Transcripts
1. Intro: Hey guys, gear with backwards animation. And in this tutorial, we're going to be talking through character animation. I'm going to show you how I do simple pose to pose animation using the curve editor pretty heavily. But it's a very in-depth course where I show you how to get that smooth, polished, professional look. Let's you want in a character animation, if you've ever had trouble with character animation in the past, this would be a very useful tutorial for you. I showed you how to get that polished look in a very simple, clean, and easy to fall away. We're gonna use to plugins, do it bustle and joysticks and sliders. Using joysticks and sliders, I'm going to show you how to get the squash and stretch on the body and the rotation left to right. At the very end of this tutorial, I'm going to show you using fossil, how to use the script. Animation blender. Very powerful script and very easy to use to. And what the script allows you to do is it allows you to replay your animation at any point in your timeline. It's a very powerful, very easy plugin and it's going to be a lot of fun to show you. So thanks for watching guys, and I hope it's very useful for you.
2. Body Rotate: This is the character that I'm going to use and it's a little bit different from my professional character rigging course. There's not much different, but with any good progress that you make, you make changes that improve a rig. And that's what I've done here is I've got some things like a body rotate, absence, squash and stretch. And I've done some other things like removed I removed all of the control handles that manipulate the arm. It turns out I just didn't need them. And what I was doing with that rigging courses, I wanted to give you all the options available to you. You can choose to pick which ones do you need and which ones you've dealt. So I'm going to show you how to do this body rotation and the squash and stretch. Because I think it's gonna be very important for use, for you to use in this course. So starting off, the things that you're going to need are joysticks and sliders. If you've taken the rigging course. If you've taken my Reagan coarse character design and rigging, Then you'll have, or you should have joysticks and sliders. And you should also have do a bustle. You're gonna need do a vassal 0.2 for the end of this course when I do the animation blender, which is a technique that you can use to actually pick when your animation sequence starts. This way you don't have to copy and paste keyframes. And it makes it really easy to do long runs of animation without getting confused with all the key frames. So the first thing that we're gonna do is I'm going to break this rigor part. So now that I've removed the body squash and stretch and the Rotate, I'm going to set it up and show you how I did that. The first thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna go to layer new. And we're gonna go null object. We're gonna put the null object right down here at the bottom of the torso. And I'm gonna call this one body. Squash and stretch. I'll leave it there for now. And the next thing I want to do is I'm going to parent my body. Or is it going to parent my body to that new null object? So body squash and stretch. The next thing that I'm gonna do is I'm going to set up, I'm gonna, I'm gonna set up some animation on this null object. So what you can do is we're going to select your null, hit P on the keyboard. And then we're going to also hit Shift S. And this is going to bring up your position and your scale. So right here at keyframe one or 0. We're going to put a keyframe right there. Then we're going to hit page down. And this will be our character rotating to his left. When our carrots are rotates to their left, I want to move this null object over just a little bit. Okay? And then there's gonna be no scale to that, so we can just copy that key frame. And then if you hit page down to your third keyframe, you can hit origin. And I'll put it right back in the middle. And then we'll go over well, was it too? Yeah. We'll hold shift and move over to it doesn't have to be much, just a little bit to get the idea that your body is shifting left and right as he rotated in these scale can stay the same. Now this next one on keyframe for This is where we're going to actually animate some squash and stretch. So we're gonna hit origin again. Or you can just copy and paste the first keyframe. And on this one we're going to go up. Maybe that looks pretty good. And then we're going to scale it upward. And then scale it in just a little bit. So you can see I have scaled it down 5% on X and up. Let's just do 10% or not 10%, I'm sorry. That's 1%. Anyway. So 95110, let's say it's L are pretty good or is that too high? Altitude has pretty good. It's always better to go to overshoot and undershoot are then we're gonna paste origin. We're gonna do one click down and we're going to scale it downward. And then out. Really compress that body. Okay, and that's looking pretty good. So we've got left, right movement and up and down. One thing that I should have done is we need to parent the hips. I think that's it. Yeah, carat the hips to the squash and stretch as well. So now I have two hips. That's why. Where's the other hip? Here it is. Squash and stretch. Okay, so now my hips are moving with it. The next thing that we have to do is we're going to set up movements for the arms. So as our body rotates, the shoulders need to rotate with it. So we're gonna do layer new null object. I'm going to put this one up here right around his right shoulder. So I'll call it right. Shoulder because it's his right shoulder and we're gonna hit P on the keyboard. We're not going to adjust the scale. If you adjust the scale, you're gonna mess up your control for the arm. So don't adjust the scale. So we're going to key the position here. We're gonna hit page down and on the next keyframe, This is him turning to his left. So this arm will move. Actually, I'm going to put the shoulder. I'm going to attach it to it. So his right shoulder will attach to write shall test should I didn't spell shoulder. So now as this moves, as this null object moves and it's going to adjust the shoulder. See that, see I was parented easy peasy. So it moves forward and we're going to have it well, haven't moved back just a little bit. So this is the shoulder going behind the body now. And then right here, we're going to copy and paste the original. And we're going to move this shoulder upward. And we're gonna move it inwards just a little bit. And then now we're gonna get the downward position. And we're going to move the shoulder down. Now we can leave it. Little lever right there. It looks pretty good. So now we have to do the same thing for the left shoulder. So do layer new object will move this one to the left shoulder. Now, Let's rename it left shoulder. And then let's go ahead and parent the left shoulder to the left shoulder. So hippie on the keyboard, key the position. Go down and move this one over, just a little bit, it down again, and move it over even more. So this is now in this position, the arm should be in front of the body. So as the arm goes in front of the body, it moves forward just a little bit more. You can have it move backwards just the same, but we can adjust these after we get the rigging portion done. It's not that not that big of a deal. So I'm going to copy and paste the first key frame. And then now I'm gonna move it upward to the same level as the original shoulder, and I'll move it in just a little bit. Now we're gonna go down and I'll move it to the same level as the right children. And I'll move it out just a little bit. All right. Now we've got some squash and stretch and rotate in the body. And there's still a few things that we have to do, but we'll get there. So now we need another one for the neck because you can see the neck is not moving. So we'll take this one, move it up and we'll call it we'll call it neck. And what I have to do is I have to attach my neck bone. Neck bones connect to neck. No. Let's see. Is this It and there it is. So this one will be attached to the neck. And actually all of these need to be attached to see body. And there we go. So make sure that you attach them to the body so that now when you move the body, everything should be moving with it. Looking good. So now I'm going to hit p for the neck or not touching the scale. Again, the scale will mess things up only position. So page down, this will be a rotation to the right or the left of the character. So I'll move the neck forward. Maybe not much. Then I'll move to the neck. To the other direction. Oops. What have I done? Forward and backwards. Okay, here we go. And then we'll center out the neck, will move it up. And then we'll move it down. Looks pretty good. Now I have this little circle here, which is supposed to be his color. But I think I kind of want that I want that on the body. I'm not too sure why put it on the on a separate layer. I think I think maybe I had some layer issues with the hand going behind the the cholera. I'm not sure. But what I'll do is I'm just going to replicate it right here on the body. No big deal. Make sure my colors are accurate. And then I'm just going to delete the color. And now we can see, cool, everything's moving, how it should looking pretty good. And now I can see that maybe the neck goes down just a little bit too much here. The head is in the way, so I can't see. You can see the neck goes up too high there. Yeah. We'll say that's good. Okay, so that's looking really good now we've got all this movement. Everything's doing pretty good. Now the only thing we have to do is make the hips. So we're gonna do another null object. I'm going to put this one down here at, we'll put it out in his right hip. This will only be the position again. Okay. If you're animating the scale, You're doing it wrong. Stop animating scale. So all go page down. This one, move over. I don't know, maybe few clicks that way. This one not as much. And I think how I want this to go is that as you pivot, let's say that you're pivoting to your left like this. This leg right here is the grounding Foundation, which is what you're kind of pivoting over. So it's not gonna move much. It might go back just a little bit, but not much. But the other one, this one will move quite a bit because it's swinging forward. And then now we're going to copy the origin. I'll paste it books. And this is your up position. So the question is, are our legs gonna move? Let me look at looks like though come up maybe just a little bit. And then as we go down, it looks like they will come down a little bit as well. And now we compare at the hip to that that I haven't named and this would be right leg. So we'll call it. Right. Okay. And then what we'll do is we'll find the right hip. And we're going to parent it. Whoops, two. Right hip. So now this leg should be moving. Looks pretty good. And this is what you're looking for to as the body squashes down, you want some bend in the nice. Let's make sure that our hip is attached to the sea body, which is our body control. All right, everything is looking pretty good. Now we'll do it one more time for the left hip, they are new. Oops. New object. Put away down here. Alright, and I'm going to call this one left hip. It p and the keyboard key, the position page down. Remember this one's own going to move back just a little bit. Not much. But as it moves forward, it'll go forward quite a bit more. Then we're going to paste the origin. And I'm just going to duplicate the positionings Of the other hip. So a line that up to this one so that they're on the same level. And then I will go down so that they are on the same level. And we go. Now let's make sure that we paste or copy the pick whip the left leg to the left hip. Okay. Looking good. So that's that. Next we're going to talk about switch templates. How do we get the arms to stay in front of the body and the other one to go behind the body. It's not that complicated of a process, but it does take a little bit of work to get it right. So let's get into that.
