have some kind of a connection here. Um, maybe that'll do the trick. I don't know. All right, but what we're gonna do is we'll pull this the pant leg out, go like so we'll keep that down, But we'll pull. This will pull this one out and around. Okay, so we're trying to get some kind of dimension to the leg. We want this kind of pant leg to feel like it's curving around the ankle and the ankle come down like this. Okay, So if this is my knee here, well, let me drop this down a little bit. I need to adjust the curve of this guy. So we'll come over here to the pen tool and I'll grab convert for a text tool. I'll pull this up and again. I'm sorry. This is just a challenge. Our trial by error. I don't know if it's gonna work to do it this way. We are experimenting and having fun with it. Let's see, because it is moving so fast, it might It might work. Fine. Let's just see how it goes. Okay? We're gonna have contact right here at 12. So the legs gonna come back down. So what we'll do is we'll keep We'll keep all these guys roughly in the same scale because the leg is forward. Okay. Remember Ford and in the cameras, I Right now it will pull this down a little bit. The knee can come back down. I will put it to where the other knee is kind of on the same line, and then these guys can come back to where they were. All right, curve this out a little bit. Um, and then we'll copy and paste the original back into position. I'm just gonna hit F nine on these, and let's watch it and see how it goes. All right, that feels pretty good. I like how it's moving. So now we have to do is add a foot to it. Okay. Who at the foot? Um, you can see where it breaks. It breaks right here pretty quickly. Um, a way that you can fix that is because it goes from this frame into a breaking frame. Um, we can just go ahead and put these together on this one and then push this up to be the knee cause, remember, we don't want any bad frames. We wanted to look perfect everywhere. Ah. 7. Runcycle Pt 5: Okay, so let's had a foot to finish off this leg. Um, so the foot right here, the foot is behind the leg. But as we come forward, the foot's gonna go in front of the leg. So we have to think through how we want to do it. If we put the foot in front at one point, it's gonna get blocked out. So let's see, I'm just gonna add a foot, and then we'll deal with it as we go. So do the hell. Maybe around here did that guy here. All right. And these feet are pretty simple. So it's nice that they're that simple. And then I'm gonna come into my contents, and I'm gonna put the foot behind on that foot. Does look kind of strange. It looks strange, don't you think? They will open it up a little bit? All right. That's good enough. You can make your foot Look is realistic or whatever. You know, it's up to you. Maybe I'll turn it in. We're just a little bit all right. That's good enough. So let's go ahead and Wolf key the position of this foot into the path. You on the keyboard and this is, Let's see. So this foot is coming upward. But is it going? Is it getting bigger is the question. So it's coming forward, so it should be getting bigger, all right? And this is the point where the foot is now going to come forward. It's gonna be in front of it's gonna be in front of my, um, leg. So what I'm gonna do is I'll probably have to make, like, a toe piece for it. But before we do that, let's just see how everything's kind of flowing before we get to that point. So this will come down and then we'll copy and paste right there. So select those layers hit at nine. Let's just see what we got. All right? That's not too bad. It looks pretty good. So what I want to do is I'm just gonna I'm just gonna draw a little like toe cap like so, and will change the color because we wanted to be a little darker and just Oops, that was on the wrong shape. Layer. Let's see that again. We're gonna do a toe cap. Yeah, maybe pull it up here instead. Pull it up like so that I'm gonna add little control point here and a control point here. We'll pull this down into position. There we go. And let's make it a little darker. This is the bottom of the foot. It will do another one right behind it, just to give some more dimension. Okay, we'll pull. Pull shape, layer five below shape layer for, and we'll make it white the next. What I'll do is I'm gonna key the path for both of them. But I'm also gonna key the opacity, but we'll do that at a different point. So if it starts to move above right here, what I'll do is I'll pull pull all these guys into position, like so. Okay, so I'm just lining this up with the foot, lining it up with the foot, and maybe we'll go straight to the bottom here. So that's at the very tip of his toe. Okay? And that'll hide it pretty well. Okay. I'll do the same thing here with this white toe cap and we'll pull it down. And next, what I'm gonna do to clean it up is there gonna hit the transform. I'm gonna go forward. One frame key the opacity for both of them. Now I'm gonna go backward one frame and put it to zero. Okay, so now I'll hit you on the keyboard. And as the foot comes forward, that toe caps going to start to come in a place, okay? And then I can move both of these guys around. Well, put it right where it needs to be. And then I want Teoh lift him up like so. And then it's gonna smack down. So then right here, let's see if we can copy and paste them into their small positions. Here we go. We'll move him down and we'll we'll turn off their opacity. Well, key. They rapacity right here on the up position. So go to a passing and key it, and then we'll before one frame and we'll turn it off. Cool. And then we can select these guys and hit F nine. So let's just see how this looks, all right. It is not too bad. I want to go ahead and close up this knee on this frame. We'll go ahead and pull that up, pull this one up, and then the toe cap. It doesn't quite feel right here. So I think we'll move it up a little bit. Maybe we'll move it at outward. It feels a little strange. All right, So you think that you agree you will do that? Or maybe we'll let's turn the capacities off here groups. So put it there and there. So now it's off. And then there there comes on. Okay, so I'm liking this. Let me turn the other leg off so we can get a good feel of what we're doing. Have a look. See? Perfect. All right, so now we got everything going. It's looking good. Um, I want to make sure I have key frames at the beginning and end of everything. So what I do is I'm just gonna make sure that everything that open is closed with a key frame, and then I'll do the same. I'll just copy and paste these guys to the end. All right? The next what I can do is ah, copy all of my key frames and I'll paste them into into position. Next. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna duplicate the leg, and I'm gonna call this one right leg. Hit you on the keyboard and I'm just going to move their money. I'm going to select all of my key frames before my halfway point at eight frames that I'm gonna delete it, and then I'm gonna move these guys forward to the beginning. Pose Next. What I can do is I'm gonna hit s on the keyboard and I'm gonna move this at the negative axis. It will hit play. 8. Runcycle Pt 6: He does feel a little stumpy, I think. All right. So I'm wondering if maybe we can scale it this way a little and see if that makes it feel longer. Okay, That might help. A little bit. I'm going to turn off the rotation. I'm not liking it. Okay, We're just lose the rotation. Zeroed out. Zero zero. Let's make sure scales are the same. So we'll do. I will do 1 20 1 20 Cool. I like that. Let's just make sure that going bigger isn't better. So let's try like 1 45 1 45 hit. Enter. And now I've gotta push both of these legs upward so they don't break. Yeah. Excuse me. I like it. I think longer legs make it feel like it's pushing into the camera quite a bit more. I'm gonna keep it cool. So next is our arm. Let's see if we can get away with the arms that we have. Honestly, do not know if it's gonna work, but let's give it a shot. So we'll turn these bad boys back on. Um I'm gonna push the legs behind my arms, push him behind. Actually pushing behind the torso There we go. Then. I'm gonna look at my hand movement for the right hand. Sorry, I e The legs need to go in front of the torso. Here we go. Okay. So let's look at the arms now. So this arm, it was originally in the back position, so we'll push it to the back, and I'm going to go ahead and rotate it. Like so you know, I'm going to start from scratch. I think that'll be the easiest thing to Dio. So I'm gonna key the position in the rotation. And then right here, it frame eight. This is where his arm will now be up. Well, put it right here. Like so. Okay, but there's something that's gonna be happening. There's