Creature Animation. Animate a realistic Panther walk. Includes polishing! | Amedeo Beretta | Skillshare
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Creature Animation. Animate a realistic Panther walk. Includes polishing!

teacher avatar Amedeo Beretta, Animation Director/ Tutor

Watch this class and thousands more

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

Watch this class and thousands more

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

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      1:19

    • 2.

      Working with references

      14:39

    • 3.

      Gearing up. Having the tools at hand

      15:11

    • 4.

      Setting up the project

      4:53

    • 5.

      Setting up the rig

      11:44

    • 6.

      Animating the hips and hind leg

      25:27

    • 7.

      Animating the chest

      7:02

    • 8.

      Posing the front legs

      16:12

    • 9.

      Designing a pose for head and tail

      3:22

    • 10.

      Splining the spine

      18:40

    • 11.

      Splining the legs

      25:02

    • 12.

      Splining the head

      6:09

    • 13.

      Animating the tail

      5:55

    • 14.

      Mirror the animation and wrap up

      12:26

    • 15.

      To render or not to render

      1:29

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About This Class

Learn efficient 3D animation workflows by delivering professional looking creature animation in the form of a Panther Walk, in Autodesk Maya.

This course is designed for intermediate animators who understand the basics of the workflow but struggle to give their animation that level of quality and believability typical of professional products.

Together with walks and jumps, runs are one of the key blocks of body mechanics animation. Mastering those essential movements in 3D animation gives you the confidence and skills to control your human characters in more articulated body mechanics shots.

At the end of this course you will be able to confidently animate a stylized run, interpret reference footage for animation, and adopt the same techniques professionals employ to produce industry standard animations.

You will learn about:

  • Working with video references
  • Identifying and designing the key poses of a run
  • Troubleshooting posing
  • Mirroring poses using Red Studio 9
  • Setting up priorities for splining
  • Animation splining and polishing workflows

The course will employ industry standard software Autodesk Maya, but the same principles can be applied to any 3D package. You can find more tutorials on my Youtube channel.

Download Autodesk Maya Fully Featured Free Trial here.

You can learn to render your animation in Unreal Engine from this series of tutorials from my Youtube Channel.

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Amedeo Beretta

Animation Director/ Tutor

Teacher


Hi, my name is Amedeo Beretta and I animate in production and teach students and professionals since the year 2003. I worked on VFX and full CGI features, series, TV ADs, Video Games and promotional videos.

I am specialized in character animation, but I started off as a generalist, developing skills in concept art, 3D modelling, texturing, rigging, shading, rendering, and compositing.

My credits include Paul, John Carter, and Planet 51, feature work performed at award-winning companies like Double Negative, Scanline VFX, and Ilion Animation Studios.

Head over to my Youtube channel to see more of my work!

