Maya for Beginners: Animation

1. Course Preview: Hi and welcome to this course, Maya for beginners animation. Now, this is the fourth in a series of courses I'm teaching about the Maya for beginners, but you are totally welcome to start with this course. If you haven't taken the other three, that's totally fine. You'll have all the scene files you'll need to follow along. My name is Lucas Ridley and I've been a professional animator for over eight years, animating characters like the hog riders in Clash of Clans to all different types of Lego characters to feature films like Michael Bay's Transformers, Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One, and the most recent Avengers Infinity War. This is the kind of experience you're going to be learning from in this course on animation. This course has over four hours of training and animation, so by the end of it, you're going to have a really good grasp of how to animate, especially inside of Autodesk Maya. There's many principles we're going to cover animation that would apply to any software. We're going to use the industry standard Autodesk Maya that I've used at every studio I've ever worked at. This course is going to be broken up into four different exercises that will get progressively more complex. I hope you'll join me in this course and learn animation and Autodesk Maya. Thanks for watching. 2. Download Maya: 4 Options: Hi and welcome to this updated version of the lesson on how to and where to get Maya. Maya is a software created by Autodesk. You can go to autodesk.com/free-trials to get a free trial of Maya. Now, if you're a student and you can prove that through their criteria that they require on their website, you can get a full version of Maya for one year for free if you're a student. The only thing that it has is a little pop-up window that says, this is a student version of Maya, you can't use it for commercial purposes, which means you can't make money using that software by the work you do with it. The next best option is the Indie license, and that you can get if you go currently, the URL is makeanything.autodesk.com/maya-indie. Now, the Indie license is a relatively new thing and is celebrated by Maya community because it is so much cheaper than the other license that you can get. Maya Indie has no restrictions except for how much money you can make. I think it's maybe a $100,000 where it varies depending on the country that you're living in. Details will be on the site after you pick what country you're in and download the software. But basically it's a full version of Maya, there's no lack of features, and it is one-tenth to one-twelfth as expensive as the traditional license. That's why it was so celebrated when they decided to take the Indie license and offer it to more people. It was just something they did on a trial basis and they decided to keep it around. Grab it while you can, it's a one-year license for roughly US $250, and that price varies depending on the country you're in. Now, the alternative, the final option that you have that I doubt anyone will pick if they have the Indie version available is the full subscription of Maya, which is $1,620. The Indie license is a steel based on the traditional pricing that we're used to with Maya. I highly, highly recommend you go grab the Indie license on the makeanything.autodesk.com/maya-indie website. If you're not sure if you want to put down even that $250 or whatever it may be for the country you're in, definitely get the free trial for 30 days and you can get through some of this course and see if it's something you would want to continue to pursue and put down that money to get the Indie license. But I encourage you if you are interested and you're committed to learning and using Maya on a yearly basis, $250 per year is a bit of a steal. So definitely go check that out. Thanks for watching this updated lesson on how and where to get Autodesk Maya, and I will continue to update things as they change. This course was made in 2018.6 Maya version. The latest as I'm recording this lesson is Maya 2020.4. Not much has changed between the version that you're watching in this course and the version available today. From 2018-2020, there's not been a ton of updates in the core features of Maya, so everything still applies. As there's new features, I will update the course and will do my best there. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. Interface Intro: Welcome to this first lesson in Maya, where we're going to cover the interface. It's the first thing you see when you open Maya. It's good to get familiarized with it. As you go through this course, you will become more and more familiar with it, and comfortable using it. But it's a great place to start, just that we know, what we're looking at because it's easy to get intimidated, when you're first starting to learn 3D. I know I was when I opened up a program and you see all these buttons and all these menus, and you have no idea what's important and what's not. It just looks like some crazy alien interface, and where to even begin with that. That's why I have this lesson. You can refer back to it, but it's also just to ease your fears, like you're not going to need to learn every single little button in menu option here to be successful and Maya and use it. I'm going to show you the things that we use the most. In this interface, I'm going to show you how to visually categorize these things. You can know probably not going to use this visually, I don't need to worry about that chaos of all these buttons up here. Let's just take and over look at this. Normally, when you open up Maya, you're going to get some type of a view like this. You can see down here that it says PE RSP. That tells us the camera view that we're viewing in the viewport. That's what this middle section is here. This is called the view part and you can see the axis down here, on the lower left. You can see y is up and z is to the left. This is where we're going to see everything that's happening in our scene. Down here, we have a timeline from when we start animating. We can scrub this, we can play it over here. We can set it to loop back several times by clicking that. We turn on auto key, turn that off, change the frame range. All of these things. But typically, when I'm using this, I use it just like this. I scrub, I look and then I can change frame range, clicking and dragging that are typing in numbers here. These two numbers actually just mean that in and out points of what we're looking at, versus the whole scene. You will see we can adjust this and slide this around, but it doesn't change the first number. That's why that's the absolute values of the in and out of the scene. But we can temporarily change that scale, we can see a smaller scale of the timeline. It's easier to scrub a smaller section, if it's a very big shot or something like that. If you double-click it, it will jump out to the whole thing, and maximize to the entire length of the frame that you've set. That's the bottom part. You can see down here in the bottom left, this will be very helpful as you're starting. This will display short helped tips and tools and selections. If I'm going up here, and I don't know this is an hover over it, I'll get a tool tip that will pop up. But if you're looking in the lower left as well, it'll say the same thing. If you're a little impatient for the tooltip to pop up, you just look in the lower left and you can see as I scrub my mouse through and I'm not clicking anything, I'm just hovering over everything. You can see as showing me what each one of these tools is named and what they do. If you leave it over there, near the tooltip will also pop up. That's one quick way to figure out what all these little things do up here. Don't worry about what each one of them does here, we'll get into that later. But just know, that these are different tabs for different sections. These sections are also related to these different drop-down menus here. Maya tries to organize the menus into different disciplines. You can see modeling ringing animation. It's all separate it into their own menu sets because typically, if you're doing one, you're not really going to be doing the other, and in a production, normally, this is the linear workflow of how things are made anyways. First, you model something, then you rigging it, you animated. For example, you can't really animate something that doesn't exist, you have to model it first, and if you're going to rigging, then you need to rigged before animation. It's just tried to do it in a way, an order that makes sense for how you're going to create things, animate things and render things. That's why these are ordered the way they are, and you can see that they change the menu options up here, but only after Windows. You can see watch Windows and as I change the options, Windows stays the same. Everything from file to Windows is never going to change, and everything after that will. A lot of these things, I'm in the animation tab here and the dropdown menu, and I'm on animation shelf here, and you can see there's play blast, there's different options and a lot of those things are also here. You can see play blast is here as well. It's the same icon, it's the same tool tip. Even though there's all these different buttons, they actually just put them in more than one place. It makes it look more complicated than it is, because the same option is put in several different places, for example play blast, I could actually even right-click on the timeline down here, and it's off the screen. But if you do this on your Maya, you can go down to the bottom and you can see an option for play blast again. Play blast, for example, as in three different places. This is also another reason why not to get overwhelmed, while these options, because visually it looks like there's a ton of them, but really they're just the same ones over and over in different ways. Depending on how you want to work or select options or menus, how or you want to select tools, then they try to give you as many options as you want, which is a little too much. Typically, you're only ever going to use this up here or the shelf, whatever you're comfortable with. I find it hard to remember what each one of these icons are, then to wait for the tooltip to pop up. Typically, I'm going through the menu up here, and I'm not using this as much. But it's definitely nice to have sometimes on a couple different things, in this course I'm probably going to make a couple of spheres just to show you how things work. We'll get manipulating things in the next lesson. But besides that, I don't really use this shelf options all that much. Now that we have this shelf option and some of these menu things covered. Let's look at what's in between them. We can see this in dropdown menu that we talked about. Then there's all these buttons up here. They all do different types of things that we're going to get into a lot later. For right now, just know that you don't really have to worry about any of these things and we'll slowly cover these later. These aren't super important and getting started, we're just going to skip them now for the interface, don't worry about these. The next thing we want to look at are these different windows as well. We have a blank window here, we have blank window here. They have their own little tabs here, and then there's these tabs on the side. It seems like there's a ton of options, but It's really not. For example, with this tab, this can actually be closed down by clicking it or double-clicking it to open it back up. But if you notice here, this little button gets highlighted and highlighted as we're clicking it. It's the same thing like we were talking about earlier in the play blast. It's just a different way to select menu options here. You can do it from up here, or you can do it from this tab. You can see the modeling toolkit, then go back to the attributes or we could select over here. Why this is significant is because, if I create a sphere, this is going to tell me the name, It's going to tell me where does in space, is it on is it visible and the history of the object and any inputs there are, I can see what the inputs are. This is a quick way to see what's the status of this object where it is. If I go to the attribute editor, I'm going to see this information displayed a little bit differently. I can see, translate as all-zero. If we go back to the channel box, we can see that shown here as well. Just the same thing shown twice like we were talking about earlier. I want to help simplify this stuff in your mind. You don't feel like that, this is something different than this. It's not, it's the same thing, it's just in a different place. To emphasize this again, I wanted to show you something that I use quite a bit. If you hold down the space bar, you'll get the hotbox menu, what Maya calls the hotbox menu. I'm holding down space bar and have all of the menu options available to me. You might be able to tell that it is the same exact way, that the tabs over here ordered. Modeling, you can see mesh, edit mesh, mesh tools and so on. You can see rigging, animation, effects and rendering. That's the exact same way this is laid out over here. It's just a quicker way to get to all of these menus is by holding down space bar. I use that quite a bit, it took me a couple of years to get used to it and actually use it. Because I think it does take a little familiarity with Maya to feel comfortable with this. The sooner you use this, the quicker you'll be in Maya and I would highly encourage you to use this instead of having to hunt around for stuff up here, and changing menus, you can get to everything right here, by holding down space bar. That's a pretty useful tip that I think will be useful even more later. Now that we know what the channel boxes and the difference with the attribute editor, let's jump over to this section. We can see the viewport has its own options. If you hover over each one of these objects, you'll also get the tool tip. I won't go over each one of these because to be honest, they're not very helpful as a beginner starting out, these aren't really that important. But I didn't want to talk about the different views and Maya. If I don't hold on space bar, just tap it, you can see I get multiple views and typically, what you'll see. Just click this over here, is something like this when you're just starting out in Maya. If I hit ''Space-bar'' again with my mouse, just over over a different window, I'm not clicking anything with my mouse. I can jump into those views and you can see what the views are by the camera name. Top y front Z, side X perspective, and we can jump between different perspective views, if we need to see something top-down and modeling, we can do that. That's one quick way to divide up the screen as well. If we wanted to divide the screen in a different wave we go to Panels, layouts and we can say two panes side-by-side. That's why I had earlier that you saw because this is the way I like to animate sometimes. I can get back to the perspective view just by hitting ''Space bar'' and these buttons over here like shortcuts to these different modes as well. Instead of hitting space bar, you can jump through. One of the last things I want to talk about is the outlier. Outliner you're going to have open and spend a lot of time and because it's basically a table of contents of what's in your scene. We can see that we have these different cameras that we saw earlier, when we are in the view setup. They're all gray because they're hidden. We can actually see them in the interface. We can see that the P sphere 1 and that's one way that we can select the object, or we can select it just by clicking it. Left mouse clicking, that's two ways this like things through the outliner or through the viewport. That is a quick rundown on the interface. I hope it got you a little more familiarized before you're looking at when you open up Maya. It's not as intimidating as it seems, and if you follow along with this course, you will not pick up these things. I won't have to walk through each little button in a dry away, will take a project-based approach that you'll get more familiar with the interface as we go along. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next lesson, where we will briefly cover manipulators and how to move stuff around in Maya. Thanks for watching. 4. Manipulators And Camera Movement: Welcome back, and let's quickly cover how to move things around in Maya, there's a couple of things to understand, especially in 3D, that's important and let's jump right in and cover that. From the previous lesson. I still have this sphere here. If you don't have that, I can just delete that and we can go up here to this polygon sphere and click that. You can also get to it by going to create polygon primitives and sphere. One other thing that's fun with these menus is you can actually tear them off so you can see there's this little option here. If I hover my mouse just above this and most menus have this, this one has it. Most, all of these menus have this little option here. If anyone's going to make a lot of primitives and a lot of spheres or something just as an example, I can just click that and I'll have this menu turn off. Now I can just click this a bunch of times and if I open up my outliner, windows outliner, I can see I made a bunch of spheres. We only need one, I'm going to Shift select all of those below it and hit "Delete" and I'll select the sphere here. I'm also going to click and drag this outliner and let it hover here and let go. It'll dock it in the window here. I'm going to close this menu that I had hovering and now I can get back to it up here if I want. Now that we have the sphere, you can see that there are these squares and different things going on here. Let's take a look, the way that we manipulate things in Maya is basically through several different tools. One of which is you may have already seen by hitting Q, you can get to the select tool or you can select it up here. It's just the cursor option. I can select the object here just by left mouse clicking. I can also select it from the outliner here. We've got the objects selected, but now I want to move it. How do I move it? I can hit "W" on my keyboard to pull up the shortcut for the manipulator. I can also select it over here. You see the move tool is what the tooltip says and you can see as well that in parentheses it says W. We can also see the shortcut is listed there. Now with the sphere selected, and if you notice even with the move tool selected, I can select different objects. You don't always have to have the select tool selected to select new things. You can have the move tool selected and you can still select "Stuff". You can also click and drag to select things in a group. Now that we have this one thing, let's move it around. I can click any access and it'll be isolated to that axis. I'll undo that and you can see it's isolated because the axis manipulator turned yellow. If I click the vertical one, it turns yellow or the Z-axis, it also turns yellow. Now I know, no matter if my mouse is going up and down or something weird, that it's only going to go along that axis. But if I want to have a free movement, I can just click in the middle and move the thing around wherever I want it. The other thing I can do is isolate on two axes and that's what these little squares are here. That I can know I'm only moving it in the vertical and X-axis. I use these quite a bit actually because in 3D space that's hard to tell where you're moving something sometimes. It's hard to tell if that's actually vertically up or if I moved it back and space. By selecting these, you can tell that I'm not moving it up. I'm moving it in the X and Z on this flat plane, this grid, and if you can't see this grid for some reason after default to that. You can also turn that on here or turn it off if it's distracting. That's just one of these little options up here. Now that we know how to move things around, let's rotate it. We can hit "E" on the keyboard and similarly we can find it over here in this little toolbox window and you can actually turn off these options from windows, UI elements, and you can turn off the toolbox. Now you can see that disappears. You find yourself not using those it's nice to turn them off and you have more screen real estate for the viewport. But for now, since we're all beginners and we're just starting out, let's leave that up. I'll go back to the UI elements, meaning user-interface and I'll go down to toolbox and bring that back. With the rotation, it's very similar that we can isolate different axis and they turned yellow and we can click in the middle here and have a free form option. One thing to keep in mind is because we're working in 3D. Watch the X-axis. If I click the Z-axis and drag the red one down. Now the red one is where the green one used to be. Did you see that? I just undid it. Right now the green one is going around and if I bring the X-axis, the red one down, now that's replaced it. Who's to say which axis is which now? Because before I rotated it, the green one was down here, the Y-axis but now because I rotated Z, the X-axis is down here. This option, this view that we're seeing is based on the object because the object is rotating, the axes are changing and that's something very important to keep in mind because that'll be important later in animation stuff. Just keep that in mind that because now we're in 3D, these things actually matter and we can control them in different ways. If we hold down E which is the shortcut for rotation if we hold down E on our keyboard and then click "Left Mouse Click'. We can drag to the world option. Now you can see the manipulator pop back to have the green going around here like it was before, even though the object is rotated. What this is saying is, we're now rotating based on the world axis, which never change. Even when we move an object around, you can see the manipulator itself is not changing. We can always have the option, even if an object is rotated weird to isolate based on the world axis, we just need to change that by holding down E and clicking and choosing this option. If we go back to object, you can see it's still kept all those changes. Now based on the object's rotation, we can see that the axes are moving all around and that's just something to keep in mind for later. We get an animation, this will be important and I explain can later in animation why that is important. The other thing that just for myself I like to do is I like to only ever stay on the channel box unless I'm doing something very specific because you can see it says attributed editor right here on the side. It takes up a ton of room. There's just a lot of stuff going on and we don't need it and I like to keep the channel box open because now we can see the values. We can zero them out, we can click and drag them and then hit "Zero" and zero everything out. This is way more useful when we're moving stuff around than the attribute editor and also can slide that down to free up more space for the viewport. Similarly to the rotation axis being different, the move axis can also be different. Right now you can see even though the object is rotated, the axis are pointing relative to the world. If we hold down W, similarly, like we held down E earlier, if we hold down W and left-click, we get the same option world object. Now we can see it's following the rotation. It's following the object axis now. That's just two different ways to manipulate the same object based on its own axis or based on the world axis. That's important. The final thing we're going to talk about is the scale. If you hit "R" or you can go over here and click the scale button or the scale tool and we can scale uniformly and we can also scale on-axis. That's pretty straightforward. We've gotten this far and we haven't moved around anything. How do we move around? We have an object now let's move around it. I want to zoom into it. How do I zoom in? I can mouse scroll, which I don't use that much. But the other option I have is to hold down Alt and right-click and then drag my mouse and you can see I'm doing the same thing. I'm zooming in and out. This is why you need a three-button mouse. Because now if you click and hold the middle mouse button, I can pan around, and then if I still holding Alt, if I left-click, I can rotate around an object. With the combination of these three things, I can do all moves and zoom in on things and center get way out here and I can't really see what I'm working on. I can click and drag and select the thing. I can select it from the outliner and then I'm going to hit " F", I jump back to the selection that I have and now I'm free to move around again and do all that. You can also get to that option from the view menu here and go to view frame selection. One other thing that's very helpful is look at selection. For example, if we're over here and I'm rotating around, I'm not rotating around the object anymore. Why is that? That's because my center of interest is somewhere over here and I can't rotate around the object. If I want to rotate around the object, I can go look at selection. The position of the camera didn't change but now it's just rotated looking at this selection and now I can pivot around that object. That's one way to help control your camera and if your camera gets too crazy. You can always select it from here. Select "Camera" which is whatever camera this viewport is, we'll select it. You can also select it from the outliner because we know it's persp. You can see on here P-E-R-S-P, persp, perspective and you can see now we have all the values here and we can just zero those out if things got too crazy and, of course, now we're inside the sphere because we're at zero world space. Now you can see I'm rotating from some crazy point out there. I can select my object, hit "F", and now I'm rotating around it and I'm back. That's a quick introduction on how to move scale, rotate, and move the camera around. Thanks for watching and I'll see you the next lesson. 5. 