Character Animation: Creating Run Cycle from Motion Capture

1. Introduction to the class: Hello everyone, welcome to another class on my channel. In today's video, I'm gonna show you how to edit run cycle. If you want to work in gaming industry or generally do animation stops, this will be highly requested things. You will do this on a daily basis. Everyone is just requesting run cycles or walk cycles. I think this class will be so useful for your early careers. So guys, let's dive in. 2. Watching Motion Capture Data: Hello everyone, Welcome again on my channel. In today's lesson, we're going to learn how to do around cycle. As you know, we are starting with smaller and smaller files and easier one. So this new class, we will also learn basic stuffs and really easy and simple things. I upload it. I actually imported our motion capture file here. As you can see, this is our scene and this is our character. You can see he's in some preparations for Ryan running. Let's see what we got here. Come on. Okay. This is maybe like this. And he's running, as I said in first-class and working on one monitor because you can easily see what I'm doing because I'm capturing screen, capturing my monitor. But if you've got two monitors, Please put everything aside from these tools so your screen nil will be much, much bigger and it will be much easier to see everything. I'm actually not used to work on this small amount of space, but we will figure it out. Let's see from, from to you. Okay, this is our thick, Let's see from the side view, someone said to me on previous class that he's more confused after the class then before because I didn't I didn't told any shortcuts in the video and they haven't showed you and told you what I'm pressing. So my advice for debt will be to find, I showed you there, you can change your shortcuts here. In interaction mode, you are changing your shortcuts on motion builder on Meyer shortcuts depending on which shortcuts you work on that. That's depend I'm always working on motion Miller shortcuts and it will be bad if I'm saying what I'm pressing because maybe someone works some minor shortcuts. My advice for debt will be to find online on Google motion builder shortcuts and print that shortcuts. And when you need something, just look at that printed shortcuts or another, you can put it on another screen also. Just take a look and then do what you want. And that's the fastest way to learn how to use shortcuts. Or if you are working on minor shortcuts, them print out my shortcuts. And every time you enter, you will take a look once, twice, and third time you will know. Write down shortcuts mainly used. Write down shortcuts, print it out, and put on another monitor, and you will, That's the best way to learn shortcuts or one program, and you won't be confused. When they do something, you will figure out what I did. So that's the way I learned all the shortcuts in every program. I use two. And same is with motion builder. Motion builder is maybe the hardest with shortcuts. So that's my advice for debt part of the problem you had. And please please please limit on feedback. I really appreciate your comments. And also you can always send me a message on my social media or just if you want to ask me something, if you need some advice or anything, just ping me wherever you can find me or also leave, leave your comments down on this class. 3. Choosing Run Cycle Range: So, okay, we figure that out and now we can start working. Let me just check what we will do first. First thing we will do is decide which which stake we will, which we will cut our take. So let just check. In the gaming industry, you always take one full cycle. So if you start on right leg, you will finish your cycle on the right leg, only one step. And if you choose left leg, you will finish on left leg. That's really doesn't matter. I will plot this character to control rig his here. Now also we got our controls. Let me show you. If you move, it will move, of course. Ikea's on. So every time I move something, my legs are being so length. Legs or not. If we do this, legs, legs don't go down but arms go with because they are not paint. But if I pin the arms when I move hips, sorry, I didn't. I need to open this icky defined now. Move this arms will stay in the same position because they are pinned. And I will now disabled that for now. I don't want my arms paint. Let me see. Where are we going to cut Arctic? We will go in this right or left camera from side view, it's much easier. We will go in story mode. As you can know, right-click, Insert character animation track. Here are now. Now we can choose, we don't need this. I don't know why that motion blur always give you this, but doesn't matter. We got now character animation track. We choose our actor. You can see our character is named vector. We will choose a director and we will go insert current, take. Our whole animation is this V also need to enable Story Mode. Story Mode must be blue. We are going to do now. Now, we need to choose WIC stake, which we got date, but we need to decide which cycle we want to use. My right hand column is selected, but you can select whatever you want. It doesn't matter. You can deselect it. Water control. I am choosing this. I am enabling control rig so I can see clearly every bone and control with control a enable and disable everything. Why am I doing this? Because when I cut, then I'm choosing which cycle I want. I want to cut it. My, my knees must be ideally in the same position, but this is also amazing. So my knees, I want to cut somewhere when