Animating With Character - Sequences

1. Trailer: Hey, I am Jake Bartlett and this is part 3 of animating with character, where I'll show you my workflow for linking multiple character animations together in a sequence. Character animation is pretty complex and requires a lot of key frames. When you need to go from one action to the next, things can get a little tricky. So you need to approach your animation with a specific strategy. This class is going to deal with creating transitions between those multiple actions. To the class project, you can come up with your own character animation sequence using your own character design, or one of the three characters that I'll be providing. If you want to take a look at my own project file, I'll be providing that as a download as well. If you haven't taken part 2 of this series, I would definitely recommend you go do that, because I covered some very fundamental workflow tips for character animation in that class, that we'll be using in this one. Let's get started. I'll see you in class. 2. Looping A Cycle By Hand: Here I have Trevor set up exactly the same way that I had him at the end of the second part of this series, so if I RAM preview, I've got the looping walk cycle. Now, this class is going to teach how to do sequences of animation linking one thing to the next. My vision for this animation sequence is to have Trevor walking, he'll start out of frame, come into frame, stop in the middle, look at the camera, wave, look back out the direction he was walking originally and then walk out of the frame. That doesn't seem like too complicated of an animation, but character animation, you see all of these keyframes, it's a lot to manage, and when you need to manually loop a walk cycle, it can get a bit tricky, especially, going from walking to stopping, and then to the next motion and the next motion. Just like when we planned out the walk cycle, we're going to be very strategic and plan out each part of the sequence before we actually go through and animate it because if we just start and went through the whole thing and try to keyframe it all, it's just not going to work out. The first thing I need to do is loop this cycle manually. Now, I'm guessing that I'm going to need around 3-4 full cycles before he reaches the center of the frame. Let's start with that. I'll zoom in here on my keyframes, this is extremely cramped because of the resolution that I'm recording this at, but I think I can make it work. Everything between this work area is where the loop cycle is. If you remember, before I did all of this overlapping, we can see the pattern of keyframes that I need, so Let's see. On the right hand, it's this set of keyframes right here that complete the cycle, and the ones on the outside of that are just for the overlap. Then down here on the COG, we can estimate that same range right about here is the cycle and then the hair rotation is what's being offset. Let's just start from the bottom and work our way up. I'm going to take the left foot's keyframes because there are no overlapping keyframes for that animation, so it's going to be a lot easier. I'll just copy these, go to the end where those last two keyframes are, and if you remember, these two keyframes are exactly the same as these two, so I can paste and you see that my animation didn't change because those two keyframes were identical. I'm going to turn my overlays back on by pressing Command Shift H, so we can see our motion path, and we can see that that motion path is consistent, so I know that nothing messed up when I copied and pasted those keyframes. I'm just going to do that, say, three times so I have four cycles complete. I'll go to the end of those keyframes again, paste, one more time, paste, and then I'm just going to RAM preview those keyframes and just keep an eye on this foot right here, that's all the matters. I'll take a second to preview, but we can see that that foot is continuing the same animation four times and that's what we want. Now, I'm going to do the same thing with this foot. I'll zoom in here, make sure I'm lined up, select all the keyframes, copy and paste, and then do that a couple more times, paste and paste. Then I'll go up to the COG and I'll start with just these keyframes right here for the position and rotation because those are lined up nicely, I'll copy, paste, paste, paste. Then I'll move the hair rotation, and this is where I need to be careful because this keyframe and this keyframe is at negative 25 degrees, and those are because of the overlap, the key poses for those keyframes were not on the same spot as the position and rotation of the COG. So I just need to be careful and make sure that I'm copying the correct set of keyframes. These go from 15 degrees to negative 25 and then back to 15, it ends on negative 25, so I want to start my selection at negative 25. I'll leave off this first keyframe, copy, go to that last keyframe and paste, paste, and I'm just going to do this until that overlap extends beyond that last keyframe for the position and rotation right there, so that's exactly what I need. Then I'm going to come up to the arms. I'm going to be very careful again, looking at the alternation between these two keyframes, we've got negative 50 and 50, negative 50, 50, and negative 50, so it starts at negative 50, it ends at negative 50. That means that I can copy all of these and it should loop seamlessly. So I will copy that. Then you want to line up your play head on whichever keyframe is furthest back because that's what it's going to paste at that time. In this case, the Upper FK is the furthest keyframe back in time, so I'm going to copy, paste, and then I'm only going to need to paste one more time because of that overlap, and in fact, I don't want any of the keyframes that go beyond this point right here, unless they're there to complete the overlap. For this arm, these three keyframes are the last ones I want, I can delete everything else after that, so I'll make that selection and hit delete. Then I'll copy the other arm, line up that keyframe again, the furthest one back in time, copy, paste, and paste, then I'll delete these sets of keyframes, and that is all of our keyframes. Now, because this work area is still set up for that number of cycles, I should be able to RAM preview and once it gets to the end, it should loop seamlessly. Perfect, that's exactly what we needed. 3. Stopping A Walk: The next part of this sequence is having Trevor come to a stop. To do that, I need to remove all the overlap on this last set of keyframes. The timing at this point is not something I'm worrying about. All I'm concerned with is getting this part of the sequence to finish before I keyframe the next animation in the sequence. I'm going to take all these keyframes back to the playhead, including the hair, so that after this point, there is no more motion. Then obviously this is not the pose that he needs to be in once he's at rest,. It needs to be more of a neutral pose. That's what I want to set up next. I'm just going to move forward 10 frames by holding Shift and pressing Page Down. Then I'm going to pose him in that more neutral resting pose. I'll take the rotation off of the COG, we'll set that back to zero. In fact, I'm just going to zero out all of these properties and then work from that zero position. The eyeballs, I'm actually going to leave, they're locked anyway, but I'm going to leave them where they are for now. It looks like I missed this property right here. Now it's all zeroed out. Something that we didn't cover in the last class was being able to switch between IK and FK on any of the limbs. If I come over to my Effects Controls, the way that we animated the arms going back and forth was using the FK or forward kinematics system. That was a lot easier for getting this nice flowing motion on the arms. But now that I want his arms to do more than that for this wave, I'm going to want to switch back to the IK so I can just click and drag these controllers to pose the arms. I need to go back to the first frame, then I'll open up the FK switch and set a keyframe on this disable property. Because for the walk cycle, I do want that to be disabled so that the FK is what's being used. I'll do the same thing for the right hand. Open up the FK, keyframe Disable, and then I'll come back to where I was working. I will uncheck Disable so that it switches to IK for both of these arms. Now I can just grab this and move it around. That's going to be a lot more helpful for when I'm animating the wave. Now that I haven't met my neutral state, I'm going to drop the COG down a little bit. I'll just click on that and then use the keyboard arrows to drop him down just enough to give them a little bit of bend. I want it to look like he's standing up completely, but I don't want it to look super stiff. Just a little bit relaxed. This is pretty much what I want the resting pose to look like. Now, one issue with switching between IK and FK, and I will just select both of these hands and press U to bring up those keyframes that we just set, is that if I go back one frame, you see that the arm snap from this point here to this point, and that obviously isn't going to work. We have to be very careful about the timing of that switch. I'm actually going to back up those two hold