01 Bouncing Ball: Hi, and welcome to this first lesson where we're going to cover a bouncing ball. Now, I wanted to record myself actually talking to you because I wanted to connect a little more than typically me sitting behind the computer here and talking because I want you to understand that I know your frustration when you're learning animation, especially when it's three animation. You're basically learning several things at once. You're learning animation, which is its own thing. Then you're learning a specific software on top of that. Animation has its own principles that apply to any software that you're going to learn. Then on top of that, you're trying to learn a specific software, so I totally understand your frustration. I've been there myself not that long ago and I'm always learning anyways. But I wanted to make this quick video at the beginning to let you know, I know where we're coming from. Hopefully that you'll trust me in the reason why I'm teaching you the things I'm teaching you in the order in which I'm teaching them. That being said, I'm specifically talking about the bouncing ball. I was super excited to learn animation when I first started and was frustrated pretty quickly by these very, what I thought were basic exercises like the bouncing ball. But the reality is, they are very, very important and they are the foundation of animation and learning animation. It's going to teach you wait, it's going to teach you timing and spacing. These things are going to be what you're going to apply it to animation from day 1 until the day you die animating. Hopefully, that's a long career of enjoying it, but it's fundamental and you really need to learn it. I was frustrated when I first started because I just thought it was too basic, and I wanted to get into doing character animation right away. But what you'll find is if you do that and you skip these foundational things is you're going to be even more frustrated when you go into character animation because if you can't animate a bouncing ball very well, there's no way in the world you're going to be able to animate a character very well. So just accept this journey. This is part of the journey and you'll move through it quickly. The more you do it and the more attention you pay to actually, understanding these fundamentals and taking seriously these early lessons and exercises like the bouncing ball. With that being said, let's take a look at this. Thanks for watching. Hopefully you've downloaded the Scene file, the Ball Animation start and you're following along or you will follow along in your second viewing of this video. But basically I just wanted to talk through what we're going to do and a little bit more about animation in general and specifically in mile. So there's a misconception, I think in animation that there are limits to where things can go and everything works nicely together. What I mean is, were going to do a bouncing ball that this won't go through the floor and that somehow we're going to simulate this or something like that, and so there are these boundaries that the ball can't go through. That's totally not true. That is not true at all. You as the animator, have to be the one to precisely place everything. So this can go straight through the floor. I can just move anything anywhere I want to. There's no respect to those boundaries. So it's all up to us every frame where we are going to be responsible for. Let's dive into this and with that responsibility, start animating this ball. We have this generic ball here. It's labeled generic ball in the outliner. We can see it has some translation here where it's above the ground a little bit. So I've created this set so that we can all start from the same place. I'm going to turn off this grid because we already have a floor here, and I have anti-aliasing on, so everything looks a little nice and smooth. I'm going to get rid of this outliner because I want more screen space here. When we're animating, we have the timeline. Right now nothing is animated, so nothing's happening when we're scrubbing it. Let's animate this thing a little bit. Let's take this and put it on top using the manipulator here I have W pressed on the keyboard, so I have the Manipulator tool available to me. Like I said earlier, we're going to be responsible for placing this thing exactly where we want it. For this first lesson and exercise, I don't want you to worry about rotation. Even though we can see the ball here, totally ignore this rotation. In fact, if this wireframe is distracting to you, let's go to Show. We can actually turn off Selection Highlighting so you don't see that wireframe view. Now, we can definitely just focus on the position of the ball and not worrying about the rotation because we want to start and build up to other aspects just like translation rotation and all the way up to animating character. So with this ball up here, we want to set our first key. We can do that in several ways. Most animators to just use the shortcut S on the keyboard. As I do that, you can see there's a result, 10. That means there are 10 things that were keyed. If we look over here in the channel box, we can see all 10. We place the key on every attribute that is in the channel box and that might be fine. That might be what you want to do. Or in our case, we know we're just going to be working on the translation right now. So I'm just going to hit "Undo" a couple times to get rid of that keyframe. We can see that a little timeline tick got erase down here. That was that little red mark. If I just want to key the translations, I can hit Shift W. This makes sense because we know W is the Manipulator tool, E is the Rotation tool. So you guessed it if we hit Shift E, it'll only key the rotations. But for us, let's just do the translations for now. So we have our first key. Let's move to somewhere in the timeline, maybe 10 frames and let's put this on the ground here, on the floor. I'm just going to move this some distance out here and place it on the floor. I'm going to hit F to frame up on it so I can get a better look at the floor. Now I want it to bounce, so I'm going to maybe move, let's say five frames. We can change all this timing later. I'm just going to move this up here somewhere. I'm going to move this back down onto the floor. I'm going to reduce the timeline here so we can watch just the what we've animated here. We're animating in 24 frames a second, which is dropped down over here that you can change the frame rate. Every film that you've ever watched is going to be in 24 frames a second, unless it's Peter Jackson's, some crazy 40 frames per second thing. So nine times out of 10 you're going to be animating in 24 frames a second. You can just not worry about ever changing that for the time being. For us to playback or animation, we can scrub the timeline. We can also hit the "Play" button over here and watch it animate through. Right now it doesn't look super compelling and we're going to, of course refine this and make it look a lot better. But we're also just still getting familiar with the tools while we're still learning about animation. We're doing two things at once here. We're just going to take our time with that. We have the animation done. Let's hit Escape to stop playback. The shortcut for playing back is also Alt V. I use this all the time. I have my left hand on the keyboard and my right hand on the mouse, so I can always hit Alt V or escape to stop it and see what I've been doing. I'm also going to turn on the ambient occlusion just for right now so we can see the actual contact with the ground because it's a little hard to make out now with everything being the same color here. So now we can see we have this ball that bounces, but the first thing you notices, it just starts immediately. One thing to know about animation is that it takes a person at least six frames to register something from the cut, basically. We never want to start animating anything from the first frame unless we're intentionally breaking that a rule that we've established. I'm going to move all the animation over six frames. How do we do that? Let's hit Shift, click on the Timeline and drag. Now, we get this red bar here. You see these little yellow arrows here. There's one over here that's hidden and there's one here at the end of the selection that scales all of the keyframes. But we don't want to do that. Also you'll notice that as we scale, it doesn't respect the individual frame. We're putting the keys on like half frames. To fix that, you can go right-click and go down to snap, and it'll snap the keyframe to a full-frame. But what we want to do is move everything. I'm going to create that selection again by holding down Shift and clicking everything. I'm going to click in the middle two arrows here and then I can just slide everything over six frames. Now we playback hitting Alt V. We can register, okay, there's a ball on a cliff, and then it starts bouncing and falls to the ground. In the next lesson, we're going to actually refine this animation and learn more about what it takes to make something believable as far as animating it as concerned. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson. 6. 02 Graph Editor: Now that we have some basic animation here in our scene, let's take a look at how we can manipulate. How this is actually being animated. One of the major, major places that we will do that is in the graph editor. Let's open that up or one we are going to go to Windows animation editors and go to graph editor. You can also get to this window by going to the panels up here and changing the panel to a graph editor. You can see it's grayed out because we already have it open. But that's another way to do it. If we wanted to split this Window, that'd be another way we can use panels as well. I like to hold down the space bar for the hotbox and go to panels this way, but you can also get the Panels here. I like to go to Layouts and go Two Panes Stacked that means vertically. Now we have two panes and then we can make this one be the graph editor panel. So we can have the graph editor and this view open and this at the same time and they're docked and nicely organized. We can also switch just to this view by hitting space bar one time while our cursor is over this view. Now we can take a look at what is the animation that we have, what it looks like in the graph editor. So the graph editor is going to be your best friend. What we have is a representation of time, which is across the bottom here, as you'd expect it because our timeline across the bottom tube. So you can see, I'm holding down Alt and middle mouse dragging to navigate around. The same type of navigation you do in the viewport. The only difference and thing you might want to do is hit ''Command Shift'' and right-click and drag. We can scale the type of view that we have here in both X and Y directions. It might be "Alt and shift" if you're on a PC, I'm on a Mac, so it's "Command and shift" for me. So we can also have A and F and frame up on stuff. But you can see these little black dots are going to represent our keyframes. These lines in between them are basically saying, this is the computer interpolating between point A to point B to point C to point D, and how it's going to travel along the time, and how the values are going to change. The y-axis here the vertical axis are values. So we can see with this keyframe selected, if we look over here in this little menu that looks like the outliner, but for the graph editor, we can see we have "Translate Y" selected because it has a little green square here. If we select something else that will change. So we have "Translate Y" selected. If we go back into our viewport, we can see translate Y as the vertical axis. We can see that on our manipulator here, which it's yellow right now. So if I click on the middle, it will change it and unisolate that. It was yellow because it was isolated. So if I start middle mouse dragging this, no matter where my cursor goes, it's only going to go up and down. So to deisolate that, you can just select the middle box here. So we can see the Y is indeed green and it's "Translate Y" here is the vertical axis. So that correlates to this right here. We can actually manipulate the keys from the graph editor. So I can shift middle mouse, drag these up and down and even though I'm not on the actual keyframe itself, you can see because I'm at this point in the timeline where this red line is, I am at a place where the value is going to change it because where it is interpolating from is changing as well. Let's take a look at the beginning of this. We have one issue that's happening here. It's crashing through the cliff here. So we need to drag this over a little bit and add a couple more keyframes. So I'm going to shift select everything and move this over two keyframes and go back to the sixth keyframe. I'm going to hit "S" or actually just undo that and hit "W" so that we can only key the translations. I'm going to move this over on this second keyframe so we can see what just happened. I change the Z translate here, that this is the one that moved. Again, I could shift middle mouse, drag this and manipulate the object here from the graph editor. So you also have to be careful when your shifts middle mouse dragging, it's going to take the first direction you move in. So if I'm moving the mouse up and down, you can see the cursor changes and it goes up and down. Now, if I accidentally go right to left before I start moving the mouse up and down, It's going to get locked in this direction and that's just moving the keyframe to a different point in time. So we can undo that. So just know that the first movement you make with your mouse is going to be which direction that isolates the movement of these keyframes in. So now we have that problem solved so we can go off the cliff here in those first two frames and it is going down to the ground. Now if we watch it, it feels soft, so let's play this back. It feels really soft. Why is that? Well, it's because it slows down before it hits the ground. We can see that it's going fast here and then it slows down here right at the end and then it picks back up speed, then it slows down, and then it slows down again when it gets close to the ground over here. So we can change that type of speed through the graph editor as well. We could also make individual keyframes here to make this continue to go fast at the end here, so it doesn't slow down. So let's just take a look at that. That already feels much better just putting in these new keyframes where it's going to keep it speed up when it bounces here. You can already feel the difference. Hopefully you can see this in your scene as well. So that already feels good, but it adds a lot of keys here. We're already starting to add keys on almost every frame in this little section. So to prevent ourselves from doing that, I'm just going to right-click on these keyframes and go to "Delete" here to get rid of those. To prevent us having to set keyframes, let's work a little smarter. Let's go back to the graph editor. We don't want to affect the Translate Z just yet. Let's go to Translate Y. Now we can see what the culprit is. We can see visually that indeed the ball start to slow and that speeds up here because this ramp, this slope here, means it's going fast. It's changing value quickly over a short amount of time. These are concepts you just need to start to get comfortable with, understanding, seeing motion represented in a graph form. So we have it going fast here and then it starts to slow down. See how this gets flat here. If this was totally flat, the ball wouldn't move at all. We can see that here in these first two keyframes. See how it's totally flat. The ball is moving but not in the Y direction, is staying totally, even in the Y direction. So if this is flat we know that it's not going anywhere. So if it's very steep, we know it's going somewhere very fast. In our case, it's the Y translation because that's the one we've isolated here and are focusing on. So when it starts to flatten back out, we know it's slowing down here again. So we need to keep that speed all the way through to this keyframe because if you think about the physics of a falling object, the object doesn't know it's falling. So when it's coming close to the ground, is the object going to slow down or it's going to keep going the same speed. It's going to keep going the same speed because it doesn't know that it's coming close to the ground. So why would it slow down? It doesn't have a brain to know, that it's slowing down. So even though the computer is trying to help us here by interpolating between these two key frames it doesn't know what we're doing. It doesn't know but the thing we're animating is in the context of it. So it's always up to the animator to control all of these things at the end of the day, whether you're drawing it with pencil on paper or it's any computer, this is your responsibilities as an animator. The computer's not going to do all this stuff for you for free, which is a very common misconception that you will eventually painfully learned is not true. How do we fix this without adding more keyframes? Let's select this keyframe and you can see we get these little pink handles here. We can actually change the direction here. If we go to a keyframe where this line is going through it, we can see that we can actually change the graph of this object. So how did we get this to go straight though we need to break this somehow so we can keep this line to go straight but have the other side to stay straight as well going back up to this keyframe. So we need a break these tangents, and this is this little button here that looks like a V, and we can click that. Now you can see this changes to a blue and yellow basically line. So now we can isolate this and translate that up. I selected this and I'm middle mouse dragging it. So I'm going to get it up into a position that makes sense for what an object is going to travel a distance and fall and do the same thing. It's going to have a recoil here and bounce back up. I can go ahead and do that to this other side as well. I'm going to go ahead and break those tangents. These are called tangent handles and get that to bounce properly. The other thing that we can do real quick before we hit "Play" is to look at Translate Z. We can see that it has an inconsistent speed. But if this thing is going across away here, it's probably not going to change speed in this direction. It's going to keep going, traveling in this direction in the same speed. So let's get rid of these keyframes for now. Then let's make this linear tangent. We could move this and try to eyeball it and get it straight or we could use these little nice shortcuts up here to make this be linear. So right now, the default is an auto tangent, meaning it's going to try to make everything smooth. But we know we want this to be a straight line and we don't want it to slow down at the end. Let's hit the linear tangents button and it's going to straighten that out for us. Let's get back into this view and hit "Play." Already we have a bouncing ball that feels much, much more realistic. It doesn't slow down when it gets close to the ground. We've learned about the graph editor and we have learned more about keyframing and tangent handles and so many things in this short video. In the next lesson, we're going to continue to refine this animation, make it look better, and learn a few more principles of animation in general. I would encourage you to maybe make a few more bounces here and we'll clean those up in the next lesson. Thanks for watching. 7. 03 Finishing Generic Ball Bounce: Let's continue with the bouncing ball and make it look even better. Currently we have something that is hard to see if we play it back in the timeline here. I'm going to hit AV and we can see it's hard to see exactly what's happening. Let me show you how we can actually export a movie so we can see our animation a little more accurately. Let's right-click on the timeline here and at the bottom there's the option for play blast. You can also get to it from the animation shelf here, there's a little button that says play blast. If we click that, it will play blasted out into a movie file. If you want to see the options for play blasting, you can right-click on the timeline and go down to the little box in the bottom right here, which is going to bring this up for two seconds. If you right-click here, you can go down to play blast and then click on this little box here and you can get all the options for how you want to play blast it out and where to save it and all that good stuff. Basically what you want to do is just choose this AV foundation means quick time and the type of encoding and whether you want to do from Window or from the Render settings. I like to do from Window because it gives you exactly what you're seeing in the view port. Make sure that saved the file is turned on, so you actually save it and now we have our movie that we can watch. It's much better to do this, to evaluate the animation, then to playing it back in the view port all the time, because it can stutter and you can drop frames and not get an accurate representation but in a quick time movie, now we can actually see what's happening. Let's evaluate what's happening. What kind of ball is this? Is what we need to start asking ourselves, how bouncy of the ball is it? If we look at the height at which it's leaving here and it bounces back up only this high, it's not a very bouncy ball and a more bouncy ball, of course would have a higher bounce up here. Let's adjust that so that it gives us more room to add more bounces, because each successive bounce is going to be at a lower height. It's going to have this descending height in the top of each bounce. Let's recreate that in Maya, I'm hit Spacebar and go into my graph editor, which if I just reopened up Maya, it doesn't remember that panel settings. I'm just going to get those panels back by going do layouts to pain stacked. Then going to panels and opening up the graph editor. Now I have that selected, now I can see and isolate the translate Y and pretty easily we can just hold down to K and click in the graph header. That's another little shortcut. If I click in the graph editor, it's not going to move the timeline here but actually anywhere that you press K and hold it on the keyboard, you can actually scrub it from the view port, you can scrub from the graph editor, you can scrub anywhere if you hold down K. That's click and drag, that's a nice little shortcut, especially in the graph editor when you want to stay in this view to use K. We can get to that key frame and just drag it up a little bit and we zoom out here, so we can see relative to the height of the top, which we can also really do from here because this represents height here. This is the values of how high it is. The other thing we need to do is just adjust these tangent handles to better represent that arc that we're going to want. The other type of tangent that we might want to do is to, let's say extend this up, we want it to have more time at the top of the arc. We could do the same thing that we were doing over here before, where we could drag up the keys on either side of the main key here to try to keep it up longer, but that's adding a lot of animation. Let's use these tools to our advantage in the graph editor. I want to extend these handles out. I'm holding down shift to middle mouse dragging and nothing's happening. I can click these tangents here and go to curves weighted tangents. When I click that now you can see the tangents themselves actually change how they look. We have these little open squares here, and if I shift middle mouse drag with them selected, I can actually change the type of curve that's happening with these tangent handles. It's very useful. If we just shift middle mouse, drag this out just a little bit, we can actually get more hang time at the top of this arc. That's pretty cool. Let's make a quick play blast of this. We're going to hit space bar here. Now we can see there's a lot more bounce to this and it stays in the air longer, but the other thing is the rate at which it's going back up on the bounce, is almost faster than the rate it's falling here. Let's take a look at that. If we click on this and we go to this little button here, we can ghost the object. When we scrub through, we can actually see the spacing here. This is called spacing animation and it's a very, very important concept. We can see what's happening on either side of these frames. It's a very slow start and then almost like a Venn diagram, you can see where each frame is overlapping each other. Then the further along in the animation we can see that the spacing is getting further apart. That means the ball is speeding up. This is another way to visually represent what's actually happening in our animation. We can see and compare the spacing between each of the balances. It's actually doing pretty well actually, what we wouldn't want is for the spacing on the bounce to be further apart than the waves coming in, because that wouldn't make any sense physically in physics. This should be losing energy and not gaining it. We are in fact doing that properly and ghosting is a nice way to do it, especially if you have geometry like this, it can get a little bit bogged down but for the most part, it's really nice. Let's add a couple more bounces here. I'm going to extend the timeline out and now I'm going to turn off ghosting for now, clicking this little button up here, no ghosting. Let's go back into the graph editor. I'm going to go forward five frames one, two, three, four, five and drag this up just a little bit. I'm going to go forward five frames one, two, three, four, five and I'm going to copy paste this value down here by hitting command C and Command V, after selecting that key frame. You can also see that we get these values in the graph editor, we can see the frame number that it occurs on and the value. We can also manipulate whatever we have selected by typing in a number here. Let's create one more balance here, let's go one, two, three, four, five, let's drag this up just a touch and then we'll go one, two, three, four, five and then we'll hit Command V. What we have here is, we need to create a descending order of bounces. The ball is losing energy as it's bouncing and continuing down. The other thing we need to take a look at is first off, these tangent handles are a little wonky but also understanding the fact that, as the ball is not going as high, we're giving it the same amount of time, which is incorrect. We want to keep this angle of a slope through each of the bounces, but as we get lower and lower, that angle is getting much more shallow. We need to reduce the amount of frames that we're giving this to occur, so that this slope maintains as the same way. Let's take a look at this. Let us take two frames off of both sides here and one, two. Now we can already see this angle right here is already starting to be way more accurate to what we're seeing over here on the first bounce. Let's get that set up the way we want it. We also need to reduce this one by a frame on either side. Remember, we did two here on either side of the top, so let's do one on other side of here. Instead of five on each side, we're going to do four on each side. Then this last one is three on each side. I'm just going to maybe bring that down and then increase the hang time at the top by dragging those out. These look okay and that one looks okay. Maybe drag this one out, just a touch and let's make one more. Instead of three, remember this one is three on each side we can see one two three to the middle. Instead three, let's go one two and drag this up. Let's go to forward and hit Command V, We can actually reset these by going to the auto Tangent button over here. Then just getting back into the tangents here to make them be what we want them to be. You might have noticed that the ball is bouncing in the same place. If we take a look at this and we scrubbed the timeline, we can see it just goes there and balance as well. We can see that it's not going forward here when we scrub the timeline. That's because it's not going forward and translate Z, we can see at Z because it's the color blue and we can look over here and see translate Z is blue. If we go into the graph editor for that attribute, we can see that it does just stop here. Let's go back to that key frame. We can actually, without adding more key frames, we can extend this animation out. If we go to view infinity, we can see these dotted lines, which means infinity and if we want to continue this animation, we need to change this tangent handle, because this tangent handle is flat over here. Let's choose another different type of a tangent here. Let's choose the spline tangent. I'll straighten this out, but still the dotted line is flat. We need to do one more thing, let's go to the curves and go to post infinity, meaning post after the key frame we have and let's go to linear to continue that animation. Now when we scrub, we can see this actually continues all along the timeline. Let's just extend the timeline out a little bit. Then we can hit a key frame over here on Translate Z and now we save that animation, that helped us project that angle that we had going forward. I just want to extend this out. It maintains this angle here and I'll maybe even adjust this middle one just to touch so that it's a little more straight all the way through. Then it'll slow down and stop towards the end of the ground that we have. Now we have already done the Translate Y. Let's just play blast this real quick and see what we have. Now we have a pretty legitimate animation of a bouncing ball now, it seems like it has weight and that it's bouncing properly. In the next lesson, we're going to discuss very quickly the idea of squash and stretch. Thanks for watching. 8. 