Introduction to Animation in Maya 2022

1. Introduction to Animation in Maya: Are you a beginner animator who wants to learn the tools and techniques for animation inside of Maya? Would you like to learn animation with easy to follow exercises and projects? If that is the case, then I welcome you to next to introduction to animation in Maya 2020 to at the end of this course, you will be able to animate complete sense using universal concepts and techniques. You will understand how to apply all the different principles of animation and utilize the tools inside of money. In this course, we will be covering animation tools in via principles of animation, IK and FK systems, body mechanics, mash and render. I will curves by demonstrating the basics of animation and using some of the most classic examples such as the bouncing ball, the pendulum. And then we will move on to more advanced stuff like a walk cycle, body mechanics, and even become at an image. I have the signed this course for students who want to learn the animation tools inside of mine. A basic knowledge of the Maya interface that gives recommend. We will be using Maya 2020 to and are no records. So make sure you have those softwares up-to-date. Join me in this course. A, you will be animating in no time. 2. Project Setup: Hey guys, welcome to the first video of our series today we're going to start with just the basic project said Look, I'm going to show you a couple of quick things that we need to make sure that we have properly installed here in Maya. Just to make sure that all of the exercises and things that we're going to be doing flow in the best possible way. So as with any project in mind, yeah, we need to create a project where we're just going to contain all the rigs, all the renders, all the textures, everything that we are going to be assigning to the project is going to be inside of this folder. So I'm gonna go ahead and go into File. I'm going to go into project window. I'm going to create a new project. I'm going to call this Maya 22 Intro to animation. I personally like using underscores. It's just something I learned from coders. Say it's a little bit more efficient in certain things about code. I don't know. I've done this for a long time, so that's how I do it. I am going to have this on my, on a specific folder here on my drive. However, by default, Maya is going to install any sort of project inside your project folder, which is usually in documents. So if you're going to documents maya and then projects, you're going to find it here. I don't use this because it clutters my main drive, but you can pretty much have it anywhere. Now this are the names that you're going to get for your project. We're not going to change anything. Just keep in mind that sometimes in certain studios they're going to ask you to have a different naming convention. I've never encountered something like that, but I've been told that that's the reason why this exists. So I'm just going to hit Accept here and then we're going to go file set project. We're going to select that project and we just grid and we're gonna set it just to make sure that everything that we do goes inside the project. Now, as I mentioned, a couple of things that we need to make sure our turn either on or off to make sure that my awards in the best possible way. First of all, if you go into windows, settings and preferences Plug-in manager, you're going to see that there's a lot of plugins that are turned on. And most of them we really don't need or we're not going to use. This will make Maya open and close a little bit more slowly. So I strongly advice to turn some of them off, the ones that they usually leave off our mash, which takes a little bit of energy by forests, which takes quite a bit of energy. Our note as well, where it's hard to know. If you're right, just empty OA, you're going to find Arnold, I have this set to auto mode because I've been using it quite often, but I actually recommend having it off. And just to again, reduce the amount of time it takes to load. And which one, What's the other one? Extra, extra and this one right here. So by turning those off in both loaded and I'll load my is going to work a little bit faster. Then you're gonna go down here to this little dude that's running. This is a preferences and this guy takes you directly to the animation preferences. So as you can see here, all of the animation preferences are here. Some of them are a little bit more directly involved. We're, we're, we're doing and some of them are related to Maya as a whole. Now on this time slider setting, there's a couple of things I need you to do. You're going to go here to the playback option and you're gonna change whatever you have. And usually it's play every frame, you're going to choose to 20 FPS, 24 FPS times 1. If by any chance you forget about this, you're going to see that your animation runs extremely, extremely fast. I recommend this being 24 FPS times one. And then you're gonna go here and update view. And I like having all set to my oblique view. So if I have several viewports, I can see the animation updating on all of them. Some people like having like bigger time sliders. If that's your case, you can go here like that key tick size. We can go two times, three times, four times, five times. And once we set a keyframe down here, the, the bard little red bar is going to be like really big and usually what we want. But let's do two for now and see how that looks. And what else. I think that's it for now. There's another thing here inside the animation options. You want to make sure that everything is set just to the basic. We're going to be talking about this sort of like tangent weight and tangents in and tangents out later on. But in case you want to change that this is where you're going to be finding them. And finally, this is very important on the display settings. If you have a graphics card on your computer, be either GPU like NVDA or AMD, doesn't matter. And B, that works a little bit better. You're going to go here into view port 2 and you're going to change your rendering engine to DirectX 11. Usually it's set to either OpenGL legacy or core profile. This will give you a little bit of a better frame performance. So you're going to be able to see your animations run a little bit more smooth. And yeah, that's pretty much, I think we're not going to be using any sort of like a scrapes or animations or plugins. We're going to work with just the basic Maya things. So make sure you have everything set up. Just do those little changes. Very important. The ones that we talked about down here, this one is also very important. I'm going to turn this thing off for now with scrolled all the keyframe we're going to be talking about that. Sometimes this guy right here is also turned on, which is the playback or cash playback. I always say to shed, but I think it's cached. So the cashflow, but you just turn that off and then we're good to go. Okay. I'm just going to save the same right here. I actually, I don't need to save anything. We're just gonna start from here. So that's it for this video, guys. I'll see you back on the next one. Bye bye. 3. Principles of Animation: Hey guys, welcome back to the next part of our series. There we're going to be talking about the basics of animation inside of Maya. So let's go. Now, before we jump into Maya, I just want to take a quick detour to give you a little bit of an overview of the history of animation's just very brief. One of the first videos that we have is called guarantee the dinosaur. You probably heard about this guy right here. This is considered one of the first shorts in traditional animation. And Gertrude, the dinosaur was made in 1914, so more than a 100 years ago by windstorm a k. Now this is a very interesting thing you can look, of course, the video in YouTube and you're going to be able to find it. And it's very funny because there was no sound of course and dirty. It's actually a pretty nice animation. You can see that the drawing is the animations, the movements, everything looks pretty, pretty good even though the principles of animation and animation as a whole was just beginning. So artists back then knew that by modifying the way or by, by creating a sequence of images that slowly progress through an action. They were able to simulate movement, and this gave birth to animation as we know it. Now, of course, we have this name who created a huge empire with their cinematography and their movies. And they were the first guys to do a long or a feature film. Snow White. So there's no way was the first like long feature film done in traditional animation. Of course, my Disney, he received an honorary Oscar thanks to the achievement though he was able to accomplish not by himself, of course, with a huge team, but it's very interesting because thanks to this, well, we're here today, right? Thanks to the beginnings of animation almost a 100 years ago, we're now animating in computers, right? So the reason I wanted to mention is no white is there were two guys wrap it around. The ancient was no white in the golden age of this and it would like Pinocchio. I don't remember all the other movies but Golden Age, this name. It's like, yeah, Pinocchio, know why Fantasia, Dumbo, Bambi. And the two animators that I'm talking about are called Frank Thomas. I almost forgot. Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston. And Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston. These two gentlemen right here, they wrote one book that's considered one of the two Bibles in the animation industry. Again, strongly recommend if you can get your hands on it. It's a really, really great wreath and it's called The Illusion of Life. In this case, coined something called the 12 principles of animation. And the general principles of animation are a series of steps or easier. So if rules we follow to make sure that our animations look as good as they can be. Now, I'm not going to go deep into theory. I don't want to bore you with all the, the, the ins and outs of different principles. There's a lot of information out there as well. But we're going to be taking a look at this principles through examples. We're going to be using this principles inside of our animations. And we're going to be applying them to all the different exercises that we're gonna be doing. Several years later came another guy by the name Richard Williams. And Richard Williams became famous because he was the guy that animated or he was the delete animator in the movie. Who frame brought your rabbits. And, and it was a milestone as well because that was one of the first movies that created a, an environment where real actors and cartoons were working together, right? So it's kind of like the, the beginnings of a live action and B effects coming together. And this guy also wrote a book that's very, very famous called the animators survival kit. We're going to be taking some information from this book as well throughout the exercises. This is a little bit more technically, it's a more technical book. You're going to see exercises in and diagrams that explain how you should or shouldn't animate certain things. But what I want you guys to remember is that all of these things, both for the Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson's book and this guy. And they're just like, they're not like hard-coded rules. There are suggestions that are there principles that worked really, really well, but we're welcome to modify them. Like the quote says write like you'll learn the rules and then you break them in regards to art, of course. So that's what we're going to be doing. We're going to be learning the basics of animation, and then we're going to be breaking them to create some