Transcripts
1. Intro: I so welcome to creating characters and animating stories with the Dhobi is character. My name's John bureau have FAA in visual narrative, and I am a multimedia, an animation storyteller. So a little bit of background on the program we're gonna be using a character generator is still fairly new. It's currently still in beta, but has a lot of big accolades behind it. Have you ever seen the trump and characters on The Colbert poor? Those reviews using this program and The Simpsons even recently did an episode live that utilize this program, so there's a multitude of things that you can do with it. It's extremely versatile, and one of the best things about it is it doesn't matter what your style is. Uh, this program really works with anything and everything, so it's a really fantastic place to start. If you've never animated before, even if you have, it's really easy. Teoh kind of jump to the fun part, and so it utilizes existing technology and really interesting way. So his facial tracking and has lip sinking and it's it's taking advantage of the Web candle to your computer and the microphone built into your computer and it says it's really it's a very fun, intuitive, simple way to animate that it yields really powerful results. I used the program primarily for my thesis project UT, which I'm gonna be referring back to. Over the course. A swell is the character himself. Beauty, eso We're gonna be delving into that kind of taking him apart in seeing you know what makes that character and we're gonna be looking initially at, you know what, the bare bones of a good character, and then from there, we're gonna kind of build that out and look at OK, you know, we have given idea of character. We've visually designed a character now for step further And have you really make a fantastic character for storytelling purposes? Um, so we're gonna be doing some short automatics we're gonna be doing lip sinking. We're gonna be doing kind of minimal movement. We're gonna build out from there into body language walk cycles, and we'll delve, um, more so into kind of the story telling aspect as we move along. Really, the key here is to have a character that the audience can look at and initially have an instant, you know, understanding or idea of who this character is before they even open their their amounts to say. So we're gonna have these little Anna Matics that we're gonna build that over the course, and then ultimately, we're gonna do a, uh a final animation of the end That's going to kind of bring everything that we've learned together. We're gonna create a short story using the character that we develop over the course. So you're gonna be able to walk away with a good understanding of how to build characters, strong characters, storytelling as a released animation. The enemy should workflow. And you're gonna have a good amount of animation for either a brand new portfolio or out onto an existing body of work. Security has so it can lead to kick things off with the first assignment. So it's gonna be really pretty simple. Hopefully, um, so all that we're gonna do is to just write down the traits of the character that you wanted to create and, for example, like for you keep for my film, you gets anxiety and he lives in a constant state of fear. If you've ever played a video game, life is strange. clothing that you know she's she's a rebel and she walks with confidence if you've ever played mass effect. Warden, is this this purity scientist and, you know, talks all proper What's operating skillfully. So, you know, just think about these kind of attributes for whatever care do you want and it can be anything I mean, really is a winner go crazy if you want. Teoh kind of own it and, you know, have it be a little bit more simple to begin with. Either approach is totally fine. It's whatever you're comfortable list. Um, but welcome. Very excited to have you in the chorus from Super excited to share all this information with you, and I'm even more excited to see what you create.
2. Crafting Characters: Hi. So welcome back. So today we're gonna be focusing on crafting characters. So the last time, I kind of give you an overview of the course. Kind of You know, what we're gonna be doing work wise, Um, and kind of the the guest Linear progression. If you want to call it that of, you know, we're gonna go from from beginning to end for this close in particular, we're gonna be focusing on, you know, designing characters. So for the last assignment, I I asked you to write down some traits, um, and thoughts about kind of, you know, what kind of a character he wanted to make. Who who is this character? You know, What do they do? What's kind of their personality and it to kind of start to get an idea of what your when you create visually, how do you go about that? How do you go about creating ah character? Visually, we're gonna delve into that. So here, this is from Steven Universe. You can see we have three different characters, and they're all pretty unique. Obviously, they have some similarities because they're related. Um, but just by looking at them, you can kind of already begin to get an idea of, you know who these characters are. So Stephen and his dad, Greg, you know, they're both. They've got a lot of, like, kind of curves, and here they're more rounded. They have a lot of softer edges, and all of those things are intentional designs by the artists, and they're already strained to tell us something about who those characters are. You know, Stephen and his dad are both very soft compassion individuals here with Pearl. It's a totally different story, you know, especially with, like this. This nose here. There's a lot of really sharp angles, very thin. Quick lines definitely goes into her character as well. Um, you know, she's She's very on edge. She's very detail oriented. Things have to be perfect. So you can kind of already start to, you know, kind of see how just the way that they're drawn, you know, the the way that their bodies are, you know, it already begins to paint the scene for the viewer about who they are. And, you know, obviously this is a static image, so they're not even moving. We're not going to get any dialogue We're not going to get any of that stuff to even give us a greater sense of who they are. But already right away, you know we can. We can make these assumptions as as the viewer, about who the who these people are. And here this is again from Steven Universe. This is Lappas lazuli, and you know, this one's a little a little different. You know, she has some of these, like, you know, subtle curves and everything in which he's wearing her hair. You know, kind of these like wings and stuff like that. But, you know, there's thes distinct. There's kind of there's a little bit of chaos, and it's very subtle. But it's there. You see the way her ribbon, you know, it's it's kind of it's kind of tangled, and there's there's this kind of pent up energy and the fabric of, you know, her dress or even in the water here. And I think the water, you know, these things kind of, you know, ethereal wings that she has her an excellent indication of who she is. If you think about you know the ocean, you know when it's very calm, everything's flat everything is is still. But here you have this water, that is, it's in motion, its turbulent. And that's exactly who your character is at this point in the story. You know, there's a lot of emotion inside of her. It's been pent up for a really long time, and it's really just barely under the surface, ready to explode. And then you have, you know, characters like like Peter Griffin again. You know, he's very, very big, is very round again. Lots and lots and lots of curves, very soft. And because he's like such a, you know, a visually prominent character. I mean, that goes into the whole stereotype, you know, and everything of, Well, you know, he's lazy. He's dumb that it, uh, we have the same thing with home, Recep said. I mean, you've got this kind of, like, glazed over look, that is just like the donut. Um, but again like very simple shapes, lobster, lots of curves. There's not really any sharp angles, Um, and all of this goes into really kind of creating just visually a sense of who that character is, and this is very, very important. So jumping back to Steven universe. Um, I think one of the best instances of how how this can change with just one character is with paradox. So when she first appears in the story, she is completely different from you know, where she ends up in the later episodes. Um, so we first see here she is. She has this, like, additional armor and everything on she's already got these angles and stuff to start with. So you know that already, visually kind of puts the viewer at kind of It puts us on edge, set to speak. You know, we already we know that this is a character that could be dangerous. I mean, that's what all these like pointing sharp things, kind of, you know, tell us subconsciously as well as like, you know, just the height of her and everything. It really builds her up to be this intimidating character. And as you can see here, you know, this is kind of what she actually looks like without the armor. And then, obviously, you know, so you can kind of see if aggression here and in the height difference does make a big change, as does getting rid of, you know, these things that really kind of, you know, fill out the character and make them that much larger. You know, actually just got the skinny arms and skinny legs, and she's much less intimidating. This is our main character, Steven, if you haven't seen the show. So when we first see your obviously like you know, she's very tall, she's menacing, She's an enemy. She's a bad, you know, person. At least she's trying to attack Stephen here. You know, we categorize her as a villain, but as the story progresses, you know all of the changes. And as you can see here, it's a totally different story. I mean, Ashley Stevens height so that intimidation factor is gone. She no longer has, like the's huge, you know, buff limbs. She doesn't look as intimidating as threatening, and it's interesting how that that progression and her character is me eared. You know it perfectly in sync with the progression of her visually, and those two are very, very important and go hand in hand and, as you can see here, so this is and we're gonna kind of delve into this later on. But even lighting makes a big difference I mean here, like, you know, the way that the shadows are cast, It's It's dark, it's ominous. I mean, she looks very, very intimidating. And here it's like if acute, the expression, and there's none of that, like there's no shadows at all. She just is, you know, colored out here, and that's it. It's a totally different field. But this is the same character. Um, so we're gonna be delving into this a lot more, you know? So obviously, once we kind of get our characters, you know, designed out and everything like that, we're gonna look at how atmosphere and mood, um, work in tandem with the way that you visually have created your character to really get in and change how you can present them to the viewer. Obviously. And, you know, based upon what kind of a scene there in what kind of a situation they're going through a kind of a conflict there facing, you know, all that stuff. So we're going to delve into that and further details. But I mean, this is where we end up. We have a character that is completely different from this character. There's there's a significant character development that's that's happened and another good show to look at if, um, if you want to, is the amazing world of gumball. And I mentioned this merely because there are so many different kinds of characters and they all look very different. So this is a good show to look at to kind of see, um, you know OK, so this character is this way and to really think about like Okay, well, how does their design, you know, going to that? So, like Tina, the two year Actually, she's huge and she's a T rex, so she's pretty intimidating. And she's like, You know, the bully, um, Barber it is, you know, this robot and he's really clunky and he like, I mean, he's very much what he is, and his design showcases that, um, in this character here, you know, she's she's made out of paper, and so she's like she's always very delicate. She's really prissy, Um, and she's like she's a total hypochondriac, which makes sense because, you know, given the nature of what she has, have you choose like super super fragile, so you know, it's it's interesting to be able to kind of like, you know, look at all the characters that introduced throughout the show and get a sense of who they are just by looking at them, not even by what they do their actions or anything like that And that's all just is important. But this'll is the first. This is a jumping off point that your audience will have when looking at your work for determining. OK, who is this? Who am I looking at? Character ways. So turn the class a little bit now. So what we're doing is you know, you have your traits. And so now we're gonna design a character. I'm gonna talk a little bit about how you design a character for character. Animator. This is a lot more drawn out than what we need to do. So definitely don't get freaked out by it. Um and you can do as much or as little as you want. What we're really looking for bare bones is, you know, a character like like this something where we have we have the face. We have, like, both eyes and view at full body. That's what we really want. If you want to go the extra mile and do turnarounds and stuff like that. That's totally awesome. Practice makes progress. So and, um, you can also utilize these kinds of things to within the program. You can really you can delve into it as much as you want. Um, I'm gonna keep things a little bit easier, since this is more of an introductory course to character animator. But there's definitely a lot more that you can you can delve into. So jump over the photo shop now and show you character that I've created, um, that I used during my thesis. So this is Yuki. As you can tell, he looks a little funky, and there's a good, good reason for that. So he has all these different layers, and I'm gonna kind of talk about them because this is kind of how you want to ultimately build your character out. So we have these lines through the eyes, you know, and basically all the layers air on. So that would be like his blink. Or there's all these different years and you know, I have that so they can hit a specific key on the keyboard and, you know, trigger his ears to go in different positions that way. You know, if he if he gets over, you get spooked or something like that, you know, his ears are gonna shoot up. He's on edge. You know what's going on around me? Um, So all that stuff really works, too, To kind of push the character further into, You know, as I'm animating the character to have him react to things in that way, it just it's more genuine, and it gives him a greater sense of being more alive. But all that aside, So this is Yuki. Ah. Then he has anxiety. So and he's a dear. You know, all of these things are conscious decisions that I made when creating this character, you know? So because he has anxiety and because two years are, you know, they're always on edge. It's like they're always about to be attacked, you know, they're gonna they're gonna be spooked at the slightest sound. So those things go hand in hand and they begin to kind of paint a picture. Um, for who he is. So you know, that's why I did that. But you can also see, even just and we're going to delve into this more, too. But just his His body posture, you know, everything is is closed and, you know, he's like he's really covered up. He's not exposed at all his hands or like tucked in your his chest and everything. So all of this is before he moved before he speaks anything, it's it's already telling us like, No, this is a really nervous guy, You know? He's, uh, obviously not happy in the situation that he's in, you know? And these are all things to really consider, um, when delving into your character. So if we look at, like the body and you know I'm not expecting it doesn't have to be like this. If you want to do like a stick figure or something like that, that's totally fine. I mean, you can truly, truly dio as much as you want or as little as you want, But if you are going to go this route and kind of do more of, ah, detail character, one of the absolute most important things is to is to make sure that you color everything. And what I mean by that is like so we have this arm here. If I get rid of the arm. You'll see that like the rest of his body is colored under here. And that's important because if I was to move this arm and this was not colored, you know, then we would just be seeing through the character. And that's gonna look pretty weird or hey it So you know, these are just things to consider. So I would always, always make sure that you do that. And it's a simple as you know, when I Whenever I start presenting a character, it's always pencil on paper. So I start super basic. They build the character up from there, and then it's whenever I take it digitally, You know, I have to do is just make sure you're you're kind of aware, you know of what pieces that you want to be separate. So, like these ears are on their own layer. You know the line art is on its own. Layer the colors on its own layer with with the ear, you know, So you're isolating everything. You don't want everything to be just one layer. The body is it's its own thing because I don't I don't you know he's a little tail here, but I didn't need that to move. That wasn't important to me. And this is all just kind of one piece, given the shot, obviously, like the eyebrows of their own thing. You know, the entire eyes, its own thing, and even breaking that down like the pupil is its own. We have a blink here, um, and then obviously, like the eye itself, you know? And I'm going to delve into we're going to go through, like, reading up care to decay, others to don't get too, you know, to bog down or caught up, and Oh, my gosh, how am I going to do this? You know, any direction or any any of that kind of stuff world, we'll go through it together. Just just thinking about how you want to put your character together. Obviously sketchy character out how you would sketch anything out. You know, whenever we get to this point or if you want to go ahead and start thinking you're coloring your character digitally or traditionally, it's just good to kind of think about. At least I like a context for what I'm doing. Be ableto note like Okay, well, this is gonna need to be its own layer. This is gonna be you need to be a separate piece. On top of that, to the mouths are another thing. Like, you know, this is really this is a super simple thing for this For this shot in, particularly for my film, there's no dialogue, so I just have kind of, Ah, a little nervous open mouth that I could turn on and off if I wanted to or not, but yes, so that this kind of gives you a good introduction to kind of like, you know, further further refining your characters, especially now as you move under the stage, uh, for really you know, creating the visuals for the character. And obviously again, you know, as simple or as complicated as you want, either way is fine. Um, and it's really what you want to create. But just know that, you know, there's a visual language associated with all of these different elements that give the viewer and insight into who you character is. So it's very important to be cognisant of those. It's important to know what they are and how you can use them to your to your benefit and in other ways, to you know, you could you could go the opposite direction. You could even you could subvert those. You know, you could have a really small, curvy character, whatever that looks really innocent. And maybe at the beginning of the story, they are. But then it turns out like, Whoa, you know, they're evil And you didn't see that coming and you duped the viewer, and that's that's totally fantastic, too. So just being aware of those different things and kind of thinking about how you utilize them, what you want include what you don't want to include. How you But it kind of turned something on its head. I mean, there's always to go about everything but these air. Definitely, very solid. Good. You know, foundational building blocks.