keyframes to the last set of keyframes of the walk cycle. If I bring them right there, you see that they switch. I'll just shift these keyframes one frame at a time. They switch from being way up here to bent and down here. That obviously does not look very good. I want that switch to happen at this set of keyframes. But the other thing I need to happen is have the FK keyframes line up with the position of what the IK keyframes are going to look like. A simpler way to say that is I need the FK keyframes to match this frame here by the time we get to this point of the animation. I'm just going to shift these two keyframes forward, one frame from this last pose. You can see these arms are now perfectly straight. This is what I want them to be and this is what they are currently. I need to adjust these values just a little bit so that there's a slight bend in the arm and it matches pretty closely to this pose right here. I will start with the left hand, and I'll increase the rotation on the upper FK just a few degrees, and then the lower FK, I'll bring in the opposite direction. I'll use this controller as a guide because I know that this controller lines up with the wrist of the arm. If I bring this back, it looks like I need to add a lot more bend to that elbow. Let's change this to maybe eight and then bring this lower FK back in somewhere around there and see what that looks like, even more bend. Let's add a couple more degrees here and back this up, lining up with that controller again. All right. That's a lot closer. Add one more degree here. The closer you are, the safer it will be. Just do your best to match that as closely as possible. That looks pretty good. Now I'm going to do the same thing for the other arm. Again, we're going to shoot for something like that. In fact, I should be able to copy these keyframe values. Let me just try that first, 12 degrees and negative 24 degrees. Then let's see how that lines up. That's pretty close. If I was trying to be absolutely perfect, I would adjust that some more. But you're really not going to notice that switch. But now if I back this up, you can see that as it comes into this key pose, those arms just very naturally come into that resting position. That's working great. Next, I'm going to just select all of these keyframes and easy ease them by pressing F9 on the keyboard just to get the default ease into that pose. To see what we're working with, I'm going to come back to the beginning of the last cycle, [inaudible] my work area and then just preview. Obviously it's not where it needs to be yet, but we're on our way to getting into that post. That's what we need to work on now, is transitioning from here to here. We've already done the arms. That's great and we've got this resting pose set up. But now we need to make this field a lot more natural. 4. Polishing The Stop: Let's focus on this back leg right here, the right foot. Obviously when that heel hits at this point, it doesn't look right going from this keyframe to the last keyframe, that rotation of the foot needs to still go flat pretty much right after that first keyframe. Let me just go forward one frame and I'll set that rotation down to zero, and see how that looks. Yeah, so we just want that foot to slap down. Then the next major thing that I'm noticing is that his COG needs to move down when he hits that last step. The last position keyframe from the walk cycle is still in the middle of the stride. I need to drop it down,not quite as much as when he was doing the full walk cycle, but he still needs to come down on that foot before he reaches his resting pause. I'll go forward 1, 2, 3 frames maybe, and drop him down just a little bit, and preview that. Nope that's definitely not enough. Let me actually back up to where that front leg is coming down during the walk cycle. Let me come back one cycle and then right here, the position of the COG, that's how far down he comes on a normal stride. I'm going to actually just copy that keyframe, come forward, maybe again 1, 2, 3 frames, and then paste. Then I'm going to back it up a little bit. I don't need him to come down quite so hard on this last step. Maybe not quite that much, that's not quite enough down. Let's preview that. That's looking a lot better. Next step I want to work on this foot, so let's just preview that in real time for a second. Obviously right there at the end, it just slides. We still need to get a lift out of it before the end. Between these two keyframes it needs to rise up, not quite as much as the full stride. We can use that motion path as a guide, I'll pick it up. Basically I want to go half as high as a full step, because the foot is only going to travel half this far. We see this arc here, is our full lift and the foot is starting here and ending here, but now on this last step, it's starting here and ending in the middle. I'm just going to come up about this high, and then I'll set a rotation keyframe. Again, not quite as much, if I bring up my guides, I don't want those toes to go below the ground. I will just rotate it just enough towards not touching the ground, and then by the time it gets to the resting pause that needs to be back to zero. Then I'm going to modify this motion path. So I'll zoom in here, switch to my pen tool by pressing G on the keyboard, and then just click on this keyframe to add some handles. Switch back to my selection tool by pressing V, and then modify that curve so it's nice and round. Then I want to convert this to an Auto Bezier keyframe by holding Command, or control on a PC, and clicking on this keyframe until it's a circle. That way, the velocity of that keyframe will just be continued through instead of easing-in-out of it and it will just smooth it out a little bit. Let's preview that and just look at how that foot travels. That's pretty good. I think I want to bend the foot a little bit further. If we look at the final pause, we can actually see this guy is actually a little bit off. I lined it up with the ankle, really I should line it up with the base of the foot. I'm going to do that now. That way I can rotate this foot down a little bit more because it looks a little unnatural. Maybe this will give me the opportunity to bend it back even further, and that will make this entire step just to feel a lot better. The ankle pops back. Now that is where there is a problem. I do need to make sure that this ankle rotates back pretty quickly, right about there, and just avoid as much as I can having those toes pass to the ground. I'm going to lift the foot up just a little bit more and then maybe curve this out a bit, and that should work a little bit better. I also want to add a keyframe between these two because right now the ankle is just angling back, and then swinging to its flat pause. I want the toe to be pointed up slightly just before it comes down right there. I'm going to lift it just a tiny bit, not much, it can be a little bit subtle, and then I'll preview that. Yeah. That's looking great. Let me zoom out so we can see the whole character. I think that's working pretty well. Now I'm just going to space out these keyframes a little bit, so that it comes to a more gradual stop. I'll just select all of these final keyframes, including that last toe keyframe that we just set, then push it forward, maybe five frames. I'll hold down the Option and press the right arrow key, and then I'll preview again. That's working pretty good, except for this foot right here, that last toe snap at the end isn't working, so I need to bring that back a couple of frames, see what that looks like, and back it up even more. Let's preview that again. I think I brought all of this out just a bit too much. Back it up a couple of frames, maybe just three, and then preview again. I think that looks a lot better. This is the process you just playing around with timing until it looks the way that you want it to. It looks like something weird is going on with the hair right here at the end, right there, there. Let's scrub through this and see what's happening. Between here and here that angle is being adjusted really drastically between 15 and negative 25. I need to spread this out a little bit further so there's more overlap. It doesn't need to bend back quite as far either because he's slowing down, he's coming to a rest. Let's preview that. That's looking better. Now, we will come back to this part of the animation to finesse it and to work with the overlap, but for now, I want all of that animation to end on this frame. Then I'm going to take it one step further, select all of these keyframes, and then hold the Option Command, or Alt-Control on a PC, and click to convert all of these to hold keyframes from that point on. All the animation is preserved into those keyframes, but nothing changes until the next set of keyframes. That way I'm just visually taking note. That is the end of the first part of the animation, and the next set of keyframes is just going to be the next part of the animation. 