04 Squash And Stretch: Let's discuss another principle of animation called squash and stretch. We've already covered timing because we've looked at the difference of frames it takes to go from one keyframe to another, that's the timing of it, and that that would be reduced between these balances. That's timing. We've learned about spacing because we've turned on the ghosting and we've seen where the spacing is between each keyframe and the position of the ball that's spacing. In this lesson we're going to cover squash and stretch. It's one of my favorite principles of animation because it can add so much to an animation if done properly. It can very easily be overdone and that's usually something that is going to happen when you're a student is pushing things too far and that's how you learn. Let's jump in and learn a little bit about squash and stretch. What I want to do first is select the ball, go to a contact frame where it's on the ground and I also just wanted to briefly mention a quirky setting in Maya. I'm going to turn off ghosting real quick to talk about it. When I have the ball selected, if I select an attribute over here like translate z, maybe I wanted to move the translate z around my middle mouse dragging it or something. We can see that my timeline keyframes have disappeared. We would expect the keyframe right here especially looking in the graph editor we can see one. There's one right there. Why is that not showing up here in the timeline? That's not showing up because the default for Maya is to only show what attribute that you have selected if you have an attribute selected. So because we have translated z select that it's not showing these y keyframes. We can see there's two different types of red here. The darker red means that there is actually a key on that attribute on this frame. So if want to see translate y keyframe, we need to select that one. Now we have a display in the timeline. But if we want to turn this feature off, we can go to right-click up here and say sync timeline display and turn that off. So now, no matter what we have selected in our sphere editor, we will see all of the keyframes here. So that's just something to keep in mind when you're working. It can be nice to isolate the timeline if you want to only move certain keys around or something like that, you can select them from here and isolate them. So I'll leave that up to you, whatever you're comfortable with it. You can also do the same thing. It's not on by default, but you can do the same thing in the graph editor. So if we wanted to only see one of these attributes, you can see the graph editor update as we click on them. So it's another little feature to be aware of in Maya. I'm going to leave the defaults on for now. So what we want to do is isolate the keys that we've already made. We don't want to screw up these tangent handles. So if I were to go in here and hit "S", you can see that this curve, which was once a really nice and smooth. Now how's this little divot in it. Because this is trying to do an auto tangent. We can see this blue auto tangent button is selected because that's the default option that it tries to choose. So it screws up this tangent handle. How do we work around that? There's another tool called an insert key. So let's click that in the graph editor, it's over here on the left. I click that. Now with the curves selected, I can actually just middle mouse click along here. I'm going to set two key frames on either side of this contact keyframe. So now we can set a keyframe on all of the keys. I'm going to hit "S". We can see that everything is keyed and we're go through here and set a key on everything for all of these keys. The reason why I'm doing that is I'm going to lock all of this in because we're going to only affect one little portion of this animation with the squash and stretch. So I don't want to mess up any of the other animation we have. So I want to lock that in. So because we've used the insert key tool, we know that we've saved this custom tangent handle that we've adjusted. The auto tangent thing isn't trying to screw that curve up. Cool. So let's take a look at this through ghosting. I'm going to turn back on ghosting. I'm going to go to this frame right before it hits the ground. This is where we're going to scale it up. If we were to just scale this up, we can see we're just making the sphere bigger in volume. It's just getting larger and larger. What we want do is maintain the volume of this object. So if we scale on one direction, that means we need to scale down and another. So to do that, it's a little difficult to scale because there's two different directions here. But what we can do is scale up. I'm just going to do it just a little bit. Scale up in one direction and then we can hold down control and select the axes that we do not want to scale in. Then scale. So you can see both of those handles coming in at the same rate. So it's nice to do that uniformly and while maintaining that scaling up that we did in the y-axis. Now what we can do is see the path of motion, which is another concept in animation. We can see the path of motion here. We want to keep this in line so I can rotate this so that it's going in the same path of motion towards the ground. I'm going to favor the ground just a little bit. So it's going to almost look like it speeds up here, I think, right at the end because we're increasing the spacing. Another concept in animation. So get familiar with these words and how I'm using them and what they mean. So now we're going to look at the contact. We need to squash this thing down. It has weight and it's going get flattened a little bit. So let's flatten this thing a little bit. Then let's scale it out and the other two. So I'm going to hold down control and scale this out and maybe scale it down just a little bit more. So now I'm going to push this back down to the ground. In the next frame, I'm going to have this stretch back out. So I'm going to stretch this out. Then I'm going to hold down control and bring that in. I'm going to rotate that. So it's following the same direction here. I'm going pull this down just a little bit. So it favors the squash position here we can see it's nice to not have things uniform. Like we don't want the bottom of this, both of these to evenly be touching this. It's nice to have things offset a little bit and makes it feel a little more natural. You can see the spacing here. The tip of this thing is still touching this ball and you can see that this one isn't. So it's nice to keep that. We want this to go slower. So this one should be touching this one where this one's coming in faster. So it shouldn't. So that all this makes sense. Why we're doing what we're doing. So let's turn off ghosting and then make a play blast and see what we've created. Now when we play back, we can see just for a brief moment, that squash and stretch. It makes that first bounce feel different than the other bounces. It feels like it has a little more impact. It squashes there for a second and then the other ones are just more stiff and they just bounce, bounce, bounce. So depending on the feeling and the type of ball and the type of animation that you're going after, squash and stretch can be a very cool thing to start to apply to your animation. It can be applied to everything again. This is the bouncing ball. It can be applied to facial animation. The jaw squashing and stretching the cheeks, bulging and stretching as the mouth moves. All parts of the body can squash and stretch when you're, even when we're talking about character animation or any other type of animation. It can really have a lot of impact on what you're doing. So consider that in the animation you're doing. I will say that just to prove the point of squash and stretch, I would say in this example, we maybe went a little too far. But I like that. It's very clear. This first bounce is much different than the other ones. It's just very quick, it's very subtle. It's over a couple of key frames, but it does make a difference and that's animation. So let's move on in the next lesson and talk about an exercise I want you to try out. 9. 05 Ball Exercise: This video is not going to be a lesson, but it's going to be about explaining an exercise. I'd like for you to open up the ball exercise start and find these two balls here. We have a beach ball and a bowling ball. What I would like for you to do, is to animate both of these balls, doing the same exact thing that we just did. What this exercise is about, is understanding weight. When we did the first one, we did it just with the generic ball and it didn't bounce. It did what it did. But now we have two very specific balls. One is very light, and even though it's big, it's much lighter than the bowling ball. The bowling ball is very heavy. What your task is for this exercise is to animate both these balls coming off of the cliff, just like we did the other ball. You can do them at the same time or you can do them one after the other, whichever you'd like to do. You can make this as long as you want it to be and all that kind of a thing. But yeah, so go ahead and animate both of these balls falling off this cliff, like we did the generic ball. But the key here, and what you have to think about is timing and spacing. What ball is going to do what; is this one going to fall quicker? Is this one going to fall slower? Is the bowling ball going to bounce very much? Is the beach ball going to bounce more than the bowling ball? You want to show, even though in 3D, these are the exact same thing, there's nothing special about either of those. But what we have to do in animation is, we have to give these things weight by using timing and spacing and all these other things we've been talking about, squashing and stretch and all that. You have all the knowledge now, but now you have to start practicing it and start thinking before you animate and make deliberate choices about where your setting key-frames and how you're animating. It's going to take more than a minute. Take some time and animate that. In the next video, we're going to cover the animation of both of these. All right. Thanks for watching. 10. 06 Ball Exercise Review: In this lesson, we're going to go over the exercise that the previous video was about. If you haven't completed it yet, definitely consider finishing that before you watch this or if you're having trouble with it, go ahead and watch this one and hopefully it'll help you out as well. But I think a lot of the animation in general is, you don't really internalize these concepts until you try them yourselves. Give it a try. You're not going to get perfect. I did this exercise with you and I enjoyed it. It's always nice to refresh these concepts even as someone who's been animating professionally for 8 years on big feature films. This stuff still it's helpful for me. Definitely take a moment and give it a try. Let's take a look at what I did and you can open up the scene file, the ball exercise end and open up this exact scene file to see what I made. So let's hit "Play", and we can already tell right away that each ball has a different type of weight. Let's discuss what is actually contributing to that difference. So if we take a look at the beach ball, it takes longer to fall. We don't live in a vacuum. If we lived in a vacuum then these would both fall at the same rate. But because this ball is bigger and it has more drag through the air, it's going to take longer for it to get to the ground. But this ball is smaller and it's heavier, so it's going to fall just a few frames quicker. We can see if we stepped through that there's maybe three frames or so. One, two, three, maybe four frames difference between when they come off and when they contact. That might be exaggerated a little bit of course what I did isn't perfect either but you kind of get the idea and the concepts behind this. We can see that there's way more bounces on the beach ball. Whereas the bowling ball just bounces twice. Basically very shallow, very short balances because it's so heavy, it's not going to bounce a lot. Then the other thing we can look at is, the bowling ball continues to roll. It's a heavier object, so it takes a lot more friction with the floor for to get it to stop. Whereas with the beach ball it's very light. Any little amount of friction with the floor, is going to kind of slow it down a little bit. Let's take a look at the scene file and dig a little deeper here because there is also kind of left you to the wolves with the rotation stuff. We'll discuss all that. Let's go into the seen file. Basically how I approach this was, I didn't think about the rotations at all. Okay, I had all of these setup so that their rotation axes were all straight. So that would be easy to rotate, right? If we take a look at the attributes over here and we rotate, it's only changing one value. So what I did was, I animated the translation just like we did in the first generic ball that I walked you through all that stuff. I did all of that same thing. Then when I was done with all the bouncy and all of this stuff, I went back in and I set two key frames and I animated the rotation. So basically what I did was, in the graph editor. Let me just duplicate this out and show you. I'm going to save this real quick and my duplicate this bowling ball and drag it over here and kind of show you what I did. So it's on the ground and we'll set a key here, and then we'll set a key over here and say it travels this far. Right now it's just sliding across the floor. Let me just hide these two so we're not distracted by them. Right now I'm going to delete the keyframe there, right-clicking and then turn that off. So there are hidden. So we basically have, this is just sliding across the floor. But if we take an isolate this rotation, so it's going to be rotate z and I can see that down here. Let's make both of these linear so it's easy on us. Now we can basically scrub through and take this last keyframe. I'm going to hit "W". So I have the manipulator and I'm going to hold down shift and middle mouse drag this down. You can see the balls rotating. So I'm going to move it down a little bit and then I scrub the timeline and just visually check it and see it's still sliding. So I want to move the keyframe down more. So it will rotate even more and then scrub it and check it. Now it's rotating too much. So I'll bring the keyframe back up and then right now, it looks like we're pretty closely Goldilocks. Moment might be sliding a little much there, there is math of course we can do based on the radius of the object. But for most things and just the general idea of how to quickly get this stuff in. This is a pretty good way to go about it. So it looks like it's sliding or it's still. It's somewhere in here basically is what it looks like. This is just takes some back and forth and training your eye to kind of see what that rotation is like. The beach ball is actually probably a little easier example to show that with. I'm just going to bring those back from the outliner because I hid them, I can't select them to unhide them. So I open up the outliner from the window menu and now I can type in a one to turn that on. We'll just turn the outliner off there. The other thing that I wanted to talk about was, how I slowed these things down because they're going at a consistent rate and they both kind of slow down. Especially with the rotation set, how do we do that? So basically, I took a key frame when we had the infinity turned on and then I just dragged it out, so it slowed it down. So basically was a straight line here. This keyframe was not an auto tangent, it was a straight line just like the other ones. So it'd be like going over here and setting a keyframe in this infinity space here. So I'll just hit "S". I made a new keyframe because auto tangent as a default it's going to go flat. That's fine because I'm trying to slow the ball down. Now I can just middle mouse drag, holding down Shift and pull this out. That's how I slowed it down. But I made sure to do both the rotation and the translation together so that the rotation slows down an equal amount relative to the translation. So that's how I did that, and then the last thing I wanted to show you was little overshoot thing with the beach ball that we haven't done yet. So it slows down and then just comes to a complete stop here, which is not very believable. So what we can do and let me just go in here and clean up these old keyframes or at least just get them all line up on the same key so we don't have stray keys out here. So what I can do and one really cool feature I use pretty much every day, almost every hour of every day when I'm animating is choosing a place in the timeline. For me, it's going to be a place I want the ball to roll backward. But we need to put a keyframe out here because I'm going to play in time and we need a place over here to key back to have it rolled back. So I can just pick somewhere that I already have the rotation values already set. I know if I bring it over here, it's going to work. I could set a key, copy paste it. But there's one tool here that if we just middle mouse drag from some point in the timeline, you can see nothing is moving now because I have my middle mouse drag down. So I can move this kind of value in time here to wherever I want it to and let go and hit "S". Now when we scrub, it's going to take that keyframe and bring it back and put it wherever I let go and then hit "S". So it looks like I need a little more distance here. So I'm going to grab one. Do like frame 85 and drag it little further out and hit "S". Now, when I scrub it rolls backward. That's kind of like a little trick to get like a free keyframe especially when you're dealing with rotations. I don't want to like, try to figure out the rotation again. I've already figured it out in this section, so I can just take advantage of that and mill mouse drag a section or like a frame over here and just put it over here and let go and hit "S" So with that, we're done with this ball exercise. I definitely encourage you to do this again and go back and watch this and really understand these concepts and get them in your mind about how to think about animation because we're animating specific things every time we animate. No two things are going to ever move quite the same. So you want to try to think about the properties. How heavy is this thing? What's the surface like? Is it a rough surfaces? How more friction is it? Is it very elastic, it's going to bounce a lot. All of these things we need to take into consideration when we're animating, because that's going to affect the type of animation we're going to do with all of these principles now that we understand with squash and stretch, and timing and spacing and all of these types of things. So thanks for watching this little section. In the next one we're going to do a little more complex animation. Thanks for watching. 11. 07 Animation Scene Setup: Before we begin the next exercise and learning some more principles about animation, I want to show you this rig and how to set up this scene so that it's easiest to use this rig. If you've skipped ahead from the rigging section of this course and you haven't taken that, you will not be familiar with the rigs yet. So I want to explain this and even if you have taken the rig in course, there's a lot here to learn as well. The first thing to consider is the fact that in the previous lessons, we were animating the geometry itself. We're moving the geometry around and setting keyframes on geometry. In general, you basically never want to do that. You always want to work on a control rig so that there's a hierarchy built in so that we're controlling something other than the geometry. The geometry is clean and has no keyframes on it, and that the keyframes only exist on the curves themselves. Now, these curves are what's called a nerves curve. Those are in this shelf and you can create your own and play around with that. But in this case, the rig is already built. You don't have to do anything for reading for this, and you just need to open the same to use it. One thing to consider is the fact that we don't want to be able to select the geometry like I just described. We want to only select the curves. There's a couple different ways you can make sure that while you're animating, you're not selecting the geometry. We could, while we're animating, just simply click on this button up here, which is to turn off selection of geometry. If you right-click this, you can specify a little more specifically what type of geometry you don't want to select. With that checked off there, we now can not select any geometry in the scene. That's a pretty quick way when I start animating, I just click that anyways, and I also will click this one. This one means that you can't select joints. In this case, there's no joints in this rig, so we don't have to worry about that. But sometimes rigors don't hide joints and there inside of geometry. So sometimes you can't even see them unless you get for them in your keyboard and you can look inside. You can hit six on your keyboard by the way, to see the textures of this rig. It's has some procedural textures in it, so you can hit Six to show that. But in our case, we don't really need to worry about this one, but just for good practice, we'll leave that off as well. But let's say for some reason, we want to be able to select this little box here and we want to select that geometry or the plane or something but not this. What we can do is turn that back on and do something else. We can select it all of the geometry here and put it into a display layer. But for us to do that, it's maybe a little tricky to select all the stuff and not the curves. Let's open up the outliner and take a look at this rig really quick that I made. We go down a Windows outliner, and you can see that the robot ball rig has a group here. If we toggle that down, we can see these two main groups here, the control group and the GO Group, and we know we don't want to select the controls. We just want the GO here. We want to put that into its own display layer. Display layers have a couple different purposes. If we hit this far right button, it'll take whatever we have selected and put it into that display layer. If we want to add something to the display layer afterwards, like we forgot to select maybe the ground or something, we can right-click and say Add Selected Objects. What this does is it gives us several different options here, and let me just rename this. We know it's a no touch and I'll save it. What we can do, we can actually turn all the geometry in that layer on and off. But we could also turn on the reference. This T means template. So it'll make it kind of wireframe, even if we're not in wireframe mode. But what we're interested in is the R, which means reference. We know we can't actually touch that stuff. But if we wanted to touch the geometry of this cube, we can still do that. That's super helpful and I typically will setup my scenes like this before I get started animating so that I know I'm not going to get into trouble later on by accidentally setting keys on geometry or joints or something weird that I don't want to. The other cool thing we can do is put the controls in their own layer as well and I'll show you one other feature of display layers. Now, if we play this back, I'm going to hit Alt V. You can see there's no animation yet, but we can see the curves. Now, typically when you're watching animation back, you don't want to really see the curves themselves because they breaks the silhouette, you want to be able to see the silhouette and to follow the geometry, which is what's going to be rendered later. The curves aren't useful to see when we're playing back. What we can do now if they're in their own layer is we can just hit the P little letter here and this square. That's in playback when we hit Alt V, they'll automatically hide and when we stop playing back, they'll come back. That's a very useful feature and I think it's newer and Maya 2018. Let's go into the next lesson where we'll actually begin animating this and learn a little bit more about the principles of animation. Thanks for watching. 12. 08 Follow Through: In this next series of lessons, I want us to focus on several different principles of animation. The first one is going to be follow-through. Follow-through is important because it gives a little more life and believability to our animations. You can think about follow-through in terms of what is following the leader. If we have this robot rig and were animating this from right to left, and eventually it's going to pick up this box. But if it's going from right to left, so let's just start it over here on frame 10. We will add a key here. Then we'll go forward in time, and place it over the box approximately where it will be, and it's very rigid. This tail basically is not affected by this animation yet. If we bring down the timeline so it'll loop back a little quicker. It moves pretty quickly right now, but we can tell that it's very stiff. There's no animation yet on the tail, and follow-through would help loosen this up. I wanted to take one second to pause the lesson, to correct myself and also clarify some of the terms I'm using. When I'm talking about follow-through, that's actually the action that happens after the driver has stopped. In this case, the driver is this top part of the robot, the ball. What's happening at the beginning is actually called drag, this is dragging behind. Then as the drag continues and the ball stops, the follow-through means that this object, the secondary motion, which is another term, secondary motion, this follows through. The secondary motion is really anything that happens outside of the main driver. This is secondary motion that drags, and when the main robot stops, we have follow-through. This part specifically Just this part is follow-through after the main robot stops, that's follow-through. That's what I want to correct here as I'm discussing the topics, it can be a little confusing the difference between overlapping action, which this can also be considered overlapping action because it happens while something else is happening. This is coming to a stop. But basically we have drag, we have follow-through here, and we have overlapping action, down the chain really can be considered overlapping action. There's rotations happening on different frames, but I mean, what we call these things definitely makes it sound a little more educated. But the reality is, if you understand the physics and why things are moving in the way they are, you can call them whatever you want to as far as I'm concerned. But for someone who's super stickler on having the very correct terms, this is actually drag. What we're going to do first is called drag. Follow-through is what's going to happen afterward, all this stuff. It's going to follow-through. Thanks for watching and let's pick back up with the lesson. It moves pretty quickly right now, but we can tell that it's very stiff and follow-through would help loosen this up. We can use these other controls here, to help add follow-through, and so we can see what that means here in a second. I'm going to Shift click the top one, so I can see where the animation of starting, I'm going to hit a key on everything, and then I'm going to hit a key at the end. It's still the same thing, and actually want to grab the bottom one as well, just so we add all of that in there. There are several different ways that follow-through. The most preferred way is that we would set a key on everything, and add offsets in as we want them going forward. But there's also another way you can animate everything together and then add offsets later in the graph editor. Let's think about what we need to do. This thing is moving forward, and we want this to drag backward. We want to follow it through from the animation up here, down to the bottom of the tail. Let's just select all of the bottom tail pieces. Then let's go about halfway, which is going to be frame 20, because we have 20 frames of animation here from 10 to 30, so halfway is 20. We'll just take all of this and with everything is selected will just rotate it to the right here. Now we can see that this actually has some loosening of the animation. If feels like this is actually being dragged by the ball. It's the separate piece and all of these hinges are working and there's weight to the bottom. It makes it feel like there's some life to this. Now the only thing is obviously, this is all crashing through the box here and it comes to a pretty hard stop when we get to the box. Let's fix that, let's bring up the main control, and it will bring it down towards the end, so it'll be at in this end position. I'm just going to move forward a little bit, maybe frame 40 and hit another key. I'm just going to move this up here. Now that I've moved this up, we could leave it this way so that it travels upward and then down or if we wanted to start from the same height, we could go to the graph editor and see that different height in the graph editor. We're going into Windows animation graph editor. Now we can see that there is a height difference and we know translate Y as height. If we look over here, that's vertical and if we look at the manipulator of the control, we can also tell that it is why it's yellow right now because we most recently used it. If we click this box in the middle, it'll deselect that. Now we can see it's green. That correlates the green curve over here. We know this is the key frame that we're currently seeing here in the view port. If I drag this over so we can see the effect is going to have, I can't hold down Shift and middle mouse drag this up. It'll snap to that height so we can just eyeball it and that'll be fine. We could also select this, copy, the value Command C, select the key we're currently on, and Command V, and it's already the same value, so that works. It starts at that height and then it travels over, and then it goes down. What we need to do is add some rotation to the tail, and that's really what follow-through is all about, is adding this type of believe ability. We wanted to finish up around frame 14, maybe just for now for the start. We know that if this thing is traveling, that the end position here, it's always trying to follow. It's always trailing behind. It's not going to stop at the exact same frame as this one. We can keep this rotation back, so that it's still being dragged. Then when it reaches this slowing down point, it can swing forward. Let's get to maybe this position and swing it forward, and see if that helps. We can see that it doesn't look as believable as the start here, so we want to take a cue from the curves and our Graph Editor. We can continue to eyeball this and move these keys around, hitting shift, click on the timeline and moving this around. But let's take a cue from the Graph Editor. I'll go to windows animation Graph Editor and let's take a look at the rotation curves. Currently we're only animating the z rotation and we can see that this steepness of this curve, is much steeper than this curve. We liked how this follow-through was following the motion here that house dragging behind, so we want a similar type of a slope here that we're seeing on this side. We want it to be reflected on this side. What we could do, is select all of the keys and just drag it back until we get something that's closer to this type of a slope. We know the speed of it going forward is going to mimic that speed we have when it started. It's already looking a lot better. But it's still a little late, so what we can do is instead of choosing it from the graph editor like we've done and shift middle mouse dragging it over. We can shift click it in the timeline just as well and move it over as well and we can see the Graph Editor update as well. Let's just move that over and now we can see that this is starting to look a little more believable as this goes over. Let's give this some more time before it goes down because now we can see that the swinging is crashing into the box before we're ready for it to go down. Likewise, we can just move the translate y and we can isolate that by clicking it and we can move it in the timeline. Just go to frame 40, so it is right there and now we can see that it goes to frame 50 at the end when it is going down. Now we have this kind of motion that looks a lot more believable that has some weight to it. Now, when this stops and the tail continues, it needs to resolve this follow-through that we're learning about. We want to continue that motion until it's resolved and being straight up and down. We might need more than 10 frames to do that but for now let's just take a look and see before we move the translate y much further, let's select all of the bottom controls and then we can go forward in time and see how many frames we gave this one here. We can count them holding down ALT and less than symbol 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, so it's nine frames. I'm just going to hit the greater than symbol and I'll jump to the next frame, and then I can say 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, so there's a three frame difference, so we can move these three frames force. These are equidistant keyframes apart and we can also take a cue from the Graph Editor again. Look at this value, we have something that's approximately 15 and rotation and this goes pass 15. Well, if you think about the bouncing ball example, where as the ball bounces, it will gradually decrease the energy, and we need to consider that as well when we're talking about follow-through, that this follow-through that we're getting on this side, I'm just going to hold down k and click on the Graph editor, so we can scrub it here. This can be also considered like a bounce, but it's more of a follow-through of the swing, and this value that goes down here pass negative 15, it shouldn't really pass this amount unless it stops really hard. Just take into consideration the slope that you've already established here because these are the physics you're setting up rules for how things move as you animate and you just want to stay consistent. I'm just going to drag this below negative 15 because I don't think it would go past the extreme point that we already created up here. I want to drag this down, so it feels like it's losing motion a little bit, it's losing energy and then we can drag this up past zero because we know we want zero to be much later. We need to resolve this, so we can go pass zero a little bit and again, it's that bounce, each swing is going to get less and less energy, just like each bounce of the bouncing ball is going to be lower and lower. Again, that bouncing ball example we can see carries through to so many other examples as well. Let's move forward some keyframes here, and let's just say maybe negative 2 here and then let's go forward a little bit and say maybe point 5, let's go for it a little more and say zero. Now we can see this swinging motion already shown in the value change here and might be a little extreme how it reduces so much quickly towards the end, but let's just take a look. It's pretty good actually just eyeballing it from the Graph Editor. You can see how that all starts to make sense. Now, this starts to go down to soon again. Let's just drag this out and let's give ourselves maybe, let's select these and see when they end. These end on 60, so let's have that end on 60. I'll just grab translate y and have that start to go down on 60, so I want this keyframe to be there, and I'm just shift middle mouse dragging again. Let's play that back, see this thing resolve a little bit, and now go down and we're just learning the basics of animation, so it looks a little robotic and stiff still, but this is important you want to get down these concepts before you start to add a lot of detail. This is very crucial stuff, even though it might seem simple, you want to dial in these concepts before we get into more complicated things. This is a good progression that we've built that we have gone on to using a rig. We've added some more principles called follow-through, and in the next lesson, I'm going to show you one more called anticipation and then we're going to go into learning how to do constraints, so that this robot arm can pick up this box right now if it moved it around, they're not connected. We want to go from a state of it not being connected together to being connected together and have this continue traveling in picking this up and doing whatever you want it to do. In the next lesson, we'll continue this animation. Thanks for watching. 