Character Animation Part 2: Animating a Run Cycle | JD McNeil | Skillshare
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Character Animation Part 2: Animating a Run Cycle

teacher avatar JD McNeil, Sr. Motion Graphics Designer

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      0:33

    • 2.

      Materials

      0:38

    • 3.

      Prepping for animation

      4:11

    • 4.

      Animating the Legs Part 1

      10:16

    • 5.

      Animating the Legs Part 2

      17:49

    • 6.

      Animating the Arms Part 1

      10:02

    • 7.

      Animating the Arms Part 2

      9:58

    • 8.

      Final Touches

      9:38

    • 9.

      Conclusion

      0:27

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About This Class

Welcome to part two of the character animation series. In this class, we will be creating a run cycle from beginning to end using the character we created in part one.

By the end of this course you should have this:

If you didn't take part 1 but still want to follow along I have included the character rig in the class project downloads. Have fun and I'll see you in class!

Meet Your Teacher

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JD McNeil

Sr. Motion Graphics Designer

Teacher

Hi! My name is JD and I am a motion designer from Glendale Arizona. I've been animating for nearly ten years and have been doing motion design professionally for the last five. It has been a dream come true to go to work every day and do something I love. Now I want to use some of my time to share my knowledge and enthusiasm for design and animation!

Some Sweet Gifs:

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Level: Intermediate

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm JD McNeil and welcome to the second part of my character animation. Siris in this class will use the character from Part one to make a looping run cycle animation. We'll start by prepping the project for animation. Then we'll move on to animating the legs, arms and then make a blink breathing animation, an overlapping head bomb strap in launch after effects, and I'll see you in the next video. 2. Materials: soas faras materials that you'll need for this class. It would be handy to have some form of reference to use when you're dealing with any type of animation, especially character animation. One great reference is Richard Williams Animation Survival Kit book. This book has everything that you need to know about character animation, and it is a life saver. You could also just record yourself running in place or walking in place, or use a video that you see online on YouTube. But it's always good to know how the walk or the run is going to work in the real world. 3. Prepping for animation: Okay, Lets start prepping our project for animation. And the first thing we want to do is change our timeline from being seconds. Two frames and how we're going to do that is we're actually going to go up to the menu bar and click on file, and then we would choose project settings and in the time display style, we can switch it to frames. Click. OK, All right. So now let's go into frame 100 and then we're going to set this as our in point. So you actually use the Beaky for that? And that will make that at the beginning. Let's go to frame 1 24 and hit the N key, and that'll be the end. And we could just bump that over one more frame, and we have the borders of where our project is going to be. Let's click back on frame 100 and we're actually gonna go over to the right hand corner and get a marker. This is gonna be for marking outer poses, and we can double click on this first marker, and we're going to name it left contact. This is going to be for a contact posts and go to frame 102 And then let's drag out another marker. There we go. Double click, and this marker is gonna be called left down. This will be our down pose and let's go toe 104 and we're gonna grab another marker and drag it over. Same thing. DoubleClick. This will be our left in between posts. Okay, 106 Drag this one out. Double click, and this will be our are left pass pose. We're just gonna keep dragging out markers. Double click, And this will be the left up pose. Okay? And then run Andre out another marker toe. 1 10 This one is going to be the second in between post for our left side. Right. Drag out the 1 12 This one is going to be the right contact post Click. OK, so we're actually switching now to the other side. And what's gonna end up happening is we're going to repeat exactly what we did just on the other side of the body. So we'll drag out 1 14 and this will be the right down pose. Okay? The next one will be the right in between pose All right. Now another 11 18. This on will be the right past pose. Okay. And then 1 20 This will be our right up pose. Alright. And just two more to go. We have our our second right in between pose. And then finally, we're just going to be right back where we started at 1 24 And this one will be the left contact post. And then this is where the cycle will start over again. It's now we have all of our poses set up exactly how we want them. We know where they're going to be on the timeline. So what we'll do is start working on our left side poses. 4. Animating the Legs Part 1: All right, let's get ready to start animating this guy. Um, I want to resize them a little bit, so let's like the body and just broom down to, like, I know 80. That's a pretty good size. And let's move them into place. Find a good spot for um Okay, actually, let's ah, nudge him just a little bit more area. That looks good. Now we want to set up some guides for our character. So if your rulers aren't showing group to view and show rulers and we want a ruler for his head position so we'll just drag this one down to right over the top of his head is and then we need another guide for his feet where the ground is going to be. So if it wasn't there, just drag it down and there we go. So now that we have are two rulers set, let's just make sure they look good, right? If not, dry it down a little bit more that we go, let's go ahead and start animating. So when you go to our left contact and first thing we're gonna do is trolled on our left leg, going to contents go into the shape, go into path and add a key frame. Okay, so now we gotta keep for him for the path and let's move on and add some key frames for our left foot. So going to the left foot and we're going to add a key frame for the rotation. And then we also want to add a key frame for the path just like that. Okay, let's give ourselves a little more room. We see what we're doing. We also want to add a position. Key frame. Okay, so now for the first pose, we want to get our left foot out in front of our character somewhere. Right around there. Don, we got our foot place. Let's grab our leg path and move our ankle to where our foot iss. So it zoom ins and see what we're doing. Just move this in right there and you'll notice that we got this sharp corner for our knee and I want around it kind of rubber hose. Look. So go up and choose Convert Vertex tool and dragged that out. And now we got this kind of rubber hose look. Okay, We'll go back to our selection tool and adjust our leg. There we go. And let's move our foot out just a little bit more somewhere right around there, and readjust our path. Okay, there we go. Just that knee a little bit. Get a little bit of a bend. All right. Now, let's do the same thing we did with the left foot to our right foot and add in a couple of key frames, one for the path and then we need to add a position and rotation key frames. Perfect. And then we're gonna go the right leg, gonna go