3. Crafting Narrative: Hi. So welcome back. This is gonna be for creating a narrative and obviously have this really pretty set up for the shape of stories in front of you. But before we do the prettier woman, I'm gonna jump to this more kind of bare bones one. So this is really how a story art happens. Typically, it's categorized into three acts. Obviously, they had the start of your story. You have the incident or the trigger. You have rising action throughout, which is obviously more and more conflict and obstacles. Put in your characters way and everything culminates into the climax. And then from there, of course, you have your falling action and your resolution or the end of your story trump back to the shape of stories. Obviously, everything starts with a few things. You have a character which is very important. You have your setting and some kind of a goal in mind. So you character usually has some kind of a goal that they're trying to achieve and over the struggle. If you want to call it that, you're gonna have all kinds of different conflicts and dangers and stuff that are going Teoh getting your characters way of accomplishing what they need to accomplish, and everything's gonna call a minute into the climax. And then from there, of course, you're gonna have your resolution, Typically stories. And on a happier note, things get tied up. But that's not always the case. So, you know, keep this in mind. This is again. This is something that you can't subvert, you know, doesn't have to be this way out. Every story has to be the same necessarily. But this is good to know. Um, but the thing that I want to jump into further, which relates more so to what we're doing in this class and what's character based is we're gonna be focusing more on the narrative in terms of framework like that. What does that mean? Um so it's very important to see how every cut in position of the camera and composition create a narrative for the eyes. So for the viewer, But this also shows an animation workflow. And what I mean by that is we're going to kind of get into story boarding and kind of telling you, you know, what you need to tell your story is kind of, you know, the point of storyboards. It kind of gives you, ah, basis gonna go forward from. But if you want to know more about this about, you know, traditional stories, building a story, even building character, I have to completely recommend that you check out this book. So this is by Lisa Kron and she teaches and she talks. You have Ted talks to you if you want to look those up. But she's actually a teacher that does introductory story and everything at the MF a visual narrative program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. That's where I'm a graduate from of she is absolutely fantastic. This book is amazing. She actually teaches from this book. So this is great if you want to pick this up and really, really kind of delve into story. This is an amazing resource, but we're gonna be focusing more on, you know, things for an animation workflow for characters. So not negate any of that because it's definitely important. But, you know, this is kind of what we're honing in on for the course. So when I talked about, you know, every cut in position of the camera composition, you know, this creates a narrative. What is that me? Take example. This shot. So this is a storyboard illustration from Steven Universe. This is Lappas laws, really. You know, we have this upward shot, and that's important. There's there's different things that are happening here compositionally and they're very important because they're affecting the way that we perceive this character, this person. So we have this upward shot. So we, as the viewer located down below her, looking up at her, that automatically makes her more of, Ah, she's a more prominent figure that puts us kind of in a more submissive pose. And here in a more dominant post. So she's powerful, as we can see here is the scene unfolds. You know, there's this big body of water that's raising it behind her, and then we, we we pan up. So now we have less of her, and now we're focusing more on this giant arm that's hovering over her and obviously like her stance or expression. All of these things are playing into the fact that you know she's the one that she's create that is creating this. She's powerful. We should be afraid of her now when we jump here, obviously have Stephen and the crystal gems that the camera is in the different position. So now we're looking down on the character, and you can see this is a wider shot. You know, before here we have kind of like a mid shot. Or so we have, you know, almost full body of of Lappas. But not quite. But here we have them either very small. And this makes them look helpless. This makes them look, you know, submissive. We see the shadow, this giant hand, and this is all working. Teoh further tell the story that's happening in this scene in this instance and obviously going through any of the hands going to reach for him. But every everything's working to to build up this action to build up this moment. Now, here we have Stephen and his dad. So this is where the scene starts. Basically there, on the enemy's base, if you haven't seen the show. Sorry. Um, and they're trying to sneak by, you know, a super prominent character. One of the leaders, the major antagonised sin, the in the story and things are tense. Obviously they're shadowed, you know, we're really close up on them so really tied in there. So we get that feeling of, you know, anxiety. The fact that, like the top of Greg's head, is cut off and it's just it's a very, very tight shot. And it works to really to push that uncomfortableness, to push the tents, bulletins, emotions and everything that air in the scene. If they get caught, they're done for. So how do you use this kind of stuff in an animation? Well, here's a good instance. So this is This is a Those were storyboards and this is more of kind of what you would do. You know how it looks professionally storyboard wise, but you can see that we have. You know, we have a concern. Pearl in the top left. You know, this character is like, What's going on, you know, And and we start out with this this far away shot of this other character, and we're slowly we're zooming in, you know, and then we have the slow head turn. So we have the suspense. That's kind of building up like what's happening in the situation. We don't know the character asking the question doesn't know, And then, boom, You know, we have We have the reveal and we immediately, you know, panning even further. So we're even more up close on the character, and then we, you know, cut back to the other character. And it's a confused look because that's not who that character is supposed to be. And then from here we have if you've ever seen, like, old school Cartoon Network, you know, we have this character just kind of show up. That is not supposed to be here, but so that really kind of shows you how you know, story words kind of work. So you can see through all of this you have a sense of, you know, you have a sense of the backgrounds here you have a sense of character movement and, you know, even subtle things here were, you know, here's our here's our shot, and then the only thing that's really gonna changes, you know, this character is gonna look over here and be like what the heck is going on? But these air important these air important movements. You have your dialogue down here, and this is really an excellent way to build a good framework for you know what you want to have happen in a specific scene and what you want to have happen over the course of an animation. So this is very integral. Teoh Ah, animation workflow kind of delving into this anymore beyond kind of goes outside of the class. So but there's a lot of excellent resource is if you want to look into story boarding, that's definitely that's a very important job. But even for your own animation endeavors, you know, this is definitely something that's worth doing, because it's always good to to have something to call back to you and kind of know what you trying to accomplish in the scene. What kind of movements are you looking at and to pull from that whenever you're actually putting together your finally animation? And it's good to story wise to remember that you know, a scene really has one purpose, and it's either going to be to affect the character or to move the plot forward. So that's really the only thing that you know a scene should be should be doing. Obviously, everything is happening. Teoh, you know, make one of these two things happen you don't just have a scene toe, have a scene. And the scene should also be challenging your character at every moment. So these are all things too, you know? Really, really. Keep in mind. And there should be a problem that complicates each scene that, ultimately, is gonna only make a character stronger. So these are all things that are really great to know. You should be conscious of when Every year kind of delving into any of this, creating a story and in a sense, obviously, for this class. You know, I want you to be cognizant of these things, but don't think it to absolutely adhere to them. So what? I'd like you to dio you know, obviously this is kind of Ah, you know, more of a story focused thing. You should still be working in new characters. Hopefully, hopefully there, you know, kind of painting out. Well, as far as the visuals go, the next class we're going to delve into character animator. But this is all important stuff to know, background wise story wise, that really, really, truly will effect your characters and really give you the opportunity to make them that much stronger but next clip next class, we're going to delve into character. Animator, I'm gonna show you how to bring up a character. Try to have ah, finishes. You can visual of your character and we'll start, you know, setting that up in bringing that up and we will be animating in the next class. But for now, I think this is an awesome exercise, and I I really, really you know, I really think you should do this just for yourself. So all you need to you this is super easy won't complicate training, you know, build out the rest of your character, anything like that. I'm but watch a scene and it can be anything. It doesn't have to be cartoon. It could be film. Um, animation. Totally. Doesn't matter. Could be a TV show, but pick something that you're passionate about. Pick something that you like, pick something that you're interested in learning more about and I have to do is just choose a specific scene, and this is going to be kind of like, you know, drawing, um, you know, drawing a character that you really enjoy or playing a piece of piece of music by an artist that you really enjoy. This is the same kind of concept you're going to be kind of digging into what's happening in this show movie animation that you love, and then you kind of take it apart and bring it into your own workflow. But so pick a scene that you like. And every time there's a cut on the camera and what that means is, every time you know, we have a scene where, like, we're close up like a I showed here before. So every time you have a scene like this, you know, we have this moment with Lapidus, and then we cut to this scene with the other characters. So every time you have a moment like that, I want you to dry what's happening and it can be super rough. Can be stick figures. It doesn't have to be anything crazy, but so you would draw this. Then we have a cut. You would draw this, and the next time it changes, um, then you would draw that. So this is kind of an example of what would happen. So, you know, here's chief people talking, you know? So you go from these thes close up shots to, you know, back and forth between the characters. And there's important stuff that's happened here. And it kind of makes you more cognizant of, you know, dealing specific dialogue. Why is a character framed a certain way? Obviously you you cut to this and it's like you have your character here and the other one that's leaving. And then you cut to just that single character and that that means something that has a significance to it, you know, now we have a character that's on their own. It's more lonely. It's isolating. They're very small within the frame. And this all is telling us something about that character without any need for dialogue. Whereas here, you know you have. You were very close in to the characters in this conversation, so you can tell that it's intense. You know, something very heavy is being spoken about. And here's just more examples, you know? So you have this, like, you know, close up, shot on this character. He's, you know, half in shadow. So you know he must be an antagonist. There must be something bad happening. He's not a good person. Obviously you cut to the next scene and, you know, someone's putting their arms out to try to protect someone else, which we see here, you know, but they don't want to have it. It looks like maybe some magic is going on it. But obviously, you know, this, this all adding to who and what you character is. All of this and everything is a conscious decision. So keep that heat that in mind. Yeah, just pick a scene something that you really like. And, you know, again, they don't even have to be this, you know, rendered. They can be super super rough. But it's good to just get a sense of the different compositions for different moments in a scene you know, for different emotional beats and ticket, you know, just just to get an overview of what's happening and how you can kind of, you know, set up your own shots because we're gonna be doing that for our character and how that it can affect you know how the viewer interprets the scene of the viewer, interprets your character. That's kind of what all of this is getting at. But so for next class, just finish out your visual designs and we will work together and reading them up. And then just do this, Just pick something, sketch it out really quick. Just one scene. I think it will really, really be beneficial. I think will help you a lot, and then we'll get to animating.
4. Animating Characters: All right. So today, we're gonna focus on, um we're gonna jump, indicate to animator, and we're gonna look at basically kind of have the programs laid out. Um, you know where things are Kind of get ourselves a little bit acquainted with the program itself and hopefully have your character in a good breaking place where we can actually bring them in and start to break them up. So I'm gonna walk through that process a little bit. That way, you can kind of get up and running, can kind of get a feel for how the program works and what you can do. And the great part about this is, once your characters rigged up, you're good to go. I mean, you basically have a character that you can pop into character animator from that point on , and you can really do whatever you want with, Um um, before I hop into that fell, you know, just in case, maybe you're still struggling with the process of character design. So I just want to run through real quick kind of how I get my characters to the point remedy to bring them into the program, and then obviously I'll be jumping back and forth between photo shop and character animators so you can get kind of a better sense of you know, what you need to do for the reading process so kind of starting out. And this is preliminary work that I had for my thesis. You know, basically, this is kind of where it all started. As's faras like sketches and stuff go Obviously you can see you know, I did rough pencil sketches. And then from there it's a matter of, you know, doing the wine art on top of it, which I did digitally. But you could do however you want. You could even just use a pencil sketch. It's totally up to you character animators, very versatile in that way. But this is the workflow that I'm most familiar with, and everything's gonna be It's its own layer. So you know anything that's not gonna move, you know, like the head soas faras like that line of the head, the antlers, those we're all gonna be one layer, same with, like these little nose holes, this little, you know, indentation next to the mouth. The eyebrows are their own layer, so there's a left one on the right one because with the facial tracking, you can control those with your own eyebrows. And then the eyes were gonna be their own as well. So you know, each people will be its own own layer each I will be its own layer. And then you could even draw a line across for a blink if you wanted, the scarf is gonna be its own layer, and then the body is It's only er so really, anything that's gonna move, you kind of want to keep separate. And I'll delve into the A little bit more in a second, just so you kind of get a sense of of you know what I mean by that. But it's under that. It's it's really just kind of putting in the flat colors and pretty much when you're ready to go. So I'm gonna go ahead and open up this photo shop. I'll we'll delve into this in a second. So just to give you a sense of you know how things are set up. So obviously, like the boy in art, zoom in here. But so the liner, it is its own layer. Um, you can see, You know what else is? It's only on the face. So, you know, within the category of the head, we have obviously the outline of it. And then the eyes are their own. You know, the I lines, closed eyes, pupils, highbrows mouth. So this is, you know, a character and a sketch that I first started doing Whatever. If I first started using character animators so there's already a problem here. It's not really that much of a problem, but the eyes here, they need to be separate. So that means that because I didn't do that now, I would have to go in here and basically make a copy of the eyes and then go through the process of us. So I raced this I now this would be the left eye. We'll turn this layer on, I will reach the opposite I. And now this layer is the right eye. So now I have my two eyes on separate layers and that's exactly what I want. I need those to be individual because they're gonna be controlled individually. So basically, that's just kind of how the program works. And that doesn't make sense right now. Hopefully, Whenever we delve into the program in a second, it'll kind of help illustrate that a little bit more, but just getting kind of continuing, like I have another marathon here, you know, the scar and the thing I would want to do here, too. And this is just how I like illustrate characters. So this is just, you know, doing the wine are and then, you know, putting in the colors individually, which obviously had to kind of change that workflow when working with character animator. But it's good to have all these things separate in case you do want to go back and change something like, you know, the end, you know, the inside color of the years where the antlers or something like that, but basically like I'm going to combine this Leinart layer with this color layer because these need to be one. Okay, so now this entire piece here is ah is its own layer. And that's great. That's exactly what I want. I want the color in the liner together is one. I don't want them to be separate. Same thing here. So we have the color on this arm. You're the winner for the arm with hand outline. And since the hand isn't gonna move separately from the arm itself, those are all things that I can just combine. So now this entire piece is, you know, one entity instead of four different layers, which again, exactly what I want. I also have this, you know, little We're a flashlight. So I would combine those layers together. And, you know, hopefully this is this is making sense. Kind of getting kind of getting a sense of what you're gonna kind of need to do. So from, you know, sketch to putting in color to them, kind of combining wine, art layers and color layers together. And so I've shown this illustration before. This is kind of the Finnish scene where it waas. Um, another thing to make note of real quick before I delve in anymore. It depends on what you're doing. But obviously it since I'm combining my, uh, my illustrations. My character illustrations here with photography in film, and I'm shooting at the standard size, which is a 16 by nine aspect ratio. 