13. 09 Follow Through Polish: We've gotten our follow-through animation to a pretty good spot. We've learned about that principle but there's still room to improve. Let's discuss why that is and why we can improve this and how. If we look at this piece as a chain, this tail, we would assume that it would never really get in a straight position if it's swinging back and forth. There would always be something trailing behind. Let's just do this for the first swing and then we can continue and do that for the rest. Since this is the biggest swing, let's follow this. We have our two key frames here if we have all these pieces selected and we have this extreme pose we can see in the graph editor. Then it travels down. They all go together. Each piece of the chain goes together. That doesn't really make a ton of sense physically. Everything gets almost straight up and down. If all of this was traveling from a right to left direction, these bottom pieces are following these top pieces. This would lead and then this would follow, and that would follow that one, and the bottom would follow the second to bottom one. We need to reflect that in our animation because right now they're all just moving together. If we just went to about halfway between these two key frames here at the bottom. Let's just say halfway is around here. Let's just keep these rotated back in the direction that they are following in. We can do it a little bit less just for this one. Now, if we take a look in the graph editor, we can see there's different grades here. It looks like these two or even maybe too much because they're going almost past their extreme. I'm just going to lift that one up because we want the extreme to be before it starts to slow down. Let's take a look at this, this top piece is starting to straighten out, but it's dragging these bottom pieces. They're still getting dragged from this right to left direction. They don't know that they're slowing down yet. We needed to reflect that. Now, when we get into this middle frame section, it's not straight up and down. It's progression. This piece goes straight up and down. Then this piece, then this piece, and then this piece in time. In this key-frame, they're not all going to be straight up and down yet. When we scrub forward, we need to keep that going. Another way that we could do this is actually offset the animation. It's not something that I would encourage, but it is maybe an easier way to conceptualize this stuff. Let's just delete these key-frames and we can offset them so you can see what I'm talking about. We could take all these bottom pieces and let's select all their key-frames and move them back to key frames. Then we can select these bottom two and move them back to key-frames. Then finally, we can select this bottom piece and move this back to key-frames. We've created an offset if we select all of these, now we can see in our curves there is an offset here. Each one progressively gets animated with this follow-through. If we play this back, feels like a chain and not that everything is moving in one piece. Now, this might be a little exaggerated. We might have needed to do maybe one frame offset instead of two, or maybe progressively get to one. Maybe we could drag this one back, one frame, just shift middle mouse dragging in the graph editor there as usual. Maybe the further we get down the chain, the less frame offset there is something like that because there is quite a bit of weight here just by the size of this picture that we've created here. It'll maybe settle a little quicker towards the end. That's the idea of adding polish to this fall through. Now, I hesitated to show you this offset method because its gets a little bit dirty when you're animating. Now look at our timeline. There's key-frames everywhere. Let's say if we wanted to re-time, this thing, where do we even begin to shift click and making sure everything's being re-timed in evenly. That's why I would encourage you to also consider a method I'm just going to hit undo on some of this. I'd also encourage you to consider a method where you intentionally place these offsets, so that they're all being keyed at the same time and that's why I showed you that first. We'll add a low offset here with them altogether. I'll deselect this top one and add even more of an offset here. We haven't changed time. We're still in this middle frame here between these two extreme poses. Then I can get to this bottom one and add even more of a offset there. Then when we select all of these, it's much cleaner. There's only one extra key-frame, and we're adding this offset in the value. This way, we're adding that offset. We can continue to do that through all of these key frames. For example, here we would know maybe these wouldn't be in this position until later. Let's go to this halfway mark and let's just middle mouse drag this value. If we middle mouse drag here, it'll actually save that key-frame, and when we hit key, we can see that it brought it over here. Instead of copying and pasting it, we actually have saved that key from over here. We can actually just delete this because we know we don't want it to continue to go in that direction. When it's here, when the top ones have finished going over to the left. This one is still falling behind it, so we wanted to show that. We already have that kind of animation built-in with these offsets. We can just delete that key-frame and just take what it gives us. We could also offset these even more by playing, favoring these key-frames on the left. Moving the key-frames up here. Let's just take a look at this first swing. We already have that follow through offset, but it's much cleaner. We only have these two key frames, and if we wanted to re-time this stuff, it's way easier, we're only dealing with one new key. Go through this and add these offsets to the animation and choose whichever method you like. You could click and drag and use these offsets. If you're confident you know how many key frames you're going to offset them then you're not going to need to re-time it. Or I would encourage you to use this method that is a little more deliberate and you're taking control of your animation and choosing exactly what keys to put where instead of animating everything and then just offsetting stuff. It's not really the best way to go about animation, but you're learning so, do whichever you'd like for now. But later on, if you've got deeper in animation, you would not want to use those offsets that often. Now, one other thing we could do is use the [inaudible] again to our advantage. Instead of setting offsets here, let's take a look at this little key-frame section here. This is getting dragged it's staying back rotated this other way. Then it finally starts to rotate and start to follow the other direction right on 38, right on this key-frame. Well, it's still getting pulled, and one's going in this direction. It's starting to flatten out way too soon. Of course, we can grab this key-frame and drag this down. We could set a middle key-frame here, there's a lot different things we could do, but just super quick, I just want to show you. The other thing you could do is to use the tangent handles. If we actually grab the tangent handle here and middle mouse drag it down, we can continue this type of animation for longer without having to set another key-frame. We could do this for the top one too, so we could middle mouse drag this so that the peak is later, it's past the key-frame. The animation we're getting is for free utmost and that it's keeping this rotation longer without us having to set new key-frames. That's another method you could use to help offset this animation is by rotating the tangent handles as offsets as well. That's another good way to eliminate having too many key frames in your scene and an early blocking stage where you want to try to keep the scene and number of key frames as low and as clean as possible. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 14. 10 Antics Contrast And Overshoots: In this lesson, we're going to learn all about antics or what is known as anticipation or antic for short. An anticipation is all about the movement before another movement, an anticipation of movement. What I mean by this, is if we take a look at the example we've already animated, and we have this motion here. It just begins, there's no indication that this robot is about to move. It just begins moving. Most times that any one does an action, they usually do some type of an antic or anticipation, and good examples of this would be, throwing a baseball or trying to punch someone, a golf swing. There's many examples in life where there's anticipation. You don't just simply hold the golf club at the golf ball, and then push it forward. You have to swing the golf club back before you hit it. You have to bring your arm and fist backward before you try to throw a punch forward or throw a baseball forward. This is what is known as an antic. In our case, we don't have a punch or a throw or anything with a character yet, but antics applies to really any motion. Because what it does is it signifies motion is about to happen. It's usually a smaller movement that happens right before a bigger movement. It basically is a signal to the eye of the viewer to say, hey, look over here. This thing is about to move this way or usually in the opposite direction of where it's moving. For example, in our case, if we wanted to create an antic, we can leave this frame here, frame 10, this is the start frame. If we look at the graph editor and we hit F to frame it up or we can hit A to frame all. We can see that translate X starts here. It goes forward from there. What we can do is actually use that frame 10, as an antic frame. Let's go back to frame six and hit a keyframe. Now we have two of the same values. What we can do is actually bring this value up. Let's just jump over to that key by hitting the greater than symbol on the keyboard. I always get the greater than and less than symbols mixed up on the keyboard. You know what I'm talking about if you've ever taken a math class. You hit those two to switch between different keyframes on the timeline. Now we're to the antic keyframe. All we need to do is simply move it backward. Now we can see it's moving in the opposite direction of where it's going to go. We can do this in the graph editor as well shift middle mouse, dragging that up. It just depends on how big of an antic do we want. This might be too big of an antic. I think that's probably just a little too big. Let's bring it back a little bit. Let's hit play. It just gives it a signal, before it starts moving towards the box, this little bit of backwards, that's an antic, it doesn't have to be more complicated than that. But basically, if we're watching this, and we don't know what's about to happen. We can see that that robot is about to move somewhere. There's this little bit of an antic right before it moves. That can be very subtle, it can be even smaller than that. But that's an antic. All we have to do, now that we have this antic built-in, is we need to go down the chain and do the same thing that we've already done and offset the chain. Let's click on everything so we can see what the start frame is, which is six. I'll set S on that. It keyframes everything, and now select just the chain and then go to frame 10 and rotate all of these back. Then I'll frame back and forth with those shortcuts on the keyboard. The greater than or less than symbols. You never want this thing to drag further back than where it started from, because that wouldn't make any sense physically. If we exaggerate that, we would never want to drag this thing all the way back here with an antic of that small, that makes no sense. This is trying to stay where it is. The furthest we want to go is really, if we look at this point here, where this white ball is at the bottom, if we hold our mouse there, and this is what I do when I'm animating just to pin my mouse to something, I just leave it there and see, okay, is that thing further one way or the other. I went too far with the keyframes. Is that thing further one way or the other, and it's good because it's on this right side of it. If it was on this other side, we'd know we had gone too far because rocking back and it's unmotivated. There's no reason why it should be moving back that way. The ball is moving to the right right now. If anything, this heavy piece at the bottom should try to be staying where it is. At a bare minimum, it should be exactly where it was or should be starting to drag with the ball. You just have to find a happy medium there of where that is. The other thing we need to do is of course, offset this next part and we can do that in several different ways. But let's just see that little bit helps hold that thing in place. It needs to really start to follow the ball and this bottom piece needs to swing over here because it's still trying to catch up. This ball's antic over here and the bottom part is still trying to catch up, even though the top has already left and started going the other way. The chain has not been pulled yet in that direction, so we need to continue that motion through the bottom of the chain here. Let's go a few frames forward. Basically where this is straight again, we don't want that to be straight. This should be maybe even in an S shape, this should still be pointing this way, and this should be starting to swing over there. Now these are still trying to follow. Maybe these are still going a little bit that way. Let's see how that looks. I think that's the right idea. We might need an extra little frame there. It feels like it's getting stuck and then it goes here. We might need to start this animation sooner. I'm just going to grab everything, and move it one frame forward. You can see this in the graph editor. It's like there's this motion here, this slope, and then it's fast over here. Let's just move these keyframes over and it starts to smooth out that slope, so it's more similar to the rest of the motion. That feels already a lot better. It feels like the bottom part hits a wall right here. You want to continue this motion more over here, so let's grab that and rotate it. Hitting Alt V on the keyboard. That feels a lot better. We could even maybe push it a little bit more, even from a higher control to favor this side because it really starts to take off there. We can adjust these even more. Then, let's drag the bottom one, just a touch more. It's trying to stay back here still. That might be a little too much. I'm going to use the graph editor, bring it back. I switch back and forth, a lot of times, I work visually in the timeline, then I'll switch over here. I think what I'm going to do is favor the frame right before this, and bring it up. I'm using a combination of all the techniques that we've learned thus far. I'm going to scrub through and see how that works. I think I like that. That looks a lot better. Half of animation, if not, probably a lot more, is really just training your eye. While I can teach you Maya and I can teach you the principles of animation, it really takes time to see what's actually happening. I like where that's at. When we look at this motion over here, the claw gets close and it just goes down. We could have it go up and down if you think about it again, just to drive point the home about an antic, it just starts falling down. We could actually drag this motion, this down motion over a few frames to give us some more time and then instead of it just going down like this, let's set a keyframe here. Let's go to translate Y so we can see what's happening and like we expect it's just going down. Why don't we set an antique here? It goes up just a little bit and then it goes down. It settles and then it goes up and then down. It tells us, I'm getting ready, boom. Let's see the whole thing. Up, down. I think that might be a little quick. Maybe not. But you get the idea. Again, what we can do to play this back, is to render out a play blast real quick, so we can see what we're doing. Let me just do that to make sure the timing of everything is as we are seeing it in the viewport. Let's evaluate this and it does look pretty good. It looks like it's going down a little slow. But I think that's okay for the kind of action, it's trying to be very accurate. The robot is trying to be pretty accurate as it comes down on the box. It makes sense that it slows down there a little bit. So you always want to try to think about the motivation behind all of the actions. Even if it's something as simple as a robot and very, very kind of linear motion here. It's just direct thing that's happening. Let's take a look at the claw control real quick. If we select this bottom control, we can see there's a pinch control here, and it's already set to zero. Let's bring this back a little bit. Because we want it to clamp down on the object. When it's down here. Let's just extend this out to 100 frames now and it's sharing keyframes because we keyed it. Since it has the rotations, it has keyframes on the pinch for everything. But let's say that we want to keep this thing open and for the beginning part and I'm not going to go all the way to 10. If we click on this attribute and then we middle mouse drag in the viewport, we can see that it has a limitation of going from zero to 10. We can't go past 10 and I built that intentionally that way. Let's drag these so they're just below 10 because we want to leave ourselves a little room that we can play with here and go even bigger if we wanted to do an antic. This is what this lesson is all about. So this thing stays open and it swings over here and then I think it would be cool if it pops open here. What if we actually closed it down? Maybe that's something cooler. This is, to me, the fun of the animation is like on the fly, thinking of ideas because you can plan all this stuff and you definitely want to plan your animations out. But part of the fun is just like getting inspired while you're animating and trying stuff out. Because you're not going to know exactly what you want to do all the time, that's just not realistic. Let's see, it comes to a stop here and I want more so we can see the antic of the claw opening. I want to move all of this animation later. Let's give it time for the claw open. I'm going to Shift middle mouse drag this stuff over. Now we have some frames to work with for the claw to open because we want to be able to see it. We don't want all this action happening at the same time, like the ball is going down as the claw is opening, the viewer won't be able to see both of those things happening. They'll see the ball moving down. They won't see the claw open. So we're always thinking about staging, which is another principle of animation that's about clarity and what's happening. This is stage pretty clear that this thing is going to open or we're going to try to grab the box, but we wanted to open before it does that. It pops open here. But what we can do is add a antic even to this opening. Let's see. This thing settles here. I guess we can see this from these other keyframes. Let's just match this backup. So it settles there. It's going to move that one over and let's go forward and have the antic be here. I'm just going to hit S. I'm going to drag this down. If I go past the zero in the graph editor, it won't do anything more. Like if I select this and I middle mouse drag over here, we're limited to zero and if I click and drag this past zero, nothing is going to actually happen over here that doesn't relate to anything so zero, we know is as far as I can go. Let's see if that's a big enough antics so we can see that it's going to open. I think that's not big enough. So all we have to do is just drag all of these keyframes, which really we only need this first one. We can just drag this one and have to frame it up and just drag this up. I'm going to add k and click over here to jump into the time there. I could have otherwise just clicked down here on the timeline, but I been using mile long enough. I have a lot of the shortcuts and the quicker you pickup shortcuts, the faster you'll be using Maya. So that's why I will continue to encourage you to use shortcuts. Let's just go even more. Let's see how that works for an antic. I think the bigger antic will be when it opens fully. So I'm not too worried about this one and you can definitely over antic stuff that's can be too much, sometimes too much of an animation, anything. I'm actually just going to make this linear. So goes straight into this. Remember this is a robot, so the motion isn't always going to be smooth. So we can have it start very fast and just pop open. But again, this is the antics. Maybe we can make this linear too. I'm discovering this stuff with you guys as I'm doing it. I think this thing just needs more time before it goes down. Let's bring this way over. Let's give it a ton of time. So we're going to do its thing. So antics a little bit and then opens, what I want is it to be way faster and to have like a pretty hard antic here at the top, let's get it to 10. Let's make this linear. It's a really sharp kind of jolt open, like pops open. I'm going to make this linear. Let's see how this linear stuff works. Because I think with the robot, it'll work really well. See all that kinds of snaps. There's always smooth motion with a tail and so it's nice to have contrasting animation. We have all this smooth, floaty swinging motion in the claw is a contrast. Always look for contrast in your animation. That's what makes it interesting. Here we have contrast with the types of curves we're using and I didn't plan this, but this is really how you find those opportunities is playing. This is why I love animation. We're just playing here and discovering it as we're doing it and so we discovered a way to inject a lot of contrast here. I say it's a lot, it's pretty subtle, but this is just an example of where your mind needs to be at when you're animating and play with timing. I think it's so fast, we're missing it actually in the viewport. I'll bring that back out one frame. Again, I'm just shift middle mouse dragging, I think that looks really cool because it's like we're waiting for it to open. It's like what's going to happen next? It comes to a stop and then it's like, boop I think that that can happen even quicker here. Of course, feel free to make sound effects. You will not be alone in that. Most animators I would think probably make sound effects at some point. Let's get this timing of it coming down and the right spot, pops open and we wanted to come down maybe right in here. Might be a little too close together. I think I want a little more hang time on this antic. What I'm going to do is go to what we've learned in our previous lesson about the weighted tangents and I'm actually going to increase this middle mouse drag this out. So we can go a little faster and let's make an overshoot. This is another concept and animation, this video is getting really long I apologize, we're covering a lot, but I feel like once we're on the stream of things, I hate to segment this stuff up because, I don't know, it makes more sense, at least to me. Let's get this thing down closer and what we're going to do is we're building an overshoot. This thing is going to go past where it's going to end and then it's going to come up. Think of it like an antic, but at the end. Like this thing, it is a robot, so it's pretty precise, but it's going to go past just a little bit where it's going to finish and then return. That's called an overshoot. We've covered a lot in this video. We've covered antics. We've covered contrast. Look at that, the sharpness of that looks really cool, the claw opening and now we've covered overshoots. This is like a semester's worth of animation learning in one little video here. Cool. It looks really cool. We could even add another overshoot. It's the same thing like the bouncing ball again, you could do the bouncing ball type of a theory here. So the overshoot, overshoots itself and comes back down. It's really up to you. If you has no Bob Ross painting, this is like the Bob Ross episode or I'm talking about painting happy trees. This is about putting in happy little overshoots and hopefully you guys get that reference. If you're not from America, you might not get that reference. I like that. Cool. In the next lesson, what we're going to learn is how do we actually pick this thing up? So we can clamp down with a claw. But the box is still going to be sitting there. If we move this around, we need to attach this box to the claw self somehow. In the next lesson, we're going to learn all about constraints. Thanks for watching. 15. 