very, very intensive stuff. So if you can get your hands on any of these two books, that's going to be great. If you're want to become a great animator, you're definitely going to need them eventually, so make sure to check them out. Now, going back into Maya, Of course in the history eventually picture came along. They created like computer graphics. There was a lot of, well, they didn't create computer graphics, but they pioneered computer graphics used for 3D animation, Toy Story, you know, the whole deal. So Maya is of course, one of the industry standards that we use to create things, to create animations. And the way it works is extremely, extremely simple. You're going to create an object and every object inside of Maya is going to have transformations, translations, rotations and scales, and. Down here we're going to have the time slider. Now, if your window does not look like this, you can always just go here and change into Maya Classic. That's the one that I use. Some people like going into like the animation section, which as like a couple of other things here and there. I'm going to be working on Maya Classic just to make sure that we're all on the same page. And if for some reason you're not seeing this guys down here, the time slider, the time range, the code, you can go into Display. And I'm sorry, window display. I always mess this guy. So up here, windows, UI elements and use, make sure everything's turned on and you're going to have everything here. So if you position your mouse in any frame, let's say frame one, you select your object, move it to a point in space, and press the letter S. You're going to set a keyframe and that will save this information, the translation information of the object at this specific time. Frame number one, now if I move my element all the way to my frame a 120 and I move this guy over here, you're going to see that the color changes. It's like a light pink. And when I press S again, it goes into red, indicating that this is a keyframe. There is a set animation at this specific point. And the other point in between, as you can see here, is not going to be a keyframe, is going to be an in-between. That's what they're called. And you're going to see that there's no specific subframe. There is a value there, but there's no specific keyframe, so you're not going to have anything on your timeline. Now, what Maya does, and this is why, why 3D animation is so amazing and it's simplifies a lot of work is instead of us having to go frame by frame positioning the element Maya interpolates the position any creates a gradient in regards to the value that changes the precision from 1 to the other. And if I were to hit play over here, you're going to see how the animation runs at real time. Now to make sure that your animation is running in real time, you need to have this little thing turn on over here, which is your frame count. And that one you can turn on here in the display heads up display frame rate. And this is very important because if you play your animation and you see that you're not getting a consistent or close to consist in 24 frames per second. That means that your computer is not actually running the animation in real-time. And once you render, it might look different. I'm going to teach you ways to avoid that later on, we're going to have animations that are going to be a little bit heavier. And we're going to have to use those techniques because otherwise it will be impossible if you were doing like simulation on like a lot of characters or elements at the same time, we would definitely need to do a something called a play blast watch organ that touch on later on. Now an object we can interrupt any part of the animation. Let's say the point here, 60 moved the object up, for instance, hit S again to create a new keyframe here. And if we play now, maya is now going to interpellate this new position. So it's going to say, okay, you want me to move it here in 60 frames and then down here in another 60 frames. And as you can see, it makes it look very, very cool, right? So this is, this is the secret to animation. We're going to be positioning or objects in different points in space, in different translations, different rotations, different scales. And then we're going to be utilizing all the principles of animation to create something very, very interesting. So for our first exercise, this is going to be very simple just to get ourselves acquainted or get ourselves used to the way these things work. We're going to create a new scene here. And we're gonna do a simple bouncing ball animation. Now we're going to start with a very simple just up and down bouncing ball animation. And then on the next video we're going to do something a little bit more interesting. So you're gonna start by creating a sphere here, and I'm going to change the name of the sphere tube, bouncing ball. Then I'm going to go to the front view and I'm going to move my bouncing bow to the top here so that it's sitting right on top of the floor. There's something very important that we're gonna do. Pivot points are very, very important in animation because the pivot point will, will tell us where the object is going to be animating from. So in this case, I want to move the pivot point of this bouncing ball down. So I'm gonna go to my letter D. And then with my letter V, I'm going to move this all the way down so that it snaps to the last vertices, that one right there. And then I'm just going to press W again and we'll deliver X. I'm going to snap the bolt right there. So as you can see, this bouncing ball has a translation of one and it's right there. I'm going to delete the history, freeze transformation, not center pivot because if we said to people, just loose, well we'll just create it. I'm going to keep it right there. And now we can start animating sphere. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to frame 1. I'm going to select my sphere. And I'm going to press S, but I'm not going to press S here down here. I'm actually going to move it up. That's saying about there. I'm just going to press S. Now. I'm going to move my points here and I'm going to position this sphere on the frame that I think it's going to just hit the floor. In this case, I'm actually using this chart right here, which you can download. I'm actually going to leave this on your project files. It's this one right here. The bouncing ball animation is a very, very common animation. So I'm going to save this chart. Mean our projects. Whenever you want to save something, you can say with, and you're. Source image folder. And just give me just 1 second. Go. Go. Let's call this bouncing ball animation. So you're going to have that for yourself as well. Or you can just look it up. So I, my frame 1, I'm going to be up here. And then on my A-frame seven, I'm going to be down here. Okay? So I'm going to, I can just write here 0, select the sphere and hit S. So now we have this. Okay? Now the next bounce is on frame 12. So I'm going to go to frame 12, move this guy up not as high as what we had before. So here, probably little bit lower. Here S again to save that information. And then the next point in which I'm going to touch the ground is going to be frame 17. She got a position Azure Sphere there you can see, roll this out to make sure that's perfect. Hit S. And there we go. Then we're going to jump back up. And that's going to be frame 21. Again, not super high, just a little bit higher. That's s. And then on frame 25, we're going to go back to 0. That's going to be S again. And then on frame 28, we're going to do a final jump, small jump. And then on frame 30 one, we're gonna do a final landing right here. There we go. Now, this guy right here is called the range slider, which is going to show us the range in which we're animating. As you can see, we don't need all of this range right here. So I'm just going to grab this little square, bring it all the way down to, let's say like 35. Now if I press this button, I'm going to go back and if I hit play, we got this. Not bad, but not good either, right? Actually the last frame right there, I think I forgot to add the 31 frame. So I'm going to say 0, select the sphere and hit S. So now if we play this out, we got this. So I mean, it's fine, but it's not looking like a bouncing ball. She was looking like a very odd ball just falling into the ground. And the reason why we don't have this working properly, because we haven't checked the curves, the animation curves. So right now my eye, it's doing its job. It's saying, okay, you want your sphere to be here, and then here, and then here, and then here and then here. But it doesn't know how we want to achieve that specific action. So if you go into Windows animation Editors and open your graph editor, you're gonna get this window right here. I personally like to dock this window right on top of my elements, so I'm going to keep it there. But if you want to keep the floating around, that's totally fine. And the animation or the Graph Editor is one of those animation secrets that a lot of people miss or day. You don't really know how to use it properly. So I'm going to be showing you not only in this exercise, in all of the other ones, how to get the most out of this. So I'm going to go into my translation y right here. And this curve right here shows me how Maya is connecting the positions of my sphere. Anytime we see a graph, we need to understand what the x and y value mean, right? So the x value right here is time and the y-value is the change in the value of that specific elements. So the change in the translation Y of our character. So we start at frame one with a value of 13.775, and then we moved all the way to frame seven to a value of 0. And the way we, we go through those values, That's what we're going to be changing. Because right now this is a very like monotonous curve. We call this a lazy curve. It looks fine for certain things, but for this bouncing ball It's looking really, really bad. So what I wanted to do is I'm going to break this curve. I want to make sure that when the ball falls, we see this like Beck snap, right like back. So the thing that just bounces around. So I'm going to grab this thing right here and this, this little button here, a V key. You can also find it on tangents and it's called break tangent. And what break tension does is it allows me to split this little like legs that this guy has. And instead of moving one and moving both of them at the same time, I'm going to be able to move them separately like this. So I'm going to move them in such a way that they create this very sharp light. And what that will do, as you can see here, is it will hold the high values a little bit longer, and it will then very heavily or very quickly accelerate until it hits this point. And instead of softly going up to the next point, will vary sharply, accelerate all the way to this point. Now very important, the positions are not changing, the keyframes are not changing. The interpolation or the way in which the keyframes Connect is what we're changing. Got it. So again, we're not changing the keyframes there remaining exactly the same. Well wishing he is how we get from point a to point B. And this my friends, is why the graph editor is so important. Now this one right here, I'm going to break this as well. Then I grab one of the little legs and what middle mouse? I'm just going to move this up, grab this guy, move this up with the middle mouse. Very important that you use the middle mouse if you tried using any other mouse, actually, single click works nice as well. I usually use the middle mouse. I'm not sure why. It's just I've just done that way for a long time. There we go. Now, if we take a look at the animation, look how a appears