[Music] so I'm not GNA I'm not going to spend too much time getting us warmed up today I'm just going to kind of get right into it basically what I'm going to do if you were if you were around for the first one we talked about philosophically what anatomy of an action is a concept to breakdown action um you can find the poses quite quickly and using any kind of video reference I went an emotion Builder and essentially just took two different actions and applied the same philosophy to it but instead of just using for reference that was my scene I just pulled only those poses and then I hit play just so you could see what that would look like so it was basically just a kind of a proof of concept just to prove that it can work uh because whether you're using motion capture data or whether you're just posing a character it's all the same at the end right so tonight I'm going to jump in Maya as promised and I'm going to just work through this this workflow just so you can sort of see that it really isn't rocket science it is super super straightforward it the magic really comes down to the poses it's more magical than people think um you know I think this is way more powerful than the sort of the every two frame rule although if you're doing something extremely um High Fidelity and you want to get all those little Nuance details and you're working on a feature film then maybe that makes more sense um but even if I was working on a feature film I would still want to do it like this just the way my brain works I like a less is more I like to lay down a really nice sort of like minimalist base that I can then continue to add and add and add because another thing I can be showing here is the the my sort of like my three-step approach to anim ating I usually start with what I call the block which is what I'm be doing tonight typically that will be stepped depending on um what kind of Animation I'm making uh T tonight's animation I'll definitely step it out so that stepping it out of course means that I'm going to use step Keys um I sometimes um I'm I sometimes get lazy and just use stepped playback in my in my time slider um to do it um but I think just for all intense purposes to be a little bit more friendly to all software I'll probably we just use step Keys tonight and um yeah so the step Keys uh for all the all the main poses and then the next and what I'm doing there that point is I'm just worrying about uh timing and staging more or less um the uh the idea being that um I want to make sure I remove all the distractions a lot of people don't work in Ste and they actually are plagued with this sort of terrible fear whenever they they they um well they they don't work with step because because when they've tried in the past they have a panic attack when they go from stepped keys to autot tangents and it's there's a reason for it and the cool thing is we'll be able to watch this happen to me you'll see me do it and not have a panic attack because I'm so comfortable and familiar with that phenomena that happens where everything just looks like soup suddenly there's a there's a several reasons for it and I will dig into that um as we work our way through this um I'm going to be doing this quick so um you know don't judge my final animation it's not certainly not going to be anything super crazy um partly due to the fact I'm going fast and also partly due to the fact that um that I'm trying to keep this simple I'm not going for something really overthe toop dramatic I will definitely embellish the poses because that's what animator should do but I'm not going to go for some sort of Academy Award with this with animation I sometimes worry about doing demonstrations because of those reasons but um I'm going to leave my ego at the at the front door and do it anyways because I think this is going to be really great for a lot of you um this this might open up a lot of sort of um levels of understanding that that some of You' been kind of itching for I've seen it happen many times before when I show people the way I approached animation the philosophy and they're just like oh my God it makes so much sense suddenly I don't know why um and if I could do that for you then that's worth every single uncomfortable moment of me animating in front of everybody and feeling like it might not be good enough all right so as I sort of struggle with my own impostor imposter syndrome tonight um hopefully it will be worth it so without further Ado let's take a look over at my desktop here I've already brought up um the the syn sketch that we used on the first night and that sync sketch is of course just a simple jump a boy jumping and um I've tagged those those frames as you can see down here in the interface um with these little orange ticks so yeah these are the frames right here that we are wanting to deal with basically I'm just using Rhino house and using the gri than and and less than signs on my keyboard just to jump from uh pose toos toose toos toe toe to pose um I have not used this rig before um so uh you're going to see me do kind of like a kick the tire moment with this rig which is basically me as an animator needing to take a look at the controls and understand them and make sure that I'm making some good choices there might be some setup that I need to do so yeah so kicking the tire now I used kicking Tire or kicking the tires as my analogy here because it makes a lot of sense I think I consider myself piloting this rig I want to before I step inside this rig I kind of want to know how I drive it how I steer it and there's so many little things that you should be thinking about it's all about planning where what are you animating should you prepare for it first the the rig might need some configuring in order to set it up for a the animation that you're making and B your personal preferences um so I'm the first thing I always look for is is I jump in I just kind of I guess I just kind of grab a bunch of the controls and I I get I get a look at what they have over in the channel box cuz the Channel box is usually going to have a fraking collection of hidden gems over there so I want to know what's at my disposal this is a very simple animation so I don't need too many tools or or tricks but knowing that this rig is just a rig with no interface then um you know and that I should check for that too I I didn't see anything in the download there was no instructions so my assumption is it's meant to just be used without a picker it just you know just go unless you want to use a picker like I can't remember there's a bunch of Auto you know Pickers that you can use that kind of you can configure with a rig I'm not I don't bother with that I mean I just use the rig the way it's meant to be used and I kind of move forward I don't know if it's because I'm old school or it's because I'm old in general but that's just kind of that's just how I roll I don't get I I don't like to over complicate my life but but you do want to make sure that like I find that because it doesn't have any of these tools or interfaces rigs will typically have more stuff in the channel box so take a look because there's going to be stuff probably so you want to make sure you don't miss out on any of it so basically the main thing is I want to see like you know is are my arms in ik or FK space they look like they're in I or FK space because I don't see any handles at the end here so I'm I'm just going to validate that and it's true that looks like it's FK that's great um we got some feet here with some controls these are always the one that has lots of tricky stuff so we have some extra stuff here for pivots which is pretty standard um this guy here is probably the toe roll and there it is and this is going to be the heal roll I assume there it is so you know I there's going to be some Usual Suspects but don't don't assume anything take the five