See full profile

Level: Intermediate

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Emilio Beretta, and ever since the year 2002, I animated on feature films, TV series, Rio games and visual effects movies. In this tutorial, we are going to see a number of quick techniques to speed up your animation workflow while animating a panther walk, the walk itself is applicable to any big cat locomotion while the workflow is applicable to any software, although the tutorial is recorded in Maya, we will start by finding suitable video references and identifying the key poses after which we will find an install custom, freely available tools to make the animation easier and faster in terms of animation, we will start by animating the core aria and only one leg, after which we will reuse the same keys to animate the front part of the creature to then generate head and tail animation in a half automated wait until we will eventually mirror the animation. The idea is to follow a workflow that confers the animation a clean, polished and realistic look in a short amount of time and the while avoiding repetitive tasks, we will use a freely available rig that you can download by following the link coming with this video, if this is of interest to you, just join me and I will see you in the next video. 2. Working with references: The first thing we want to do before even starting animating as usual, is to look for references and we can find them on YouTube or on websites that sell stock footage like for instance, pond five. In fact, in here there's quite a lot of stuff regarding animals. You can't just use the preview as reference. You're not going to use it commercially anyway, different videos will give you different pieces of information. For instance, have you doing wish the character is Phase Steel relative to the edge of the camera gives you a pretty good information regarding the variation of poses internally in the internal economy of the body. Whereas VDS in which the camera is still or it doesn't follow the character one-to-one can give you a better idea of how things are perceived outside the fixed frame of a camera. For instance, they make you appreciate more easily the absence that stick out from the general footage. Like for example, the shoulder blades which are popping out quite large even if the character is moving through space. Finally, another piece of information you can get from the videos is timing. One of the issues I have found we've stock footage is that sometimes that happens in slow motion, it is fairly difficult, in my opinion to get to the right timing, especially on YouTube, you can get some information about the actual speed of the video. So for instance, down here, it tells us that this is a high-speed video motion capture at a 120 hertz, that is 120 frames per second. And it's now being played at 25 hertz. And this is going to give you a pretty good idea on how to speed up or slow down this clip as you need after evaluating all the clips, it is a good idea to pick one in particular that gives you the mood you want. I am looking for a fairly generic walk in here and I will go for this clip. Now, these clips have been uploaded on a platform which is called the sink sketch.com, which I really suggest you use if you need to work in animation or do animation, because it lets you easily evaulate stuff and you can draw on screen at the first glance, animating quadrupeds may look a bit more complicated than animating humans. The true fees at these more work mainly because you have twice the amount of contact with the floor. But if you break it down to smaller chunks of work, you can manage it just fine. So for instance, there are a few approaches you can employ for quadrupeds. One consisting in finding the up and down or pale Reese and shoulders and use them as a base. You could do the body first and then animate the legs afterwards. Another approach would consist of treating their hind legs in a different fashion if compared to the front legs. So you may be solved first the hind legs and then the front legs as if they were two different human beings walking. In this case, I'm going to have some sort of mixed approach. I am going to first find out the key poses for the hind parts of the body off four legs and pelvis. And then I'm going to do the same for the front part. I usually start my local motion animation by identifying the contact and the contact being the first contact with the floor. So this one looks about fine with the leg. One thing that I notice immediately is that the leg is not fully extended like for a man, for instance. And that's something I will have to keep in mind. I will draw a line here just to identify where the bomb is supposed to be. And after finding this first contact, I went to find the same contact at the end of the loop, probably this one at frame 37 or my reference. And again, the pelvis is there. I can't really use the height of the pelvis as some reliable information because you see first of all, did the two poses are different, so the stride or the second contact being a lot wider than that of the first one, you see it is different and the wider the stride, the lowest the pelvis. I already know I will have to come up with a compromise between the two Post-Its. The important thing for now is really to find out where these two contact poses are happening so that I will know the general timing of this. For instance, it seems to happen over a 30 frames, which is a good indication for us because we already know on the timeline where to put the first year and the last key for the loop, after every contact that must be a downward, the body has to go down and the legs have to stop the body from folding in here you can tell that the body goes down and there are 123 frames of going down, and then the height doesn't change much and you see that the pelvis tends to rotate counterclockwise. So this is something to keep in mind. There is more than just simple up and down in there. The pelvis is actually twisting in several directions. And it's something I would love to keep in mind. The fact that the two contexts present different stride. It already tells me that this may be a situation in which the character is actually changing the speed at which walks. So we tried to scout the reference footage in order to define two contexts and look more similar to one another. So for D7 will be the one and then I will find maybe 68 as another contact as well. They look pretty similar. 67 looks more like the thing, will use 3767 as the two key poses. There is 30 frames between the two. And I expect the opposite contact of these hind legs to be roughly in the middle. So 37 plus 15 is equal to 52. So if I go to 52, I should find something like this one, for instance, that should look pretty much you see like the opposite pause. Not incidentally, it's right in the middle between the two contact poses. Now after the food of creature touches the floor of the body will go down. The leg will impose resistance so that the body doesn't fall to the ground and this creature is no exception. In fact, you'll see that the body goes down in there. So I can maybe track this point on the pelvis to see how long it goes down for you. And you see that after going down for free frames, it kind of stops going down and then changes the motion. So tentatively I'm going to consider posts 40 as my down that's free frames after the contract. It means that on the opposite side, I imagined that if I go to 55, some sort of downpours there and you see, I'm not very disappointed by this because it seems to line up. Then after the down we have usually a passing pose and then an up force. Let's try and find the up pose. So I will move forward until I find the higher point of the pelvis. You see that the pelvis reaches the highest point at their own 47, and then it kind of stays there as it twists clockwise, which is something I would have to consider there moving down and then it starts moving down again. Actually, I think 46 is more OPT as an oppose. One thing to consider in here is that after reaching the up pose, you see that the body stays up and then it starts going down. And I think I want to consider that 46749 will be my held up pose. In general, the loop will run between 3752 and then it will mirror itself. I do not need really to find all these poses after 52, although at the beginning it helps to identify them between the down and the app, there will be a passing pose somewhere, but it is rather difficult to find a defining moment of the passing pose as far as the pelvis is concerned. Instead, that will find the kickoff pause for the leg which is behind in the motion and the kickoff pose since to happen here on Frame 43, by kickoff pose, I mean the last pose in which one food East contacting the floor. It doesn't matter by how much it is contacting for as long as there is some sort of contact. So now I have 37 as a contact for D, as a down, 43 as a kickoff, 46 as a nap one, the first step, and 49 as an app to the second up, because we see these up is hailed. And it is very important I think, to understand that the app movement can be held even when there is gravity involved. Much the same way it happens on a swing. When you reach the top of the elevation, you see we stay there for quite a long time before the swing comes back at us. In my opinion, understanding this is a good chunk of understanding body mechanics. Similarly, on the way down, I find it a bit difficult to find a very clear reference for the downward movement of the pelvis. But since we have found the contact pose, I don't have to think about it too much. Now we have the contact pose, the down pose, the kickoff pose, the upper one, and the up-to. Now let's have a look at the legs a little bit better. So on 40 on the down, the right pole is flat on the floor. That's not bad. And the left one you see still fully in contact with the floor. So this is kind of straightforward. And then on 43, please notice how the main motion is actually the hind leg extending in order to conclude the push and prepare to lift. So if I make a line of action for the leg, you'll see that really the main changes around here, and this would be a very interesting feature to have then the app one, what happens in here is that the leg bands quite a lot and there is a sizable amount of spacing forward for the left leg, while the right one is still flat on the floor on the app too, as far as the legs are concerned, the up-to pause is essentially a passing pose. The left leg nearly has the same pose silhouette wise, but it's crossing over the right leg, which is still flat on the floor, poor guy. And then as we go down to the contact, the left leg extends again and we're going to the down again. These thing, having these few pauses on the timeline makes me confident we can mirror them after a frame 52 and get the other side of the walk. Now let's have a look at the front legs. Generally speaking, there is some sort of offset between the front and hind legs of a quadrupeds. So at frame 37, you want to have a contact, of course not for this type of gate any way. In fact, you see that you will find there right front leg contact at around frame 42. Now for the sake of simplicity during the blocking, I will treat 43 years of contact for now also because you see that's the moment that leg extends and stays there for two frames extended. I would love to keep that in mind as I spline, but for the first pass of blocking, I will treat the contact as 43. So we'll call this thing contact plus one. For now the shoulders don't tell me much because I haven't compared them to any previous you're following frame. But you see that right after the contact, true to the nature of locomotion, the shoulders go down quite a lot, the ribcage goes down quite a lot and there is the most fascinating twist on the shoulder blades. See that? Fantastic. However we are here to find the down pose. And it seems to me that tracking the line between the two shoulders, these lining here between the two shoulders, the downward motion really stops at around frame 46 when the chest twists visibly, but it's faced the same height. Then it starts moving up again. This will be my down pose for the chest. And now let's go back and check the front legs. So at the beginning of the loop, the front right leg is essentially in a passing pose. It's crossing over the left one. The left one is flat on the floor. The chest seems to be essentially the same height it will have on frame 14, the reason noticeable amount of twisting counterclockwise on the shoulder area. I would love to keep that in mind as I animate. But overall, it seems like the chest is more or less there. Maybe it goes even a bit higher, but it's more or less there between 374040, the front right leg is significantly changing the line of action if compared to the previous pose entities at 40 free that leg fully extend and there is a little bit of a bend in the down pose, not so much so, and then the right foot stays flat while the leg doesn't really change its internal economy that much, it just slides to the back and it stays relatively straight as it does transition to frame 52 pretty much the same way the left leg was if you think of it at the beginning of the loop, as far as the left leg is concerned, we have an almost unchanged internal economy between 3740 and the same thing goes for 43. It is indeed on the down at 46, we start seeing the variation of this angle between the elbow and the shoulder a little bit. And at 49 we have the last moment of contact with the floor, which is probably something we could call a kickoff. Then we have the most beautiful inversion of silhouette in here, which already started in the previous posts, if you think of it. In fact, at 46, we went from a narc that was pointing to the right to then see 49, we start seeing an inversion of the curve in a fully inversion at 52, you'll see that it's quite a beautiful inversion of curve. If you think of it, it's really important to notice the impact of the down. It goes down quite a lot. In fact, one thing which is fairly typical of big cats is that the shoulder blades move up quite a lot after the down in order to allow the fraud legs sustaining the weight to stay straight. Otherwise, the leg would have to bend or the body would have to go up, which is a bit unlikely, and these are going to be the key poses of our walk. Now what we do is called 3D animation because it happens in 3D space while it is all fun and games to look at things from a profile like we are doing in here, for instance, we should remember that we have to look at other points of view, just understand what's going on in there. In fact, in here, I have a different point of view of a similar walk in which allele part walks towards the camera. This is pretty useful because as you notice, it gives us a pretty clear idea of how much the shoulder blades are moving in a big cat. And also it shows the head moving up and down quite a lot. Now these guys looks a little bit bigger than the one we see in the previous reference, but I'm not an expert in little parts, so I can't say for sure either way I find it useful to edit them together. We can do that. We were free software and named shortcut, which you can download from shortcut.org. Or you can use Adobe Premiere, whichever you prefer. If you think of it having the two references side-by-side, it makes it a lot easier to understand what goes on. And it also gives you a lot of information about the line of action as it is from the front side. So for instance, if you look at the front right leg, the banded leg hairs from the front view is something you can't tell from the side view. A good idea is always to have two different points of view. At least if you do quadrupeds, if you have a top view, that would be amazing. In fact, I find that top user often very useful, although they are not aesthetically very pleasing. Also the good thing I've seen sketches that you can download the video with the sketches or you can download this sketches altogether and use them as grease pencil for your Maya session. You can certainly have a look at the line of action and notice how when the pelvis goes down is also when the chest tends to go up. And this gives you this sort of undulating motion of the body. Now the more the creature is cat-like and the more flexible these eye of the body will be. Now that we have a less foggy idea of how the story works is time for us to start the blocking. 3. Gearing up. Having the tools at hand: Before we start the actual animation, Let's prepare myosin that we have all the tools we need to make it easy. First of all of these tutorial was recorded for Maya version 20, $20 for, although at the time of recording this tutorial, Maya 2022 is already available. However, I think Maya 2022, as of January 2022, not particularly stable and also poses an additional issue for which some older scripts that you can find online for free may not be working with the default settings you will find in Maya 2022, because my add 22 uses a Python interpreter with a different version if compared to the previous version of Maya, if you hadn't gone. And daily end of this video, I will point to a couple of approaches you can follow. Make the older scripts work with my at 2022. In our particular case, oldest scripts should be working in Maya 2022 except for one called overlapping. By the end of this video, I will also show you how to make that work in Maya 2022. The other thing to know is that we will use some specific tools which are freely available, but you do not have to use exactly the same scripts I use for as long as you understand the result that we tried to achieve by using the scripts, you can use any script that does the same thing. And let's get started with studio libraries. Through the library is a very handy tool that lets you save and mirror poses as well as mirror animation under Maya, redo it useful and for free, it counts with installation instructions. So you can download it from Studio library.com, which we are going to do. Once that's downloaded, you can extract the zip archive and you will find that it contains a folder names to the library dash the name of the version. In order to store through your library, you need to head over to the folder named documents maya on your computer if you're on Windows, while if you are on Linux, you will find it under home slash Maya. And if you are on Mac OS, you will find it on their home library preferences. Autodesk Maya, which I believe is a hidden folder by default and a mic. In this case, we are on their windows, on their documents maya, you will find a folder named scripts and hours through your library folder and goes in there. So we're going to open it and just drag their studio library. In my case, it was see plenty of sub-folders, but that's not going to be your case necessarily. It depends on how many things you haven't installed before this. Once you have copied your studio library folder into the scripts folder in Maya, you can open the folder and you will find that there is a bunch of files in there, one of which is called Install dot mail. This is the file we need. Once we are in Maya, we need to make sure we are looking at a customer shelf. In this case, I'm using the regular custom shelf in Maya. During the tutorial, you will find that they normally cold my scripts from other shows. In this case, however, let's put them into custom. You can put them wherever you want. So we take installed up mail, we dragged it over to the view port on Maya and new icon is created. It's two squares, one white, one blue. And as you click on it through your library will open up. And in my case, it's already set up because they're already used it. But in your case, it will ask you, where do you want to store the folders of 3D library? And we question, it actually means where is it that you want to save all the data that you're going to store with studio library. Any folder will do for as long as you know where you put it under the script that I wanted to install is the title bar dot mail. Let's open it in the script editor of Maya, we go to the bottom-right corner where the logo descriptive or resides. We click on it and we go File Open Script. And we go to the path for these groups was downloaded. You will find the script along with the material of this class. I opened the title bar adult male. This is the code. I'm just going to select it with the left mouse button and then drag it with the middle mouse button over my custom shelf descript toggle the visibility of the bar above the Maya interface so that as you work, you can earn some precious pixels, especially if you work on small monitors. Let's give it a name. Let's right-click on it and go Edit and under shelves and under the renames section of the shaft content In type, in title bar. And the same goes for the tooltip. Finally, let's give the icon labeled the same name. Now on the custom shelf in there I have a button that says title bar. And when I click on it, it switches between title bar O1 and off next up in line we have Insert key dot mail. Now the script you can find with the material of this course and other way to open it up in the script editor is to just drag it over the script editor or a male tap possibly. And this is, the script is pretty basic, but it is very useful indeed. So let's say you have a cube moving from left to right, and you want to watch the drafted into a curve. This is the curve. Now imagine that you want to create a breakdown in these are the curve you would normally press S in Maya. But you see that as you press S, the curve changes shape, which can be a bit of a problem sometimes when you don't want to touch the curve at all. And here comes the alternative by running this set keyframe, insert Maya. We'll set a key on any channel that has been previously animated without changing the curve. Look at this, I execute the script, I get my breakdown and the curves stay the same. Let's select it with the left mouse button and let's middle mouse, drag it over our shelf. This is going to be our Eastern Turkey buttons. So I go on edit shelves and I'm going to call the insert. And same thing for the two teeth and the icon labeled Save. And now. Whenever I hit that button, I get my Insert key for as long as the channels were previously on inmate, you can even assign the script to a hotkey. Next in line is the AB stalker come tool. Let's drag it over to the scripts folder in our documents Maya folder, the same place where we just stored this 3D library tool. Very often you find the instructions to run a script in the script itself. So if you right-click on the script and you open it up, we've got the text editor. That means that in this case we can open it with Notepad in Windows for instance. And we can just drag it over to it. And you'll notice that in the script itself we have a brief description of what it does followed by the line used to run the script. So I'm going to select the two lines used to execute the script in my Angular to create an extra Mail tab in the script editor, I'm going to paste that script and I'm going to select the command middle mouse dragging over to the shelf. And let's see what the script does very quickly. So let's say I have a character running through space and I want to follow it with a camera so that I can check the official expressions. For instance, I can position my perspective camera, select the character I want to stalk, or the controller I wanted to stalk. In this case, I'm going to execute the script. And the script lets me decide which channels I want to follow the character on. In this case, I can click on all the channels and I can stalk the chunk. Now I have a new camera. You see that he's following the character or the control one-to-one. So I still retain the perspective camera in there, but you see that the camera is following it. And the next tool we want to install these Morgan Lucas's world baked tool, which is super useful. And you will see why it's useful during the course of the tutorial. So let's see how to install it. We had over to Morgan Lewis.com and we don't load MIL, we'll bake thought BY you will find a gain to the link in the material counting with the video. We saved the link as and we don't load the file raw thing to notice with this tool is that it requires a library which is specified here on the requirements. You're requires these M and utilities dot p-y. Unfortunately, these link does not work, so we'll have to download it from somewhere else. If you go on their tools in the same website, then you scroll down. At the very bottom, you will find the MLU utilities here, which you can just right click and save. As with the two Python scripts downloaded, it