into contents, go to shape, path and add a path key frame. And actually, we weren't thinking about it for the contact pose. We actually need to have the heel on the ground of the front foot. So let's go ahead and add a rotation to our left foot just like that. And that will be the left foot contact posts. So let's go back down to the right foot and the right foot is going to actually be behind the character and kind of up in the air. So let's bring our leg up. Got that same issue with niece. Let's go to our Vertex tool and just round it out just like that. Perfect. And then we want to get this leg kind of up in behind the character a little bit somewhere right around here, ish and then let's grab that foot. Bring him up into place and the foot is actually gonna point kind almost all the way down. So let's rotate that all the way out. About 142 140 degrees. And that looks pretty good for our first post. So that's our contact post. Now let's move on to the down pose, and this one were actually going to need to just the body. So let's go ahead and go back to contact, click on body at a key frame for the position and then moved to the down pose. Wrestling come down 20 pixels, some holding down shift, impressing down twice. And now let's readjust our feet to accommodate. So we're gonna go to our left foot, and the first thing we're gonna do is get rid of the rotation. We're no longer making contact with the hell we've actually made contact, so the foot is now gonna be flat to the ground, and we're gonna move it up into where it is level with the floor. So zoom in, moving up into place, and it's not gonna be completely out in front of the character anymore. It's gonna be back a little bit because we're actually moving forward over the step that we're doing. So it's pull it back a little bit. It's like that we're not adjusting the path. So at a key frame for the path. And then let's go to our leg and move the ankle up in a place and then adjust the knee and he's down a little bit. So then he's gonna be bent. Now, as he's leaning into the step and then with the right leg, it's actually going to start moving towards the front of the character. So we need to move that foot forward and adjust the rotation a little bit right, And let's actually move the path and add just a little bit of a bend to the toes because he's starting to swing his foot forward. So the toes we're gonna bend and we're gonna just the ankle into place. Ah, right there. Perfect and adjust in. Ni six and he's coming forward a little bit. And then let's just take a quick look at what we got. So we're coming from there, moving into their look like much now. But we're on our way here, getting this character to run. So now let's go to our first in between pose for our left side, zoom out to see the full frame and then we're gonna go up 10. So hold shift and press up once and now we're going to move. Are left leg just a little bit more centered and we moved up. So we have to move the foot back down into place again. So it's level with the ground, and it's gonna be more towards the center of our character as he's pulling the step forward . Still not adjusting the path for this foot yet. So go and just make a key frame. Same thing for rotation. We're just going to use the current key frame. Now let's move that ankle back into place, toe the heel of the foot and the knee is gonna be bent but more towards the center of the body, and the same thing is going to be happening now with the right foot, it's gonna be coming in towards the centre as well as it makes its way to stepping in front of him. So let's move that knee more towards the center like this, we go is starting to come out. Legs coming back. There we go. So now this is kind of This is in between our down and our pass pose. All right, so let's move the foot back to the ankle. Harry, go And we're going to rotate it a little bit more towards the front because he's starting to come out to make the step as its swinging out ups okay, could click on path. And let's just bend that foot just a little bit more because as he's swinging the leg forward those toes, we're gonna bend a little bit just to add a little exaggeration to this. All right, let's see what we got. So he's stepping, and that's starting to look a little better. Okay, it's already starting to look like kind of a run. It's starting to look like a little bit of movement, all right, 5. Animating the Legs Part 2: But so now we're gonna do the past pose where the leg is gonna The right leg is gonna pass the left leg. Tory, back up to where we started with our height. So the head should be level with that top guide. Let's move. Our foot are left foot down, back into place. We moved up another 10. So the foot's got to come back down. So it's level with the ground and go back kind of starting to go behind the character. All right? Just like that. All right. And as the foot comes back, it's going to start to go up on its tippy toes. As you're pushing to push yourself forwards, we're gonna move up a little bit and rotate down. Let's move this foot back up in a place a little bit. We're gonna just the path to bend the toes a little bit. So it's been the toes up. Here we go with the foot up a little bit more, rotated down a little bit more, So we look like we're starting to go on to the toes with the middle point just a little bit , and we go. Let's adjust the leg to match. It's almost going to start to push off for this step. The right foot is going to start to do it in front of our character now. So let's push the knee forward even more. There we go. Just a little bit. Let's bring the ankle out just a little bit. Starting to step forward, pushing forward right about there. All right. With knee up just a little bit. All right, let's get that foot attached. Don't bring the foot all the way to the ankle and the foot is going to start to come out just like but before with the first contact post we're getting to the he we came to the hell. So now we need to start swinging out so we can start to bring his