3. Switch Templates: Now what we're gonna do is we're going to set up a joys to concider, to actually rotate the body to get the effect that we're looking for. So taking all of the null objects that we've just created, the body's squash and stretch. Right shoulder, left shoulder, neck, hips, and hips. These six null objects, once they're selected. And you can see all the keyframes that there are. Makes sure that there's no blank keyframes, meaning There's nothing like this. If you're missing a keyframe down here, make sure that it's filled in with, with some kind of attribute attached to it. There's any blank spots, it will not work. So select all your null objects we've just created. And we're gonna come over here to joysticks and sliders. And you're going to click this little square, which is create a new joystick. I'm gonna name this one, body, rotate. And once it's done, what happens is it creates this nice joystick to which I can move the body around. And you can see right away it works. The body's moving as squashing and stretching and true rotating. That's great. That's exactly what we were hoping for. The only thing we have to do now is create switch templates. And the switch template is simply changing the opacity of a layer so that as it falls behind an object, joysticks and sliders tells it to turn off. And as it comes in front of an object, joysticks and sliders tells it to turn on the opacity 100% or 0. And it takes a little bit of thinking. So what we're gonna do is down here, There's something called switch templates. We're gonna create one. This one I'm going to call left arm swing switch template. And the hit ok. So now we have a left arm switch template, and I've got a ton of these, most of which are not necessary, so please ignore them. So now we've created our new switch template and it's going to drop a new composition over here. The composition is very small and there's only one frame in there. So how does this work? Well, we need to objects. We need an object for the front and an object for the back. So I have these laid out, so the yellow ones are all of my right arm. I ever write sleep, right hand and a right arm. If you wanted to, this would be very redundant. But what you could do is you could create, and this is actually what I did. You can create switch templates for everything. The left arm, left hand, left sleeve, left ear, so forth. It's not really necessary because. All of these things are going to be switching at the same time. So you can create one switch template and just copy or parent the opacity. And let's say that we parent the opacity of the sleeve and the hand all to the arm. Whoops, not position or why didn't it positioned? Sorry. O, and you can see that I have all of these already done. So what you can do is just select these two objects. Take the pick whip, and parent them to the right arm. This way we're only creating one switch template. Next what we're gonna do is we're going to, we're going to ax, actually duplicate them and we'll move them down below the body and the hips. Let's rename them. So this'll be right sleeve back. This'll be left-hand or I'm sorry, right hand back. And then we have right arm back. So now that we have a front and a back layer, I'm going to take my right arm, hold control and select my right arm back. And I'm going to hold control C to copy them. And then I'm going to realize that this is the left arm switch template. So I'm gonna create one that says left arm, I'm sorry, right arm, man. I'm just not thinking. Switch template. Okay. And so now that I have my right arms copied, I'm gonna go into my right arm template and I'm going to paste them. And then these are going to look very strange. But that's okay. That was really okay. All the switch template is trying to do. It's just reading the name and the switch template. So make sure that once you have your objects named in assigned a name, you do not change it. Because once you change the name, After Effects no longer reads the script to understand what it's changing. So leave it. Once it is what it is, that's what you get. It's like naming a child. Once your child is named, it's named for life. So what I'm gonna do is now I'm going to rotate these. So something strange is happening. Can't even move them. What have we got here? It's because I don't need any of this stuff. So I can delete that. Can delete all the effects, everything that's causing it to be read, read is like a. Alright, so now I'm going to rotate these down and we're going to start to move him around. So the way that the way that it works is there's a left and a right side. Basically everything on the left side. Depending on which way the joystick is positioned, it'll read it as a 100% opacity. And then everything on the right side, depending on which way the joystick is positioned, it will read it as 0% opacity. And this is where it takes a little bit of tinkering with. If you know, if you know this technique really well and you don't have to worry about it. But sometimes it's not as easy as just x, y, and z. So what we're gonna do is I'm going to try this by putting the right arm on the left side. And then I'm going to put right arm back on the right side. Keeping in mind that the center point, the center point here is my, is my threshold. Once it crosses over the threshold, then it switches to a 100%. So let's see if this works. So what we'll do is we'll come into our little guy here. I'm going to select the right arm. We're gonna select right arm switch template. And we're gonna select body rotate. And we're going to create. And I'd say didn't work. So it did work. And it's just backwards. So that's an easy fix. And the way that you fix it is scale it really big now. You just switch the sides. So it will be right arm, back, which is on the left side and right on front, which is on the right side. So now when we come back in, it will switch. So we have an arm in front and then we have an arm and back. And what I need to do is I'm going to hit t here and t here. So these, the opacity needs to be parented to this r. And i think they're being parented to the other arm at the moment. And there you go. So it's really that simple. So now we're gonna do the same thing. And that Coke. Let me walk this up. So it's behind the body. Now I need to shy all my layers and put the right arm to the very back so it goes behind the legs. But for the time being, I think it looks pretty sweet. That's the effect that we're trying to get. And I'll walk you through the other arm real quick since we know what we're doing. Alright, so we just did the right arms. So now let's do the left arm. So I'm going to duplicate these. Moving down and hit T on the keyboard. This brings up my opacity and I'm going to parent or pick whip the opacity to the left arm. And I'll do the same for these. It t, kill it to the arm and to the arm. And now I'm going to rename these same way SB back. This will be left-hand back, and then this will be the left arm back. So selecting left arm and then the other left arm, Go Control C will come in here and then go control V. And then again, we need to delete these paths, all of these effects. And then we're going to rotate these down. And what did we say? It was left arm back will be on the left side and then the front arm will be on the right side. Oops. Is that right? Let's just double-check. Right. Right side or I mean, yeah, that's good. Okay. And you don't need to worry about this position here because it's only reading this whole section as basically black or white. Okay, so now that we have that set up, let's see how it functions. So then we're gonna go left arm, body rotate and we're going to lock it up. Okay. See. I guess it's reversed. I guess I don't have enough time spent with switch templates. I do it once, then I forget about it. So we're going to come in here and we're going to switch these guys around because it reads it backwards. Which makes sense. Because if you want the other one to turn on and the up, up, up, and you get it. Alright, so just to reiterate, in the left arm switch template, the back arm is on the right, the front arm is on the left. And then in the right arm switch template, the front arm is on the right and the back arm is on the left. There just reversed. So now when we move our body, look at that beautiful. And the cool thing about this rig, the way that it's set up is that we can just align it to the center. And there we go. Now if you want the arms to either be in the front or the back, as they're neutral pose. That's going to take a little tinkering with the placement. I believe these guys I think that's the part that's always confused me. Is, is there a way to get arms in front on the neutral pose versus arms and back. But for now the arms and back, they worked just fine for me. I don't mind it. And if I have a position or a character that I need the arms in front, I'll just turn those layers on and go from there. Let's see. So this moves around o our leg is broken. What happened with aren't leg? So let's look, do we ever how we never attached it. So that needs to go to see body. Alright, there we go. Now we've got movement. That looks great. We have rotation with ARM switching and whatnot. And now I need to do it to one of the legs. And you don't need both legs because they're not going behind the body. They're just switching in front or behind each other. So this one is simple because you only need one leg. So let's look at it. And also while we're at it, let's grab the let's grab the back arms for both sets. And we'll just put them behind everything, legs and hips, all that. So these are the bottom of your composition or of your euro layers. Okay, and so now let's look at what we have here. So these are a little confusing to me, but I think we'll, we'll get it setup using little coloration. Let's do yellow. And then for this one, let's do maybe read set include the leg. Yes, it does. And then this is my back leg. So I'll just delete that and and duplicated for you here. Okay, so I guess I don't have a switch template for that. That's okay. So what I'm gonna do is because this is using a switch template right now, let me just go ahead and turn these background. So I have my this is my right leg. I'm gonna duplicate everything and I'm gonna pull it behind the other leg. So I'm just going to rename these back and it won't be right foot back. And back, and then finally right leg. Back. Then back to joysticks and sliders. We're gonna create a new switch template and this will be right leg switch flipped. And then copying the right leg will go into the switch template for it. And we're gonna paste it. And again, we'll delete the effects. Delete. And we will position these guys accordingly. And because because my brain doesn't function at a 100% of the time, we're just gonna do trial and error. We're going to see if it sets up right, and just go from there. Alright, so right leg switch. We're going to, we gotta go to our comp. We're going to connect it to the body rotate. And then we're going to connect it here. Boom. Let's just see what happens. And it looks like some of it worked, but not all of it. So let's look at what's happening. Ok, so it worked. It's backwards. Alright, so let me walk you through this. It will go it'll go right leg in front on the right. I'm sorry. Leg in front on the right. Leg in front leg and back on the left. There we go now and come back in the switch around. And the next thing we need to do is parent the opacities of all of the attributes to the right leg. And they'll apparently these opacities To the right leg as well. Alright. So now you can see as he turns to the left, his right leg is in front. And then as he turns to the right, is left leg comes in front. All right. That's pretty great and hot. Then I will just realign this and I think we're done. Alright guys, so that's how you set up a joystick and slider to create body rotate and squash and stretch. So now the fun part, we get to jump into animating. Let's do some action, some acting things and have fun with it.