is time for us to stole them once more. We had over two documents, Maya folder and in there you will find the scripts folder. And we want to copy those two scripts into the documents Maya script folder. In my case, you see I already have it installed, but I'm going to replace them anyway. And if we head back to Morgan lunacy is page we have the installation extraction and we also have the lines to execute. When running the script. Such code needs to be executed from a Python tab, which I'm going to create in the script editor in Maya, just going to paste the lines in there and middle mouse drag them over the shelf. And now I have a Python code to see if it works. And you'll see it opens up, it works nice. The next tool we're going to stall is called half cm high there from Francisco Saqqara Montero. I hope I'm pronouncing this right. The beautiful thing about this tool is that it lets you hide parts of the character even if they belong to the same mesh. This is very useful for creature animation and any type of high-end animation in which you want to be able to evaluate the motion of individual parts of the body. You'll find SEM hi there on gum tree and in the donation box, adjust, just input the amount you want to donate. You will be prompted for an email address. After inputting that, you will be able to download your files, which will come in the form of an archive, which we are going to extract, extract the gain. And there you will find a how to install text file. The instructions are asking us to copy the icons and to drag and drop an installer. Sounds easy. Let's see if it works. I'm going to find icons either, and this is the icon folder. I'm going to copy it. Then I'm going to go into Maya 2020. My gaze preferences that I'm going to go into documents, maya diversion I'm using right now, 2020. And then there, there you will find preferences and icons. I'm going to paste the icons there as you see, I already have them installed, of course. And then back to Maya, I'm going to grab the installer mail file, drop it over the viewport. And here I have the tool which as I open, opens up, which means it works. Next in line, we have the twin machine which you can download from GitHub. Between machine being a pretty handy tool that you can use to create breakdowns easily. To download the tween machine, we just click on code on GitHub and we then click on Download zip. This will start the download, the archive. And the only thing we really need from these archives is defined contained in the Python folder and it's called twin machine dot p-y. We are going to drag this file over to the script folder in our documents Maya folder. And once that's done, we're going to try and see how to run it in the instructions. If you scroll down, there are these two lines that say import twin machine to machine dot star. Let's see if this will work. I think IT want. And as I paste them into a Python tab in Maya and run them, you see that my complaints that there is no such module named twin machine. Which is a complain reasonable enough. In fact, if you go and check the actual name of the twin machine in the script, you'll see there's an underscore between the two words. We're going to copy the name. And in the line of code that was supposed to execute the Turing machine going to just paste the new name in both instances. The underscore that ease. Now as they run it through a machine works, these was a bit confusing, I have to admit, but it's now sorted out and now it's time to install overlapping. Overlapping is a really useful tool to automate tail animation and any appendix that needs overlapping. You just need to download it either from GMB road or high-end Friday. Again, you will find the link in the material coming with this video. Once downloaded, you go into the folder with the latest version. And in there you will find at PY script, all you need to do with the script really is to open it up in Python tab in Maya. Once in the script editor you go File Open Script, you paste the path and you open the script, you select the whole code by clicking with the left mouse button and then hitting Control a on your keyboard and middle mouse dragging over a shelf. Now as you click on it, overlap issued run, there you go. As I mentioned earlier, overlap be unfortunately it does not work by default in Maya 2022, you have two ways to make it work. You could convert the script or you could force Maya to ram with a Python interpreter. I will show you a possible solution on how to convert the script for the running different Python interpreter in Maya, I will point you to some resources from art station. Here we are seeing overlapping. If I select the whole code and paste it into a Python tab of Maya 2022. The code, if I run it, you will find an invalid syntax error. And these happens because this code follows a different convention rather than Python three, which is the one Maya users. So we're a bit stuck, but we can think of one thing. Maybe somebody wrote a tool to convert Python two into Python three. And maybe these works for most of the cases. Let's have a look. If you head over to Python two, free.com, you will find a website that lets you paste Python two code, and it will hopefully convert it into Python free code. I'm going to paste the code in here. I'm going to click Submit. Wait a little bit, grab the converted code, just copy it. Then into my younger into paste it into Python tab, and then going to drag it over my shelf and execute it. And you see it works. This could be a way, of course there is no guaranteed these will work with any script, but it's better than nothing. If you find those script that doesn't work with the automatic conversion I've just shown you. You are a bit out of luck, but you could still force Maya to use a Python to interpreter. This way the old scripts would work, in which case a recommend you follow the advice, you find the desired station page, which you will find the link to in the material out this video. An alternative to overlapping, although not free, is called overlap Pr. And it's a tool that does pretty much the same thing in a bit more of a solid way when we some more features, I actually have it. And it's pretty quick and it works very well. We're not going to use it in this tutorial though, but I suggest you have a look and see if it's of interest because it saves a lot of hours of work among the features that overlaps her hands that overlap it doesn't have there is the ability to add a little bit of wind. There is some noise in the animation that can be very, very useful in a lot of instances, which is for me a reason enough to consider this product. However, as I said, we're not going to use it for this tutorial, but you will find the link in the material coming with the video, which means that if you buy for that link, I'm going to get a little bit of money, but let's not tell anybody. And last but not least, if you are under Windows and you want to do a play blast, but can't see the QT format under the format window, the play blast, That's because you do not have QuickTime installed. And from Apple.com you can download QuickTime seven for Windows. Now be careful because officially time for Windows is no longer supported. You do a security issue in the code. However, it's the only way I've found in Maya for Windows to have a quick time play blast if you are in a Mac computer, instead of having a cutie format in there, you will find something called AV foundation, which will do exactly the same thing if you're on Linux island, no, you have to do some research. Sorry. This is pretty much it for the scripts we are going to employ for these tutorial. 4. Setting up the project: And now that we have our references edited together and we can start to work in 3D. Of course, you can download the references by following the links provided with this video. Becky, my other first thing I wanted to do is to create a project. So hold down spacebar go file and the window is specify a name for this project. And I hit Accept, as you know, whenever you create a project, a bunch of folders created and everything that we work with should be included in there, in fact, into source images, I am going to paste the video references off the video and image sequence to be honest, frames sequences play a bit faster and Maya's viewport, provided that you keep them under the full HD resolution. In this case, the resolution of my frame sees 960 by 540 after the references, of course, we need the rig which you can download by following the links provided with this video. We are going to copy it into the scenes folder of our Maya project. Here it goes. By the time this tutorial is live, you may have a different version of the rig because of course I will keep updating it in the meantime, back into Maya, you have noticed that I am missing the top bar in there. I'm using Maya 2020, but in practice you can follow this tutorial on any Maya past Maya 2018. I get to show the top bar you can hold down spacebar on your keyboard, go Windows, settings, preferences, preferences. And in there under the section interface, you will find something called short title bar in main window, and that's how you show the title bar. I don't really want to show it now because I don't need it and it takes away precious pixels. Also, if you hold down on your keyboard, the keys Control and M like mic, you can show and hide the menu at the top you'll see. And similarly, if you hold down Shift and M like Mike, you can show the Menus inside the viewport. This is really handy if you have a small monitor. Not my case, but since I'm recording this tutorial on a single monitor, I do have a small monitor. In fact, you want to animate with a capital of monitors, at least now that we have all we need, we need to insert the Reagan to the scene. If you have watched any of my tutorials, you know that you need to reference this rig. If you haven't, you should watch some of my tutorials. Let's reference the rig and their file create reference. We're going to grab the rake and hit reference. And here's the rig. By hitting Alt B like Bravo, we can change the background color, this character being very dark, it makes it difficult to discern its silhouette against a black background. So I'm going to change it to something a bit more palatable after the rig. Of course, we need the references. So I'm going to first create a new camera under View. Create camera from view, I mean perspective. So I made a copy of perspective. I know there's a new one because down here you see there's the new perspective in town in the outliner. The same thing happens. I want to place the image plane in new camera because maybe it will need the perspective to be free of image planes and I need to use it for something else. I don't know. Maybe I have a backup camera if I need that. And then I go view image plane, import the image. Myosin simply opens up the source images folder. And in there I can find my frame. You can pick any frame. The problem you will have is that it doesn't play because you have to hit Control a like alpha into the attribute editor in there, click on Use image sequence, and now the animation will play fruit. Now of course, this video does not have the sketches I've made as soon sketch, so I paste those as well into my source images folder. And again, you will find the frames with sketches by following the links coming with his video in Maya again in the same camera, I'm going to go under View Image blending import image and I'm going to find Panther phrase. We've sketches and Leo part sketches of course Panther and layer bars belonging to the same family. And make sure that I use an image, an image sequence in there. You'll see that now the playback is a bit nuts. One of the problems we've freely software is that if you put two planes and double one another for the software does not know which one to play in the channel box of one of the planes, I can maybe change the size, make it smaller, change the depth, and make it closer. And now I can press Play and see buf two sketches and the version without sketches, I can also operate the offset said than y to position this sketch. Now I shall have my sketches ever so pressures as well as the clean version as well as the front camera, That's pretty good. The problem, however, is that you see that as I move the camera around, the rig is sometimes behind the image planes and sometimes in front of them. So I'm going to add a 100 units to the depth of the plains. And you'll see that these way it's a bit easier to work, but still not quite as good. So I'm going to add 1000 units to both the image planes in the depth attribute and change the depth in this smaller one just a little bit, just so that it becomes visible again. So now I have all I need to start the extra job. I will save the file as capital are named panther walk 001. I use my ascii is a format, is simply speaking more practical. And in the following video, we're going to see how to sit down the key poses for this animation. 5. Setting up the rig: Now we know for a fact that we highlighted only off of the poses we need. In fact, if you check the backside of the character, you will see that we only have the left leg moving forward. We do not have poses for the right one doing the same thing. But also if you think of it, is being free the animation, we can do half of the loop and just mirror in deposits at a later stage. So it would be good if we could already set up our rig to mirror the poses before diving straight into animation. I think it's a good idea to devise a technical approach to make the best of what the rig has to offer. In order to do that, we have to first analyze the references once more, then decide the strategy for the break as a check the references. One thing that I notice is that the area of the spine here is pretty flexible. There's a lot of up and down. There is a little bit of stretch and squash. So it would be great if there Rick do the same. So for instance, in this particular rig, and you can follow along with any rig you want. The important thing in fact, is to understand the philosophy by which we operate. I was saying in these particular rig by default, you see we have this controllers for the spine, which seemed to be FK controllers. In fact, if you check the name of the controller, it even says so K stands for forward kinematics, meaning they're primarily achieved by rotating and usually work based on a higher, which means that you grab the first one of the hierarchy and the others are following. This method is historically fairly useful to achieve good our axis Z, you're rotating objects around the pivot. So in practice that makes it very easy to draw arcs on screen. However, one of the limitations of this approach is that if you check the pelvis is now a reference. The pelvis goes down while the chest actually stays at the same height. Meaning that in here, it would be difficult to achieve that effect because we would have to counter animate the rest of the spine up every time the pelvis goes down, which is a lot of work for what we have to do. Be nicer if we could control the height of the pelvis and chest individually. In order to do so, we will need to have what's called a Nike spine. And in this particular rig, there is a cross next to the spine. That's the IK to FK converter. We can set the FK, I can blend value to ten. Now, most rigs will give you the ability to convert the spines from AKA to f k and the other way round. But it's not a given that the value will range between 010, a lot of rigs operate between 01, for instance. Anyhow, now that we have an IK spine, you see we can control the height of the pelvis independently from the height of the chest. So it seems to me that will make it easier for us to animate this kind of motion. I think it will go for Nike approach for the spine, the neck and head area, or another big chunk of this animation, we want to see what happens when we rotate the chest. You see when we rotate the chest in here, the neck and head follow one-to-one. However, if you check the references, you see there's plenty of twist in the shoulder area particularly so from the front view. But you see that the head doesn't twist nearly as much. That is a negation for us. It's telling us that having the chest rotate while the head stays stable would make our animation life easier because we wouldn't have to counter animate controls. So usually you want to check whether your head and our neck can be kept to global rotation as you move the chest. And usually in the FK controllers like this one, you have an attribute which is called parent's local space are global, in this case, it's called Global. Once you set it on, the head will be kept. You see on global whichever thing the body does. However, when you rotate the neck, you have the same issue with the head. So maybe we can grab the head and set it to global as well. So now when we rotate the neck, the head stays global. When we rotate the chest, the neck stays global. However, there is the case in here for which we could use IK head as well. Let's try out and see what it does. Most rigs will let you convert between IK and FK head. Of course, in this case I have a cross next to their head and I can switch the S-Gateway like a blend to ten. And I will have to square controllers, one on the head and one on the neck. The problem you see is that they still follow the chest one-to-one, thus defeating the purpose of an IK setup. But let's see if there's any additional channel in the neck. For instance, there's something called fixed orient. Let's set it up to ten, and let's see what happens now. Unfortunately, these fixed orient attribute, which seemed to promise a global orientation on the IK controller does not seem to work, which is a bit of a bummer considering this is an IK chain. However, this is a great opportunity for us to learn to work about the limitations of a Rick. I will keep it in inverse kinematics just to be able to show workarounds to this problem. And the neck to head chain will be moving in a bit of an awkward way at the beginning for which it will follow the rotation and translation of the chest. But when you rotate the neck, that won't move the head because of course it's an IK chain. Will learn to work around this problem just in case in the future you will have to deal with a similar issue for the legs. It goes without saying that IK is actually a very good solution. So I don't have to think much about that for the tail. One of the issues we are going to encounter is that whenever we rotate the pelvis, the tail will rotate, a behavior that if you check this footage is not entirely true. In fact, the tail does react to the motion of the pelvis. Stays for the most part stable even from the front view, you see that while the pelvis, wings left and right in here, the tail down there is relatively stable. It certainly reacts, but it doesn't rotate one-to-one with the pelvis. So we would in fact be fantastic if the tail global controller here that global attributes, which it does. So now we can set the global attribute ten you see, and have the tail cell stabilizer, which is going to be very useful as part of setting up the rig and devising a technical strategy before animating, I would argue that having the possibility to mirror the pose is quickly in this animation will be an essential feature. In fact, if we go check the references, it is clear that we highlighted only one step. In fact, we can see how we did not highlight poses for the right hind leg. Of course, the idea was that we would animate one leg and then mirror it onto the opposite side. Of course, we can do it manually, but why do it manually when we can do it automatically? So we need to find a solution to mirror this pose is quickly a tool I would really recommend unimportant for this process, which however, isn't free. And I can tell you that in most companies you will work in this particular time you will find on him but anyway installed. But for the sake of this tutorial, we will use to do a library instead, which is a free tool. You can easily download it. It's free. It comes with installation instructions and you will find the link, of course, along with this video. So we'll open up Studio library and we'll create a new folder. I will call this thing Panther. And I want to create what's called the mirror table. That is the definition that the tool will use the mirror poses. To do so, I will have to select all the controls they plan to use for my animation. Now on the upper side of the view port of Maya, you have this magnet icons and you can collapse them by clicking on this vertical line next to them on the left. And you see that when the icons are collapsed, the line becomes a line with a triangle pointing to the right. If you click on it, it will expand again. Next to this line, there's another one on the left, and this one is actually showing this selection masks. These buttons are telling Maya what can be selected within a viewport. For now they're alone so you can select a bunch of things into the viewport. But if I click on the triangle next to them and set, all objects do off. Now when I drag a selection in the viewport, I am no longer selecting anything. Which means of course that I have to activate a couple of things, at least when we animate, we usually operate NURBS curves. So I want to click on this curve icon here in the selection mask. And now when I drag a selection, the viewport, I can only select NURBS curves if you don't believe it, you can create a cube in there and then drag a selection and you see that the cube won't be selected. This is pretty useful for animators. In fact, I don't think you can work without it in Maya, at least with this selection mask on. So only curves I can select all the curves I want to animate. So we stood your library open and with the Panther folder in front of us, we can click on the plus icon on the top left corner of your library and go for something called mirror table. And you see that Indian suing window on the right, we are asked for in mirroring plane and for some left and right side token, we're going to need to see what that means. If I grabbed a random controlling the rig, you'll see that the naming convention is name of the rubric, colon, name of the control underscore, capital letter indicating the site. So this is the side token which is underscore capital L. If we grab an opposite control on the right-hand side of the character, and these tokens are always relative to the character itself. You see that we have capital R on the left and right side tokens. We have two input star underscore, capital L and capital R star means whichever named the control has, which is followed by the token underscore L, That's going to be the left side token. And the same goes for the right hand side. For the mirror, we want the mirror to go from left to right or right to left to understand on which axis the mirror we'll operate, we only have to go to the bottom left corner or the viewport in Maya, you see this is the axis box and with the character being frontal two, as you can see that the x-axis is the one pointing to the left of the character. You can see that an invisible mirror axis cutting through the half of the tiger would necessarily line up with the y and z axis. The y and z in fact, is the correct mirroring plane. And as you remember from school, a plan is the geometrical entity defined by two axis, in this case, y and z. As I said, I'm going to give the mirror table and name called say Panther. Then I'm going to select all of the controls and then going to click on save. Maya will ask whether I want to store a thumbnail, which I can. And at the end of a short wait, I will have my mirror table. Now let's see if that works. I will move one pole to the side, say here, than in the mirror table settings I will select as an option left to right, and I will hit apply. And you see that the left pole has been correctly mirrored. That's not bad considering it's for free and it took us only a few minutes. I will try that with the chest to see if that's a thing. You see that the chest mirrors as well. So it seems to me that we on to something and then the mirroring seems to work. Of course the sailing is not always that smooth, but now I know this works and this is going to stay with me for the duration of the project. In fact, in production, you'd normally receive mirror or tables or you can create your own and share them with other animators. I have saved this file as anime panther walk to rig set up so that they will remember this is the scene in which I have done the setup. And another thing that it would be worth considering is whether we will need selection sets. If you think of it, the character has plenty of controls, so it would be great if as we animate, we will create selection sets to select entire chunks of the character. This is something we will do as we animate. But just to let you know, in uninvolved, there is the possibility as well to make a selection set and select the opposite control, which of course makes animating a lot faster. Now if you think of it, this means that we have references that we understand, including from different points of view. We have devise a strategy on how to operate this rig so that it already behaves the way we need it. And we have a solution for mirroring poses, which is essential for an animation of this kind. Which means we can move forward to the next step in which we will actually create the key poses. 