gonna be a a large swing around the body, and then we'll keep the original frame at the end. Okay? We'll change this curve, Teoh the opposite direction. So let's just take a look at it and see what happens. See how close and how far we are? Obviously, the arm needs to go behind leg. All right, so that's not working. Maybe maybe we can keep it up like this. Don't go like something like that? Maybe. All right, so let's try that. And we need to change this rotate or this path point, All right? I think that's gonna be pretty good. So now we just need to change the timing of it. So, like we did before, we're gonna crunch these in all the way, and then I'm gonna offset the rotation by one key frame. Okay? It's looking pretty good now. It might not be perfect, and I might not be exactly what we were trying to achieve, but I'm trying to do this with speed in mind. I want it to be moving. I want the animation process to be moving quickly. One because the editorial and it's gonna be pretty boring if you have to watch this for hours and hours on end. Um, but to a lot of times, you don't have a whole lot of time to work for a client, and they want stuff done really quickly. Uh, so you got to be fast faster than this guy runs. Let's pull this down, see what happens. This is all right. I like that. I got a copy and paste these guys. Here we go. Um, actually, I need to know who these. Back up above the arm. All right, legs. Let's go for another ride. Where are you? Right here. Right here. Let's get moving. All right. Cool on, Because these are gonna be working backwards. Unfortunately, I cannot copy and paste these key frames. Sorry, I can't copy and paste the key frames to the other arm. Let me see what's going on here. So now I've lost. I lost my movement. Why? That keeps happening. I'm sure there's a good explanation for, but I don't know. All right. Perfect. So I'm gonna copy and paste this last key frame at the beginning. Oops. Let me looks good. Let's get this big curved back in there. All right, so now it's copy and paste. That guy's doing it again. Alright, let's try to get a copy. Face. Did a fix. Okay, there we go. Finally Got it. So let's dio maybe three seconds as well. All right, turn that off. We're gonna extend the legs. 23 seconds. Now that you we'll extend these legs. 23 seconds. All right, so now I get to animate this other arm so I'll keep the position and the rotation, and I'm gonna turn it on. Where is that? Are your arm? That you are? Oh, God. All right, so I get to switch this into reverse. We're gonna move it. This arm will be forward. Also needs to come up to above the body. I put it right next to the other arm. Here we go. Some other things we got to do is change the curve. We're gonna change the hand around. Oh, you know what? It's because I'm using the other hand. Not this is going to control it, which is a bummer. So this is the problem that we run into is whenever we have two compositions in one project file? Well, they're both reading from Onley, one of the compositions. So this is my master composition. Run side basically controls everything. So run front is reading things like the hand rolls. Well, in this particular instance on Lee, the hand movement for the fingers. Um, so as of right now, this hand cannot be animated in this composition. Basically meaning I can't do anything with the fingers. The fingers are stuck where they are because they're controlled by run side. You guessed it so the way around that is to you duplicate the hand. I didn't wanna have to do this, but if we duplicate left hand and we have left hand too, we dropped on top of left hand with it. I'm selective. So what you do is you hold Ault, click and drag and drop it on. And now it it substitutes your new composition with all the same attributes from your old composition. What? It's connected to the scale of it. Everything and what we can do here instead of it saying runs side. We're gonna change it to, say, run front or whatever your composition is called. Run front. Now, this is not a perfect fix, okay? It's not a perfect fix because we're only changing the visibility of the hand. We still don't have things like finger rolls and all that good stuff, but it will get us to a pretty good position. Okay, Next thing I gotta do, because I have to actually scale it to get that thumb in the opposite position. Here we go. Okay. So now we can animate all that's done. Let's animate this hand. All right, so we'll put it right there. should be good. Don't come forward. Teoh. Eight at eight is where the arm will go back hand will come down. Let's make sure that there, because of this arms up higher. But what looks better? We'll keep it high for now. So this arms up in higher just like this. But I kind of like the silhouette of this one better. So maybe we'll keep with that one. Remember, it's all about silhouette. You want your character to look beautiful at all times. Okay, we'll pull this down, pull this one down crunch these guys in really tight. Then I'm going to copy the last key frame and paste it at the beginning. It didn't work. Why's there always an issue? I guess it was just the middle one. I don't know. Alright, let's try it again. A copy? No, is not working. That's unfortunate. Okay, let's see if I copy. Although Okay, that worked. Interestingly enough, let's just see how it's looking, all right. It's not the best. It's not the best with the arms, but I think there's enough going on in here that that people aren't gonna worry too much about if the arms air coming backward of forward, so I think it's gonna work just fine. I'm gonna go ahead and move this arm out like the other one to get that nice silhouette. It's copy and paste it. All right. And now we can go through copy and paste a lot of copying and pasting in this one. What has happened to my legs? You got to be kidding me. All right, let's watch the full loop. See where we went wrong. Something has happened. Here they go. Now they're on the same time. Now he's doing Ah, hopscotch. Oh, and his legs get back to normal. That's weird. What a strange thing to happen. Okay, let's see how that went wrong. So I'm going. I'm just gonna delete everything over here. We're gonna try this again. Okay? I'm gonna copy paste, copy, paste, paste. I'm gonna copy paste, and then copy and paste. And let's see if that fixed it and it did. All right, Cool. So that's looking good. Let me finish off the other hand, it's copy and paste it and paste it. There we go. 9. Jump Pt 1: now that we've finished our run cycles and signed into the jump section Onda. I'm envisioning my character running through clouds, and it might make sense to you once we get there. But at this point, I want him to kind of jump through the air almost like he's doing a jump from one cloud to the next. But as he lands, his feet popped through the balloon, not the balloon through the cloud, and he kind of gets stuck trying to find a little humor in this. So let's try that will happen to a jump. And as he gets to the next cloud, instead of landing on it and running again, he sinks into it and his body gets stuck. So at the end of our timeline, I haven't run for about three seconds, and right here in three seconds, he's gonna come back down, and this is where we're going to start our jump. So as his body starts to come down, he's gonna make contact, and he's going to go into a deep set up posed for him to do a big jump. So for me, it's like right at 33.5 seconds. What I'm gonna do? Is there gonna drop his body down? I'll drop everything down. He's gonna scrunch in, pull his head into Andi. Can't even rotate some of these things like his head and his shoulders. If you rotate, be sure that the frame before the key pose before you have to set a key frame for the rotation so that now when he goes forward, we can rotate. Otherwise, you would rotate. You would rotate, transform for the whole thing. And it's hips and everything would be out of alignment. Rotate the shoulders back a little bit. All right. Now put that head into position, pull it down and I have to have to square his feet up below his body. So this foot is hitting maybe just a little bit too far forward. So what I'll do is come to this key friend, move the foot back. There we go. So we want those feet to be right below It is, but everything needs to be balanced. Needs to have a strong sense of weight. Soften up this rotation here and then this foot needs to kind of slam down right around the same time. It could maybe come into position right here. So put it right here. Where it needs to be will rotate it. Maybe we can push it back a little bit. There we go right there. We can maybe push the pose to a little more of an extreme. So he's really coming down g o. And so this is kind of a fun part, you know, posing a