minutes take the five minutes what are you in such a hurry for I guarantee you the time you spend kicking these tires you will it will pay off in dividends in the long run because if you don't check these things and get ambushed or surprised by it later it's pretty annoying a perfect example of that is um space switching so if you have the ability to change whether the head is following the upper body or something else you don't want to think about that way later because you may end up re having to reanimate the head because if you change the space later you could you can make the change but the offset the F curves are now going to be reporting um relative to a different parent suddenly and therefore it will be Offset you know like your animation be awesome with the head doing this and then suddenly you change the space and then it's going to look like this and then you're going to have to offset it all down it's you don't have to reanimate it typically but you are going to need to make some adjustments so just take the time take the time you may not catch everything but uh catching catch as many things as you can is probably a good idea I don't know what these little arrows here are so they're intriguing me what do they switch I can oh those are my switches so that's how to get to ik to FK and vice versa okay that's good to know um I'm not going to be messing with these I'm going to leave the whole thing I and the legs and the um the upper body is going to be FK the entire time I don't need anything because it's just a hop up onto a box as a matter of fact I'm probably going to do a hop off of a box um because I like that action better than the one coming up um yeah so I it looks pretty basic there one thing though I do like to typically do I knowing that I'm going to be just doing basically a hop forward I'm going to probably want to have my my head um not following the hips because I'll be probably doing a lot of stuff with the hips potentially um and I know I'm not going to be rotating I'm always going to be looking in in the same direction because of that I can Fe I can very easily um safely change my orientation of the head because you can see if I grab this I love by the way rigs that have um ik um spines they're my favorite I really don't like FK spines I really don't like them at all I prefer drastically a more of an ik uh feel to my now there are exceptions sometimes you depending on what you need if you want something really feels Wiggly or something like that and has some nice overlap it's nice to have that FK but that is usually like the exception to the rule in my opinion where I would I would prefer to have a lot more stability with controlling my upper body and my spine and not have to like f with a whole pile of rotational joints um that I have to fight with to to do exactly what I want I just I just like ik rings on the on the and and and the other best part is I can easily do this nice squash and stretch business now quick note though quick note um one has to be careful of these kinds of rigs um for um unreal or any game engine for that matter it looks like this one doesn't do any squash and stretch so it's fine it just probably translations happening there so you're probably okay um but if you want to make sure that the squash and stretch works in those sometimes the rig has to be set up in a very special way this is due to um a bunch of technical reasons I don't have time to get into right now but just take heed of that that okay so the cool thing is is that you could still reuse a rig um in cases like this you just might not get the squash of stretch um control sorry uh effect in the engine um and if that's a problem you can just not animate um the the translate of the um of the of of of the upper body or just do it very minimal so it doesn't look weird that it's not you know preserving the volume I don't need to be I don't need to be squash stretchy here I you know she Semus is in a in a in a in a metal freaking suit so naturally I wouldn't expect a lot of that anyways and so therefore um I really just might want a little bit to cheat things like I really like be able to cheat spine compression for instance with just a translate I just love love being able to do that okay so um so this whole idea of wrap my head around this is just again in it needs to be through the through the lens of what I'm going to animate here I am going to want to control the uh the head's orientation to keep it a bit more stabilized so I'm assuming there's going to be a control up here uh what do I got I got a top Orient that might be it I bet you that's it right there let me turn this translate off I'm assuming that I don't know why it's called top I'm assuming the head's going to stay there when I do this yeah okay so we're on the right path but I don't want the translate I want the rotate so I'm going to put the translate back on and I'll put the Orient off and I'm going to sort of hopefully safely assume that I'm going to get oh by the way this is another thing I'd like to do make sure take the time if and see if there's a display layer for the mesh there should be um if there's not you can make one no problem I definitely definitely recommend putting it on reference because nothing sucks more than trying to grab the controllers and always selecting the mesh that drives me bananas so uh just take the second to do it I I've seen animators do like just continue working and always selecting the mesh and never taking the second to go over there and just turn that on R and make their lives easier it's like they're punishing themselves for some reason just do it it's so much easier you don't need to select this mesh the mesh should just be unselectable I mean I there's very very seldomly is there a need for an animator to be selecting the mesh um unless you're trying to hide a part of it or something like that um and if that's the case you can just um disable that reference and then select it temporarily and turn it back on I could go up and just unfilter take off the mesh right here the surfaces I don't like doing that though because there's a good chance that I might need to select other surfaces so for me I like to be a bit more specific and say I don't want to be able to select this mesh um as opposed to all meshes because I will usually uh dry myself bananas and forget that I did this and I'm trying to just grab a prop or something like that to to to make it hidden or or whatever I might be doing your workflow is a very personal thing so like don't let me make comments like this and make you feel like you're doing it wrong if it works for you then freaking awesome um I just I like utilizing this unless I know for sure that I'm in a really you know heavy scene with a lot of goo and I know I'm only going to be selecting other things I can then safely turn off the um the Geo filter here or the surface filter okay so let's just test this really quickly and now we have this nice stabilization on the head which is going to stop me from having to counter animate the head all the time uh I am like I said this is going to work well for me because I'm only animating this one dimension going forward um I don't have to have the character turn around and do other things um it's uh it's really just you know uh it's it's just I know that I can get away with this if I was doing something more complex and I was going to have Samus do some sort of like ballet routine and do lots of spins then there's a good chance that I would probably take the time to just have to worry about counter counter Orting or counter animating all right so let's get things going here um one thing I want to do is let me just go back and take a look at my um my reference again uh I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to build a little box just because I it's it's not going to it's not going to feel right um that that that I