5. The Double Take: The next part of this animation is Trevor looking at the camera and you might think that I just animate the eyes moving from where they are to pointing straight at the camera, but that actually would look pretty boring. I'm going to exaggerate it a little bit and I'm going to have him do a little bit of a cartoony, almost double take. I'm going to go forward 10 frames and I'm going to hide the FK controls for the hands because I'm not going to be using them in this part of the sequence. A really nifty way to hide any property is to hold Option or Alt in a PC Shift, and then click on that property and it goes away. I'm going to do that for both of those and then I'll bring up the position for the right and left-hand. I'll select both of them, hold Shift and press P. Because this is the first time that I'm using these controllers position values, I actually need to go back to the first keyframe and set position keyframes for those so that I have those neutral values on this neutral pose all set up and I'll convert them to hold keyframes by holding option Command or Alt Control on a PC and clicking. Then I'll come back to that last set of key frames again, add keyframes for the position of both hands there as well. Then I'll go forward 10 frames and one layer at a time, copy and paste this entire pose. That way I have a pause between Trevor coming to rest and then moving on to the next part of the animation. Then I'll select all these keyframes and because they have some easing on them, I will hold Command or Control on a PC and click, click one more time to go to linear and then hold down Option or Alt as well, and click again to convert them all to hold. This is where I want the animation to transition from the resting pose to this double take animation that I'm going to do. I'll set my work area to this part of the animation and then I'll go forward five frames by pressing Page Down five times. What I want Trevor to do is bend over just barely, then bounce back in the opposite direction and then come back to this resting pose looking straight at the camera. The next set of key frames is going to be Trevor bent down just slightly and looking a little bit towards the ground. I'm going to grab the cog and switch to my rotation tool by pressing W and then rotate them forward just slightly, maybe 4.5 degrees looks about good. Then I'll switch back to my selection tool and pull him down a little bit so that his leg isn't perfectly straight. Then I'll grab his eyes controller and make sure I unlock that so I can grab it and actually that's something I need to catch right now. I don't have any keyframe set except for that very first one. I need to back up to this second resting pose, set one more position keyframe there so that it's preserved all the way to that point in the animation and then I'll come back and then I can move it down. Again, just moving the eyes down a little bit. Then I will grab these arms and pull them up just slightly, not too much. Then the hair can rotate back just a little bit, since we're moving down, this hair would go up. Then let's just jump between these two key poses with the J and K keys on the keyboard and you can see that that's very slight, but that's okay. I don't want it to be extremely jarring. Then I'll move forward five more frames and we'll go in the opposite direction now, so he's jumping back on his heels. Again, I'll start by rotating the cog, so that he's leaning back a little bit now, maybe three degrees and then pull the cog back and up. His legs actually can go completely straight because I want this to be a little bit stretched because he is a cartoon character and that's something that you can determine based on your character design. If your character isn't super cartoony, maybe you don't want to over-exaggerate these motions and you don't want the limbs to stretch, but Trevor is definitely a cartoon character and I want there to be some exaggerated motion. I'm actually going to stretch it even a little bit further and then I'll pull his arms down a little bit. So now all of his limbs are stretched. I want to also move his eyes up in the opposite direction. Let me just bring them up a little bit. Again, I don't want to completely overdo it, but just a little bit off center to the top left. Then I'll bring his hair down since he's moving up now. Then I think I can actually rotate him back even a little bit further. Then again, I'll use my J and K keys to go between those two poses, actually all three of those poses. We can see what's happening. So down, up, down, up, and then we need to go five frames forward again and get back to this neutral pose. I'll just copy and paste all these keyframes one layer at a time until we're back to that resting pose. Except for the eyes, I want the eyes to now be looking directly at the camera. I will center those up so that it looks like he's looking right at us and then I'll just preview those hold opposes. Give myself a little bit more room at the end and that gives me an idea of what this motion is going to look like. I definitely want some of this to happen a little bit faster. Let me zoom in here and I'll work on the timing a little bit. So down, that's probably too much time between the first pose and the second pose. I'm going to take two frames off of that. It goes down and then probably up just as quick. So 1, 2 frames forward and then I'll back these keyframes up. If you've got 1, 2, 1, 2, actually, there's three. I want three frames between each one of these poses. So 1,2,3 down, 1,2,3 up, and then 1,2,3,4 frames back to his resting pose. The feet are never changing, they're always staying on the ground. So I don't need to worry about any of the keyframes between these two poses. The same goes for the rotation of the hands, I don't think I'm going to need those to rotate at all. I'm not going to worry about that. Now I can just select all of the key frames in the middle and convert them to easy ease by pressing F9 on the keyboard, then I'll select all of these keyframes here and easy ease out by holding Command Shift or Control Shift on a PC plus F9 and then easy ease in this last key pose by holding Shift F9 and then I'll play that back. Now that that's tween I can definitely tell it's not happening fast enough. I'm going to take out one frame between these two poses, I want that to be very quick. Then take out at least one frame here and I'll play it out again. I think that works pretty well. But what I don't like is that his arms are almost motionless. They're basically not moving. So on this pose right here, I'm going to pull his arms down even further, like he's almost throwing them down. Then I'm going to try and match the angle of the arms to the legs so that everything is going in the same direction and that might give a lot more motion. Let's preview that. That's pretty good. I might need to spread this out one more frame now that that motion is more exaggerated. I think it's the distance between these two key poses that's bothering me right now. I'm going to take one frame out of there, so this motion is much quicker. Then I think the position of the cog from here to here is a little off. It's going a little too far back, it needs to go more up than back. Let me move that right about there in preview. That's working pretty well. Again, I'm going to come back to this after I have all of my motion set up and finesse everything, but for the most part, this is working the way that I want it to. I can continue on to the next motion, which is Trevor waving. 6. The Wave: Again, I'm going to add a 10-frame buffer between this key pose and the next key pose, and then just select all these key frames and set a new key frame that's automatically set to hold because these were set to hold out. Then I'll go forward maybe five frames again, and I can start working on this waving animation. We did this animation in the first class after the rigging process, I showed you how to do a wave, so it's going to be fairly straight forward. First thing I need is for Trevor's hand to come up, so that it's up where he would be waving. Then I'm going to rotate him back just a little bit, and drop him down, so his knees stay bent, so he's leaning back as he's raising his hand up. Then I'll position his hand to where it's closer to his head, rotate the hand back a little bit, not so much that goes behind this horn, but enough so that you can tell that his hand is actually moving. Then I'll go forward five more frames. Bring it out to where I want the extended part of the wave to be, rotate his hand out a little bit, and then rotate him on his hips a little bit towards that wave as well. I'll just jump between those two key poses and see what that looks like, and that's pretty good. Even that little bit of rotation is really adding some rocking between his knees, and that's all I want. Just to make his other hand a little less stiff, I'm going to add a little bit of position animation on it as well. So between this frame and this frame, I'll just lift it up a tiny bit, and then between this frame and this frame, I'll push it back down. Now I'm going to want him to wave, let's say, one, two, three, back and then come down. So it starts at this pose closer to his head, and I want him to go out once, out twice, out three times, then back to his head, and then down. So I'm going to copy these two key frames for the right hand, go forward 10 frames, because that's five frames from the next pose and paste. I'll do the same thing for the left hand's position, and the rotation of the COG. Everything else is pretty much going to stay where it is. Then