6. Animating the hips and hind leg: Image plane, image plane attributes grab the image blame. And in there, in the frame offset, we input 34, that should move the whole plate 34 frames to the left. Now let's do the same with the other image plane. And now you'll see on frame one we have the first pose that we marked earlier on. Then we want to click on the settings for animation. The little men running away from the gear in the bottom right corner of the screen. And on their playback speed will make sure that we have the playback speed set to 24 frames per second, x1. That should ensure that we get real-time playback. Well ladies, that ease as much as Maya and your computer. Let you do that. Let's make the timeline shorter to say about 73 frames for now. And let's start posing these character as far as the pelvis is concerned in the contact pose, it is not at its maximum height. In fact, you see we have an upwards in there and that's where the height is four. So in here, I will just lower the pelvis ever so slightly and then it will move to the bank, the left leg. And I'm not going to fully extend the leg because what happens after the contact is that the leg extends even more. So we'll give it a little bit of slack. Also sees the left leg is going to the back, probably the pelvis. We'll rotate a little bit to favor that motion. As far as the right leg is concerned, the right leg as they move forward. And that looks indeed like the maximum extension forward for these legs. I can't exaggerate as much as I want. One thing I can certainly do is to roll the pelvis down to favor the contact of the right leg. When you see that your control no longer lines up with the geometry of the leg. That's when you know that your overstretching the IKE and limp a lot of breaks also have stretched mobility. You can grab the IK control and increase the stretchy ability there so that now you see you can stretch the leg. I can also do that. I think in fact, I will set both legs to be stretchable. I am not planning to abuse this feature, but I'm certainly blending to take advantage of it. We want to be able to orient the knees right now it's very difficult to know what happens. But for instance, if I check the front references there, if you see that the muscle of these sides of the pelvis since to point out after the contact and before the next one. So maybe I can keep the knee in here a little bit and have it out instead on the right leg. Let's also create a plane on the floor just so that we know whether we are placing the feet on the floor or somewhere else in 3D. In my opinion, it is a good idea to sync your character a bit deeper into the floor. And I can do so by grabbing the master and just lowering everything. These will give me, if you think of it, a better sense of contact with the floor if you compare the before and after. The after, certainly looks a lot heavier. How much you can sync a geometry into the floor Depends on the camera you're employing on the project your own and are a number of features. Of course, if the camera were these clothes, I wouldn't be able to sync the pole that much, but we have a distance more similar to this one you are seeing right now. It looks okay. I think it would make sense to save selection sets now. So I will grab all of the controls of the left leg, including the pole vector. And in Studio library I will right-click go a new selection set, and this will be B underscore left leg. I'll save this, capture a thump y-naught. And now every time I click on this, I can select the selection set. If I was working with running, but I will be able to select the opposite set of controls much faster. Of course, in here I'm going to manually select it. So let me right-click on studio libraries, save the selection set. This is the back right leg. And now every time I double-click on one or the other, you'll see I get my selection to work. So I will set a key on both, and I will set a key on the pelvis. Then I will find the opposite contact, which happens at frame 15. I will select all controls for the hind legs and the pelvis, set a key, and then using those to your library, I will grab the mirror table and as an option, I will just swap the pose. And once I hit Apply, I will get the precisely mirrored pose. I will hit S to store the key. But in fact it makes sense to enable auto key. In the bottom right corner of the screen you see this icon with the two arrows changing one another. That's the auto key. Let's set it up so that every time we move a controlled for as long as the controller idea had a key, it will get another one. I did the two extreme poses because this way I get interpolation for free. In the middle, you see the character is half doing what I wanted to do, which is not bad at all. Since once the character will move for space, it will move linearly for space, I want to make sure that the forward curve of the food is set to linear as well. This way the food wants slide in the graph editor, I will just set the curves through linear. If you're unclear as to why we set it to linear, recommend you watch my walk tutorial at any rate, we will check this lighting feet later. So now we have our first motion. Remember the story after the contact, the pelvis went down. So we want to create down as well on frame for for instance, I will just lower the pelvis down. Please notice I'm using world axis in this case. And since in the down the left leg is meant to be extending even more, I am going to move it to the bank by how much you will ask. My suggestion is for the time being to just cross compare the speed of the left and right leg. Make sure the forward motion is linear and make sure that the speed at which the left leg goes back is similar to the one on the right leg so that they both move to the bank at the same speed. This way, when we will move the master forward, they should not slide. Or at any rate, it will be easier to fix them. There you go, and you see they move to the back together at the same speed. I guess it will make sense for the pelvis to rotate a little bit towards the leg, which is extending in order to favor the extension from the front view of the reference, it seems like the pull vector of the left leg could even be pushed inside. We'll try that out. Now animating our character, which is so dark, is a bit difficult because you do not get to see very well the geometry. So you can go into shading and uses the default material and then maybe enable wireframe from the time being. This way, you will see the geometry a lot better after finding the down we have the kickoff pose, which has massive extension of the leg even further, which makes me think that I'm already pushing my leg to match to the back, but I don't think it makes sense to do the kickoff yet because if you check the pelvis, it goes down towards the down and then towards the key coffee cans backup, but it keeps moving up until the up one. Which means that if I do the app first, it will be able to zoom the speed on the way up from the interpolation. So I will take care of the app first and I will raise also, I can't ignore these beautiful line of action that I have on the top side of the spine. So we'll try to get to that by maybe rotating the pelvis clockwise from this view and lowering the middle control of the spine. And I can lower and rotate the middle of control until I get to oppose that looks more or less like that in the reference, I will hit S to set a key in there to try and re-create the same beautiful line we can try and rotate the pelvis. There's a controller up here which is called pelvis fixed, which also can give us a little bit of leeway to control the curve. And we can also operate these round control in the middle to create a curve that is a bit more in line with what we need. We can also rotate it. Of course, it would be a bit too early at this stage, however, to stay here and refine these controllers, since we did, since we don't even have the main poses and we didn't even pose the chest. For now, I will just focus on the hind parts of the character. And if I go and check the left leg, there's a moment in which the left leg is supposed to kickoff. You see there for the pelvis, I have done the down pose, the app one and I have of course the contact. Now there was an app to pause if you think of it, the one we now have it framed for teen. And you see that between up one and up two, there is very little difference in the height of the pelvis. So I definitely want to have that. And to get to that pose, I will use the three machines, but I want simply reusing the twin machine on all axis instead, what I'm interested in is the height of the pelvis. So I will grab which axis is responsible for the height, which is the y-axis for this control. And I will use the twin machine to give me a pose which is a lot more similar to the previous pose. This way you see I will retain the rotation of the pelvis, the interpolation I had earlier on, but I will keep the app that I need. Also if they track the base of the tail, it seems to me that the pelvis is rotating almost clockwise if from the point of view of the cameras. So I will add a little bit of that rotation, which if you think of it, we will facilitate the forward reach of the hind leg. In fact, that will go as far as checking the contact pose. And you'll see that as I spin the pelvis, I removed the IK stretch that was in there. Whenever you fix a contact pose, it makes sense to fix the opposite one as well. So if I am twisting the pelvis downwards, I also want to make sure that at the beginning I have the same twist. And you see that the moment I do that, I get a much more dynamic down transition with the pelvis. That is simply speaking, a lot stronger than the one I would get with a simple translation. It's a bit too exaggerated if compared to what we have in the reference, but we can always reduce its intensity. Now for the pelvis, we have contact pose down, pose, one up to n, the other contact pose. That's it for the pelvis. We don't really need to do much else for now. I would say now that the pelvis is sorted, let's move on with our strategy and we want to find key poses for the hind legs. I will start with left one. Of course. The left one starts with a contact and then goes into a downpours, which we already made. And then the next one we know about is the kickoff balls. Now you'll see that in this case when we have a kickoff bows, they don't really have a pause on the pelvis, but that doesn't matter too much for now. Let's move the leg to the back. It would be great if the leg we're moving at the same speed to the back, they will feel otherwise the food was lie a lot more easily with turn these tangents to linear and you'll see that I do get the leg fully extended, but it's also fairly stretched. If I remove the stretch, these will be the actual length of the leg. This is a red flag to check the reference, it is hard to notice, but while on the down the food is actually fed on the floor and then it bends as we rolling to the kickoff, the food is actually straight now and it's only with the tip of the toes that we are making contact with the floor. It is clear from these angles, from the front, this is what's happening. While we did get the right timing for the kickoff, the toes are not really in the position they should be. And we can try solve this by rolling the food. And you see that just by rolling the food, we can control these a lot better. In fact, my suggestion would be to grab all the controls of the food, including the toes. Set a key at four, go to seven, set a key, go-to 15, set a key so that we have a key for everything in there. Then let's play with the other controls we have available to see what they do. This one could be handy. Then we have another one here. This one not so much. So there's one should be the pivot around the tip of the toe and this one is the heel pivot. That means that for this particular rig, you could use the roll if you wanted, but you could also use the individuals who were all controllers that we have in here. This one in particular looks pretty useful and you see we can still roll from the tip If we need for now we'll use the embed role. And then I will create a little bit more of a dynamic pose with the toes. And it would roll down the first phalanx or the toes and then grab the second, third and roll them back. It's Ziff, the toe was still contact in the floor and it was flattened the floor. This should give me a little bit of a better idea of contact with the floor. I can do the same with all the other toes. Toes in place. We can check if there's anything that needs to be doing. We can maybe use the tweeter here on the pelvis to adjust the line a little bit if we feel we needed, maybe I could push it a little bit to the back. And even though we're Who knows, you see that there is a moment where the legs snaps. That's a Nikesh nap. You don't want to have that kind of stuff unless you can control it. And with this particular rig, we have a device called anti pop, which I want to see if it works with the anti pop set to ten. You see that the way we go from stretch to not stretched is actually quite okay. So this is something I will probably keep in mind. I will set a kiosk on the tweeter here. And at frame one, I will 0 the tweak air out. And the same thing I will do on Frank 15 when I have the opposite contact. Now for the left pole, we have the contact down and they kick off pose to be fair in our reference, the kickoff pose does not have the toes on the floor. It's just the tip of the toy in there. So in here we could have already lifted the fruit. Now moving on to the next pose, we're going to look at AP one and up two. And I want to start from up to we truly something passed the passing pose. And I start with these because the idea is that hopefully I will get enough interpolation to make the pose work. And I'm starting from this pose because hopefully the interpolation that, that will regenerate in the middle will be useful as a base for the next pose. I will just lift the leg 0 out the role, 0 out the pelvis tweak. This is a bit tricky because we don't have enough resolution here to understand which pose we have in here. We can only assume this is kind of straight. And if I look at these new sets of reference I found on YouTube, you see that the lower part of the leg is rather straight and it actually does some sort of banana shape. So you'll see the quality of the reference really does make the difference between emission, which is the fruit to the original material and one that maybe is a bit too free. The like, I will probably try to straighten this leg a little bit and I will use also the additional controls possibly to try and get it a little bit straighter. And then I will grab the fingers controllers and I will just 0 them out to begin with and roll them down, something like this. I guess I will set a key on old controllers taking part in this pose. And I will also make sure to bring the knee out a little bit. One thing that is very important for the up pose of both humans and quadrupeds is the distance of the PO from the floor. We normally do not leave the feed that much because that would consume a lot of energy. So I'm going to lower down Depot a little bit. Now that I have the second pose, I can go back in the middle and find the up pose, which of course is fairly different from what we have in the interpolation unfortunately. So we can't really use it. If we check the line of action, it looks a bit like this. This looks like what we have in there. And these picture from the front view seems to suggest the same curvature. Indeed. Let's get to that. I will first of all zeros out the row, then lift the food, rotated, wrap the toes and rotate them to the back. Another thing that happens as you lift that toe off the floor is that there is no more weight on it. And if you compare to's which are supporting the weight, say those are the front leg. You see that they are much wider than those at the back. Of course, in this case, some of these differences due to perspective, but we can use these yellow controlling in front of the toes and use the spread attributes to get them closer and closer together. Between 710, the leg moves forward quite a lot. You see it goes from fully extended to fully bent in there. I want to make sure that in my animation I do have the same amount of bending there. By enlarge, we seem successful at it. And just by scrolling with the period and common keys on my keyboard. Do you see? I can find the key poses of my walk, at least for the left-hand side leg, which is not bad at all. Considering we spend only a few meters to make this thing work, we need to do the opposite leg, of course, but we have to devise some sort of strategy. I want to try animating the full loop of the left leg and maybe mirror it on the opposite side and offset that animation in time. I want to see if that's a fast method. I will start by mirroring the pelvis. So I will shift left mouse drag, select all keys between 413. I will right-click on them and hit Copy. And then I will go to a free empty spaces after 15 because 15 is the contact pose. So 115 would be the same but opposite. So we'll go 123 spaces after frame 18, I will hit right-click and Paste. Now of course, these is paste in the pose exactly as it was on frame for it, but she's not exactly what we need. But remember we have the mirror table is through the library so we can grab Panther mirror, set the option to swap, select the range and hit Apply. We are greeted with an error and this error complaints about namespace being wrong, these happens and I made this on purpose to show you that you have to keep your eyes open because depending on certain situations your namespace may change. We want to operate these mirror tables from the current selection, not from the namespace. I will try again, select all keys between 1827, swap them, and that seems to have worked. And then two frames after 27 on 29 IN going to paste frame one. The fastest way I know to copy a keys to middle mouse, drag it to the destination and then hit S on your keyboard like star. So we know that a loop goes between 129 and the deposits need to be exactly the same. This is not the case now for the left leg, but we're going to fix it for the time being. I can set the time slider to 29 anyway. And if I hit play, I shouldn't have them loop on the pelvis. And you see already there's a bit too much up and down, but we're going to sort that out as well. The first thing I notice is that between 1315, The pelvis is going down a bit too fast, so I can maybe grab the y curve and grab all the keys that represent that pose along the timeline and just lift them up using shift and middle mouse button. If you incur in a stretch of the limb, you can just grab the tweeter and move it down. However, we probably want to have the anti pop on throughout the whole duration of the animation. And at 15, I will just lowered the tweak or ever so slightly to get to a known pop situation, I will also duplicate the posts between 115 for the weaker. Another thing that happens in the references that between 14 dependence disease indeed going down. But then you see that between 45 and a little bit of six, the pelvis is I'm staying down. It doesn't really move up that much. It starts moving up a little bit on frames six, but otherwise it stays down for longer. And this is something I can fix by keeping the pelvis down on frame six and maybe you're rolling it a little bit counterclockwise. This way the Federalists, we go down between 14, stay there at five and then it will start rolling back up at six, just like in the reference when it will move up quite a lot indeed. And probably I can go and grab the top point of this app motion and just lower it ever so slightly in the graph editor, if what I'm doing in the graffiti story is a little bit too fast for you. I recommend you watch my walk tutorial. Now of course, since I've added a new key, frame six, I have to copy this key, go to frame 20, paste the key and swap the key. Anything I do on the first half of the animation, which is between 115, needs to be mirrored in the second half or no. And you'll see that right now we have the up and down motion of the pelvis. The apps are a bit exaggerated if compared to the reference. So we'll go into the graph editor and just lower them even more. Now I want to animate the left leg moving backward. The first step I probably want to do is to make sure that the leg loops. So I will middle mouse drag frame one over 229 and hit S. This way I will make exactly the same pose on 129 for the left leg. And in fact, I should be doing the same thing for all the controls of the left leg. Here my contact is a bit off because the contact of the reference really has the heel on the floor almost and they told us in the air. And so maybe I could use the role and just roll the food back a little bit on the heel. And maybe I will create a little bit of variation in the toes just so that they won't be perfectly aligned to one another and I will keep the spread tight for now. Also, if I wanted to be a little bit more refined, I could rotate the fruit a little bit to the outside and maybe I could draw it a little bit so that it doesn't land perfectly flat. Of course, these means that I left the fixed frame one. I can also add a little bit of rotation parallel to the floor just not to keep the food perfectly straight and I can rocket a little bit to the side just so that it doesn't lend fully flat two frames after the contact, the foot is flat on the floor. So I'm going to grab the graph editor, make sure the movement of the foods to the Becky's linear. Remember this will come in handy later on when I will want to fix this lining of the feet and I can't reset the position of the toes just by duplicating the first key. In fact, I can roll them even further into the ground, maybe not. The last following sees the clouds. I will keep them out and I will make sure that the food. It all goes back to 0 and the rock goes to 0, which makes me understand that I didn't really need to rotate the toes. This is a great lesson that reminds us that first of all, you want to fix the route control, in this case the pole and then the limbs, in this case the toes. Otherwise, you risk fixing the toes and then having to fix them again another time. Maybe I'll twist the toes ever so slightly just so that they're not perfectly straight. And then they will look a little bit more natural. And then the fruit will, simply speaking, slides to the back and repeat the loop. There you go. There is a problem with the knee. Of course, you can tell that the leg is snapping at the certain point, but that's the last thing we will probably take care of for now. What we want to focus on UC is the same kind of motion overall in terms of timing. And I can tell that the up and down, it's still way too much. So I am going to take the Bailey's upper pose and that would reduce it a little bit. And then I'm going to take buff up one and up two and lowered them. And that may be working a little bit better. There's also the problem for which these middle of controlling here is animated and it goes from one post to another. So maybe I will delete frame one for this control and just keep for standard form. Now, this thing will certainly look back there in steps. But if you want to have a look at it in step, you will have to key every single axis that you have in here in the pelvis, otherwise they won't show up in steps. I will hit S and comma and period to go for the keys and release a key for every channel. And now I can right-click on the timeline. Go enabled other steps, preview, and I can press Play. There you go. That's my animation. But you see the problem is, since there are no breakdowns for the food on the way back, it becomes fairly difficult to evaluate these kind of stuff in steps. One thing that you could do to mitigate the problem could be to select both the pelvis and the food. And every time there is a key on the pelvis, you add a key on the fruit as well. These will create keys that you don't need these guys, but at the same time it will let you appreciate you're blocking and step preview a little bit better. Which solution is better is hard to say. It depends on your situation. I have to say that for these kinds of cycles, sometimes it doesn't really make sense to add keys just to see them in stepped, in my opinion, will go back from step preview. And I would want to have a look at this from the top. As I said earlier ONE, having a reference from the top would really, really help you a lot because it makes you understand how things are working. But in this case we don't have it. So I have to kind of make do. One thing that I don't like is that the pelvis seems to stay relatively straight apart from sliding side to side. Whereas if you think of it, the control lets you do quite a lot of rotation there. So I'm wondering if I'm not missing out on an opportunity here at any rate, you see that from the top view, my apparently doesn't really stay straight. It actually rotates left and right. And a way to make it look a little bit more realistic is to add some left and right motion so that as you go down into the down pose, you can push the weight a little bit more onto their right leg because after all it has to move on to the right so that the left can lift off. And in fact, we can delete these keys in the meantime. So the pelvis will slide onto the right as the white is on the right food. And it will stay there for a little bit longer as the left leg lifts off. As the left leg lifts off, then the weight can center again itself. But in this case, I want to delay that a little bit and then it will start to re-center and start over again. In fact, maybe I could control, see these keys from the graph editor go to frame a dean and Control V. Then the problem is that in the second part of the motion, the penalty is actually needs to be on the opposite side. The easiest solution to this problem is to select the keys going into the value box or the growth rate or the one next to the time and type in, Multiply equal minus one. In practice, we are multiplying the values two minus one, which means we are inverting them. One thing to keep in mind is that when you invert values, you're actually breaking the tangency here, which is a bit silly, but that is the way it is now. We also have some left and right motion of the pelvis. It doesn't look amazing yet, but we'll improve it by the end of the animation. And if you think of it now we have taken care of the blocking of the pelvis and the left hind leg. We won't be even looking at the right leg for now because I think it would make sense to take care of the chest beforehand and sort out also one of the legs in front. A thing that we will do in the next video. 