my knees are like separated. I want to cut foreign invokes. I want to cut my knees are together, so let me see. Okay. From front you my right ankle is down. So I will cut here and I am switching my cameras. I will really try to tell you the shortcuts. I was switching cameras with Control F front with control, air, side view. With control ie. I'm going in perspective mode, so I will go now back on site. Okay, so my first cut is in this position when my right-hand close down, my knees are together and that's amazing. So next cut won't be on the left ankle. It must be on the right end goal, so I will go. This is right, left, and right. Again. As I said, my knees must be to gather, so I will go control. Next, next, go back. And this is the perfect position. Frame to vote. Sorry. I, as you see, I express this cut and everything is gone, but I will just go Control Z and go back. And I will select this and razor it here. Now we got our take, delete, delete, and this is our cycle. We want it. We will go now, double-click here and press 0. Case he is now in our animation will start from 0 frame. And we will select this, go right-click and frame start and then plot holes seemed to Current take 60 FPS plot. What we will also do, we will position our character in center. We will double-click this and we will just here in clip soft set go 0 and 0. X and z are 0. So our character is now put in 0 position. That's amazing. We can now move into editing process, but before we do that, we will flat Holstein to Current take blot and disabled story mode. So now we can edit. 4. Editing Motion Capture: Okay, We're going now into editing phase. So we're now moving into editing motion capture. First thing we're going to do is create a new layer. As we said in the previous lessons, we said that every, every, every change we do on our character, we need to do on the new layer. And after we're done with everything with new layer, we just plot there everything to scale it. And skeleton is actually base layer, base animation. So let's begin how we're going to do this. We will first make photos and then we will place that pose at the end. And then we will have a loop animation for like. Look at now, when you press this, then you just press once controlled space and you see your character running all the time. Loop. What we want is to make loop. To make nice loop, as you can see now, 1st and end pose are different. And vigor that glitch at the end, we got that glitch. So we will make everything without glitch to go smoothly. So we will go now in PostController and we will, before we create new pose, of course you must be on another layer one and on 0 take I want to, I don't like actually this pose. So that's the editing process. We will do this. I will start from the leg. You don't need to be dead precise, but let's make it more beautiful. He's on his knees. Just lazy. Innovation, gut, disabled. So let's like this. That's fine. Breaths key just in case I will be in a whole body mode because I need whole body posts for this. But you don't have to. I also want to change my position. His neck is broken. It's kind of hard to be precise and this scheme problem. And you can always got that skin problems, but there's nothing much you can do about it. Just try to make it the best you can. And I will do this soap. He's like pointing his eyes in us not to look down. I will press a key on my shortcut, keys s, So I will change a bit position of his hand just to make it a bit like this. Let me be this other hand like this. Maybe just a bit here. C0, C0, C0. Forget to press kit, and I forgot to save our file just in case. Don't forget to save because if you if you got something wrong. Always good to have version of your progress. And don't make same mistake as I did in my past because who knows what can happen and you lose your progress. Okay, I'm satisfied with this first pose. It's much better if you turn off this, you will see how your character looked before. If you turn on the navel, your layer, you will see it's much better now, if you mute, It's this. If you enable it, it's this. I think it looks much better. So I'll just key again and I will press Create. And okay, I got some teams shifts here, sorry. I will rename. I will call it full body pose. And then I will go at the end of our animation and I will enable x and z and press full body pose and go key. And as you can see, my character is moving. Moving across the x position. You can see his, the first he's here and in the end his next I will, I will go here and press this and I will delete this last key that will disable this X position. And then I will now double-click on this and now press keys. So let's me see It's our character night now. Okay, home and home. And we still got some differences. Let me check. I will delete these key and turn off the air rotation. Let me know, check key, comb and comment. And it's perfect. Now this, you can see now in first pose, you can see grid in second posts, you can't see grid. That's because our character is moving in the front and that's totally normal. So now he's in perfect position, no rotation, no x sliding, just z. And that's perfect. Okay, and now let me see what we got. Okay. As you can see now our legs. I will press, you know, I will now let me check. We will. I'm totally OK. How it's his amazing, but we got that foot going down. So we will, let me check like this. If I do this 0, no. Select legs. Go into the a body part and go 0 keys everywhere. You can go 0 here and here. Now it's better, but it's still not good. So what I will do its go frame