heel in for the step for the contact. And let's adjust the path a little bit. Gonna swing those toes Just a little bit more. Were in full swing of the leg now, right. See what we got here. All right? I started to look good. Right? So we have our past post. The right leg is now passing the left leg, which is gonna bring us into the up pose where he is going to be up above the line, his leg, and that means the back leg is actually pushing the character up. So zoom out, go up to so shift, press up twice and that is gonna give us 20 pixels up. And let's adjust that left leg to accommodate the up posts. And now the back leg is going to be pushing off almost straight. So the Bagni is gonna be completely straight, so let's get the foot down into place. He's gonna be more back behind the character now and a little bit more up on the toes. Even Maura's. It's pushing off, and it's been those toes a little bit more. Our character is really pushing off the ground now like that up a little bit more. Okay, right around there. Okay, that looks good. Let's reattached that ankle toe the heel and get that leg looking almost perfectly straight . We'll leave a little bit of a bend to it. Let's get that leg almost perfect. Almost perfectly straight, and we go and that is our opposed for a left leg. Now we can do is move down and let's adjust our right leg, and we're just going to be coming up, even Maurin, to the front of the character now as he's preparing for that step. So it's pushed that knee up even more and out in front of him and ankle out a little bit more. Some like that right there. All right, and let's go to our foot. Same thing. Let's move the foot out into place when we're gonna get that attached to where the ankle is again and start to rotate it forward even more in front of the character because we're still preparing for that contact pose. Were on our way to it. And the foot's actually gonna start to come become straight now because we're coming up. So let's adjust our path. Point here to make the foot almost perfectly straight. All right. And take a look. Okay, now we got our post. Its in between are right contact and are up pose. So our characters actually gonna start to come down a little bit. So zoom out, hold shift, press down. Once on the keyboard, I'll get us halfway in between. And this is actually a point in the run where both feet end up being off the ground at the same time, so this back leg is gonna kick up. So let's kick this back leg up behind the character and the knee. It's like that, too. Let's grab the foot and bring it up in a place. It's like that. Zoom in. So you see what we're doing here and we go position that right into place, rotate the foot backwards behind it, and we're actually going to start toe unbending, Atos. So let's go to our path and straighten this foot back out like that and just a little bit. There we go. Just those tangents. Busy handles just to get the foot straight. Then we go. Now we got the foot straight. Can't see the movement were coming, too. So it's just coming up. Certainly kick up behind him like that. All right and all right. Now with the right leg, this one's just going to start to come out a little bit more in front of them. So move that knee up, move the leg out in front of him a little bit more. Here we go and the foot is going to be is going to come back up attach it to the ankle part . Okay? And then let's grab the path and actually, just straighten this foot out. We don't need it bent anymore. Do men? You see, we're doing And let's just get this foot nice and straight. Go. Just the busier handles and there we go. So now we got this pose pretty much locked in. Take a look. We hit this part where? Both feet. So it starts both feet off the ground. All right, that's looking good. Okay, so now let's work on the bright contact post, and it actually is just gonna be the exact same thing. The left contact pose was just with the right leg in front now. So let's move our character back down to the starting position with his head level are right foot is going to be he'll facing up. So it's kicked that he'll up, and it's just gonna come slamming down in front of them were running. So it's Yeah, it's just slams down in front of them right here. He'll pointed up to make sure it's level with the ground. No path key frame. So click the path key frame. Let's move the foot up where it goes first level with the ground and we go and then move the hell in its place. All right. A little bit of a slight bend to it. Not much. There we go. Right. Kind of. See what's going on here. Comes down. All right, Now, let's go up in address. The left leg. Left leg's gonna come up even higher behind him now, so let's grab the left foot. Bring it up. Even higher. Kicks up behind him. Rotate that back a little bit more. Go to our path. Right. Grab the shape. Grab the path. Bring the ankle up to the heel of the foot, just like we did before. It's like that and we go and bring the knee up into place, and there is our right contact pose. So all the poses from here on now are the exact mirror of what we did on the left side. So what I'm gonna do is I'm actually gonna fast forward through the animation of this part just to speed it up. You don't have to watch me do the exact same thing I just did with the other foot. Um, I encourage you to just try to do it on your own at this point. Look back at what you did before and just mirror it to the other side. And you can kind of watch me go through the process now of how of how I get there, what I'm doing, it's literally just the exact same poses over again. So give it a shot yourself. And, um, I'll see you at the end of this video home. Don't home. All right, So now that all the poses air done for the for the right side, we actually come Teoh the left contact again, which is where our loop is. So we're actually just going to highlight the left, poses the left contact post, copy it with control or command, see, and then paste it with Command V And just do this with all the poses so that we get that left contact post exactly the way it was on the very first frame that we worked on. And now we have a run cycle with just defeat. And what we can go ahead and do now is actually select all the key frames and head F nine on the keyboard. Give you Eazy E's. And now we have a nice eased run cycle with the legs. All right. In the next video, we'll start animating the arms and see how those work with our run cycle. 