now. Cool, right? So now the animation still have looking very soft light just up and down, up and down. It looks a snappier. It looks like it's actually bouncing, like it's like a hardwood floor or something. And this is like a very solid object, is just balancing like back and forth, back and forth. Now we can actually make this thing a little bit nicer. And I'm going to show you how I'm going to go into translate here. And instead of having this element, I want to have this be a little bit flow year. I want this to be a little bit nicer, little bit brother. However, we can't really scale this little crystal right here. And the reason why we can scale this is because this curve is considered a, is considered a non way that tangent. So I'm going to grab this element or this curve. I'm going to go into curves and say weighted tangents. Now, all of the little crystals are going to change into squares. And the cool thing about those squares is that we can actually scale them. So I'm going to scale this guy a little bit here. I'm going to scale this little guy a little bit here. I'm going to scale this guy. Not move it, just scale it a little bit there. And scale this guy a little bit here. Now we need to fix a little bit of the tangents here. But what's going to happen, as you would expect, is that it's going to have a little bit more air because again, we're not changing the key poses. Well, we're keeping the value high, high, high, and then sharply accelerating until we hit this low value right here. It's very important for me that you guys understand the principle of what we're doing here. Because this is the basics of like very, very good animation. If you don't understand why this is happening, just pause the video, go back a little bit and try to, to understand that again, we're not changing the key poses. We're changing how we get from wonky post to the other. And this is thanks to something called the interpolation. We're breaking the tangents were waiting. The curves are the curves. And that's allowing us to create this interesting effect where we're able to give a little bit more variants to the way in which this bulb ball bounces. So now when I hit Play, it holds it just barely, barely but just a little bit more up here on the, on the high points. And you're gonna see that our animation starting to look a very, very nice. So I'm going to stop the b the right here guys, this is just the first step on our bouncing ball. We're just creating this little bows. Make sure that you can get all the way to this point. Because on the next video we're going to be adding a little bit of squash, a little bit stretch. We're going to be moving the ball around and where I'm gonna be showing you some very nice tools to get a nice clean render out with this. So get tried to get all the way to this point, guys, and I'll see you back on the next one. Bye bye. 4. Bouncing Ball Animation: Hey guys, welcome back to the next part of our series. Today we're going to continue with the bouncing ball animation. So let's get to it. This is where we left off. This is the result that we got from the last video. If you haven't seen the last beat on, you thought that the exercise is started here. Just go back, check the last part of the video, get to this point and then we are going to continue from here. So there's a couple of things I wanna do. First, I want to move the ball, right now, the balls just bouncing up and down on the same axis, in this case, the y-axis. I want to move the ball forward. I want to make it bounce forward. And it might seem like the obvious option is to go to the first frame, hit S to keyframe it, and then go to the last frame and move it to the side like this, right? And just hit this. However, if we do that, what's going to happen is the following loop and then boom, all the way to the end of the track, right? So why is this happening? Well, the reason is, right now we've been working with a set keyframe approach. And what the set Q from approach does is it will set a keyframe on every single value, even if we haven't animated that value. So for instance, the translation on the c-axis, which is, which is what we're moving here right now, I'm sorry, the x axis has not been animated anywhere on this points, but it still has a different. So if we were to take a look at the graph editor, you're going to see that on the Translate X, we have a constant value of 0 throughout the time. Remember time and change in value. So 000, 000, 000, 000, and then we rapidly changed all the way to 20, Right? So how can we fix this? Well, there's several ways. The easiest one, just erase all of this guys if we only need a keyframe on the first and the last frame, which is where does it start and where does it end? Maya, we'll do the rest. Maya will do all the job for us as we know. And it will create this, which starts to look something closer to what we're going for. Now, this also means that we need to modify their curve up here to make sure that the movement so natural. So how does, how do things move according to Newton's laws of dynamics. I think it wasn't near them. I'm not sure if it wasn't you that I'm pretty sure it was Newton. There's this law right? In physics that says that every object will remain in motion until an external force acts on it, which in this case will be like air resistance, friction and stuff like that. So I would expect the velocity or the speed of this guy to be faster at first. So I'm going to bring this guy forward. So you're gonna have a lot of speed is going to cover a lot of terrain first. And then it will slowly lose some of the energy until it gets out to the final position, right? So if we modify the curve in this way, now we're going to have this. I still feel like it's stopping quite suddenly. So in order to minimize that, let's bring this down a little bit. And let's bring this down as well. But so we have a smoother transition into a slow in and slow out. There we go. That looks a lot nicer. So now we have two things going for us. We have this very nice bounce thanks to the changes that we did in the curves in the last video. And we have this very nice movement going forward. Now we're going to talk about one of the first principles of animation, which is called squash and stretch. Squash and stretch is a property that we normally see will not normal. We see pretty much air anytime, like in every single motion, in every single thing. We're going to see some squash and stretch. And squash and stretch allows us to exaggerate some of the poses for our characters and create this very night contrast from our basic shape to our contracting shape and are stretching face, right? So squash Of course means pushing down and stretch, of course means like pulling out. And again, as I mentioned, this doesn't only happen, we'd like bouncing balls and stuff. Any single time you're doing any sort of animation, a punch, a kick, a jump. You can use this principle of squash and stretch principle to really push the silhouette of your characters, the deformation of your characters, and create a very nice dynamic effect on your animation. So squash and stretch, super, super important, one of the 12 principles of animation. Now how are we gonna do it though? Well, I know that at the first frame, this one right here, are spheres going to have its scale like pretty much uniform. However, when it hits the frame seven, I would expect this thing to become squashed. Now the problem by or with squashing it like this is that we're losing volume on the side, so it's just becoming smaller without actually going wider on the sides. So I'm going to push this 2.7 and then I'm going to push the x and the c 21.31.31.3. Now, you might see here that anytime I change a value, instead of getting this pink number, I'm getting a red number. Why is that? Well, I have this little thing down here called auto key-frame. And anytime the auto key-frame detects that there's a change in any value, it will assign the keyframe. I'm going to turn it on. I recommend you do as well because we're going to be doing a lot of keys and doing sss. It's a little bit time-consuming. So I'm just going to keep it like this. So very important if we scale in y, we also need to scale in x and NC to make sure that we get a little bit of volume to the sites. Now one frame, one frame before I hit the ground, I'm not going to be squashed. I'm going to be stretched. If I were to play this right now, what's going to happen? This, we're going to be in this basic shape and I'm moving and I'm squashing beforehand, which is not what I want. I'm only going to squash when I hit the ground. One frame before that though, I'm going to stretch. So let's go to like 1.4. And now we're going to say 0.6.6, right? So the sphere is going to stretch. So we're going to have this. And then the gravity. Well, what's happening here is gravity is affecting the bottom part of the sphere a little bit more intensely than the top part. And we get this a stretch effect. So stretch, stretch and then boom, squash. And this change right here, this conscious between these two frames is what's gonna make our animation loop very, very nice. Now one thing I can do here is I can also rotate this a little bit so that direction of the sphere, it's actually going in the direction of the arc. Every single motion, that's another principle of animation we're going to be exploring a little bit in more depth later on. It's the arcs, everything most in this sort of like arc shape. So I'm going to move this thing like this. It's squashes pretty much like straight. And then one frame after this, it's going to squash again, but they still have going like 1.4. I'm going to go 1.3. And then I'm gonna go 0.7.7. Now this or just like semi-random numbers as deserved, the ones that I've used for a long time to teach this exercise. Eventually you're going to have to figure out which of the numbers are working for you and which ones aren't, right? So in this case, we got squash, sorry. Yeah, stretch squash and stretch again pointing Towards the next high point here in which we're going to recover our whole volume. There's always a point like a balanced word like equilibrium point, where we're just not going to fight gravity. We're not pushing gravity out. If, if that's what you can say it and then grab it is not pushing on it. So it's like a complete bounds before we start falling again. And at that point, the scale is going to be completely uniform again. So now if we go to our frame 17, I want to repeat this squash and stretch is 1.21.71.3, but I don't want to have it. What's the word I don't want to be it shouldn't be as intense as what we have here. So I'm gonna go here and I'm going to say 0.8 instead, 1.21.2. So you, how it was important to have the pivot point down here. Because otherwise, if we were to scale like any other sphere here, let's say that the spheres here, when we squash this thing, we would need to then move this thing down as well. And that makes animation a little bit more complicated. So that's why it was very important for us to have our pivot point down there. Now, one frame before this, of course we're going to be stretching. So I'm gonna do 1 a to 0.8.8. And I'm going to be, I'm going to rotate this slightly like this. And then here I'm going to go 1.15, I'm going to say point 85 and 0.25. As you can see, I'm, I'm reducing the amount of squash and stretch because Assad's, I'm going forward, I'm losing a little bit of energy, right? So we have this look at this very nice effect. Now we recover our normal volume and then on the point 25 we're going to squash again. And I know this is the penultimate jump, but there's going to be one final jump here. So I'm going to go 0.9. It's going to be 1.11.11 frame before this, Let's go 1.1.9.9. We're also going to rotate this slightly to the side. Squash. And then here again, let's do 0.91.1. Sorry, this is stretched, so it's 1.1.9 here, 0.9 here. And then we'll just rotate it a little bit. We recover our normal element. And then here I am going to give it the final squash, another 0.9. I think it's good. 1.11.1. And then a couple of frames later, I'm just going to recover my normal volume. So it's just like a final, final squash before finishing the animation. And if we take a look at this, we're gonna get the following. 