character to make it look like they're about to do something pretty cool. So is a cool place to be, So I'll rotate those a little bit. I think that's probably pretty good. Let's make sure did keep frame yet. Okay, so that's looking good. Now we get to do hands to pull these arms in. I mean, it would be cool if you did a dive. Almost like he's diving in the clouds. I just don't know if I want. I want to do that. I don't know. What do you think you could tell me? Sorry if you hear some banging. It is trash day. So the garbage truck is now in the street. I think it's just leaving them. Pull these arms around. All right, so we have a pose. Let's make sure everything is hitting properly. That looks pretty good. So he is. He's now ready to spring off of this post. He's got some good weight to it. Looks like he is geared up. So I'm gonna worry about how everything flows into this post, maybe in just a little bit. But the Keith the key point is to get him into the post. Now we can go ahead and spring him into action, so I'll go forward. I don't know how many frames is this? Maybe I'll go for, like, 10 frames. Let's try that. So 10 frames, 10 frames and then he's gonna jump up and I'm just going to focus on his body right now. So the hips, torso and head, so he's going to spring up. We can break outside of the composition. Don't worry about that because that could be fixed and solved. When we go into our next phase, which is the kind of compositing section. Here we go. He's done his spring forward. We want to have a nice, nice, clean line of action. Okay, so that means that the body should all be in a pretty much straight line so I can do stuff like rotate the head, maybe rotate the shoulders a little bit. I just wanna have a nice clean line going to rotate the hips. So if we rotate the hips, we need to make sure that we key the rotation before he springs up. And then when he springs up now, we can rotate. Okay. These back. It's kind of putting a weird arching his back, which I do not want rotated for just a little bit. A rotate back just a little bit, you know, that's probably fine. I'm not gonna worry about it. All right, So our character is now springing upward, so they've come down, and now the jump up. Okay, So I'm gonna go ahead and pose the hands into position. The hands will probably come up, can rotate palm down, make sure I have the rast arise. Often I do. And I do. Okay. All right. Now I can move the other hand, go down the half resolution, could move this little quicker, rotate this palm down, all right? And these are just placeholders. So if it's not perfect, don't worry about it. And next, I'm gonna pull the feet up. So the legs are gonna come up and they'll suck up into his chest a little bit. There we go. Feel free, Teoh. Also break it up a little more. This is more like a superhero pose, which is cool. Fact Spider Man or something. Well, angle the feet downward. They're pointing the kind of pointing to where they need to go. This one will pull this one up a little bit. All right, let's play around with this hand. Where does it need to be? We will pull the arms out. Maybe they could be kind of, like, straight out. Think through what it would be like if you were jumping in the air. If you were up on a cloud and you could just jump, you weren't really worried about what the impact was gonna be. How would you jump? Okay, that's good enough. 10. Jump Pt 2: So I'm gonna start to play around with some of the timing now, OK? And I always like to do things in section. So I'm gonna worry about how the body functions. I typically always focus on the body first, what is the body doing? And then the limbs follow. So what I'm gonna do is select my hips might torque my shoulders and then my head. I'll come into my graph editor. So I'm gonna select kind of this whole sequence here, where he drops down and then jump part. I'm gonna hit at nine. So I know that I want him to drop down kind of quickly. Or maybe I'll never mind. I'll have him drop down a little more easily, which means he's going to drop down easy and then spring up pretty quick. So I have ah, drop here with a spike missing the head for some reason and shoulders. Body. All right, there we go. And then I want him to spring up very quickly, so I'm gonna pull this over, I'll crunch it all the way, and then I'll even pull this side over here. Now we're getting that Twin Peaks kind of five I'm gonna It's space barn just to see how we're feeling. I'm not gonna worry about what the arms and the legs look like, because odds are they're not gonna pair up properly with the body. But I just want to get a sense of the speed and the timing that we're working with. Okay? I want him to hold on this down pose a little bit longer. So he's gonna come into this thing opposed to gear up. I wanted to hold on that for just a beat. Okay, so I think what I'll do I think we don't do is old. Copy this key friend here for maybe, like, two frames. So this is the down post key frame where I'm at right now, So I'm copying and pasting it. Where, where I wanted to hold till I'm going to do it for the legs and the arms as well. I want there to be a hold here on the whole fear. Okay. And sometimes what you might find it didn't do it with much of the body, but it did. Down here, the foot. Whenever you copy and paste a key frame, it's gonna it's gonna be trying to do these busier curves, And so instead of holding it, it's gonna throw this big giant Arkin there. So if you hold Ault, sometimes you don't need all you just click it and drag it into the center point. There's gonna be two sides. That's weird. And we're trying to center it out. So there is no curving in there. It's just a funky thing that aftereffects does. I don't like it, but something got deal with. All right, so now he's got this drop in. Maybe something else we can do instead of it holding static on these two frames, we can go ahead, select our body parts, and we're gonna crunch him down just a little bit to give a little more squash to him. I don't know why my shoulders aren't functioning properly when I select. All right, we'll do the same thing to the hands. We'll drop it down to you, Okay. And then with all this selected well hit after nine, what has happened? So let's select these guys. We'll just do the positions. Okay, so it drops in and maybe we'll go the other way with this. So now he'll drop in quickly, and I'll settle in to this post, and then we'll have him. Okay, Come on. These little things they're so hard to grab stuff being difficult. Here we go. All right, So now we gotta valley. Then. I wanted to spring up, so we're gonna pull this back in. So this is the big jumping are? I wanted to be really quick, so I'm gonna crunch it all the way in. All right, let's just give this a shot and see what we're working with. Way Got a jump. Hey, I like it. That's looking pretty good. Not to. Bathroom is too rough. Start. All right. And then once we kind of time up the legs and all that stuff, it's gonna look quite a bit better. All right, Cool. So now he's got a jump upwards, which is looking good. Now he's going to start to fall, and he's gonna go through the cloud at this point. So what I can do you is we're gonna pull all of this stuff down. I'll do it at the same time. All right. Now he's fallen. Woo and I havent fall down farther than where he jumped from. So this way. He's kind of in the cloud a little bit, okay? And I'll square him up. So there is not so that is not turned inside of the cloud, but he is held perfectly inside. Okay, We gotta make sure that everything is Rotated Square. True, We can extend the head up a little bit, maybe turn that rotation off, actually, will, we'll push his head down because I think his shoulders will need to come up at this point stuck inside this thing. Okay, so let's just see how this goes. I might want this arc to be a little more in the center, so that would mean, I mean, this jump. He would have to kind of come in between where these peaks are. So something like that. That means we have to move the limbs as well. - All right, so another thing that we're trying to do is we're trying to create a nice, still wet for this character. You want to make sure that your character looks good when they're up in the air. All right, the next we're gonna work on the timing of when he comes down. So we wanted to kind of really ease into this fall, and then he's gonna slam down really hard. Okay, so let's watch this and see what happens. Um, and so through this process, we're getting a sense of the general timing. And once we get all the general timing down to where his body is kind of moving in unison and it looks good, then we can play around with the secondary action in the offset timings. This will give some good squash and stretch to the character