I want to loop this three times. So I'll select all these key frames and copy, paste. So we've got one out, back, two out, back, paste, three out, back, and then we're going to go down. So I want that many key frames for the wave, and then I'll copy these three and paste the same number of times, and the same thing for the COG's rotation, copy, paste, paste. So I've got one, two, three, and then back down. So, I'll go forward five more frames, one, two, three, four, five, and copy the same pose. Just to be safe, I'll copy every single keyframe on all of these layers just so I know that it ends exactly where it started. Then I'll select all these keyframes in here and easy ease them by pressing "F9". Same thing for the COG, as well as this first position keyframe. Actually that is a keyframe that I missed, I need to copy and paste that on this last pose right here so that that position stays where it is until it's ready to animate out again. Then I'll select all those keyframes and easy ease them. I'll select this first pose and easy ease out, command Shift F9 or control shift F9 on a PC. I'll easy ease in these key frames, shift F9 and preview. There we've got our basic wave, and I just need to work on the motion path. So let's start at the beginning. His arm is just linearly traveling from this point up to here and I need it to curve outwards so that it's a little bit more natural. So I'll select the position of that key frame, and grab this motion path handle, as well as this one up here, so that I've got this arching motion rather than the straight line. As I'm adjusting this, you can see that it's affecting the curve up here, so I'm going to have to come back and edit that. But first I'll just worry about the motion between these two keyframes so that it arches out like that, rather than going in a straight line. I could probably pull those handles out even further because his arm is pretty bent. Maybe not quite as much on this top handle. Yeah, I think that looks a lot better. But then going from this position keyframe to the next, this handle is messing with the motion. Let me zoom in here so we can see nice and close. I want to adjust this part of the handle without affecting this part. I'm going switch to my Pen tool by pressing "G", and then as I hover over that handle, you see that it switches for the vertex tool. I'll click on that, and you see as I do that it breaks the relationship between this handle and this handle, which is what I needed. Now that it's broken, if I click again, it links them back together, and I don't want that. So what I need to do is hold down "Option" while clicking, to preserve that relationship. Then I'll position it so that it matches the rest of the motion path that's already there on the other cycles, this arch right here, and we'll just preview how that looks. Actually I don't want that arch, now that I see it. I don't want his arm to travel up in that arch, I just want it to pretty much go in a straight line between these two points. So I'll grab that handle, again, I'll hold down "Option" to keep those two handles separate, and I'll bring it back down to match the rest of the straight line motion paths. Now if I go through this, that looks pretty good. Now I just need to come to the last two key frames, and you can see that now that hand is traveling up and over again because of this motion path handles. So I'll click and bring that back down, and then I'll grab this other handle for the last two key frames and adjust that motion path to match the way that it came in, there we go. Now we got pretty similar motion paths and I'll preview. I think that's working a lot better. The amount of time that it takes to go from this position up to this position, and this position back down is happening too quick. So I'm going to select all these key frames except for the first pose and move them forward two frames, so it takes a little bit longer to get from here to here. Then I'll select the last set of key frames and move them forward two frames, and preview that. It's still pretty quick, but I think it's working better. Maybe I'll add one more frame between those poses. Yeah, that looks great, let me zoom out and preview the entire motion. So we've got this nice little rocking motion between the hips, the arm moving up and waving very nicely. I think this arm is moving a little bit too much, it's kind of distracting. So let me go to the point where I raise that arm up, and I'll zoom in here again so we can see nice and close. I know that this keyframe is the same as every other keyframe in the sequence, so I'm going to select every other keyframe so that when I move this, they're all being adjusted at once. Then I'll click and drag this down just a little bit, and see that now the motion between those two points is drastically reduced. You know what, I think I can go even a little bit further. So I'm going to back my play-head up to that first keyframe. There is something that's very important to realize, is that if you're adjusting multiple keyframes, your play-head has to be lined up on at least one of them. Then I will drag this down to be even closer to the second set of key frames. That looks way better. I think that's going to be subtle enough, that it's not distracting, so let's play that. His body movement is so subtle that I'm not going to worry about animating his hair at this point. I think it can stay still. That's looking great. I'm going to just hide all of my controllers so I can see just Trevor and preview that motion. That's working great. Let me backup this work area and just preview everything that we have so far. Make sure that I start on the right frame and play it all back. So we got him walking in, he stops, looks at the camera and waves. Again, I'm going to go back through all of this and make sure that if there's any finessing that needs to be done, I'll work on that. But for now I'm just concerned with getting the individual animations laid out in my timeline. 7. Duplicating the Walk: So the next part of this animation is Trevor looking back the way he was originally and then walking out. Let's go forward 10 frames. I will duplicate this pose, so that there's a pause between this pose and the next. Then I want to go back and duplicate his walk cycle again so that he's walking out the same way that he was walking in. To make things simpler, I'm actually just going to copy one of these loops cycles again. Then once it's copied over the place that I need it, I'll loop it by hand again. Let's start with the left foot and it should be everything between these key poses right here and here. I'll select those keyframes, copy, go to this pose and maybe go forward 10 frames, and then paste and I'll do that same process for all of these layers. I'll zoom in to make sure I'm copying right keyframes, copy and paste. Then I'm going to copy the position and rotation of the COG again because it's not in line with the hair rotation. Just to be safe, I'm going to copy position rotation and then I'll come back for the hair. Copy and paste. I'll grab the hair, again, keeping in mind that this is alternating between 15 and negative 25. I want to make sure that the first and last key frames are the same. Fifteen, I'll copy those and I'll also take note that there are one, two, three frames between the hair rotation and the position. That way I can paste them where they need to go. I'll go to that position keyframe and then back up three frames and paste on the hair rotation. Then I'll go to the end and make sure that it loops one more time and delete everything after that last keyframe that goes past the loop. Next up is the hand. I need to show all of my keyframes because we're going to switch back to going to FK, so I'll select both the right and left hands, press U to collapse all the keyframes and U one more time to bring them all up. Before I copy and paste them, I'm going to go to this pose rate here because this is where he's going to transition from the resting pose to starting his walk, and I'm going to turn to the disable IK back on for both of these layers so that we're back to the FK system. You can see that when I did that, the arms just barely moved because we set up the FK values to match this resting pose of the IK system. I'm also going to set key frames for the upper and lower FK on both of those and then I will copy and paste one at a time the upper and lower FK's keyframes. Again, I just want to select the key frames that are between this walk cycle loop, so between these two poses here and here, I can use as a guide. Because of the overlap, I want to make sure that I catch the two key frames that go past that point. Then I'll select everything before that for that cycle, copy. Then again, taking note that the second key frame of the upper FK is what's lined up with the front of this cycle. I'll copy that and then go back to where I need this walk cycle to start up again, start at this pose, paste, and then back this first keyframe up to that point. Now that actually isn't going to work because it's running into this pose, so I'm going to undo before I paste it and then shift all of this forward another 10 frames. Then I move my play head forward to that first key pose again, select that layer and paste and then back up those key frames so that this first