11 Constraints: In this lesson, we're going to learn all about constraints. If you've watched the rigging portion of this course, you have already gotten a pretty good understanding about constraints. But in this case we're animating, we are not building a rig. How do we use constraints in this instance where we have the robot and it goes down and the arm needs to pinch down on it. Let's create that pinching effect, and then we'll use it to pick up the box. We're going to do that with constraints. Let's get this to pinch, should close around frame here, and we can make an antique here as well because we're not all the way to 10 yet, we can have it open all the way, and then slam shut. We can make this linear so we keep the consistency of what we've established already for how the robot moves with the claw. Let's just give ourselves even more time here, drag this thing out. Let's say we have it go down, it clamps, and then now let's see. Maybe eight frames after it's clamped. Let's count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Or we can just do the math 8 plus 6. Let's have this robot go up and pick up the box. Let's have it go up. I think it should go up slower because now it has a little weight. We'll drag it up and let's compare the Y translation motion. We can see it is slower. This would be super slow. This slope is longer and not as steep. We want it to just be slightly slower than it was before. Because these are weighted tangents now, we could actually middle mouse drag this out so it has a really slow start. We could drag super out like this. Now, I'll have a pretty slow start. Yeah, I like that. Now, the only problem is the fact that the box isn't going with it. How do we animate that constraint that we're going to make? Well, it's pretty easy. Let's find the frame or we can set this. You basically, need to choose one frame and it needs to match, where the box is going to exist on the thing that's constrained to. We don't want to constrain the box to this and it's not on it. It needs to be where it's going to be when we constrain it. Let's select this. If we click on the box, let's see how that's set up in the outliner. We'll get to windows, let's go to outliner. We can see there's a box GEO group. In general, whenever you're constraining things, if there's an opportunity to constrain it to something other than itself in a hierarchy, you always want to go above it. We have this empty group here, and we can use this to constrain it because guess what? This controls the box too. Instead of using the box as constraint, we're going to use the group. Because if you remember from rigging, as soon as we make a constraint, it's going to lock all of these channels. For some reason we wanted to animate maybe the box slips a little bit when it is getting picked up. We wouldn't be able to do that if we had controls here. We want to put this on whatever is above this in the hierarchy. If this wasn't already there, we can make it, we can make another one. We could have two groups of others. We can just set ''Command G.'' Now, we have another group, and we can call this number 2 and now we have a group within a group. We can make this hierarchy for ourselves if we want to. This is what's important about having a little bit of a technical knowledge even as an animator, because there might be instances where you need to create your own tiny little rigs, even if it's just like an empty group there above a piece of geometry, it's important to understand the concepts and how these things work together, because it won't always be handed to you. Even if you work at a studio with some of the most talented people, even though they could do this for you, like a rigor or something, they just might not have the time. You need to have a little bit of understanding so that you can do this stuff for yourself. Even as an animator, if that's all you're interest is animating, you still need to know this stuff. Let's actually make the constraint now, we can go the rigging or the animation menu. They're both there. We could also hit ''Space bar'' in the middle of the viewport or not in the middle really anywhere in the viewport. Now, we have the same menu here, we have constrained here. I like to keep it in animation, that's what we're doing. Let's go to the animation, it's the same menu, and we can tear that off. Again, if you followed rigging in the earlier part of this course, then you are familiar with all these different types of constraints already. What we're interested in is the parent constraint. let's open up the option box of that, and close this little menu. We have only really one option when you need to be concerned about, and that's maintain offset or not. Typically you want to maintain offset because like I said earlier, you'll have placed this thing where you want it to be. When you want the constraint to turn on. First we have to select the thing that's going to control it, and then the child. But remember we don't want to select the geometry, you want to select the group. Let's go up here to that liner and hit "Command'' click. Now, we have the group. We can hit "Apply" with maintain offset, meaning there's an offset between these two pivot points, and pivot point for this control is up here. The pivot point for this box is over here. If we don't have maintain offset on, it's going to snap the pivots to each other. We don't want that. We want to maintain this offset between this pivot, and that pivot, the distance between those. That's what the offset means. Maintain offset, maintain that distance. When we hit "Apply", it doesn't snap over there. It stays where it is, except for the fact when the parent here gets moved by it's own parent really in the hierarchy, this is its parent. But when that moves and the animation we've already made, the box goes with it. The problem now is the fact that it's constraints, so it's always going to be following it, but we only want this to get picked up around here. Let's see frame 115. What we can go to is the actual constraint, and in this constraint we have the pincher control over here. This is why it's also important to name everything properly when you're rigging, because it's easier to identify when you do constraints like this. What we can say is right-click and go to key selected. One means on. If we go to the frame right before it, we can say zero and because we have auto keyframe one over here, it's going to automatically set a key when we change that value. I'm going to close this. When we scrub backwards now, we can see it stays there until this keyframe that we made for the constraint itself. Now, the most important thing to remember with constraints is when you're retiming things. It's really easy to forget that you have things constrained. When, let's say we wanted to move all of this animation over like 30 frames or something. We moved all the stuff over I didn't move the animation of the constraint. The constraint is going to get popped on before we wanted see right there, it's already started. Let me just exaggerate this even more so you can see it more clearly. If we moved all this animation way over as we scrub through and we get to that keyframe, I think was 115, it'll pop up there. That is not what we want. We want to re-time everything so the key frames are going to exist on this constraint note here that we made. If we're going to select everything, we need to remember to include this little group here, this or not the group, but this node is really what it's called a node. We would select all of the controls and accidentally selected the box, but there's no key frames on it. It won't really matter because there's no key frames on it, there's nothing to select down here in the timeline for it. If we command click this, we can see that little extra key popped up here. Let me command click that again. Look up frame 115, and we can see now there's that frame, and we know it's selected. If I click and re-time this whole thing, let's slide it over here, again, we can see that when we scrub, it is actually still following along. Cool, in this lesson, we've learned about constraints and how to have things follow something else that we already have animated, or animating too. Definitely, I would encourage you to have fun with this. If you're bored with this example, and you want to make it more interesting then I challenge you to make it more interesting. When you look at this animation and you're always evaluating, okay, this looks boring and I don't really know why? Start asking yourself questions. Well, what can I do to make this more interesting? Well, I can tell you for this example you could. The path of motion, which is another it's not really a principle of animations, it's more of a concept. But there's this path of the motion. The path of motion we've created for this thing is very linear, meaning it's very straight. It's a straight line, and it goes from point A to point B. Well, what I think would be more interesting would be, take advantage of the fact this is 3D. Always think, am I taking advantage of the fact that this is 3D? If you're not, then you might as well be drawing this with a pencil and paper. But for us, we can move this thing in three dimensions. It could be over here, and the antic could be whatever it is. We could rotate this thing, the antic could be a rotation thing. Get creative with this, make the antic be more interesting add rotation. You could have this have a more interesting path of motion. Maybe it travels down and it's rotated, the whole thing is rotated back, and then it goes up like that. It's already more interesting. But again, we need to remember how we've set up all of these animations you can see down here, if we're going to translate why this didn't really like that. We didn't have a keyframe over here, let's hit "S". We can bring this back up to the level that we need it to be at to have the tail to settle. But even in that one keyframe, that one little thing to me it's already more interesting. A little duck. It moves in another axis. Previously it was moving in one axis, it was moving in the x-axis. It was going from right to left, and that's it in a straight line, but now we made an in-between. In between two keyframes, we added a key and we added some interest here. I challenge you to use this exercise as a chance to experiment, and play around with how do I make this more interesting? It's a pretty simple example. But to me the most fascinating thing about animation is when you can take a simple example, and really make it interesting. That will get people's attention. Their expectations when they see something simple, like a little robot like this, it might be not very high, but if you do something pretty interesting with it, that's what grabs people's attentions. Even something, we took two seconds here and added one or two little keyframes and it already looks more interesting. What I would do is of course add an overshoot to this. It hits this wall here, it goes pop and it just pops right there. Now, we added this up and down motion, which probably add an overshoot vertically here. Let's bring this up and over a little bit, and then I'm just going to mill mouse drag this key over here and set a key. I basically copy and paste it will if that. Like super wonky, I think the Y translate it's messed up. Let's just bring that back. We have a little bit of a settle there. But anyway, you get the idea. Use these principles and these concepts, make this your own. In the next lesson, we'll continue learning animation, and some more advanced concepts and practices, and exercises. Thanks for watching. Bye. 16. 12 Referenced Rigs: In this lesson, we're going to begin to learn how to animate a character. This is the next step in evolution of learning animation going from simple shapes and very limited range of motion to a fully articulated character with limbs and a spine and a head. Before we do that, I want to teach you what referencing is and why that's important. Right now, we have this bones rig seen open, and we've done this with the robot rig. We were just using it in a scene and we're animating it. Well, there's something called referencing, and that's important because what that means is we can reference a Rigan to a new scene, and that way we're not actually affecting the rig itself. Let's say we're in production or we're going to do more than one shot or more than one scene, and all of a sudden we have a model update. You would have to go through every single shot and update them individually, and that is just totally impractical. What you do is you actually just reference in one rig file into each of your scenes that you are using it in. Then if you need to make a change, you just edit that reference file. We're actually in the reference file right now. Let's go to a new scene, will go file new. To reference a rig, we'll just go file, create reference, and we can just choose the bones rig and click "Reference". Also you have a few options over here, and so it'll choose a namespace for it, and it's probably going to go based off of the scene, you selected namespace as parent. Basically, it's the filename. It's going to say bones rig, and then it's going to have a colon and then say all these other stuff after it. This isn't super important to know now, but just know there is a way that Maya tries to keep track of reference things and that's what namespaces. I'll click reference, and now you can see we have this new little icon here. It looks like the groups we had before, but there's a little blue dot here. I don't know if you can see that. You can also see the namespaces here. You can always tell a namespace by the fact that there's a colon in it, and so it says bones rig, colon, hat rig, and bones wrinkle on bones rig. It'll do that for every asset, every node, group and joint and everything. That's Maya's way of keeping track of reference rigs. I'm going to hit six in the keyboard to turn on the textures. This scene doesn't really look that much different from the one we were in earlier that said bones rig, other than the fact that now we have this referenced object and it's a new scene. But the power of this can be demonstrated by making changes to the original reference. Let's save this, and I'll just say test for now, and we'll save that. We could open up this scene here, and we can make changes to this. Just say we want to make the head bigger, if we save this file and then open up the one that this rig is referenced into, this change will happen in that other scene. I've already done this in another scene, I don't want to mess up our nice bones rig scene file. I'm going to open and back up the test that we have been doing. Again, if we had made that change in that reference file, we would see a big head here now. But because I don't want to mess up that original file, I'm just going to replace the reference here with one I did use a width. We can go to the reference editor and that's basically an outliner for reference rigs. I'm going to click this and I'm going to choose a new path here. We know it is called big head here. If I go down here, underscore big head, so I can just type that in right here. This is telling you where it's referencing the file so I can just type in that new one, and hit reload or just it will reload. Now you can see it has a big head. We didn't actually affect this in this scene. We did it another scene that is referencing. Again, the power is, imagine you had a short film or something and you had 50 shots, and you made a decision halfway through, you know what? I want something a little different about this model or the rig. Usually it's the rig being updated, you will start animating and realizing you don't have enough controls or something. You can go back to the reference and update that model or the rig using what you've learned in the other parts of this course, and then you'll have it in your animation. When we learn this walk cycle, we're going to use a reference rig just as a good practice. I'll see you in the next lesson where we will begin working on a walk cycle. Thanks for watching. 17. 13 Walk Cycle Start: Let's get started with creating a walk cycle with our bones character. But first, let's talk a little bit about what we're going to do with the walk cycle and what a walk cycle consists of. If you were to see your best friend walking at a distance and you can barely make them out, you would probably know it's your best friend or relative or whoever, because a walk cycle is very specific to each person. As subtle as it may be, everyone has little differences to their walk cycle. As generic and boring is animating a walk may seem to some people, it can actually be very, very telling about their character, their mood, what type of person they are, and their age. It could be all these types of things. So we're going to focus on a more basic one to start with. But also just keep in mind that you can add a lot of character to a walk cycle. If you need any motivation or examples of this, just take a look at Kevin Parry's 100 different types of walks. He starts out with a generic but then does a lot of different types. Definitely go through here and see all of these different kinds. They are pretty exaggerated. But the general idea is one foot in front of the other. Let's take a look at this in Photoshop real quick, where we can break it down even more simply. We have basically two poses we're going to focus on first, in this lesson, which is what's called the contact pose and the passing position. We have contact passing, and it's going to switch legs. If we just switch these layers on and off, and it almost looks like this drawing is walking even with just two drawings and two poses. So that shows you how important these poses are. Poses like these can be called several different things. They could be called key poses. These could be the main poses. They could also be considered the extreme poses. Meaning these are the furthest that the person travels. So they extend their legs at the extreme here. This is out the extreme distance that this foot travels this way. It could also the extreme of the height. If we look at the contact and passing position, we can see that the top of the center of gravity of the hips here are passing this horizon here set by the contact because the contact is lower and the passing it goes higher because the leg is getting straight. It's right underneath the hips. So we need to start to begin to think about the biomechanics of this. Why does a walk look the way it does? This really gets to the heart of animation, which is observation and using reference. Don't just think that when you become an animator, that you just make all of this stuff up in your head. You really need to look at reference, how you walk, film yourself, look at other people walking, look at your favorite movies or characters of people. But use reference. Preferably not animated reference, so that you get the original source and you don't get someone else's interpretation of it. So always look at reference and we're going to start without it because I don't want us to over analyze reference and get hung up on that. But definitely know that these things are all rooted in biomechanics and how things actually move and work. Let's jump into Maya and start with this scene, 10 walk cycle start here. What I'm going to do first is hide everything that we're not going to need. So I'm going to go to Windows and go to Outliner, and I'm going to hide the hat, and I'm going to select everything above the waist and put it in its own display layer over here and just hit the visibility off. Now all we have are the legs. Cool. Let's start with the contact poses. I will first grab one of the legs and just drag it forward, drag the other one back. When we're doing this, we want to make sure that we're doing it at a specific distance. Let's say something like eight here. Maybe a little further back on that one, maybe like negative nine. Now, we need to drag the center of gravity down. But people don't walk like this. When we walk, we actually try to keep our foot on the ground as long as possible so that we can push off with our back foot. So I'm going to use the roll here to indicate that. Then on this, we do a heel-to-toe motion on the front foot. Our heel strikes first and then it goes to toe when we're walking. So I'm going to put it in the heel position. So now that means we didn't have to pull our center of gravity down that far. So just bring this back up. Other little thing to think about is the fact that our hips rotate. They don't just stay straight here. When we are reaching forward with a foot, we actually do so with our hips as well. So you reach forward with the hips. So let's bring the hips around, so they're reaching with that front leg. That means we can bring up the center of gravity even more to try to straighten these legs out. I'm just going to bring this foot roll back maybe a little bit so that leg gets a little straighter. I'm just going to bring this toe up just a little bit. Now we have our first pose. I'm going to select all of the controls. But first, I'm going to make sure that I'm not selecting any geometry. So I'm going to click this little geometry button and click the joint button here so that I know I'm only selecting locators and curves. So I'm going to hit S on my keyboard to set a keyframe on frame 1. I'm going to decrease the timeline here a little bit so we can focus in on a fewer frames. I'm going to go for it to, let's say, frame 20. I'm just going to reduce this down to 40. Let's set a keyframe and all of these as well. Now, let's reverse this. So let's bring this foot back. This is why we had exact numbers here so that we can match them on either side. I'm just going to look at this other foot. It's negative 27. I'm going to go negative 27. I'm going to take this toe control to zero, so it's back on the ground. Then I'm going to reverse this rotation to negative 14 point whatever. It doesn't really have to be exact but just to give us an idea that they're in the same ballpark. This was eight. Let's go jump back to this frame so we can see what the foot roll was. It was pretty much 20 there, so we can say 20. Cool. Now, we have our two contact poses just for one leg. Because remember, this is going to need to happen more than once. So we'd have this one leg and it looks not very impressive right now. But this is animation. You need to get comfortable with seeing things not perfect. I know that that's one thing when I started drawing that kept me from being very good at drawing because I wouldn't want to continue past seeing like a bad draft of a drawing. That's going to happen in animation just like anything else. You have to start with the basics and build a foundation. Let's continue to refine this animation to make it look even better. Let's go to frame 10, which is right in the middle of what we've already done and make our passing position so we can bring up the leg that should be passing. We're going to rotate the foot down just a little bit so that the toes just barely off the ground. Because as humans we are kind of lazy and we also want to be efficient. So we don't want to bring the leg all the way up here to walk every time. That would definitely be a unique walk. But it's not typical of what most walks are. The other thing we need to do is make sure this is flat on the ground. So let's make the foot roll [inaudible] and let's bring up the center of gravity so the leg is straight as we saw in the Photoshop drawing I was doing earlier. Let's bring this up maybe a little bit more and rotate the foot back down. The other thing we need to do is because this is on one leg now, we need to shift the weight over because if we look at the center of gravity, it's not under where the foot is. So we need to make sure always that the center of gravity is being held up by something. So let's push this over, so that now, the center of gravity is a little more supported by the foot that's still on the ground. The other thing we can do is we can lift up the hips because the body is trying to lift this foot off the ground. The hips trying to assist. It is trying to lift this leg and this foot off the ground so it can put it forward. Now, that means we can bring the center of gravity even higher, try to straighten out that leg that's on the ground. Now, if we were just to look at these three poses and play them back, I'm just going to select all the curves, deselect the locator here and put them on their own layer and hit P here. Deselect it so it will show the curves on playback and I'm going to start to name these so that we won't lose track of what they are. I'll say upper body. I'll say lower cons. Cool. I'll just play this back. You basically have one stride of a walk here. It still could use a lot of work. But you get the idea of where this is going. Let's do this for the other side of the next lesson and we'll go a little quicker and then we'll continue to refine and add better timing and spacing and maybe go into the graph editor a little bit. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next lesson. 18. 14 Walk Cycle Mirror Keys: We're back working on this Walk Cycle. I've just opened up this scene 11 walk cycle start, and so I'm going to select everything and you notice some grabbing, maybe some things that don't want to grab. Just make sure we have joints and geometry selected off. I'm going to click and drag again, and I think it's because this locator selected, everything's located under that. It looks like we have geometry selected when we don't actually. I'm going to deselect that, and with all these keys selected, none you'd see our last key is on frame 20. If we wanted to see this loop, we would reduce it down here. But we know currently we only have one step, and we need to duplicate this over to the other side. Because our animations ends on frame 20, we need to double that to frame 40. We can just type 40 in here, and now we can start to mirror these poses over onto the other side. Currently, all the animation stops here. But we know we want this pose back at the end because we want this to loop one entire time. For this to loop one entire time, we need to start with the right foot forward and that goes and now it's back, and now it needs to come back forward again, meaning it needs to be back in this pose that we have on frame 1. Because we know that, we can actually just middle mouse drag this frame. I'm just going to hold down middle mouse and drag it down to frame 40, and add a key frame there. Now we're after frame 20, we can see this slides back forward. All we have left to do is add in this middle key frame here, which if we go into our graph editor, might be easier to see. I've hit Space bar, I get the four view, which I don't want. When I hit Space bar again over the perspective view, hold down Space bar and go to Panels, Layouts, two panes stacked, and then I'll choose this one to be the graph editor. I'll be a little easier to see these inbetweens. I'm just going to go ahead and hit S on these as well. We know this is landmark inbetween. When I say inbetween, that's actually a technical animation term. Inbetweens are historically when you were drawing animation, you would have the key poses and have the key artists, key animators, draw those poses, and then you'd hand up those after the inbetweeners and that was a whole position you are an inbetweener and when we're doing 3D animation, that is one person. You're doing everything, you're doing the key frames and you're doing the inbetweens. We know this is an inbetween, and it needs to match this inbetween but with the other side. Let's first start by taking a look at the COG. We can see that this is not the same. We want this Y to be about the same as the other inbetween and it looks like a translate X. But instead of going the same way, we don't want to go over the foot that's off the ground. We want it to go the other way and if we wanted to mirror it exactly, we need to take a look at this value. We can see this value and the graph editor here. So we have a negative 1.1. So we can just click this and drag it up to 1.1, and I'm just holding down Shift and middle mouse dragging. It's about in the neighborhood so you know, the center of gravity, it needs to go over the foot that's actually on the ground because that's where all the balance is going to go. I want to keep our weight over our feet. If not, we'll just fall over. Now we need to pick up this foot, and if we look at frame 10, we can see how this foot is picked up and when we to do the same thing for this other signs. So we can see there's some value here which looks like it's rotate x, and it is about 45 degrees. If we click this and we go to the inbetween we're working on now, we know we can go ahead and drag this to about 45 degrees, and if you notice or just what happened when I click this and dragged it, nothing really happened or not happened because if you look over here on the y-axis, you can see that we're working with very small values. What I do is hold down the Shift Command and I right-click, and I can scale this down. You can see all these values change. Now it's a much bigger scale. Now when I click on move, this is going to move a lot further and when I let go, I can see the values here. There's 21, and we're looking for something like 45, that's close enough, and I can drag this up so that the toe is just off the ground, and that's pretty close, and then we can make sure that this roll and this foot is all the way to zero. Let's go to the foot roll and at zero, and now let's play this back when it's Space bar over this, we can see it in full view here and say "Play". Now we basically have a walk, is very generic and there's a lot left to do on it. In the rest of this course, I want us to polish this. It doesn't take much to get to this stage of it. But really, what separates a good animation from bad animation is that final 10 percent that usually takes, not 10 percent of the time, it takes even more of the time proportionally. Meaning, we're going to spend a lot more time to make this look way more polished than it currently is. In the next lesson, we'll continue to break this down into even further poses because we select this when we look at it. We only have basically for poses because we know this beginning and end poses is the same. If we click between them, we can see there are the same cycle. One other thing to keep in mind is we don't want to play the same frame twice. Currently while we're playing this back, we're going from this frame all the way through and playing this frame again and they were playing it again. If you actually want to loop this, we need to cut off that last frame because it's going to share the same frame as that. When we play this back now it should actually be a loop, like a proper loop. We're not going to have duplicate frames here. You can already see when we start to analyze this, we have some knee pops here at the back of this stride. I don't think we're getting it on this other side. There might be some inconsistencies on how we mirrored it. We can evaluate that in the graph editor and as we further break things down in the next lessons. Thanks for watching and I'll see you there. 