and also make his movement look more engaging. And so that's kind of like the final tweak in the fun part. So let's see here. It's not too bad. Maybe it holds a little too strongly here, and also maybe he goes forward a little too far. So what I'll do is I'm gonna push him backwards. We'll see how that looks. - Alright . He's coming down and boom, and we'll add some bobble wobble. All right, That feels a little bit better, all right. I like it. So as he hits here, we're gonna add a little jiggle to him, so I'll go forward. Two frames. We'll move him up. I'll go forward like six frames moving back down for a little while. They will do like, little two bumps up. It will be four bumps up and I will come forward, maybe about eight frames, and we'll very gently dropping down two frames. So this is the wobble that he's gonna have, like, he's just jumped into a cloud. So I'm gonna select all the key frames for that bounce, but not the key frames for when he hits. So as he comes from the peak and into position, those key friends are going to stay the same. I'm just going to select the key frames behind it and hit F nine. Another thing I want to do is I'm gonna clean up this little guy here. So as he comes in really strong, which is this key from down here, the computers trying to find the path of least resistance. So it puts this nice little busier handle to make it seem kind of, um, to give it a nice art, but we don't want that arc, so I'm just gonna take it out, okay? I'm gonna do the same thing for the torso. So if you hit Ault and click, it will break the handle so you can move on. Lee. One control point. It was like that guy down there and find my handle. Okay, So let's before a few friends and see how this wobble looks a lot of rendering a lot of play back. A lot of watching, a lot of rendering. So sorry about that. If this gets boring, it's all part of the fun, right animation way. Got some balancing in there? I can see it happening. Looking good. Here we go Any second, all right. Not too bad, something weaken due also to make it feel a little more jiggly, although we're not going to see a lot of what's going on because he's gonna be inside of a cloud. But what we can do is offset the shoulder books, offset the shoulders by like one frame and then offset the head by about two frames, and that will give a little more squash and stretch to his body. 11. Jump Pt 3: The next thing I want to do is right here on the impact will move the feet down. We'll move this foot down. I'm gonna extend the legs out. I'm even gonna maybe separate them a little bit. And I want us feed to be kind of curled upward. So the challenge is that we can't see his legs perfectly with this composition size. Um, which is a bummer, but we can get a general idea. Okay. Another thing I gotta do is scale this foot the opposite direction. I'm gonna worry about that a little bit later. Um, but what we'll do is we'll pull this arm in. I think I want his arms to kind of beholding him up so he doesn't slip through the cloud. Um, but his shoulders need to move is Well, so what I'm gonna do, because I'm the selected shoulders hit p on the keyboard. I'm gonna keep the position, and then right here on impact, it's gonna be very fast gonna pull the shoulders upward, both of us up and maybe out a little bit. Yeah, it would go, like, really high up. We want exaggerate it. Okay. And that means the arms gonna come up, Teoh. We can see we're starting a break here. So if you start to break and you see it's breaking, just try to find the the best possible posed for this. We might need to move the shoulder out just a little bit, all right? And I don't want I don't want his hands in front of his face too much. So if we can get away with it, let's try to keep his hands away from his face to us. A certain degree are announced. Take this hand down and this arm's gonna need to switch our I k. And not only that, we're gonna need to bring it in front of the body because this is a quick movement. We can do it pretty pretty easily. Um, so let's just see what we got here. I'm gonna pull this hand over, and before he makes contact, I want one his arms to kind of stay upward. So if this is the Posey's in before he hits, we'll have his arms kind of up and back, like there. They're staying elevated. Rotate this like, so rotate this handout. Okay, That means that we got to switch this elbow around. So the question is, how do we do that and make it look not terrible? Uh, actually to before we go with the feet down, Let's put them up. So right here in this frame, what we can do is we'll make it look like he's attempting to land with one foot, but it's at this point that he just breaks right through, and I think maybe and get away with it. But going on pulling this forward so that his hips, we'll move forward, you know, to straighten out his body because right now they're a little too far backwards. Okay, let's just watch this. I like to watch things over and over just to see that I'm on the right path. Okay, we're getting there. We need a little more hang time in the limbs, specifically the feet. So I think that will make it feel like he's holding his weight in the air a little bit longer. If we can change the timing on the feet. So let's look at the feet and what they're doing for starters on his hips to be rotated right here. There a girl he's just jumped next next, I'm going to move these feet forward so that they're not jumping yet. Okay, I wanted to hold this post, and then what we'll do is we're gonna come inside this little guy here, and I want thes feet to snap upward. So we're gonna move the peak of it over so that they're jumping really quickly. All right, so they hold and boom pop up in the place. Let's make sure that they're both going. Yeah, okay. And the next thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna we're gonna create a valley. So we're gonna push this all the way over, make sure we're locking into place. I hit f nine there, and then we're gonna slam them down. All right? So they're gonna hold their hang time, and then they're gonna crunch in. So it's this. Let's see if this makes it feel any better, it does a little bit. It kind of feels a little too robotic like a to B. So maybe we can dio is well, we will take it out of this pique, and we're gonna create a nice little arc, and this will give some good lateral movement. So now that he goes up, the foot's gonna start to move out instead of down. First, pull this out to let's look at this one. It's got a nice little curve. And in here that that's the problem right there. So we don't want to have these, like sharp peaks and edges. We want to feel we want to feel his movement to be very fluid and arc like That's weird. What was I What is this? Oh, the hand. So are you guys. I was grabbing the hand for some reason. All right, so what we gotta do for this foot? Discreet valley. That's part of the reason to pull this over hit F nine, and we'll crunch this one over. All right, let's see what we got. All right? That feels pretty good. It's a little choppy on the playback, but, you know, I do think that they defeat snap up a little bit too quick. We're supposed to have a hold here. Oh, it's because they did the hand. That's why all rights to pull this over, I'm gonna grab these 21 more time. And instead of having them snapped like super quick into place, I'm going to give it a little ease. All right, Now, let's watch it one more time. There we go. It's feeling pretty good. Something else we can do is maybe weaken. We can work on the timing of things. So the body is gonna animate first with the jump. So maybe what we can dio is move the shoulders forward, one frame, and let's see if we move the head for two frames. What happens, doesn't it maybe stretches the head a little too much? Oh, yeah, we're that too much. I kind of like help how the neck really stretches here. That's kind of cool. So maybe what we'll do is we'll pull it back one frame here to lock in with the shoulders so the body looks like it could have some stretch to it, and that works. But the head seems to be doing something a little weird. So let's watch this one now. Okay, This is looking pretty good for a jump. It's not my best work, but I think it's going to get by just fine. Except for that. Yeah, I don't think we can have that. So we need that. Torre said, uh, I need that torso not to come press so much. Let's just see what we got here with this version. All right? Not too bad. I still feel like these legs are kind of a to be, which isn't my favorite, but I don't know if I need to change it or not. So I'm gonna offset this leg a little bit. I think I want to stay downward a little bit longer. And also, we need to change the rotation of the feet just a little bit. Same with this foot. I need