4. Action 1: So now that we got the reading out of the way, we can get into the fun part of actually animating our character. Recently I got a client who gives me a lot of full-time work. And the deadlines are very quick. So I've got a lot of animation to produce. So I had to figure out a way to create long form animations of character acting, but do it in very quick way. And so what I came up with was creating very precise ending and starting animation sequences. And that's what I'm going to show you. I'm going to show you how I did that. And I'm going to walk you through four different actions that are very generic and they're meant to be generic so that your character can replicate these movements over and over without it becoming noticeable. So step one, we're going to start with one action. I'm gonna do my character to his left. So I'm going to pose him in this direction, kind of as if he's speaking to somebody next to him. And you can see that there's like some breakage on on the rig. That's something that I'll clean up later. This isn't a final rig for me. This is just a work in process. I actually have a final rigorous character. So I'm not too worried about it. And I'll leave that to you to actually clean up your own rigs. So now that I have my character positioned in the way that I want him to, maybe I'll move the eyes over like he's sexually talking to somebody. What we're gonna do is I'm gonna do a hand shrug. Almost like he's responding to somebody or even saying something. And the way to do this is we do it in sections. So I'm going to estimate that this first movement is, I don't know, maybe 20 frames. And just so that you're aware, my composition settings, or this is a 1920 by 1080 composition. And I'm animating at 29.97 seconds. Some people animated 24 frames per seconds. Some people animate at 12 frames per second. It's really up to you or it's up to the client. And I prefer to animate on the higher end just in case. I don't know, you never know if you're going to need that higher frame rate for some reason. But you can always downgrade using a post rise time effect. Anyway, long story short, let's get into it. Let's have some fun. So with most movements, what we're gonna do is we're going to key the position and rotation of the body. And I'm going to play around with some of the timing here. Also, another thing to keep in mind is I have my hands and my head parented to the body. So used to pick whip. This is just going to keep things very simple and very easy. Okay? And I'm going to rotate him forward just a little bit. And that looks pretty good. And all my movements are going to be very subtle. Sometimes you might, you might want very large movements. You might want very exaggerated and animated movements. And that's fine too. Just for the sake of the, what I'm doing with this character, everything is going to be rather subtle. But I think it's going to read just fine. So I'm going to select my position and my rotation. And I'm going to move these. I'm at the Edit speed graph. You might be at the Edit value graph. I'm not worried about that now. Right now I'm worried about the speed. And we wanna make this a little mountain, almost like a steep ramp up and then along curve. And, and we're just gonna look at this and we're going to see what he does. It's not too bad. But I think his his legs bend a little bit too much. So maybe what I'll do is I'll get rid of some of this curve here. And maybe I'll start him standing a little bit higher. So I'll select my positions and I'll, whoops, a bump them up. Just a little bit. I don't mind a little bit of a leg bend. Is you wanna make sure it's not too much because nobody bends down that far to do it. Subtle Gesture. Alright, now that we have that movement out of the way, let's go ahead and add some movement to the body. So we're hit P on the keyboard. And I want his body to move up and over. And what I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to pull this first movement down. I wanted to really squashed down and then kind of pop up. I'll hit F9. And then we can adjust these keyframes are these speed values as well. So let's just see what's happening here. And this gives us some movement in the shoulders and a very subtle Squash to it. You don't see too much, which is a good thing. All right, and the head, let's go ahead and move the header on two will do position and rotation. I'll rotate it forward a little bit. And then I'll move it upward and over. Yell. Hit F9. Come in here and we'll do the same thing. It's just the speed values, just like so. And then I'm gonna do a little something different on the rotation. So as the head as it comes into his first gesture, I think maybe I want the head to rotate downward. You know, he's like building up. So let's see. If we pull up on this rotation value. It's going to push it downward first and then up. Or maybe that didn't work. I think it's because I haven't rotating down. Maybe I'll get that effect with the joystick. But if I've pulled this down, you can see now as head goes backward, which might work, you know, it gives a little more flair to his, his movement. So you can see if you pull down on the rotation, is head begins to rotate backwards before it goes forward. So it comes back. And then in. That's pretty good. Alright, now I'm going to animate the head. So I'm gonna hit P on the keyboard. Come over here. And this one I want to come up. And maybe over. And then you guys have to keep in mind too, that whatever, whatever neutral pose you start on, that's the neutral pose that we're going to keep throughout our entire animation. So if you don't like the way that your character's standing in the first frame. You better change it. Now. Otherwise, you're kind of locked into this position because of the way that the animation's line up. They all piggyback or they all start off the original starting pose. So just make sure it's nice and make sure you like the way that the character is standing. Next, what we'll do is we'll come here and we'll pull their head down again, just like we did for the neck. And let's see let's see what we what we get. Crunched these in. And let's have a look. There we go. It's got a nice little bounce to it. Alright, next what we're gonna do, this character has two hands to set up the back of the hand. And then I also have like a front of the hand or a pom. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to leave my palm exposed because the body is turn. So you'll see the inside of the hand. And I'm going to reverse the rotation. Ik path. So now the arm bends backwards. Okay, so I'm going to do those two things. And now I'm going to animate this hand. So I'm going to animate the position and the rotation. The handle coming upward. I'm going to do very, very subtle movement on this one. And you go, and you're going to put it here. So the character is going to raise his hand, like, What are you talking about? And then maybe I'll have a, another hand drop as like a subtle inflection of the hand. Maybe he's like giving a gesture of like excitement or something. So let's just see how these things look and I'll move it here. Actually. Hit F9, crunch these in. And you can see that everything's kinda moving at the same wavelength, kind of same pattern. And that's by design. You kinda won. And what I could even do is now that I have my a to b pose, just select all these. And then I'll unanimous, unanimously or at a single moment, move them all at once. All right, so we're getting some good movement here. I'm going to change the, the arcs in the hand. You want them to kind of it dropped down a little bit when I have a nice curvature to it. And then the rotation. And again, this is going to be a cool place and we'd get some nice rotation. So as the hand comes out, I want the palm to kinda drop downward. So if I raise it up on this rotation, you can see the hand is not dropping backward. And that's going to give that kind of inertia to it. See that it looks so good and I can even push it n, so it's going to rotate slower. So let's look at it. And there we go. It gives the illusion that it's moving through space. And I think what I can do is once your character hits this pose here, maybe I'll have, maybe we'll have him come back. Just very subtle. Now rotated this way. And I'll do a little drop here. Okay, and so the way that I animate just so you're familiar, as I tried to keep everything in line with each other. So all my keyframes are here at 0. All my keyframes are here now at 20. And all my keyframes would then be at, you know, whatever my next frame rate's going to be. I'm not sure if I'm going to stick with this or not. But it keeps it very clean and keeps all your movements very uniform and unique. If you don't do that, you can have some very strange movements that don't look right, which is not the effect we're going for. And then maybe the head will move this way and up. And so we're just looking for very subtle, unique changes to the acting. So it makes it look like your characters alive and thinking. So now let's just hit this and see what, what happens. Ok, so that's something good. It looks good. So what I'm gonna do is select these guys. And I'm going to hold a little bit more on this section here. So the lower the Valley, deep down in here, the slower it moves. So this is almost a hold right in here, these three