19. 15 Walk Cycle Breakdowns: Now, we have our main keys, we can actually take a look at breaking this down even further. It's really easy to get overwhelmed with animation and think, "Oh, my gosh, I have." We only did four key-frames basically because again, that last one is mirrored, it's the same key-frame as frame 40 is. We really only did four poses here and when we look at this animation, we have 40 frames. We would think, "Oh my gosh, I have to do this ten times what I already did." Don't get overwhelmed. Let's break this down. Let's drag the timeline. This is what I like to do. I just focus on between two key frames. Once we have the keys in, now we can just take it and piecemeal it down. We just have this motion to worry about now. Don't worry about anything else. We're just going to get this looking right. So when we look at this, we can think, okay this is the extreme pose. That's the technical term, an extreme pose. These are the furthest that these two legs are going to be apart from each other. Those are the extreme distances. When we think about extreme distances, we also have to think, "All right, how's this weight being carried?" Is if it's tripod and the weight is very far out there and there's a lot of weight here in the center of gravity, it's going to want to fall down. While you're walking, for these next few frames before this foot picks up the weight, your body will be going down because basically walking is controlled falling. The foot in front is basically catching you each time that you fall. If that's the case, then we can know that this center of gravity, which I accidentally made a key-frame here, I'm just going to delete in my lower example there. That this center of gravity is not going to be going up immediately. Because this foot hasn't had time to really catch the weight of everything yet. What's going to actually happen is this foot's going to be going down. We can maybe come out here three frames and keep this down. I'm going to hit space bar. I have the same setup I had from the previous lesson. I have the graph header down here in another panel. I just want to go a little bit past where we started here. The other thing we need to do is get this foot flat because your foot doesn't just hang out on the heel here. When we're going, you're just sliding along the heel. That's not realistic. You need to get this foot roll down to zero. So let's get that to zero. Then you can see that the leg is very straight and that can help guide us to know bio-mechanically, how far down will this COG need to go to keep that knee from popping and getting too straight. Because if we were up here with this center of gravity, then the leg would be far too straight and it would be a pop. When the foot goes flat, the knee would be very hyper extended to the point that it would pop right here. We can use the fact that we know the foot needs to be on the ground to drag. I'm just shift middle mouse dragging this key-frame down to a point where the knee is no longer stretched beyond where it would be hyper extended. Now when we play this back the knee shouldn't pop. It's playing back a little fast. But we can scrub this. We can see it's getting hyper extended here and we can fix that. Let's go into the center of gravity and instead of this having an auto tangent where it will slowly go down, we probably need to make this to be straight. It means is you go straight down. We can grab these tangents and middle-mouse drag them so they're going straight. An easier way to see this would be to go to View, Infinity. Now I can see that this curve is flat-lining here. So we can actually say Curves, Posts infinity, Cycle. We can see how these now, two key-frames relate to each other in a cycle, which is how we'll be using this. It's good to go ahead and see that now. We can see that that tangent continues nicely down to the bottom here. That should help us a little bit to keep the knee from popping. It looks like it's still popping a little bit and that can maybe be from the foot. Let's look at the foot and the Translate Z. Now, anytime that we are animating and we're moving at a consistent rate with our feet, you have to think about this as a special way to animate. That we're animating on the spot. Meaning he or she is staying in the same spot. In reality they're going to be moving across a distance and if they are moving across a distance and this foot is going to stay in its place, then these need to be linear. They don't need to be nice smooth tangents. So I'm going to go ahead and delete that and I'm going to select all of these and go to a linear motion here. Because as soon as this hits the ground, it should be moving. In reality, we might want to move this foot roll zero back a couple of frames. Now it's coming down much sooner and it's working a lot nicer. So as this foot comes down, we can see now that it's catching the weight of the center of gravity and only after that this is flat and it's catching the weight, can the center of gravity go up. Because the center of gravity must be pushed up by something. It just can't float around willy nily. We need to understand the motivation and the bio-mechanics of a walk. What is actually keeping the center of gravity from falling over? Well, it's these feet. So these keep it upright. We can see that only after that this takes the weight of the center gravity can this go back up. So we wait for that to happen and then this goes back up. That makes sense. So now we get into this pose. Cool. We can go ahead and make these be linear on Translate Z on this other foot as well because we know that's how we're going to be working. Let's bring this back up to 40 and just take a look at this one break down real quick and see how much that little bit of animation added. We can see the difference between this foot and this other one. You can see how this other one floats and the foot roll doesn't cut to the ground, but this other one the foot roll gets the ground pretty well. Cool. It looks like we could probably adjust the Y Translate now that we have the feet in linear space, remember when we grab these and now the Translate Z is linear. Now it's also affecting the distance of the Y translates. So we could even take this. Let's grab the two top ones and let's experiment a little bit and drag these up. Looks like it won't be enough. Maybe we can even bring this up or we can mess with the tangent a little bit. Let's see if that helps keep this leg straight. Because we don't walk bent kneed. As you do this, you might find what you have been animating isn't exactly what you need. Cool. The other thing to think about is that there's going to be a little motion forward and back. As you move, you're going to gain speed and lose speed as you're getting pushed up by your foot. Every push off of the foot is going to push your center of gravity forward a little bit. We can actually push the center gravity forward and then it can fall backwards as it gets to this in-between. That's another little thing to think about how this motion actually works. Let's do that to this one as well. When this hits the ground, we know that the foot roll maybe two frames ahead, I believe is what we did on the other one, it's going to be zero. This is going to be forward a little bit and we're actually going to do that a couple of frames later. We want to take the center of gravity ones and move forward two more frames. Now let's play that back. It might be a little much and we see it bouncing back and forth. So you go to Translate Z and then we can just drag this down. We can also see where this in-between we'd done set for Translate Z whereas over here we have this be at zero and that wasn't the case earlier, so it's going to bounce a little more here. Let's just drag these values down a little bit. We don't want to get too crazy with it. But just in general, we want to understand the idea of like why the center of gravity is moving the way it is. It's going to move very subtly forward. So in the next lesson, let's take a look at these little knee pops and finishing out these other passing positions. Right here the knee is starting to bend way too soon. So let's continue to clean this up in the next lesson and then we'll move on to adding the upper body. Thanks for watching. 20. 16 Walk Cycle Finish Lower Body: In this lesson, let's continue to break down this walk cycle. We can see that we have some keyframes over here and we have a big gap here where there are no keyframes. When in doubt, you can always go to the middle keyframe or set a middle keyframe between two large distances between keys and then evaluate what's wrong with it and fix it on that key frame, and then you can break it down in half again and do the same thing until you get to the previous keyframe that you know is correct. That's one way to break down an animation into pieces and not get overwhelmed with, "What do I do next?" I am not sure what to do next." Well, you know what, go in between those two key frames and start setting keys. The one thing we need to look at first is the fact that we might not have keys on every keyframe. We want to make sure that when we select everything, let's just select the locator off. Let me just turn off the joints and the geometry selection up there, and deselect the locator. I just want to make sure I have a key on everything on frame 10, and a key on everything on frame 20. Same thing on 30 and 40. I'm just going through and hitting S on those. I'm going to go to 15, I know that there's a landmark here and there's a landmark here so that if I start making any changes on this frame 15, it's not going to be trying to interpolate from the first frame all the way through to this frame. It will have a landmark keyframe here. When you take a look at this, like I said, this is going to be the middle keyframe, and again, so I can select everything, deselect the shift-select the locator de-selected, and hit S. I can already see that this is wrong, that the heel should still be only grounds. I can go here and hit 0. I know that's right now. The other thing I need to look at is the fact that this foot is starting to get a little wonky. The distance it's off of the ground is quite a bit and its position is a little weird because we have animated the foot roll and we've animated this rotate x. We know that on this key frame, we have foot roll initiated and we have rotate x are combating each other. I'm going to create these panels again, go layouts, two panes stacked. I'm going to bring in the graph editor. What we can do is we can force this to be what we want it to be. We know we want this foot roll to be what takes over, but we don't want it to take over just yet. This should still be flat-footed a little bit as it transitions into that role. This foot is way too high off the ground. Let's bring this down a little bit. Let's bring back this rotation just a touch. It's still dragging across the ground pretty closely. Now we can see that in this transition, this toe is just grazing the top of the ground. I could even maybe do a better job here and stay a little bit closer to the ground. Because, if you remember, humans try to walk as efficiently as possible if we're talking about a generic walk. That foot should not go very far off the ground. Cool. Now we can see that we've created a pretty decent breakdown for that frame and that little section of this walk. We also need to keep in mind that we animate the rotate y, but it looks like we also left out the rotate z on this other side. We need to go down here and mirror this. This is one thing that we forgot to do on this side. If we look at frame 10, this is very cockeyed to the side. As it tries to lift up this hip, this hip rises. We need to do the same thing on frame 30 here. This frame is nine. Let's go to nine down here, we have negative eight, negative nineish. Now that's also going to affect our key frames and how this is animated. You can delete that keyframe so it can smoothly go in between each other, and same thing that we saw on the translate of the COG back and forth. If we looked at this as infinity, we'll go to curves, post-infinity cycle. There's no reason that these curves should slow down at this middle junction here. This should stay consistent so we can go to a spline tangent and the curve. Now we can see that this continues nice and smooth through the cycle. Cool. Now let's play this back and see what else we need to be fixing. We need to do this for this other opposed down here, we need to see 30 to 40. We can go to 35 and do the same thing. Let's keep the heel on the ground. We'll go to zero that out. Then we will fix this and we will zero out the foot roll. That's actually pretty good, I think. I might want to bring the center of gravity down just a touch so that this leg doesn't get hyper extended. Do the same thing for its sister over here, it's brother, sister, keyframe, twin, I guess I should say, and make sure that the center of gravity is doing the right thing. Now let's take a look at this. It's already looking a lot better. We do have some pops on these transitions. What we can do is go in here and fix those with the foot roll. If we think about a foot roll, it's like a bouncing ball. The foot roll shouldn't necessarily slow down. Let's make that to be a linear tangent so it comes in very fast. If it does that, we might have it fix the knee pop force. Let's make that linear rather. Now it's coming in straight. We can see it bends here, and then it gets straight, and it bends again. We want to fix that. There's a couple different ways we could do that. I think the easiest might be with the center of gravity. Let's just fix this tangent here and go back to spline on that. We had done something a little different there. Let's maybe bring this down just a touch. Basically, there's no right way to go about doing this, but what catches my eye is what I'm trying to fix, are these little knee pops. Right now, it's looking a lot better. I want to see that knee not get so straight here. I'm going to bring that translate y back down. I want it to be consistent, it pops here to bend, and then it should stay there or go further. I think we do need to bring this down even more or change this tangent handle. We can do that as well. Now it bends. Yeah, we really need this to go down more. I'll just bring this back down as we did originally in previous lesson. Now we can see this cycle over here where my cursor is, and it's dragging down, and now the knee doesn't pop as much. We can do the same thing for this side. We can see that the knee gets a little straight here. We can drag this down and adjust this curve as well. I want to make sure that this leg is also getting pretty straight. We can maybe bring back the translate z a little bit here. Just like we're going forward with it, we could also bring it back. On this frame, let's see if we can't bring the translate a back, almost like an equal distance of this value. We have 0.3, so this will be like 0.2 something. It goes backwards, now it goes forwards. That's looking pretty good and now it definitely gets straight here. Let's see if we have translate z in the right spot. After this frame, we want to keep it going down if we remember. Here, it is going to be the equivalent of this frame. We could actually just hit command c, and we could go four frames forward from frame 20,1, 2, 3, 4 and paste that. Now we have the equivalent on that frame. That definitely helps out that knee pop, but it looks like it's getting a little too straight there so we could even bring this foot roll up just a touch and that'll help bend the knee a little bit. We'd also make sure have suspect that this translate y maybe isn't as far as it needs to go. You have negative 14, that's negative 14. You bring it down just a little bit more. Let's go to translate x here for the COG and make sure that that is right. Yeah, that's on zero. It looks like this didn't take from the previous lessons, so I'm just going to make sure that's correct. Now we can see that this surges forward here. Let me make sure that the foot itself on the Translate z is doing what it should do. It looks like it is. The roll is doing what it is. It looks like maybe here is the problem. Let's see, we'll scrub through here. It's not super far off what it should be doing. One thing I like to do is to turn on this field chart. If we click this little button here, we get a grid. If we move our camera, we can position this cross hair to be wherever you want it to be. We see in screen space where does that knee go? Is it doing what it should do? See how it goes straight and it goes down and then it surges forward there. That's what's catching my eye, I'm trying to prevent. If we look at the other leg, let's see if the other leg does it. Well, it goes forward, it goes down, and then forward. It's not as bad really. Has a much better motion there. It's really just this other knee we need to figure out why is that happening? I think what it is is this. Let's take a look at the two foot rolls. I'm going to isolate those in the graph editor. I've got a foot roll here and a foot roll there. They definitely look different. This stage of the game for this foot, is right almost to 20. We know the equivalent of that for this other foot is at this frame over here. It's this one, so it should be going up there. For this one over here, it should be doing the same thing and it pretty much is which is what's confusing. Why is this not behaving the way I want it to? I think what we need to do is just make this work for us and bring this foot roll in and see [inaudible] to straightening out the knee. I think this is going to be our best bet. Let's set a keyframe here and then let's go forward and set it to be what we want it to over here. Now it keeps it from popping the knee a little bit. It's starting to look a lot better in terms of a field guide there. Hitting "Alt V" to play back. You can see from the first lesson to now, we have made a huge improvement. Again, look at the hips. It's swaying side to side. The weight is being transferred properly to each foot. The other thing we could do on these feet, is we could actually bring them to the center so when we're walking, we actually have our weight more over the center. Let's look at that. Let's go to translate X. We know it's translate X because of this red arrow here. When the foot is moving, when it's on the ground rather, it should be a little closer to the middle. Let's just grab everything and bring it closer to the middle because that's where our center of gravity is. Our center of gravity should be trying to get over our foot and our foot should be trying to get under our center of gravity so it's a team effort there between those two things. I selected all the keyframes and I middle mouse dragged them. Now, all the animations getting moved over. I don't want to go all the way to the middle. We can see the grid here, which is this little button. We can see this line is the middle. I don't want to go all the way to the middle with it so we can just make sure we're all just on this other side of the middle, and then we can figure out when is it off of the ground, which is over here. Now on this in between, which will be maybe frame 30ish, we can move it over to the side back to where it was. Let's go to frame 25, hit "keyframe" and let's go to the last point where it lifts off the ground, and then we can move this back over so it gives room for this foot to be in the middle when it's it's turn. Then it goes back towards the middle where it's going to land again. Let's do the same thing for this side. We'll take translate X. I'll just grab everything and let's get to where it's on the ground actually and let's just move it towards the center. Then when it's off the ground, let's just move that keyframe which will be, it looks like in here, frame ten. Let's hit "keyframe". I'm always doing the middle part one to ten, so I'm going to five and hitting key, which is like one of the last points it's off the ground back here. I guess not really. If we look at from this other side, it could even start moving. We could even just delete that. Whoops, I didn't mean to hit to lead on without selecting a keyframe there. I'm going to actually go right click delete on from the timeline. Now we can drag this over so it's out of the way. You can see how now the feet are running into each other. We need to make sure that this is clearing that foot. When it goes back towards the middle we can actually bring that keyframe back up. We're only worried about contacts. As soon as this contacts the ground, it should not translate side to side anymore. Let's do the same thing and make sure we're getting it at the right point on this side. Let's go to translate X and here I think we can get rid of this keyframe. Then now, it goes to the front as soon as it lands, then we'll be good. Now let's take a look at that. That's looking a lot better. We can see too that it looks like this is maybe snapping a little bit, so we can bring this down and just massage this stuff. We don't want to ever have a knee pops be the most distracting thing about a walk. Let's just go through this and again imagine what should really be happening here, and once we get the body going we can further refine this as well. I think we might want the foot roll to start happening maybe a little bit here, so we can drag the foot roll down. That'll help that from snapping too much. If I ever affect a keyframe on the end, I need to do it at the beginning as well because this is the cycle. These are the two keyframes. If we move one, it'll break the cycle because these should be the same keys. Because as we play through it's going to loop back to that keyframe and if those don't match up, it's going to break the cycle. We can just adjust that a bit and that's negative 30. I just want to make sure that I'm in the ballpark. That's negative 28 so it's pretty close. Now we have a walk cycle of the legs of the skeleton. In the next lesson, we're going to turn on the upper body and make that workforce and we can further refine this a little bit. It looks like we still have some knee pops which is the bane of any animator's existence. If you do much animation you will be fixing knee pops for quite some time. But we'll continue to refine this now with the upper body in the next lesson. Thanks for watching. 21. 17 Walk Cycle Upper Body: Now we have the lower body and a pretty good spot, let's turn on the upper body. We have this display layer that we created earlier in the scene, and now i'm going to just set the visibility and turn that back on. Let's take a look at the upper body now that we just have it turned on, and see what we have left to do, just maybe quite a lot. It's actually not looking terrible. It looks like he's on a tight rope or something, but we can make this look a lot better. Put the CONS on their own visibility layer. I'm going to turn off joints and select geometry there. I'm going to go select just the CONS. I'm going to go make my own display layer, and i'm going to say, "UpperCONS". Now, that's saved, I can hit the, "P," so that when we play back, those will also turn off, and I can analyze a little better what's going on. Anytime that we walk, our upper half counteracts the lower half. If the right foot's going forward, the left hand is going forward and vice versa. We can adjust that, and as i'm looking at the second C, I already see that we have, maybe a couple of spots that we can adjust the lower body, which anytime I animate i'm always back and forth on stuff. I never just assume something is done. I always want to play with and think, all right, well what if I did this and then see how that works? This was the NAEP optics we did earlier. I'm just afraid that we maybe took it too far, or that we need to go down for less frames, which I think is really the case. Yeah, I think that's really what needs to happen is that, this little dip needs to be much shorter than what we had originally set it as. Let's do the same thing here. Let's bring that up and then translate that down a little bit, get this tangent going down, and now let's look at those knee pops a little bit. It just keeps the body more upright. When you're walking casually. You don't want to pretend it's taking a lot of effort to walk. It's good to try to keep somewhat of a consistent translate why. Again, just looking at these knee pops as a good indication of, is this actually going the right way that I want it to? The process will work on upperBody. Now we can see that we have everything on lowerBody working. What I'd like to do is work from the bottom up. For our case earlier, that was the feet up and now we've done that now it's the spine. The spine is the next thing we need to work on. What we're going to do is go through and set a key frame where we know the keys need to be. We have these extreme poses we've already set, which on 1,10,20 and 30 and 40. Basically every 10 frames. If you remember where the COG is, we see 20,30, 40, and the breakdowns are on the in-between frames. We can go ahead and set those keys so we know, we at least need to have keyframes there? Now we can just play off animation we've already done, if the lower half has the [inaudible] , we know the right arm needs to go forward. The body would be twisting that way, and it looks we don't have this arm set properly to follow. Let me just go to follow the chest, and now we'll rotate the spine, that arm should go forward and it does. It's always a fun thing about making a rig is when things work properly. We have this rotation, now we know we need to do the opposite for these other sides. I'm going to rotate this way and i'm going to mill mouse dragged to the first frame. Again, these need to match. Anytime we do a change to one, we need to change the other. Now we basically have this kind of swinging motion for the upper body, and the next thing we're going to do is bring the hands down. We're going to do the same thing. Let's first get the first frame done before we go through and make a bunch of poses or a bunch of keys. We can you just bring this arm down naturally to the side, it should be behind us because the foot on its side is forward. That we can go to Frame 10, or rather Frame 20. We know this hand should be forward a little bit. I'm just also rotating the hand. The forearm and the hand are in a straight line. We can bring this forward a little bit. We can also adjust the pole vector here. I'm going to set a key there, i'm going to set a key on frame one. Bring this out just to touch the same thing for Frame 20. Just bring this elbow out just a little bit. Now when we do the same thing for this in-frame, let's mill mouse drag that to 40. Now let's bring down this hand. We know this needs to be forward. Because the opposite foot forward. The opposite hand should be going forward. Again, we need to bring out this pole vector, this is to keep the elbow out. Let's make sure we're setting keyframes on everything, and that our arm poses aren't too extreme. Remember it's a walk, not a ran, so that the arms aren't doing a tunnel work. We just want to have them down by the side and being a bit natural here isn't natural, I guess as a skeleton is going to be. Again, anytime I make a change to one end, I needed to make it to the other. I'm going to set those keys there. I'm going to go to the middle keyframe, and i'm going to bring this one back because it's sides of that leg is now forward. Another thing I can do is adjust these shoulders, but the main thing that's going to do a lot of the movement are the hand icons. I'm going to adjust those. Now let's play this back. We can see that it's doing pretty good. We have this natural walk motion happening. The only thing is this head is rotating with the spine. Instead of following the body, I can say follow the world and so it's going to snap the head forward. Now when we play, the head should stay looking forward when the rest of the body is rotating around with the spine. Depending on how we want this walk to look, we can continue to adjust this and refine it. I think for one thing, I think the rotation on the spine is a little too much. Now that we have that set, we can always dial it back in the graph editor. Let's go to the rotate Ys, which is pretty clearly these, and with these selected, I'm going to hold my cursor around zero. We know this is the default value, i'm going to hit "R" to pull up scale. I'm going to shift middle mouse drag this, so that it scales all the keys back down to the default. One thing i'm going to do to see where I came from, his hit the buffer curves, which is this little button right here, buffer curves snapshot. If I click that and I start making changes to the curves, we can see where we left off. We can see what's the change that we made here. We can tell if maybe we went too far. But I think for us, I think dialing it back a little bit is probably the right thing to do because we are walking again, you're not making a huge, huge effort. The other thing to think about is when we're walking, that we don't walk totally straight up and down. Again, think about walking as you're falling forward. We need to have a slight lean forward to our walk. For us to do that, I want to do that for the entire thing. I'm going to go to the rotated x of the COG, and i'm just going to grab everything, and i'm going to rotate him for just a touch. Then the other thing I might do is grab all the translated Zs, and I might drag them for just a touch. I think we may be missing some animation here that we didn't carry through on these breakdowns. Let's think about what we're doing and translate Z. It's going forward. No this is going forward and then back, and now it's going forward again. Now it's going back, and I think the breakdown that we missed here is just this back. We didn't have this mirrored through. Again, because it's a cycle, we need to get these splines to be straight so they're carrying through each other. We can see that if we go to curves, will go to post infinity cycle. Now we can see that these curves should be flowing into each other, meaning just the tangents if we need as well. Now it's "Spacebar" here and look at what we're doing. We have a slight rotation, lean forward because the character should be leaning forward and moving forward. They're constantly kind of falling forward and the feet are what's catching you. The other thing we can do in the next lessons is to offset some of the animation. It's not as robotic as it looks right now. In the next lesson that's further refine this and make some more improvements to the walk cycle. Thanks for watching. 