6. Animating the Arms Part 1: All right, so we have our legs now animated. Let's take a quick look at what we got so far. It's looking good. Now we're going to start working on getting our arms moving. Okay, so now you can select everything, hit you on the keyboard, and that'll collapse everything down to show just the key frames. And we could start setting up key frames for arms. It's like the left arm and twirl down little arrow here and same for the hand and for the hand. We're gonna do a position key frame. And for the left arm, we're going to do a key frame on the path of the arm. We're also going to do a position, key frame and rotation key frame on the sleeve. All right, that's good for the left side. Hit you on the keyboard and let's go ahead and start setting up our first pose for our left side. We're going to select the path just kind of click off to the side a little bit and click the little dot on the shoulder that'll give us access to that, and your arms go opposite of your legs. So if your left leg is forward. Your left arm is gonna be backwards. So we want to move this arm towards the back just like this. And let's move the hand backwards right there. Keep it connected. And the hand is awkward now, so we're actually gonna add a rotation key frame. So if you hit Ault and are, you'll get a rotation key frame and then let's rotate that hand. There we go. And now we have to do the sleeve. So let's grab the rotation on the sleeve, rotated into place, and we also need to move the position down a little bit. There we go, and there is our left side contact. Pose for the arm. Now let's move on to the right side. Scroll down when you set up the same key frames we did for the left side. So grab the left hand and let's do a Ault p alter our that'll give us ah, rotation and position key frame and then on the arm. Let's twirl down to the arm layer and at a path key frame and then on the sleeve, we're going to do a position and rotation key frame. Here we go. All right, you on the keyboard. Little collapse it down. And now we can start positioning our right arm. So let's select. Okay, so let's move the hand out a little bit, because the hand is gonna be out in front. All right? Grab the path for the arm, click off it, grab one of the points and let's pull that arm forward out in front of him. Just like that. Just the elbow. A little bit. All right. And same thing for the sleeve. Let's just rotate the sleeve out a little bit right there, And it's probably not to be moved down slightly. Zoom in. So you see you are doing There we go. And there is that sleeve, All right? And that is going to be our contact. Pose for the arms. So right, arms out in front, left arms out in the back. Okay, Now let's move to the down post. We're gonna start moving the left arm forward in the right arm backwards. So first, let's grab the hand, Start bringing it down, okay? And click on, just add a key frame. We're not gonna rotate it and then path for the arm and let's adjust the arm with the risk down, I'm gonna move the elbow down and back a little bit like that, right there at a key frames for position and rotation on the sleeve. And then let's go up to the left arm. Let's move that hand forward a little bit and down a little bit. It's like that, a key frame for rotation, and then we're gonna go to our path of our arm. Click off it. It's grabbed the elbow, and we can now move the wrist forward a little bit. Just that elbow down just a little bit. There we go, and then we could start to see what this is gonna look like. It's just a little bit of movement in the beginning, just like the legs. All right, okay, so now let's do our let's do our posing between the down in the past, so said they were bottom of the elbow down ends quite a bit. Move the rest down. What's gonna be almost perfectly straight down as we're on our way to the past pose and then let's grab the hand, move it into place may need to be rotated a little bit. Let's rotate it down a little bit. Just it and we go. And now let's get that sleeve fixed. Rotate that down, Put it in a place. All right, There we go. Cool, right. That is our posed for the left side. Kind of See what it's doing. I missed the down poses sleeves. Let's just grab from the first frame. Copy paste. And there we go. That's fixed. There's not that much of a change between Pose one and two, so that could be just copied and pasted. And that's looking good. All right, so now let's do the right side. Okay, so now the right side is going to start coming back down. So it's moved that hand down and backwards, rotated a little bit. Grab the path for the arm Blick, grab the wrist, bring it down into place, grab the elbow, straightening out with busier handles and bring it back a little bit. Starting to come in closer to the body. Perfect. And then the sleeve. We're just gonna kind of rotated out of existence. We're not going to see it anymore. There we go. Looking good. Right? So now we can work on the past pose. Now, this is where the arms are going to start to pass each other just how the legs start to pass each other. So we're gonna move that right fist all the way into the body. It's gonna get rotated a little bit. You don't have to rotate it here, but I'm doing it just for the sake of knowing how the hand is moving and same thing with the arm. We're just gonna pull that back and it's gonna come all the way out of the way. I'm just gonna kind of gas where the hand is here. Just kind of shape the arm, how I think it would be and we go and we're going to rotate that sleeve back just a little bit and kind of move it in a place just to keep everything