frames. It's almost a whole towards not moving. And then he's going to do is a little movement here. Let me go ahead and animate the body as well. So we have these unique abilities to actually gets subtle animation using the things that are disposal, like the joysticks and sliders. And the next thing I wanna do is basically whenever you have something moving, Let's say that your torso is the one leading. If your torso is the object on the body that's leading the animation, meaning it has the most weight. Everything is counter animating to it. So if the body pushes backwards, that means that the head will probably rotate forward. And what I'll do is I'll grab my rotation for the head. And now I want it to drop. So drop forward before it moves back. So now let's watch it and see what happens. All right, not too bad. It's starting to really loosen it up and we can probably dropped even more. So as you get these nice bends in there and things are moving, that really breaks up that animation and it gives it that feel that it's alive and moving. And I think I want to offset the head from the body. So right now the, the body position in the head position, they're rotating on the same wavelength. So what I'll do is maybe I'll push the body movement. Forward a little bit so it moves first. So this peak, the peak is the bulk of the movement and that's where it's moving the quickest. And I'll push the head rotation forward a little bit. So now it's moving a little bit delayed from the, from the body. Alright, cool. And so now that the hand comes up and maybe I'll raise it up again. Like he's he's preparing to give his big final what kind of moment. And that's where the hand's going to drop down. This point. He's, he's winding up for the pitch. And then he's going to give the pitch. And I can have it maybe dropped down a little bit too. So explore the movements. So have fun with it. Don't have everything just locked into an arc. You can break it up and sees now are going to drop and then lift long, grab these keyframes. And let's look at what we got. Hit F9. And there we go. And again, let's look at the rotation of the hand. So as the hand comes up, what do you think it's going to do? Well, in this case, actually, I have the hand dropping. Let's make sure that that's what I want. Let's look. Now. Not too bad. Okay, so as the hand drops, that means that the hand will rotate upward. Oops, I rotate upward. So let's see. And then an over rotate downward. So let's see if we can get It's down to drop. Let's just see what this looks like. It's very subtle. I don't know if it's quite working that well. Let's just see if we go the other way. What happens? All right. That's too much. Yeah, I think I'll go the other way. Will have a drop down first. I read it. Definitely done something wrong with that. But let's look at, we'll just do very subtle. This might be too much movement for what I'm trying to do. I'm going to try to just get that drop out here. Maybe it can have a subtle drop is not so much. Okay. So now to look, and there we go that I think that's going to look better. Alright. And then we have him lift up and then I'm going to have him now drop come up. And then he's going to drop his hand downward. This is him kind of putting the period end of the sentence or the exclamation point. Okay, and we'll rotate. Then again, all I'm doing is finding where I want him to end. And then I'm adding the key poses. Okay, so it's not necessarily about finding the right movement just yet. It's about finding the right pose. Alright, and so now that I have all that done, select the keyframes, hit F9 and we're going to come in here. And I'm going to move all these. I want this one to be a little more delayed. So what does that mean? That means that I want, from this keyframe here, where it ends, I want it to be very subtle movement and then a kind of a large explosion down into his final position. So that means that the spikes going to be right here at the end. And let's just see how that looks. Not too bad. I think maybe I'll move these in a couple of frames. And then right here I'm gonna go out, let's go out like maybe eight frames. Eight. And what I'll do is I'll move my body upward and then move the head upward. Move that head up, that body up. But then I also want to adjust maybe the head, the head rotation just a little bit upward. And I'll leave the body rotation as is. The hand's gonna come up to k. So this is like the hand being stopped in mid air. Then I'll move forward another maybe eight frames. And I'll drop the hand down, drop the rotation down just a little bit. On drop the the body rotate down. Drop the head back down. Conjure up that one down. And what this is doing is just giving you a nice follow through. And I'll select those keyframes and hit F9. So if we go back into our curve editor, what we want to see is as we have this big movement here of him coming into the final aha moment. We want that to be pressed up against this. So it's gonna go Bill, and then it's going to spring back up. So watch this, we'll crunch these all the way over. So you have a large hint and then a large balance, and then it will settle into position. So let's look at that and see how it looks. That's not too bad. I think we're going to have to play with the timing of some stuff a little bit. So first off, let's look at the hand. There's some rotation in the hand that we didn't catch. That's wierd. Alright, so we need to rotate the hand down like it's been, you know, had a lot of force exhort, exerted on it. And we'll pull this in, pull this in, pull this up and over k. And as the hand comes down, what we want is we want the rotation of the hand to go upward. So now let's watch that and see how this hand works. Only focusing on the hand. It's not too bad. I think maybe it rotates upward a little bit too quickly. So that as it comes down, boom. We can maybe even push it downward a little bit. And then this, I'm going to select these two key frames. And I'm gonna rotate it downward just so that it's not rotating upward too much. And I watched it again, we'll see much better. So next we have to break up the head movements. So the head is moving a little too quickly. And we want to have that nice flex to it. So let's. One, look at the rotation and we want the head to rotate backward, oops, before it explodes. C. So the willing. Alright, that's going to be really nice. Next we're going to look at the joystick and sliders portion of it. So as he's coming into his final movement in this head is rotating backwards. We want the position of the joystick or the arcs of this joystick. We might need to move on. So I'm going to come here to the pen tool and I'm going to grab my convert vertex tool. And I'm going to pull this one out. And then I'm going to break it and pull this one up. And then hit V on the keyboard. And now I can start to manipulate what it's going to be doing, loops. And so I wanted to move upward and let's see how it looks. And if I go up and then he hits down, it might even push it up higher. So now let's just look at that and see how it looks. I think there's a little bit too much going on in the head. So let's let's change that. I'll take away some of his really hard hit. I'll subtle up this head raise. Let's see if that helps any. All right, it looks pretty good. But now that I've kind of animated everything very uniformly, you know, if you look at all my keyframes, everything is hitting on the same keyframe. If you're first starting off, I would recommend just do that. Don't break it up. But if you want, you can break up a few things. Select this head rotate. I'm gonna move over like one frame, and I'm going to grab the last two and move them over another frame. I'm just kinda try to break up some of this, this wiggle so that it gives us a little bit more flexibility to the character. Alright, looks pretty good. I, one thing I do not like actually is the head wrote keeps rotating. Do not like that. Uh, keeps retail and see if this will fix it. I guess it makes it a little better. I don't now, I guess maybe the only way to fix that is to add a keyframe. I guess it looks better and just kinda move these around a little bit. So what I did was one thing you could do is you could just raise this and rotate backwards a little less. But I lined these too. And to be honest, I don't know if it does much, but it seems to have worked. Alright, and then finally, what will do? Well not finally, there's one more step after this, but what we'll do is we're going to animate the position n. We'll do the rotation too. And I just want this hand to kinda move naturally. Naturally as one arm would. We don't want to get any awkward bends in there. So maybe this arm can go back and down a little, drop it down. And all I'm trying to do is give some subtle movement to the arm. And then we'll hit F9. Will go ahead and we'll crunch these guys in together just a little bit. Maybe on these last two will even amount. All right, now let's watch that. Alright, easy peasy. Now finally what we do is once our character has kinda finished their cycle of they're acting, we're going to move them back to their neutral pose. If you want to have a long pause here, feel free to do so. The way that you do it is you would just key all the keyframes. And then once you're keyframes are in place, I don't think I want mine that long. It'll do something like that. Once your keyframes are in place, then we will now copy and paste our original keyframes back at the end of this action. So what we're doing now is we're creating a full loop. This is like a 3 second loop. So character does one gesture, or actually it's a sequence of gestures. And then they go back to neutral. And going back to neutral is very important. Make sure that you copy your key frames from the beginning and place them at the end. If you do not do this, this whole process won't work. So please, please, please be sure to do that. Now such a subtle movement, I could probably get away with just a few key frames. So let's do that. And I'll also, I'll speed up the action a little bit. So that hill ease into the movement, speed through it, and then settle in. So we have a nice large peak here. So now let's watch it, see if it's any better. All right, not too bad. And you're probably pull it out a little bit, is maybe a little fast. And also this hand rotation. Let's select the hand position. And let's have it curved downward. So now as he comes back, his hand will drop. And then also we can adjust the rotation again. So as his hand comes down, his epi, the rotation will go upward. Whoops. Let's watch it. Live it. I think it looks great. Alright guys, we got one action out of the way. Now let's go for another one.