to rotate the foot back. All right, that'll do. 12. Jump Pt 4: The next thing we have to do is we have to focus on the arms. I need to get these arms looking pretty good, because right now they're not great. There's, like, a weird rotation in there right now. I don't know why. So let's see what we got. So it comes down, we'll look at one arm at a time, so this arm is coming into position a little too quickly. So we gotta find out why that's happening. And I think it's because this is piqued. So we want to ease it up a little bit. Here we go, going to select the rotation. This rotation is a little too peaky as well. All right, so he's gonna come down smoother. It's gonna drop, okay? And I want his arms. Need to rotation his arms. Need Teoh delay a little bit. So his body is gonna go first, and then his arms can kind of follow, so we need to have a little stretch to it. We also need to have the hand rotate downward a little bit if we can. Let's see. Okay, we will do it by hand. It's a big jump, so he's gonna rotate down like this. So let's see, there we dio and then the arm will come up and follow along. And then there's something strange with this rotation was because because I need that arm to switch. So the way I'll have the arm switch with the I K is that I'll I'll do a quick switch. So if this is where it needs to land, let me let me think through this. So it comes up instead of it coming here, I'm gonna put it in front of his chest. I'll put it in front of his chest. It's like so maybe we'll put the elbow up a little bit, will rotate the hand forward to keep in alignment. And I need to change the curve here to a downward curve. I need to keep that elbow kind of level. I don't want it to go to High is in the arm, look awkward. So his arms gonna come forward and it's gonna suck into his chest, and then it will. I don't want to drop just yet, so maybe we'll do it like that. Boom. Okay, that looks pretty good. I like that. So we got to make sure that everything is rotating properly. I'm gonna turn this hand downward a little bit here. Okay? So let's just focus on that hand and let's watch it and see what happens. All right? Not too bad. I think I wanted Teoh extend outward a little more here. So the way to do that is I'm going to select the position and actually don't know if we can do any more. That's pretty maxed out. All right, so we can't do that anymore, Cem. But maybe what we can do is change the curve. So instead of kind of coming down this way, we'll have it bend around the opposite way like this. All right, so let's see if that makes it. I feel like it's stretching a little bit more. All right? It's not too bad. Something else that we can do is that now that as the hand comes out and it's gonna whip in pretty quickly, it can't be facing downward here. So we got to extend it open a little bit, and then here we're gonna keep it open. Teoh. He like, So, um, So maybe what we can do is get rid of this one. There we go. So it's always good to keep fewer key friends if you have the option. So if you realize that one key frame is doing the job that another key frame is trying to do, just get rid of that one key frame. All right, I like that. Now, let's look at the other arm, see what we can do for this one. So he's gonna jump up. Let's find that arm. Here we go. So it comes down and he jumps up. We need to have his hand rotate downward. Okay? I think it's OK how it goes right now. So it's got that been to and then it comes up, maybe comes forward a little too much here. Okay, we can do something like this keeping kind of compact. It was like you're gonna karate chop. Yeah, and then this arm can come up. So let's try that. And then, um, he's actually going to crunch down in the next frame, so I'm gonna try just doing something like this. I don't see how that feels. So is up right before the moment of impact and the boom, he comes down and what we can do to really simplify it is. I'm going to key the reverse and then switch it here at the impact point. But this means we're going to need to pull the hand, but luckily, not the arm. So we pull the hand into position. So let's see if we can do something about this hand. So if we are to duplicate the hand and then move it above the body, it almost works. I guess we do need to duplicate the arm, which isn't a big deal. I don't believe so. Let's go and find that arm. His left one will duplicate it. Let's move it below. Left hand, too. All right. Cool. Not a big deal, because we're working with this awesome rigging system. We can duplicate limbs and they still work, and then awesome. But what we gotta do is turn them off. So select your left hand in your left arm and do Ault Braque, Um, open. Breck, get yep, open bracket. And then that should turn it on right when it needs to. Come on. Okay, so that's perfect. But what? Another thing we need to do as we need to go from a Ford facing hand to a backhand. So select your hand here. We'll go page up and we're gonna find where hands are going to check. Mark both of them. We're gonna page down, We're gonna switch them out. There we go. But another thing we need to do because of the way that this arm is positioned as we need to hit scale on the hand and we're gonna change it to a positive and that will give us our thumb up, which is where it needs to be. So now we watch this whole thing, Let's see how it plays out. He jumps up any lands, Boone, we're gonna need to bend that arm around. But all in all that's looking pretty good. So what I'll do is I'm gonna select these control arms here, hit P. I'm gonna key their position that I'm going to do page down, and I am now going Teoh change the curve of these guys so that they feel more natural. They're gonna bend the opposite direction, so we'll bend them up next. What I want to do is kind of lower this elbow a little bit, and, um, I think that should be good. All right, let me change the timing of this hand. A little bit kind of smacks up in here. He's doing some weird timing stuff. So let's take a look at our curbs. So it goes up into this position real quick, Holmes and then down. I guess it looks OK. Yeah, it looks okay. I like it. So nothing that we're gonna do is right on the moment of impact. I'm gonna change some of his face, your facial facial features. So things like head rotate, I'll change. This should actually moved to center up. I was falling into this position. We can rotate this guy this way to follow the curve, and I think that will be OK. This head moves a little too quickly. So what we want is this to peak right here so that by the time he gets to this frame, his head is up and maybe it could be up a little more here, and then we'll go down. That will come forward. A few frames go up and well before a few more frames to 10 and it'll come down. And then these three guys we can hit f nine on and even this one, too. Okay, so now that he hits here, I want his eyes to come center. So, hippie, we'll keep the position afford, like, two or three frames. I'm gonna century out his eyes. It was looking at camera and then eyebrows with P woman forward over here. I'm gonna lift him straight up. I wanted to be surprised. Like, whoops. What have I gotten myself into you and then right here on the bling. I'm gonna close his eyes for impact, and then I'm gonna open him straight up. Okay? We're gonna hit F nine on these guys and mouth. I think maybe I'll pucker the mouth of just a little bit more, See if I can do that. All right, let's watch it. See what happens. Nothing we gotta look at is the feet. Now we gotta watch the feet and see how they kind of dangle as they break through the cloud . So we'll go ahead and will pull his feet around. So as they crunched down here, maybe right around four seconds, we'll pull them in together. We'll have them kind of hit each other. Um, drop the feet down a little bit and I gotta change this foot around. So let's go find the foot will hit ass on the keyboard for scale. So this is where it's gonna make caught a contact. We'll leave it at the right scale that it's at no key. The frame go page down and let's change it too negative or positive. So now we have a foot that just quickly rotates. And then we have to come up to our legs again. And now we can rotate this foot downward, just like the other one. And let's change the timing of this. So let's look at what our timing is so quickly pops through. The legs go out. So I want them to kind of, like, hit each other pretty quickly. So I go in. Maybe we can move these Ford, maybe like two frames and they'll come forward a couple frames. We'll pull them both out. We'll do like to you. She holds shifts in two clicks and the feet can come upward. Then we'll go forward. A few more frames do one. Maybe 45 pushes in, and if you could go down just a little bit and then we'll go forward. A few more friends and then we'll push him out. Maybe two clicks. All right, so then on these, I'm just gonna hit after nine. So the feet will come in together quickly, and they're just kind of dangle, just ever so slightly. So let's watch this and see if we can get a feel for those feet. See how they're doing. That feels pretty good. All right. I love it. I actually think it looks really great. Um, I was kind of contemplating on if I wanted him to do a fall or not. But I think for just the sake of timing and where we're at, I'll let him let him just hanging there. Yeah, I think that's pretty good right now. I don't think there's anything else I want to do to him. I guess we could watch the whole run cycle jump in just to see if everything flows properly . All right, That looks good. 13. Animation Composite pt 1: Okay, so now that we've finished all three sections, we have our front run, which is looking good. We have our side run, and then finally, we have our jump. Now we get to go into the compositing section, we're gonna put all of these animations together, and we're gonna see what kind of, ah short little clip we can make. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go composition new composition, and I'm gonna call this one. I don't know running and Luke, maybe. And then I'm probably gonna change it to a 10 80 by 10. 80. But for now, I'll do 1920 but 10. 80 just so I can have it in case I need it. And I'll set the duration to about 10 seconds. And because I'm my rig is 29.97 seconds. I'm gonna leave my frame rate as 29.97 seconds, Then I'll click. OK? And in all fairness, in all honesty, I have already done a compositing version of this. So I've got the clouds and everything kind of made. The only thing is, I didn't like how the jump was happening, so I started this whole section over. But what I'm basically trying to say I'm going to do a little cheating, a little cheating. I'm gonna walk you through how I got to this part, but I'm gonna cheat just a little bit. So in your composition that you've made, we're gonna bring in our, um, animations. So I'm going to start with this in my head. I already knew that. I wanted to start with this this character running in this position. And I think I want this character to do maybe, maybe just over a second of running, Okay, just over a second. And what we'll do is we'll do Ault close bracket to trim, and then I'm gonna bring in run front, then run fronts gonna come right at the end here. And you want to make sure that their legs kind of lineup together. So as his right leg comes up, that means in this pose his right leg up on a toy down, okay. And so on this one, What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna scale him down. I mean, it s on the keyboard, and then I'm going to move forward. I don't know maybe 25 seconds. I'm gonna scaling up a real big He's running into the camera. Maybe I'll do four. Okay. And then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna do run side again, and this is going to be the jumping section. And this is the one that I'm actually gonna be doing some animation, Teoh. But I want to find where he jumps. That's right. Here. I'm gonna have him. Do you? Maybe one cycle. So as he moves forward, he'll jump. May be right here, so I'm gonna keep this position now. Key. I'll keep this position here. So, hippie on the keyboard. All right, now, I'm sorry. Right here is where I want to keep his position right where he makes contact. And then as I go to his first frame, I'm gonna push him backwards quite a bit. Well, let's just see if he lines out. All right, So he's going way to slow. So he comes flying in. He's moving. I guess that's not too bad. All right. And then he gets stuck. So then we'll hit and on the keyboard to close it out. Let's just see the whole process to see how it feels alright. He's running now. He's running towards camera and runs and jumps Boom, and he gets stuck. Perfect. I think it looks pretty good, I guess. One thing we could do, maybe to give a little more variation. So move him back, hit P on the keyboard, and then by the end of his he's run cycle, move him forward just a little bit, maybe. Like so, let's see if if we scale him up real big, let's see if how that looks. All right. I like that. And it comes in super hot here. Boom. Okay, so now we have the general layout of what our animation is gonna be. We're gonna have some quick layering effects to this or lighting effects, so we're gonna go layer styles in her shadow. The next thing we're gonna do is come into our inner chateau properties, and we're gonna change it toe white. Oh, bump it to 100. And we're gonna change the blend mode, which is this little button right here. Teoh overlay. And now we can play around with the direction of light in the distance. I'm gonna do my distance at about 10 to keep it even, Um, I'll change the angle, Teoh. They will do 90 to 90 and the size. Okay, The size is basically the blur. How blurry Do you want it? Um, And how or how crisp do you want it? I'm gonna do may be very subtle. They will do fourth, okay? And then I'm gonna do one more thing. I'm going to go right click layer styles and I'm gonna do color overlay. And on the color overlay, I'm gonna change it to black. But then I'm gonna change the opacity of it to make about 30%. You could go less than that, or you could turn it off altogether if you'd like. I just want a dark in my character from the background just a little bit on. Once you have that all set up, you can select the layer styles control, See? And then you can paste it. Control V to the other characters. Control V. So now that we have that out of the way, the next thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to just copy and paste something that have already made. So what I have here is a linear, radiant background and I just did this orange color. So if you just use your rectangle toolmaker rectangle and then change the fill two great linear radiant, you can select your colors and I just have a dark orange fading up Teoh, A light orange. Okay, so what I'm gonna do is copy that, then the next thing I have is a circle. So this circle, if you just go to your he lips tool, you can making the lips and then you come to your fill and do radio Grady int. What I have is to whites, so both color sides are set toe white. But on one side I have the opacity set to zero, and that's my outside marker. So now fades from 100% white 20 And I believe that's all, actually, let me see. Oh, and I haven't changed to add. So if you toggle your switches, come here instead of normal Goto ad. I'm just gonna select these two. I'm gonna pace them down here into my running loop. The next thing that I'm gonna dio is I've made some clouds. So the clouds and just very simple shapes. Um, I used the lips tool to create some circles, and I move the circles around on the, um, shape layer. The next thing I did, that's kind of clever. That you might want to know is, Let's see. That's not a good example. Where is a good example? That's not a good example. Well, for some reason, I can't find a good example. Maybe all this, I'll just tell you and hope that you understand. So I created a circle, and this circle has a stroke of two pixels around it. But I didnt want all these circles to have strokes around it, right, because then it wouldn't look like a cloud. It would just look like a bunch of circles with strokes around him. So what I did was I created another circle and I took the stroke off. So this is white. And then I moved it into position to block part of the stroke so that it looks like the stroke ends and we can have these circles that kind of and they look like they intersect with one another. So that was just a basic, real, simple way to block out some of the stroke. So you don't see them all and it looks like this bump goes in front of this big bulge. And then this little bowls comes in front of the big one. And as you give some more dynamic and more depth to it, the next thing I did was like, animated this. I animated this cloud, just going from left to right, left to right. Moving pretty quickly. Okay, I think it's a total of one second. So goes from off frame all the way across frame in one second. So because I've already done that, what I'm gonna do is I'll select all these clouds. Copy. Um, and then I'm gonna paste them into my running loop above my character. So now we should have one second of that run cycle. Another thing that I did was I selected all those hopes. Your final call. Nothing that I did. Was I selected all those clouds? No, that's the wrong one. That's back. Clouds. Here we go. Sorry about that. I selected all those clouds and I slowed him down. So now we have a total of like instead of a one second