7. Animating the chest: If they're doing the poses for the pelvis, we can ever look at the poses for the chest RAM. And there's a little trick you can try to play and see if it works. If we look at the video reference, we can almost see the rotation up and down of the body with the chest and the pelvis alternating in the ups and downs. And I made a few lines through underlying the difference to see what goes on. You see for the pelvis, this is more or less what happens in terms of up and down. And if we check the chest, you see that the movement of the chest is alternating that on the hip. This is a general observation. You shouldn't take this as a mathematical alternation of poses, but it's very close to that. Maybe we can try play a trick in here just to see how you can reuse animation in 3D. If you observe the references up close, we could maybe grab the pelvis, paste It's an animation onto the chest and offset its animation just to see how it looks like. And if this stuff is usable, I'm going to select the pelvis, double-click on the timeline, right-click, copy the whole animation, then select the chest. Find a moment in which the chest is down, say frame six, for instance, paste the animation on frame one. And now if you look at it, you have the chest and the pelvis moving at the same time? They move one-to-one. However, I could grab the whole chest, move it either no, six frames to the right. And now you'll see that the chest and the pelvis are alternating one another. Of course, these relies on the fact that your pelvis animation is quite clean. I'm just showing these to open up the mind to new possibilities. Sometimes it makes sense to just do the blocking and do this blinding on top of the blocking. Call it a day. Maybe sometimes for a character that is far away from the camera, it's just faster to duplicate keys and offset them. In these case, we're missing the first key, but it's very easy. I mean, we have a key at 29 now, we just need to middle mouse, drag it to one and press S. And now we should have a full loop. And you'll see that we have a full loop in which the chest and the pelvis alternate. So we are reusing animation quite actively. The movement of the neck and the head for now are a bit distracting. So I'm going to right-click on the geometries, select the faces of the neck. And we've FCF either the tool I've introduced in the previous video, I can actually right-click and add the selection to the headset. It this way I can hide and show selection as I need. In fact, I cannot the gums, the teeth, and the eyes, and the mole. So this way I can evaluate the animation without being distracted by the head. Similarly, I could do the same with the tail. In fact, when I animate them a shot and I know would be spending several hours, if not days on it. I usually save selection sets. So this is going to be the tail, which I would be able to toggle the visibility off at real. Now I can check whether the motion does line up. And you see that, and you see that of course it doesn't line up perfectly. So if we track the upper body line between one and for the bottom line stays started there and then it starts going down. While in our case, it kind of moves up and then it goes down. So maybe we can set a key on the chest that frame for open up the graph editor. And I can just grab all the keys which represent these upper portion of the motion and just lower them so that the body won't lift up anymore. And then at six, when the body is supposed to go down a bit faster, I'm going to grab the respective keys and just lower them down at 11. I can maybe keep the body even lower, then it will come back and it will start again. Now please notice that the keys that we have mirrored have broken tangents. That tends to happen with mirroring tools. So I will just set them to auto for now. And now that looks maybe a little bit better. Let's have a look at it in the perspective one. And while the up and down is a bit too much, I think as far as the work. In fact, I can maybe grab all the poses and hitting R on my keyboard, I can middle mouse shift scale. Then from the bottom you'll see, and I will scale the curves proportionally. Of course, this is just one method. And to be fair, if you only have to do free for poses, sometimes it's just faster and more precise to do deposits yourself. But I wanted to show this technique because it's fairly useful. Please notice these corner between the upper arm and the lower arm, and we don't really have that corner there. We have to do something about it. I think in general, we could grab the chest and just move the whole curve down lower. And you'll see that now that we did that we are matching the curvature of the spine a lot better. Also, we can translate the clavicle to the back and we can maybe even rotate it a little bit. There is an intersection there between the elbow and the chest. So we can grab the pole vector and move it out a little bit unless you're working we were fairly sophisticated rig. You won't be able to avoid all the intersections between the front legs and the chest. Also think that possibly I could rotate the chest a little bit forward. And you see by doing that, I have two effects. One, I get a better angle between the top of the arm and the bottom of the arm to I removed this bulge that he is at the bottom of the chest and everything looks a lot better. So I will hold down E like ACO on my keyboard, left mouse button, and I'll make sure I look at gimbal axis, the only true axis you have to look for when you work with animation, because these axis is the true representation of what you see in the graph editor. So once I know it's the chest axis that can pitch the chest forward, I will just grab the x curve and shift middle mouse, drag it up until I get to a pose I like a little bit better. Now let's have a look at the legs. One thing that you have to consider and then you often forget when you start animating is that in real life we tend to keep the feet pretty close to one another when we walk and so do the animals in a lot of instances, you'll see that in year that pose are actually pretty close to one another. So one thing that I can do is already moved the pose closer to one another in the front. But before proceeding, I would just ask you to listen to my reasoning for a capital of minutes. I would of course have to move the leg back, generate all the poses that I see in my reference. And of course take care of clavicles and not the relative angles between the various bits of the arm that is granted. Also, they have to keep in mind that the hind PPO tends to land on the last known position of the front one or in a nearby RAA anyway. Finally, there is a technical consideration. After animating the full character walking on the spot, I will have to move the master forward, which means that the master will move forward linearly. And for as long as the feet are on the ground, that will have to move backward linearly by the same speed so that there will be no apparent sliding occurring. However, if I were to manually post the front pole, there is a high amount of probabilities that I will make a mistake and I will introduce some sliding before proceeding in this new and they were I would probably have to think about it for a couple of minutes, which means I will see you in the next video. 8. Posing the front legs: Let's have a look at the front leg instead. One thing to keep in mind is that we will animate the legs on the spot and then we will grab the master and move the master forward. The feed will have to slide back by the same amount of master slides forward. It is important of course, that buffer feed front and back will move backward by the same speed. It's going to be difficult to match the speed unless we play another trick. That trick might well be the same we've played with the chest. We select the whole animation for the hind food. We copied. We grabbed the front foo where you go to frame one and we paste the animation. Now if you think of it, both feet are moving at the same pace. These is handy and we right-click on the timeline, go paste, paste, connect. And now we have exactly the same motion on the front and hind legs. Now we don't need now we will not need the same exact motion as the leg lifts off, but we certainly needs the same speed as the leg moves through the back. And we have accepted that. Now of course, the problem in years that they are not meant to be moving at the same speed. So maybe I can't identify the moment where the food goes from being flat to rolling forward, which is between 47. And I wanted to check in the reference when that happens, then it happens between 1013. So if you could frame for fall over a frame, 106 frames the right, then we should be able to get more or less the same motion. So I'm going to open the graph editor, grab all the curves in the stats for the time I'm going to type in plus equals six. And now frame four became frame thin. And between 1013 we have the famous role. And then we move forward. So that gives us, you see the same offset we have in the reference for which it almost feels like the hind leg expulsion forward the front one. Of course, at the beginning of the motion, there's nothing going on in there, but nothing is hidden to the person who knows where to look. So we're going to grab all these curves, make sure that in the graph editor we have infinity set to on and then we're going to go under curves, pray infinity cycle. We will have the animation loop anyway. And now you see that we have the same motion forward and you see it was very quick. We didn't really have to do much guesswork and the gain is not really that perfect. But did you think of it in here we are trying to explore modern workflows using a walk cycle as a pretext, could be animating anything else indeed, but we're trying to understand the philosophy of working here. Of course, one thing is the workflow and the other thing is the creative value of the animation. The problem is that in order to unlock the creative value of the animation, you need a strong workflow to support your work. As far as the creative aspect of it is concerned, you either need on his feedback to grow or you need yourself to be very honest and they're attentive to what happens. Now I can go to frame one, set a key. Be careful because you see when I said a key, I am actually creating a tangent, which is not the same way was when I was looping. So I have to remember to linearize this thing. And now we are in a perfect loop. We move to the back and the same exact speed we had on the back leg, that should make things a lot easier for us. Now that we've got the technical problem out of the way, we can focus on the poses. On frames seven, we have this kind of contact plus 11. Thing to notice is the shoulder blades, the pattern on them is actually quite useful because if you check what happens between frame 17, you can clearly tell how the shoulder blade moves to the back. In fact, if you check the y curve of the chest in here and move it up, you see it was already moving in that direction. And remember this curve was something we copied straight from the pelvis. By the way, we want to grab the clavicle controlling here and maybe we are going to lift it up on frame one because I see there's a big bumping there. And I will also move it a little bit more forward. And then I'm going to go to the next pose of the food, which is on frame seven. Actually, I'm going to find out first what's the most extreme posted the back of the shoulder has and it seems like at around ten we are the third, there's the back. We also oppose all the food on frame ten, so we'll go to the clavicle and just move it to the bank and low quite a lot until I get to a curvature which is similar to what I have in the reference. And I'm going to go to frame ten, set a key, and see if the difference between the reference and mine is similar. I think I should lift up this thing a little bit and maybe Turing machine it a little bit more to the back. You see that now it helps the leg slide bake. That's really handy. Then let's see what happens to the leg between 1013. Between 1013, we have a beautiful reversal of the curve. You see that it is really quite beautiful. So I am going to achieve the same effect using the row and this row controller here, the independent one. There you go. That should give me, you see the same curvature, but you see there is no key on my raw controller, so we'll. Make sure that there is a key before at ten and then at 13 I will roll it with this method. You have to be very careful. You want to remember that we didn't really set key on every pose yet, and we're not even sure what was do that. So it's very easy to forget that you didn't use some objects on 13. You see that as we roll we could actually dig in deep into the ground. So I'm going to lift this up and there is a double inversion or curve in there. You'll see that there is an inversion of curve in this sort of ankle connection. But then between the East and the toes, there is another inversion there. So I could maybe achieve the same in here. So I could grab all the controls for the toes, set a key at 1013, and then just first roll them in a little bit to remove this bulge that looks a bit like a boot and then de-select the root controller for the toes and move them forward to create that inversion of curve. Now the thing that is happening in years that they are very parallel to one another. So I can grab the master control for the doors, set a key attend and one at 13. I said a key at ten because I don't want the modification I will apply to frame 13 to be affecting also everything that happens as the food is on the floor in there. We'll need a different posts for sure. And at 13, I will just use the spread to pull the toes together. Now since we are looking at it from the front view, you'll notice how there is some sort of curve in here from the front view. So the food is not perfectly straight legged using my 3D model. And I want to achieve that. Of course, I could rotate the foot controller in here, but now it would have to deal not only with the translation but with the rotation there, which could make things a bit complicated when we spline, instead, you will usually find some sort of twist or a rock controlling your food. In this case, there's the ROC control then I can use to achieve the same effect. But you'll see that the line here on the front leg goes almost straight while mine sort of breaks, I can use these additional rod controller and rotate to achieve the same effect. And this way you see we get a lot more organic posts and I can push it even further. Why not? I will grab the pole vector for the elbow and maybe move it a little bit closer. Now the pole vector for the elbow is moving with the food control. You see? I don't really like that too much. So we'll set the follow through 0 so that it will be independent from now on. After all, this is a loop. I don't really need it to follow the link and then I will move it in. You will notice that unless the rig is very sophisticated, you won't be able to get rid of all intersections we will have between the legs and the chest area, for instance, we're just going to leave with this. This is just a workflow with the administration in practice. So again, key on 1013 for the pole vector and we have our inversion. Now we will move forward until the contact, the contact happening at 21 is select all controls for the toes. The select the food controller there. And I will just paste then over 21. So we'll go back to a default pose with the toes on the floor. They're not entirely on the floor. And that's because probably the sum rule. And in fact, if I 0 out the role, you see that we are there also, please notice that I think that we have the toes and year and then we go up relatively straight. While in here we go First flat and then our substrate. In here, I want to also 0 out the roles for the ankle and you see that pose becomes immediately lot better. I mean, a shape like this one should already make some bells ring. It's a red flag. And in fact, I recommend we 0 out the rock value as well and just adapt the pose and even lift it up ever so slightly. There you go. Now you will notice how there is a little bit of a problem in that clavicle liver. But again, if we look at what happens between 1321 to the clavicle area, you will notice how the clavicle translate forward quite a lot. And I sure way to double-check that is to check the perceived distance of the neck at 13 if compared to the perceived these things of the neck at 21, you see that the neck becomes considerably shorter. Not that it is shortening in real life, but it's perceived that shorter. And that's because at frame 21, the clavicles are indeed a lot closer to the head. In fact, I can grab the climate cool and just move it closer and maybe rotate it a little bit to preserve the line of action I want, you see now the clavicle would translate forward languid extent and we're all happy there. Now I will copy the clavicle key from one over 229 so that the clavicle will start sliding back again. One thing that is typical of big cats is the shoulder action. You will notice that as the animal touches the floor, we have a leg. It tries to keep the legs straight and that causes the shoulder blade to pop up. Look at that. We touch the floor and then the shoulder blade is pushed up in here. We want to do the same thing in here. So we want to find a full extension of the clavicle and the way up, which seems to be happening at frame 27. And in there I'm going to lift the clavicle up quite a lot to give me that bump, that angle. You see that typical of the kappa unimportant thing to check as the front leg translates to the back. Is the kind of raced angle that we have in year. Do we want it to be up? Do we want it to be midway through? Do we want it to be flat on the floor? We need to decide what we want and they're taking our decision is the best thing you can do to push your animation forward. It may be go forward in the wrong direction of course, but at least it will be your decision. In here. Once again, my references are not so good, but I can't think that they can't assume that they've reached is going to be relatively straight. So I'm just going to straighten it a little bit. And I think that looks okay. And then I will go to frame 29. I feel like at 29, I should probably move this shoulder blade a little bit more to the bank and a little bit lower, just because they're free, just because they're freely leg looks relatively vertical and the one in the reference doesn't really look like that. Then remember you will have to copy 29 over 21 every time you fix one end of the loop, you have to copy it back to the beginning or the opposite end. Now I press Play and you'll see that we start to have something that looks like a walk. If you think of it, it didn't take as long to animate per se. The longest part was indeed the setup and explanation of the workflow. Let's take greater care of the kickoff bows. First of all, between 1013, you see that the shoulder blade is going down noticeably in the reference in desire of the screen. I want to do the same and lower the clavicle even more. And then I want to go to the front view. And after the kickoff, I want to see what happens to the leg. And you see that the front leg gets straight immediately and you see that front the front view, our front leg straightens up immediately. But from the front view or references a beautiful line of action there any wouldn't be amazing if we could use it. I am going to first rotate the poll so that we get to the same line of action, then grab the role, rotate that as well so that we get the same line of action as well. Then I'm going to grab all the controllers for the toes and roll them to the back there you're, now if we go to the front view, you see that he starts to look very organic. In fact, I could probably push it even more to the center and have the elbow as well, a little bit more to the center. You see how important it is to check the references from different points of view. Otherwise, the risk is that your 3D animation will look like it's going on a straight rail. Here. I could maybe rotate the clavicle little bit to favor the orientation of the arm. And I will go around and check if I can do the same for other poses as well. That is rotate the clavicle to get to oppose, which is more similar to the one in the reference. Then you please notice how the clavicle works. The reason weird rotation between 2629 with the clavicle, which I want investigating the graph editor. And you'll see that in year the curves are crossing. Now, this is not necessarily an issue, but when you have two poses that look very similar and you have crossing curves very often. Or you see something happening in the viewport, which is strange. You might benefit from selecting the curves and running a non-linear filter on them and see what happens. You'll notice there is some weird rotation between 2627 in my case. And this is because this is a very basic rig at the end of the day. And the clavicle rotation is sort of automated, which is not really helping here. How, however, I can grab the food controller and there is an attribute in the channel box called Leg aim. I could play with that and see what it does. And you see that it seems to sort out the rotation issue a little bit. It is in fact the activating the self rotation of the clavicle. So maybe able to just remove a bit of that value there. And similarly at 29, keep it low. You see that reduces the problem quite a lot. And possibly later on I will show you a technique to get rid of it completely as you spline, it's still a bit wobbly, but we're going to do something about that. We need not to worry. If we put the 3D character on top of the reference and we enabled the X-ray geometry in the viewport. When we press Play, you can