upper FK keyframe lines up with the front end of the cycle. Then I'll go back and select those same keyframes for the other arm, copy, paste and back that up. Now if I ran preview this loop, we should have our looping walk cycle again and sure enough we do. Just like before, now that I have this entire walk cycle, I'm going to loop it manually three or four times. Because we're using the FK system now instead of IK, I'm going to disable the position so that it's just not in the way, I'll hold Option Shift and click on position. I don't need to see the disable IK, so I'll hold Option Shift and click on that as well and I'll do it for the other arm. Now I'm only looking at the keyframes that I'm concerned with and I'll loop these keyframes manually. We'll start at the bottom and work our way up. So copy, paste, paste, paste. Now I have four instances of that walk cycle, do the same thing for the other leg, one, two, three. I'll do the position or rotation of the COG, paste, paste, paste. Then I'll grab the hair again, making sure that the first and last keyframes I select are identical, paste, paste, paste. I'll grab the hand, copy, paste, paste. By the way, I'm holding down Shift to snap to keyframes. There are so many of them that it's a little difficult to snap to the exact one that I want, but it's still easier than not holding Shift and trying to line that up perfectly. I'll copy the last arm's keyframes, paste, paste. Now if I put my work area to this full cycle and preview, I should have four cycles of this walk before it loops. Now I need to come back to this pose right here and work on the transition between the resting pose and starting to walk. I'll zoom in to that part of the timeline and I'll convert all of these keyframes to easy ease out by holding Command Shift F9 and now we can see how this transitions into the walk. Obviously, it needs some work. One of the first things that needs to happen is his eyes need to go back to looking towards the right. Let me just back up to where that original keyframe is and copy that. Then I'll move forward a few frames off this first pose and paste and then easy ease that keyframe. Now his eyes look off as he starts to walk. Then let's work on his feet. I'll turn my controller's visibility back on, I'll select the front foot first and zoom in and let's take a look at what's happening between this pose and the next set of key frames. Its foot is just sliding forward, and obviously that is not how you begin to walk. It's foot needs to come up for a half-step forward before going into the full lock cycle. I'll go forward a few frames, lift his foot up, push it forward a little bit so that it's halfway between these two points and then switch to my pen tool by pressing G and click on the center there to add handles to my motion path and adjust this to be a little bit more rounded. I think I'll pick it up even a little bit further. Then I'm going to want his foot to be rotated back on the heel. Again, I think the guide for this one is also off, so I'm going to drop it down so I know exactly where that ground is, so I don't put his toes any further below that. It looks like I'm going to have to bring his heel up even further. Right about there looks good and I'll push his foot back even further. The toes are definitely going into the floor there, but the timing is completely off on this, so I'm not going to worry about it just yet. All I'm concerned with now is getting from this resting pose into this walking pose and I think the motion is working pretty well. Let's take a look at the other foot. This one is supposed to just slide back, so that's working fine. But if you take a look at the rotation values, it's changing even though both keyframes are set to zero. The reason for that is because of the keyframe interpolation settings. What I want to do is actually convert this keyframe to a hold keyframe again, so that this value does not change until it reaches the next keyframe. Just hold down Option Command and click to convert that to a whole keyframe, and you see that now that stays at zero until it reaches the next keyframe and it continues on with the animation. Let's preview that. Looking good. Now, obviously this is going too slow. I'm going to just adjust the timing a little bit because I definitely know it's not going to take him that long to get back into his walk. So I'll select everything after that first key pose, except for the eyes and then I'll back it up, say five frames. Now let's preview that and I'm going to zoom out so I can see the entire animation. Even that is too slow. Let me back it up maybe two more frames. Backing it up that far, the right foot now doesn't have any time between these two key frames, so obviously, I need to push that forward a little bit. Let me say two frames and we'll see how that looks. Even that is a little too quick, so I'll push it forward a couple more frames and I think that's working better. I'm looking at this foot in the front as he picks it up from that walk. To make it a little bit clearer, I'm going to back my work area up a little bit so I can see him from his resting pose going into that first half step. I'm going to push it forward even one more frame. Yeah, I think that works better. Now that I've got his feet working, I'm going to adjust the COG and his body shouldn't be dropping down as he's taken that first half step, it should actually be moving up. So I'm going to go to the same point in time that I have is foot at the highest point and I'm going to grab the COG and just lift it up a tiny bit and play that. That way he's lifting himself up before dropping down on that first half-step. Think that's working pretty well. Now let's focus on the arms. Obviously, switching between the IK and FK, the first keyframe for the upper FK is, again, just one frame off of that first key pose, so that's not going to work. I may be able to just get rid of all of these keyframes for both hands so that it transitions from the resting pose into the first arm swing. Let me just select those six key frames and hit delete and we'll see what happens. Yeah, I think that's exactly what I need. Perfect. Let me extend my work area out and we'll preview what that whole motion looks like. His arms are completely messed up and this is a result of me making mistake when I copied and pasted my keyframes. So let me look at these. The upper FK for the right hand starts at 50, goes to negative 50, then it's negative 50 again, 50, negative 50, 50. I definitely copied these wrong. I need to select all of these keyframes and push them back so that it goes from 50 to negative 50, back to 50. I'll delete everything after those first three because that's my loop and I'll copy and paste until I have my full loop again. This is just something that happens during character animation. There are a lot of key frames, a lot of things to think about, and you're going to make mistakes. The important thing is that you know how to catch those mistakes and how to correct them. Let me do the same thing for the left-hand negative 50, 50, 50, negative 50. So I'll select all these keyframes and pull them back, delete everything after the loop, copy, paste, paste, paste. Now if I preview, perfect. His arms are swinging back and forth exactly as they should. All right, now let's look at the timing of the transition between being at a resting point and the walk cycle. At the very first step his hair rotates down and that doesn't make much sense. But his body isn't really moving fast enough for that much movement of his hair. Let me go to that first keyframe, I'll zoom in and we're looking at this one right here. I don't want it to be quite so bent down, so I'm going to bring this back to maybe just five degrees. Now there's a little bit of motion, but not too much. All right, preview that again. That looks better. 8. Easing Into the Walk: Next, I want to space out the amount of time it takes to get from this first step into the next stride. The reason for that is because this walk cycle is at a constant speed and I want him to ease into that walk a little bit more than he already is and the easing I have between this resting pose and the first step isn't quite enough for me. So I'm going to select all the keyframes for that first stride, and then I want to deselect the first keyframe of the entire loop. So the first keyframe on every value. Then I'll push the whole thing forward one frame by holding Option and pressing the right arrow. Even just that one frame is going to give us a little bit more time before he gets into that full cycle. This is going to make this transition a little bit more gradual. I think that's looking pretty good. Now I'm going to do the same process of finessing the transitions between each one of our motions. So I'm just going to work in reverse and will back up and I'll preview from the end of the wave to that point. I think the timing could be a little bit quicker between him going from his rest pose into the walk. So this gap right here where nothing is happening at all, I'm just going to select all the keyframes up until that point and then back it up say four or five frames. I'll preview again. Yeah, I think the timing that is better; he finishes his wave and goes right into his walk cycle. Then I'll just back up to the previous transition