movement, we now have over to second movement. Okay? And I put them all in this background, like so so they're moving a lot slower than the front ones. And the reason I put them in their own composition called back clouds because I wanted to do just a real quick, subtle, settled changing color. And the way I got that changing color was I did the capacity down to 70. So all I did was pulled the opacity down to 70 and it already gives this nice, warm glow and it blends into the background much better, almost like they're often in distance. So that's the way that I achieved that effect. So I'm going to copy it. I'm gonna paste it down below my character. So in the original, actually only had him run for just over a second, so I think that's what I'll do is all. I'll stick to what I had in the original, and I'll move these guys forward. And what I also have is this big cloud, and it kind of creates this nice transition. So as a big cloud covers up our sideways running character, it reveals below it are forward running character. That was just a nice transition that fit perfectly, So I kept it. The next thing that I have is I have another layer. I just called cloud movement. I'm going to copy it, and then I'm gonna pay sit on my running loop, and I'm gonna show you what I have going on there. So running cloud movement also has a capacity change. Um, so it's at 70 but you can see the clouds are kind of moving into each other and behind our character. The way I did that is I just took some of the same closet already had, and I move them from this position, offside the out of the view, and I move them down towards the center, and I also scaled it. So it goes from a very large cloud scales down to very small cloud, and they all just layer on top of each other to give this movement. It makes it look like it's rolling behind him, rolling behind him. So it's looking pretty good. Um, and I'm gonna keep with my original, and I'm just gonna trim that right it three. Just about three seconds. I don't move this character in 14. Animation Composite Pt 2: So now that we have those two things out of the way, the next thing that I'm gonna do is I just copied and pasted, right? I just basically copied my clouds for this scene. Um, and I still actually have to set it up. I don't quite know what I want it to look like. I just know that I'm gonna copy these clouds, and I'm gonna move them around. So it be on the keyboard, some of them I need to go behind my character. So scale this up. And I'm I'm just trying to find and nice a nice layout. How can this cloud How is it gonna look? So if he's running, he's running from these clouds and the jumps, and I want him to get stuck right in the middle. That means that this cloud needs to be in the middle. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna move it into the center. I'll move him up, and it actually needs to be a little bit bigger. We'll go like that. Okay. Right there and then this cloud needs to be behind our run character, cause I'm gonna mask him out. He'll be mask out. And, um yeah, so that should work. So the next thing I want to do you is really Figure out how I want this to look because I feel like he's not dropping far enough. All right? So I I would prefer it if he so when he jumps, maybe we'll push him up. So p on the keyboard, he locks in, they would start to move him here. I will push him upward, jumps up pretty high so that he can kind of sink in into the cloud. Okay, then we'll copy and paste down. So now he's jumping up over the cloud and then into the cloud. I'm gonna hit F nine on these three key frames and let's just see how his movement is. So I think I'll do. I think what I'll do is I'll make a valley here, so we kind of jumps up a little quickly, and then he drops down a little quickly and right here, I'm just gonna watch and see how it looks. All right. It looks pretty good. Um, I feel like I do want him to jump outward a little bit, though, So maybe what we'll do is we'll kind of play around with some of his positioning. And if this is where he lands, that means I need all of my key frames move over so that I could get him into the center. Which means he's gonna jump a little bit off of center and land in the middle. All right, I love it. Everything's looking great, right? Here's where that will go. Let's extend some of these guys out. I'm gonna move this over to clearance in space. I wanted to feel like he's actually jumping across something. Okay, some of these guys around, all right, jumps up and Boom, he's gonna get stuck. And I have a little animation on this cloud here already. So let me go ahead and put it there. And it's just this real quick bounce down and then bounce up. Um, And what I can do is I'm gonna attach my character to the cloud so that as the cloud goes down, he sticks with it. All right, So let's watch this. See how it goes, all right? Not too bad. Maybe I'll square up my character a little more inside of the cloud and I'll change this drop over one frame. There we go. And you're probably also wondering, you know, his feet aren't showing his head cuts off a little bit of the top. That simple. All we do is click this continual Raston ization button. And then now we'll see his feet. We get a feel for where his legs are. So let's look at that now, - okay , I like that. He's kind of framed up nicely inside the cloud. That's all looking good. Um, I want to work on this Lay out there. I want to make sure that it's it Looks good. Okay. I don't want it to feel like it just falls off. So maybe we can move some stuff around and fill in the blank space. Pull that one there. They will pull this one over Mother Maybelle, duplicate this one and push it to the other side. So now that we have all that kind of set up and it's not looking too bad, um, for this shot, what we can do is we'll go layer new. We'll do no object. I'm gonna I'm gonna rename this one foreground. I'm gonna duplicate it, rename this one mid ground, and I'll duplicate it and the name, this one back ground. So my foreground elements will be these two clouds, and I'm going to attach them. Teoh, foreground, when I have this cloud here and my character and then also the cloudy lands on. So I'm gonna select the two clouds because my characters already attached to one cloud, I'm gonna attach these to mid ground. Next. What I'm gonna do you is I'm going to find these two background clouds and attach them to background. Now that that's done, what I can do, select all of these. No objects hit p Young or not, P it's s on the keyboard for scale, and I'm gonna come to the very end of my timeline. So for the foreground elements, I think I'm going to scale it up to, like, 1 30 Maybe the mid ground. I'll do one 15 and then the background, I'll do one of five. And now when we hit play, we're gonna feel like our cameras moving through the clouds a little bit. All right? It's looking good. Now all we have to do is mask out his body, so that looks like he's inside of a cloud. Um There's gonna be a couple of things that we have to do, but it's all relatively easy, All right? That looks really good. I'm very pleased with the outcome of this so far. Um, another thing that I want to do is I want to keep the stroke on the clouds. Consistent, and it just doesn't look like it's the right size because I scaled it. So I'm gonna select all my, oh, my guys with stroke and I'm gonna go. Hadn't bump it up a little bit so that we start to match the size of our character here. So I did a four on that one. Maybe I could go to five. Let's see. Yeah, five looks good. And then I'll do the same thing to this. I'm gonna select these and make sure that my stroke it is at five. And then with these guys, I'm gonna make sure this stroke fits and maybe I'll go down the one. See how that looks. One looks good. Cool. So let's make sure everything it's at one. When these in the background, they're a little bit bigger. Then they should be. But I'm not gonna worry about it. I think it looks pretty good. All right. This just looks so good. You can We can maybe even scale the foreground up to, like, 1 40 maybe make it feel like it's moving even faster. All right, cool. 15. Animation Composite Pt 3: Now we have to mask out the character. How are we gonna do this? Well, I'm going to do it into ways. The first way is I'm going to do a very simple mask. Um, so the way to do the simple mask first is we're gonna do just a rectangle. I'll make a big rectangle, just like so we'll make the Phil just like a solid whites. Fine. And then we're gonna come down here to our character. We're gonna go right above it, and I'm gonna attach this to the cloud. The next thing I want to do his toggle, my switches, and I'm gonna make the character Alfa Matt inverted. So now when our character drops, they hide