by frame. And just do this. He had done his foot down, go under the grid. That's fine. And other leg. That's amazing. And this one down slightly due this year. Control Z to go back. Here. As you can see, this is like too many, too much movement. So I will just put it 0 key, I will just move one frame. So it can be more slower, change, not go from this to this in that short amount of time. So I will prolong that time between these two keys. It will be more natural. Let me check. Okay, blacks, perfect. Inches back. Now we wanna see. Hence, as you can see, hand is going through the bodies. So this frame I will just go into, as you can see, that here, rotation and translation and x. Just a bit so he doesn't go through his body with his his his hand. Now, don't go to his body and here, it's fine. And let me check another can't amazing. Totally satisfied how this is looking. And don't forget to go. Big plot to scale it down. So our whole animation is now on, scale it on. It's not anymore on Animation layer one. That is our Bayesian base animation. Now, this whole editing phase, it's on our base and emotional level. We go back to control rig. And if I turn off now this layer one, nothing will happen because we plotted our whole animation to this base animation. 5. Changing Run Speed: So V just finished our editing process. We created boat pose. We place it on frame start and then just check, go to perspective mode. First and close. And it's the same. It's perfect, nicely done loop. I want to show you now, if you plan to work in gaming industry, I want to show you have you can create your character to run on the exact same speed you want. Before I started working in this company at notice where I work now, I work in here for seven months now. And my test animation was to create around cycle that is seven meters. That goes seven meters per second. How can I do that? Because in company now I got a tool where I can just select my hips and press button and see how fast my character goes in depth frame. But because I didn't have that tool, I needed for tests to do that by hand. On some simple. I needed to figure out how I can do that because when I search it online, like how to measure speed or your character have to change speed of your character. I couldn't find anything. That's, that's actually secret. Think so. I think it will be this will be so, so, so helpful for you in your careers, not only for motion builder files, but also for keyframe. And you can check this in Maya or motion builder or wherever you want. So this will be really helpful, helpful for you in your careers if you want to. Especially if you want to be in gaming industry, because for developers, it's numbers are really important. And if they wanted him to go seven meters per second, you need to do that. So now let's, let's say that our character must go five meters per seconds. How we can check that v will find where is hips. And I will enable this character control rig. So I can see that. And I will go here in the browser and try to find here in elements, I will pick this smooth and just, just take it and place it here. This is our null. What we're gonna do is place it here where our hips says, let me just do this. Our hips is here and I will place more there. Let me check with that position of that node. Here. Let me just find it here. If you go right-click, arrange all horizontal and everything will be arranged for you. I didn't know what is this? I will this is old character rig. I forgot to delete before I, when I was preparing this scene, a created character array, but I wanted to delete it so I can create with you another one, but I forgot to do that. So I now just get our character and our control rig. And here is our null. If you press Control one, you will have one window. If you've pressed to, you will do. If you press three, you will have three. Now what I'm gonna do, I will come to, and I will go in somatic view here and right here. So our newly sphere. And if I look at his Z position, I will need to write it. It's minus 2.98. If I said that I want him I want him to go five meters per second. I will need to I will copy that and paste it. I just was like copy paste. Control. C control V. If I want him to go five meters per second, I will just go here like 500. As you can see on grids, you got 12345 and he's here 500. It's like five meters per second. As you can see now, it's minus nine minus two. So you can just make it like It's not that big difference, so I wouldn't do that. But you can add here like 502 if you want to be exact for its size, but it's not a big deal. Actually, we can do that. We will be precise, so we will do this, but you don't have to be that precise. Actually his minus, so we will, sorry, it will be 47.20 to sorry about that, but it's totally okay if you press fifteenths. Not big difference. Because our character is going in 60 FPS. What we want to do is that he in 60 FPS reach this. Now here, we are going to do that. So I will delete the old story that we created and I will enable Story Mode. I will go insert current ache. I will go with my point here. And I will go copy, paste control V, Control C, Control V. And I will take this now character is for 60 frames long, but as you can see, he is going from 0 to reach here and he goes back to 0 in this clip. How we are going to prolonged him to go there is like go here. We will just choose clips, heaps to previous clip at that, at that, and we will take his hips and match clip to previous clip. And we will match time when our previous clip feet is finished at the end of