kind of how it should, how it would be. Okay, okay, let's just check and see how that looks. Okay. It's looking good. Let's do our left side. Right. Move the hand forward, cause as that right leg starts to go forward, so does the left arm. We're gonna just the rotation on the hand. Grab the rest. Put it in a place. It's like that just the elbow forward a little bit. There we go and keep framed the sleeves. And now we got a pretty good looking movement so far, arms or sureness swinging past each other. And when we get to the up post now, the arms were going to be the arms are gonna be past each other. So let's go ahead and start doing our left side up post. Going to start moving that left arm out in front of the body now to match the right leg. It's like that. Rotate the hand a little bit. Let's grab the path and match it back up with the wrist and get that elbow into place. Just a busy handles a little bit perfect right there. And then now we can adjust. Our sleeve rotated down, and that looks good. 7. Animating the Arms Part 2: all right. Arm is starting toe. I'm starting to swing forward and let's do the right side. Now grab the fists. Going to start coming all the way back and the path the arm is going to do the same. Start coming all the way back. Start to see the elbow popping out behind him a little bit. Go set. A key friend for the sleeves. Key friend for the rotation of the hand. Not going to change that now. All right, All right. Let's move the right hand back a little bit for this for the pose in between the up in the contact, because now we're almost to the right contact, and the right arm is gonna be completely behind the body. So we're just gonna just this see elbow a little bit, um, out a little more. Find a good pose here and we go. All right? Just keep offering the sleeves. We can't see it anyways, and I'm gonna readjust that elbow a little bit more. Bring it up. It's too low. Let's go up the hand. Bring it up. There we go. OK, now, now that's looking better. It's actually a just this pose. Who huh? It's actually just this pose. A little bit right down just a little bit more. Bring it out a little bit more here. It looks, though, in a trance. There we go. That's a better transition. So now the hand is coming out from behind his back. Yeah. There we go. That's better. All right. Perfect. Now let's do the left hand pose, and this is gonna make it almost completely out in front of the body. Now, let's go ahead and grab the hand, move it out and up a little bit more in front of the body. We go rotate it a little bit. Let's move the rest up in the place. I was gonna come up a little bit and the sleeves we can rotate a little bit and move in a place like that, all right? And I'm actually right here. I'm gonna just this key frame. His arm gets a little weirdly short when it's coming by. So let's go ahead and just just that A little bit on. Here we go. All right, let's move this hand up a little bit more for the contact for the right contact, and it's gonna be the full contact pose again. Just like the left contact post were just on the opposite sides. Perrigo arms all the way up and in place. Rotate the sleeve, right, Go to the right side and we're gonna move that back and up a little bit more. A little bit of rotation. Have the path for the arm. Move the elbow up a little bit behind him. But the wrist where it goes. Readjust those busier handles around it a little bit, and we go. Okay, let's add key frames for the sleeves. And that's the first half of our run cycle for the hands. So just like the legs, I'm gonna challenge you to do the second half of this on your own. I'm just going to fast forward through it so that you can still watch me do it. But this is a good way for you to kind of look back at what we did for the first half and just replicating Mirror it for the other side home. Don't old. All right, So now that we're done, let's go ahead and do just like we did it. The legs and we're gonna copy the left contact poses and paste them into the left contact post at the end here and the same for the right side. There we go. I'm gonna just this arm just a little bit here. I don't like how it's moving back into the post. There we go. That's better. And sometimes you got to do this. You just have to keep tweaking until you get the pose you like. That's looking like a pretty good run cycle. So let's go ahead. Highlight all these key frames with left and right and F nine on the keyboard to ease ease them. All right. I noticed some weird issues with the sleeves, so we're just gonna go in between the poses here and just kind of a just, um And get rid of some of those weird spots where you can see the skin tone in between them , like right here, just going toe, nudge that into place and fix it. And sometimes these weird little things happen like this winner animating all kinds of weird glitches can happen. Ah, 1,000,000 different things and you just correct him as you go. So it's gonna look through this and see anywhere you may not have this word got offset a little bit, but let's just go ahead and just clean this up a little bit. Here. Uh, right there. Okay. All right. There we go. OK, so in the next video, we're just gonna do some finishing touches. We're gonna add a shadow on the ground that moves while the characters running. All right, So that's this part in the last video, we're just going to do some final touches. We'll do some breathing with the mouth, a blink, move the head a little bit as he's running at a shadow and some other couple of really cool things. We'll see you then. 8. Final Touches: but right now we have a run cycle going. Let's go ahead and do a little head Bob as he is running, Um, because all parts of your body move when when you're moving that nothing just sits completely still. So what we're gonna want to Dio is actually grab her head and add a rotation key frame to it. So are on the keyboard. Click the little, uh, click Click Lock, and we're going to go to the all the way to the up frame and just bring it back a little