if I follow this reference and I jump from the ground and back to the ground there's going to be some things are wrong timing wise and I'm just going to rather than mess with all that stuff I'm just going to go ahead and for the first example uh the first time I do this in front of everybody I'm going to kind of recreate the scenario as best as I can so it looks like we have a box that's roughly you know I don't know like uh I guess a little a little over a third the height of the character so I can go and reproduce that reality very easily over here let me just go make a box create polygon Cube we'll make that Cube nice and big definitely too small right now and we'll make this I don't know um a bit too big that feels about right and I'll just scoot this right on Underneath Him her sorry uh for the purists out there and I am pretty much ready to go um it would probably be smart for me to make a um a an environment layer or I'll call it set and then I'll make this referenced as well so I just can't select it all right so let's um I'm going to use my little god node here to get the character kind of in this I I like using this node to position the character into it the starting position is usually the way most people will use it so I'm just going to kind of try to get some traction here um I'm just going to start posing and um and I'm looking at looking I I need to find a starting pose so if we go back to my reference here um I'm actually just to make my life a little bit easier what I'll probably do here is I'm going to tear off this panel and I'm going to do this just to make it a little easier to switch back and forth here I'm going to have it kind of like right here so that I can kind of see the character and then I'll you I'll be flicking like this I don't I I haven't installed anything that allows this to always be on top and that would might maybe be a bit annoying anyways so something like this should work uh for tonight so let's look for that first pose a first pose is just basically a nice standing pose but don't get tricked I see a lot of people be like oh yeah it's standing pose that looks close enough I'll just bring the arms down and I'm done um just you know it's just a starting pose doesn't mean a default pose I think you want to make sure you take the time to at least give it a little bit of um attitude and a line of action whenever possible um and again I'm not going to I'm not worried about dramaticized exaggerating doing all the things that animator should do um when you got a set of poses to work with um so I'm going to just try to you know make this work for now um so you can see how straight the line of action is here but then if you take a look over here you got this sort of nice kind of like S curve in the spine so I'm probably going to want to create something like that here just to you know make sure that it's uh you know it's it's a little bit more interesting so I'm going to go ahead here and maybe just tip just a little bit like this and then a little bit like this and then bring this back a little bit like this maybe you know just to get a little bit of something going on there and then I need to uh if you take a look at the arms the arms they they kind of hang the forearms hang straight down and then they kind of hang out this is pretty normal for hands especially because you can see the hands are kind of being placed on the legs a little bit so there's probably some friction stopping them from fully hanging straight down uh Samus has a very big gun hand here um so I think that this hand might be need to be a little bit different okay so we're going to just drop those shoulders a little bit put them down in a bit more of a a more realistic I find that the the proportions for Samus is kind of awkward here that's something I'm going to have to work around um and it's because of how you know about wide the hips are here that means that these arms are always going to have a hard time hanging straight down so I'm going to have to probably play with that a little bit I'm going to have to you know accept that that's the reality here and um you know and and take the take take note of of how long this is taking me right I'm not I'm not trying to speed through this I'm the first the first poses especially I find are the ones that are um going to take me the longest don't be in a rush lay down these poses in a nice way um and I you know I don't I won't POS fingers typically on my first pass um but I will will um I will definitely at least try to pose like the hand orientation uh basically and you know what I'll do to make my life a little simpler I will pose the hand but I'm just going to do on this first this first frame um just so that I can um it's a very big big manipulator um just so I can hold on trying to figure out which axis I'm supposed to be bending this on this one here okay I'm going to kind of make a fist I think uh I don't see let me check here I forgot to check this do I have no some sometimes you'll have rigs that'll have like um controls to make oh wait hold on that's probably just a switcher yeah sometimes you'll have like hand poses like or hand like multiple finger controls that you can use uh to quickly pose out something like the um the hands uh but I don't see that here so I'm just going to have to pose this manually which is not the end of the world um grabbing all of these guys here Pickers are nice in a case like this by the way something that I will do to make my life a little easier as well I don't if you guys do this but let me go to my I can go make like um a shelf I'll go make a new shelf um new shelf I'm going call this samis and uh what I'll do is I will make um paint like annoying uh and I'm going I'm going to want to do this probably also for the um yeah I don't because there's no character set or anything like that here just I'm going to want to make something that allows me to select all the controllers um but I'm going like so I'll make little buttons on my shelf to speed up my selection process I'll do something like this um luckily I don't need to do this for both hands because there's only one hand um I'll select all these guys like this and then what I'll do is I'll say uh create uh set quick selection set like this and I'm going to say um left um hand fingers like this and I'll say add shelf and then I can hit that button there and very quickly so I'm making my own picker basically by doing this and um you know there's other ways of doing this this is the quickest way I find and um if you're you know if you have rigs that are using like if you want to make a script um you could do that if you're making if you say you're using a bun of rigs that are using the same name nomenclature but the problem is is most rigs won't and so th you know these these little scripts will pretty much only work on um um you can make a a smart script that can learn the nameing convention I guess and maybe take a stab at that but you know by the the amount of time you'll you'll maybe spend just messing with that might uh not pay off in the end you want things to speed up not become slower so I'm just going to make a oh they don't they don't fold very well do they that's okay okay doesn't need to be perfect leave it like this it ALS this rig also doesn't have carpal in the fingers which is going to make um life very annoying when I want to try to make um a proper fist here because it's hard to close the gap on um the um between the knuckles but I'll try to tweak this a little bit make it a little bit better and uh this thumb needs to come out a little bit more like this something like that close enough it's not amazing but it's also not terrible oops okay getting somewhere I don't like the way the um the weight feels right now so I'm going to push the weight forward a little bit put put them on a little bit put her a little bit more on on her toes it's hard