1080 by, I think 9 20 Anyway, the point I'm trying to get at here with these dimensions is this background is the standard of screen size Soas faras, like, you know, this is the size of any television, their relation to say this is the ratio of any television. And I made sure since I'm shooting HD footage that this was that size and you know, so this is basically my composition that I set up and then I put my character within that frame that way. I personally as an artist, I have You know what my shot looks like and I can put my character in there and get a sense of where I want to place Yuki within that within whatever shot I'm working on that as well . Then whenever I'm done and I, you know, take this, take this out to finish, you know, within character Animator, I'll have my finished shot. I don't worry about Well, you know, I put him on this arbitrary, you know, like this rectangle shape or something like that. And then it's like, Oh, that doesn't really work for the format of film or the format of a screen. So these are all considerations to make and obviously like, you know, he has a full body. And I made sure that I finished that all the way through. Just in case I need a shot with the legs or something. I have it. But otherwise for this particular shot, you know, that wasn't needed. So I only have this part of him within the crane, but the rest of him's there, just in case. So now we're gonna go over to this. So this is Ah, you know. Ah, rough of that shot. This is him. You know, he needs to be color corrected because the colors are too light and he doesn't have any shading on him, but so this is where I started. So this is my finished illustration, Except for the color correction in the seating. Well, this is it. This is my done deal. Have all my pieces on my layers, and I have him on the background of the shot that I'm gonna be working on. So what do I need to do now? Well, there's a few different things. So I have this mouth here. We need to combine these layers. Okay, so I have his years down with the color for that, so we're gonna combine those and we have his scarf. We have the color of the scarves Were gonna combine those and because thes ears aren't gonna move independent of the head Mexican to go ahead and combine these two and the pupils closed eyes. So I'm just going to kind of run through this real quick and I'll be back in just a second . Okay, so I've merged layers, got everything separated, so now this looks a bit more manageable. But so, like, we have an open mouth that's on its own layer. You know, each eyebrow is on its own layer. We have, you know, closed eyes, those air separate. Each pupil is separate, the eyes themselves or separate and the whole head because it's it's not gonna change. So the head's going to stay the same. So that's, you know, combined with scarf the arms of their own thing. The body is its own thing. And I left this piece separate because we might want Teoh. We can add some elements later on, so I'm just gonna keep that separate for now, and we'll delve into that a little bit later. Um, don't get too overwhelmed by this. You know the great thing about character animator and everything is you know you can. You can work on things here and photo shop. And then once you jump back into character animator, anything you change here will be updated there so you can kind of go back and forth, see what's working. Maybe there's something that's a little quirky and you can fix it from there. So it's it's not. It's certainly not a big deal, and it's nothing to get bogged down about. All right, so when you first happen to character animated, this is the screen that you're going to see on. There's a lot of really great resource is here, so it already comes with puppets. Saturday comes with characters that you can use and each one each one is basically showing off, you know, some different things. So this is this will kind of give you an idea of you know how your character should be. You know, if it's design and photo shop or illustrator when to go have some head turns that you can see, um, the clothing fish has in different particles and some other kind of elements that you can, you know, kind of pop in on the fly, Um, animation wise, which is great and then walk, but is, ah, side view built for a walk cycles. You can kind of see you can kind of look at all these and see how they're put together, how they're rigged up. And it's a really fantastic resource that character animator team has provided in here for you. So it's definitely something you should check out. There's a lot more characters as well. If you want to see those, we're basically going to kind of run through all of these different things. Not specifically. These characters hopefully will be focusing on the characters that we've created. But this is a great resource in the West. If you need a character animator. Obviously there's an interactive tutorial here, and it'll kind of it'll kind of give you some basic understanding and concepts of the program, so that's worth watching and also to which is great. There's all kinds of video tutorials, So if there's anything that you get stuck on or if you want to watch one of these tutorials by the animator team, the character innovative team, they really delve into a lot of stuff, and I have found them helpful, especially starting out. Not really knowing. You know what I do with the program there definitely very beneficial, and you can learn a lot that way. We're going to kind of do the bare bones in this class, but this is a great resource if you kind of want to dig in a little bit more afterwards, or while you're taking the class simultaneously, either either or it's a fantastic resource. But this is the first screen that you're going to see, and it's divided up into three sections. So you have rigging a character you have recording your characters. That's basically gonna put your character kind of on the stage that you want them to. Beyond that will be basically what you export into export out as a video file is your your finished animation. And you can do streaming stuff, too, if you're interested in that, and you can add workspaces as well if you want, but we're not going to really focus on them, so we're going to dig into reading a character. So this is where my character is gonna be, and we have some different tools here that we're gonna explore in a second. So first things first need a character in here. So I had to do is go to file, um, go down the import. Basically, what we're gonna do is we're gonna find our file wherever we saved it on our computer minds right here. And they were just gonna hit We're gonna select it and hit import, so it'll do its thing. It's brought it up here. So we have our little character, and then I want to do is double click on it. Okay? And now we have the character brought up. So, as you can see, these are all of my photo shop players that I had before the backgrounds its own thing do. So I've done a few different things. First things first. I have, ah, one group and I have to do is just do a new folder. And I titled it. You know what the scene is specifically and you want to put a plus sign in front of that And you do this because that's gonna tell character animator that this is something that, um is gonna be moving independently. So we have that. And then underneath here we have two more holders. I put everything that is on the head into the head folder, and then anything body related is in the body folder. So we're gonna do a few more little things, and then we should be good to hop back into character. Animator. So first things first, we have two eyebrows, and all we need to do here is we just need to select that and put a plus sign in front of that. That way the eyebrows were gonna be able. Teoh move independently. So basically, this is just kind of telling character animator, um, what to do with the specific players? They're going to stay on the head, but we're gonna be able to control them independently. And that's really all The plus sign means, um, ready to other things, too. Since we have different layers that are within the eye itself, we're gonna create another folder we're actually gonna do to folders. And this will be right I when this one will be left eye. So I'm just gonna want to fight your corner corresponding layers to put in there. So obviously this warren is left. This one is right. As far as the blinks go. This people is left. This people is right. And we have our eyes down here. So this is gonna be my left eye that in there on some from what? This guy's gonna be the right eye. So obviously I want my eye layer to be at the very bottom. That way, we have our blink and her people on top. Just pop that down in there. Our pupil is going to be something that we're gonna wanna have moved eso We're gonna put a plus in front of that for both peoples. All right, so that's starting to look pretty good. That should kind of give character and animator an idea of what? What we're wanting to have happened with those layers. So all we're gonna do now is we're going to save this when they were gonna jump back into character animator. So as you can see, it's already incorporating what? We changed our photo shop pile. Okay, So still have some problems, But now we're starting to get somewhere the head isn't working all crazy. Um, and when I blink, at least the only thing that's warping is the eyes. So this is looking a lot better, obviously still know what we want, but it's getting there. So we're gonna jump back into photo shop now for the closed eyes. So this is going to be the right closed. I we're gonna title this right blink and then in parentheses. We're gonna put a B and an exclamation mark and say that I'm ready. The same thing for this This is going to be left. Blink be exclamation point. Make sure it's and parentheses and say that and let's go ahead and see this pop back over the character animator thinking changes. Okay, so immediately, we seen that something's happened. Now we have these two bees here. So what is that? So because we did the be inside of the parentheses with the exclamation point character animator has recognized that as a key trigger. And what that means is that whenever we're here, how does so you can see now that whenever I blink, Yuki's blinking? And if I hit the b key on my keyboard that will make you he blinked as well, and I could hold it down. You have his eyes closed, so that's really great to know. And you can assign key triggers Teoh. Really anything. Um, So I've had, you know, with with Yuki at one point is holding a flashlight, and I actually had a treat key trigger for El. That way he could turn the light on on and off. Um, as needed. Within the scene, I could make the flashlight flicker that way. So that's just one example. Kind of You know what you can do with key triggers, but blink is excellent to have. And because we did that now, character animator recognizes that for blinking. It's working, you know, with facial tracking, but something still not right with that eyes. So let's see what we can do to try to fix it. I'm gonna look a puppet that had made before. Okay, so we're gonna do this just because this is what I noted. You, um and I usually do three of these points already. Have you select the pencil here? As you can see here, I have three different points, and that's just me plopping it down. Um, they don't have to be. They're gonna be on their own layer, So we're gonna hop back over here, so I'm gonna put one right here, but here. Well done. Step back. We're gonna name this origin. Look at that. Oh, we're gonna do another one. So quick off of that will be another one, which will also name or a germ spell. Click off of it. Another one. Okay, so now we got that. We're going to save that. This is all in the head layer, which is exactly where we want us to be. All right, So now we're gonna look back to character animator. It's gonna incorporate our changes. Okay, So as you can see now, the number here we have a three. And that means that we have We have those three origin points that we just added. So that's basically going to kind of stick the head down. So basically, that's gonna attach the head to the neck. OK, so now we have where the eyes were working. So the the eye tracking is working. If you're like me and you have a lot of hair, um, that makes it a little bit more difficult. I usually try to put my hair up Webcam. You could say have all these little dots on my face that way it can really see my face, it can track out where my eyebrows are added. Contract my eyes better. That way you can see now is like I'm holding my hair out. If I blink, you know you keep blinks, so it's working better. Um, have you ever get to a situation where you know things get kind of weird and it's not really canal you want. You can always just, you know, if you change your position. If you just want to click, set, rest, pose, we'll reset everything to how it was when you first started. Um, and that can really the super beneficial. Okay, so you get that going on. But, you know, if I smile, I had a wanted amounts to come on. And if I do the key for that, if if u s one of the whole head disappears. So that's not what we want to have happen either. So we're gonna go, go jump back into Photoshopped, find her that's at Okay. So I have my smile there. So it works because we did the again the parentheses, the s key and the exclamation marks. When you tell me what the s key that will happen for sure But we're gonna go ahead and put this in its own little group, and we're gonna title that mouth. Make sure that layer is put in there on we will say this so back to character, animator. And now if I smile now, you see that You know, we have that little lake, that little gas that happens. And if it hit the s key, then that happens as well. So now that's working. You know, we're getting to place where our characters kind of, you know, the movements pretty good. His head isn't floating up of his body, you know, we have it so that the facial tracking is working. Theo, I eye tracking is working, you know, and I can do things like smile and we get a results. Um, obviously, I'm not gonna have this character Yuki smile just because of kind of who he is and everything. You know, he's He's a very anxious, timid, uncomfortable guy. So it's probably not gonna be crapping all this my house. Um, but otherwise, you know, this is this is you know, this is getting into a really good working place. Um, and obviously, whenever you create characters and you do the kind of the layer system and everything like that, you're gonna have problems where, like when I first brought this character and you're gonna run into those kinds of things, that's just, you know, it's just kind of the nature of it, Um has used the program, or you'll be able to kind of anticipate what's going on, and you can kind of fix it quickly. But you've already seen that we can kind of hop back and forth between photo shop and change things on the fly, which is fantastic. That makes it makes it life a lot easier. And it's great to be able to you happen a photo shop, make a few changes, save the file. When we come into character animator, it automatically updates are file and you know, that'll help kind of fix things. Um, so this is just kind of your basic reading up your character. Obviously, if we hop back over into the rig section again, we still have you know, these all of these different parts, and this kind of shows you things that you can add on. So I'm not gonna go into, you know, different motion triggers and stuff like that. There's a lot more that you can dig into. Um, but that's for another day. Um, you know what? The body you can tag different things, so and you can also dio, you know, different heads. So if you wanted to have it, where when you turn your head, your character could do that, would look up or look down and you have to create these visual assets. You have to, you know, go in and create these things and then come in here and jaggery king up. But there's a lot that you can add on to your character, and you can see all these different pieces. You know, if you wanted to have, you know, a bottom eyelid, it's hop eyelid. You know, all of the all of these different elements that you could have. You don't even have to have these if you don't want to know is don't ever knows if you don't want a mouth, don't have a mouth, you know, it's totally up to you. It's totally up to whatever your character is gonna be. Um, and we're gonna be delving into this in our next class whenever we get into, uh, toe lip sinking and everything. But these were kind of, you know, this and this is a nice visual reference for the different kinds of mouths that you could have for the different sounds that we make. And so this will kind of be your next assignment is Teoh drops amounts. They could be really simple. They want to be anything complicated. But that way, whenever we talk, our character is gonna talk. And character Animator is basically going to use our built in microphone or whatever kind of microphone we have. And it's gonna look for these sounds and it's gonna bring up these visual layers to match the sounds. And that's going to in turn maker. Care to talk, which is pretty pretty Dane cool. But obviously there's a lot of different things that you cannot onto you. But what I want you to do is just to create for each of these different, um, each of these different, uh, mouths. I'm just create some layers. They don't to be crazy. They're not to be anything you know, insane. But, you know, just kind of dropped these different mouth so we can get some some basic mouth shapes and be able to do some some dialogue, work with her character if I go here. So this is the more finished character. So not what we want worked on. Obviously, he didn't speak in this scene. So we don't have anything for that character. Let me find Okay, so under my head layer, you know, we've created the mouth Layer said, This is what we have here. I have six different layers. So let's turn these guys off. So I didn't do anything crazy here. So, you know, for this scene here, he kind of has his mouth a little bit open because he's, you know, he's uncomfortable where my ad gets separated from his friend. He starts getting nervous, but so there's the our mouth, the M else. Oh, our ah wr Afghanistan. What a T h eighth and ah di for like. And that's really all that you need. Yeah. Let me kind of show you how that works. So I'm gonna go here again. I'm gonna import a character that Okay, so he's already tagged up in good to go, so I should just be able to go ahead and add him to and you seen? So let me go back to him real quick. Select him. I'm going to use thes pin tools because we don't want his body to move around like that. So that's gonna fix it. Armas, If he had legs, we'll go back over here. Rest pose. Because things were getting kind of crazy with the eyes. Okay, so now that I've done that, um, you know, he's not moving around us crazily. My hair isn't helping with, like, the eyebrows and any of that kind of stuff. So Okay, so now you get kind of get a sense that as I talked, Yuki is talking. His mouth is moving. Character animator is basically doing what it can Teoh match what I say in my speech to different mouths. Obviously, the more amounts that you have, the more variety that you're gonna have and the better character animators gonna be able to you match what you're saying better, the more mouth shapes you have. So if you can, I would definitely recommend, you know, drawing out all the mouths that character animator shows. And it's ah, it's ah, it's visual reference in the rig area. Honestly, you know, you can do exactly kind of what character animators telling you can draw those same mouths where you can, you know, just kind of kind of, you know, do something that fits for your character. If you want to do something really simple, that's totally fine, too. It's totally up to you whatever you feel comfortable doing, Um, but this gives you a good kind of sense of speaking. And then obviously everything's, you know, it looks like it's coming out of your character, which is awesome. Go back over to our other seen here with this other puppet. Okay, I'm gonna reset that because his eyes were getting kind of funky. So hopefully this gives you kind of a good you know, a good understanding of what you can do in a basic starting place for, um, you know, kind of breaking up your character. There's a few other things I want to leave you with before, before we say goodbye. Um, so within this scene within, um, your set up, we want to make sure that your, um these two icons were blue. That means they're on. You know, this is obviously the audio and you want this to stay green, not get read. The other thing, too, is if you see I have all these dots on my face. So that's That means that the facial tracking has found my face and it's able Teoh, you know, basically relay that information so the character moves like they should. Super important thing. Make sure you have light on you if you're in the dark. It's very hard for character animator to pick up your face. So basically, any time my enemy ah, I'll usually just use my desk lamp in China. Tommy, that we character animator doesn't have a problem with that. The program was able to find me, and that's a non issue. Here is another issue, but again I could use just put it up. Or, if you don't have long hair than you're good to go, you don't even have to worry about that. The only other thing. So if I click off of, so if I click on to this, that'll bring it my facial tracking. And that's when I'll be able to kind of, you know, you know, I could hit the record button and start basically kind of putting in an animation after click out of that. This is going to show us our information over here. So the frame rate is 12 frames per second, have it set up for 32nd duration, and this gives us our 10 80 by 1920. So that's that's the frame that we have. Obviously, if you want to change that, 24 frames per second is pretty standard, So I would probably bump it up to that. And this may look different depending upon what you have in here. Now, if we click on are the character himself. And this is just good to know, because when you import your character when you add them to seen, you know you might not have your hair to really one thing to be, things might be a little off. You can change that. So we have the exposition that we can change that basically Movsar character from side to side with the Y position that moves them up and down. I think if you hold yet, you hold the shift key down while you alter these. Then you can you can control it and move it a lot faster, so you can really kind of you change this more quickly. Um, but that we're gonna get you character where you want them. There's also the scale thing here. So obviously you don't wanna go too crazy and be upside down unless that's what you want. But basically that way, you know, I could kind of shrink Yuki down. I could move him up. And now you see that like, I have a lot more of him in the cream. And again, this is just depending upon what you what you want of your character in the crane kind of what you put in there. And if we go, Teoh is good. At this one, we have a background layer. So if I turn that on and hop back over here, you know, now we have Yuki and he has a bit of a background, right? I'd really try to set up your character and your background how you want TEM And really I only used the background in character Animator as a visual reference were basically setting up the composition. I kind of get an idea of. Okay, so this is the context of this character is in and this is kind of what I want to do with them. But when I actually go to animate the scene, I'm gonna drop out the background, and I do. Now he's on this, you know, Black space. I do that. And I do that for a particular reason. Without the background being here. If I want a further kind of tweet this after I'm done recording. So let's say a record, you know, that does kind of have to move around. I'm not too happy about being here. Uh, now that we have this this recording and we don't have the background here, we can do some things with that. So if I export this like, say, I'm done, you know this is gonna be my finished animation. This this file here. If I want to take this into, like, aftereffects or something like that, I can put whatever background I want behind him. And the nice thing about doing something like that is, you know, I want to add movement where maybe I make him larger. It looks like he's kind of coming towards the camera. He could move independent of the background, because if I just leave the background on here and I tried to make him larger, something. And after effects, the background is going to stay stationary. It's gonna move with him wherever he moves. If you want to think about that, you know, kind of frame. You know, if if he walks up the frame, the backgrounds gonna move with him versus you know, him moving independent of the background. Hopefully, that makes sense, but it's good to be aware of. So obviously, you know, if we want to, like, for instance, here will turn out well, turn on the background. And, you know, we have Obviously, it's cut off here because it's meant to be zoomed in a little bit more. So let me go ahead, make this back at 100 shrink it down just a little bit. Okay? So now our background is seamless. It's all the way there, you know? So and now we can have you kind of, like act out within this space. And this is fine. This is totally fine. This is great. If you don't want to do anything fancy, where you have you can get larger. Anything within this space within this, like little moment within the scene within the shot, I should say, then you're good to go. You find you don't really worry about anything. Um, you would only really want to drop the background out if you're gonna put that. If you're gonna take this this animation and pop it into, like, after effects and, you know, kind of add some other elements that really kind of you can enhance reanimation. Um, but we're gonna go keep things kind of simple on bare bones, but that's just something that's good to be aware of. So that's basically how you bring your artwork into character animator and kind of the back and forth, you know, work well, you can do to try to wriggle character, Um, and again, like thes thes visual tags and everything are great. So make sure that you use them, and this gives you a good idea again of, You know what you can create visually to bring into character and basically, um, we're going to break this down into four classes. So this was kind of an introduction to breaking up your character. Kind of how you can, you know, solve some different problems. You know, different resource is that you have through the program itself, So we're gonna break it down into four classes. The 1st 1 is going to be lip sinking and facial tracking, which we kind of already touched on a little bit. So your next assignment is just to make those different mouth shapes for your character, and then we're going Teoh, I'm just gonna basically show you how to break up the different mouths record Dialogue will look at recording a scene and then kind of, you know, tweaking the dialogue here and there. Um, audio wise will look at how you can correct that and fix that. Then we're gonna look at body movement and how we can kind of add different elements under the clothing. So, like, we have that scarf that I mentioned. So we're gonna look at setting that up in just different little elements like that. Like I mentioned the flashlight that you can turn the beam on and off. So we're gonna look at that and see kind of how you can add these different elements to really kind of enhance. Who you care to is. We're gonna look