bit. So when he's up, his head's coming back. When he hits, contact Head's gonna go back to normal. When he's up again, his head is going to go back and contact. His head is going to go normal. Now let's grab all those key frames and Eazy E's F nine on the keyboard and take a quick look. Now we got just a little bit of a head bounce as he's running, just adds a little bit more character to the run, all right, and then let's go ahead and do a breathing animation with his mouth. So let's grab that mouth mask that we made and we're just gonna slide it in and out, in and out, like, kind of like he's breathing as he's running. Let's go to the contact post. Zoom in so we can see what we're doing and want to start it with a little wider. We go add a key frame, so the scale and let's go to the past pose and skillet and this skillet down a little bit that so it's big and it's going down. And that's goods. Go the contact post copy from the left, Contact and paste. It will go to the past. Copy the past pose, paste it, go to the last contact pose, copy the contact pose and paste it just like that. Pretty simple. Highlight everything. F nine Easy's Let's take a quick look. All right, cool. So now he's breathing. Okay, that's looking good. Now let's make him blink and blinking is pretty easy. We're just going to turn the eyes from open to blinking. So let's go to the past pose and, well hit all too right bracket to cut those and snap it right there. All left bracket to cut the blink and let's go out to the L to an altar right bracket. Select are open eyes and duplicate control or command D and then left bracket to put him into place over on the L to where our play head is right. And now we got a blink. All right, We're getting a cool animation going here. So now I think it's time to add the shadow on the ground. And what we're gonna do for that is go up to are a lips tool, and we're just going to make sure nothing selected down at the bottom. And then where the ground is, just drag out this ellipse something like this. Kind of like overly so it looks like it's flat on the ground just like that, all right? And we're going to change the color to let's select the background and then just make it a little darker, just like that, All right? And then we're gonna go ahead and drag it down below the character. Okay, Now that it's at the bottom, go ahead and name it shadow, all right? And then what we're gonna do is we're just going to scale it as the legs were moving in and out. So let's scale it and a little bit A little further. All right, All right. Just adjust the shadow to kind of match with legs are that looks good. All right, Looking good. Let's go to the up pose. And let's scale it back out a little bit. So scale it to match where the feet are. All right. Looking good. Take a look at how it's moving with the character. Okay, Pretty good. Let's go to the contact posts. And again, we're just going to scale the shadow out to match the legs. All right? Okay. Let's go to the r one pose and just copy it from our l one pose and go to our up pose and copy it from our oppose and the same thing with the left. Contact. Just grabbed the contact pose, copy and paste one more time. And actually, let's grab the left contact pose copy and paste it into the left. Contact posed to make sure those air perfectly looping. Then there's no changes. It's preview it. That's looking good. Hit t on the keyboard and let's just bring down the transparency. A little bit of the shadow. All right, All right. So now we're gonna go and create a new composition, and we're gonna make this 1 800 by 600. Let's name it final and go ahead and click. OK, all right. And we're gonna take our main, and I'm going to take our main animation and drag it into our timeline and all of our markers. Hold and come over when we dragon the composition. So we can just go back to where are markers where? And we could see where everything was lined up. Now we can put our in and outs back in place, So hit be on the keyboard and and on the keyboard at the end Here There we go. Now we can play our animation. See it? All right, That's looking pretty good. So let's go and grab our background out of our main animation and place it into our final composition so that the effects that we're gonna apply don't affect our background. And now we can lock that layer and right click on the on the main animation composition and go to layer styles, Inner shadow. All right. And let's make some changes here, So I'm gonna go toe overlay and we're gonna change the color toe like a yellowish sunlight type color. It's like that there looks good. The opacity is gonna be 100%. And we're gonna do whatever type of angle looks best to you. I'm just gonna kind of just this until I like it had 146 degrees and we're gonna just the distance to like, a six and at a little bit of choke to it to kind of choke off how much light is there and adjust the size a little bit, and then we're gonna add some noise to it. And, um, at 6% on the noise, all right, So actually don't want the shadow to be affected. So let's go back into the main animation and cut the shadow out of here with Commander Control X and go into the final and just paste it back in and drag it below our main animation composition. And now the ground shadow is no longer affected by the inner shadow layer style that we did . So let's go ahead. I'm just gonna just the size a little bit more on it, maybe more like a nine. And I'm gonna re adjust the angle a little bit. I didn't quite like the way that was looking like 134 and I think that's good. All right, and there we have it. A completed run cycle. 9. Conclusion: I hope you had fun animating this looping run cycle. It was really cool to build a character solely using after effects and take it all the way through the final animation process without using any third party plug ins or additional software. This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to character animation, so be on the lookout for more trainings coming soon. I'll see you that.