to see that nice line that I put in the in the um in the back because the arms are kind of in the way so you know I'm not going to I'm not going to worry too much about that another thing um even though the character is clearly standing straight here um the the the toes are pointing outwards a little bit as opposed to perfectly forward it's little things like this that I find go a long way to making a pose look more natural people forget to take the time to just make small changes like this and they're wondering why their characters look so stiff it's because they're not going and asking themselves hold on a second like what else is default and let's make sure that we don't just let everything just look default um don't forget about the knees either even subtle changes with the knee with the toes will look weird if you then don't follow suit with the the knees the knees will typically uh try to point in the same direction as the toes if they don't things are going to look a little bit weird I'm going to bring those feet in a little bit too just to maybe make the rig or make the character's pose look a little bit more graphic kind of intentionally having those feet kind of close together feels pretty good um I still think that this needs to be a bit more rotated inwards like kind of like this maybe really feels awkward this uh big huge gun here it's not uh not easy to to pose with this hip it's going to be colliding with that hip all the time probably but that's okay that's okay I'm not trying to I'm I'm not like I said I'm not trying to make an amazing pose here I'm just trying to do justice to this pose another thing I see with this character pose here is the chin is just up ever so slightly that might be kind of a nice way of showing a little bit of Def interesting Defiance to the pose some sort of like a bit of a superhero pose is just a little bit like that chin up um and maybe also just push oh interesting so I forgot to I I got tricked here I got tricked talk about kicking the tires I noticed that um when I do this that the the the um the the shoulder's not following but I forgot to check to see what this is following because as you can see I don't like I don't like the fact that I do this and those arms come with it I don't like animating like that uh depends on the scenario maybe that would make sense in somea cases um but sadly it does kind of look a little bit like maybe it's in this control here I don't see an obvious control that would allow me shoulder Orient is is on maybe that's maybe that's what I want let me see here yeah that's what I want okay don't know why that control is there because it's uh for me it's clearly coming from there so it should always be on the controller that's actually the one that's being influenced but I guess whatever and it's they're also more visible so I'd be nice to put them on visible controller so it looks like that is the thing I need is the shoulder Orient so let me just go to turn that off here both of these guys shoulder Orient there we go that is going to just allow me to be able to have you know some tweaks um in orientation on this upper body so um so yeah now I should have a little bit more control here on on not having to counter animate the arms which is always a nice thing um um I also need a quick way of selecting the whole the whole character because I'm going to start posing out the character on these beats now and I want the whole character to be selected so I can make full body poses there's lots of ways of doing this if I had a bit more time I would probably quickly take make use of the character node um I I mean I haven't used it in a while so I'm worried that's going to backfire on me but that's I love using the character node for a million reasons I think it's just a nice workflow um but tonight what I'll probably do just to make another button up here just to be able to select all my my main controllers basically so what where I just discovered that that problem with the the arm there was because I wanted to kind of just also tilt the chest up a little bit just a little bit more and maybe even push it out a little bit further as as well and this this control setup looks like it also has something in here that allows me to kind of tweak I guess a little bit the the in between state of that spline so maybe I'll just do that to exaggerate that roll in the back maybe and I can also also I can rotate these guys backwards as well I'll do this in um changing myself to World space here temporarily just so I can rotate these straight back remember like there's multiple Dimensions that you could play with here right you're not just you're not just limited to you know the the dimension that's obvious you know I I you know I people think about the clavicles bringing them down and like this but don't forget but the forward the back here especially because I'm trying to get that sort of chest out feeling here on this pose um it would be beneficial for me to try to get the um think I maybe overid the uh chest out there a little bit there we go there um having those shoulders back allow for a little bit more that chest forward feeling basically so now we've got a pretty decent pose but I was I was saying what I wanted to do here is um I wanted to have a quick way of selecting all the controllers and putting the button so what what I can do here is what I my trick usually is to take a quick look make sure they all have a Ctrl at the end and you should also check display layers cuz there might actually be a controller layer let's see there is a controller layer right there so I can just use this so as a matter of fact instead of making a um a a button up here I'm just going to get used to going down here to to the control layer and just saying select objects that's what I'm going to do tonight it's faster you can use display layers like that a lot um um very conveniently for things like this if you want a quick way of grabbing just a bunch of a bunch of controls so let's just do that here for the first one then so U not not mesh so so it might be a little safer you know what I'm going to just to be safer so I don't grab the wrong one by accident I'm going to say controls layer and I'm going to say select objects but now with them selected I will make a quick selection set so that I'm just get I get used to going up here for everything so uh you know just to increase my ergonomics so create uh set quick selection set and I'm going to call this s all add to shelf how about I spell it properly there we go and add the Shelf good so I got this and I got this for my hand we're in business so with that selected I will hit S I want to lock in that first pose absolutely now we are starting to roll so this took me a while because this is part of my tire kicking process as well CU as I'm doing this sort of these adjustments here and making that first pose I'm also getting acquainted with the the rig itself you know I'm taking the time to play with some things and I'm kind of warming up a little bit so don't stress about how long it takes to get that first pose take the time necessary uh to get the get something that works really well and um something that um you know and also give yourself the time to kind of play with the rig a little bit okay cool so let's uh let's find the next pose so the next pose is going to be um now this is kind of annoying cuz my framing uh so when my frames count start I'm going to make my life a little easier right now and actually match my FR my frame range because I can always shift it later I just don't like having to do the math I don't want to be thinking about it I want to be able to look at a number and then put it on the same number I want have to be like oh okay what's that minus a certain number so what I mean by that is I can't change this because it's not my I don't have a video clip I can't just bring it to Premiere