and we'll take a look at the timing there. So from his double-take into the wave. Preview that. Yeah, I think he could definitely get into his wave quicker. So at this point right here, I want to be sure that I select all of the keyframes for these layers. So select both hands, press U to collapse them, and U one more time to bring them up because we had hidden the position keyframes. Actually, it looks like I missed a couple of keyframes when we backed up this part of the animation. Right here, we have the Disable IK and the position that were hidden. Again, something very important to keep track of is all of your keyframes when you're shifting stuff around. So I'm going to back these up to the point where they should be, make sure everything's still looking okay, and it is. Then I will grab all the keyframes again between this point right here where he's not doing anything and after. So I'll draw a selection around all these keyframes and back it up four or five frames again. Preview. Again, that timing it's just a little bit quicker between that double-take and the wave. Now I'm going to zoom in on this double-take and I think this whole motion can use a little bit of finessing. So I'm going to preview from where he's at his resting pose up until just before he waves. First of all, I think the timing of him going back into that stretched upwards position needs to be tightened up. So he goes down in two frames, up in three frames, and then back down to its resting pose in three frames. I want to get rid of one of those frames in between the down and up positions. So I'll select all the keyframes after that point and back it up one frame and preview again. Now it's just a little bit more jerky. You can clearly see that one frame on this type of motion makes a huge difference, especially at 24 frames per second. Sometimes one frame makes all the difference. I think that looks pretty good. Now let's look at the timing overall from that double-take into the wave. Yeah, that all still works really well, even though I added one frame between these two key poses. All right, let's back up and continue this process. So we're going from the walk now into the resting pose. That looks pretty good, but I think that slowdown is a little abrupt. So in the same way that I added one extra frame of timing as he started walking again, I'm going to add one frame extra on this last stride before he comes to this resting pose right here. So I want to select everything up to that pose and then push it forward one frame. Option or Alt on a PC and the right arrow key. Now there's just one extra frame between that step and the last half-step. So we'll preview that. Now his slowdown is a little bit more gradual. One last thing I just noticed was his hair. At the end here, you can see that it just floating a little bit weird. So I'm going to go to the hair rotation and we'll take a look. It goes down, it comes up very slowly. That I actually did not want to push forward. So I'll bring that back, and what needs to happen is it needs to come down a bit further before it gets to the resting points. So I need to rotate this down we'll say maybe two degrees. Then I'll push it forward just a little bit and preview again. Okay, I think that's working. Now we can actually take a look at the entire sequence and see how it all turned out. I'll just set my work area, and preview. Before I do that, I'm going to turn off all my guides and make this a full screen. So we have Trevor walking, comes to a rest right there, looks at the camera, waves, looks back out, starts walking again, and the cycle continues. 9. Transitions Overlap: Now that I have the timing working, I'm going to go back and work on the overlap between each motion. If I back up to this point right here where Trevor stops walking, I removed all of the overlap on this key pose, and that was just for organization. It doesn't look that great for him to be walking and for every animated property to come to a stop at the same time. So I want to add some overlap back in on these keyframes, but not all of them. It's important that the feet keyframes stay where they are in time because adding overlap into his feet will make animating him coming to a stop as he's walking across the screen very difficult. But the COG, and his arms, and his hair, all of those things can be moving after his feet have stopped and it won't affect him actually moving across the screen. Let's start with his arms. I'm actually going to do both of these poses at once because you can see that the upper FK, lower FK, and rotation for the arms at this point are also lined up perfectly. I need to add in 1,2 frames between each one of these keyframes. I'm going to do both arms at once in both poses at once. I'm going to select the keyframes that I need for the lower FK and rotation on both arms, shift them forward two frames by holding Option or Alt on a PC, and pressing the right arrow key. Then select adjust the rotation and shift that forward two frames. Then we'll preview. Again just look at his arms. Now you can see that they don't come to a rest at the exact same time. There's some overlap between the upper and lower parts of the arm and the hands. You see the hands are the last things to gently ease into the resting position. That looks a lot more natural. I also want to move the disable IK keyframe forward to switch when the lower FK gets to its resting position. Because as soon as this kicks in, these two properties don't matter anymore. It switches from a FK to IK. So I'll shift this forward two frames and now they line up with the lower FK, preview one more time. Very nice. Let's go to the hair next. I'll come down to this pose again and look at the hair rotation. I'm just going to push this say another two frames forward and we'll see what that overlap does for us. That looks pretty good. Now the hair continues to move even after the body is stopped. But I also want to overlap the rotation of the COG. Let's grab that key frame as well by holding Shift so that I can keep the hair offset from it, and try two frames forward on that as well. Preview. Now that I've pushed that forward, I'm noticing that I need one more keyframe for the rotation between this point and this point. He needs to lean forward a little bit before that last step. So right here in the middle of this last half step, I'm going to add one more key frame rotating him forward just slightly, maybe only two degrees and preview. Much better. Now that coming to a stop feels way more natural. Great. Let's move to the next motion. I'll zoom in nice and close. Again, everything starts at this one point in time and all the keyframes in between are blocked off at those key pose timings. Let's add some overlap between some of these properties. Let's start with the eyes. I actually want that animation to overlap backwards in time. I want the eyes to lead the motion, so I'll select all of these keyframes and back them up one frame. I'm only going to do one frame of overlap because this entire motion is very quick. Let's back that up and just preview, see what it looks like. I think even just that one frame of overlap is too much. So instead of shifting all four keyframes, I'm just going to shift the first keyframe back. Let me grab everything else and push it back forward and preview again. Then maybe I'll overlap the last keyframe forward, so the eyes drag after that double take. That looks a little bit better. The goal is to just make it feel a little bit less robotic, so offsetting these keyframes just a little bit will really help the motion feel more natural. Then let's look at the hair. This should be able to be overlapped forward one frame, so let's try that and see how that looks. It's very subtle, but it's a nice little touch. But then just like we did easing out of that walk, let's also select the rotation and shift that forward one frame with the hair. There we go. Now we're getting a much less robotic and stiff animation out of this double take. You can see the rotation and position of the body is not so lined up, and that really helps this animation. Let's try offsetting the position and rotation of the arms, but honestly this is happening so quick that it might not work. Let's just try and see what it looks like. Let's just start by grabbing the position and rotation of both arms and shifting it forward one frame. Honestly it's so quick that it's almost unnoticeable, so let me try one more frame. That actually looks terrible. So I'm just going to undo, and I think we can actually get away with not overlapping those arms. Let's move on to the next motion, which is the wave. There's not as much to work with the overlap of this animation. Because if you take a look at the position and rotation of the COG, his body is not actually moving between the rocking of the hips here. You see the rotation has lots of keyframes, but there's nothing happening between these two points and the position. So I don't really need to introduce any overlap there, but I could take the rotation of the hand that's waving and select all of these keyframes in here and push it forward one or maybe even two key frames. Let's start with one and see what it looks like. That's a little too subtle to notice, so I'm going to shift it forward one more frame. I can see it happening