5. Facial Tracking + Lip Syncing: Hey, so welcome back. So for today's cause, we're gonna be focusing on facial tracking and lip sinking. Obviously, whenever we kind of in the last class, you know, looked at rigging up our characters and everything. We kind of delved into it a little bit. And you get a little bit of a taste of you know, how the facial tracking works and kind of how the lip sinking works, too. But today we're going to delve into that a little bit deeper. We're gonna look at how by setting upper character in bringing them up and having thes visual assets. So, like different mouths and obviously like the, you know, the visual descent of our character, how this really simplifies the animation process. So once you have this kind of groundwork done, you really have limitless creative potential for you know what you can do with it. You know, once the characters finish to put together, you can put them in different environments, different backgrounds of you always have that character, and you can go back in. You can re record lines you could react things out with, like the movement of the character. Once it's it's all rigged up in good to go, which is fantastic and and exciting. So what we're gonna need today to do this, we're gonna need ah, finished character. Ah, and it could be just the face of the character. Uh, that's all that you've really kind of gotten done. That's fine. We can we can work with that. But ideally, you want to have the whole thing done because this is going to be one of the elements that we're gonna incorporate basically, our final project so that, you know, we're gonna want to try to if we can incorporate those animation that we make today or that you make on on your own from today's lesson into the final, uh, a little story that we're gonna put together the final little little scene that would be best. But again, just depends. React with your character on. Obviously, once you've gone through the class, you kind of know how this works. I mean, you could do it on your own as many times as you want. You want to add on to it? You know, you felt like I was pretty good, but, you know, I really want to redo it. That's totally fine up to you. But we're gonna be looking at blinking. We're going to be looking at a moting talking and hot keys. So we're gonna be kind of putting all this together and then either the vowel sounds and everything and how important the various mouth shapes are. And they are very important because the more of those that you have, the more intricate that your lip sinking is going to be. And it's gonna be It's gonna look a lot more fluid whenever character animator matches the dialogue. You know, whatever you're saying with the mouth movements for your character, it's gonna look a lot more seamless and a lot more natural. The more mouths that you give character animator toe work with. But let's go ahead and let's dive right in. So I have this scene pulled up and it's a little bit zoomed in, so I'm gonna go ahead and change the scale of this to kind of fit it to the frame that were working in. So so we have our set up here. We have our character. All that stuff's good to go. We're in the record section, but we're gonna hop back into Photoshopped. This is their basic set up. We have our our main folder with the plus sign. We have our body category and we have her head category. So we're gonna go down and we're gonna look at the mouth. So all you need to do is make a new folder which you could just click on this icon here and then you're going to a plus sign in the word mouth. Now, when we twirl this down, you're going to see there's a bunch of different mouth shapes in here. They're all turned off. So all we have honest our basic mouth shape here, you know, that's because for this scene I wanted this character, you know, they've entered the space and you know, they're uncomfortable. Yuki again has anxiety, so he's not happy with where he's at. And that's just a stylistic choice. It could have easily have been closed. But that's just you know what I felt doing in in this this particular shot? So I have six different mouths that I'm working with. This is, you know, kind of my bare bones. I wouldn't do any less than that. And honestly, at this point, and probably do more now that I know that there, you know, I can do more mouth strips. Character animator has been updated, so I would take advantage of that. But we have, you know, are all mouth and oh, uh, you know what are Oh, we have very ta trice the sounds and your d sounds. Um, so we're gonna turn all those arm. Obviously, that looks a little funky because we got a bunch of mouths going on, but we also have the blink turned on, but that's exactly what we want. So we would just go. We would save that. I've already done all that. So it's good to go and we hop over into character Animator. So we have our scene set up, you know, when we would just do file import and that would give us our puppet, which is right here. And all I've done is I clicked on our main layer here, and I've taken the pen toll and I've just fixed the bottom part of our character down that way, like the head will move in. The body will kind of move, but the bottom is going to be pinned to the screen and all. Kind of I'll show you what that means hopping in here. So you're gonna want to make sure that your microphone is turned on and you can see now that as I talk, his mouth is moving. So it's already doing the lip sinking for us, and they were gonna want to turn on the camera. And obviously, things can get kind of funky sometimes. So if you need to, you know, click the set, rest pose, button. That'll kind of, you know, bring everything back to how it originally was. Also, you're gonna want Teoh turn on some kind of a light. I have a little desk lamp here, but that's gonna help, You know, the face starts to, you know, find my face and work out. I have to much here. Maybe you do. I don't know, but it's good to move it out of the way that way confined your eyebrows and everything. And as you can see, you know, now Yuki is moving a lot better. We're gonna just I'm gonna record a quick scene. So this is our timeline. This is basically, you know, what? We're gonna have record. And if I click away from here. You can see that. You know, right now, this is set to 12 frames were gonna bump that up to 24 because that's a good, you know, standard Teoh frame rate to be at it. Set the 30 seconds if you recording. You go past that point. Obviously, that will expand If you want to set that. You know, the more you can totally up to you. And we're at 1920 by 10. 80 pixels. Um and that's your standard high definition. That's not four K, but you standard high definition, so that's a good place to be. So anyway, I'm gonna click back on the timeline here. That way, we're back, Teoh using our our character. You know, when I move, it's gonna affect UK and everything like that. So now I'm just gonna hit the red record button here and just record something really quick . Ah, I'm not really like in this. Ah, hello. Is anyone in here at all? Okay, so super basic. Nothing fancy there. But now we have all of this data. Now we can kind of dig into this, and obviously, if I, you know, move the little scrapper over here, You know that's going to go through the animation. So it's going to stop the A so you can see the top right corner says pause during playback . So it's going to stop that life, eat and just kind of give us what we got here. And if I hit the space bar, uh, I'm not really liking this. Hello? Does anyone in here? But all OK, so that's our performance that we just did playback. So now that we have all this data, we can kind of dig into it a little bit, So we're gonna look at the lip sync So we have this little thing down here, and it basically let's zoom in and out of the timeline. So I'm gonna pull it to make things larger, and you can see that once we get to a certain point, we're gonna automatically It's gonna tag the mouths that we have here. So it's gonna tag the sounds that we made, and it's gonna turn on and off our corresponding mouth so you could see we go from the A mouth to the our mouth. Ah, you know, and basically and we can play this back. I'm not really liking this. I'm really so you can see how you can kind of scrub through everything. Uh, you can see this works world. Uh, you know, that works well for what I said, Um, the rest of us not see, I'm not really like in this. You can see that. It's kind of off. It's not really quite worrier. You know, Maybe I would like it to be at, so you can see now we can kind of expand over if you wanted Teoh. So everything's categorized based on the sound that we make and we can, you know, pull these little sliders to extend, You know, certain mouth shapes. I'm not really like in this, so that looks better, you know? But say, for example, you know that. Aw, you know, I don't want that there. So I would select it, and I would just hit, delete, And you can see that it didn't give me an open space here. It just filled it in with the, uh, which is nice, because obviously, in the middle of speaking, unless there was a pause, like there is here or there is here, we wouldn't want to just have a gap here. So it's nice that it automatically goes in and keeps that, But we're gonna do undo delete, because I'm actually gonna keep that in there. That looks pretty good. Uh, that looks great. Lo. Hello. So you know that's not great. That's probably more on the art side of things, though. It would be good to go in and kind of add some additional mouth shapes to kind of get that on an over here. The end. Is anyone in here? Is anyone in here? Let's see if we move that up. That kind of helps. Is anyone in here? Is anyone in here? Is anyone in here? Okay, so that looks a little bit better. No. Go. Okay, we'll put that back where it was. Eso if you double click or right click depending if on your mac or PC, this will bring up all the different mouth sounds. So if you wanted to pick a different one that you have, then you could put that in there so we can go to edit, and we can go to split. And so that gives us another mouth shape to work with. So now, if I want a pop in here. Maybe an L. We'll see how that looks Trying to pin that down here? No, that she? No. So Okay, so that looks a little bit better. Um, you could really kind of go in and you could, you know, you could refine this as much or as little as you want, but it's really great to have the option to do so. And obviously you can see that this is a really simple editing process. So that's fantastic. If we jump back into the rig side of things and we click on our puppet or any part, if you scroll down here, you can see that we have Ah, character animator has a bunch of different mouth shapes that you could put in there. Does Firas like the new field? A smile on, Surprised, that's more just to kind of, you know, help give some, you know, different ways that your character can emote. But the rest of these are gonna be in relation to dialogue. So, you know, and this is a really good, handy like visual reference toe have Obviously, you can do mouth shapes in completely different ways, you know, minor. Very lake. They're very circular. You know, these are a little bit more geometric, but these air great. These give you a good starting place? Honestly, I would. And this is gonna be part of your assignment. I would create. I would create all of these mouth shapes. You could just do the six that I did. But ideally, I would say, Do you all, uh, through all 11 of these? Well, you'll have a lot, you know, wider range when you do dialogue, and it'll just look more fluid and natural. But that's how you're gonna put in dialogue. So the hot keys are so in the in the photo shop file for this. If we hop back over there, if we look at the eyes you have left blank and then in parentheses I have the letter B and an exclamation point. So what that does that sets up a hot key. So when we're in here and we're animating and everything if I touch the Beaky than you desires air gonna close if I let go of it. The open and I could do that, Aziz much or as little as I want, but used that to advantage. You can do that with a lot of different things, and we're going to get into props and stuff for our characters later. But like for a flashlight, I have a beam of light that I could turn off with the letter L. So that way I can kind of, you know, hit the key on and off, and it will make it look like the light is actually flickering in and out. So there's a lot of cool things that you can do in that regard. BSO hockey's were good to be aware of. Obviously, you can. You can do different facial expressions. There's a key you can do s and I usually just title it smile, even though I haven't really had a character that I actually had smile. I usually make it like a frown or like a terrified face. But that's a good way to add some additional emotions that you can kind of, you know, put onto your character space in different ways that you can kind of help from a moat, whatever situation or whatever, you know, seeing that they're faced with. So you have your dialog and everything like that. Um and you can just use your internal microphone for me. I have an external mike set up that way. You know, that's what I'm using to record of my audio for all of the classes. And that's also when I'm using right now with character animator. But you can just as easily use the built in microphone in your computer. It's totally up to you if you don't have an external mike or, you know, if you have access to that, it's totally up to you. It's whatever you'd like to deal, but obviously you can see how simple it is to record everything and then you're good to go . Let's say that this is the finished animation that I have, the one that we just recorded, and that's that's what I want to export. And when I say export, that's gonna just basically say this file and we'll be done with this I have to do is just file export. Um, there's two different ones that you can use. You could do a PNG sequence and wave, so basically that's just gonna be your visual frames. And if we have 24 frames a second, it's gonna be a lot of, you know, PNG files, and then your audio is going to be the way file. And you would only really use that if you want to put that into after effects and you could further tweet things. So if you wanted to kind of make your character move a little bit more like move within the frame or do some other you know, little snippets here and there you could you could have the background move. Maybe there's clouds moving in the background. Um, but we're not going to really worry about that. That just kind of So you're aware that that features there, But we're going to video via a adobe media encoder. So that's just gonna basically take our file, and it's gonna just toss it out so we'll just have a little title. This where is where is everyone? And I'm just going to put this on the desktop. So we have easy access to it. Each 0.264 is great. That's your standard, you know, format for animation. So then we're just gonna hit save. Um, media encoder has opened up here. We jump over to media encoder. So selected that were exporting it. So you can see here. Yeah. This is how much time has gone by. This is how much time is remaining. So, you see, it's going back a little bit quicker, and this gives us all of our information about it. What? It's titled, where it's gonna go so well, that's working. We're gonna jump back into character, Animator. So yeah, basically, for your for your assignment, just use the facial tracking, create a short little animation. Doesn't have to be long at all. That's gonna be, You know, give us a little insight into your character. Just write one line of dialogue that you feel like, really kind of captures who your character is, Doesn't have to be anything complicated or super fancy. So maybe they come through the door. You know, if you want to think of it, is like a western or something, and they're just like, What are you doing here? And that's it, Like, that would be fine. You could just have that that short little snippet, you know, with that And maybe they have angry eyes or something like that. It could be a hockey. You put in there, you press a and, you know, maybe give kind of 1/2 load, so we lose, like, the top part of their eyes. But that would be great. And that would that's all you need to dio. So that's a great little scene that gives us an idea of who you character is. Immediately, they're rough and tough. Just do that and then just go ahead and export it and you'll have a nice little animation. This was almost done, so Well, check this out once this finishes. So now if we open this up, uh, I'm not really liking this. Uh, hello. Was anyone in here? No, that's that This is super basic Seen. That's totally fine. It doesn't need to be any more polished in that. Obviously we have. You know, me hitting the space bar recorded the end. That would be something that you know, ideally, you'd probably want to trim off. But it's not a big deal if you leave little artifacts and stuff like that in there. You know, really, the heart of this of this class is just, you know, familiar as yourself with character animator, and basically, just to just start doing animations. I mean, if you look at this, we have a 32nd animation. That's fantastic. That's awesome. I mean, normally, if you were to try to do this traditionally and another program, it would take you months and months to learn that program, you know. Or it would take you weeks, if not months, to do frame by frame animation. And but the computers already dental that. And we just had to, you know, designer character, set it up into photo shop, which I love, but it can be a little bit tedious. But now we've got this and we can do as much as we want with a, and we can record any kind of dialogue. It'll do the lip sinking, the head movements and everything. It's really easy, as you can see, you know, Now we have a 32nd animation clip, and we can do with this whatever we want. But yeah, that's basically assignment. Just create some different mouths, you know, just create a tiny little scene, and that one that one line of dialogue, at least that really kind of encapsulate to you characters. If you want to add on dialogue a little bit more totally fine, you know, going to go as much or as little as you want. But bare bones, at least one line of dialogue and that's it just exported. And you'll have your nice little animation file trying to keep in mind if we can. It would be nice to kind of use all the animations we make an kind of, you know, compile them into a scene. So, you know, I did the Western example earlier where someone comes in here just like, What do you doing here? The opening scene or received them. You know, maybe there's like, the saloon doors Is the background here are character comes in, um, you know, says that line, you know, and then we have them. Then we cut to another shot where Maybe then we have them, like, walk walk into the bar. And there you go. You have, like, a tiny little snippet of a scene. We get a clear understanding. An idea for your character is like, you know, they're roughing and tough and gruff. They're in charge there, kind of a dominant force and, you know, utilizing all the things that we've learned over the next. You know, four courses. Um you're able to put that scene together, and that's a solid awesome, you know, little snippet of animation. It shows that you can do a lot, and it shows that your understanding, you know, all the different things that kind of go into convey who your character is, what animation companies were looking for, um, many, even for your own work, Uh, as well, you know, all that stuff is really crucial. But just just keep all that in mind to keep that in mind for greater context. Obviously, if you do the assignment for this and you're like, you know, I'd really like to change it up or do something different for, like, you know, that the final project, um, you're like, add and like, out Turned out, I want to do another one for the finished thing. That's totally fine. If you want to turn something that's more rough for your first pass for this particular assignment. Totally fine. That's great. And again, if you have any questions, uh or you want to share any of this with me, please, for sure. Share this on on the skill share website with other people that are taking the class that we can kind of get feedback, you know, critiques and everything. That's very, very important. Ah, and crucial. But also, if you want to share it with me or you have any questions just hit me up on Twitter. I'm at Dizzy Mingo. Share stuff with me. Ask questions. I'll respond as quickly as I can. But I'd love to see you know what you're working on. And particularly, you know what? You're making him a class. That would be awesome and exciting for me, but yeah, so that's all you have to do. As far as, like, exporting and doing the lip sinking and everything. So, yeah, that's your assignment. And then I look forward to seeing you in the next class.