22. 18 Walk Cycle Offsets: In this lesson, let's make some offsets so that it doesn't look as robotics right now. Each time the foot hits the ground, the arm is at it's furthest extreme and we don't have a ton of breakdowns yet for the arm. What we can do is delay these, every time I look at this, these fricking knee pops, annoy me. There's probably not going to be a time where I'm ever like so super satisfied with animation that I'm not going to see something that I'm going to want to fix, and that's animation for you. I'll do the same thing here, because that knee pop it's happening at the back of this stride just like the other one. Should start to bend there and stay forward so let's maybe do a linear here. See that doesn't help. I think that's maybe what was messing it up, is that it was easing into the foot role and it should bounce out of it. I think that's maybe the issue here as well. Let's go down to the foot roll, isolate that, and let's make that be linear, and this one will be linear. Now let's play those back as well. Cool. I think we can maybe carry these foot rolls through just a little bit here, and we don't have a breakdown here, so we can just make one ourselves and just to delay that foot roll a little bit. The same thing for this side. When it gets back to this end, we don't want it to just totally bounce off, so let's bring this one down. Again, let's look at the upper body. We can make offsets here now. Let's think about what we're doing. When this arm is coming forward, I think we should still have it coming forward a little bit. The arms should be a little bit behind the lower body. So let's bring this arm forward more and rotate that in. Maybe bring it in towards the body a little bit and for this one, maybe let's bring the arm back so delay it going forward, and I'm going to middle mouse drag that to the last frame as well. Now we have the arm continuing forward after the foot lands, and I think it's going to maybe a little too far and fast. One thing I'd like to do if that's the case is just middle mouse drag from a frame above it or like ahead of it, and I know it's going to take a smaller value. Again, because this is a cycle, we need to make these tangents, a spline tangent. Okay. We can do the same thing on the backside, right? That the swing should happen after the foot is taken off here. Let's bring that back and then let's go to frame 20 and bring this forward just to touch, and we can always get the fingers and hands in a better spot. But even just that offset and makes that feel a little bit better now, right? The only other thing I would say is this is far out to the side. It's going to translate X, let's just bring that back. See if we need to bring that way back in and it's just getting too far from the body there. We can even just grab all this stuff and bring it in. Something that needs to be that far away from the body. You can see just what that little bit offset does, because we've done this hand but not the other hand. It just prevents it from looking too robotic. Right? The other thing we can do is loosen up the shoulders. Let's get the shoulders involved. So let's set a key-frame here and on 20, and see what we need to do. Let's have the shoulders lead. The shoulders are already coming back on this in-between breakdown on frame ten, and they'll start to go forward as the hand is still going back. Then on frame 30, they'll be forward, leading the hand, and then on frame 40, we'll just copy that and we will probably need to make these spline again, since it's a cycle as we have learned over and over again. Now the shoulders getting involved a little bit and I think the hand is maybe going a little fast towards the end back here. Again, I'm just going to middle mouse drag something in front of it so you can watch it happen in the graph editor. I'm grabbing link frame 23, middle mouse dragging it to 25, and it should just reduce and calm down those values. You can see them bounce to something a little more reasonable. Again, it's maybe looking a little fast, we can just do that again. Bring frame 23, bring it down until we get what we like. I think the same thing is happening here, so we'll just bring that back. With a walk, again, it's very subtle. It's not like these offsets have to be very huge and again, I think the spine is maybe still too big, so we can go to the rotate Z here, and then we can middle mouse drag with R and bring those down just a touch. Again with a walk, in general, you're not making a huge effort. All of these changes don't have to be massive, Right? I think I'm going to incorporate the rotate Z here. So I'd like to isolate that and see what we're actually doing here. When we're rotating it back, it should be down. Let's see. This should be down here. Let's see if that's down. Yeah, this one's down so let's bring this down and then when it's coming forward, it shouldn't be up here, and maybe down again there, we're starting to go down. In general, I think this is a decent spot and make those be spline. You can see the shoulder working a lot better. Hopefully see that on your monitor like that little bit of difference. Just getting the shoulder incorporated, loosens everything up. Even with simple rig like this, it makes a huge, huge difference and maybe is too much right now, but it proves the point of just, it looks so much better to have that shoulder involved than not. I'm just going to grab everything and again, scale everything down to the zero value here just to make it maybe not as obvious. One thing I like to do and I'm animating is go big, make big changes, and then you can always scale it back. You're not married to any of these, so you can make them work for you. I don't like this pop. You look in this angle, you can see this left knee pop, right there and I think it's that we did the linear thing here and we left it that way. Anyway, you get the idea. I think the other thing that maybe is too much is the side-to-side motion. Now that we have the upper body involved, we can go to translate X and we can bring this back down as well. Just going to delete these key-frames that we don't need here, and I'm going to grab these extremes. I'm going to bring them and scale them back down to zero or towards zero, not all the way. Maybe half of what they were. This is where you start to really massage your animations, right? Nothing is going to be perfect the first time you try it. And so you need to be patient. Animation has a lot to do with patience. In the next lesson, we're going to finish this up and I would encourage you to do this other arm, set the offsets on this other arm, not going to spend the time this lesson to do that and do this other shoulder. We're really getting a pretty good spot with this. I would go ahead and pose out the fingers as well to make them be in a more relaxed position, and in the next lesson we will maybe get a little head bop going and a little more motion and the spine possibly. But yeah, this is looking pretty good. See in the next lesson. 23. 19 Walk Cycle Polish: In this lesson, we're going to polish up the walk cycle. If we take a look at what we currently have, remember if we want to really evaluate this walk cycle, we want to exclude this last key frame here, right? Because that's the same as this one. When it loops back through, it's going to play that key frame twice is going to play it here and it's going to play it there. If we want to loop this back, we need to exclude one of those key frame. I'm just going to go to frame 39. Now when we look back, it's actually only playing that key frame once playing the first one. Currently what we have, both arms working, There's a few more things we could do to polish this up even more. Let's take a look that. Let's look at the spine real quick. Let's take a look at the z because currently, you know, you have to think that everything isn't three axes. We're animating in 3D. We want to make sure everything is twisting on all axes and working in every way. We haven't animated this direction much. Let's just do a very subtle rotate Z here. I'm going to go to the rotate z. I'm going to hit space bar here on the graph at her so I can make sure I'm selecting only the rotate Z's of these three spine joints. So I'm command clicking them from here. Now when we go, I want to make sure that it's leaning to one side or the other. Let's scrub through and see which should basically compress on this side, on this screen left side. In here, let's go to frame 5, and let's just compress this side down, just a touch. It's getting compressed on that side and it's coming up. Now it's falling down this side. I'm going to hit key frame here. I want to keep this side slightly compressed. I'm going to drag all these key frames up just a little bit. Now it's coming back to neutral as it's falling down. When it hits the ground, it's going to start compressing on that side as well. I'm going to add a key frame here on 25. I'm going to compress that side down. I'm going to try to get the same value 0.87, I click this and go down to 0.87 each. I'm going to select this key frame and bring it up. Now we can see that it's rotating on that side as well. Maybe do a little bit more on both these. Now we can see it's got a little bit of rotation is probably too much. Every time I do this I tend to take things a little too far in the scale of back. We adding just a little touch of very small changes. We can do the same thing. We can drag the wrists. When the risk is going forward or when the arm is going forward, the risk should drag backwards. I'm going just do a slight drag here as it drags back and it catches up. I'm going to leave it dragging back here until it gets all the way to the front. Then I'm going to have it rotate forward here on frame 30. Now when it goes forward, it's going to rotate forward. It's very small change, but it's just going to, all those little things add up. Again, I want to drag it all the way back. I want to carry that change through to its sister frame there at the beginning. We can see this dragging motion with the risks now. Maybe a little too much, a little too fast, but I like it, adds just that much more to the animation. We're going do that this side as well. Now, we have both risk of moving in a way that's dragging a little bit. Again, maybe that's a little exaggerated, but that's okay. Then the other thing we going to do, is we going to take a look at the head. The head we haven't an animated at all yet. As the body goes up right here, I'll frame 5, let's hit a key frame one, and then frame five. Let's see, it starts to go up. We can drag the head down just a little bit, still going up to frame 10. Then I'm frame 15, it's coming down so we can bring the head back up again. The same thing through frame 20. Then it's going to hit the bottom here. It'll start to drag down again and through frame 30. Then we can just copy this first frame back. That there, see this little maybe had Bob here. It's very small, very subtle here. You can see this head bubble. It just adds so much like that tiny little thing. It's almost hard to see from a distance, but like that makes everything feel connected. From the feet all the way to the top of the head. Everything needs all that energy to carry through. When it goes up, that should have a little tilt down. You could do the same thing to rotate Z. Remember we did that with the spine. When it goes to this side, we can have the head drag this way. It has dragging that way. It's trying to stay where it was all things in motion to stay in and they try to stay where they were. Now, when it gets to that side, now it can swing over and rotate to that side. Now it goes back to almost neutral, maybe leave it over there just to touch. Now when it goes to the neutral here, it's going to hit this side. Try to stay over there. It's going to swing over. Frame 30 to go back to that side. Maybe try to stay over there just a little bit longer. Now we have a little bit ahead bubble. It might be too much, but I like it. It gives it a lot more life. With it being a skeleton, things maybe move a little bit looser than if it had muscle and everything connecting it together so you can get away with a little bit more. The other thing that we could do is we could do the same thing on the compression of the chest. We could do a rotate X compression. When it goes up here and frame 5-10, we could rotate this down. Then it'll go up. We get straight again as it's coming down. We're going to leave this up. Then it compresses at the bottom. It compresses down just a little bit. You can tell I'm just doing the smallest changes, I'm not doing a ton here. That's just the smallest changes. I'm going to drag this to the end. I'm hitting Shift E just to key the rotations remember. If we do shift E and shift W. It looks like maybe went a little too far with that. We can go into the graph editor. It's spacebar in here and grab the rotate axes. Then we can see where we went too far possibly. Just grab those extremes and just kind of scale them in a little bit.I'm going to spacebar that back out and it play. That feels a lot better than when we started, right? There's a lot more going on. Again, we could refine this further and further. It's really how far you want to take these walks cycles and give it personality. This is a generic walk cycle that we've gone through. You have got the idea of what to look out for. The feet should be pushing off into the hips. The hips should be trying to lift the leg forward in the next step. Just the main takeaway, I want you to take away from this is to start to think about the mechanics of how things move and why they move that way and what's driving what. Hopefully, you've discovered some new things in this little section here about the walk cycle, the fact that you're falling every step and so you need to lean forward just a little bit. We could probably even do that even more on this. Just lean everything for just a touch. All those biomechanics things we need to start thinking about. Because when we do more complex motions, we need to understand how the body works and how forces work on each other and how that carries through the body. Hopefully this was helpful to you. In the next lesson, I want to touch on a few more things with this, I'll see you there. Thanks for watching. 24. 20 Walk Cycle Off The Spot: Now that we have our walk cycle on a pretty good spot, no pun intended because it's still sticking on the same spot here. Let's actually get it moving in space. So let's think about how we need to do that. If we want to move it in space, we need to figure out what distance it would need to travel in one stride. That's pretty easy to do based on the values that we put on the foot controls in the z-axis. So if we take a look here, we can see we have an eight right there and we have a negative nine and we know if we scroll forward and we do the same thing here, we have the opposite on each of the feet there. So what we can do is just pretty simple math is 8 plus 9 is 17, but we need to do that twice because we have two strides across 40 frames, so that'll be 34. So let's get this back to zero, it looks like I accidentally maybe had some values here, so I'm just zero that out and I'm going to open up the graph editor as well, which looks like I need to reset this panel by going to Panels, Layouts, Two Panes Stacked and then getting the graph editor up here. Then I can just delete these other keys here because we just want to zero it out, and I'm going to hold down Command and Shift and right click to get this all framed up. I'm going to go back to the first frame and set a key by hitting S and then I'm going to go to frame 40 and drag this out to 34. I can just type that number in here. You also want to keep in mind that this skeleton character, is not slowing down, it's a consistent walk. So we don't want these tangent handles to be splined, we want them to be linear. So I'm going to go to the spline tangent here. I think it has the wrong tool tip popping up for some reason right there. It has motion blur. I think it thinks that I'm doing these up here. So it's just a little goofy thing. Yeah, now it's fixed, so let's call this spline tangent and so let's play this back and now we actually have our character walking in space. To get him to continue or her to continue walking straight, we need to cycle the animation. So let's select all of the curves here and I'm just going to check off the joints and the geometry, and I'm going to select all of the curves. I'm going to de-select the locator that we have translated this character in. So now I know when I select all the curves, I'm going to hit A to make sure I frame up on all. I'm going to select all curves, I'm going to go to Curves, Post Infinity, and I'm going to go to Cycle. With the View Infinity turned on, we can see these dotted lines and we can continue this animation as far as we want to basically. So now when we hit play, that animation will continue. But we need to do something special with the locator itself down here, which is what is doing the translating. We need to continue this same trajectory of this speed over time with the rest of the animation. So we could try to figure that out with more math or what we could do is just select this key-frame and with the spline tangent applied, we can see the tangent handles are also going in the direction that we want it to go. We can go to Curves, Post Infinity Linear. So that will keep the animation going. Now when we hit play, I'm just going to de-select the character so we can see it without it all selected. It will continue going past frame 40. Now we have maybe some slight foot slides here, maybe not, it's hard to tell. The feet might be sliding, just did a little bit, but that's nothing really difficult to clean up. It's way quicker to do this if we need the character to walk a distance than it is to animate every single step. This is the power of Cycles. We can make a cycle and then we can have it continue as long as we have the math figured out for how to translate it. So that's pretty cool. The other thing that this allows us to do is see and catch other things that we need to polish up. So the next lesson, we're going to take another look at how we can polish up this walk cycle a little bit more now that we can see it moving in space. So I'll see you in the next lesson. Thanks for watching. 25. 21 Walk Cycle Polish More: Now that our character is walking in space, we can now re-analyze what's not working and how we can make this even better. For me, what's not working still are some of the steps. We can make edits to just that first cycle and of course, because it's a cycle, it'll work for the rest of the animation. We can make these changes pretty quickly now that we can see them clearly and that we just have one cycle to fix. One thing that I don't really like right now is the fact that the knees are still slightly bent on the contact poses here, the leg should be pretty straight here. I think part of that is because the foot is getting maybe here a little late, it should get there a little sooner. That the foot is maybe traveling a little slow through this gate. What we can do is we can hold the foot back longer and we can get it to the front sooner, so to do that, let's take a look at this first step. We can see that the foot just starts to slide along the toe and really when we are walking, we're pushing off with the foot so that this leg gets really straight so that we can push off with it. We need to keep this foot back at least for maybe, let's try two frames. I'm just going to drag this back and I'm going to toggle with the greater than and less than symbols. If I hold my cursor here, we can see that it's pretty close. Maybe I could drag it back even further and we can lock out the knee, and that's okay because what we're going to do is also increase the foot roll a little bit. I'm also going to increase the foot roll, so now the knees no longer getting locked out. What we can see is that we might need to push this next keyframe down or we can delete it altogether. Let's hit S here and keyframe everything, and then just delete this one. What we going to see is we are also getting tricked by one of these fun little Maya things where I have this foot roll selected, so I deleted this keyframe, but it's still popping here, so that's telling me that there's keys elsewhere. If we look here we can see we actually only deleted the foot role. Again, that is this little tricky thing here, if you right-click on any of these, you can see it's sinking the timeline display with what we have selected here. If I select something else now we going to see there's actually a keyframe down here, but if I select the foot roll, there isn't. Either you need to remember that or you can just select everything here to make sure that you're getting all of the keys and now we can delete that and it shouldn't pop back. Now let's play that, and we can see that the foot is definitely traveling a lot faster now. I think we could even get away with a little more foot roll here, so let's just increase the foot roll. Let's also decrease the Rotate X, so we'll keep that down and then we'll keep the Translate Y down as well, because we don't want that to lift off the ground just yet. I think that's already looking a little bit better. Let's actually bring the foot roll all the way up so that we can fill that push off through the whole step. The other thing I noticed is it stops here, we get to this frame three and it just hits this pose, and the foot stays in this pose the entire way. We can adjust that a little bit, and let's go into the graph editor and see what's happening. Maybe we need an extra little keyframe here to keep the foot roll going so it doesn't appear like it just stops there, so I'm just going to grab this tangent handle, so this curve continues past that keyframe. It doesn't feel it hits a wall here as much. Whereas before the foot roll merely stopped on this keyframe, now it continues for another frame before going back to neutral, so that already feels a lot better to me. We going to do that to the other side, and I will see you in one second while I do that. Now let's take a look at this other foot and make sure it's doing the same thing that we want, yeah, it looks way better. Men it just looks so much better. Sometimes you have to put the character in this mode to be able to see these types of things, because when they're walking on the spot, it's sometimes hard to see and hard to fix a little bit. Cache already looks so much better. It's almost hard to see other things that's wrong with it now because that fixed so much that was wrong with it. The other little thing I want to fix real quick is how bent this knee is on the extension here. Normally when we're walking, this leg gets pretty straight right at the contact pose. But what's difficult in walk cycles, if you've watched this far that you know, is dealing with the knee pops. When you get the leg straight, you're in knee pop territory, so it's definitely something to keep a lookout for. Let's approach this and see what we can do to try to fix that. I think one of the things we can do is bring the foot out sooner to that end pose where it's going to be. I think the other thing that we could do is maybe lift up the torso. We're going to Translate Y and just bring this most bottom keyframe, I will just drag it up. What I'm looking at here is this knee right now. I'm going to hit W and I'm going to shift middle mouse drag and I'll watch that knee as it gets straighter and straighter and I want it to get pretty straight, it looks a lot better. What we're going to deal with now is all these knee pops, and that's okay because now we can go back in and maybe translate this up a little bit. Now we're getting rid of that knee pop. The only thing is, it looks a little goofy that this is going up, so I think that the thing we could do is actually use the foot roll and have the highest foot roll actually be over here instead, so let's try that. Let's have a foot roll go down a lot sooner, so where we did have it, it's now going down a lot quicker. Yeah, that already looks a lot better. The foot is traveling a lot faster than we had it originally. I think we just need the foot roll to be a little bit higher, so you don't get this knee pop on this frame or you can just move this one over. Let's take a look at the knees now. It's definitely hyper extending here, so now let's just bring up the foot roll, so the knee is no longer popping. Do the same thing for the next frame. I'm just shift middle mouse dragging to keep the leg kind of straight here at least for two frames. Maybe I'm going to hit another keyframe here on the foot roll and bring it down, let's keep this leg kind of straight through here. Now when we toggle through, that looks so much better I can already tell. That looks better. This might just be my eye, I'm sure hopefully you'll be able to see it in your own animation. When you stare at this stuff long enough, you can see these differences and maybe we can even see it between the left and right leg. You can tell how much better this leg that we worked on is for the plant contact. See how this other leg is staying bent the whole time and the other one is getting straight and how much better that straight leg feels, it just feels way more natural. Let's just do that for this other side and I'll see you in the next lesson. Thanks for watching. Bye. 26. 