behind, um, our shape layer that we just created. We can't even move it down closer to the bottom of the cloud. The next thing I have to do is duplicate the run character and move it behind our cloud. All right, You see how that's working? It does not need to be Alfa. Matt. Inverted does not need a track, Mac. Okay, so now we have this space between where are character goes into the cloud and where his legs go behind the cloud. But it still doesn't look right on the reason that it doesn't look right. Because what we're gonna do is we're gonna mask out his shirt here so that we can have his arms be above the cloud and his shoulders are maybe out of proportion a little bit. I'm going to move this over. Um, I'm gonna move this one down a little bit. I'm gonna move this hand. I start the hand was the hand. Here's the hand with this hand around. A little bit more. All right, So now let's get into masking out the shirt. So the way that we're gonna do this shirt mask, uh, it can be done very similar to very similar to our shape layer that we did on the body mask . But for this one, I mean, look at this real quick, so he's got a fall through the cloud, but then I want him to be on top of the cloud. So this is maybe going to be a little more tricky than I had originally envisioned. That's okay. I like challenges. So maybe what we'll do is we'll start to build in a little spot here actually will follow where the arms hit. So if this is where our character is going to you hit, We just don't want to be on the cloud. I want to be on the mask. Where's the mask? Here it is. So if this is where our character hits, I'm gonna build in a little bit of this. Bill O All right, so this is gonna be for our feet. So now our feet are gonna go behind this little guy here, Little break through, then it out the bottom. Okay, But right here, we need the arms to be above this bill of section. So what I'll do is I'm going to keep the sheet, the path, I'll go up key, the path go down, and I'm gonna move this build section below the arms, then back inside the the run comp right here. I'm going to mask out the torso. Okay, so I'm going to create a shape that kind of follows the hand line, and I want the torso to be gone at this point. So I'm going to take this new shape that I've just made gonna move it down. I love the torso, and I'm gonna create an Alfa. Matt inverted. So now the body is gone. All right, but this is where it gets a little tricky. Well, not tricky, but what we're gonna do is we're gonna keep the path. We're gonna move up. Well, let's see where did it. Okay, so here's where it hits. So boom right there. Where it hits is where we want that key friend to be. And then right before it when the body's extended, we're gonna pull all of this down so that we can see the torso. I'm just gonna move it out of the way completely. So now it's there. Now it's not. So I hope that makes sense as to what I've just done. I've masked out my torso, so we can't see it. So that now, when we come into our running loop boom, his arms stay above the clouds, but his torso disappears here. Okay? And then we're gonna do a little bit more, so we're gonna create a new this kind of shape here. We're gonna follow the curve that we've just created. All right, I'm gonna turn the fill off. We don't need it. And I'm gonna turn this drug Teoh to you. I think it is. Okay, so it's a lot of little tedious work that we're doing here, but it's gonna make it worth it. So I'm gonna attach this to our animated cloud, which is cloud 10. I believed. Here we go. So I'm gonna go right to make contact with our foot. Turn it off. I'm gonna turn this stroke off, and right before it, there's nothing. So, boom, now we have it. He goes behind, and then right here, I want I'm just gonna turn it off and I'm gonna create a new We're gonna create a new set of shapes. And in fact, I can do my lips trick again. All right, so let's try that. Lips. I just made a mask. All right, so let's try this trick and see how it works. It may or may not work. We'll fill it with white. Move this here to the elbow. We'll move this over here, but I'm sure Nick trying to get some little billowing effects. I want this to feel like a cushion, like a big, pillowy cushion. So we're gonna create some little roles within the cloud and I think that will help facilitate that feel. Can we go right to the elbow? Okay, so now that we have this we can duplicate, we can duplicate, are little ellipse, and we're gonna take the stroke off. No stroke. So now when we move this around, what we're doing is we're masking out from asking out the stroke, so it's just gonna have one stroke on it, but it's gonna be taught beyond top of our lips. So there, Alex. Really good, Actually, I really like that. All right, so let's just keep going. I'm gonna solo this, so weaken, move quicker. There we go. On. Finally, this guy. All right. I love it. What's the outlooks? Perfect. Okay, so what this needs, what needs to happen to this guy is we're gonna put it down here. We're gonna make sure that we turn it off before this key friend. So before we have this guy and then boom, we have this guy. We also need to make sure that it's attached to cloud 10 which is our cloud that moves. And for the coloring purposes, I'm gonna find Cloud 10. I'm going to select its layers or is layer styles. Copy it and then I'm gonna paste it on there and see if that works. Not quite. So let's see if we can adjust it to make it fit a little bit better with the latest styles . So inner, inner shadow, I'm gonna pull in. And to be honest, we might not be able to get We might not be able to get it to work properly. This actually looks pretty good to increase the size a bit distance. Pull it and more. It's got 90. Let's do a distance of five, maybe turn the size down. Okay, I think that works. We will turn the size So, like four and the distance to, like eight. There we go. That's not too bad. All right, let's see how that looks. Didn't get everything working properly. Does it look like he falls to the cloud? It was a lot of work to get here, but I hope the payoff is worth it. He goes up into the air, he's coming down and he busts through. Boom. I like it. I think it feels like he's stuck in a cloud. What do you think? Not too bad. So this is. Basically it was basically it. Guys, um, I'm probably gonna add a few a few minor effects like cloud bursts and special effects here using using a juice liquid elements. This is such a powerful plug in. Um, it's just I mean, look at these explosions like those, they're perfect for cloud, right? Make it white. And now that he's jumped through cloud boom, you have a proof of smoke. So I'm gonna go through at some of these effects. I actually put a link in the description to get this plug in. If you feel like it's worth it for you to have all this amazing stuff like swooshes and I mean like, there's 66 different swooshes. It's crazy. So this stuff is bonkers, like teardrops. Look at that. Oh, my gosh. Super easy to use. Anyway, I'm gonna go through and add some special effects to it using this process. Um, so if my product looks a little different than yours, my ending ending product, I do apologize. But it just I have a few things at my disposal that I could make it look better. So I hope you guys have fun with this Really dig into, like, polishing some of the effects and techniques we used, but it was fun. This was a fun little project to work on on. Thanks for watching guys. 16. Thanks: so we made it through the run cycles. I hope that your animations action packed and awesome as anything. I really want to see it. So show me if you got something to show, show it. Posting the discussion, leave comments, likes review this class. Just engage in the course I need to hear your feedback. Otherwise, I'm just doing this in the dark and I don't know if you like it. Don't like it or don't care. So if you don't like it, that's great. Let me know on I can change it. But I hope you guys have fun. I know that I had a lot of fun creating this animation. In fact, I had so much fun that almost 60% of the innovation that I did I scrapped it, and I restarted the tutorial. So there was, like, three hours of footage that I just got rid of and restarted the animation cause I wanted it to be perfect for you guys. Um, so it was a lot of work, but it was a lot of fun to create this animation. And if you have any questions, please ask. And I'll try my best to get back to you. An answer them. But thank you guys so much for watching and taking this course. It really means a lot to me that you would take the time to even make it to this part of the video. So close this down. Go take a break. You know, get a snack. Maybe take a nap or something. I'm sure you're tired. So tired, but thanks for watching guys.