and start uh know cut the clip so it's earlier so what I'm going to do instead is I'm just going to literally um say let's see what is it from 374 all the way to uh 4 453 I don't want to start at frame 374 but I can do that temporarily because it why not it allows me to speed up my process a lot of animators will make their life difficult um unnecessarily here this is easy to just change my my frame of reference here so that I start at 374 temporarily get my animation blocked in and then I just grab all those keys and move them back to zero right or do that really even all the way at the very very end there's no rush to get that to frame to frame zero that's very easy to do and the time it takes to do that is a lot less than trying to do the math in your head and try to like convert uh fra know 374 equals zero and now that means every other key pose has to be minus 374 to get the right number from starting from frame zero that's just dumb so let's go ahead and hit this button here and hit s again so we have a key to begin with um another thing I should be doing here which I forgot to do is I like to go in there and change my animation um uh t tents because I'm going to be stepping this like I said so I weighted tangent is good but I want to make these stepped so it's linear because there's no stepped in the first out type or the intangent I mean and stepped here there we go save it and uh let's just change this one here while we're at it to stepped okay good um now what is our next uh pose here let's see uh we got 399 we got it right there pretty easy um let's just go and switch back here I'm just going to look really quickly at this me move this over here uh yeah okay nothing special here pretty much just uh ducking down and pretty pretty balanced but with a little bit of a lean forward um um unsurprisingly because the character does want to jump for forward and up so typically you know like he's pretty balanced here but then into while he gets down into that final low position there is a little bit of a a bias towards the the the the toes here because and it's going to continue you can see the four momentum is just going to continue to move right here all along it's always there right from the very beginning there's sort of like right after he gets into this partway down here he's going to start to roll forward so we need to break that down so there's a bit of an arc there but for now we're just going to worry about those poses so let's go and take that 399 and let's just make the uh the quick uh edit here so we're going to bring him down her down sorry I keep forgetting the gender is a thing with Samus kind of surprised us all back in the uh the 80s with that helmet coming off you weren't all mostly most of you probably weren't alive to witness that um firsthand it was one of the first big video game surprises that pleased everybody um no one would have expected it to Samus to be or met the whoever that character in The Metroid suit to be um a girl because at the time most of the heroes in games were like typically these you know big muscular dudes so it was very nice to see um so early in the game um and I don't mean the game Metroid but just the game in Game Dev development in in general being a little bit more surpris exclusive I know bit a bit more inclusive basically was kind of nice it's weird to think that that was so long ago and yet we're still struggling with this today okay so let's see here I'm making an ass of myself because you can see I'm not on the right frame so we're going to have to go ahead and undo all that stuff um and bring it to 3.99 first and what I like to do is I like to just so I don't do that that is hit s right now and then just lock in my pose as a matter of fact I might even do that I can I could just go and bookmark them all right now but um it doesn't make sense because then I'll be fighting against um um some of those because I'll be making big big edits to it so just I just try to do it as I go along right just set the key lock it in make sure you have because I also don't want to forget to key some things because uh the stepped uh tangencies will will keep things holding together pretty nicely for you even though you don't have key on everything but as soon as you aut a tangent you're going to see where all those problems start to pop up all right so let's see here bit of a lean here and I got the legs or the arms got to swing back they're not doing that by default just because I told them not to so that's fine I'd rather tell them to do that just trying to find the controllers there they are bring that back did I turn that back to local no I didn't still world I forget what the hockey is am Mya for uh changing the uh changing from world to local so I'm just going to do it the old school way and just so we going to bend the uh bend the arms elbows a little bit because that's what I'm seeing in the in the reference probably have a little bit more fun with this and just push them back a little bit more just to get a little bit more of a a dynamic look looking anticipation pose here I'm not going to worry even about like I I would typically be worried about twinning as well but right now I'm not worried about that I'm just blocking in the basic poses not worrying so much about being super super picky and we'll take a look at the head you see the head is definitely ducking down a little bit there so I can go ahead and let that happen as well because the head might feel a little bit stiff trying to like stay completely connected to only the you know the world that's not the right controller there we go okay cool um awesome let's just push forward a just a little bit more here oh that's what happened I changed this to object by accident translate there we go I want to make sure that I have a good good lean here U because those arms are back then I'm going to swing these back even further so uh like I said I'm not going to be I don't need to worry about perfecting these I often worry about just blocking blocking it in and then I'll come I will typically come back and make adjustments later on um get it get it closer to the space I need it to be so let's look for that next pose the next pose is Takeoff pose obviously and so we see us the T takeoff pose I will not have the arms straight up I think that doesn't feel right for Samus and so this is where the animat brain needs to come in you have to ask yourself is it necessary is that a necessary part of the action now in in this case it kind of is so I I will probably use a little bit of it not as much as we see who can tell me why the arms are way up ahead talking about body mechanics here so watch what doing with those arms swinging them right there you have different masses right the fact that you have the arm which is an independent mass that just happens to be connected to your body you can swing that M that arm and generate what's called angular momentum which can be kind of converted into a linear momentum especially when it sort of reaches a maximum sort of constraint so by swinging those arms up it brings the mass upwards which helps actually contribute a little bit towards that up upwards momentum we see this a lot with gymnasts when they tuck their knees in you'll see them jump and then up at the top of the jump they'll really Ram their like their legs up and the just just by just by recoiling their legs and folding them like this up and towards their body that is mum going upwards it will help actually provide a little extra Hang Time and lift to that jump um or a flip for instance um and so that's why that's what's going on there it's using other part parts of our body that we can manipulate in midair to have a small influence over our momentum so I kind of lied a little bit or I wasn't super super 100% um um honest when I said that you know in the past when you when you're when you're in the air