22 Walk Cycle Motion Trail Wrists: In this lesson, we're going to cover a new tool that will help us analyze what we need to polish in an animation. For that, we're going to need to go into an orthographic view, because I want to see and more isolate some of the motion and the hands. We can see if we zoom in here for a second, that the hands jolt around a little bit. Another quick thing that you might want to know about is, you can mute channels. Even though we have this RD animated, and let's say we want it to actually go back to being on the spot. Instead of deleting this animation on the locator here, we can just mute it. We can go to the channel box here and select everything, right-click and go to mute selected. Now when we play this back, it won't change the values there. Let's take a look at this little more, we can see as the arms go back and forth and in and out, they hit these walls here. To see that a little better, let's go to an orthographic view. I'm going to go to the front view, and I'm going to zoom in here. I'm just going to watch this wrist. Just watch this wrist little quick. As I play this, you can see it hits this wall, and it's pretty much even with this grid line right here. It's almost like bouncing off of it when in reality this has its own weight, and it would swing a little bit past that and wouldn't go up exactly with the timing of the, of the hips and everything. We need to adjust that and an easy way to see that as well is, we can select the con and we can go to the animation menu over here. Let's go to visualize and we can create an editable motion trail. I'm going to click that, and just to make sure that you can see it, you can go to show and motion trails, make sure that's checked on. Now we can see where these keyframes are. These are the white buttons, and I'm just going to change the background with all bright now so we can see that a little better. We can see the path of that motion, and because we're an orthographic view, we can isolate a little bit. We can see that it's not super nice and smooth there's these jagged lines. They go to a point and then back out, typically, you want things to have these nice curves and they float like that. This doesn't have that, so we can fix that, the other thing we can do with this motion trail, as we can select it, we can select any one of these points which selects the motion trail, and now you can see that's what we have selected. Let's go over to the attribute editor here, and we can have all these options. We can change all these different colors and everything, but I'm always interested in this show frame crosses. I'm going to select that, and now you can see we can actually increase the frame cross size, below that. We can increase that and maybe even the color, let's make it something like bright yellow. We can see where the frames are in between the keyframes, but little white squares are only the keyframes and you can see the frame number next to it. But what we want is also the frames in between. We can see this spacing, and there's big spacing here and very close spacing over here. I'm going to reduce the timeline, so it's easier to scrub. I'm going to go through this animation and see where there's an opportunity to loosen this up a little bit at least and translate X. I'm going to change to the world axis, so I know I'm isolating in the world axis here, and I'm going to scrub through this and see where there's opportunity to just make this little path of motion a little bit smoother. Now, before it was pre-jagged and it bounced there recreating a little bit more of a smoother path. I'm going to drag this over here, and now when it gets over here, this is the one that was the trouble spot for me, that stuck out to my eye and maybe drag this back. It gives us more room to move as it needs to go through here. It looks way better, we can see this spacing here, continues through, and I might do that for another frame here. Now, that we're in the polish phase, I'm not worried about where my keys are or how many keys I'm setting, because I'm feeling pretty good about everything. I'm just setting keys where I like them to be. Now, when it hits up here, we need to continue going this way. We have motion like this, it needs to carry through. It can't just hit a wall, especially that something hanging, like the wrist is hanging. There's no reason for it to just stop there. It has its own weight and momentum and it should carry through the animation. You know what, we might even want to do that and carry that through here. I think what would make sense is, it does this big loop and that loop should continue, and then maybe a loop down here as well. Instead of going back in and out zigzagging, I think this should actually stay out here. Again, we'll have to copy this a middle mouse dragging to the first frame and hitting Shift w, so that we're copying that frame over here because remember, whenever we do that in the first and last frame they should match since it's a cycle. You can see where you zoom in even more. You can see where this zigzag still right here next to this frame. I'm just going to brute-force this and make it do exactly what I want it to do because this arm is connected to the body. What I'm doing? I send another key on 42 we got actually going to go back to the beginning of the cycle. Undo that, we can see these keyframe numbers two, three. That's also an indication like, hey, this is a cycle, don't keep going past the end of the cycle. Otherwise, you're making keyframes that are included in the cycle. We're on two, let's go to three, let's just bring this down. We got a four, let's bring this over as well. Now, that's going to have this nice motion here that will carry through. Let me just get a perspective view and see where elbows out here and check this from another angle. That's another thing we do as we can go to the side angles is going to the right view. I'm just pulling down spacebar. Maybe we need to go to left view because it's on this other side. Make sure that the same is true for this other axial animating in 3D, we need to make sure all of this stuff is happening in three proper. I'm going to drag this out, and I'm just making sure these are nice smooth curves. This is called arcs, you want to make sure you're arcs are looking good. Right now, these do not look good because the momentum of the hand is not being carried through the animation. Currently, we just set keys to get in the ballpark, and now, once we're in this zone where we're polishing, we want to make sure that everything is doing exactly what we want it to do. Also, see we have an opportunity maybe drag this next keyframe down. I think we need to drag this down and maybe illustrate an alarm a little bit, but I don't like how it balances low here and goes right back up to the same height as this frame. See how these two frames are the same height, and keep this down just a touch. I'm checking to make sure I'm not hyperextending the elbow that actually roomed to do that, and I'm going to go to the next keyframe and drag this back out and drag that animation. The elbow gets pretty straight there, and we want it to get even more straight so that it doesn't feel like it's just popping over one frame there. That's actually supported with the frames around it. I'll drag this back a little bit maybe drag this down. Looks like we're starting to hyperextend the elbow there, so I need to bring that back vertically a little bit. I think that should work that already looks way better. You see we made this figure eight pattern here, except for this little hitch right here, which I think we could make look even better. I'm going to just drag those out, smooth that out. I'm going go back to shift middle mouse, drag this first frame to get those to match. I'm going go to the end. I'm just going to drag this down because the spacing between these kind of back the bouncing balls stuff. It shouldn't speed up between these two. It should be pretty consistent through here and there was a spacing, I didn't like that. Just dragging that stuff around to be exactly what I want it to be. Cool. I've got a 39, maybe drag that one down, just to touch. That's looking pretty, damn good in that angle. I'm going to go back to the front view and revisit this, so that on the in and out, it still makes sense. Maybe even get this arc going a little wider so it's not all straight up and down. See you through this section. It was just like straight up and down. I always want to try to find opportunity to create arcs. Everything doesn't move very linearly because that'll make it look like a computer did it. I want to have these nice arcs throughout the animation. We can see we need to follow up with this out again. I'm the worst at that. Let's see, 1,2,3,4,5. Let's go to frame five. I was just getting confused on, I was working on the cycle part that time. Outside of the cycle part rather. I'm just going to drag these in and get this stuff working in these nice arcs. We're looking kind of a figure eight again. Let me drag this back in, and have it continue past that one. See how we're making these nice figure eight arcs? The arc of a curve, we can see here, is looking a lot better. Maybe we can drag that out, and just make it look nice. This is kind of the most fun. This is the most fun part to me because you can really get after making these arcs nice and not have to worry about where the key frames are and all that kind of the thing. It's one of my favorite stages of animation when you get to polish because then it's kind of a free for all. You're not concerned with keeping everything organized because up to this point, we've wanted to keep everything organized. If we wanted to breed time things, but now that we had the timing down and go in here and really finesse these things. I'm going to turn off motion trails, I'm going hit play. You can see how much better. You can compare the left and the right hand right now and you can see how much better this left hand already looks. I think we need to go further on the out. It feels like it's getting stuck around this grid line here, where it goes down here. I think we can continue that. Let's turn back on the motion trails and see why that's happening. I think it's that, yeah, it's all this stuff. I think we could bring all that even further out. So it doesn't look like it's going up and down as much. Bring this all the way out, bring that out, go to these other key frames, go to middle mouse-click to frame 1 and hit "Shift W", so that we match those frames up. I go back here and make sure this stuff is in a nice arc. Now, the one thing that you do have to look out for is when you're making these changes, if you're going to make more changes, the more key frames you have the more you're going to have to change. Which I'm not too worried about, this is what I do for work. I'm used to these very tedious things. But starting out, you might get bored with this or frustrated. Just be aware that's normal and this is just part of the processes it's getting comfortable with spending time on these things. That doesn't seem like it's that bigger deal, but it really will make the difference between looking animation and pretty damn good looking animation. So I want to turn off the motion trails again, and I'm going to hit play. That looks way better than when we started. It's way less stiff and we can see it's not really hitting a wall anywhere. That's very obvious. It feels like the arm is still has its own weight. We need to do that to this other side. See here, compare to this other side on the right. Watch this, this wrist just stops over here on this grid line. I don't know if you can see where my mouse is. Right on this grid line; boop, boop, boop. It just hits this wall. Whereas over here, the arcs are nice and flowing. Everything kind of makes sense. There's still maybe a little bit of a bounce here, but it's not like it hits a wall over here and sticks there. If we look going left to right, it stops going left or right for several frames. It's right here. We have 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13. It's almost half the animation. It sticks on this wall over here. Whereas on this side, when we look at it, there's never really 12 frames where it just stuck or hits a wall. It's all nice flowing and has these arcs. In this lesson, we learned about motion trails and how to visualize our animation and turn the show key frames and show frames for it, how it controls visibility to play back and look at it from different angles. We still haven't looked at it from the top view, which is something else we could do. Doesn't look too bad. But in general, this is one of the last stages. If you're having a problem, you can't figure out why is this not look good. Click one of your cons and turn on the motion trail for it. To delete it you can actually just go to your windows outliner. It's actually an asset over here. So we can just delete that to get rid of it. We can make another one again if we wanted to, and it's just a tool for us to use. I'm going to do that for this other side, and I encourage you to do the same thing, and I will see you in the next lesson. Thanks for watching. 27. 23 Walk Cycle Motion Path: In this lesson, we're going to look at actually putting this character on a path. Currently, we have animated the locator. If we unmute the locator animation by clicking on it in the channel box here and going down to unmute selected. We can see that indeed this person goes off into the distance in one direction. If we wanted them to maybe curve around and turn left or something like that, we could try to animate that and rotate it and all that stuff. But what would be better and easier would be to actually attach this person to emotion path. Then we can control the path instead of this locator by itself. Let's do that. Let's delete this animation. I'm just going to shift select here and right-click and go to delete. I'm just liking just because it's easier than getting exactly on that key frame and deleting it that way. Am just like this shift, select it. We need to create a path. Let's go to the top view, spacebar left clicking on the middle. Hopefully you know how to do that by now. We go over to the curves and I'm going to click this all EP Curve tool here. You can see it's also icon selected here. I'm going to go over to the tools actually. I'm going to dock this. I don't know why it's not docked. But again, all of this stuff is, you can move things around and it's not a big deal. Cubic is good because I want it to curve a little bit. I'm going to have four so I can see the grid through this guy. Hold on x. It will snap to the grid while I left click, to set the first and I have him go straight for a little bit. I'll hold on x and have him be on the grid, again. I'm going to set another point close to that because I don't want the curve to start out here. I don't want him to round out when you do EP curve tool. If I do that, you can see it starts to curve like this. But if I was to set another point just in front of this one and then curve. Well, it's going to get a little wonky. You going to have to, maybe put it a little further out and then do that. It gets a little wonky. Basically, it it all depends on how extreme you make things. You definitely want to be careful about that. Basically I can make this go in circles and let's make him go out here and then go another direction. It's really whatever we want it to do, doesn't matter at all. I'm going to hit enter to save that curve. Now I'm going to attach the locator to this motion path here. I'm going to select the curve and turn off the tools here so we get a better screen area. I'm going to select on the channel box here so we can see that we have selected. I'm going to select this. I'm going to first delete all of the animation from this because it needs to have clean, channel box here. There's no keys on it. I'm going to shift select the curve and then go to constrain, motion paths and attach to motion path, cool. We can see that is not pointing in the right direction. Let's undo that and open up the little option box here. We can see we have a few options here and we want the front axis to be z and not x. That's why it's going sideways there. Let's choose z and we know it's z because if we look in the bottom left here, we can see the z-axis is the left or right and we want it to go left to right to start because that's how locators are oriented. Now we hit apply. It should go in the proper direction. I'm going to delete that. Now the only thing we have left to do is to get the correct type of translation based on, the length of our stride. If we go to frame 40, we know that's where all of our animation ends, that's where the cycle ends. That should be. I think we had calculated 34 units based on the distance of these two strides back to back and believe were eight and nine, so that would be 17 and there's two strides left and right, so it would be 34. This should be 34 units to the right. Let's create our own locator. Go create locator. Just going to close this motion path menu down. Now this new locator, I'm just going to say 34. We can see that this locator is not in the correct spot where it should be based on the speed that this person should be traveling based on the cycle. We can see that the feet are sliding around and that doesn't make any sense at all. What we can do is go to frame 40, where we know that this should be 34 units here, we're basically using this locators, a measuring stick here. We want this to match up with this locator. Let's go into our graph editor and hit spacebar and it looks like I need to set those panels again. Am going to go to layouts, two panes stacked and go to panel, graph editor. You can also see that by default, the splines are auto tangent. That's this little button here. We want linear because this character is moving at a constant rate with the walk cycle. I'm going to hit that. Now you can see it actually goes way past where it shouldn't be. What I can do is just reduce this down so that those match up. I'm just grabbing the end key frame here. If it's hard to get it in on the exact spot, I can hit command and shift and I can zoom in here, so the values are a lot smaller. When I shift middle mouse, drag this up or down, it's over much smaller values. I can get much more precise movement and the graph editor, when I scale this up like that. We can get it pretty much right where it should be. Now we know, whenever it goes across the motion path, that it will be moving at the correct rate. It's moving at the correct rate and then it goes around this corner. The one goofy thing you have to look out for when you do especially tight turns like this as probably wasn't the best example to use. That's way too tight of a turn. No one turns like that. But, you know, it's good for education purposes. You can see what the problems are. Basically the feet slide right there, just rotating around this center pivot. This is what's moving around. When the foot's out here, it's getting rotated around this pivot, so the foot's going to slide out here. That's the only thing I had to look out for, for these motion paths. Typically, you're not using motion paths. In this crazy way. You're using it in a very gentle, much more gentle way than I used it here. Let's adjust it. I'll grab the control vertex and we're going to run into another problem here I'll show you what the problem is in a minute. Just going to drag all these points out and make this be a more gentle a curvature to this turn here. Am going to grab this point over here when I click this little isolation. I know I'm not moving it up or down vertically and then move these over. Basically we have this character walking in a circle now. But what if you notice was, we changed the length of this curve. How motion paths work is they use a 0-1 value. If we select the locator that's actually attached to this motion path and we go to the Inputs, over here we see motion path, we have a U Value here. If we go to the Graph Editor we can see this key frame over here it's on frame 200, we can also see it over here on the timeline if we go there, you can see that actually has a number associated with it. It has the frame number is written on the on the motion path. So it's going to stop right there. Well, why is it stopping right there? Well, because it's last key frame we have. We have the rest of this curve, what if we wanted the character to go all the way to the end of the curve? Well, basically in motion path will say, the beginning is zero and the end is one. When we have the locator selected and we're looking at these values on the left side of the graph here, we have zero down here and we have, let's see, 0.8 here. 0.8 is correlating to the length of this curve. 0.8 of this curve if it was 0-1, beginning to end, 0.8 would be right here. If we drag this up to 1.0, it'll go to the end of the curve. The main takeaway here is, if we change the distance of this curve, it will effect what that graph is. It doesn't matter when it's at one, but let's say it wasn't at one, let's say we did want to end right here but then we change the length of the curve. Like you know what? We want him to go further over here. Watch, he starts to move, he slides, because the length of the curve is changing. The zero to one value relative to the curve length is changing too. You want to keep that in mind when you're using motion paths. One way to keep that in mind and to always keep track of the proper length, this is an intermediate thing. But we've already gotten this far and I want to show you this. This is a really cool trick. Not a lot of even experience animators know this. This is something I discovered and I've used on a lot of projects. If we take an arc length, we can go to Object Mode, select the curve, let's go to Create, Measure Tools, I'll see Arc Length Tool. I'm going to left-click and you can see now we have this length. We can see in left-clicking, it just gets stuck to this curve. Wherever I drag it will stay stuck on this curve. But the number is changing because it's a measuring stick basically it's saying, this curve is 280 units long. Why is that important? Because if I'm going to put someone on a motion path, what I do, I make the motion path crazy long and say, you know what? Screw it. Emotion path is going to go way over here. The reason why I do that is that, I want this value, let me change this background so you can see the number. Now let's just go 600 just for fun. But I want this person to stop over here. Well, first I need to get the locator to be accurate to the length of the cycle. So I need to go way down. I'm going to grab the end key frame while I'm on in the cycle. I'm manipulating key frame that I'm not actually viewing. I'm on that frame. That's the beauty of graph editor. I'm going to drag this back to where it should be. The cycle is the correct length here as far as where the animation is. Again, I'm zooming in so that I can get a finer control here on where it's meeting up on the motion path. Now I've set it to be where it should be for the cycle. When I play this back, the feature and slip, and he's going to turn, he's going to do a little turnaround, he's going to stop right there. If we look at the curve now, remember when we're at 0.8 or whatever, you can see the buffer curve up here where one is. Look how far we had to drag it down because the length of the curve is so long, it goes to 600. We pulled it all the way out here to 600. Now the 0-1 value in graph editor is crazy. That relationship is way different now. We had to accommodate for that and pull this key frame way down. So it's on 0.2 now. Remember we are on 0.8, that's 0.2. It's all relative to the curve length. Now here's the fun part, the tricky part, that I hesitate to even teach because it's more of intermediate thing. Just these concepts. It's hard to stop at a beginner level because just everything plays into the next piece. We can see it says 600. Now let's say, I've got everything set. The walk cycle is working, it's going at the right pace, the feet aren't slipping too much. I can fix these curved ones that are slipping later. That's no big deal. But later on when you're, "You know what? I want to change the path." I want him to not turn all the way around. So I'm going to go to the curve, I'm going to edit the curve. Edit curve, he's going to be over here now but it's changing the length of the curve, even if just by a little bit. Well, how do we know it's changing the length of the curve and by how much? Well, what do we have? We have our fancy little arc length tool that we made over here. Now we can see we move from 600 to 659. If we play this back, you can see on frame 40, the two locators aren't matching up. We know that the feet are going to be sliding here. Look at this feet sliding because now the curve is longer. Well, gosh. Now we're going to go back in, and do the motion curves in the graph editor and drag that back down. Or what we can do on what we built instead of doing this now, instead of doing this trying to line that backup, what we can do is instead change the length of the curve and that's why I make it to be super long because it gives me a ton of room to move it. If I decide to change this length over here. When I right-click this go to Control Vertex, all I have to do now is bring this number back to 600. That's where we set everything and we said everything's locked in and the walk cycle works perfectly for this motion path. I'm going to click and drag this and just watch the numbers go down. It didn't matter where this thing is going to be over here, over there, what matters is that number. We wanted to get it to about 600. When we go back over here and we're at 600 and we've got to frame 40, guess what? Those locators match up and everything's fine now. We can edit this curve to our heart's content as much as we want. Drag this thing over here, drag this piece over here, and instead of having to go back into the curves of the motion path and the graph editor, we can make these adjustments to make sure that the walk cycle is moving along this path properly. We can do that with this distance over here. Look how much we drag it, 900 and whatever. No big deal. We just drag that back to 600. I might have to delete some points here just to be able to go past them. I did this in a very exaggerating way on purpose so you can see the power of this and that relationship between the motion path and the length of the curve. That 0-1 value and the length of the curve. You can edit the motion path 0-1 value in the graph editor, or you can adjust the length of the curve. It's up to you. They will both get to the same issue here, which is we're trying to keep the feet from slipping. They should be moving at a certain distance based on our animation of the walk cycle. Hope all that makes sense. We delved into a little more intermediate and really advanced animation techniques to the motion path and walk cycles. But do you know what? You've watched hours of training and if you've made it this far, I think you're pretty advanced already. Congratulations on making it this far in the course. I look forward to teaching you more in the next. Congrats on finishing this section. 28. 24 Wrap Up: In this final lesson, I just wanted to wrap up what to do next basically. You've learned a lot of the principles of animation. You've learned how to do a walk cycle. There's still a lot left to learn. This is Maya, for beginners. It's not Maya for intermediate or advanced. There's still quite a bit to learn and I plan to release more animation courses in the future. But if you don't want to pursue this on your own until that time or if you don't want to watch other courses, I would highly encourage you to do your own stylistic walk cycle. That would be the exercise that I would leave you with. I wanted to show you the one I did when I was in animation student. Gosh, this is maybe eight years old or something like that. We were tasked with doing a stylistic walk cycle. I went as far as I can go with it like super exaggerated, crazy, walk cycle, it's not perfect but, this pushes the concepts. You don't want to get stuck in a rut of thinking, okay, the contacts are supposed to look like this and the passing positions are supposed to look like that, and you can't do anything else. Well, that's not true, you can do anything. There's all different walks you can do. What I would highly recommend you do is to film yourself, get your iPhone or smartphone, film yourself, and then play that back and see where, like if this was me walking, I would pause the video and think, okay, these are my contacts here, so those are the extremes. Then I would go inside of Maya and I would pose this out like this. Then I would go and scrub the video of myself, if this was me. I will find the next post and then post that out and count how many frames in between each pose there are, and I'd start block that in. Then I would abandon the reference and then try to make the animation work on its own inside of Maya. Yeah, this is what I would highly recommend you to do next. While you still have the motivation and everything is still fresh in your mind, jump right into another exercise and do a stylistic walk cycle. The other thing I would recommend is looking for other rigs. This is the Norman rig. It's a free rig you can find. If you go to 11 Second Club slash resources, you can find download links for Maya and Blender if you want. For the Norman rig, there's also a few others in here, but for me, Norman is the next best step up from a skeleton rig that you can do it, it's not super complicated and it's good to expose yourself to different types of rigs because they're all going to be built a little differently. If you ever work in animation, you're going to have to get used to that because every rigor does things a little differently. Go find free rigs like this, Google free rigs. There's a lot of other ones online as well. I'd recommend this one and then you can make your own. You could find models on something like turbo squid. You could pay for models. If you wanted to find rig models or generic models and then you rig them yourselves. If you've watched the other section of this class about rigging, you could just buy models and then rig them yourself. There's plenty of resources to do whatever you imagine. If you go to 11 Second Club, you can watch the critiques, watch a winner critiques. If you click on this, you can go through, and this is one of the best ways to learn is to see a finished animation, and then you think it looks amazing and it usually does. But then you watch for like 30, 45 minutes to an hour of someone just tearing it apart. This is almost like an advertisement for animation mentor, but yeah, they're cool school, but they're also pretty expensive. If you want to pursue animation, this is definitely an option. There's also anime school, anime squad. There's a ton online of other schools. But of course, I have my own classes that I'm going to be teaching too, so I would encourage you to watch this too. But yeah, these online schools are just more expensive basically, but they still have these free resources I would highly recommend. Watch these professional animators critique these animations and you'll learn a ton. This is basically like go into school just by watching these critiques. You can go through the different months and the different years, and I mean, there's hours of critiques here. This also goes to show you the reward for winning this contest. This is a little contest that's run monthly, they called the 11 Second Club, the reward is to get critiques. This is also where you need to start mentally preparing yourself for animation as you want to get critique, you want feedback. Don't be shy about showing your work to other people. Even if they're not animators, they can tell you that feels funny or that doesn't look right to me or something. They might not be able to articulate why, but it'll give you a hint at what to look at and how to evaluate your animation to polish it and make it look better. You have to have tough skin and be able to just listen to people and take their critique and try to make your animation better. That's how over the next few years or if you want to continue to pursue this, that you'll really get better is to pursuing critique and learning from other people's critiques like this. But for the next step for you, I would highly recommend using your imagination and think up a very highly stylized walk, or not even highly stylized, just something different. You could do a sneak, you could do a old person, baby, you could do anything and you could grab these other rigs and they're pretty generic so you can make them be whatever you want them to be. Yeah, so congrats on finishing this course. I hope you've watched the other sections. If not, I would encourage you to go back and watch those and also follow me, and if you want to be updated on the future animation courses that I'm going to be creating. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next courses. Thanks.