5. Action 2: Now we're going to do another action. It'll probably be quite similar to the one that we just did. Only will do the right-hand instead of the left hand. And I'll try to do this one a little quicker. So it'll be a very fast kinda gesture. So now that we have a beginning and end, which is about a 3 second cycle, you can. Actually, what I'll do is we're going to duplicate keyframes. So I'm gonna give a little space to it. So we're gonna restart by basically adding a keyframe. And we'll have this little middle section here. And I kinda drops, which I don't think I want, but I don't know if there's a way around that. Lets find out. Nave, if we copy and paste these keyframes. Will it fix it? No, it did not. So sometimes that happens whenever you have curves in your action, it places these little extensions and it's basically trying to keep that busier curve to it. Which is not always helpful, especially when you want to have a hold. So in some places, like on the body and it looks like this hand here, you just have to go back through and pull him back to 0. So by holding Alt on the keyboard, you gotta find the right handle. There we go, hold ALT and you can break it. And then I'll select this one. And then move that one back to 0. Ok, and let's see if there's any other places. It looks like both the body and the head. Alright, so we're going to find these guys and we're going to fix them. That's not the one. We want, this one. We'll put it at 0 or at least close to it. There's a little movement. I don't care. That's not the one. Since we're dealing with this section here. It's going to be these two keyframes. And we'll put it back down to 0. Now it's time for the head. Alright, this head has a big one. Put all right, there. Will select the other key frame and then will manipulate that guy. So it's a little frustrating that there's this redundancy in this kind of curve in there, but now we've fixed it. So I had V on the keyboard. And then we're going to do, let's do like, I don't know. For the first move, I want this to be around 1 second, no more than two you and I think maybe I'll have him kind of well go up. I don't want him to kinda like ARC backwards. A little loops are backwards a little bit. And this'll come up. And we can even turn it and remove that. And then we'll turn it. And the hand will come up, will rotate it into position. And we'll pull this handbag since we're at it. Okay, so we have a movement. Let's see it. Alright. So we have one, keep one pose to pose. And I guess I'll have the hand drop again. I'm all about this Heyne drop. It's kind of like the, I'm talking here. Alright, and on the hand drop will drop the body a little drafted. The body rotation a little annual dropped the head a little, whom? The hand will come down. And I have yet to actually put a change in the head rotation. So let's go ahead and move this guy around a little bit. And let's play with our RAM speeds. So if we come in here and we'll see that it's not very uniform. So hit F9 on the keyboard. And then we are going to crunch it in. Crunch it in, pull it out here and let's just see. Okay, that looks great. And again, what we're going to start to do is embellish similar the movement. So let's look at the head and we'll look at the rotations. So as the body goes back, i want the head to rotate forward or rotate downward. Let's go into the curve editor. And we'll pull this up to get that and head to start rotating forward. So now as he comes forward, his head's going to rotate down and then spring upward. And if we look at our head rotation, we have the same thing happening there to only I'm going to extend it downward a little bit more. So now let's look at the head. It's pretty good. There's a nice spring to it. Okay, looking pretty good. And then here on the downward movement, I'll leave the head rotated as is. We need to have a rotation on the hand downward. I don't need to move that wrist, I don't think. And then the head rotation on just pushed down. So then I'm going to select all of these points and I want to have another very strong accent to it. Hooks. So I'll hit F9 over here. And then I'm going to push these all the way over. And then I'll even push this over a little bit too. And then coming forward maybe about ten frames for eight frames or so. We're going to start to spring things upward. So maybe just two little cliques and doesn't have to be much. Doesn't need to be much, but just to, just enough to feel like it's not a static, just settled pose. Right there needs to be a little vibration to it. And I had believed did the hand. Okay. Now we'll leave that and carry out. And then what we'll do is we'll hit F9 will come in here and then we're going to crunch these over in this direction. And then next what we're gonna do is we're going to look at the rotation of the hand. So because we have some, some big movements happening, what we're gonna do is I want this to rotate backwards a little bit and then ease in. And this one I want to move upward. Let's see if we can get it to look right. And then it's going to explode into position. Let's just see how this looks. Alright, that's pretty good. It's really subtle. I don't like to rotation now, so I'm going to put it back where it was. And then I'm actually going to move to maybe about here. And the easiest thing for me to do is just to rotate the hand upward. And then right here is where it's going to crunch. So like one frame before it hits, there'll be upward, rotate it up. And then about two frames. Forward is where it will rotate down. So now if we come back into our curve editor, we should have a very sharp spike coming into here where everything's crunched over k. And then this one, which is this one will hit F9. Let's get in there and look at it. It's kinda offset. Okay, we can push this down here and we'll crunch this one over. So it's almost like a heart monitor beep, beep, beep. So let's look at it and see how that does. There we go. Much better. They might even add a little too much spring to it, so we'll pull that out. So let's look at it. All right, easy peasy. Now, I'm sorry for saying easy-peasy. For some reason it keeps coming out of my mouth. Now what we're gonna do is we're gonna settle back into our neutral pose. So right here at the end, I want to make sure I have a keyframe for everything that, that and move forward a few frames, maybe ten. And I want to make sure everything is copied into position. That needs to be alright. So now let's watch this. Okay, and then from here what we can do is we'll do about the same amount of key frames. This looks to be about just under a second. So if I go to here, I'm going to copy and paste all my keyframes back into my neutral pose. And so when I watch it, let me just see how these curves look is just a nice uniform bump, which is fine for some things, but that's not what I want. I want that nice snappy animation. So let's watch it and see what happens. This should be the final section for action number two. Alright, then ease back into the neutral frame. Alright, and so the final thing we're gonna do is put this hand here. Instead of just coming straight through, I want it to arc and big downward. So we'll pull this around. Make that feel nice and weighty. And then we'll look at the rotation. And as they hand comes down, the rotation of the hand will go up. Just like so. I'll put these back. All right, now let's watch it one more time and see the final product. All right, it rotates a little bit too much for my, my liking. But overall the actions very smooth, very clean. And I think it's generic enough that we can duplicate this over and over again to where people aren't going to watch it and get bored. Okay, so now we have to action sequences and they're looking really good. Now let's do a third. And then on this one, I'm gonna have my character actually turn to his right. So it's going to be a full rotation of the body to look behind him almost like he's talking to somebody that was next to him or he's even looking at something behind it.