but the rotation of the hand is actually so subtle, I'm actually going to have to exaggerate the motion of the wrist a little bit to get this to look the way I want it to. To do that, I'm actually going to go into my value graph. So I'll come up here and click on the graph editor, and I'll hide some of the switches so I have a little bit more room to look at. Then I'm going to switch from the speed graph to the value graph. These are my lowest values of the wave, and these are the highest values. I want to make sure that I have this transformed box visible, and then I'll select all of those key frames. I just want to increase how much this wrist is actually rotating. So I'm going to hold down Command or Control on a PC before clicking on this square right here, and then dragging down. As I do this because I'm holding Command, it's going to scale proportionally in each direction. Keep an eye over here on his hand as I'm doing this, and you'll see how much it is rotating. Again hold down Command or Control, click and drag on this square to adjust how much the hand is rotating, and I am going to pull it back quite a bit. Now if I scrub through, you can really see that hand flapping as his arm is waving. Preview that. That is much better. I'll exit out of the graph editor, bring my switches backup and preview that whole motion. Then I just want to shift the position and rotation of the arm forward, maybe two frames, so that it doesn't come to rest at the exact same time as the COG and everything else. The next motion is getting into this walk. I already have the overlapping animation going into this walk. But from this resting pose, I can actually build in a little bit of overlap. So I'll grab the lower FK and rotation keyframes for this key pose on both arms and shift it forward two frames, then adjust the rotation, and shift it forward two frames. Preview. Now the arms have a little bit of overlap in that beginning of the animation. Then I'll grab the rotation of the COG and push it forward two frames. Now we've added in all the overlap. Let's preview the entire animation just one more time so we can get a feel for all the overlap. Again, I'll make this full screen. Awesome. That looks great. Now we can create a main comp or we can actually animate him walking across the screen. 10. Walking Across the Scene: Now, I don't want to do this animation using my character animation layout, so I'm actually going to switch my workspace to one that I've already prepared called Clean, and this is a much more standard way to look at After Effects and will give me more room to animate Trevor across the screen. I want to start by making a composition based on the sequence character animation, so I'll click and drag this comp down to the new comp button, and that will place that comp inside a new comp exactly the same size and length as the original. I'm going to rename this Main Comp, and then I need to change the composition size. I'll come up to Composition, Composition Settings. You see it's 4,000 by 4,000, which is the size of my source. I'm going to change that down to 800 by 600. You can adjust this to whatever you want, but I know that I want my final project to be 800 by 600. I'll click "Okay," and then I need to scale Trevor down. I'm actually, going to fit him to the width of my comp by pressing Command, Option, Shift H, or you can right-click go to Transform, Fit to Comp Width. Now, I have some background art that I'm going to bring in to the composition, and fit that to the comp width as well. Then I'll zoom in and shift that background up so that the ground plane matches his feet a little bit better, maybe lift Trevor up a tiny bit, and then I'm going to switch my Fast Draft down to Off, so that I have my final quality and he looks a little bit better. Now, if you notice on this Trevor-Sequence layer, I have a marker that says Start, and if I double-click on this sequence, you see that it's also in this comp. I set that there so that I knew exactly where the start of the walk cycle would be starting. You can do this very easily by just making sure you don't have any layer selected and press Shift 8 to add a marker, and then you can double-click on it and name it whatever you want. I know that that's where I want this layer to start so I'll go to that point, hold Shift to snap to that marker, and then hold Option or Alt on the PC, and press the left bracket to trim that layer. I'll go back to the front of the sequence and press the left bracket to jump that layer back to the front, and we can start animating. Now, I could put the position key frames directly on this layer, but then if I need to adjust any of the scale or position of Trevor relative to the motion, it's going to make it a lot more difficult. I'm actually going to come up to Layer, New, Null Object, and I'll parent Trevor to that null, so I'm going to right-click here, make sure that my columns have Parent visible. Then I'll parent him to that null and rename the null, Position Control. Now, wherever I move this null, Trevor will move with it. I'm going to start by adding a key frame right here because I know this is where I want Trevor to end when he stops walking and looks at the camera. Then I'll push that forward a little bit, then click and drag this null position control off to the left side of the screen while holding Shift so that it locks to moving just horizontal until he's completely off the screen. Then just get a sense of the speed. I will preview between those two key frames. Clearly, that position null is moving way too quickly, so I need to increase the distance between these two key frames. The position values are exactly where they need to be, but the timing needs to be adjusted. Let's preview that and that's a lot closer, but let me zoom in on his feet and you can see that they're still drifting forward. That means that the position null is still moving a little too fast, so I'll just drag this out a little bit more. Now, they're drifting in the opposite direction so I went too far. Now, instead of clicking and dragging, I'm just going to start nudging one frame at a time, so hold down Option and press the left arrow a few times. Still drifting backwards, go back a little bit more. It looks like right there is almost perfect. I'm going to push it back one more frame. It looks like right there is pretty darn perfect. I'm going to go with that, and now by the time he reaches this position I need him to stop walking, so I'm going to go into this Trevor- Sequence and find that key pose where everything stops. I built in some overlap with these other key frame so it's a little bit difficult to tell, but what I'm really concerned with is his feet: when do his feet come to a stop? That we did not put overlap into, so I'll just go to that key pose right there. Then I'll just go back to my main comp, and add another marker on this layer by holding Control and pressing 8 with that layer selected, and then I'll double-click on that marker and type in Stop. That way I know exactly where those feet stop. Then I want to shift that point in time back to line up with this key frame, so I'll just back that up until it lines up perfectly, and I'll preview again. Obviously, near the end there, his feet start drifting again and that's because we gradually slowed him down on those last couple of steps. The speed is working just fine until that step right there where this front foot is coming down. What I want to do is add a key frame right where his heel hits the ground right there. I'm going to verify that that's the right frame by going back in here. Sure enough, the play head is directly over those position key frames. Then I'll go back to the main comp. On the position control, I'm going to add one more key frame right there so that the speed is preserved between these two points. Then I need to make some adjustments from here on as Trevor comes to a gradual stop. Between right here and right there where he picks his heel up again, we need a different speed. Again, I'm going to guess that this is the last frame that his foot is planted, and I will go into that sequence and just verify that, "Yes, that's exactly where I need to be." Then I will set one more key frame. Now, we can adjust the position of that key frame so that the speed is slightly slower, so I need to back this position up a little bit, and then preview. That's close, but again, just take a look at this foot right here, it drifts right down that last step. I need to make sure that his foot does not move between this key frame and this key frame. I actually, moved this null position too far back, because his foot is slipping backwards, which means that the foot is moving quicker than the null. I'll just shift to that position controller forward a little bit. That's much closer. It just is ever so slightly moving forward, so I'm going to back it up maybe even just one pixel and let's see what that looks like. Perfect. We've got that step speed lined up perfectly. Now, we need to work on this foot. It plants right here. Then we need to adjust the position of this last key frame to give the right speed to keep that foot planted where it was. I'm shooting for right here, keeping that foot right where it is now. It goes way far forward, so I'm going to back it all up, and then just compare. I