Original subtitles

- [Instructor] Now that we understand the very basic

of using an armature,

let's do a new bouncing ball animation

but with some more advanced mechanic.

For this animation,

we will be exclusively working from a side view.

It's like working on a 2D animation in a way.

So I will create a new action by duplicating our keying set

and I need bouncing ball.

It means that this action will keep the keying set

we have created before

or the keyframe we have inserted before.

And I've enabled the only active keying set option

in the auto keying

and enabled the filter available.

On frame zero, I will position my bouncing ball

at about nine meters on the z-axis,

using the root controller.

This controller will allow us

to move the ball in space,

while the other will be used

for secondary motion like squash and stretch

and rotation or revolution of the ball.

We can plan our animation

by directly drawing on the screen.

I'm holding the D key

while left clicking and dragging on my screen

to use the grease pencil notes.

Here I've made a beautiful drawing

of the path of the ball

that we are going to animate.

The idea is to bring a bit of physics into it

so that it looks more believable

and input a bit of damping until the ball stop.

You can access your annotation in the view panel

under Annotation and click the minus button

if you want to remove it.

As soon as you make a new drawing,

a new annotation will appear.

You can change the color

by clicking the little vignette next to its name.

These annotation are in 3D,

so you can rotate around them

and you can create new annotation layers

or new annotation slot by clicking the plus button.

If you make multiple drawing

on multiple keyframe,

a new drawing will be created on each frame,

allowing you to do awesome animation

with the annotation

or a crappy drawing like this one.

All joke apart,

it's very handy whenever you want

to review your animation

or plan the next move.

Let's start animating our bouncing ball.

I will select all the existing key,

press T and set them to constant

so that we can start our new animation

as we did before by the blocking stage.

We will be animating in pose to pose

by first setting our main keyframe on golden keys.

Then create some in between

and then start polishing.

So I'm currently trying to match the different extreme poses

of the ball.

The different poses when it hit the ground

and the different poses when it is at its highest point

in the air.

Seeing that I don't have a green line between the keys

on my action editor,

I figured there was still busy interpolation.

So I've pressed T

and reset to constant all the keyframe.

As I've erased my annotation,

I have a hard time figuring out the position of my ball.

But there is tools that could help me

and that we have already used.

It's the motion path.

So while I'm trying to figure out the spacing

of the ball from one frame to the other,

it would be easier if I add an ID

of the previous position of the ball.

So instead of fighting

with my animation and my brain,

trying to figure out or remember

where the ball was in the previous frame,

I will simply add up to the armature properties,

not the object properties.

And here I will find exactly the same motion path menu

that we have seen previously

but this time, we are using it at the armature level,

meaning that I'm currently tracking my root ball.

And I can track any of the bounce of the ball

or even multiple bounce at once.

I've previously set a couple

of quick favorite I can access pressing the Q key.

You can create your quick favorite

or assign your own shortcut

to any tool in the window

by right clicking on it.

From there, it's way easier to position the ball

from one key to the other.

I'm creating a new keyframe every five frame.

This is pretty arbitrary.

You could use every 10 frame or whatever.

I'm used to use every five frame.

And when all my golden keys will be done,

I will then go into a slight timing path

where I will move all those keyframe left to right

to revise the timing of the animation.

Here I'm writing the ultimate pose

and then I will play my animation

or scrub through the timeline

to fill the motion.

See if the up and down

and forward motion feels natural.

And this is something you have to train about.

You have to train your eye about this.

And this require experience.

And you will get experience only

by animating, not watching videos.

So even if you are a more advanced animator,

I advise you to do this exercise.

And if you are a beginner, embrace failure.

Failing is an important step

in the learning path.

The sooner you accept failure,

the faster you will learn.

And being a good artist

is not really about your success

but the way you bounce back after a failure

and the way you learn from it.

All right, let's stop our philosophical discussion here

and let's go with animation.

In my action editor,

I'm moving all the keyframe of the ball

on the timeline.

The smaller the bounce,

the fewer the frame I will have between two keyframes.

And then I'm moving the latest pose pretty further away

because the ball will be slowing down before it stops.

So it will take some time to get there.

To quickly manipulate the key,

you can box select them as we have seen before

or click the summary

so that you will get all the keyframe underneath.

You can watch my timing on the timeline

but don't feel wrong

if your timing is not the same as mine

because it depend on the height of your bounce.

And we will certainly revise the timing

during the animation.

But try to make it feel as natural as possible

as soon as possible.

We will now start detailing this blocking path,

meaning that we will add a few more keyframe

and input a bit of squash and stretch,

using the upper and lower green controllers.

I will start by adding those stretching

and squashing information

on top of the existing keyframes.

As explained in the previous chapter,

when the ball is contacting the ground,

it reaches it at full speed.

So it is full stretched.

And since the first pose is the one

where our ball has the maximum speed,

it is the pose where it will be the most stretched.

You can use the stretching controller

to orient the ball toward its previous frame.

Just translate it a little backward.