6. Action 3: So again, what we need to do is we need to key all of the neutral pose here. And then just hope that there's now, yeah, I'm not going to worry about the movement because we're going to set up boundaries so that we don't see the movements anywhere. This will be our starting pose. And let's just see where we go. I'm not sure how long this one's going to take. I'm trying to keep everything down to three, no more than four seconds. So from here we'll start with the body. I like to work with the body first because it's kind of the core of our movements. So we'll say maybe close to 1 second for this movement. And I'll move it over and up. And I'll even rotated slightly backwards. That's good. Then we'll get to play around with the body rotation now, our switching sides. So this'll come over and up. The head will come over. And I'll rotate over and up. And this is where it's gonna get a little tricky because now we're going to start switching the directions of the elbow. It's not a complicated procedure, but, you know, it's it's not like the easiest thing in the world. So this handled come out an a right here before we do any of our posing, I'm gonna put a keyframe right here on IK arm path one. Hit that stopwatch. And what it's gonna do is put a keyframe and so that I can select my arm or my right-hand hit you on the keyboard and it shows up. And then I know at least at this point here, I want it to be reversed, so I'll come over here and reverse it. Now my character also has a front and a back hand. So I'm going to key those as well. Yours may or may not have this. So do you know, do whatever works for you for your character? Now this one is going to be a simple turn. I don't think I'm going to have very many gestures to it. So as the character turns, we want the arm to drop. And with this kind of. Elbows switch the only, there's only two ways to do it. You can either have you can either have the arm drop down low so the arm is extended fully, or you can have it come over the body too, where you get the bend over the chest. But in this case we have the arm extending downward. So what I'm gonna do is go to about a nice, easy place for worthy arms should be extended and I'm gonna make sure that it is fully extended. So maybe we'll go, we'll go right there. And so now, whoops. Now that the arm is in a location where it's going to be fully extended. What I can do is pull all of these guys here over to that spot. And when I hit play on the animation, you'll see that it switches in the right place. And it looks relatively natural, looks normal. There's nothing out of sorts except for this hand here, which is kinda popping in front of the body. We're gonna do the same thing to this hand here. So at the beginning, we're going to key the reverse IK and both hands that have opacity checkboxes to them. Then it'll hit you on the keyboard to bring them up. And I think probably right here is a pretty, actually the hand doesn't even move. Let's go and get that hand to move a little bit. And then we'll pose everything out. Alright, that looks pretty good. So then I come over here. Let's see what we're working with. So this is my line of action. And I'm going to bend it down. I don't know that I need to do this. Mip easiest just to switch everything along with the other hand and kind of go from there. But let's see. Alright, actually what would need to do is if this is going to be my extended pose for this hand, it needs to be down and away from the body. So I'm going to actually push this curve way out so that it swings wide and then comes in. Alright, that gives the illusion that it's rotating around the body to little jittery. And I think that's because it's kind of extending in the wrong spot. Let's see what we can do. I think this one's going to have to extend right here, just offset it by one frame. All right, now let's see how that looks. Can already tell it better. All right, much better. Alright, so going over it one more time. There's a nice curving outward. Only using this controller. I didn't put a keyframe and so just using the control arm, I put a big curve in there so the arm swings outward. And then it comes forward. And then depending on where your character is in, you know, the scale of their character, that'll determine at what point it should switch. I'm actually might even want to push this one back to. I'm just going to leave it. Alright, cool. So we've got that movement down. Now what do we need to do and need to kinda tweak some of this stuff. So this head rotation, I want him to kinda hold or even turn backward a little bit. And then hill WHO slide in and look. It feels a bit fast to me, but I could be wrong. Maybe I just need to pull it out and pull it in a little bit. And let's look at this head rotation. There's a rotated backward or forward. Let's see, maybe backward. And then what we'll do is we'll adjust the timing of it. And then as the head comes back and wants to head to rotate forward. And if that's the case, maybe I'll rotate the head the opposite direction. So he's like tilting it downward. So now as it comes off the line and said she go down and then 0s in it. Let's have a look. Not too bad. And think I want this. I want the curve of the head to be a little more dramatic. So what I'll do is I'll pull this went around and then I'll add another extension to this guy that I need to make sure that I collapsed the other side so there's no wiggle to it. And so once I've done that, I'll hit V on the keyboard. And I'll pull this one out and around. Let's just have a look. That's pretty good. He's definitely moving very quickly. I don't know if that's what I want. Maybe I'll add maybe we'll add a little length to the time it takes for his head to rotate. Let's have a look at that. Alright, hadn't moved its way too slow. Timing's off, but let's try this or that feels a little better. Okay. So what I did was I I broke the timing of it up and we'll just count this. 1234567891011121314151617. Wow, pulled it 17 frames out. That actually might be too many. But you get the GST, you know, go out about ten frames, maybe 12 frames. And that's kinda really slow the head movement down. Okay, that's looking pretty good. I actually might need to line up that head movement, which is right here with the rotation of the head. Let's see how that looks. And that didn't work. Alright, I'm just going to leave it. I think it looks fine. And then next, we got to go think about it and should I should I add something in there? Maybe? I don't know. I guess we could do a hand drop. Not like an emphasis, but he's kind of like a hand lower. Just to kinda adds something to it. And then maybe he'll go, we'll go backwards a little bit and rotate M. And the hand will just come down to here by aside. Rotate it down. Just trying to come up with very subtle unique movements. That that adds some, some qualities to the animation that make it not only believable but enjoyable to watch. So we'll put a big curve here in this body rotate. It's actually going to throw off my elbows. So maybe I'll take that curve out since I've already lined everything up. Alright, I'll take that curve out, right? And that hand doesn't need to move. And in fact the head doesn't need to move. So I think everything that needs to move has already moved. I guess maybe I could put a little rotation in the head and it'll drop it down, down and over. And we don't need a big curve like that. So now every, I'll pull that one out. So everything that has a keyframe over here, we'll hit F9. And then we're going to put a nice curve into it. Alright, with the exception of this head rotate, which needs to come out. So let's have a look at it. There's a few weird things happening, which I'm not happy about. Let's see what they are. That's one of them. So I could see the body was rotating kinda Strangely. So I'll hit F9. I'll reposition these guys. And then I'll push these over. Alright, and the next one I'm gonna do is I'm going to look at the hand. As his hand comes downward, I want the rotation to go upward. Right? That's the standard way that we do it. Alright, so this rotation Got a little strange to, so always check your keyframes and makes sure that your movements are still in sync with one another. Let's see here. I'm not going to worry about that one too much. But this one as it comes down, you want the hand to rotate up to see how that hand looks. Well, it's really good. Now the timing of the head actually is kinda thrown me alphabet. So I'm going to crunch these in. I want them to be a little bit closer. Alright, and this head moves a little too quickly. And a lot of this animation is done with the speed editor. So you get your a to B position, and then you go into the graph and then you just kinda change how quickly things move. It's a tedious process, but it's really what makes that polished animation shine. So I highly recommend that you get comfortable with the curve editor because it's really going to improve your animation game. Alright, that feels pretty good to me, so that I'm going to hold here for a little bit. I'll add some key frames in where they need to be added. Maybe even some that don't need to be there. And then I'll come over here and then I will copy and paste my origin. And now this one's gonna be a little bit trickier because you've got that rotation in there. So we're gonna do a few things. One, let's play with the timing first, first and foremost, also make sure you do not select any of these boxes. If you select a box, it messes up your curve editor. So