see that we just a few poses. We nailed the general motion of the character, although it would be nicer to see a little bit more flexibility in the spine, just like we did with the pelvis. Let's have a look at the left and right motion of the chest as the weight is onto one leg, we would like to chest the translate onto that leg. And if we check the curves, you see this is already happening because not so coincidentally copied the curves from the pelvis. Maybe a could increase that emotion by say, 10%. So we'll just go into the graph editor and into the value box I can type in star, that means multiplying by equal, which means a venue equal to. And then let's say one dot one, which is 10% more. You see that it's a very little change and willing to do to show you It's a very little change, but it's definitely a change. And I can go on like this, typing star equal one dot one and increase that interval. You'll see that even from the top, the character starts to look organic. It is not anymore a solid piece of geometry that just rotates up and down. At this stage, I could indeed height the right-hand legs because I don't really need them yet. Remember that plan was to refine the left-hand side and just duplicate an offset. So in SEM Hi there I can assign these phases through the right arm, would just disappear and then again, select the hind legs, hit greater than which in an English keyboard is Shift period. To expand my selection. And this will be the right leg. So that now I can look at this and not be distracted by the other legs. And in the next section I'm going to devise a general pose for the head and tail. 9. Designing a pose for head and tail: As anticipated in this video, we're going to set up the general pose for head and tail. So I will assure them back through SEM Heider go to frame one. The head and neck system, of course, presents a unique challenge as in its supports IK, but it follows the rotation of the chest. We were left to play a little bit of a trick in there, which is a good trick to learn and it involves, of course, space switching. For now, what we're interested in is achieving a nice decent pose. I think it would be amazing if we could have produced these line of the shoulders with a straight line going down to the neck, something seeming there to this one That would be amazing within notch, Let's try and do that. Rotating the base of the neck does not quite help, but there is some sort of star-shaped controlling inside the base of the neck, which I can't rotate to achieve that effect. This is good enough as a starting point. It's still not exactly what we need, but you see it's getting us quite close to the line of action we want from the reference. Then it would grab the head controller and just straighten that a little bit. You'll see that now we get a very similar line of action to that reference. If we want, we can maybe grab the middle control of the IK of the neck and see what happens if we translate it down a little bit. We can also grab the base of the neck and rotate it a little bit to change the shape. There you see something like this could work. And then there is the beautiful curve leading from the chin through the neck and down to the chest. This one will be nice to have in our model that line is not so graceful as I would want it to be. There is a controlling front of the chest which I can't rotate you see, to achieve that effect and then gives me a much nicer curve, much more similar to the one we have in here. To top that up, there are controls on top of the climate goals, which I can pull up to give me a sharper corner on top of that clavicle. Now, we have achieved more or less the same line of action in the neck that we had in the reference for the tail. The cheapest way to achieve these Bose is to just grab all of the controls of the tail, rotate them down together until we get to oppose that at the root of the tail is similar to the one we have in the reference. Then I will deselect the controls their route to the tail and just rotate the others back and maybe adjust a little bit. I can even rotate the end controller is a little bit more. And you see that we'd get to a similar pose. And all of these were just a few clicks. Of course, maybe I will unroll it a little bit. There you go. So now we have achieved the general pose, but we have no motion yet. We could already create the motion, but my plan is to generate the motion of head and tail based on the pelvis and chest. Hopefully without having to sweat too much through the poses and it would be a bit premature for me to do so now when I didn't even clean up the chest and pelvis, the risk would be that if I animate the head and tail now, without cleaning up the chest and Bailey's, I would end up to spend time to generate the motion of the head and tail and then having to clean up again had entailed from the problems that they he narrated from the chest and pelvis, which at the time weren't displaying yet. So instead of focusing on neck and tail in the next video, I'm going to splice in the body. 10. Splining the spine: As promised in this video, we're going to clean up the body while cleaning up the body right now and not very interested in seeing the leg. So I'm going to hide both of them by using SCM. Hi there also I don't need to see their head and tail. I keep the wireframe visible because it gives me an idea of how things are moving and I will start by cleaning the pelvis. One thing that I noticed in the reference there is that the beginning of the pelvis as this kind of bump, which as we glide into frame four levels down a little bit, Let's open up the graph editor and let's have a look at the curves. The first thing to notice is that in the areas where the poses were mirrored, you'll see that the tangents are all over the place. So I'm going to run an auto tangent on all of them. The first thing, now let's have a look at the down motion. One thing to notice is that at the end of each cycle, the cycle needs to continue. So we want to see what happens to the infinity curves. There we go under View infinity. We make sure that that's set to one. And then we go under curves, pretty infinity cycle, curves post infinity cycle. And then we select all channels, all curves, go curves, post infinity cycle, curves, pretty infinity cycle. We go check the translate y curve again and select a few keys towards the end of the loop. And we press F, like Folks on the keyboard. And you see that by the end of the loop, the curve grinds, stands still and then starts over again. And that's because while the curve is supposed to be continuous, well, the tangent doesn't quite account for repeated animation that is not driven by keys. And thus you won't be able to give you a nice continuous curve. By default, you can sort this problem out in a couple of ways. One solution is to grab both keys and beginning and end of the loop. And then grab both tangents on the same side of the key and just move them together. And you'll see that that sorts out the continuity of the curves. The problem being that if you just grab one curve, you're not necessarily going to sort out continuity on the opposite side, solution works, but there is another solution that you can employ. You could make the timeline a little bit longer before and after the beginning and end of the loop. Then you can grab maybe the first three keys of the loop, copy them, and paste them over to 29. If you check the graph editor as you paste, you will see that this will recreate the same curve that the cycle created procedurally. Of course this will break the loop, but we're not really interested in what happens after 29. And then we go grab the two keys before frame 29 and paste, and paste them before frame one. That the key that happens right before frame 29, that is, we were to frame interval is going to happen by the same interval before frame one. That means that frame 129 will still be the same, then emission after 29 will be the same as if we use the cycled curves and the one before one will be exactly the same. But now you will notice that even if you mess up the tangent for the first key and the last 129 of the loop. The moment you apply auto tangent, you will see that the curves are smoothing down properly. And this is an alternative solution to manually tweaking all the tangents. At the end of the day, it's down to your preference, but I have a bunch of curves in here. There really are a lot, so I can just auto tangent them and I'm pretty sure this will give me a decent curve. Not perfect, but nothing is perfect, right? I'm merely finding a compromise to spend less time on manipulating tangent. So we have the pelvis go down. We want to make sure of course, that it goes down at a pace that is consistent with that of the reference. And I have to say that it goes down a bit too quickly if compared to the reference. So I'm going to pick Translate Y, grab all the upper keys of the loop and hit R and shift middle mouse button at the bottom of the curve. And you see this way, I can reduce the whole animation on the upside of the curve. Now we'll get a little bit less motion on the way down. Then after frame for the pelvis stays down and starts rolling up a little bit between 46. So we'll need to roll it up at 6. First of all, you need to hold down E and left mouse button. First of all, we want to make sure that we operate on axis which are consistent to what we see in the graph editor in which we see these three curves. But if we were, say, in world coordinate system and we were rotating the pelvis on the y-axis. You see that that changes all the free curves in there in the graph editor then happens because the axis you see in the viewport, as I said in a previous video, are not really reflecting what we see in the graph editor to know, to find a better connection between what you see in the viewport and the graph editor. You need to make sure you're operating gimbal axis. That means holding down E, like acorn, your keyword and left mouse button, and then drag your mouse to the right over to gimbal and release. These are the true axis and in fact, you'll see that as I rotate them, I only affect a single curve. That's good. So if I wanted to pitch the pelvis more on forensics, I know it's the x curve and I could go into the graph editor and grab all peaks for that curve. And you see, I can pitch it up there way. Similarly, I could just grab the top keys and just scale them from the bottom and pitch the pelvis more, whichever is easier between 46 we are pitching and we're also lifting up the bump little bit. In fact, you see the curve is doing that. So maybe I can push even more there than between 610. We're still moving up. We stay up within 1013 and we come back down since we operate the keys on both halves of the loop between 1151529. Now, we don't really need to fix this second half as far as the ups and downs and forward and backward pitches are concerned. However, we want to have a look at the site, decide swing and translation. It seems to me that between 14, the main motion swings towards the left leg, which is left behind. So I want to check the rotation y to see if that's what we do and that's indeed what we do. And then if you track the reference between 46, you will notice that the pelvis will start swinging forward on the left-hand side again. So I do expect an inversion of motion in the curve in here, and that's exactly what I get. I could make it stronger, but for now, happy with what I have. If I wanted to make this inversion stronger, I would have to move down the key. The problem is that I would have to go to the opposite poles on frame 20, and I would need to move up these key the same way because anything that happens after frame 15 in this loop represents the same motion, except inverted, that the pelvis will do as it swings to accommodate the right leg motion. However, it seems to me we have made a little bit of a mistake in here because while on frame 115, we do have the same value but inverted for this wing on rotation y and on 184 we have exactly the same value again, if we go and check frame 24, and then you see that the values are different. So in here, there is a little bit of a problem which we identify that the curve is not perfectly mirrored. And that's going to be a bit of a problem. Because if you remember, we did grab this curve to create the chest, which means that they rotate Ys wing on the chest will be necessarily having the same mistake because of course, we did copy the keys and indeed, there you have it. The simple solution here is to just delete both keys so that you will have exactly the same curve. But you see that every workflow requires you to do some sanity check every now and then and understand the implication of a choice. If we had not kept in mind that the narrower on the motion of the pelvis was being inherited by the chest. We would have assumed that the chest was perfectly moving and we might have become complacent if you want to access better visual feedback on our motion, we just create a cube using modify, match transformations, match translation, and again match rotation with snap it to the pelvis you see? And then we've parented to the pelvis control. Once we have that in place, we can make it narrower. And why not? Let's give it a nice bright red color. Play the animation between 128 and this alone should give us a very good idea of whether something is moving a bit too fast, are a bit slow or in a weird way. It seems indeed that by the end of the loop, the pelvis is twisting down the left-hand side fairly quickly. We want to investigate them motion because it doesn't look very appealing. So we're going to check the rotate Z axis and you see there is a peak moving it up and then it suddenly moves down and then slows down. And the curve again, he's not even symmetric. So another mistake on our part. Also, if we do check the z rotation at frame 15, which right now is recorded as minus 8.368, and then go check the same value at frame one, you see that they're not the same, they should be the same but inverted. Now of course, in real life nothing is perfectly symmetric. But at least as a base for our work, it's easier if we make the first pass of spline is symmetric and then we can add variations. Of course. You see that by doing that, the curves that look the same but specular, that means that also on 29, we need the same value of course, but inverted. Now you see that the motion is a lot more moderate. So you see that adding visual aids makes it easier for you to assess whether there are any issues for now, I am happy with what I have achieved and I don't want to go into very fine tuning, which would be a bit outside the scope of this tutorial. We want to do the chest aria again. So I'm going to duplicate the cube that I've created for the pelvis. Select the chest after having selecting the cube and then go modify much transformations and match translation and rotation so that now I have a similar visual aid for the chest, which I'm going to of course parent to the chest control. Remember that we will have to invert some curves after frame 15, while some other like the Translate Y, we'll just need to be exactly the same. So I'm going to quickly check the rotate y, which seems to be inverting or write the z, which seems to have a little bit of a problem. Remember, we had a problem with the zed earlier on. So let's, let's make the Z inverted. I will just delete all keys on the past frame 15, grab all keys between 115, Control C, Control V. And then of course, I will scale them to minus one. And that should give us a perfectly symmetric curve. Of course, I want to play the same trick that I played with the pelvis. That is to copy keys to before and after the loop. So we'll grab the first two keys that I have after a frame one and paste them after frame 29. So make sure that the emotion will go on the same way it went on after frame one. Then I will drop the two keys preceding frame 29, copy them, and paste them over frame one so that they happen at the same interval that they had before frame 29. This would, let me select all the curves in the graph editor ran an indiscriminate auto tangent. And this will make sure that between 291 we have exactly the same tangents. And now we can talk, of course business to translate. X seems to be okay. Ty seems to be repeating equal to itself. There isn't much going on in zed at all, which is something worth considering, in my opinion, rotate, rotate x seems to be functional. Rotate y, since the beam mirrored, rotate Z, we made it mirrored, so we're fine with it. And there's nothing on scale. If we now play between 128, we should get the loop working. In fact, one could argue that since we did clean the pelvis already and we usually it's blocking to create the chest animation. We could have, simply speaking, cleaned the pelvis, copied animation, paste animation over to the chest and adjusted the chest. But for the sake of this tutorial, I'm just going to clean this up. One thing that I want to do is one thing they want to consider is maybe between 69, it is true that the chest goes down, but it is not, strictly speaking true that it rotates that much down on the left-hand side, you see it rotates down quite a lot. I don't think that's really what we're seeing. So I'm going to grab frame nine, find its twin frame on the second half of the motion and just scale them by increments of ten per cent until reduce the downward motion on the Z. You see that now, if we check the reference between 911, You see that as the reference twist down towards the left leg, my animation does the same, whereas earlier on that wasn't that strong. In fact, probably that's a bit too much now. So I can reduce it a little bit. And now we have our animation in there. I think the rest seems to be okay. I have the same debate about the rotate y that I had for the pelvis. We'll decide to keep the noisy motion there anyway, and that's sorted. Now that the body is sorted, maybe I can play a little bit with the up and down or the middle of control the body just to see if I can get any fidelity out of it without sweating too much. I will call this file version five, bodies spline. And I want to examine the central control of the body. You see that the central control of the body stays in the middle position between the pelvis and the chest. So maybe we could achieve something by storing its animation in world space and then delaying it by a couple of frame that maybe will give us something to make for a stronger visual aid in my effort to introduce some fidelity, we'll of course use a sphere as a visual aid in an effort to make it easier to troubleshoot what the problems are with please this fear there, where the central control is, assign it a nice red shader and parent it to the central control. Now that we have our visual aid, we want to make sure that our timeline shows the frames between frame 129, that is the full loop of the animation and using world bake. After selecting the center control, we want to bake on ones and maintain the constraints. The result will be a locator that moves exactly like the central control in exactly the way the central control date. Now nothing will have changed. It's all the same animation. But now I can consider oscillating up and down motion, say by four frames to the right. And you see that gives me a nice up and down offset if compared to the chest and pelvis motion. Of course, the first frames of the loop won't be covered by that because these curved wasn't looping. But we can always make it loop by setting the pre infinity to cycle. And these in turn should make the animation loop seamlessly. Let's say evaluate this animation without the visual aid. When we evaluate the animation we brought the visual aid is very hard to see anything in here. In fact, maybe I can grab the translate y and scale the whole curve down. Maybe even lower it down. And you see that now the effect is a lot more visible and it's definitely too much, which seems to suggest they can scale this motion a lot lower. It is of course, difficult to appreciate the difference between this version and the previous version unless we make a comparison. So what we're seeing here is the version with the offset central controller animation. While if I right-click on the channel box and I mute all while having, of course the locator selected. I will see the difference with the previous version. And you see that in the previous version it feels like the central part of the body. It doesn't quite move at all. If I unmute all, you will see that there is a lot more motion in the center part. I mean, which way is better depends on whether your reference support that decision or not. In this case, I have to say that the reference doesn't seem to move up and down that much in the up and down motion. But having said that, it seems to me that the new motion we achieved is a bit more organic, so I will definitely keep that. That means I have to bake the locator back to the controls. So I select the locator, make sure I'm displaying one to 29 on the timeline. That's the full length of our cycle. Baked from locators. I am banking on once, of course, and I bake the selected locators back to Object. And I have my animation there. And I don't have my animation for the center part of the body without having to do it myself manually. Maybe you could stretch the body a little bit as attached to this animation. You see that as the pelvis goes down, it moves back a little bit and then it seems to move forward a little bit. So maybe I will do it myself in here between 14, I'll move it back ever so slightly. And then at 13, I will squash it ever so slightly. And then I will want to repeat the motion. That means I have to make sure that 151 have the same value except inverted. So we'll just paste the inverted value over to one. And then it will gamble the translate that keys in the graph editor and over to frame 15. At frame 15, I want to set a key and bring the value back to 0. Then it will grab all the keys between 150 controls, see them, Control V them. I don't really need keys before and after. Of course, I want to make sure that the curve is continuous indeed. And that will give me a little bit of stretch and squash just a tiny bit, which I can of course increase if I need, if I scale this curve quite a lot, you will see it a lot better. You see in here, you have quite a lot of squash and stretch now, which is a bit too much. So I'm just reduce it a little bit. We could of course do the same with the chess and we could simply duplicate the curve on the pelvis, go over to the chest, grab the translate Z, delete anything that is happening there, delete any key on Translate Z, and just paste the animation over to translate Z. The problem is that they would both move at the same speed. But really, you see they move back together. But really if I offset them by a couple of frames, that will increase the amount of stretch and squash. And you see that now there is a tiny little bit of stretch and squash in there. And again, the only way to perform a reliable check is to mute Translate Z. And now you have the motion from before. And if I unmuted, you will see the new motion, which is a little bit more elastic in the way it stretches and squashes. And at this stage we have a body motion that is relatively clean. It does loop and is by-and-large, very similar in nature to the one we have in the reference, except maybe the spine in our case is a bit too flexible. In the next video, we're going to take care of the legs. 11. Splining the legs: Having spline the body, we find ourselves in the ideal position to animate the legs. We will start from the back leg in this case, when dealing with the legs, my first concern is to get the aurochs and the general speed of the pole right after that. And only after that, I will take care of any IK popping that the leg might have as they check the reference. One thing that I notice is that between 1517, there is definitely a change of orientation of this part of the leg, which was a little bit steeper in the previous pose. I would love to recreate that effect in my animation because the blocking didn't quite described that. And in fact, if you check the rolling of the research itself, you see that that thing is in there at all. So we'll go to frame 17 and I will draw the ankle down quite a lot. And you see by doing so, I achieve a line of action for the leg that is a lot more similar to the one in the reference. If you want this transition to be even more evident, you could go to the previous pose and make it a little bit steeper. This way, the difference in orientation will be stronger and more visible because there will be more contrast. And then let's see what happens. And