you don't really have any well that's that's not true I did actually say it honestly I just was a bit of a I was sort of being a little bit deceitful um when you're up in the air you can't change your momentum unless there's another Force acted on it well it just so happens that your body does have the ability to act forces on it it has its other Mass that you can use the muscles to sort of get them moving and then that movement will then be able to like literally pull the body or push the body a little bit now the arm and the legs are not necess nearly as heavy as the core of the body but it's still something the arms much less so than the legs but that's what's going on here using that arm swing is actually contributing a little bit towards that body uh movement I don't think that Samus really needs that though because Samus is in like some sort of exoskeleton and so probably doesn't need the extra mph so I'm going to limit that cuz I don't like the pose so much doesn't seem like a Samus thing to do so let's go to 409 select the whole body go to 409 and um hit s just so we actually have a pose locked in there another thing to note here is look at the angle right look at this it's important that you see this you see this and this okay this angle that takeoff here is the vector that the character is going to be traveling in because that's the last Vector that the force was still existing pushing off of the ground so this is very important you got to get this right um for instance you can't just jump straight up and then have the character drift forwards you need to make sure that the launch itself is indicating the direction the character should be traveling in because that's that's that's where they're pushing in right so I can just grab this and do this basically I'm going to bring the character up a little further because naturally I'm going to have to go and play with these toes here like this okay and uh probably want to straighten the back a little bit here whoa not completely okay you can start to feel it right now you can feel that there's a there's a definitely like momentum heading in the right direction at this point and what what's the head doing the head is sort of looking straight forward pretty much that makes sense let's do that these arms to contribute a little bit I don't know how much exactly we're going to see going to swing them like this something like that would work oh I guess these shoulders interesting I just noticed that these are kind of independent so we're going to have to oh that's an interesting that's an interesting problem to solve with this rig the fact that I need to manage this business here doesn't look like it's hopefully that's not going to be a nightmare to uh to interpolate between we're going to find out I guess lot of lot of geoc cisions here H it's a hard controller to select where is it there it is so I'm just letting them swing kind of up to this point here I'm not worried about bringing them all the way forward and see if I can kind of get away with something feeling a little bit more like this CU they're definitely swinging so that would contribute but especially also I have to be careful about limiting how much swing is happening because of the way that this this the suit works right let me just tweak this up a little bit more so see how picky I am with these these these uh these poses I mean like be picky these poses are everything okay so I want to make sure that I have something that feels like a nice line of action that kind of runs right through here um I can shape this a little bit maybe just by tweaking that pelvis controller try to get that feeling good okay that's close enough I can move forward right now I think so there's my takeoff pose that's kind of coming along so now we got we already got a bunch of poses here and so the next pose would be of course my action pose this is the fun one okay so what frame we dealing with with uh 4 416 so let's bring it to 416 now maybe make my life a little easier I can just go like this grab the feet and these guys all at the same time and move them all together all right and we're the top of the jump here so my body will already start probably also preparing for The Landing so I like to kind of make it so like where where she where she's really leaning forward here maybe by this point there's less of a lean maybe is a little bit more of a a bias towards take off what else am I seeing here uh we got yeah so I want to make sure that oops I keep doing that yeah okay I got to have the arms kind of probably going to roll outwards a little bit here now you want to make this pretty like this this po should be awesome we should be really thinking about making this like the the real poster frame so I might even want to go and take a look at some like reference of like a some sort of you know superhero kind of comic Booky pose for reference because I'm not getting that from my from my reference so I might want to consider looking elsewhere for it um because as long as I find something that would still work um then you know with this context then then we're going to be okay um I'm not going to do that right now I'm going to fight the urge to do that because I'm just trying to make it for btim what I'm seeing the next lecture I'll take the Basse and be like okay so now let's do the animation thing and go in there and push things so now I'm going to go this point I can have less of that like at this point this character could be a little bit more forward like this a little bit more compression maybe um I definitely want to at least play around with the the legs though to make sure that they're not all oh I'm going to want to make sure that I turn this off too I don't want those to be on I like to make sure that I don't forget I I don't want to turn off things like this so that I can just manipulate um um ankles without trying to compensate for the fact that I've left on the um um the any kind of heel heel or toe roll this really confuses animators and they end up with these weird contorted looking poses with like huge transforms on them because they're they've they've they rather than just turning off the actual tow roll they then counter animate that tow roll with the actual main like I just just don't don't get lost in your controls you should always be trying to whenever you can default back down to a neutral state with some of those specialized controls like the um the toe rolls this is a common problem I see I I see this happening all the time just trying to come up with some kind of cool looking pose on the feet doesn't have to be awesome like I said I'm not trying to go for gold yet probably bring these down a little bit okay what I'll probably end up doing up in the air is having kind of like a cool pose where you know eventually I could turn into like she jumps up and then shoots and then lands that could be pretty awesome but for now we're just going to go with this basic jump to try to get that completed before we try to get extra fancy here uh let's play with this and bring it out a little bit same thing for this one actually no toe is pointing this way so it's actually a bit more like that maybe I should have this instead yeah okay good so I'm okay with this it's not perfect but it's something and then I'm going to go back here and take a look at what my next pose is I mean look this is taking me time right this is not like you know some people are a little faster with the rig it's a new rig so it's obviously going to take me a little extra time um but um you know don't be in a hurry these are this this is what you want to nail these these this is this is it this is the the foundation you're laying down the foundation for everything else you're going to build on top of so don't be in a rush do not be in a rush um to make my life a little easier here by the way um I'll do a shortcut I'm going to go