This controller only allow you

to move it using its location, not its rotation.

The ball will automatically stretch

toward the green controllers.

I will then scrub through the next frame

and with my green controller still selected,

I will press Alt + G

to cancel any location transformed on it.

I will take the lower squash controller

and I will push it up just a little touch

to make the ball squash

when it slow down in the air.

I can see that I have a little interpolation

between my keyframe,

so I will select them all, press T

and reset them to constant.

This happen sometime when you try

to add the constant interpolation

on a single keyframe.

So I will go ahead

and input a bit of stretching

and orientation to the ball on each frame

and as I go along,

I will reduce the stretching strength

on each consecutive bounce

because the ball is losing energy.

Each time, I slightly translate the upper green controller

toward the previous frame

and when it's up in the air,

I'm slightly moving the lower controller up.

I have forgotten to insert a keyframe

on each channels.

So in the action editor,

I will go on each keyframe,

press I and choose all channels.

I can now add some breakdowns

or in between to my animation.

This will really help me reading the animation

in the blocking stage.

So what we are going to do now

is add the squash just after landing of the ball.

Be very cautious with the squash and stretch

because it translate the softness of the ball.

If you're going to extreme,

your ball will look like a water balloon.

As impact occur on frame eight,

on frame nine, I will slightly squash the ball.

Then on frame 10, before the ball is leaving the ground,

I will stretch it a bit toward the next position.

To do so, again select the upper controller

and press G to move it towards the frame 13.

See how after the bounce I'm stretching

the ball less than before?

Because as it touch the ground,

it's losing energy,

so I can't make it stretch

as much as when it was going to touch the ground.

Again, I did a little mistake along the way.

If you check frame 18,

we can see that our bouncing ball

is not touching the ground

and I'm offsetting its root controller

to fix the problem

but the issue doesn't come from the root controller position

but from the second squash and stretch controller.

The lower one.

When I inserted the keyframe

on all the controller previously,

I've forgotten to reset its position

when the ball was touching the ground.

So currently, this controller

is still in its squash position

as when the ball is in the air position on frame 22 and 13.

And this is why the blocking stage is so important

because if I was already splining my animation,

I would have a hard time to stop this

and I will be fighting this deformation with my curves.

So with the lower green controller selected,

I will go over all the keyframe

and press Alt + G

and you can see the ball getting back

into its original shape.

And now I can fix the root position

on each of those frames.

Now, to make my action editor a bit cleaner

and more readable, I will collapse all the panel

because I don't need to see all the channels

and starting with the root bounce controller,

I will duplicate the frame 18

and move it on frame 20

and get rid of frame 19.

Since the ball position doesn't change

between those two frames,

I don't need to have a keyframe in between.

And duplicating frame 18 on frame 20

will ensure I have consistency

into my animation or at least onto the position

of my ball when it's on the ground.

I will also duplicate frame 26 on frame 27

because the ball is still on the ground

on this frame.

Then I'm checking each frame

and I see that I need to revise a bit the squashing

with the lower controller

because it's still very strong on frame 29.

So I press Alt + G to cancel it

and then press G and Alt + Shift

to move it on the z-axis very subtly.

From there, I will play my animation several time

to fill the timing.

So I can see that on the first bounce,

there is something a bit off.

Having the first upper position on frame 13

is a bit too soon

and we configure this in the timeline,

the upper pose is on frame 13

and the contact pose on frame 18.

So I only have three frame to get up in the air

and five to fall down.

So I will offset all the keyframe from frame 13

by one frame

and then I will move all the keyframe from frame 18 or 19

by one frame back

so that I get an even spacing

between the upper pose and the lower pose.

The first bounce uses eight frame to complete.

So I guess we can use six frame

to complete the second bounce.

So frame 20 will be the contact post.

23, the upper pose,

26, the next contact.

And the final bounce could use one frame less.

So our bouncing ball timing is quite logical.

I start with an eight-frame bounce,

then a six-frame bounce

and finally, a four-frame bounce.

It's totally fine if your timing is different.

The important thing is to get this logical pattern

between the first bounce and the last bounce

with a decreasing number of frame

between each bounce.

This logical approach of motion

will help us solve some animation problem later on.

It's not a rule of thumb though

because animation is also a matter of randomness.

Our ball could be bouncing on an uneven ground, for example,

so it will make the timing a bit off at some point.

But in your learning path,

it's important to understand the logic of motion.

In this specific case,

the fact that the ball is losing energy

on each bounce so the timing

between each contact pose will be shorter,

in the next video, we will polish the animation

using the graph editor.

To summarize, we have seen

that we can use the grease pencil annotation

to plan our animation.

Using the motion path display is important

even at the blocking stage

as it really help us figuring out the motion of the ball.

We have to be careful when using squash and stretch

because it does communicate the softness

or the material of our ball.

So ask yourself what kind of ball am I animating?

We can tackle our animation timing

with a logical approach.

Our bouncing ball will lose energy

on each bounce so there will be smaller and smaller until.