6. Motion in Body: Hey, welcome back. So today we're gonna be focusing on Motion and Body. We're gonna look at a few different things you can do in character. Animator Teoh, Basically kind of be able to create motion through the bodies were gonna look at pinning, breathing and body tracking. And basically, what that means is gonna be kind of, you know, piecing together like the body elements of your character. We're gonna look at adding elements like dangle to a scar, her hair to give it more life. So just little details that you can kind of throw on here that, you know, really make your character feel more alive. And again. This is another aspect that's super important. It conveys a lot of who your character is to the audience visually, without any dialogue s. So this is a very crucial component, definitely a crucial part of animation. This is very important stuff. What we're gonna need today we're gonna need a character with a body. You may have already done this. You already be finished with that. That's awesome. But it's gonna think about what clothing, what they wear. And then what kind of movement do you want? How do you imagine your character moving through? Uh, whatever world that they're in. And all of this should kind of culminate Teoh really convey, you know, that character's personality through all of these different things. So if you want to look at you key here, for example, you know his breathing is very, very shallow, and everything with him is always inwardly position. You see that we have the arms tucked in here, you know, he's all bundled up, user down. Everything's, like, really inwardly focused, really tight. And all this is working to convey who he is as a character, you know, again, he's extremely nervous. He's got anxiety and in all of these different visual elements, the way that he's positioned, you know, they all worked to express that there's certain shots in my film where you Yuki shaking because he's scared and because of the way that he looks, You know, when I when I shake in front of the camera, I mean, it fits. It looks, it looks right. It looks believable. We're gonna look at those kinds of things today, and and another good example here is, uh, we look at Sonic, you know, he's very much like, You know, I gotta go fast. You know, I gotta I gotta go to your got to do that. He's very impatient, and you can see that we got the arms folded here. The expression on his face. Like, you know, he doesn't have time for whatever is going on. And especially like that foot going, He's really gotta here, get under the next thing. So just these kinds of things to pay attention to you, because again, here we have no dialogue. But you already get a great sense of you know who sonic is. What is personality is like, and he doesn't even have to say word. One of the things that I have, um, with Yuki is the scarf and I've had the ability Teoh have that dangle. So what does that mean? Lets trump in the character animator. Okay, So have a character here, obviously get notice he doesn't have an arm. That's because I have different arms set up on different hot keys that I can use as I want , but I'm gonna go ahead and hold down one of these just so he doesn't look look like he's missing an appendage because their their promise and we're gonna talk about a few different things. We're gonna talk about this flashlight about something that we can kind of add into the mix . Right now, we're gonna focus on this scarf. So you notice, You know, as I go back and forth, there's this very, very subtle, you know, kind of sway to that fabric. And that's something that I set up in the layers and photo shop of my character, and I'm gonna show you how to do that. But additionally, when you're when you're in here, we're in the record section of character animator. You have all these different things that you can kind of play with, and you can really dig into a lot of them. I'm gonna show you, dangle so we can change the stiffness of it. So if I want to drop this down a lot, Nike noticed that, like, now it's really like it. Swing a lot more, um, or you could make it, you know, very, very stiff where, you know, there's some subtle movement, but not a lot. Um, so it's it's really a teaching. I mean, you could have a go, you know, really crazy, like now that things really going, and that's just as easy as you know, kind of kind of sliding this thing around. You can put in whatever you want. You can change the gravity. You can change the direction of gravity. If you wanted to have, you know, let's let's turn on some wind will have it blowing this way and that way whenever year you're animating or whatever, you can have these different elements that just kind of really start to add a lot visually to your seen to your character. And it just really enhances everything that you're dealing and you can even change the variation on the wind. So you know now we have, like a really strong wind, and you know, we have some variants in the way that it blows. Now we have even more so there's a lot of different things that you can kind of play with here, which is exciting. It's great that you have all these different kind of tools to dig into, and there's more stuff to again character Animator leak Each time the team releases more, there's war and war features added on, which is fantastic, but so, so more to dig into, And that could be a little overwhelming just starting out. So, you know, we're not going to get into that. I'm going to kind of give you again, like the bare bones, and this is, you know, good basic stuff in really good place to start, and it gives you a lot to play with. So we're gonna jump into photo shop and see, how did I set up that scarf? So here's this. You can see I have these air, all the arms. It looks kind of funky and scary. Where you're gonna want to set this up, it's gonna be under the body folder. You twirl that down and you can see that there's a few things going on here, so and it may look really complicated, but I promise you that it's a pretty quick and easy set up and again. Once you have it set up and rig, you're done. You don't ever have to worry about it again. There's two things I have scarf attached, one so and I All I did was just used the pen tal and I put a point there, and I titled it that Then I put another point over here. Title did the same thing. Now all of that's doing is telling character animator that this layer the scarf layer, you know, we're gonna pin it right here. So it's it It's basically it's attached to, you know, the rest of the scarf that goes around Yuki's neck. So that's all of those do. But make sure that you title them exactly like that, and obviously it's going to be above the body layer. Since this scarred players in front of this and then we have this folder. Now, this folder is is crucial. It should be named this way. So it's gonna be we're going to the plus sign body a space. We're gonna do one of these little, you know, curly brackets. You're gonna do the word. It's hatch. You're gonna do the word to with a capital T a space, an equal sign, another space. You're gonna do quotes, and then you're gonna put in this this title that you put down here. So, scarf, you know, little dash attached one. Then you're gonna end the quotes and you're going to end the little twirly bracket basically what you're telling character animator is that you know, in this folder this is going to be something that's gonna move and warp independently. And you're telling it that its going to warp independently, but it's going to stay attached here to the scarf. And then inside of that folder, you're gonna have three things. One is gonna be the scarf layer or whatever you're gonna have. And the next one is gonna be the origin point. So this is basically kind of, you know, where this starts So thinking about, you know, putting this just a little bit below where you attach the scarf or attached that layer toe , whatever you're attaching it to. So in this instance is the top part of the scarf. And then you're gonna and you're unable that origin tree label that origin and then you're gonna put another 10 point down here and you're gonna label that dangle. So what that's gonna do is tell character animator that you know this point. This is where we're gonna have the movement from the movement's gonna be restricted appear you're basically kind of pinning this layer appear so this part can move, but this is going to stay stationary, and that's all you have to do for that. If you label like that, you set it up in that exact way. Um, character animator is gonna recognize what all of those layers and things are in. The functionality is going to seamlessly come over from, uh, from your PST or your illustrator file into character Animator. And you're good to go, you know, automatically work. Dingle will automatically work. And then from there, like I showed you can play with, you know, when speed the stiffness of the dangle and you could really kind of die. Elin, Um, exactly what you're looking for for your particular character jumping back over here. The other thing I want to talk about was this flashlight. So, you know, I have it where I can, you know, basically, you know, I can hit the l key, which is the hockey that I have set up for the light, you know, and I can kind of dim this in and out. I could make it look like it's, you know, kind of flickering. And that way I could have it where, you know, maybe maybe you key like, you know, he here's a noise and he reaches for the light, you know, kind of kind of cover it up and demand out. So it's not so bright where I could just have him holding this and, you know Oh, something's wrong with the flashlight. So that gives me some kind of added functionality. Teoh again, you He doesn't have to say you're speak or anything like that, but we have this element that we can play with to enhance what's happening within this moment within the scene in our story back into Photoshopped. So how do we set up something like the flashlight? Okay, so to show you how to set up that. So this is all one layer. The flashlight is, you know, connected to this arm because it's not gonna in this particular shot. He's not gonna put the flashlight down. It's gonna remain in his hand, so didn't need to be a separate piece. So this is probably a little funky hacking to be what you expected, but we're gonna go into the head folder, and this is just how I set it up for this particular character. We'll get another instance where I have the flashlight and kind of how I arrange the files there. So within the head, we're gonna ignore everything. I created a folder called Left Arm. And if we toil that down, you can see that there's two different things in here. So I have this regular, you know, basic white And all this is is just, you know, I took I took the pen tal I chose, you know, this this color of yellow I did a really, you know, giant brush. And I made sure that it, you know, it wasn't a hard edges. It was a feathered edge. Put it on there and then you can see a knock down the opacity 25%. So if I bump that up all the way, that's what it looked like. I just just clicked, made this giant huge yellow orb. And then I knocked it down to 25%. And so that's one later. That's my flashlight lier. You know, on top of that, I did the same thing. So I just duplicated this layer. I made it less so. It's 11% but the differences in the way that I named it so we have flashlight, flashlight light, and then you know, I put Flicka right here and then all I did again. Same thing with, like, the blink and any other to just to set up the hot key I put in parentheses. The letter l an exclamation point, and I closed my parentheses. So and you can see that something that carries seamlessly over here so that when I had l you know, basically, it's gonna turn off that layer. It's gonna turn out that top layer. We still have that that basic yellow orb that's there. So basically, this is just kind of dimming the flashlight, which is exactly what I wanted. You know, I wanted him to kind of cover it up if he needed to or to have the light kind of flicker in and out. But the light doesn't go completely off. So that's how I set up that one. But let's let's look at another instance, Um, So here's one Were you keys downstairs and, you know, he's kind of exploring around. He's basically, you know, wanting to get the heck out of here. Now we have the flashlight off, but if I hold down the Elke, you know, then we have the beam of light on and it moves with his body. And as you can see here, if I kind of ducked down, you know, this isn't what we would want, so, ideally, should have extended that being out. But, you know, we could always zoom into the scene or, you know, really, for this scene, You know, Yuki wasn't gonna move like too much. This this was this was a fine kind of movement right here. And I don't really have any any major problems with the beam of light, but, you know, I can turn it on and off at will, but just something to think about whenever you're creating something like this. So how did we make this? Well, let's jump into the Photoshopped file you got We get this set up, so we're going to go down into the body. You Obviously, there's his arm. There's his hand, flashlight is in his hand, and that's all one layer because they weren't gonna, you know, be separate. And then the body layer. Yeah, I have this folder cold right arm. And if we twirl that down, this is This is super easy. It's again. Just, um it's just the same kind of thing like I did before where instead of just, you know, plopping down a huge circle Maybe I had a brush that's this size, but it's still that that yellow color so like that. And then all I did was just, you know, draw, draw and just kind of just fill that in and then, you know, dropped it down. Teoh, whatever a past view is that before and then in naming the layer, you know, I name it what it is just because that makes it easy for me to be able to recognize what I'm working with. And then again, just the parentheses. Al exclamation point close that parentheses. That's it. Now you have a beam of light that you can turn on and off, which gives the illusion of a flashlight. And because it's at a low capacity, you know, this is live action film as the background, but it's really cool to be able to kind of get this. You know, this this flashlight effect over film when you obviously you key in the flashlight, everything like they didn't exist. Obviously, the background is all that existed whenever I filmed that, but it really kind of helps a mash the character into the space and make everything look more cohesive. So that's how you go about adding, you know, something, something like that. And obviously, like, you know, we could always you could zoom in on here and, you know, make it more intimate and then we don't worry about you know how it isn't. It isn't filled it up here maybe as much as we want. But, you know, and this goes back to the conversation we had about the frame and keeping things really tight, you know, this is more intimate. It's more spooky and makes for, you know, um, or intense experience or seeing than you know, like that doesn't work farther away. So if you did happen to have a character that doesn't have legs, um, again, that's something that you could explore with at one point I have you know, you he's basically exploring this, um, this abandoned, haunted house. All these creepy things start happening, and at one point there's kind of this like, you know, ghostly kind of entity. So, as you can see here, you know, doesn't have any legs house, this body that just kind of drapes down, but you know, this is perfect If I want to kind of have, like, you know, this ghostly character kind of like, you know, move across the scene or, you know, they're kind of floating there, ethereal and everything so I can show you real quick how I made this. You know, it's it's very simple to put something like that together. OK, so here's this character hears that background. So all I did was plus Shadow because that's you know, just what this character is as my top folder. We still have ahead. We still have a body. So if we go into the head, um, we have this folder that's plus face, background and all that's in there is just the head and all that's telling character animators like this is going to be where the face would be so that you know it's gonna it's gonna put your head tracking on that character's face. And then again, use the pen tool, and I just I always do three origin points, but that's just connecting that the head, you know, to the to the body that so that's all that those do you and then if we go from the head and we go into the body folder, all we have here is just the body. So that's a really simple rudimentary, you know, character set up. But you can see how you can use this in a in a really interesting way, you know? And obviously, you know, you can kind of as you move, the character's gonna move across the screen and kind of float. And again, if you wanted to kind of get in there So it's, you know, more intimate. Er, you know, you can really kind of work with how you want to train that, but super easy set up to get something like this working. It's interesting to see how you can do something like this with this kind of a character where you know we don't have a face, they don't have any eyes. There's no, you know, mouth shape, except for just this basic one. And there's not even any legs or anything like that. But so there's a lot that you can play with, which is fantastic. So now we're gonna look at this one. We're gonna look at this guy. Let's jump into photo shop, though, and check him out. So this was a really early, um, rough past that Yuki, you can see he looks kind of kind of crazy. All of his mouth, They're on different eyes and stuff like that. But basically, the main thing I want to show you here is, um you know, this is where we can kind of start to play with limbs a little bit. So if you want to be able to move those have something that you can do in character Animators. Well, you know, we have his arms out like this, which obviously isn't a natural posture, but it makes it so that we can go into character animator, and you can kind of play around with that. So, you know, now he's kind of floating around in the city. Ariel, you know, space, which it's like, if you wanted that, maybe he was in zero. Gee, that'd be great, but we're going to switch over to the rig for this character, so I'm going to select the top. You know, this is our main, uh, layers faras the hierarchy goes, I'm going to do the pen tool. We're gonna put one and one in this foot and one in this foot. So now we go back over to record. Okay, so now you he's not, you know, moving around. Now he is family planted on the ground, very stationary. So let's look at how we can kind of set up in arm. We have the right arm here, so pick, click on that. There's a few things I can do. So this is a handle, and I'm gonna put this basically in the place where I would click to drag to move the arm. So I'm gonna place that right on the hand. Think this will do it here and then we have sticks. And what sticks do is they basically kind of a good way to think about them is bones. So you know pretty much dragged them wherever you have a bone. And basically what this does is it makes sure that leak wherever you have these, that part of the character isn't gonna bend. We leave this space here where the up the arm would naturally bend. Okay, So basically, what I've done is we have Yuki. We selected his left arm. Yeah, I put the point, um, the handled school. I just put that on here. And then I click on the risks it's attached to. So in this case, the left wrist. Then it clicked on drag a ble, and then we took the stick tour, but one here putting Here's to remember that those kind of actors, bones. So now when we hop over here, um, if I grabbed his hand, you can see that now I can I can move his arm around, so, you know, we could have him, like, you know, kind of like a wave. Um, tuck his arm behind there. You know, maybe he's, like, gonna grab his wallet or something or, you know, it was a little bit nervous. You can see now that we kind of get this functionality with the arm. Um, and all I'm doing is just, you know, clicking on it and moving it under the drag. Your tool here. And this is good to point out to. So we have all these red dots on. That means that all these things you're gonna record whenever I hit the record button you say I had my performance. Um, I'll turn this off. I'll give you I'll give you a demo. That way you can kind of see you see all the different mouths and everything like that. Uh, yeah, sure. Let me Let me just grab my wallet. Okay, so now we have that in there. So I recorded that. And let's say that, you know, and I find it's a little hard to try to do all of this stuff it once. So now that I've done, that'll turn off the face, the eye gaze when keyboard triggers and the lip sing I'm gonna record now is the Drager so and user kind of your options So mouse and touch input. That's good, because I'm gonna click with my mouse to drag his arm around, and then you can decide, you know, after