0.1. Very cool right now, I think that blast like on squashed and when we go from squashed through like normal volume, it's a little bit slow. You can see it here on the timing. Hopefully the decompression On the video is good for you to appreciate it. You can see how it's I can't see it. And that's what I mean. Like I don't want to be able to see it. It should be slightly faster. So I'm just going to, I want to move this keyframe here to another part of the timeline. And to do so, I'm going to press Shift, click on the keyframe, and then just move it like a couple of frames back. That way, instead of taking four frames to recover its volume, it's only going to take two frames and we're going to get this. Awesome, right? So this is said like this is the first exercise in our animation. In our animation like course. So i, i, yeah, I think we're doing a good job here. Sorry, I got lost I lost my ward over there. So here's what I'm going to talk about now, once we have an animation, one of the things that we wanna do is we will not present that nicely. And there's of course, two ways to do it. We can do something called the render, which if you've taken the, the intro to Maya course, you know how to do. We can just assign like a normal Arnold material HDR, light set up and do a very nice like a scene setup here. And we can also do something called a play blast. So a play blast is taking just this element in pretty much compressing a small video to show our client, to show our leaf and to just show the animation before we go into the final render. Because renders, sometimes it can take a long, long time. So there's one quick tip here that I'm going to give to you guys. When we do a play blast, we do it by going into the Time Slider here, hitting the play blast right here. And you're going to select the QT, which is QuickTime element, the QuickTime compression method. We're going to change this to H.264, which is like an MP4. And we're going to do a 100 quality. Now, in order to select the Quick Time 1, you're going to have to download the QuickTime plug-in. And QuickTime is this or was this a player? I'm going to say click on Maya, play blast, quick them was this player that Apple released several years ago. But there was an issue where it wasn't possible to or rather they found an issue or a couple of years ago that has a security breach. On the other thing. And the problem with that security breach is that it's pretty much impossible to fix. So Apple just this continued quick diamond, you can no longer download QuickTime. However, however, there is a way to download the, the QuickTime Codec, which is the H 264. So what you're gonna do is you're going to look for the QuickTime element. Let me check real quick here. Just 1 second. Yes. So this is the side of that I was looking for. It's CEF Castillo.com underscore block. You can also look at like this if you just google how to play a plus H 264 in Maya without QuickTime installed, you're going to find this guy. And this guy takes you to the Apple's website where you can actually download the latest version of quicktime, which is this QuickTime seven. And what you're gonna do is you're going to install the QuickTime thing, but you're not going to install the software. You're gonna go here into the options and you're going to unselect this week then Player features, you're only going to insult the QuickTime essentials, which is the codec that we need. And we this, there's no security breach, there is no problem. And you're going to be able to have the QuickTime movie encoder inside of Maya, which is excellent for us. So if you want, you can do this. Other option, of course, is here in the play blast, which again, I repeat it's right here, right-click here on the time slider, play blast on the option box. You can also export as an AB, however, a VI, however, this one is going to be uncompressed. Even if you try to decompress, we're going to be like super, super dense. So I've had like 5 second animations take like a full gigabyte of space. I strongly advise against this, but if you want to, There's also hand brake, which is a free software that you can use to compress your files and share them around. Quick them Option, way, way better. So I'm going to select this quick them option. I'm going to select H.264. And before I do any sort of render, I want to have a little bit of life to this thing, right? So I'm gonna go into poly modeling. I'm going to create a plane here. Let me change the color of the background things a little bit too. Let's go with this one. Then I'm going to select the sphere. I'm going to go and assign a new material. Let's do a blend material. And let's just add like a, like a traditional light red color material right here. I'm going to go into my rendering tab and I'm going to add a directional light, move it up, rotate and I'm going to press number seven, which is going to turn the light mode. And when light mode is on, I can also turn this little button here, which is shadows. You're going to see the shadow there. Not the best shadow you can see. It's a little bit pixelated, but it works fine. I can also turn on this multi-sample anti-aliasing motion blur and even ambient occlusion on the, on the contact points. So now when I play this, I might not be able to say this at full speed. If your computer slows down, That's completely normal, but you're going to see like a better rendition of the whole thing. I'm going to move this light down so that we don't see it. I'm going to turn the floor off by pressing this button right here. I'm going to add one little sun right here, which is the ambient light. Reduce this to like a point to, so it's very soft and move this guy down as well. And now if I hit play, we got this very, very nice animation. Okay, so now what I can do is I can go again, right-click play blast, option box. I'm going to capture a movie on H.264, QuickTime. I want full quality. I wasn't full-scale and I'm going to use my window. So whatever it is right here, That's what I'm going to capture. I'm going to save this file and by default it's going to be saved on drew movie file folder on your project. And I'm just going to heat the playlist. So what's going to happen now is my is gonna go frame by frame. It's going to render this and it's going to compress it into a movie. You can see, it looks very, very nice. I'm using VLC media player to, to play it out. You can use any player that you want. And this is usually what we sent to clients or to the leads of the project to show them how we're doing, how our animation is going. And they will then give us feedback based on this. Sometimes they don't like seeing like Olga motion blur and stuff that will be asked to turtle turn those off. So just turns them off right here. But yeah, this is the way we're going to be able to present our animations. So that's it for this video, guys. I'm going to stop the video right here. We're gonna do two more exercises in the scene, two more little bands. So hang tight and I'll see you back on the next one. Bye bye. 5. Heavy Ball Animation: Hey guys, welcome back to the next part of our series. We're going to continue with Module 1 and we're going to be doing a heavy ball animation. So this is where we left our, where we left off last time we have this very nice bouncing ball animation. I'm going to turn to lie the shadows. All of those like bells and whistles off for just a second. I'm gonna select my bouncing ball and what I'm gonna do something in that group it, so that this group is cleaning. It has no animations. I'm just going to press H to hide the group. So now if I play this thing, of course, nothing's going to happen. So we're going to be doing a bowling ball bounce. And for that, we always need to find some sort of reference. So let's look for bowling ball bounce and let's see how it bounces. There's a lot of referencing YouTube. Youtube is going to be your friend and take a look at this. Like if we compare this bounce to what we just did, What's the difference that you see? First, the bounces not as high. The distance is not as much. And there's no deformation pretty much. It's a very flat and very intensive balance here, right? So we're gonna get this. I do like the little role that it has. So let's see if we can add that to our little mesh. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna create a new polygon here, a new sphere, and make it slightly bigger just so it has a little bit more contrast to the other sphere. Let's go to the front view. Let's turn off our grid. Move the pivot point down again, press the letter D and then letter B and snap it to that, to the last vertices. And then we'd let our x, I'm going to snap it to the grid, freeze the transformations. And I'm going to try and see if I can model this as a bowling ball. So I'm just going to grab like 1, 2, and 3. Just delete those guys. Yeah, it looks good. So I'm just going to grab these guys right here, here, and here. Let's extrude this edges. Extrude them down. And I'm just gonna say mesh, feel whole. Then I'll grab that face, that face and that face, I'm going to bevel it. So we get like another edge loop down there. And that way we're gonna get this very nice looking element. I do think we can make this look a little bit better. So I'm just going to select this whole thing. Let's change the scale to like component, which is going to try to make this a little bit rounder. There we go. Same deal with this guy. So to change the component is press R, click and then go into component mode. And that follows a little bit more closely, be the direction of the elements. And that way we can get this like rounder effects. Perfect. Let's add a new material. Let's add a blend material. And I'm going to show you a cool material here that you can use. This, this is something that I only use four for animation purposes, but it looks cool. I'm going to go into the color and I'm going to add a noise texture here. So if I press number six, you're going to see that we get this very cool looking effect. I'm going to go UV and let's do another spherical mapping right here, just so that we get a nice textural pretty much everywhere. And then if we go into the North here, I can go into the color balance and we can change the color so far of our object here. So the Color Game, let's do like, let's look like a dark green. There we go. I like that one. And then this one, It's going to be like a lighter green. And you can play around with the threshold and the amplitude, the ratio like this is just a noise. Know if that's gonna give you like random noise. So I want to get this sort of like marble effect. If you've ever been to a bowling alley, the sort of the thing that you see, right? So now we're gonna go to the front view. It's just preparation. Go to the first frame. And I'm going to position this roughly about there. I'm actually going to turn on my sphere just to see where they're starting. Then I'll make them start at the same position. But I am going to do something here. I'm going to move this back. So this thing is bouncing on a different depth, right? Well, actually it's not that back, it's this back. There we go. Perfect. So now we can press H again on the group and that's going to