hold shift and only select your keyframes. Next, what we'll do is we'll come here and hit F9 on that last one. So we don't adjust any of these. And we're going to crunch these over. C. I selected a box and trying to show you not to selected. So if you even selected at any point, you gotta start over. Alright, here we go. So we'll crunch this over. I'll pull it back a little bit. Then we'll crunch these over. Next, what we'll do is we'll come to about the halfway point. And this is where I want my arm switch. But in order for them to switch, they need to be in their extended positions. So what I'm gonna do is find the position. Now what that is. Where did I come from? So I came from up there. And I'm going to as the tricky part. Alright. Now I'm going to extend my arm outward, fully extended. Let's just watch that and see how it does. Well, all in all, I think he moves a little too quickly. Let's lease to a second. Maybe more than a second. All right, now let's watch it. Alright, that's not too bad. And then I have to adjust. And where my arms are going to where are they going to switch? So right now it's switched way too early. But I also want to find where it's fully extended. So it looks like it pops forward here. Which means that I want to push the animation so that it is hitting and lining up with that. So right here I'm going to push these right there. And that's where my arm's going to switch. And I'm sorry if I make it look easy and I'm sorry if it's confusing, but you just have to play around with the timing and the curving of your limbs. And once you have the timing and the curving right, then you can select when things switch back and forth. So let's watch that and see how it switches. Alright, that looks good. Let's try and Amir, the other arm now. So if we haven't switch here, that's good. And what I'll do is I'll push this forward just a little bit, just like I did on the other one. And now what I have to do is I have to extend the arm outward so that it, its extended right here, or maybe even extended right here. So I'm going to find my position. Not sure what this one is. Definitely not something by one. So it through it through this big curved handle in here because it's trying to match some of the alignments that I'm doing. And that's not at all what I'm what I want. So I'm going to pull it back. And the next, I'm now going to adjust. Where my hand hits. So I'm gonna go to where it pops and I'm going to try to extended so that string. And then I'm going to collapse this handled loop's gonna collapse this handle here because I don't know why it's there. Alright, now I want to watch it. Let's see. If that looks better. It looks great. All right, not too bad. Next, I want to play with the timing of the head. The head to be a little bit slower as it turns. And then I also wanted to drop, right? That's two linear. Nobody really moves their head like that. I'm going to select the keyframe that I need. Drop down. And I'm going to collapse this one by hitting v and then just dragging it over. Alright, now let's look at it. All right, head drops and comes up, that's perfect. The last thing I'm gonna do is with the head rotation. So it's at, it's at negative eight there and it goes to 0. So I wanted to rotate way from the way then to moving. So that looks like it's going to do just fine. So let's watch that and see if it helps. Alright, perfect. Alright, and one final thing that we have to do, something I haven't really addressed at all. Up until this point is facial animation. I'm not gonna do much facial animation. I'm gonna save that for, I'll save that for like a dialog type sequence. And you'll see what I mean at the end of this tutorial. Why you don't, you can add some facial expressions as you go. But it's not necessarily very helpful. So right here at the bulk of his action, I'm going to put a keyframe In the eyes. Go forward about two frames, and then I'm going to move the eyes to the other direction. Okay, now he's looking off behind him. And then as he comes here right here, I'm going to add another keyframe. Go down two key frames, and then I'm going to put the eyes right back where they were. And if you select these icky frames and hit F9, what we can do is we can crunch loops. We can crunch these guys together if we get close enough. And this just gives a nice snappy movement to the eyes as he whips back and forth. All right, so that is our sequence. Let's look at it, the whole thing. So it's got a nice turned to him. And then he comes right back to where it was. It's perfect. Okay. That's looking great.
7. Action 4: Now it's on to action for our final action of her entire acting sequence. This one, I think I'm going to, I'm going to do a very simple Up and Down shoulder shrug with the hands moving outward. This will be a very common gesture like What are you talking about or something along those lines. So the first thing that we're gonna do is we're going to add keyframes from our neutral pose. We're going to add just a little section here, just like we have been. So we're going to key everything all the way up. And this will probably put, oh nice. I thought it might put a weird dip in our character, but it didn't. Nothing. Perfect. All right, so starting off here, I'm going to hit beyond the keyboard right here. And I think I'll probably do about, I don't know, maybe about a 2.5th for him to go upward into his What are you talking about? Position. And this will be upward with the shoulders, upward with the hips, and maybe just a little bit upward with the neck and upward with the head. And k. We're also going to do upward and outward with the hands. And this one will come over here to now, I'm contemplating whether or not I should put a switch here. So let's just see what it looks like. If I switch. Yeah, I think I'm going to switch. And maybe what I'll do is I'll, I'll pull a shoulders this way a little bit and it'll pull him out. We're just trying to get a natural pose because they're kind of looks good. I feel like his arms. It's maybe like two in front of his body or something. I don't know. Let's try that. And there we go. Okay. So we have a switch here. So oh no, I didn't ask weird. Forgot to keep the body in head rotations. Which yea, they Let me see if I delete these federal happen. Oops. Now let's key K0. Oops. And we get a dip. And there's one in the head. So let me just clean that up. So hold alternative keyboard, nevermind, don't hold Alt. Just move it and we're trying to center it right there, so there's no movement. Alright, and then I'm just gonna go ahead and add my animation back in. Shoulders, come up and then go over. Okay, so now we're going to select all of our keyframes. Excluding the squares. If you have the squares, you might not hit F9 on the keyboard. And let's look at our action. So this will probably be a quicker action upwards. So it's gonna start early, boom, and ease into the upward motion. So let's just watch this and see how our timing looks. Alright, timing looks pretty good. Next for this hand, I need to extend it downward. We need to have a nice arc in there so that our hand or arm extends fully before it switches. So I think that'll do they will switch right here. There we go. I like it. Can maybe even lift this up and push it. No, that didn't work. Alright, that's pretty good. So now we're going to work with the head. So the movements in the head, and they should have some good flexibility to them. So what does that mean? That means that as the body goes up, the head will come down. So pull it down. Alright, that looks pretty good. And then also the hands. Let's look at the rotation. As the hands come out, the rotation will go inward. And as this one comes out, that rotation will come backward. So let's look at your rotation. Alright, let's just have a look. Pretty good. Alright, let's look at this rotation again. While we've got it. Wants to rotate a little bit more. Alright, looks good. And I'm going to have him hold this upward pose. Maybe for a few frames. Will go here and I'll just copy and paste. All right, that looks good. And then I wait. Movement in the hand. Go ahead and collapse that. That's not the one I want. And we'll pull this one in. Because anything else? Move. Now, Netflix, good. Alright, and then finally, we will have him go back to is neutral pose. Which would be that. And yeah, I'll just keep those. Alright? Alright. Let's watch the whole thing. Looks to be about a 2.5th of animation. Alright, cool. So I'm going to select these ending keyframes and I'm going to change, I'm gonna change the pace of them just a little bit. It's a little too uniform. Alright, and then also I have to change the position of the right hand. So right now the right hand does some weird stuff for some reason and goes way up. And that's not what I want. I wanted to actually match the curve of the original. So we'll try to align it pretty well. And then we're going to find where it gets pretty close through extended and a real we'll just extend it like that. And this is where it will pop. All right, now let's watch this. See how it does. Alright, that's an easy action right there. And I'm happy with that. I hope that you guys are happy with that too. And I hope you guys will come up with some cool maybe variations to what I was doing. But that is it guys, that's the bulk of our, our acting. So that was action number four. So now what we get to do is we get to string all of these together and create unique acting pieces based off of these four actions. So let's get into that next.