I move it If I once I'm done, you know, clicking. Once I let go of the mouse, you can see that his arm just goes back to where it was originally. Now you can change that. You can hold it in place, so I kind of have him wave. And then I see his arm stays there, so it's really kind of whatever. Whatever you're after, whatever you want. Ah, so Let's seize. And now we're gonna record with just moving his arm. Uh, yes, sure. Let me Let me describe my wallet. Okay, so now we recorded those things. So let's kind of let's let's see how that turned out. Uh, yeah, certain. Let me just certainly wallet. Okay, so that looks pretty good, right? So that's a super super easy way. Teoh again add more functionality if you want to move the arms and stuff like that. And it really it helps when it helps when they're out like this. If you have them kind of tucked into the body, you know, like bad or something, then it's It's really hard, like you can see where the arm overlaps with the backpack here, even though they're separate layers. That starts to get a little hard for the program to kind of differentiate what's what in that sense, so that could be a little tough. So it's it's best to have your arms out like this if you're going to be using them, but you can see even like in other characters. Let's see what we got like in here, you know, obviously like his arms air that way they're not going to move in that shot at all. They're completely stationary and stuff like that. But it works really well. You guys really nervous? He's looking around like, Oh, my gosh. Where the heck am I? Well, you know, I thought I heard something, and that's that works totally fine. The arms don't need to move independently or, you know, have any kind of extra control to them. You know, for me, it really comes down Teoh, you know, kind of a shot by shot basis of what I'm wanting to kind of do in that particular shot in that particular scene in the story. You know, I just It depends on what you're wanting to accomplish. So your assignment for for this class, you know, we want to encapsulate the character's personality through their body language. No vocals. Air speaking. Um, but just create something like this if you want to add, you know, some kind of an element, like the scarf dangle or the flashlight, you know, are really kind of any element if you wanna have, like, there are move or something like that. But just try to incorporate something along those lines into your character it really makes a big difference. So I totally think that's something that you should explore and try out. At the very very least, you know, we're looking for something kind of like this where you he's not going to speak. Your character is not going to speak. So that's what we're after. So just t create like a short little scene that's basically your homework for this class doesn't have to be anything complicated or long you saw last time. I think we did like a 32nd clip. If you want to do something shorter than that, that's totally fine, too. And then, obviously just tried to, you know, keep keep in the context of, you know, maybe two. Maybe you're going to use this animation car final project we create like just a short little sip, you know, snippet of a scene. But if you want to create something entirely new for that, that's totally fine, too. Up to you. But until next time
7. Background + Backdrop: Hi. So welcome back. So today we're gonna be focusing on background and backdrop pretty much mood, atmosphere and tone and how these elements can come together to help create the world of your character. So here is an illustration by one of my favorite artists on shape, um, his illustrations and artwork in general, they really kind of start to provoke a lot of emotions. And you assume, as you look at them and it's really, really easy to construct a place, an idea of what's going on, you really start to kind of place emotions on his imagery. You have this, you know, this one light this fire that's, you know, burning and flickering in the middle of this, you know, obviously a very icy, forlorn kind of landscape, and it looks very unforgiving. It looks very cold. She really have the sense of isolation built up. Plus, it looks like we're in a cemetery. So I feel like he's worked as a really good job of really encapsulating a world encapsulating emotions. And it's and it's really easy to start to kind of build a narrative from that, and his work even features, obviously, you know, characters and stuff like that. This is kind of more of an ethereal kind of character, but you can't help but look at this and you start to you start to place characteristics on this figure, and the only thing you have to go off of is the color palette, you know, kind of the mood, the tone. I mean, all these elements that are already here, Um, that's really all you have to pull from is a viewer. But you already start to make associations based upon those those things with this character that's in front of you. So you see here, obviously now we have, like, you know, a very physical, tangible character. It looks like they're in the middle of nowhere. Maybe it's a desert, something kind of like that. You know, we have this empty tourney, it building. Who knows what's happened to it? Maybe there was a whole blasted into the side of it. Maybe it's just been abandoned and sat there for so long, and the elements have taken their toll on it. I mean, there's a lot of different paths you can kind of go down and our character themselves, you know, they look like they've seen some stuff, too. I mean, it looks like we have, ah, bandage on the arm. And, you know, the clothing looks kind of tattered. So, you know, it looks like they have seen some things they've been through some stuff themselves. And, you know, obviously they're not in the most hospitable places. So you start to ask these questions. How did they get there? What are they doing? Were the going can hear we have ah, character, you know, obviously looks like they're out on a patrol or something because we have of this weapon in their possession. We have another character back here, and then we have this flare that's gone up. And the thing I love about this illustration is it's very much kind of. It's very much on this pivotal moment where, you know, it was the flare shot up by one of these two characters, you know, Are they just trying Teoh, you know, signal where they're add or they're trying to be able to see and, you know, in a really dark night, where is this flare coming from? A character that, you know, we as the viewers we can't even see and maybe they're about to be ambushed. There's a lot of possibilities and possible tension in this moment, and he also does, ah, comic based work, too. So you can see here, you know, you have these really soft shadows and everything. Obviously, it's these two characters sitting out underneath the stars. But even in those panel, you have like this really nice, subtle lighting from the stars. That's, you know, cast on the on the background on the surface that they're laying on, and it's it's very subtle. It's very soft, and it lends itself to really kind of, you know, making this feel very inviting visually, and it makes it feel it makes it feel kind of encapsulated. It makes it feel cozy, in a sense, like you could really kind of, you know, insert yourself into this obviously like private conversation between two friends to lovers . We're not sure we don't have that kind of insight into that, but you feel like you could insert yourself into this this very kind of intimate conversation, and here again you have, you know, this character and because we get a sense of you know where they live, Well, that obviously tells us a lot about who that character is, you know. So from the background alone from, you know, their living space, we get a sense of, you know, how did they keep their place? Is it Messi is a dirty? Is it organized? Is it you know, chaotic? Um, you know what they wear? How did they kind of, you know, You know, where are they physically when they're at home? You know, it's obviously they're kind of like lounging and like, you know, things bed space, which I guess is the only place he could really sit down aside from the floor. But, you know, there's no place to hang the coat there. It looked like maybe there's a coat hanger here, but the character places it on the floor, just kind of in a heap. And those are the things that you know. They're surrounding our character, but they're important. They've been considered by the artist, and they already are telling us more about this character. So flipping to something different, but still very character based is Dexter, and he's a really interesting character for a variety of reasons. It's it's interesting that depending upon what's happening in this show depending upon the scene. Um, Dexter looks very, very different, and this is absolutely intentional, because is the viewer were, you know, grappling with And if you haven't seen the show, Dexter is a serial killer, but we use the viewer. We're grappling with the fact that he's a killer betting on the Kills, bad people. So it's this kind of gray, you know, Gray area between. Well, is he a bad guy? Is he a good guy? Doctors in every other sense, Pretty much a very good person. He's a very good father, you know, It was a good husband, but he murders people so great to hear this. This duality that's very much reflected in all the different shots and and lighting is is very much a key to how this happens and is executed within this television show. So here, like, you know, we have we have some pretty basic lighting. Um, in texture. Doesn't look, you know, he he doesn't look menacing by any means. And then, obviously, like I said, he could be a good husband. And he can be. He's a He's a very like sweet good person. Um, and you've really relate him as as a viewer and obviously that you want to, because he's Air protagonist. But again. So you have lake, you know, very neutral lighting. Obviously, they're outside. It's daytime, but, you know, it's it's very much the norm. But then we go to something like this where we see you know, Dexter's killer side. Um, now we're in the dark and you know, we have this like light source that's coming from above. And so now his face is cast in shadow, and this immediately changes the way that we perceive this character. You know, his hair is a little, you know, maybe a little bit more unkempt or whatever, but not considerably so. Obviously, he's wearing different things, But even so, it's really the here the way that the light is playing on this character's face that really alters how the viewer, you know, how we is. The viewer see this character and again here, like the hair is on camped, and obviously he looks very sweaty. He looks like been intense moment or something's just happened, you know, But you and we don't know what's obviously going on because this is just a still, but you just have this very, very subtle light source over here. But you have these, you know, it creates these very dark, sharp shadows that kind of, you know, really, really kind of carve out his eyes and everything, and that makes him look a lot more menacing. That makes him look a lot more dominant, obviously. Here, nine time again. We have a hard, you know, brightly for both of these characters. But we're still getting that that dark shadows kind of carved into his face, and it really, really considerably alters again. How we see Dexter. So here's a few examples. So he's in his home, and we haven't kind of a neutral soft light. And what that does is again calling back toe legs on shapes, comic. And, you know, some of the other stuff already mentioned with Dexter. I mean, this isn't in an atmosphere that is, it's inviting. It's calm, you know? I mean, there's nothing out of the ordinary here, and it's just that soft light that really, really does it to kind of, you know, paint that picture for us and again here, you know? Okay. His faces is in shadow. and it's dark. But again, we still have this very soft white and it diffuses like any tension that we might otherwise have with Dexter's face. So again, like, you know, he doesn't look menacing. He doesn't look like a killer at all. But, you know, when we flip over here, whatever. Now we have this this obviously very intentional hard light. I mean, it's very sharp. He creates these very sharp shadows in turn. What that does is it makes everything look sinister. It makes it look a lot sharper. Harsher. It's certainly not as inviting as you know the scene before. I mean, if you just walk in here and sit in this chair and then Dexter would be like staring at you . But here, you know, just even the lines on the walls the way that his face is cast in shadow. And obviously you have, you know, his weapons and things here. All of this just comes together to build this this, you know, the space and, you know, really play up this moment. Play of what's happening here. I mean, obviously this is much more inviting toe walk into then this. And obviously this isn't a still from the show. But again, the way the light is coming up from below, it's creating these very sharp shadows, and it makes him look menacing. It makes him look like the killer that, well, he is. If we flip over to alien, it's kind of a similar thing. We don't really have so much, you know, drastic, you know, hard, light, soft light kind of going on. But we certainly have an overall tone and mood created from I'm going to say, probably a lack of light. You know, the over the whole film overall is, is very. It's very dark and obviously there in space. You know, if they have celestial bodies that thereby like a son or something, obviously that would, you know, put out light. But otherwise they really only have, like, the artificial light created from their ship. And one of the interesting things about alien in general is it's kind of this lo fi sci fi where you know it's advanced. It's in the future. But everything's like really old and analog looking. So that's a very interesting juxtaposition to begin with. But so here we have this low light at this point in the film Sigourney Weaver. Her character, Ripley is basically waiting for the alien to enter the space, and she's just kind of preparing herself. But obviously, you know, it's it's eerie. It has this ambiance of, you know, it's It's unsettling. It's it's tense, but not in Not in the way that Dexter is where it's very late, kind of in your face it Sharp Lake There's something quietly disturbing about you know what's going on in this image, and here this is again from alien. Whenever you know, this character enters the airways the air shafts, looking for the alien for the creature. Um, and this is it. This is all the light that he has. And obviously we're getting these, like, you know, hard, hard shadows and everything. You know, it's really kind of carving out his face like it did, Dexter. But the thing here is just the lack of light. You know, that really becomes kind of lake, your lifeline. In a way, that's the only thing that keeps us from being in this pitch black like we have, you know, on either sides of the character, the frame, and so that makes this scene very tense. We can see that, you know, obviously the way that it's framed like it's very narrow. It's very claustrophobic feeling, Um, and he's in there with this thing. So all of this is adding to really kind of play up. You know, the intensity of the moment, the intensity of the scene and the horror of being being trapped on the ship with this thing and the other thing, that makes it even more terrifying. I think a lot of the Thea, the setting and everything it's this very kind of industrial looking kind of aesthetic, you know, it's nothing's does. Nothing is really designed. The thing was, nothing has this aesthetic quality where it's like, Oh, this is really nice And it was designed just to look pretty like it's It's very much it's functional and that's it. There's there's no ornamentation to it And if you look at the alien, you know it too. Even though it's organic, it has this very industrial kind of, you know, kind of almost manufactured quality to it. I mean, it very much blends in with, like all this piping and this like metal grading and everything, and that makes it almost even more terrifying because it's like this camouflage that it, you know, somehow magically has because it blends in with all of the stuff and because it's dark and it's black itself. I mean, it can hang out up in the shadows, have been here and I mean all again, all these air, all intentional things that are being done. Teoh really play up the horror. I mean to make use of you are even more uncomfortable because it's like, Well, now there's this thing. They're not only is there this horrible thing, but it's like, you know, everything's dark, it's dark, everything's, you know, all industrial looking. So's it, So blends in it. Just all these things have consciously affect us in the way that you know, we see these things. So it's interesting. You know, there's so many different approaches you can take to really kind of enhance your character . And obviously the world that they exist in, you know, should play off of who they are and should, you know, enhance the situation that there any. So these are all really, really great things to consider and keep in mind and jumping back. Teoh Rebecca, Sugar Steven Universe. You know, the backgrounds were usually they're very bright, very cheery. They're very colorful. And that plays off of Stephen. I mean, he's that way. That's just kind of his personality. Um, in the backgrounds, absolutely mirror that. And just to give you an example of different color palettes, different lighting situations and how that can affect him. Your mood. This so minister, you this image three different times, and it's gonna be different times a day and just different lighting, and you can see how it changes your perception of that space. You know, obviously they're all very different. But it's interesting how just changing the lighting, just changing the colors. It's the same image, Um, but they all have a very, very different vibe and different feel to them. So with that said, I'm going to jump over into my movie, and I made this all the character animator. But this is my film Yuki. Ah, and for the backgrounds, everything's either, you know, it's either photographic or or ah, film. And I did this intentionally because I had a space in mind that I thought would work really great for what I wanted. my story to be you. These very anxious. And I had this, like, derelict, abandoned house and the architectures, like, very different, very strange. So worked really well. And it was It was something I want to play around with, you know, medium wise and everything. But so you can see here already like we have little light, you know, there's stuff hanging out. There's all these chords and everything and these, like old flyers. And that kind of stuff in this all really creates an atmosphere for this character to be in . Um, and obviously, you know, just different shots, too, you know, really kind of play that up. I'm gonna happen to photo shop here and just kind of show use. Obviously, we have Yuki here, you know, he's in. He's in the basement of this building. We have kind of this ominous red and I just Everything's everything's all old and abandoned , its creepy. It's dark. And all of this is, is playing up in playing off of this character. So, you know, obviously he is very anxious, scared, not happy where he is at in this environment, this background is absolutely enhancing that, and it's giving this character a place to essentially live in because you can see if I drop out the background, it's It's just it's it's not the same. And it's not the same just because it's like, Well, now there's no background. It's it's just it makes a huge difference between having this character and then having his character, like in a space. I mean, it makes a tremendous difference Visually, it gives us a reason to understand why this character feels this way. Just by looking at this, we can already, you know, we can already understand. OK, yeah, I get it. I would probably be creeped out and freaked out in the basement to, and this is an older version. This is like one of my first character designs for Yuki. But just to show you that color is really important to you, you know? So this is the original, you know, just just basic color palette. Um, but obviously, I can't just drop this into here, so, you know, I would I would film this scene and then, you know, obviously created this illustration. I have this color palette to go off of, but I have to tweet the color so that, you know, this character fits within the space because obviously, you know, this doesn't make sense and it doesn't make sense for a few reasons. Um, one. The colors need to be darker because this characters in a darker space, there's less lights that helps them blend and more. And then to obviously, this character over here is shaded, and that really, really helps a lot to kind of a mash them within the environment. And it's just a lot more cohesive looking. But