hide it. We're gonna select this guy, press S. And I'm going to start by doing the bounce on the same place. This is a technique that I really like about animation. And that's the fact that instead of trying to do everything from the beginning, if you do it in phases, like in stages, sometimes it's a little bit easier. We're going to see that once we get into the character animation, sometimes if you animate only the torso and the pelvis first and then the arms and legs and then the head and all the little fingers and stuff that makes it a little bit easier to manage the whole animation process. So I'm gonna go to Frame 7. I would expect this guy to fall in a pretty similar manner to what we have with the other ball. So it's going to be a very, very light, fast fall here. And then we're going to go up, but we're not going to go that fast, right? So I'm gonna go like frame 11 and then frame 14, probably even less like that. So frame 10 is going to be like a bounce there. And then Frame 13 is when we when we fall back down. And then frame 15 is probably going to be another small bounce. Frame 17 is probably going to go down here. Frame 19, one final bounce, and then frame 21, we hit there. So let's take a look at how this looks. Okay. Yeah. That seems close to what I'm going for. I think on the first jump on this one, we can go a little bit higher. Yep, I like that. So that's a good buildup. But as you remember from our previous exercise, There's a couple of things that we need to do here on the, on the axis, on the curves to make sure that they look a little bit nicer. So I'm gonna select this guy, this guy, and this guy, this guy as well. And just break the tangents so that we can start moving these guys up in creating this sort of like sharp curve for the, for the bouncing ball, for the bowling ball. So we're going to move this guy up like this. There we go. And I think I'm going to go in the way the tangents as well, just to give this a little bit more of a flow, the flow, the effect. If you press F, we can frame. So let me select everything and frame. There we go. So now we can control this a little bit better. And now let's see how this looks. That looks really good. So in this case, as you saw, I did not have any sort of guide or reference to know exactly how much of a distance I would need to have in-between the frames. So how did I do it? Of course, practices one of the answers, but the real answer here is, I need to think about how I want the timing to be. Timing is one of those properties and it's another principle of animation that tells us that the distance between the frames is the time it takes to go from one place to another will affect the way the animation looks. The more frames you have, the more time you have, the slower the animation is going to be. And the less frames you have like in here where we only have two frames, the faster the animation is going to be. So compare that to the animations that we have here on the bouncing ball. And you can see that there's enough space here on the bouncing ball to make it seem like it's actually like floating a little bit more for the bowling ball. Since we want a completely different approach, we're going to be having a smaller elements here. One thing that I forgot to do, let's change the nameless go bowling ball. And now we can turn on the other sphere. And if we take a look and compare the bounces, you're going to see that they're bouncing in a different way, which is exactly what we're going for. So the next step, of course, is to move this ball to the front. So I'm going to go to the first frame. That's fine. And then the last frame, I'm not going to move that much. Probably going to move all the way until here only. I'm going to hit S just to set that key frame and we're going to have the same issue or not. Why do we not have the same issue here? Why is it actually moving in the proper way? Now, the reason why this is happening is because when we started animating this guy, we use the auto key-frame and since it's only detecting changes on that axis, it's properly animating only that axis, which is the Translate X. I'm still going to change this way. We did modify the curve a little bit to get some nice speed up first, and then they slowed down towards the, the end of the animation. And we're going to get this. I think the last bounces a little bit too high. So I would expect this bounds to be like a really, really, really close to the the finish line right there. That looks way better. Now, one thing that I did mentioned that I liked was the fact that we could add a little bit of a role, right? Like what if this ball rolls a little bit and we end up like just slightly, slightly farther out. Well, the problem here is that we have this pivot point down here. And if we start to roll this guy, well, it's not going to really work, right? So how can we solve this? This is something that we're going to be taking a look later on when we do some simple rakes. But there's something called a hierarchy. And if I group this guy Control G, Now this group right here is a parent of whatever is inside this, right? So bowling ball will keep doing its animation down here. But this group, I'm going to be able to animate something different in here. So if I center the pivot point here, wherever I move, this guy actually know that the group is going to move there. So in this case, and in this case what we're gonna do is the following. We're going to go all the way down here. And then I'm going to have a couple of extra frames. And let's just roll this guy a little bit, like half a turn and move it. I don't want to confuse you with all the heirarchy and stuff. We're going to be taking a look at that extra size in the next couple of elements. So we're going to have this right here. Another thing we could do is we could have this ball rolling from the very beginning. The only thing is that we need to control the poses. So for instance, if I go into the graph editor and I check the rotations, I now have a rotational right here. If I eliminate this point, the sphere is going to start rotating me from the very beginning. And we're going to get this effect. Now we just need to be very careful because maybe due to the fact that the pivot point is rotating in a different way, we might need to fix a couple of contact points to make sure that the sphere is not crossing the, the floor. So for instance, there, let's go there. Let's go there. And then let's go there. And finally we stop right there. So now we're going to have a bulb that is rolling. So let's turn this off. Now. Same thing, like the role should be natural and right now it has this sort of like slow in, slow out of the effect. So I'm just going to move this things and make it a little bit smoother and a little bit more like a linear role. So now if we take a look at the other thing here, we're going to be able to see that with the little holes there. There we go. So just make sure that the view add that little small role to this sphere. You, you make sure that the contact points need to be changed to the other. We have that nice effect. We won't be able to do that with this as small trick that we did with the other ball because this one is stretching and squashing and that's going to have completely modify a lot of things. But don't worry, we are going to be talking about are where we're going to be using some more advanced rates later on. And we're going to be able to implement those sorts of effects. So now if we take a look at both of them at the same time, we have this. I do still think that that's that role right there is very, very like it stops very quickly. So what I can do here is I can take this guy and let's just give them more time to my giving it more time. Which need to make sure that there's no like weird bounce here with that with the ground floor. Because this is the the first hit there. See you that. So the time will definitely modify the rotations that we need to just check my, my positions here, make sure that the bolus impacting with the ground. There we go. And now it just rolls. Now I'm gonna go here to the, to this section right here. I'm just going to move it down so that it rolls on the same like element. Probably move a little bit forward. So at the role carries it a little bit farther out. And this is one of the things about animations. You're going to be tweaking and moving and checking stuff to make sure that everything looks and works in the best possible way. So for instance, here i'm, I'm, I'm noticing a small little jump here and see that right there. So I need to go into this intermediate frames called in-betweens, and I just need to adjust this guy so it does not leave the ground. You've been there. I'll rather have an extra keyframe just to control that role than have done a little bounce looking very weird. And there we go. So we have a very heavy ball falling with a different timing, with a different spacing, with a different effect. And then we have our traditional bouncing ball here. And you can then go again, go into your lives, your shadows, your elements here, like all the little bells and whistles. Going to another, like a nice shot here. Let's go like something like there. I'm going to right-click. I'm going to play blast. The only thing is I'm going to change this and I change bouncing ball, I'm going to have heavy ball. So that way we're going to have to be the OS in our, in our movies folder. And I'm going to be able to see the two different versions. So we have the normal bouncing ball animation and then we have this very heavy ball animation as well. And that's it guys, this is it for this exercise. Now, as you're probably seeing with the way this course is a structure or a little different than the others that I've recorded for you guys. Now, we're going to be doing a lot, a lot of exercises. So I strongly encourage you to do the exercises, make sure they look good. If there's an issue, try to pinpoint what it is. Is it the spacing, is it the position of the elements? Is it some sort of like maybe a curb that's looking weird? So make sure to try and find what the answer is for your, for your issue. If you need to do the exercises 2, 3, 4 times, do them. They're short exercises are like five to ten minute exercises that are going to give you a very, very nice mileage on your animation career. So we're gonna do one more exercise, we bouncing ball, and then we're going to jump into some more interesting stuff. So hang on tight and I'll see you back on the next one. Bye bye. 6. Floaty Ball Animation: Hey guys, welcome back to the next part of our series. Today we're going to finish the bouncing ball exercise with a new bow. Bow, which is going to be the ball, the ball, so the ball, so I'm gonna go with my sphere. I'm going to make this even bigger because it's going to be like a beach ball. And let's do it a little bit of modelling, right? So I know you guys like modeling. So let's suggest a little bit of modeling. I'm going to drag this guy and this guy. And then I'm going to bevel those that will, those with a small fraction. I'm going to select the faces, they're top and bottom and extrude this n. So when we do number three, we get that sort of effect there. And then I'm going to graph from, let's say, this edge to this edge and this edge to this edge. This one to this one. And this one to this one. We're going to bevel again. I know we're getting angles, don't worry, don't worry. Angles are not bad. If you know what to do with them. They're not bad at all. Now, grab the new edge loop that we just created right there. So it was like I forgot to select this guy right here. So let's just select the whole deal. We go Extrude, bring this in. And then when we do a number three, we're gonna get this sort of effect. And what I'm going to do to get rid of the angles. I'm just going to say mesh and then smooth. And that's going to make this a permanent like smooth. And you can see angles pretty much solve themselves. It's not the previous topology. We can of course clean it up, but for our main purposes, this is perfectly fine. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to assign a new material and let's do a bleed as well. And similar to what we did with the other ball, the bowling ball. I want to show you how to do this with a color note here. We're going to use a ramp node. Now, I'm going to turn on number 6 and I'm going to start adding, I'm going to have four points here. The first one is going to be red, the second one is going to be green. The third one is going to be yellow. And the fourth one is going to be blue. There we go. I'm going to change this from dram to your ramp. So it goes from left to right. And I'm going to change this from linear to none. So there's no interpolation. So as you can see, we get this completely filled in colors. And I'm just gonna push this guy's until we get like the four colors right there. And there we go. Let's push the, Let's grab a red and add it here. And we're gonna get this right here. Then. I mean, it's not necessary, but it's going to make it look nicer. I'm going to go to the front view. And I'm going to graph all of these phases right here. And down here, I'm going to grab all of these faces on here, right-click, assign another material. An object can have multiple materials. That's completely fine. I'm going to make this white. So now we have this sort of like a beach ball material, very simple. It's just going to look nice with the rest of the elements. We'll do the same thing that I did with the other bouncing along, going to group the bowling ball. And I'm going to press H to hide both of them. And now let's start animating this guy. So I'm gonna go to my front view, move the pivot point down to the very last vertices. And then move this to the bottom of the grid right there. And we're going to start animating. So let me turn on the bones here to make sure that we're bouncing at the same height. So I'm going to grab this guy. Let's call this a beach ball. And this one's going to be here. There we go. And that's gonna be my first frame. So it's going to be a little bit less dense than the other balls, meaning that it won't hit the floor. At Frame 7, we're prone going to hit the floor at frame ten or maybe 12. So I'm gonna go here. And then it's going to bounce really, really high again, it's going to take quite a bit of time to, to bounce high like here. And then it's going to take quite some time to bounce down like here. Let's take a look at this first bound and see how it looks. It looks okay, but it's not exactly like what I'm expecting. Now I'm going to show you another trick here. What if, what if we copy the exact same frames that we have on the bouncing ball and then somehow scaled him. So I know that my high points are going to be number one. And then it's seven, 12. So seven is my ground plane. 12 is my upbringing. And then I believe it was 1720, 125. So we're gonna go 17, ground plane, 21, plane 25, ground plane. I believe was 28, up, 31, down. We're definitely going to need a couple of more. So I'm gonna go like 34, 33, up, 35, them because we're losing elements. And then probably one last little bounce here, 37 and 39. So if I check this balance right here, this is where we're gonna get just like a traditional, very, very much like a bouncing ball, right? Well, here's where knowing the tools and understanding how to use them will allow us to save a lot of time. So I'm going to go into my graph editor and the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to break the tangents. I'm going to grab all the lower tangents and break them. And we're going to start messing around with this. I want this to look very, very flowy. So we're gonna go here. Here it gives you how the transformation there is changing because we're not in a keyframe right now, we're in the middle of the in-betweens. Let's grab everything in the frame. There we go. We've got all occurs in frame. You're going to get a nicer distribution. And of course this one is going to be right there on the ground. There we go. So now if we take a look at the bounce rate, now, this bond is going to resemble pretty much what we have on the original ball, right? And we know that the bounces, right? The only thing that's not right is the timing. We want this to feel floor here, and therefore we want things to last longer, right? So the distance between my keyframes should be bigger to allow for that effect. How are we going to do that very easily? I'm just going to make more room here. I'm going to grab my range later and give myself more frames. I'm going to grab all my keyframes here. And instead of moving them with this middle arrows, which are the ones that we used before. I'm going to grab this outermost arrows and I'm going to start scaling this. So I'm gonna give a double the time. Let's go all the way to 80 frames. Now by scaling them, that time increases. And now if we take a look at the animation, It's going to look way, way flew here, right way, way lighter because there's more time doing the exact same animation. Now the problem here is that by doing this scale, sometimes the frames will not land on an exact frame. So for instance, this one is at 42.5. This one right here is that 50.80 and having like not properly aligned keyframes could potentially cause issues later on. So what I'm gonna do is we're just going to grab all of the frames after scaling them. Let's give it a little bit more skill. And I'm going to right-click and I'm going to hit this button here that says a snap. Snap will do is it will snap the keyframes to the closest like whole keyframe that it has. We will have the exact same proportion, but with more time. And by having more time, this ball looks like it's a lot lighter than the other ones, right? It looks like it's filled with way, way more air. Now, will this ball have compression, will have squash and stretch. And the answer is yes, but probably not as much as the, as the other balls, right? Because it won't bounce like a strongly all the way to the top. So first let's fix the issue of the distance. Since this is flow here, I'm going to actually make it move way more than the other ones. So probably all the way over here. Let's see if the auto key-frame works nicely. There. There we go. Perfect. And same deal that we did with the other ones. I'm going to go to the translate here, press F. And let's just like interpellate this a little bit nicer. So we have a nice transition, perfect. So bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong. There we go. We could have been like another little bounce here, but I don't think it's necessary for now. Now for the squash and stretch, we definitely want to go to the first frame here. Squash it just a little bit. I'm going to say 0.9 only. And let's do 1.11.1. And I'm actually going to keep this squash pretty consistent. So anytime it hits the, the, well, let's go here first and let's just hit S. I'm going to go to the high points first. And let's just set this to one because there's no keyframe here to make sure that when it's on the high point, it retains its original size. So there we go. So I don't really think we need that much stretch either. So I'm just going to push this to like, let's say 1.1. And these guys are going to go to 0.9.9. We of course are going to rotate this around, so boiling point. And then we retain our or recover our original volume. Here. We're gonna go to the other side and same deal is going to be 1.1.91.1. Sorry, sorry, sorry. 1.1 here, 0.9.9. So we're going to have going and then doing again here, making sound effects is part of being an animator. So have fun with that. Now I really like making sounds, actually really does help, like get your timing rights and stuff. So don't, don't feel ashamed if you need to do like your sounds to, to understand what you're going for because it's really helpful. So I'm gonna keep the same 1.1.9 effect on, on the, on the squash and stretch on the first two bounces. And the reason I want to do this is there's not a lot of the information, so it keeps most of The main effects. Now here I will definitely start reducing the amount of effects. I'm going to go to like 0.95. I'm going to go 1.05 here and 1.05 here. And then one frame before that, remember we're coming from the squash, so we're going to stretch a little bit. So 1.05.95, there's easier ways to do that. Actually, there's a couple of tricks that we're going to be using later on that have this sort of options. Like automatic. However, I do feel like for this first exercises is always good to understand why we're doing this sort of stuff. Here. I'm not going to add any more stretch. I'm just going to add squash. So I'm gonna say 0.95 and I'll say 1.051.05. And then here I'm pretty much not going to add anything, like maybe a little bit of squash here, like 0.97 there. That will be 1.03 here and 1.03 here. Just slide squash there. And then it's just like the basic shape. So if we take a look at how this looks, we get this. And now if we compare this to the rest of the spheres, to my initial bouncing ball, to my bowling ball. We're going to get a very nice effect. Now here's one small issue that we have. And the problem is that we animated this guy and we didn't move it to the side so that we could see all of the bolts like bouncing at the same time. What can we do here? Well, I know that we need to move this in the c-axis. One thing I could do is I can go right-click and I'm going to say Break Connection just on this channel right there on the C channel. And if I move this to the side like this, now, since that channel is not animated, I can move this in C any, any place I want. And the animation is going to jump or it's going to look exactly the same. So you that. So now let's add a little bit of fur of a proper courtyard for the whole thing. And we get this AT think I'm actually going to move this guy to the back like this. So we see all of them bounce at different speeds. Pretty cool, right? So we have a normal bouncing ball like a, like a rubber ball, and then we have a bowling ball that's very heavy and rotates a little bit. And then finally we have this beach ball that goes all the way to this area and bounces very, very nicely. We can of course, store, turn on the light, the shadows, motion blur, anti-aliasing like everything, turn off the floor so that we don't see it. Let's find some nice, like, like a nice actually like this. Your weight all the way until this thing just goes out of frame. I think that's fun. And yeah, I'm just going to right-click here, play blast. And we're just going to save this as beach ball. I'm going to hit play blast. Wait for the video to be created. And there we go. Perfect. Now remember, all of those videos are being saved to your project file. So if we go into my projects here and we're going to movies, that's not the one. And so on for the YouTube channel, you haven't checked her YouTube channel. Check it out. We upload things every week. So here in the movies, we're going to have original bouncing ball, just like a rubber ball, very cartoony lot of squash and stretch. We have our heavy ball, which is just a bowling ball there. And finally, we have our beach ball. It's very slow, boom, boom, boom, boom. And there we go. With this guys. You should be able to understand the basic principles of animation. You should be able to, to animate pretty much any simple shape like moving, translating, rotating. We're going to be doing some more exercises inside of this first module just to