and grab this takeoff pose uh and I'm going to middle click and drag and bring it here and then all I need to do is essentially bring this this this this oops missed this and this I will bring it where it needs to be here let me look through a kind of a left view just so I can get an idea as where that Arc should be this might start being a good time for me to try looking at um what do you call it uh a um the emotion Trails but I don't think I need it too hardcore for that it's basically I want this now you'll notice that it's asymmetrical right the way up is is not as far as the way down like number of frames that's because she's jumping off of something and she has farther to fall than she did go up which is it's normal which is also I will be traveling a little more than um you know um this this wouldn't be my Midway um translation point forward it's going to end up being a little further forward not quite that far forward probably should be like probably just back off just a little bit maybe something like that actually no I probably had it right before because she needs to uh no I didn't have it right before she be like this I can tweak it in a minute anyways uh and obviously we want this to be leaning back this way at this point point and the feet need to be out in front so let's get that going here and you want to make sure that the heels are um rolling here get rid of the toe rolls what oh yeah that's right and uh put the heal rolls instead and then we're going have to bring them down a bring her down a little bit like that yeah so it's a little bit too far forward it feels weird so we're just going to fix that really quickly by doing this back it up a little bit just scrubbing this it should feel natural there should be a parabolic Arc here that's forming it shouldn't go up and then suddenly be like way over here like this it should be very natural and as a matter of fact there's a really easy way for me to see this um accuracy right away what could I do right now to measure without using a um um a mo path and trying to look with my eyeballs well obviously have to use my eyeballs but I mean trying to eyeball it by just looking at the poses here what would be a reliable thing for me to use right now to get an idea to make sure that I have a somewhat constant velocity forward it's very important that I I establish some um some um some momentum here okay on the launch and it sticks until I land okay yeah I could use dry Ras if I want to just dry on I don't like doing that on my monitors because I always find that over time it starts to stain them um I have a way more reliable tool that's just sitting here waiting to be used and that is of course the graph editor I don't use the graph editor very uh much at the beginning of my workflow but but this is a good example of a good time for me to use it I can look at let's say something like the translate um Zed on the hips here as a good indicator translate Zed boom so it should feel like a straight line here you know it's stepped but like I can just draw with my eyeballs through here and it looks pretty accurate I did pretty good and yes using acetan on the top of the monitor would be a very smart idea if you're into drawing on top of monitors that way you're not ruining your beautiful monitor so I mean like I could also just set these just temporarily to linear just to see how how well I did and that's not bad for old man eyes it could be a little bit fur F forward but I think it's okay it's within tolerance a little bit further forward would slow it down it's a little it's spiking it's getting a littleit too fast um so I I would have been way too fast I compensated a little bit but I didn't compensate enough so let me go bring that back and just because I'm a picky SOB I will go and bring it back just all that much more like this cool that's going to do it for sure um but you see what I did there right I'm reusing poses as much as I as I can I I knew that like I wanted something that looked a little bit like the takeoff but just angled slightly differently so use it damn well use it it was quicker doing it like this than having to make all those manipulations on my own okay so um now what I want to do is take a closer look at that pose I don't like how bent forward he is but I'm going to have a little bit of that going on so yeah what else what's going on with the arms here here I want the arms to be up even more they kind of oops I keep doing that I keep dragging the wrong time slider um yeah so they kind of go up and stay up and then land I think that could be kind of cool I'll try that I'm not too sure if I'm going to like it so much but we'll see I think at this point what I would do here is just grab this guy this guy I think this is not going to work right yeah opposites that drives me bananas I'm going to bring this up like this and bring this one notice I'm using the screen space controller I do this all the time it's quicker to to to get my rotations where I need them to be kind of blocking them in rather than just using the um that can get you into lots of problems with gimbal lock though so be careful mileage may vary and what else is going on in that little kid's mind here um you'll notice that there's also stuff going on here like looking at the ground for instance um it makes sense that when you're Landing that there's going to be a little bit of eyeballs on the ground so bringing the head down a little bit it's not a bad idea okay also there is I a dollar every single time I grabbed the wrong he's really contacting the ground with both feet at the same time here but they're not planer so I could actually do something like this just to make sure that there's just to make sure that they're not uh totally and I'm going to separate them a little bit too because it for the landing it would make sense that feet are a little bit more spread for a bit more stable Landing does not to be that much there we go that's good okay last pose we're going to do um the uh the squash pose so we're going to go right here here and we're just take a look very deep um pose here which is another good reason why that kept this the the feet a bit more separated I might need to separate them even more we worry about that in a minute so let's uh what was that frame that frame was 435 bring it to 435 and set that key and we're going to go and get the feet sorted out first guys turn off the business oh right my zero is up here because I moved the uh some people um won't do what I did um by moving the whole God note up like this because then you can kind of screws up the idea of that Translate Y is ground um but um I was trying to go fast so I was cutting some corners now I want you to notice something here um The Landing notice how the waist the the hip and the weight is behi behind the feet that's important because there's some horizontal momentum um and then what happens is it allows the compression okay remember we took took a look at the takeoff Vector The Landing Vector looks like this and this is interesting because it is angled in a way to to push this way which is a bit is like upward Ward with a little little hint of backwards so they're trying to get rid of two momentums here we're trying to get rid of the forward momentum but we're also um trying to get R rid of the uh the the down the downwards momentum so that's why um this pushing in this angle makes sense just like we used to be pushing in this angle up to get going we want to be pushing in literally the mirror version of that on the landing so that's why the body needs to be positioned properly and as as he compresses kind of just ends up in a nice equalized balanced State especially with the arms forward like this um he doesn't need to feel like he tips forward um he's in full control by the time he he lands it's very important if you want to make it feel like that that character can stop