you can see even with this, you know, illustration this character here where, you know, even I don't really fit in. If I move them down here and now we have this, you know this layer that's the flashlight covering your head already be there becoming a little bit more integrated into the scene, and it feels like they belong there a little bit more. Obviously, the colors would still need to change. Shading would help, but just the fact that now they're underneath the beam of this flashlight and we see that difference That just helps kind of bring them into that into that world a little bit more, and obviously, here downstairs, you know, scared and everything like that. But just just another example of, you know, I mean, obviously the illustration, The drawing itself is fine. It's it's good. And again we get a lot. We get a lot of who this character is just just based on what we're seeing here. But as soon as we drop them into a space like this, it are interested. It prompts a lot from the viewer, you know, and again, going back to likes on shaves work. You start to you already creating a narrative based on what you're seeing and how this character is reacting already coming up with assumptions as to you know, what's happening. Why is this character there? You know, in these kinds of things, you already started to put these questions out there and then, you know, answer them yourself. And so here is this lake. Ah, the kind of skeletal wolf character that comes up in the film. Um, and again, same thing. You drop out the background. It's just, you know, it's it's the character, and there's nothing wrong with that. But obviously, this enhances it and begins to tell us a lot more. Um, And even if you change the background like we put this character, you know, over something like that, you know, it changes our relationship. It changes what we think is probably happening in the scene, you know, and even during the day or whatever. And it's not that this looks bad by any means. Obviously the colors or, you know, they gave me a little funky, but but it changes your perception of what's happening with that character. And we could put this character in something that doesn't even make any sense for them. Like, you know, obviously, this is probably how I would feel to you if I had this like big, goofy, happy son buying me. Obviously, these two don't go together. I mean, the sun starts to become humorous instead of scary, because it's just it's just, you know, one extreme, and then the other or even this is just again it. You know, Could this thing exist in this like forest and, you know, be this creepy entity that lives there, share. I mean, that's a narrative that I just came up with, and, you know, it makes sense. And that kind of adds this like you know, creepy element to it. Otherwise, it's just like what's going on? It's almost just humorous. Especially. We have a list like Big Goofy Grant on the sun up here. So, you know, background mood tone, atmosphere. These were all very, very crucial things. You know, whether it's, you know, in filmmaking, a static illustration or, you know, if it's an animation, it's it's very important. It's very crucial. So many of you a short assignment. Obviously, we've been working on our characters. We've been doing the, you know, bits of animation here and there. We've done movement. We've done, you know, lip sinking and talking. Now, let's kind of give them a world or a space to exist in the same. It's gonna be pretty open ended. Um, you can use, you know, life footage. So if you want to do film, if you want to make something in photo shop, you wanna use photography collage? Um, just a sketch. I mean, really, it's completely up to you what medium that you're interested in, as you could see. I mean, here, you know, this is digital illustration, and then, you know, photography and film for the background. So just choose a medium. Any medium that you're happy with totally doesn't matter. But your assignment is to design a background of some sort that enhances who your character is. So something that plays up, you know, obviously the traits of your character. You know, where might your character be? So, for example, you know where your character might live. You know, if your character was out and about, you know, what part of town would they be in? Would be a good part of town would be a bad part of town. Would we see them at like an ice cream parlor? We see them in Lake, you know, Super industrial, scary, bad part of town. Where Blake would we see them in an abandoned building when receive them in a new building ? I mean, just try to find and pick something that you think really relates to your character. And that's the other thing, too. You can find something if you want to you. If you want to do Google search, that's, you know, like an image search that's totally fine. Or if you want to make something, it's completely up to you. Just try to find something that fits, who character is and, you know, seems like a world that they would belong in. And if you want to shade them So you know, if you have a situation like this where you strayed them and you might change their colors , so they kind of, you know, fit into that a little bit more Feel free to. But you certainly don't have Teoh if you have your your character if you're working and photo shopper illustrator. But if you have your character, um that you that you built that you set up that we brought into character animator and that's the one that we can have rigged up. If you want to just plop a background behind them, then when you open this up and character animator again, it will automatically pull in this new image. So it'll basically it'll automatically since that you made a change to your original document and added in, So that should bring in your background for you to have, and then you can actually animate. On top of that, if you want to create an animation, great. If you want to just turn in a still image, that's totally fine to you. It's completely up to you BSO background backdrops or just find something that helps kind of create an atmosphere tone that would that would really be the world that your character would exist in.
8. Walk Cycle: eso Welcome back. So now we're in our final class. Um, as far as kind of working through character animator and the animation will have another class after this, we're going to delve into kind of our final project, and I'm some tips and tricks to help you out with that. But this class, we're gonna be focusing on the walk cycle. There's a few things that we're going to need to do this in character animators. So right now we're in photo shop. See, I've got Yuki here. You really wanna have a side profile of your character, and it doesn't have to be as finished as other character design that we work done. It's good to do these turnarounds for characters anywhere, just just to be able to take advantage of the walk cycle and to kind of get a sense of how it works because we're gonna build it a little differently anyway, because you can see here. I mean, you know, we have our main folder, You know, this is the title of it. I have my background layer here. Turn that off. And if I twirl that down, you know, we still we have our head and body. Nothing's changed in the head group here, so that's all fine. But if we go down to the body, so we're gonna have a few different things here. So the only difference between how you would normally rig this up and how you're going to do it for the walk cycle is you want to make sure that the legs and the arms are their own layers. So, you know, we have the right leg, the left leg with the right arm and the left arm, and you can see if I take away the body. So that's all we have here. So you know, we have this arm is its own. This one's its own, and it's the same with the legs. They're just their own pieces. So that's what we wanna have. And you want to put those layers inside of their own little group and you're just going to plus sign and then the corresponding appendage that it is, and again, all the plus Sign is doing is telling character animator that this is this is ah, layer that can warp independently, and it's not gonna, you know, try to drag the body with it so. But that's all you have to do to set this up. So let's go ahead and jump into character. Animator. So we have Yuki here and, um, you know, make sure that your top level is selected, and then from there, we're going to go down and we're gonna hit. We're gonna click on the body when we're going to grab the handle toll here, Um, basically gonna add these data points. So this is gonna be smack dab in the middle about where the belly button would be. Unit click over here to corresponding tag, and it's gonna attack. That is waste. They're gonna put another one down here about where the legs would connect to the hips. You're a tag that we're gonna want to click on each of our appendages. So, like, left arm and where we were gonna wanna come down here. So let the staple tool and we're just gonna attach it where it would attach to the body, turn the body. Ah! Ah! So this is gonna connect about right there on the Internet. Lear back on. And we're gonna do the same thing for the legs. So we have our way again. Staple tool, right leg. And I'm gonna go in, turn this layer off and I'm going to turn the body off on this one is going to connect right here. Okay. Turned his back on. So after you've done that, you're gonna want to come up here and you're gonna want to select the whole head layer. And rather than select this handle to put a little data point in here, we're just gonna go right on ahead for the entire head. We're just gonna select the neck. So what that's gonna do is that's gonna have the head Bob up and down on. And as the body does with walk cycle, it's gonna help everything look more cohesive, more in tune. And from there, we're gonna want to select our entire puppet. So the top most level that you can select and down here under behaviors we're gonna add walk. Okay, so now you see that we get all these options, um, for walking. There's a whole bunch of stuff we can dig into their. But before we do that, it's good to come up to the top here and then where it says attached style not to do, hinge. That seems to work. Well, obviously you can play around with those as much as you want. That's just the one that seems to, you know, kind of kind of give you the best results. Now that we've done all that, um, let's go ahead and add him to a new scene or at your character to new scene and kind of see what's going on. Okay, So obviously, this is a now what we want, you can see that we're starting to get somewhere, so we're gonna go ahead hot back over to the rig. So let's start with the legs first. We'll start with left leg, and we're gonna grab the handle tool again, and we're gonna put a point right about where the knee would be, and then you're gonna correspond. You attack the corresponding thing over here. So left knee, we're gonna put a point where the ankle would be tagged that over here. We're gonna put a point for the hell and we're gonna do one for the toe. We're gonna do that for the right leg as well. So I'm gonna go ahead and turn off the left leg. Just a little bit easier to see, so the knee would be right about there. That tag right ankle the hell on right toe. So let's see how maybe that's looking. Okay, so we've still got some problems. We still get some stuff to kind of work on. Um, I don't know why we lost one of our slaves because I had it turned out. See, it's easy to make little mistakes like that. Um, they're super easy fixes, but it can kind of leave you stop for a little while. Okay, So now we've got two legs that's looking pretty good. It's OK, you know, it's not not bad by any means. So let's go ahead and bring up the arms. So the left arm and we're gonna do here is basically do an elbow and then a wrist. I'm ready. The same thing for the right arm had turned all of these off, so I can see so elbows about there, and the rest is right there. I'll make sure to turn his back on this time. Hop over into our scene, looking a little bit better. Let's see if we can kind of dig in. Here is a little bit though. And see we can do so we can change the stride length, which it's probably good. At 60 we can change the step speed, so that's already starting to look a little bit better. Body speed, arm swing will knock that down because we don't really need it. Uh, crazy. So there's things you can do here. We can change the arm angle. So, you know, you could have it be kind of like a zombie blood, a kind of different things you could do. I'm gonna have them tucked down to back to the sides just because that means that makes more sense for Yuki's character. Yeah, so it looks pretty good. Elbow bend. So we could even kind of make him look like a little timid. We could have has had his hands out here, But I wanna break his elbow host like something like that. Looks pretty good. Obviously, you can see that. You know, I have to go back into Photoshopped because his scarf is now, you know, over his arms and would probably look better if it was underneath this arm. So But you get the idea first. For sure. You know, you could even like toughies and further. And that looks pretty good. We're just gonna leave them down here for now. I think that looks pretty good. Okay, so you can play with strength, so you can kind of really, you know, bump up. What's going on? This works pretty good, because given his character, I mean, the way that he walks is really light and timid. That just goes with you. Yuki is so this is a pretty pretty good set up for him. It's kind of these timid, you know, trap. It steps in this, like dark space. I know the other thing that you can change. If you do body speed, you got 100%. You can actually have your character walk across the screen, so that's pretty awesome. And we'll look at that in a second. If you change the start, toe left and right, arrow keys, you'll be able to control which direction that your character moves. So pretty exciting. Okay, I get you keep back again. So that's good. So now you can see that, you know, if I change the body speed again will bump it up to 100 so you can walk off the screen. Now when I do the arrow keys, I can't control his his walk, and I can actually have him walk right off of the screen. So that's pretty great. This is a new ah, you know, this is newly introduced into character animators, so this is great. This is a fantastic feature. Um, I haven't gotten to play around with it to super much, but obviously there's a lot that you can do with it. So, you know, that's pretty cool. I mean, you know, I could have him kind of, you know, some over looks like there's a lot of stuff on the other thing. We can change, too, his this style of his walk. So I'm gonna search this back to immediately that we he's kind of walking on his own so we could have kind of, like, kind of us slumped walk, you know, and this totally just depends on your on your character, for sure. You know, we could do strut, you know, it's like he's a little bit more confident. Here we go. He's got some swagger, so that looks pretty great. You could have him run, obviously want to play the stuff so that it was it was faster. You can see there's a lot of there's a lot of things that you can play around with with here and really, you know, kind of work this to to suit your characters style, to suit their personality because, obviously, you know, depending upon who they are, they're gonna move very differently. You know, like a character that's, you know, a strong warrior. Super confident. Everything is gonna move like the complete opposite of how Yuki moves. But this is great. This is another, you know, tool in your arsenal if you want, if you want to call it that. But this is fantastic that this is something that you can do and character Animator. So yeah, And then obviously at this point, you know how to, you know, hit the record button you would do, you would normally do, and then it would be the same same process of export, and you could send it to, you know, media encoder. If you want to just have this as it is and it's done or panji and wave, he wanted to kind of toss it out into, um into after effects. But basically, So your assignment for this class toe have for the next one is just Just do a simple walk. Cycle doesn't have to be anything too complex or crazy. But convey who your character is through the walk. So no dialogue or anything like that. Just focus on conveying your character simply through the walk. And if you want to kind of delve into it and you play around that and see, maybe there's some added thing you can throw on there that you really want or, you know, just just have fun with it. I think that's the big thing, is just to have fun with it. But that's your assignment for next time. Ah, and then from there we're gonna be delving into the final project and kind of taking the animations that we've already made and composing a scene with, um, so we want to try to tell some kind of a little story, and it could be super short. We'll try to use that we have already made. If you want to make new stuff for it, that's totally awesome. But we'll delve into that more in the next class. So for now, just focus on, you know, making a walk cycle for your character that represents their personality. So next time
9. Telling a Story: Hey, so welcome to telling a story. So this is going to kind of be the culmination of everything that we've done so far and our final project. We're gonna be using all the elements that we've learned over the course of this class, and we're gonna kind of bring it all together and basically come up with, like, a short little snippet or seen that features the characters that we created in this class and, you know, kind of pulls from all the different storytelling elements that we've we've learned, you know, different visual things that we have learned basically kind of covering everything that that we've covered. But I'm gonna give you a few little snippets a few little additional pieces of advice to kind of, you know, have as options to kind of bring everything together. You know, one of those is so, you know, here we're in character, animator, and, you know, I already have this scene here that we didn't a previous class. Uh, yeah, so that's great. That's totally fine. That works. But let's say that, um, let's say I'm recording with a different type of microphone. Says you could tell like that was the microphone on my computer doesn't sound that great, which again this is fine if you want to just use that for, you know, whatever you you make for your final project or whatever, that's totally fine. But if you happen to have an additional microphone and stuff set up, then there's a way that we can utilize that. And if this is something you're interested in, you know, this is totally in a side. But my set up is basically have my Mac. I have an audio interface. I have, you know, Ah, boom. To put my Maikon, I have my mike set up. And then, you know, aside from all of that, there's a lot of us be Mike's that just plug directly into your computers. You could kind of you could kind of, you know, for go everything that I just mentioned and just have the USB mic. But one crucial thing that I would add on that they're pretty cheap on Amazon would be a pop filter. What that does is you just you put that in front of your mic and, ah, basically, there's a lot of air that comes out of your mouth when you do peas and tease, which can create kind of a, you know, a popping kind of sound when you're recording into a microphone. So getting that and putting that between you and the mic helps eliminate that, and it makes your audio sound Ah, a lot smoother and a lot more professional overall. So it's really, really cheap, great piece of equipment that if you're gonna do a lot of, like voice acting or voice overs or anything really audio related singing, for example. Totally up to you. But it's it's a great thing to have in your studio. But let's say that I recorded a piece of audio separately by itself. You know, maybe I recorded in Garage Fan or Logic Pro or you know, any other kind of any other audio program, and I want to incorporate it into this. So it's super easy and simple on you to do is file import, just like we're gonna bring in like a photo shop file or we're gonna bring in an illustrator file, and from there, all I have to do is track down my audio file, so you're gonna want it to be a specific audiophile type you're gonna want to be a dot ai f You know, there's auto, other audio file types dot mp three that wave, but you're gonna want you're gonna want to export it, and it should give you the option. All those different options. When you're exporting from whatever audio program you're working in to save it is a dot ai f. We'll do this one. This one sounds good. So I think many tracked I import it. You can see up here, it's it's got it sitting right here, and this is exactly what I titled it. So all I have to do is drag that and just plop it in here, okay? And so here's the title down here and this is the audio file itself. Now I'm gonna move it to right