understand the remaining principles of animation. Some of those principles we're going to be exploring later on in more advanced modules. But for now, we're going to jump onto a very cool exercise is called the pendulum. That's the next one hand. And we're going to leave it like this. So make sure to finish this exercise again. And believe me guys, if you don't follow this advice, you're not going to progress as an animator practice, you need to practice. I've done this exercise hundreds of times, literally hundreds of times. So that's why I can get this to work very, very nicely in a, in a fast, fast times n and I can make sure it looks nice, right? But believe me, my first times it was looking very, very bad. Show always do it, do it once to twice, do it as many times as you want. Practice. And I'll see you back on the next one. Bye bye. 7. Animating a Pendulum: Hey guys, welcome back to our next part of our series. Today we're going to continue with the pendulum exercise. So let's go. First of all, we need to do a little bit of modeling just to create our pendulum. And there's a couple of things that I want to explain about the heirarchy that I was mentioning in the past video. So we're gonna do a very, very simple rig. I'm going to start by creating a flat plane right here. And then I'm gonna go to the front view. I am going to create a cylinder, which is going to be the first like arm of our pendulum. Something like this is fine. Control D habit or in their control D, have it right there. And then we're going to add a sphere down here. So this fear is going to be called weight underscore GO, this is going to be ARM. C, underscore. Underscore. Go, there we go. It's going to be Arm. B. Underscore GO are a, first one, underscore GO and finally base underscore GO. So we're working do is we need to modify the way we're going to be animating these things. Because now instead of having just one element, one sphere, like what we had in the past exercises. We have all of these different elements and they need to animate in a sequential way. So what I need to do is I need to parent this guy's in the way that they're supposed to be order. So technically, if I move this base, I would expect this guy to follow, then this guy to follow, then this guy to follow, and finally, this guy to follow. Now, I am also going to move the points to the center place here. It doesn't have to be perfect. We're just in this exercise to show one of the other principles we're going to be working with Drake's shortly, very, very shortly, probably in the next video. And and, and I really need to explain to you what's going to happen here because this is something that's going to be happening in all of the rates that we're gonna be using. So if I take this guy and then select this next guy, the ARM C and P. What I'm doing here is I'm parenting this guy, this guy to this guy. So wherever this guy goes, the other guys, since it's a child of the chain, will follow. And I can continue doing this sort of change here, going through each individual arm and then finally going into the base. And what's cool about this? And we saw that with the spheres that if I animate this first part, everything else will follow with it. And we'll have a nice animation that we don't have to animate every single thing. We'll just animate the highest heirarchy. And then all of that animation is going to be inherited everywhere else. Not only that, but each individual piece on, in the heirarchy will be able to have its own animation. And that's going to allow us to create something a little bit more complex. So one thing that I want to explain to you guys is something called double transforms. If I were to grab a cube, say this guy right here, and I duplicate it. And I make this cube a son of this cube. And I phrase transformation on both of them. Actually, the first transformation before we parent this and this. So now this guy moves both of the queue, right? Now, if I move this cube to this side like a 100 units, this guy is also going to be moving a 100 units. However, he has 0 transformations because he didn't MOOC. He's father, the guy on top of him and did the movement. So that means I can also animate this guy moving and we will create something called double transformations. So if we are called old transformations, it's just like it's an animation in each part of the haircut don't transformation something that's bad in reading. So if I grab both of the elements, you can see both of them are highlighted here in the hierarchy. And I move them. This guy move a 100 units, but this guy moved 200 units because he moved its own 100 units plus the a 100 units from the guide before. Okay? So this only happens with elements that are connected in this way, in this sort of parenting element. And the reason why this is going to be important is because I'm going to be able to grab these three arms, for instance. And if I rotate them, I'm going to be able to create this sort of swing effect. See that very cool. And the cool thing about this is that even though I'm only rotating this 30 degrees, this guy is rotating 30 degrees, but this guy's rotating its own 30 degrees plus the 30 degrees of its father. And then this guy is rotating 30 degrees plus the 30 degrees of its father, the degrees of the grandfather. So this guy is 90 degrees. You can see it's pretty much flat on the ground. Okay? So that's going to be important for us. So keep that in mind. Now let's jump onto the animation. I'm gonna go to my front view. I'm going to turn off the grid. I'm going to grab this box right here, the first box, I'm going to move it printed out here. I'm going to press S, and then I'm going to move it at 60 frames and position it right about here. If I do this, it's just a normal translation, right? However, we know due to physics that objects will drag, right? Like this guy right here, this weight will take a little bit longer to start moving, then the rest of the element and the energy, the movement is going to be transmitted from the base all the way to the arms. So I know that eventually, what's going to happen is if I grab this three arms, once this element reaches its final point, will have something like this, right? So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to grab all of this guys, keep S. And on the first frame, I'm going to grab this guys. And under rotation hits 0. And again. Yes. So now we have this. Now, what would happen when this thing stops? What's going to happen? Well, of course, this weight is going to push the whole arm to the other end. It's going to start swinging. So I'm going to go, this guy's, Let's go to frame 17. I'm going to rotate them so they swing one way. And then let's go to frame 80. Rotate them so that they swing the other way. A little bit less of course. And then frame 90, a little bit less. Frame 100th. A little bit less. Frame a 110. A little bit less. Yeah, a couple more frames here. So let's increase our time slider. Let's go a 120, a little bit less, a 100. A 120, a little bit less, a 130, a little bit less. Harder than 40, almost nothing. And then let's say I'm a 150, we finally arrest. So we go to C. So now if we play the animation, we're going to get this dong, dong, dong, dong, which looks good, right? Like just by having this already looks good. But we're not using one of the principles that we're going to be exploring, which is called follow-through. Now, before we do the follow through though, whether you know this ink here, we have a slow in and slow out, which is also one of the principles of animation. This thing, the swing, starts a little bit too late, like the platform is pretty much stopped. And then this thing happens. And usually I will expect the movement to happen a little bit sooner. So I'm going to grab all of this frames and let's delayed them like 10 frames. And let's see how this looks. Okay, that looks a little bit better. I think it's a little bit too fast now. So let's grab all of these guys, all of these guys and push them like 55, like three frames. Let's something like that. And I mentioned it's a lot of trial and error. Trial and error, you need to find what the specific element is. Now, we also have a little bit of a slow in, slow out on the translation here. Next, we can keep this a little bit more linear so that we don't lose as much momentum. And the stop is a little bit more sudden. So let's do this. Okay, that looks a little bit better. I think we can delay this a little bit more. Let's try that. Remember when we're moving the frames, we always use this middle mouse arrows. We do not use this ones. We use this one to scale the elements, but right now, no need to scale. Okay, so that doesn't look that bad. I do think that we can still keep this a little bit more fast or faster. Sorry for my English, sometimes I use the wrong words and hopefully the concepts are clear. So yeah, that, that seems to worry working. So as you can see, this is swinging very, very nicely. Now, the only issue I have with this animation is the fact that this animation is very tense. Like the wire seems to be made out of a very solid material and it doesn't seem to be flowing like a rope. It's more like a, like a metal wire, right? And if we want to add a little bit more natural duality to it, what we're gonna do is the following. We're going to grab the objects here. And if we take a look at the graph editor, It's quite obvious what's happening here. It's rotating in C barriers modally, no need to break the tangents or change the weight. This is working perfectly. I mean, we could add a little bit of weight and that would make the swing leg a little bit harder to one side, but I think that's fine right now. But what I'm seeing here is that both are the three harms that we have right here are swinging at the exact same time, C, like they're all swinging at the exact same time. And if we think about what we talked about before, the fact that the energy or the movement is transmitted from top to bottom, I would expect each individual part of this chain to be moving in a slightly different time, slightly delayed, right? So what I'm gonna do is the following. I'm going to grab the second arm and a third arm, both of them. I'm going to grab all of the animation frames from here, not the first one, just all of these guys. And I'm going to give it two frames, 12. Okay? And then I'm going to grab the last arm. I'm going to select all of the frames again, and I'm going to give it two more frames. 