then you'll see that the steepness sort of stays the same. And then eventually you'll see that the ankle rolls backup. Now if you check the 3D model, you can clearly feel the moment when we touch the floor and then you can see that the ankle goes down to handle the weight of the pelvis. In a walk cycle, you often have to go frame by frame and check off the contact motion and the kickoff one. For instance, between 47, you see that our 3D model looks a bit odd. It's first list the toes, then it leaves the doors and the pole, and then the poor goes down again onto the floor. This is really bizarre. So let's have a look at this thing and try to see what's going on. So the control of the fruit is flattened the floor and doesn't have any vertical variation. So that can be the guy who would leave us. The problem there is the rolling here. There were all curve starts softly and then speeds up. Maybe we can see what happens if we make it started a little bit quicker. And you'll see that if we make the roles start quicker, it doesn't really affect their addition of the fruit. So I think in here it's a method of going there and just keeping the fruit on the floor. I will set a key at five for flood control and just lower it at frame six so that it will feel like the George she's actually rolling onto the floor. You will always have to keep in mind that once you go to the cinema, you won't be able to see the controls, so you have to make sure that the geometry actually works. So that's why we're looking at the geometry and not really what the controls are doing. The action of the controls is however, useful for technical troubleshooting. In here we have a bit of a role and then a lot more of the role. And then on frame eight, we are off the ground. And if you check the front view, you will see that the fruit is basically rotated backwards. So on frame eight, we actually need to rotate the whole thing backward quite a lot more. I will grab all of the controls that make up the poll, except maybe for the main pole control and between machine, I will try and make a pose when she is more similar to what I have in the next pose. And this should give me a pose that is significantly more similar to what we have in the reference. There's also the method of the backside of the ankle here, which is rolling down quite a lot between 46 and then rolling back up and then doing nothing. So we want to fix that maybe for framing running 29, I will roll the ankle to the back quite a lot to get to these angles that I see in the reference this way as we approached the kickoff, the ankle roll forward exactly the way it does in the reference. Then there is a moment in here in which we have omega rho going on. If you want to see if the Mega Roll is due to stretch and it's not. So for now we'll go to frame five and just count there, animate that role to the back so that it will be a little bit more continuous with the previous action. In general, it seems to me that the leg is now overstretched so I can grab the tweak control in here for the hip and just move its y curve down. And just move its old zed curve so that it wants stretch the leg in here between 57, what we have is probably a double game of rolling on these control of the food and the ankle. In hindsight, it would have probably been easier to roll the individual controls rather than rolled from the poor control. But now we are invested, so we are going to stick through it. In here there is Omega rotation again with the ankle which we want to prevent. And then finally there's the kickoff. What I'm tracking here is this point behind the ankle. I don't want it to pop all of a sudden or to do anything strange. Then after we have the kickoff, we're just moving forward. And between 1315 we roll the toes up and then we flopped down between 1517 and then we just rolled back. That part is taken care of. I just want to hide the upper side of the leg now because I just wanted to check if the motion of the leg makes sense in here, the lower leg. And it seems through indeed make. A lot of sense, there is a bit of sense of push between 57 before the contact. And the same sense of Bush is not there in the, in the 3D animation. Maybe I can achieve that sense of Bush using the individual controls of the tools, which at this stage I can save a selection set back left tours. And I will keep the selection set on the other screen that you can't see, but it's there. And I will put all controls on an animation layer, set a key at 401 at six. And at six I want to create a pose which is which has a lot more attention. Roll down the toes as much as I can and then grab their second, third phalanx and enroll them up. And if I have to cheat and translate them, I will also do that this way. It will feel a little bit more like there's some sort of pressure on the toes. And then at frame seven maybe able to 0 them out and tried to achieve a post doesn't intersect too much with the floor and then I will 0 them out. Another thing that tends to happen after the contact is that as the wave goes onto the toes, they thought may well spread to simulate the fact that there is more weight on them. And then as the poll lift up again, the doors will get closer to one another. So now you can feel that as the poll travelers under the weight of the body, the tours are compressed than they spread apart. And in general, now you'll see that the motion is nice and clean. If you want it to be very refined, you could even delay one of the toes falling down or even two of them. And then we'll make sure that it won't feel like all the doors are moving at the same time. What actually happens in the references that especially the front doors, they hit the floor and then jump back up and then settle a little bit. But this goes beyond the scope of this tutorial. Now that we have the motion of the leg figured out, it's time for us to figure out the pelvis and see if there's anything in there like a stretch or anything that looks a bit bizarre. I have to say the image blame now it's a bit bothering us, so I will hit out for on my keyboard to disable it, I will check that the first and the end frame of the loop are the same and they are. Now I will check for IK pops in here. If you check the thigh, you'll see that it's fairly straight and then between 23 sort of pops paint and then it doesn't bend anymore between 34, but it just travels to the back. I am looking at this section. You'll see there's a pump or the geometry and then there is no pump anymore. It just travels to the BEQ that usually is ascribed to what's called an IK pop, which is the IK chain just popping, bent or straight to depending on the situation and we certainly have to take care of it. There are many solutions. One of them being the Anti Pope, which is already on in our rig. The other one often consisting in additional controls that you can drag and affect the link for the hip wave. And in our case, we have this controller in here which could come in handy. We're going to use that instead. I want to check what happens in the reference just for safety, maybe we could already start with a bit of a band on frame one after all, that seems to be the case. Also maybe on frame one I want to pull vector to be a little bit outside. So on frame one, I will just lower the, it's a bit of a cheat Of course, but you'll see between 23, we still have a major bands. So I will set a key on to go to F3 and move this up to counteract. Maybe you want to move it down. I really dislike operating frame-by-frame, but in this case I don't see a way to avoid that IK bump unless I go in there frame-by-frame and operate either the control or the pelvis controlling here, you have to be careful, you don't want to move it too much in single frames, otherwise it will start trembling and it will become visible. I really wonder now if it is the anti pop that makes this problem. We'll just set it to 0, muted and see if I still have the problem. And sure enough the problem is there so that it wasn't the anti pop. Now let's see if it's the stretchy attribute that is creating the problem. So we'll set it to 0 muted, and I still have the problem. So he's not the stretchy. It is something going on within the rig, so I will have to intervene manually there. Between 36, the reference is actually stretching quite a lot in the pelvis, Zara in the hip area, and then add seven, it bends forward again. It's not a massive deal. I think you'll see that if I check after tweaking it a little bit, frame-by-frame, it's holding up quite a right. It seems to me we have achieved decently clean result in here. If anything, from the front view, I'm not quite happy about the fact that at around frame ten or 13, Here's this kind of line breaking with the wrist. Here. I would like the race to be a bit more in line with the rest of the fruit. But now the problem is that when I rotate the rest of the food, the pole vector rotates as well. So I will call him world bake, will need to change the follow attribute or the pollex. So you see that as I do so I lose the post, so I have to bake these onto a locator. So I grabbed the pole vector calling the world bake and bake the selection to locators. Then I will grab the locator itself, set the follow to 0, break the connections and the follow so that it doesn't go back to be ten, grabbed the locator and baked animation from the locator. This should give me exactly the same pose except in world space we bought following so that it can go to frame for t and u c and add a little bit of subtlety to the food so that it doesn't go down perfectly flat, it doesn't move that Flint. A trick that is often played in visual effects animation is whenever you have a contact, that contact if there's a lot of weight, it causes some vibration here and there. The cheap way to do it could be very to wiggle the pole vector ever so slightly. Maybe at 15, I could wiggle the pole vector in a little bit. And then as we go down, leave it there for one frame longer. And then as we go down to frame a teen, I can wiggle it out and in again. And then maybe, then maybe bring it a little bit earlier to the final pose. In doing so, you'll see we create a little bit of disturbance in the movement of the pole vector, which might be rare. There's some start the reaction to the walk. It's not very evident, but it's something you cannot. Now let's maybe merge the layer with the toes on it. So we'll go select both layers, right-click Merge Layers options, make sure that smart bake is set to on and hit Merge. Now let's have a look at the front leg. As usual, I will start with the movement of the pole. Then you see as usual, I will have to check the contact and kick-off in here you see that the kickoff, there's something weird going on in this case, there's a massive amount of role between 1011, which is not really there in the reference. So I'm going to reduce quite a lot that amount of raw between 1012 and you might well end up doing this frame by frame again, what we want to achieve is the feeling that the rest is helping with the roll forward or the kickoff. And between 1112, you see that what rotates is the brief from these people. Not really, it doesn't really translate forward. So in here we, I think we are rolling a little bit too early. So we'll set a key on the pole control at 11, Want to 13, and then I would go in the middle at 12. Now we'll roll it back so that the W3C want role that much forward, except it's still does. So we'll have to fix the position. In this case, I'm fixing the position or the controller. And now that Bruce rotates forward a lot less. There you go, that's a bit more reasonable. And then of course we had the massive translation and rotation forward, which are due to the reverse of the curve. Let's have a look at the animation and other kickoff works a lot better when you started operating the translation backward of a controller which is on the floor like the poll for instance. It is a good idea to make sure that you're not introducing sliding feet. So we want to move the master forward and check how much these Panther translates for space. We'll call this file legs pipelining, and I will translate the master forward. So given the master key frame one, to know how forward these master needs to be translated, you would need a motion that is the same as the one of the feet moving back linearly like you see in the graph editor, but in the opposite direction. Of course, there are many ways you can do it. But the cheapest I can think of is to grab the food controller on frame one, Control D as delta duplicated and parent by hitting Shift P like parent, these would give you on frame one copy of the controller that does not move, you see stays there, that you'll find the last moment in which your controller simply translates to the back before it even does the kickoff thing. And you move the master forward by the same amount until the two controllers are lining up the duplicated one and the original one. In the graph editor. These master must have a linear curve. Because if you don't have a linear curve, what will happen is that the difference in acceleration you see will cause the food to slide and you see does. But the moment, but the moment I said the translate Z curved linear for the master, you will see there will not be any sliding on the food whatsoever. As the master goes forward, which is really handy. Once you have found the general speed of the master forward, you want to set its curve to post infinity cycle with asset. And that has the general effect of duplicating the curve over itself and an offsetting it through space. So now we have just found the general movement of the master forward, which is very handy for us. Which also means that we can truly ensure that the food works at the bank. And you'll see that in here due to the role, their role is introducing some translation and we don't want it put the pole control and a layer, set a key on five where everything was working just fine. In six, I will move the controller back because now I'm checking the movement of the geometry. I don't want the geometry, just lie it forward. See that on seven, there's a bit of sliding forward, so I will move the foot to the back a little bit. There you go. Then on eight, I wouldn't move it back a little. And then on 15 for the contact, I will 0 out the motion. This way we fix a little bit of the problems we had with the sliding there there's a limited amount of lighting, But Feed dues and lied in real life as well to a certain degree, of course. And also depends on how close to the food you're going to be, the amount of sliding you can tolerate in a scene depends greatly on how close to the character you're going to be. After we have attached down on frame 1720, here's a bit of sliding going on. See that I think that's something to do with the wire rotation. Rotation is 11 something at 17 and then at 20 becomes free dot something. So I'm going to 17 and just paste the free dot something at 17. And then another is much less sliding due to rotation. However, there is a bit of a problem with the translation. I think translation is not very precise, so I will delete every key in the linear movement forward between 152929 is the pose that works because it's the one-way fixed his lighting for. It's my reference pose. I will duplicate the controller again and I'm parent it again. And that will leave me, you see, we went other controller there. And then on the layer at 15 for the contact, I will just move the fruit forward to match the landing pose I want. And at 17, I will just match translation and rotation on the layer. So that will guarantee that I will be in the right position. And at 29, I'll match it again. For as long as the curve between 1729 is linear, I should get in those lightning food whatsoever. See that? Now, the fruit is his lighting anymore. And this is just one of the ways you can fix sliding feet with. And I have another tutorial on YouTube called fixed sliding feed in Maya. The easy way that goes through that method. That's not you want to check out because it's also a fast way to proceed. Coming back to us, we don't really need those two additional controllers that we duplicated it on your own. So we can just delete them. I will save the file and I will move on onto the front leg, which is what I was doing to begin with, remember, I'm interested in not having the food slides all of a sudden during the contact or lift off before the contact. Maybe the forward motion of the wrist between prevalent 13 is a bit too strong, so I'm going to reduce it ever so slightly. And for the pose before the contact, you see how in the front view of the reference the fruit isn't straight at all if compared to the floor while mine is computer straight, I want to achieve a similar pose. And here with food and ankle and egg gives a much more dynamic pose if you think of it, I want to of course, get rid of these lighting feed in here. And then you'll see that between 110 we have some sliding feed going on in here. So I'm going to use the right line method. From the red line menu, I will call the animation toolkit. I will position myself at frame ten. It will select the time range between frame 110 by holding down Shift and left mouse button. And then it will tell written nine to please truck or stimulus the time range and process backward written, I would go through the whole timeline and you see its time realizing my food there and now I no longer have sliding feet, which is handy. The drawback, of course there is multiple keys. I want the same key on frame one and then Frank 29. So I'm going to copy one over 29. Now the problem, no doubt will be that after touching down at 21, I will start sliding again. One thing I can do is at 21. So of course I can play the same trick. Select 21 to 29 and then process back. And there you go. I have no sliding feed whatsoever. That was quick, Was it not? In fact, you could even touch down with detours a lot higher, have them land down quite quick, bounce back up and settled down again, and never give them a stronger impression of weight. Of course, once the food is taken care of, it's time for us to evaluate the shoulder. Remember the shoulder head, a little bit of a problem in general in life that were weird rotations going on Every now and then due to the fact that the shoulder was aiming at stuff. So we maybe want to first nail the key poses of the shoulder and after that, clean it up in here I have additional control the shoulder that I can use to create a curve that I much prefer in general with the shoulder at the top of the shoulder, of course. And then between 15, there is some motion to the back in the reference, but really not as much as the one I can see my animation where each starts to read a kickoff from four on. So maybe I can use the twin machine and just delay the emotion of the shoulder so that at the beginning won't be that much movement to the back. I also want to see what happens. You see that the shoulder start to stays there and doesn't really go down, then it starts moving down because the chest is moving it down and to the back, maybe it will delay a little bit of motion to the back and keep the shoulder up. And then between 1013 I see the shoulder going down quite a lot in the reference in here. See that? So I wanted to maybe have that effect myself and I will have to do something about the crazy rotation I see up here. Then we move forward quite a lot indeed, contact, think I can keep the pose until 22 and then there's the big push up with the shoulder. You see it moves up quite a lot and I'm going to do the same and going to push up quite a lot there. And we start the game. Let's maybe play the animation between 128 so that we avoid playing the same frame twice at the beginning and the end of the loop. And overall the translation is okay, but you see that the way the clavicle balances. In terms of rotation, is not really in line with what we've seen in the animation. The rotation in decision is actually happening quite a lot here in desire between 1718 and then again between 2629. So that's a bit of a problem. The best way to solve this would actually be to again convert the animation to world space. Because in world space you won't be subject to the rotation of the leg aim attribute, which in hindsight we should have disabled. So that's an option. The other option is to check whether by increasing or decreasing the auto rotation in the name attribute, we get a better result for the clavicle. That seems to work. But you'll see there are still a moment between 1718 where this would require some sort of love which I can maybe give it. Let's see, I can go in there. Actually it does work to use the lagging to sort of counter animate that. And if I check the result, that kind of works. Although the rotation is still a bit dodgy. So I will try to convert this rotation to world space. So we'll select the scapula controller Bacon once mundane constraints in the world bake tool of course, and bake this election to locate or it's important, we bake one to 29. Now in theory, since these animations depends entirely on the locator, locator being free in this locator rotate Z curve, we can clearly see all the irregularities of the rotation that we had in the shoulder blade, which we can now clean up a little bit. And now we have a little bit of a softer rotation of the clavicle there. That's another method. The important thing really is to know which method could work in which situation. One of the issues of converting animation into worlds spaces that you might get into a gimbal lock like this one, for instance, if you want to learn more about gimbal lock, I suggest you watch my video on YouTube about this problem in here. The bottom line is we can no longer control the lateral rotation of the clavicle, which is a bit of a problem. And for this reason we are going to select the locator, fire up the convert rotation or their script from Morgan Loomis. Gentlemen, we all owe a monument to. We ask it to evaluate the situation and these objects is indeed a gimballed controller right now we have no way to control some axis. We can maybe convert the rotation order is way the animation will be converted to a different rotation or their animation world stayed the same. And hopefully we will benefit from better axis. And now you can see that there are spikes here and there on certain rotations. This is an extremely powerful tool because it sorts out a lot of the issues you normally have when working in world space. And it makes it, generally speaking, a lot easier to spline unruly animation. And you see that by removing the spikes in the curves provided we are using sensible axis studies, we get a much better rotation on the clavicle and things are indeed looking up for us from all points of view we should think of it. That's quite good. Nice trick to have converged rotation order. Great tool to have any convert rotation order tool is a good addition to your tool set. Again, antibodies does it as well, once happy with animation and indeed we are, it can't convert it back. So we select the locator, we open up the world bake tool and we make sure we're previewing one to 29 on the timeline and we bake from locators, we bake on one. So remember otherwise the auto aim will do its trick again with baked animation. And now we should get the same animation we had earlier on except on the rig, which is wonderful news indeed. And now we find ourself in the inviolable situation of having both the legs and the body splint next on the list of things to do. And we'll see that in the next video will be the animation of the head and tail. 12. Splining the head: It has anticipated it is now time to animate the head. So I will show it ahead. As you see, the head is moving left to right, which is a good sign if you think of it to a certain degree. Of course, this is what we are seeing happening in the reference. That's pretty good news. It means we are on the right track. But you see that the problem is that although the timing is more or less correct in the movement left to right, There's actually a lot of motion going on in the 3D model that we don't really have in the reference. Also for every transition we would have to count their animate, maybe these star-shaped controller, they translator of the head itself and maybe even these dude. That seems to be a lot of work and I don't know what you think of it, but I certainly think we should reduce the amount of work. Let's do that. First of all, we want to get rid of the problem of having to counter animate. Right now the problem is that we are following the chest, so we would have to counter animate a bunch of controllers, but it's usually a solved by externalizing the animation towards space. So we are