8. Animation Blender: Now that we have our whole acting sequence animated out, I have just over 11 seconds of animation, which is pretty fast to do in the time that we've done it. So well we get to do now is we're going to set up boundaries for each one of these actions in its, at this point that you were definitely going to need to Basel. If you do not have duplicate this point, go download it and return here so that we can actually set up your markers for your animation. This is called marker animation or trigger animation. And what we're doing is we're going to set up a command that triggers a set of animations or a set of actions. So the first thing that we're gonna do is up here into Bessel. Click on this rigging arm, and then come down here to this little thing. Make sure that you're in links and constraints. Not in create structures, but links and constraints right here in the middle. And we're gonna go to animation blender. So there's a lot of stuff in here and I'm going to walk through your real easily. The first thing we're gonna do is composition to set up. So we're going to do the eyedropper because we're in the composition that we want to set up. And then we want to control the character within. And okay, so we're gonna do the eyedropper for both. And if you have multiple characters or multiple compositions, it might not register. So do the eyedropper and then do refresh and it'll pick it up. The next thing that we're gonna do is we're just going to hit blend. There's this little thing here in the things where you can do all animated properties, which is what we want. Or you can select the properties that you want. For now we're just gonna leave it as is, and I'm going to hit blend. Now what blend does is it creates a new controller which all of these attributes are attached to your position rotation. All of these keyframes are now attached to this. Okay, so that's great. So now we have and what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to rename this. You can name years, whatever you want. I'm going to call it just acting, you know, I would probably name it whatever your character's name as if it has a name. And then so the next thing we're gonna do is we're now going to set up our boundaries. So right here at frame 0 is the beginning of action one. Now what we're gonna do is fast forward to the end of action one. And where does it end? And that's right here. And if you hold Shift, it should lock you in. Now there were the end of action one, hit Enter on the keyboard. And what we're trying to do is we're trying to get your your work area and in alignment with action one. And once it's done like that, what we can do is I'm going to call this action. I'll just leave it as action. And all we're gonna do is hit set. And what happened is that animation blender has set this action for this amount of time. So as this is the beginning of the action, this is the end of the action. And if you come here to the beginning, you can rename it action one. Each one of your actions has to have a unique name to it. If it doesn't, it doesn't know how to play it. So the next thing we're gonna do is come to the beginning of action to hit V on the keyboard and then move forward on the timeline to the very end of action two. And this is why I've created that bumper there so that it's easier to line up your action sequence. So now that we're at the end, hit Enter on the keyboard. We're going to hit set over here in blender. We're gonna double-click and rename it to action too. And we'll fast-forward to this one. Hit V on the keyboard. And this one's going to be a little different. So I left a space in here. I left a space. And the reason I left to spaces so that we can kind of set up when he turns and when he turns back. So, and on the keyboard, hits said double-click, this'll be action three. And then do page down, hit V on the keyboard. Or actually, oh nice, I set that up perfectly. Okay. So this is where he'll start to turn and this is where he ends. Where does the end right here. Awesome. So we have this nice pause in the middle. That's great. So he turns, pause and misses going to be our action for. So action for is really just going to be him turning back two's neutral position. And then right here at the very end, HIT BY an income all the way over here. And then this will be our final action. This would be action A5. So now that we have all of our actions specified in the timeline and ranges have been set accurately. Here's how this whole thing works. So this controller at the very top, which is called C blender acting. This is what triggers your animations. And in case you're wondering. No, it doesn't, it doesn't loop. You're animate or you can loop, I'm sorry. You can loop your animation. But what I'm saying is that it's not just going back to frame 0 and replaying it from 0 to 10 to 10 to one is not doing that. What it's doing is it's actually remembering those keyframes and playing them at any point in the timeline. And the reason that's important is because it allows you to do things like lip-sync to a unique performance using the old keyframes. So it's not a time remap. So if you did, if you were to do something like a time re-map, you'd only be using that section of keyframes over and over and over. So there's a little difference to it, but it's a huge impactful difference if you're doing something like lip-sync. Okay, back to it. The way this works is you go to any point on your timeline on your keyboard. Over by the number pad, there's a astrocytes. If you hit the asterisk, it sets a keyframe or marker, I'm sorry, sets a marker. You can also right-click. I don't there's let me see how didn't live at layer marker and we get there. Yep, marker. Ok. So if you write also, if you right-click on there and you go to markers and then addMarker marker. And you can see right here it says number pad, star. Cool. So now that we have a marker, what you're gonna do is double-click the marker. And this is where we write our action. So I'll do actually, let's do two and hit OK. And you'll see what happens is when you play it, It's going to hold on the keyframe until it hits the marker and it's gonna go, oh, action to, I know what that is. And then it's gonna play it. And it does the whole sequence. All right, so when I found this out, it was a game changer is like mind blown. Oh my gosh, this is going to make animations so much easier. And then if you come here and do another one, we can go to like action. You know, you can jump around. That's the cool thing. Action A5. So now we're starting to break up our performance. And this is a very powerful tool. And what's awesome is that let's say that you have another character. And that character is using the same rig that this one is. You can copy all of these keyframes and add it to the new character. So now if you do an acting sequence for, let's say George, you can use that acting sequence for Sally. As long as they're rig is identical or very close to identical. So there you go. Pretty cool stuff. And again, like I said, this doesn't affect the lip sync. So you, if you have a joystick insight or like I do, you can still add your lip sync to whatever dialog or audio you might have. And then at this point, what I would probably do is I would probably hand animate my blinks and then I would add my blinks throughout. Separate from, separate from the blender animation. Simply because if you only do blender animation, there's going to be weird pauses where he's not blinking or maybe they're blinking too much. So you want to have like the ability to change the blink percentage whenever you need to. And also if there's something that you want to just kind of delete, like I have these eyes here moving with this action. What you can do is hit Alt, hold Alt on the keyboard and then click, and then it erases the code, right? And so now you can move the eyes around however you want to. I would just delete those keyframes. And you can have your character looking around up, down, whatever you want, and all animates in real time. So that's pretty cool. And then let's see. So let's say, let's say that I was bringing in a new character. So let's say I have male character two. And let's say that male character two has no animation, nothing to it. Well, how does this whole thing work? Well, it's really cool. So as long as I have no keyframes and everything's deleted, what I'll do is I'll come back into null character one. Select all my keyframes. Then come over here to this animation trigger. And right here is a little button called copy. Hit copy. It's going to copy all your key frames. And then coming back into character to, I'm going to paste my keyframes where they need to go. And then hit OK. And then, don't worry about script alert. And there you go, guys. That's how you copy your keyframes to another character. And then the way that you would set this one up is to go back to your animation blender. Use your eyedropper, and then we're going to blend. And so now this blender was made using this new composition which is mail to. And then I can come here and do the Astros on the keyboard or the star or whatever you wanna call it, and do whatever actions I need. And now it should work. All right, and so that's how animation blender words. It's an amazingly powerful tool. It's really great if you have a long form series that you're animating or a character that you're reusing and you continue to use quite a bit often. And so yeah, I highly recommend it. And then also a little side note for whatever reason, I haven't found a way around this yet. But let's say that you create a set. You've got this awesome background that you made in After Effects or Illustrator or whatever. If you decide that you want to import your character into that set. Whatever reason animation blender does not work. It breaks, it doesn't respond, it doesn't listen. So the way that you do, the way to get around that is you open your character that already has animation blender in it. And then you import your sets, you import your backgrounds and all that. Once you do that, you can then import new characters into that file. You can import new backgrounds into that file, but you have to first start with that character. And it's a little quirk that there might be a way around it. I'm not sure that was an issue I had. And the only way I could find a way around it was to import all my assets into that file. So that's just a little side note. Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed the video. I hope that this was very useful to you guys. I hope you learn some really cool stuff and I cannot wait to see what you guys have created Anyway. Thanks for watching guys.
9. Thanks: Thank you guys so much for watching if you have any questions at all about how some of the scripts in the plugins work. Please feel free to ask away if you have any questions about character animation, let me know. I hope, I hope that you learned a lot from this tutorial. It was a lot of fun to make and it was a lot of fun to share with my share with you my process. It's something that I've been learning for the past ten years of trying to become a character animator. So I hope that I broke down the steps for you easily enough so that you can create some pretty amazing animations of your own. Thanks for watching guys.
Jared Freitag, Animation Supervisor