here. That way it doesn't interfere with what we've already we've already recorded. Obviously like if I If I go over it and play it, you'll notice that nothing's happening up here. There's no mouth, movements or anything, and that's how it's supposed to be. So So here's Randi. We plopped in our audio file, which is down here, so we're going to select our puppet which is UK, and we're going to go down to lip sync. We're gonna hit the red button here, so that's going to be armed to accord the lip sinking with the audio. And then I'm gonna go ahead and command select that so that we have it selected as well. And then all we're gonna do is timeline and go down to compute lip sync from audio. So now it's going to run through the short process. And now when we play this back, Did you see that war, any of the wolves or through the howling or Okay, so you can tell that doesn't look quite great. And that's not so much the process that we just went through. That's this is a very early puppet, so it's kind of limited in the mouth shapes that it has. But just as before, you know, we can expand this out. We can go over to where audio is And if you want to, you know, kind of play around with this and, you know, maybe you need something here or a change out. You know, I just double click to bring this up so you can kind of you know, do the same way you would if he recorded it. And here for this section, youth isn't moving because we haven't recorded any movement. But we could easily turn that off. We could do the face, the eyes. You want keyboard triggers. You could do that. We won't do that. You can turn on my camera. Let me turn on a light real quick and get my microphone out of the shot. But so you know, now we can. Now we could record something. Did you see that wolf? Any of the wolves or through the howling Or Okay, so that's super rough. We could totally clean that up and make that way better. But you get the Jesse any of the wolves Are you the howling? Or again Could be better. But for the purposes of what we're doing, you know, that's a super quick way to kind of, you know, show you how you can bring in separate audio and then, you know, be able to just, you know, act out how you normally would with the facial tracking, and you can see that we're already like we're already getting results. Obviously, we want to go in and fine tune that if I was going to do this better, I would, you know, get my hair out of my face, and then it would be fantastic. And then obviously from there, when you have a scene that you're happy with, ah, you would want to go to file export and then you could, you know, either do it p and G and wave that way that you could open it up and play with it and after effects. Or if you want to go the more simpler route, you know, just do it Adobe media encoder. And then you have the file and it'll be good to go. Obviously, there's no background here. I would encourage that you put a background in, or if you're gonna play with it and after effects, then leave the background out. And you know, you kind of deal with that whenever you get into the program. But it's it's really how deep you want to delve into it. But really, you can do a lot of really fantastic stuff just in character innovator by itself. You don't really have to go into after effects unless you really want to start getting like super fancy and, you know, adding all kinds of different stuff around you care during all that kind of stuff. So that said so we should at this point in the class, you should have these different little animation files. So we should have our facial tracking lip sinking with our, you know, a single piece of dialogue. At the very least, we should have some background atmospheric where a little scene or, you know, maybe they're just standing around and it looks kind of spooky. What have you We have our walk cycle, and then we have our body movement. So we have all these little things that we put together. But how are we going to combine that? How are we gonna kind of, you know, put all those together? It's not really something that we can do in character Animator, but there's a lot of really great super easy programs. So we've Adobe Premiere Pro. If you want to use that, there's Final Cut Pro. If you're on a Mac or this is the one that we're going to use theirs I movie. If you're on a Mac I movies really super, you know, intuitive. It's easy to use. I know there's PC equivalence, but we're gonna jump in tow. I movie. So all I've done because I click this button up here? Yeah, and it brings up the same kind of, you know, it brings up stuff that I could import. But since I've already done that, we're not going to deal with that. So I have my clips here. This is one earlier that I did in an earlier class. Uh, I'm not really liking this. Uh, hello. Does anyone in here go? Okay. So this is something else I want to point out. You notice that I have all of this left over from this This animation that I exported where nothing is happening and I have that click it the end Whenever I finished recording. So jumping into character Animator. Okay, so this is the original. This is it. This is that original clip right here. Uh, not really liking this, So we have all of that saved here. We have all that done. Now, the reason that we have all that extra spaces because we have we haven't set here that it's gonna be 30 seconds long. So when we exported it. Everything that is, you know, highlighted here like this is all kind of great out. This is what it exported. Now we can fix this in one of two ways. We could either go in here and we could change that. So this is about it ends it basically 11 seconds. So we could go in here. We could change this to 11. Boom. Okay, so now when we export, it's only gonna be this portion of stuff here. So that's the one way we could do it. That gives you less editing to dio. Um, after you've exported your animation the other way that we can do it is so like with this, we have it stuck in there. You know, I could re export that clip, and then I wouldn't have to deal with that. But it's also just is easy to pick here, you know? I know. I want to get rid of this little clip down here of audio whenever I ended the recording. No, I have to do is just go to modify and split clip and boom. I can highlight that hit delete. And now we have this entire clip here, and we're good to go. So you can see here. You know, I have this clip. I have this clip. I have this clip. These clips are from my film that I did using character Animator. So they already have a bunch of different clips that have been put together and in the audio is, you know, there's music, tracks and stuff. So this is a lot more refined and finished, then this is but you don't need to do the same level of polishers. Thies, this is totally fine. So you'll just have a bunch of different little clips like that that you can kind of put together kind of like this and you'll end up with a scene, you know, along these lines and again doesn't have to be this polished, but that's fine. So to kind of give you an idea of what we're looking for for a final project, You know, we're gonna watch these two clips, and they don't have to be this long, obviously, but it will give you kind of a sense of you know what we're looking for. Okay, so that was one shot that could have been, you know, are beginning one where We had our lip sinking in our facial tracking, and that's it. So that that's great. You're me. You e t reincorporated a walk cycle. We have our lip sinking because we have some dialogue in there and we have some body movement. So that's great, My boys. No, no. Okay. And you can see for that last quote there, that's literally just having the character look around having some body movement where he's , like, kind of shaking or whatever. And it's the background that's actually changing. But it makes it seem like he's kind of, you know, slowly, like, you know, spinning around this room. Um, it really plays up kind of that, that fear and anxiety that he's feeling in that moment. But all that is it's just a video clip of, you know, just just spinning around a room basically. So I mean, that's something, you know, given iPhone or a smartphone of any kind, you could just record that. Put it in the background. Basically, you have that. I'm just trying to show you kind of, you know what you can do with what we've already learned, how you can incorporate different things. And again if you just want to use what you've made in the class and put together. That's fine. If you want to kind of go above and beyond and, you know, maybe make some new stuff or play around with pudding, like, you know, film footage in there. We're adding onto whatever you already made in any way. I mean, truly, this guy's the limit. Do what you want regardless of you know how far you decide that you want to go or whatever . I mean, feel free to share anything with me as you're working on it. And again, I'm on Twitter at Dizzy Mingo. But I'd love to see stuff that's in progress. Or if you have questions, you can reach out to me there. I'm more than happy to let give you any feedback. Take a look at what you're working on or answer any questions that you have that we're gonna look at this last clip here too. And this is a little bit more just so you can get a sense of what you can Dio You okay? You, uh, meet you. I'm not liking this meaty. Uh uh. Okay, So obviously there's There's a few things going on in here. You know, we have, like, have some camera work, but like this, you know, this could be a walk cycle that we worked on. We just zoom in on his head. Same thing here. Just you know him over a background and, you know, having him walk towards the camera, we can hear walk cycle. And you could have two characters basically going on at once. So some of these things going to be a little a little tricky, like for having him, like, you know, basically, I'm just moving and all I do is I'm making Yuki bigger. And that's something I did in after effects or here. Like having the two characters together. That's something I compiled in after effects. But like this, you know where we have him, like, you know, after he gets scared, every sustain their breathing like that's something you could do. Character animator. Fantastic. And that's just a shot. And then here is that you know, that shot we have so we could do the walk cycle with the flashlight. Obviously, this is a little bit more fancy, You know, this is adding some, you know, kind of film effects. Not expecting you to do anything like that. You know, here's a shot that we could do to as well, where you know he looks behind him whenever he hears that creepy or this. This is a shot to that You easily do in character animator with dialogue and having him be freaked out. Same thing here having that quick, creepy thing, you know, kind of fly across the screen. That's something you probably need to do more in after effects. But but you get the idea. There's a lot that you can do bare bones. You don't have to do anything fancy. Obviously, this has, you know, and it'd audio work to really make the voice work sound like it exists in that space. We have music tracks, so there's that kind of stuff. You don't have to add those things. And again, like if you're interested in and kind of adding, you know we have the character walk towards you or multiple characters on the screen at once. That really starts to get into after effects territory, which I don't want to delve into you because it's a you know you can get complicated and I feel like that's That's more if that's a course in it of itself, just to show you kind of what you can do with character. Animator. I think this, you know, kind of nicely illustrates that. But I've shown you how to bring audio that you record outside of character and an animator into the program, which is exactly what I did with this. So that's definitely an option that you know you can take advantage of if you want. In addition to that, even just adding like a subtle background track music so audio network has been searched by mood. You can search by, you know, genre type of instruments, really, really all kinds of different tags, and it's it's a really great resource. There's a lot of fantastic, just fantastic music, you know, with or without vocals. I mean, you could really find whatever you're looking for on here, and it's all free to use in any way. So you know it. Whether it's just for personal use for a student project, you're gonna put it up online. You're going to use it in a film festival or anything like that. All of this music is, um, is copyright free. So that's really great. Yes, A musical styles, mood, emotion, instruments. It's It's a super super fantastic resource. So this is definitely what I would look into. This is where I get all of my, um, music stuff unless I'm composing it myself. But if you're not into doing that kind of thing, then this is This is a great place to go. This is definitely a very quick, easy route. So jumping back into my movie So, you know, if I decided that you know these these are the two clips that I wanted. Maybe, you know, I don't want this one, but you know that this works for me. This, you know, So just imagine, you know, here's here's my walk cycle audio that states say this is the finished, like, little little scene that I wanted to you Very easy. All you do is just you would go to file, share and then have it is a file, and you could title it whatever you want. So you keep your character animator class final or something like that probably probably make it a little bit more eloquent than that. And you know, it's really all yet to do. Everything is already pretty much here tells you how big it's going to be. Its 29 seconds and I have to do is hit next, and it will, you know, ask me, You know what I want? Title it If I want title it something different and where do I want to save it to you? So I could easily say, You know, I'm gonna put it operated in in this this folder or I'll put it on my desktop. And then from there, it's just saving it and it'll, you know, Go ahead and render it out. And then there you go. You have your finished projects, all of your clips, air together, and it's really, really simple. Easy to do so if you have I movie, I would take advantage of it. There's actually a lot that you can do, and I'm moving. So it's a pretty good program for video editing and then even for like, you know, incorporating it with your animation workflow, so that pretty much covers it. I don't can't think of anything else had really, you know, kind of kind of throw out toe. Add as faras things you could incorporate your workflow, but those were all great. So outside audio I movie to kind of compile things. So the only assignment that you have for, you know, after this because this is our pretty much our final class. It's just a work on your final animation, you know, putting together all of your clips again if you want to go back, and ADM or enemy more to, you know, kind of bring into your final animation seeing that we're gonna be working on. But otherwise you had just, you know, continue working on on your little animations. Bring everything together if you want to add music or something like that, you know? Go for it. You don't feel like you have Teoh. It can be super minimal if you want. But if you want to, you know, add more and get fancy with it. That's totally cool. Yeah, And be sure once you finished it, you know, share it online. Make sure you use your social media. Share it with me if you want. Teoh definitely shared on the class page. That way, you know, everybody can see what you're working on. They can see the finished piece and you can get feedback on it. Yeah, there's not. Just keep working, keep trucking on it. And I really look forward to seeing what you make.
10. Outro: Hi. So this isn't so much a class. It's just kind of a well, first bit Congratulations for finishing the course and just kind of an outro. So you learn to do anything, really? Store Iwas our animation wise can be extremely daunting. So I mean, super kudos to you for being ableto you know, jump into it, dig into it and really make some awesome work. Um, I'm so excited to see what you guys dio what you continue to do as you go forward. I just want to get you a little bit of, I guess, professional advice going forward. So there's obviously there's a lot more than you can dig into with character animator. I mean, you know, you do live streaming, So I wanted to like, you know, if your big avid gamer and you want to have, like, your little character avatar of yourself there that you could do, you know, acting out, live animating wise. There's just there's so much that you can do with this program. There's so many different ways that you can implement it. You know, I mentioned a few things here and there, but that's really, truly only scratching the surface. You could really push it as far as you want. As Adobe continues to kind of refine and build up the program, there's only only gonna become more and more usability for what you could do with it. Top of that. All of the work that we've done this collapse, all the animation system that you created. These are exactly the kinds of things that companies look for in a professional riel in a portfolio. So that's something that you're interested in. That's kind of the rap that you want to go. I just know these are the different types of animations. Um, you know that their tried and true and that, you know, can potentially get you a job somewhere. You know, I'll be all those fires to say, like Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon. Big companies like that. Hypnosis is another one. There's a lot of different. There's all kinds of different studios and stuff like that. If you're interested in going that route, you know, be aware that including has a fellowship and they have, you know, a writer, a visual artist, one you know, so things for storyboards, animation, all those kinds of things. Cartoon Network offers internships. I mean, these are all avenues that you can explore and go down if that's kind of you know, your trajectory, so to speak. In addition to that, though, uh, you know, make sure that you have your work. You think that's something that's also kind of brushed off to the side, or it's like is an artist. You make something, and it's kind of like that's done. You can you move on to the next day, but it's super, super crucial tive to share what you make, you know whether that's you know, whatever online platform you use Twitter, Facebook, instagram, tumbler. I mean, these are all important things, and companies like that look at those sites as well. They have a very, very big online presence, and that's a lot of really hire from, So that's worth considering as well. But it's just it's very crucial to share your work. You know, that helps kind of, you know, just share what you're doing. You get feedback from the community that you're involved in. It helps make people murder where you and your work. Um and it turned Teoh just just more exposure, which is fantastic, you know, in doing that kind of thing. You're getting your work out there. I just don't miss the possibilities for a lot of different things. Plus two, you know, this is super crucial. I'm at a about doing this. I think a lot of artists, maybe we're getting better, but you're working progress. That's always something that's like It's really interesting to people that are both, you know, artists and artist to be able to see kind of like, you know, you project in progress and you ultimately can bring it all together. Get that kind of, you know, behind the scenes peek. People love that. So that's definitely something worth sharing. Absolutely anything you made in my class or anything he would like to share with me. Uh, I'm primarily existed with him and dizzy Niego, Please, please. I mean, feel free to reach out to me. Feel free to share your work with me and love. Love to see it. I just want to be relieved to this class, like anything do down the road or whatever. That's awesome, you know, I love to see that you're working on, and I think that's the most important thing to it's just continue to make work, you know? Maybe what you know you've made or whatever. You know, maybe it hasn't quite got me. Everyone go quite yet, but that's fine. That's just part of the journey. That's part of the process of getting where you want to go. As far as like, an artistic career, Um, the only thing, the absolute only thing that separates you from we want to be. It's just experience. And the only way that you can do that it's just continue working, continue, you know, making great work. And so I had to do. That's like the ultimate secret to success. So again, I just want to congratulate you. Thank you for taking my course. I really hope you got something you know, beneficial out of it. I hope you're able to learn a lot. And I hope now that you know, you can have this, this knowledge or whatever, whether you're just starting out whether you've done a donation for a while, you know, I hope you can carry this knowledge with you. I hope it helps you in some way. And I can't wait to see what you continue to make