and be in Balance you need to set it up properly on the landing otherwise um it'll look like the character is stopping magically and not dealing with all those forces that they need to deal with so let's make sure that we keep the wait back here a little bit and let's make sure that we probably need to bring out these guys give a little bit of room here and probably also push it a little bit it's going to we need some room for those knees but not too far because those those we need to leave some room for those arms to come swinging down here um I'm looking at the hips but the hips are angled backwards a little bit it's going to be a little tricky to do with the ik rig because um um how is this one set up I think it lets me do this isn't it yeah okay so this might be a little easier for me to use these guys here a little bit to get me into the right position so I have so let's make sure I get this guy this guy this guy this guy and this guy well actually let me just bring this guy a bit more in line first and then this this well let me just do this that work yeah um let's see here now I can bring these arms down naturally um I'll just quickly get there by zeroing out those arms it's going to make my life a little bit easier um and I'll do the same thing I do this all often when I'm trying to get into into another pose that's radically different from where I was I'll just zero it out and then kind of work from a zero point we go and now this arm is going to be down like this this point let's take a look at what the action was here the arm was up and then sort of coming down just like what I'm doing here more or less oh we swing in the uh oops don't want to break the elbow the arms have been kept out on purpose to help be part of the balance so I want to maybe keep that in mind here and do something similar having a hard time getting I might need to not have the waist leaning backwards I might need to have a little bit more of flat there just to get it in the same pose because proportions are obviously a thing right we um I'm not dealing with the same proportions that that kid has so I need to be realistic with what I'm trying to do with especially the knees because the Samus has a pretty pretty short torso compared to like the ratio of torso to leg is pretty exaggerated so naturally the knees are going to want to be right up into the freaking into her nostrils here in a pose like this we have to we have to be careful we have to make sure that we are compensating naturally here for this I don't like the way this is built in here this little this metal thing has driving me crazy I feel like it should be having some sort of like an average blend between um what this what the shoulder doing what the what the this this thing is doing otherwise it's going to be broken all of the time I used to rig a lot that's why I'm such a big picky SOB with my with with rigs when I'm using them okay so what we're getting now let me just go ahead and um turn off my uh curves here right doesn't look like a lot yet doesn't look like a lot yet but those are my poses I can now go back in I obviously I want to go and add like a proper settle and recover a recovery and settle here at the end I'll probably just keep keep her down there in a cool like Scout like Crouch but like looking at this the timing is blocked in there based on real like the real life so we're going to want to play with timing uh that the poses we're going to want to mess with and make them a little bit more heroic in some cases but not so much that we're throwing off the necessary body mechanics you know there's going to be a series of things we're going to want to do here to you know tweak up uh from this point forward but like again this whole whole point of this lecture series was to make everyone understand that like animation doesn't have to be all that hard especially if you were going to lean in on and use reference you got to know what poses to take and then just take the time to meticulously pose it like uh you know this is not perfect yet the poses they will get a lot closer to perfect once I've gone and done a proper editing path to them right now I just wanted to block it out and Stage it because I want to see is it kind of working right at this point like do I have the basics kind of in place that's the main thing that I want to be able to like um say yes or no to at this point and um yeah I'd say yeah it's it's like there are issues 100% but it's um it's a starting point which is where a lot of people fail they don't do anything like this they just sort of do some other kind of random thing and just start putting poses all over the map and and there's nothing really grounding them to having a set of rules that they should be applying to their work so you know if you are new to animating or relatively new and you really are looking for a way to move move forward I would highly recommend you try what I'm doing here you're going to want to watch the two previous videos so you have a little bit of context but um you are going to probably learn a couple big big uh things that you can lean in on to help get you kind of kickstarted a little bit uh this is just how I work I work like this first to block it in and then I kind of take a bit of a straight ahead approach uh when I'm sort of refining things I let I I I allow myself to to make some changes but I I just for me it just this is definitely the way to go like it gives me much more control of the scene the big problem with Straight Ahead in its purest sense is it's um unreliable and hard to control because the whole point is you let the animation sort of Drive things but that's not realistically what you'll be dealing with on the job the job's going to be like this is your number of frames and here's your composition you're going to need to work within that that sandbox and the idea of straight ahead is kind of counter to that in my opinion because you're not really thinking about the constraints you're thinking about the movement and you know sometimes if you really go with the flow there you're going to have to recompose the cameras half the time and more often than not you're not going to be allowed to do that on a show um and video game production same thing they're going to have very specific metrics and constraints that you're going to want to try to hit um I mean you'll see you know keep watching you're going to see what I what's going to end up happening here towards the end I'm going to end up with um a bunch of poses like this that I'm going to perfect and then it towards the end it turns into a very freefor all where I I start to like just make what whatever changes I need to to help just really let the the motion flow properly but within sort of this sort of this the boundaries of this sort of sandbox that I'm creating with this block so stay tuned if you're curious and what what it looks like towards the end um because I think that there are some a lot of Straight Ahead s um sort of uh philosophies that I tend to lean in on when I'm uh finishing the uh the shot so thanks for hanging out um if you are new here just a quick note that we do have a website called g. community and that is pretty much where our base of operations are we have a lot of free content and we also offer a service where you can book uh people like myself and people a lot more uh seasoned and even uh quite a bit more talented than myself as um as a an expert that can reveiew your work so if you're looking for um some feedback on your animation because you're learning on your own or you really need some sort of some some sort of guidance um or you're putting a demo real together you want some sort of advice on then um hit us up send some stuff our way and uh we will get back to you but you just have to look for the order or review uh button on our website and we also have a Discord server talk to you soon cheers