1 to what we're doing here is we're, we're changing the weight. Did the animation is happening? We're not changing the animation. We're changing the time at which the animation happens. So all of the arms are going to follow the exact same animation. However, there are going to be slightly delayed. And by delaying them, we're going to create this sort of follow through, which is the principle of animation. And this happens with arms, this happens with legs. If your character is wearing a scarf, if you have a tail, ears like a ponytail, like there's a lot of things that use this principle where the outermost part of the object is going to be slightly delayed because the action happens first on the center of mass, which in this case it's up here. So now if we play this, look at the difference. Now when this thing swings, it's going to swing a lot, a lot nicer. See how that, that very natural movies happening there. That's exactly what we're going for. Let me, let me close this and zoom in so that we can see a little bit clearer. Let's turn this on and we get this very, very nice flow here. Okay? So this only happens, or the only reason why we have this is because we're offsetting the different parts of the arm. We're offsetting the top, the middle, and the bottom, just by two frames. Sometimes you even do it just by one frame in certain areas. And it will still give you this very natural look when you have a character, for instance, and he's breathing, not all of the movement from the breathing happens at the same time. You breathe first with the chest, then with the shoulders, and at the end with the head and the arms. So you have, you have this overlap and you have this follow through a factions where not all the actions are happening at the same time. It's the exact same actions, but not all of the same time. Now this step is recommended to be done at the end of the timing stage. So you first do your key poses that first, like the beginning and the end. We then do the timing so that things flow nicely and then we do this breakup, so we get this more natural. Why? Because now if I select everything, you're gonna see that our timeline gets a little bit dirty because we have are way, way, way more keyframes pretty much everywhere. And it's going to be a little bit more difficult to understand what's going on. Of course, if I select each individual one, it's, it's very clear what's happening. But if I try to select everything, it gets really, really messy and people very, very frequently have issues with this. So I strongly recommend that whenever you're going to do this sort of follow through an overlap, you wait until the very end of your animation once you have your poses ready, and then we're gonna do it, okay? Otherwise things are going to get a little bit tricky. And that's it guys. This is the exercise, this is the follow through an overlap with this. We've pretty much covered the basics of animation. We're now going to jump into module 2, where we're going to be exploring the rigs. And we're gonna be doing a lot of very cool different exercises that hopefully you're going to be able to learn a lot from and the, the app. So make sure to keep practicing. If this doesn't work the first time, try it again, make sure you check the very first part of the B2B because this shared key right here, the way we created this, the way where are the place where we position the pivot points? All of those things are really, really important for this example to work. Otherwise, your pendulum is not going to work properly. So get your hands-on Maya and started animating. Make sure you get all of these elements right, and I'll see you back on the next one. Bye bye. 8. Using Rigs: Hey guys, welcome back to the next part of our series. Today we're going to start talking about bricks. So let's get to it. Well, a rig guys ease a sort of construction that we have here inside of Maya that allows us to control the geometry in an indirect way. In this case, we're going to be using this curves that we have right here to modify and to move around the geometry that they are attached to. This is a very simple rig. It's not a skin break that actually is just a normal parents Rick, we we parented all the surfaces of our object onto the bones themselves. And then we're controlling the bones through something called constraints. There's really nothing that you need to know about bringing right now we're going to be focusing on animation. But one thing that you do need to know is that usually when you're animating, you don't animate directly under curves. You're usually going to be handed something like this, which is called a rig. And you're going to be animating the curse right here, which are going to allow you to move things around. And curves are supposed to be like this one right here, thought out in such a way that you only have access to the channels that the rigor once you to move. So in this case, for instance, we can only animate the x channel and only until a certain point, as you can see, it stops at certain angle because that's just how it this Reagan's the sign. So whenever you get the rig, the first thing we need to do is we need to explore the rig a little bit just to know what it can do. So for instance, the biggest curve is usually the one that controls the most things. This case, this one, the master control, will move her crane around her arm around and they will rotate the arm as well. If we want to attach this to a wall or to the ceiling, we can do so. We just need to rotate everything positioned properly and then we can animate from there. The next thing or the next curve that we have is this one right here. And as you can see, we can only rotate on y. So if I start moving this around, we only wrote it and why? And we can only rotate so far until this point where it hits because otherwise we would get some sort of overlap there that might look a little bit ugly. Then we have this other curve right here. That's one that allows me to rotate pretty much 360 degrees, which is great. Then we have this one that allows us to rotate the arm. Again, we have a limit on how far we can push the arm. Otherwise, we start getting some collision there. Same for this arm. We can push it all the way to certain position right about there. This one right here, most of this thing very nicely. This one right here rotates this little like a handle on the front. And then finally this three guys will rotate on the x-axis and then we will open and close our crane. Perfect. Now this screen does not have a material right now if I check all of the geometry has this Lomborg one material. So I'm gonna show you how to create a material for this. It's going to be a complete material, um, and it's actually very easy. We're gonna go into the Arnold section. If you don't have Arnold turn-on, don't worry, you're going to go into windows, settings and preferences Plug-in manager, and you're going to look for empty, okay, which is the blogging mTOR is the is the Arnold plug and you're just going to load that. I usually have this set as a low because that's my preferred render engine when I'm working in Maya. And here on the Arnold tab, we're going to create a new shader. So on the Arnold options, you're gonna go into, let me save this first. And then I'm gonna go here into Arnold. I'm going to create an AI standard surface, which is this one right here. And we're going to call this M has seen material on their score, robot arm. And inside your source images folder, you're going to find a another folder called robot arm, where all of the textures are going to be living. So I'm gonna go here into the color first. Let's plug in the color file and we're going to plug in here, the robot arm folder are going to plug in the color. There we go. And then we're going to plug in, I believe it's the mentalist, so we're gonna do a file as well. And then this file is going to be the maleness. Now for the metal, unless you need to do a couple of things, you're gonna go here and you're going to say Alpha is luminance. And you're going to change the sRGB to wrong, very important like that. Then we're gonna do the roughness. So here file, there is going to be this a roughness map that we have here. There we go. And we're going to insert, and we're going to change this to Roswell, and we're going to change this to Alpha's luminance as well. Finally, we're gonna go all the way down here to geometry. We're going to go into bump mapping and select bump mapping, a file. You're going to see that we have an extra file here which is the bumped today. We're going to change that as a tangent space normals because it's normal map. And then on the file, we're going to insert the file that we have here. The robot arm wrote urban normal. And I believe if you also need to change this one to wrong, because it's just an non-local. See there. You can see that the materials looking nice over there. So now we're gonna go select all by type Geometry. Right-click and I'm going to say assign existing material. And down here I'm going to find this M robot arm. And if you press number six, you should be able to see this. Now to properly see the colors we need to create a light setup. However, I'm not going to create the light setup on the scene because I wanted to keep this as clean as possible. And that means that we're only going to have the materials and the connections ready, but that's it. So I'm actually going to save the scene, save Scene As I'm going to call this robot arm. Are ready. I'm break, Let's call it. So if you want to practice the creation of the material that you're going to grab the robot arm one. And if you want to just work with the rigged, you're going to work on the other one. Now I'm going to create a new scene. And here's where the word important part comes into place whenever we want to animate something. In this case this robot arm, we're not going to be animating directly under 16. Why not? Because if at any point during production we want to modify or do any sort of change to the original rake. We want all of the animations that have been done with that ring to be updated with the new capabilities. And that means that instead of working directly on the like, the source file we're going to be referencing in. If you're familiar with working in After Effects, for instance, it's a very similar process. Whenever you create an After Effects seen, you're not working with all the acids, you're dereferencing the assets and then you do what you have to do within the software without modifying the original acids. So I'm gonna go here into file, and I'm going to go into references, create reference. And I'm going to select this robot arm array, and I'm going to say Reference. And what's going to happen is that we're going to get this thing right here. We all the materials and everything that the same things that you haven't your original scene, they're going to be present right here. So as you can see, are reg is looking very nice. The floor is a little bit big, but that's because of a setting that I change here in this grid. You can just click this option box, Edit, Reset Settings, and Apply and Close. And now we're back to them like normal, normal size. I also moved my animation graph all to the top here just to make a difference. But let's, let's bring it back down. You can just drag and drop it anywhere you want. Sometimes when I have my my camera turned on, it obscures things and that's why I move it up. So now you can see that the only thing that's different from this thing that we have here and the one that we opened before the, the, the source seen is that all of the elements here inside the outliner have this little blue crystal. So there's things that I can't do. For instance, I can't just delete things. See you then trick to delete something. It gives me this warning says, Hey, this is, this is just it's locked. Like you can't do anything. I can of course grab this things and move them around. I can animate and do whatever I want, but I won't be able to modify this. If I want to change this, if I want to do any sort of different thing with this element, I'm just going to go File reference editor. And here on the reference that either I can delete this reference, update the reference, do whatever I want. I'm going to show you a real quick why referencing is so important. So let me save this and let's call this robot arm. And animation. Just like that, I'm going to open my original robot rig. There's one right here. And now, let's say for any reason, I decide to make a couple changes to the controls here. Maybe I want to like flatten these vertices out, like move this guy down. And this guy's like pull them up, right? Like something very silly, right? But it could happen to you. It could happen two, to the construction. Let's say for instance, this, this curve right here, I'm going to go into curves. I'm going to rebuild a curve. I'm going to change this from one to let say 12. Hey, rebuilt. So now this thing has 12 control vertices, as you can see there. And with 12 control vertice