previous clip, then this clip we'll start in, we will press a case. As you can see now, he's just moving. And he just goes, He's not coming back on this clip to 0. Then you just go here. As you can see now, when I do this, when I play it, he just stops here. Why is that? Because we were in, we need to select the both clips. Right-click and plot holds, not flow block called seem to care. We need to press this frame start tens. So our N frame will be in 60 frames. So let's try now. Amazing. So frames star tent, plot, whole scene to current intake plot. What we said now that we want our hips to reach new in five meters per second, I will now go in one, right? So you can see better. What we can see from this that our character in 60 frame is much, a little bit more faster than five meters per seconds. So what we are going to do here is go into this, not that one. This one, it's like loops, scale clips, scale clips. That's the right name for this tool because we will select this and we will scale our clip what we wanted, because he is faster than five meters per second. We need to slow him down. How we're going to do that. We will, because we want him to be in 60 frames here. We will stay with our own, our timetable in 60 frame per second. And we will select both of these and we'll just put a little bigger bags so we need to slow him down. And let me check. Can I go one frame here? Be more precise if I pull him back one frame, he's still a bit far from NEW. If I move him from one more frame, he is on the exact same position as I wanted him to be. So his normal is right here. So that's yeah. That's perfect. As you can see. Here is now here and I will just go frame start. Tent. Plot holds Sin to Current. Take an our car character now is going five meters per second in 60 frame. They're amazing. Now if you don't want him to loop. So we will just, what we're going to do now is just cut this and print start then. And plot called seem to current ticks so we don't need anymore him to be going along. We will cut here where he is on his right ankle. Our animation is not now 30 alternative frames long. It's 31 frame block because we slowed him down. So here, please running five meters per second. And please, please, please, please. This is really important, especially if you want to work in gaming industry. You can easily, I've got this on your test, so that's it for this video, I will show you in X1 how to place your character to run in one place. 6. Running in Place: Hello guys. And before we finish this class, I want to show you how you can. Because also I told you on tests that you got like speed and things like that. You also got some times that you need to place your character in one as one. You need to make your character around in place or walking in place so not to go through the grid that then sorry about my English. I this is first time I'm doing voiceover when I'm working and not voicing after. I think this is much more easier for you and me also. So what I wanted to say is that you will usually that also requesting your desk that your character must be in place. We're going to do that. As you can see, he's now going to degrade and he's going through that oh, that how we are going to do that, as you can see now he's moving through the Z position so you want your character to go in place. You will do it like this. Navigator, I will go to character. Actually, I had no idea. This is just think you need to check, but we will find it together. I haven't done this a long time here. Okay? You are going to in Navigator find characters and go on your character. Actually my character is named actor. Just press it on actor and go here. I'm sorry. I'm actually going to do because I will actually do this so I can clearly see what is here. He's murdered. Here's my dog. Sorry about that. We will go now in actor. No, it's not there. Maybe modifier. Yeah, cool. I remembered. Yeah. You just go in Navigator, characters, actor, and in modifiers, and go in these in place. Think. Press here, locker. So sorry about my dog. As I said, Go here in characters, actor, and go here in modifiers and this lock set position. And we will just press that and he will immediately go back. I can now pull this down. And he will immediately go back in zeros, zeros 0 pose. And when we play our animation and I will turn on loop, he will be in place. And this is highly requested think so. But also at I want to tell you that if you want to go back now that he can go through grid, you can go back. No control z, nothing. When you do this, there's no going back. So please save your, say, save your file before this step. And that's it, guys, for this video. I hope this lesson was helpful for you. And I will leave you this, this, this file. So I want to see yours runs cycles. You can leave it on the grid. I would love to see it, but you can also make it in place. So let me show you how it looks from side, from front, from perspective. Yeah, guys. I think we finished. Please, please please don't forget that practice. Makes several imperfect and do your takes please, and just upload it into section and see you in the next course. 7. Final Thoughts: Thank you everyone for taking this class. I hope it was really helpful for you. Don't forget to do your projects and upload your things into the project gallery. If you've got any questions, please ping me or comment down below, or if you have any requests or which class to do next, please, please, please inform me about that and I will do my best to film that next. Thank you so much again, see you in the next class.