need to go even further back. I'm just going to press J and K to go between. You can see that that's moving forward even still so I'm going to back it up even more. That looks a lot better. Let's scrub through there. We've got some weird drifting going on. Now, this is because in our animation sequence, we're easy easing into this final pose, so I need to add an easy ease to this key frame. Add that, and then see how it looks. That's a little bit better, but I need to work on the speed graph. Let me open up the graph editor. Go to the speed graph and we'll work on this curve. As soon as the foot is planted, it gets pushed back. I need to adjust the speed curve to have less influence on the front end. I'm actually going to remove all the influence and then I'm going to increase the influence of this handle so that it gets to that final position a little bit quicker. The position of that is a lot better, but I think there's some rotation happening on that foot. Let me jump back into this animation comp and take a look at the rotation value of this angle right here. Sure enough, even though these two are zero, the interpolation is messing with these Keyframes because the way they're eased. I need to convert this to a hold option command or Alt Control on a PC and click and now that foot plants and it does not rotate in the middle of that step. Let's preview again. Now the foot isn't rotating. I'm still having some weird drifting problems going on and it's not very consistent. It's going in one direction and then coming back a little bit. What I think I need to do is go back into my animation sequence, take a look at this last keyframe where the foot is planted and go into the speed graph and I want to take all the influence off of that handle. Then I'll make sure this keyframe right here is at default ease by pressing F9 with its elected, and it was. Then I'll come back to my main comp and do the same thing. Makes sure that there's no influence on this keyframe and default easy ease of this keyframe right here and work from that point. Now the drift is going in just a single direction. What that's telling me is that my null control is probably moving a little bit too far forward on this keyframe. I'm just going to back it up just slightly and that helped for sure. Let me just click that and tap the left arrow key so I can make tiny increments, and there we go. Now that foot is completely planted and not drifting at all. Let me zoom out so we can see this whole thing and we'll watch him walk in, come to that gradual stop. Perfect. Now he's not in the right portion of the frame, so let me select all of my keyframes and drag him to where he needs to be somewhere around there in the center, and then back up. We see that he's not completely off the frame at the beginning. I'm going to have to readjust the front of this animation. I'm going to select all the keyframes on this position control and shift them forward 10 frames by holding Option Shift and pressing the right arrow. Then I also need to make sure I move the Trevor-Sequence layer forward 10 frames. I'll select it and press Option shift Page Down so now that animation still lines up. Then I'll select the position property for the controller and go into my speed graph. I'll push that controller back and I'm looking at this line right here, which is the velocity between these two keyframes and I want to match it to the velocity between these two keyframes. I'm just going to back this up and tell those two lines are pretty much identical. Right there's pretty close. Then I should be able to delete this keyframe and preview the animation and have that velocity still match. Sure enough, his feet are staying planted on the ground. He starts completely off the screen and ends up in the center of the screen. Great. Let's go forward in time and preview the whole animation until he starts walking again. Awesome. Now let's work on the animation of him walking out. Again, I'm going to take a look at where I think the start of this animation is, right there, and I'm going to verify that that's where I need to start. Sure enough, it is that's where the feet start to move again. It's the last point where they're stationary. I'll go to this main comp, add a marker and name it Start. We'll set a keyframe for the position right here and then I need to go forward in time till when this foot is picked up again. It looks like this frame right here is the last one. Again, I'm going to verify. Yes, that is the right frame and I'll adjust this forward. We add another keyframe. I'll zoom in on the feet and then jump between the two keyframes using the J and K keys. I want this foot to stay exactly where it is between both keyframes. I'll go forward again, and I'll pull this forward a little bit and it still needs to go a little bit more forward. Right there you can see the foot is not moving at all between those keyframes but because of the easing I have, it is drifting. I need to take the ease off the second keyframe and I'll do the default easy ease by pressing F9 on that one right there. Again, I'm getting some weird drifting in-between those two keyframes so I'll go into the speed graph. Start by trying to take off the influence of the second keyframe. That's better but then again, I will go into the Trevor-Sequence animation into the speed graph for this Ankle Control. I'll take all the influence off of this second keyframes handle and there we go. Now that foot is staying perfectly planted on the ground until it is picked up. Then I need to go forward until this foot is being picked up. Right there. Again, double-check that that is the exact frame. It is and I'll push it forward again. Jump between those two keyframes and an ease go a lot further forward. Even more. This one is harder to line up because the foot is not completely flat once the heel hits the ground. I'm just going to eyeball it and I think it could back it up a little bit and we'll see what that looks like. It's pretty close, but it looks like it's going forward so I will just back it up a couple of pixels. That's a lot closer, maybe two more and that looks rock solid. Great. Now, if you look at the speed graph, you'll see that there's this arch in the velocity when Trevor should be standing still. He's actually drifting even though he's standing still. Again, this is because of the weird interpolation between eased keyframes. I will just convert this one to a hold option command or Alt Control on a PC and click. We've got that working and he's gradually going into his full walk cycle. From this point on, he can go back to the same speed that he was going between these two keyframes. Again, I will switch back to my speed graph. Let's count the number of frames that we have between these two keyframes. Initially 40 and I'll go forward 40 frames from this last keyframe. Hold Shift and press Page Down four times and then I'll move him off the screen again enough to where this velocity line is matching this one as much as possible. This is going 241.86 pixels per second. That's what I'm going to shoot four. So 241.86. Bring that forward a little bit more to 40. A couple more clicks. That's pretty close. Let's see what that looks like as he's walking off. Sure enough, it looks like his feet are nice and planted on every step. Let's preview that. Trevor walks in, stops, double takes, waves, looks back out and then walks off again. Then it loops and with that, I've finished my complete animation sequence and it's ready to be exported as a loop GIF. Now you have an idea of what the workflow is for linking multiple actions together. Obviously every animation is going to present a unique set of problems and depending on what you want your character to do, this could be more or less difficult, but if you approach it with the strategic sense of animating one action at a time and then working on the transition keyframes between each motion, you will end up with the animation that you're after. 11. Thanks!: That's it. Congratulations on making it through this entire series, and thank you so much for watching. Now you should be able to take all of what you've learned and apply it to your own character animations. If you have any questions or trouble along the way, please don't hesitate to ask any questions on the community page. If you need help exporting your animation, just check out part 1 of this series and scroll down to the video where I show you how to export it out of after effects and save a looping GIF inside of Photoshop. If you'd like to learn about some more exploiting options, definitely check out my compressing videos for the web class and compressing GIFs like a boss class, where I teach multiple ways to export in both formats. Don't forget to your post animations to your class project so I can see them. If you'd like any feedback from me, all you have to do is ask. If you liked this class, I would love it if you left me a review and if you show your projects on social media, be sure to tag me @jakeinmotion. If you're not already, be sure that you are also following me here on Skillshare so that you're up-to-date with all of my new classes. Again, I just want to say thank you so much for taking this class. I hope you enjoyed it and that you were able to get something out of it. Thanks again, and I'll see you next time.