going to grab the base. So we're going to select the Base control, the middle control, and the head control for the IK chain of the head, Coleen world bake, make sure we are seeing one to 29 frames on the timeline and bacon ones maintaining the constraints, two locators. And now we have the exactly the same animation. We've a little bit of an advantage if you think of it. Because now whatever we decided to do with the locators we have selected is not going to be affected by the rest of the body. So we are no longer counter animating, which is amazing. Let's say that the first thing I want to check, maybe it's the up and down. If we track our references in here, you will notice that as the chest goes down, the head tries to stay there. While in our 3D model has the chest goes down, the head goes down one-to-one. So in here we want to, of course, to delay the movement down on the head. The head controller is this locator here. There's one. And since we're going some offsetting in here, we want to first of all, precise cycle and post cycle all the curves. Then I will grab the head controller there, find which curve is defining the up and down motion. And you'll see that as the curved points down the head goes down, we want to delay that motion on the way down. So I'm going to shift middle mouse drag to the right so that as they chest goes down, you'll see that the head comes up. That's a little bit too much. So I'm going to reduce the offset. Now has the chest goes down and the head stays there. And then it goes down again. Now is I press Play so that now that's a bit too much, but it looks already ten times better than it did earlier on. Indeed. In fact, this was how the head motion looked before and this is later. So you'll see that just by converting the animation to world space and also thing you'd a little bit, you can achieve amazing effects at virtually no cost. In fact, of course, if the problem is that these head is moving too much, and if compared to the references, it is moving a bit too much on the vertical axis. One thing that we can do is find the posts that we don't want to change like this one, for instance, which is the top pose. Then by hitting R on the keyboard and middle mouse click and drag at the top of the curve, we can scale down the downward motion so that it will live the same delay, but you see a lot less up and down motion. That's quite cool. Now let's reduce the side-to-side motion, which is way too much. The side-to-side curve in this case is the XX curve. You see that there's another thing to consider, which is the rotation wide curves. So I think we want to scale both of them down. We'll choline from the graph editor, the scale tool. And as a venue scale pivot, I will input dot 90. That will mean that we'll scale it down by 10% every time we iterate. And 0 is the standard line in the center lines. So if I go to an extreme point and I hit Apply, you'll see that I reduce the motion quite a lot and now I am reducing. You see the left side motion there. However, I still think it rotates way too much. So I am going to grab the wire rotation and I'm going to reduce it quite a lot. I'm thinking of even delaying it by a couple of frames. And also maybe I wanted to reduce the z rotation. Similar way, I can just see you scale down by 10%. And you see that all of these columns visually at no cost for us. I think we can raise the head overall motion a little bit. And I think we can still reduce the up and down motion here. Now as the head moves up and down, the head is locked, of course, to the neck. In this position, there will be a little bit of a delay up and down. I wonder if by delaying the x rotation by the same amount of the translation in y and even a little bit more, we can get maybe an interesting set of motion going on in there. You'll see where the head rotating a little bit in reaction to the up and down. That's pretty cool. We can even grab the z may be delayed at as well by a couple of frames or even more. Let's see. You see if we delayed even more, we get uneven software motion there and maybe we can scale it down a little bit so that it doesn't feel too soft as emotion. I still think it's probably moving too much to the left and right. You'll see I'm reducing that as well. And we're just a few clicks, you see we get very cool martian out of the box without sweating too much. Of course the drawback is that you get one key every frame. But I didn't know. Is that really so important if the animation works similarly to what we did with the central control of the spine, we could play the same game with the control of the neck and delay even further to give the neck a little bit more flexibility. This is not exactly what we see in the reference. You see the reference doesn't move as much, but I'm happy with it. Of course, once you get the gist of it, you can do the same with practically any control. And now you'll see we have very clean motion on the head. Now let's do the tail. 13. Animating the tail: Now let's have a look at the tail itself. We're going to employ a similar technique this time around, we're going to use a tool named overlapping. These tutorials, really a mass of tools that you can employ to make your animation faster, not only better. First of all, I want to make sure that the loop only happens between 129 and there won't be any other keys outside. To do this, I'm going to select all of the controls are my REG except for the master because remember the master does not loop between 129. We'll de-select the master from this selection. And then on frame one, I wouldn't run the set keyframe minus insert command. This command will insert a key on every animated curve without changing the tangent type. And I will do the same on frame 29. It is way I'm sure I have a key at 129, which automatically means that if I position the cursor on the timeline on frame 29 and delete any key that happens after 29. You'll see there's nothing changed in here in 29 because there was a key on them. Similarly, if I go to frame one and I delete any key that happens before frame one, there will be no change whatsoever in the pose, and these two poses will be exactly the same apart, of course, from the other side of the legs which we haven't touched yet. Once this is sorted, I will grab all keys, go curves, pray infinity cycle, post infinity cycle, so that the animation will cycle seamlessly. You see before and after 129, then it would set the timeline back to 129, since I have changed it now, this way I am creating an animation that is looping for sure. And these loop will inform the overlapping tool before you can run overlap. However, there are a couple of things that you have to do. First of all, overlap ease seems to work better. You can create a locator at the end of the chain. I guess that these way it helps orient the last control that you want to overlap. So I will grab the last control of my chain and using world bake, I will just bake selection to locate those here. This will give me a locator that is perfectly aligned to the last control. In fact, now that I have it, I can delete the animation that locator parents that located or under the controller and move it out. This will be helpful for overlapping, means that when I rotate the last control, you see the locators following along. Then I'm going to select from the base of the tail down all the controls. And last but not least, I will add the locator to the selection. We'll go to frame one. I would maybe check from the top view that I have a nice Bose. You see not a straight butt, a little bit of poles with a line of action there, set a key on everything, delete any key that is happening in the middle and set a key on 29 so that they have exactly the same key. These seems to be a requirement for overlapping to work. Then we were overlapping. We'll maybe increase the smoothness of the animation a little bit, increase the scale a little bit so that the objects will be a little bit slower and again, increase the weight a little bit so that it won't bounce around that much. I want an emission to loop because this is a loop. So we'll click on looping animation and then I will run the rotation baking. And I will cross my fingers, of course, as I wait, if you encounter a problem at this stage, something like object not found. My suggestion is to close the window of overlapping reopen it, reselect the controllers, rerun it. As his move failure for this exercise, I found that 1.70 something is okay as a scale, Zero Dark Thirty something is fine. 3836, There's a weight. 016 seems to be a good value. The truly is far from very quick. Once overlap is done, you press Play, which is pretty cool, but it's waiting around way too much. So maybe we can scale the animation down, for instance, so I can grab all of the controllers using the gimbal axes. I can see that the way we just depends on the y-axis. Maybe one thing that we can do is go under the channels in the channel box and sink selection and timeline display in the graph editor and on the time range here. So that whenever we select the rotation channels in the channel box, you see that the graph editor automatically updates, which is quite useful. So I can select the Y rotation in the graph editor, open up the scale tool, maybe scale the y rotation by F5, 50% starting from zeros of p. But now you'll see I have the same motion, but a lot less white, and that's quite good. Now, the last bit seems to be a bit too active. So maybe this time around, I can grab the bait only and use the Z rotation instead, reduce it by 50%. And similarly, I can do the same way if it's immediate neighbor, see how useful it is to sync channel box and graph editor. Maybe this guy, I'm just going to reduce it by 20%. And maybe I wanted not to become perfectly straight, so I will change the curves so that even in the lowest bows represent servers a curve. Now you go and now I have my animation there, which is nice and smooth, very elegant, and also loops which is not bad at all. Of course, this is not a one-to-one representation of the reference. In order to do that, you would need to sit down and create poses. But if you think of it, it took as how long, five minutes. And the advantage of it is that it's also an a layer called overlapping animation layer. So at anytime I can go in there, reduce the weight of the layer and these way reduce the overlap. In fact, not that I think of it. Maybe I didn't even have to scale the curves down. While overlap ease for free, There's also tool named overlap or which are not covering in this tutorial because it's not a free tool, you have to pay for it. And I'm going to lop reaction that gives you quite a lot of control over the animation. It's also faster in the calculation and you can also add wind. It adds overlap based also on disturbance, so to speak, turbulence. Of course, there's a link to this tool in the material coming with this video. 14. Mirror the animation and wrap up: And now that we have the animation, then it's the big time we need to mirror it on the opposite side, it's a good thing that we have a mirror of tabled prepared so that we can use it, or at least try. And let's see how this works. First of all, I want to select all the controls for the left-hand side of the body. This is going to take a little bit of time. I also want to grab the Bailey's and scapula is because they contributed to the general pose of the legs. So we can't really work without them. And see me literally this little guy here that I use to shape the scalpel that top. If you want, you can also grab the additional controllers for the arm, which we didn't really use, but we could have had, maybe. We're going to save a selection set with studio library. There's going to be the left side. There you go, that sorted. Before doing the mirroring, we want to consider why are we even mirroring this stuff? Let's look at the case of the hind legs. On frame 15, the left hind leg is about to conduct, we could call it a Contact indeed, in fact, we have it here in the animation as well. If instead we go to frame one, it is the right leg, which is about the contact. We can indeed make the case for which the right leg animation is nothing but the left one shifted in time. Whereas we had a contact on the left leg, frame 15, the same way that happened for the right leg at frame one. Meaning of course, that we can reuse the same animation only shifted by 14 frames to the left. I say 14. That is 15 minus one. So let's try that. Having gold, the controls selected on the left-hand side, I'm going to select all keys between 129. Grab the mirror table that I prepared at the beginning of the videos. And in here as an option, instead of swapping it, we want to copy the animation left to right. Whereas the left and right terms are always relative to the character we use as a namespace, the one from selection that works for us. And we cross our fingers and hit Apply. And this isn't working. You see, let's investigate why this isn't working. First of all, it would be a good idea to remove any key that exists on the right-hand side. That's a bit of a bummer indeed, because you would expect the script to do it for you. But at the same time, there are many options in the script. It's for free and then super happy that I have it for free. I mean, if I were using uninvolved, I would be paying for the tool. So of course I could ask a couple of features, but in here, I don't have the same luxury. I'm going to select all the controls that control the right-hand side of the legs. You want to be careful not to add anything that belongs to the left-hand side. I'm going to save this as a selection set right side. We've unembellished. You can just simply speaking, select the opposite control and their work. So usually I'm going to delete all keys on those controls. Now, there shouldn't be any key whatsoever in there. Then I'm going to select the controls on the left-hand side, going into the mirror table, select the range one to 29 and copy left to right. And you see these works for the most part. I say for the most part because I feel like the clavicles aren't really doing what they were supposed to be doing. So we'll look at them from the side view. There is this rotation here that we have a 26 that doesn't seem to really match what happens on the left-hand side. In order to understand this problem, we have to consider what moves these controller of the scapula. If you remember, well, the controller is animated by translate and rotate. By the way, this is an excellent exercise to start troubleshooting rig issues. As you animate the scapula controllers, they said these controlled by keys of course, but there is a factor down there, which is the leg aim attribute in the pore control in practice is you operate the leg aim attribute. You see you're effectively rotating the scapula. I suspect the on the opposite side of the leg aim attribute is causing some issue. That's a bit of a bummer off course. But what can we do? Are we really going to fix the rate? We're maybe the deliveries tomorrow? I don't think so. I think we can do maybe is to disable the leg game altogether and then transfer the animation over to the other side. Now the problem is that the moment I disabled the leg aim that's going to change. You'll see there in addition to the clavicle, we already animated this clavicle. We don't want to do it again, but there is of course a way to store the emission of the scapula control, which I keep calling clavicle. And that way is of course through the world bake tool. In fact, we can bake on once, we can maintain constraints and we make sure that we are making 129, which is the full duration of the loop. We select the left scapula and we bake two locators. Now the animation will stay exactly the same, except we have a locator in their USE and it does maintain the animation. So that means that I can go into the pole control, select the game, switch it off, and you'll see that now it doesn't matter which value I give to it because of course, the scapula is held in place by the locator. So you might as well break the connections on the leg game. Set it to 0. So now I have the animation of the scapula exactly like before. Nothing else has changed. And I can grab these capita located or M bake from locators. So now we'll have the scapula free moving exactly like before, but no longer dependent on the AIM attribute, which means that hopefully it will be able to mirror it without further problems. But let's see. I will delete all keys on the pole and on the scapula and the opposite side. And then grab pull and scapula control on the left-hand side, select the time range between 129 and mirror, left to right. And I would argue that most probably the problem because now when I check the scapula motion, you see it's the same, both left and right. Of course there are variations, but that's due to the fact that the chest is indeed controlling the scapula as well. So it is going to influence what we see on screen. But you see we don't have the wonky motion of their neuron. This was excellent. It is always a good thing for an animator to understand which issues may come from a rig. Having said that, let's call in SEM. Hi there and let's show the right and left legs. You see now they should move exactly the same way as the opposite side. It looks a bit like around in slow motion if you think of it. But our mission won't be over until we offset the animation. So I'm going to select the right hand side through the selection set I made earlier on, select all the curves in the graph editor. If you want to have visual representation of what's going on, you can go to 15, right-click and convert the key to break down. Now this gives you a colored key, which means that you will see if these key goes to frame one. Then you know you're doing the right thing. If you go somewhere else, then you're not. We've all the keys selected in the graph editor in the box at the stats of the time, I'm going to type minus a equal 14, that he is 15 minus one. That moves the whole animation. Of course you want it to be pre and post cycle if we haven't already. And now everything should work just fine and you see it does. So there you go. You have now your beautiful walk in there. And it didn't take too long to make. You see that animation is really clean without us going too crazy with explaining it, which is of course a great plus if you want to see this thing going for his space, so you need to do is select the master and unmute all the channels in the master. Then you will see there's a little bit of a problem there because you see that the head stays there. I wonder why it stays there. Well, if you remember, we still have the free locators we use to create the head. There's still controlling the head and these locators aren't really following the master if you think of it. So it means we have to bake them back. So we go back to frame one when the master, it's at 0 mute or channels on the master, grabbed the free locators and with the World Bank tool, bake on one's from locators. You always have to make sure that you are showing the timeline between 129, of course. And now if you've got the master and you unmute all, you should get your nice walk going on forever and ever and ever or DOS it because at the round frame 48, you see that the front left leg is doing something a bit weird. Start to wobbles and then keeps wobbling and the arm breaks here it over stretches. There's something going on in there and I wonder what that could be. Well, if you think of it, we did convert the animation of the clavicle. But converting the animation doesn't mean looping it. You see it's not looping. So you have to pre and post cycle all curves again, and these will solve the problem. There are usually two reasons for a loop not to go on forever and ever in a seamless way. One being you didn't loop all the curves. The other one usually being some courage or looping between 129 and some others aren't looping in the same interval. So now let's make our good play blast of this. And in order to play blast, I would like to have a camera that follows the character around. So I will go out there and master, position my camera accordingly. And then I will open up this Volcker com, install all the channels that will create. You'll see a new camera here, which is following the character. Not bad. Now the reason little bit of a problem intersection you see between the chest and the arm. So I can go into the perspective and see if there's anything that can be done. There isn't either controller in here that maybe I can animate to mitigate the impact of these intersection. I will bring the timeline back to 129. And on frame one, I want the controller to be at 0. And as the arm travels to the back, I want the controller to go into the chest a little bit more. And this way you see I mitigate the intersection quite a lot. And then there's the leg opens up. I want to reset the controller and then it can copy frame one over 29, and that seems to improve. You see the intersection quite a lot. Now of course I've added these new animation. That means that I have of course, the pre and post infinity this time around, I'm going to use a button on the Graph Editor. This guy here is setting the curve to pre cycle while the other guy on the right is setting it to pass cycle, That's a bit faster than clicking multiple times into the menu. There you go. And you see that now the intersection is a lot milder. Now that we have done it, I think it would be only fair if we mirror the animation. So I will grab the control which I already have selected. I will select one to 29 and it will mirror it left to right. Of course, this needs to be cycled and offset, but we have the two button to cycle and we know we can type in minus equal 14. And this way we successfully mitigated intersections on both the left and right sides of the chest. So let's do a playlist under Show, we select platelets display. We tear off the window by clicking on the double dashed line. We override it, set everything to non-exempt for polygons and heads-up display. And then then their display, heads up display. We want to show the current frame that will give us a reference frame, of course. And then we're going to play blast the animation this way we should not be seeing the curves as we play blast. And then in the render settings of Maya, the copying board with the gear next to it. We opened it up and at the bottom under Image Size, we want to have a full HD 1080 screen. That's useful because once we right-click on the timeline now and go into the options of play blast, we can set the display size two from render settings, and that gives us a full HD play blessed. We can set the scale to one. So that gives us again full HD. And as a format we use q t If you don't have q t is because you are either on a Mac, in which case you will have AV foundation, or you're on a Windows PC and you haven't installed QuickTime, do some Google about it. As equality. I said it through a 100 y-naught and I click on Play blast. Last that's done. I have my animation there. Isn't that lovely. 15. To render or not to render: Thank you for having followed the tutorial so far. If you have found this course useful, please consider leaving a review that would help me a lot to understand whether people found this useful. And it could also be useful for other people wishing to join the course. Maybe they are in doubt and they don't know if it's worth it or not. Also, it would help me immensely if you share your achievement with your friends. In order to leave a review or share an achievement, you will have to mark all classes as complete. At that stage, you will be able to both share and review the course. Now I am recording these tutorials in my spare time, but, but thanks to your support, I can record better and more frequent tutorials. Back to the course. Now the question becomes, where do we go from here? We have a decent piece of animation and we would like to render it. While this is an animation course and does not cover rendering, I find it that people respond better to rendered animation if compared to gray pixelated play blasts. For this reason, I have recorded a series of free tutorials that show you how to render your animation in Unreal Engine, which is also free. You can find those on my YouTube channel. You will find a link to it along with this video, and that's it for this course. I would really like to take this opportunity to thank you very much for trusting my work and for choosing this course. I hope you found it useful and I certainly hope that I will see you sometimes in the future. Who knows, maybe we will work together on something amazing. Keep practicing and remember that luck helps those who prepare, Have fun.