Original subtitles

- [Instructor] The time has finally come

to animate our squirrel character.

The first thing to do

is to play the Squirrel_Rig_UI.pi script.

It will enable our rig layer

and we will be able to hide bone groups easily.

You can duplicate our keying set action

and create a new action

that we call 01 Run cycle.

And then double check our preferences

by going into the Edit menu in the top bar,

Preferences, Animation

and check that the Only Insert Available is on.

It will override our usual automatic keying set,

making sure that we don't have any key

that will be written

if there is not an existing keyframe.

If I move this knee joint tweaker controller,

you can see that the auto keying is on

but Blender is only recording and writing location keyframe

for this controller.

This way, our action editor is clean in the keying

but on top of this,

we can still use a specific keying set.

And I will enable the whole character keying set.

This way, when I press the I key

to insert a keyframe,

Blender will key all the controllers

of my character and this is done

on top of the only available option we have set

in the preferences.

When we were blocking the bouncing ball animation,

I advised you to key all the controllers.

And here is the reason why.

I will rapidly block out a turn

with a change of foot position.

Our little friend is rotating his body

to look to the right

and he's also moving his feet accordingly.

During most of the animation,

his right front foot stays on the ground

and it switches position only on the very last frame.

Here I've done the blocking of those three poses,

only keying the controller I'm using.

It looks great in step mode

but as soon as I will switch to spline,

the right front foot

will be interpolating from the very first frame

to the last.

And it doesn't look good at all.

And I will have to move the keyframe,

insert new keyframe, et cetera.

While if I insert a keyframe on the whole character

on each main poses,

I will get a better behavior

and the right front foot will only move

from frame 20 to frame 30.

So you may think this is not a big deal

but believe me, if you have this kind of problem

on the whole character on every leg,

this is going to be a pain.

And if you have the same issue

with all the controller, the head, the hips,

that's gonna be a nightmare.

So key all your controllers during the blocking stage.

The second step is to study references.

You will find a link to this one

in the documentation.

It's very important to watch as much reference as possible

and honestly, nowadays, it's not that complicated

with YouTube to find good references of animals.

I guess you already know what I'm going to show here

is that the body of the squirrel

is like the bouncing ball.

Squashed when it's on the ground

and as soon as it's going in the air,

it is stretching.

Basically, the chest of the creature

is arriving first

and then the hips are catching up.

So when preparing an animation,

you have to make this work of seeing the character

as a whole piece.

Look at the curve

that make the body, for example.

Once you have the broad detail,

you have to go for the smaller detail.

Look how the front feet arrive at the separated time.

It's just one or two frame of difference

but it will make your animation way better

than if both end arrive at the same time.

In animation, when we get something symmetrical

or something occurring at the same time,

we call this twinning.

And this is something you should always avoid

unless it is done on purpose.

If you do the Hulk smashing the ground

with both his hands,

you want both to hit the ground at the same time.

It will communicate impact and strength.

But in the case of our squirrel,

look at how breaking the symmetry looks way more natural.

On the left, the character looks stiff,

on the right, it looks way better.

So don't forget to avoid twinning

both in timing and in shape

and let's get started.

I don't know how many frame I will need to block

or how long will be the jump

but I will start by aligning the feet

with the ground.

One cool feature

is that once I've positioned one

of the foot, I can select it

and press Control + C

to copy its pose and you will get a copied pose

to buffer message in the footer of Blender.

If I now press Control + Shift + V,

I will paste the mirrored pose automatically

on the other foot.

This is a shortcut I'm going to use a lot.

From there, I will start posing the pushing pose

when our character is preparing to jump.

So I have my reference image on a second screen.

So I invite you to have it always open

and try to find the frame

where the squirrel is preparing to jump.

His body should be very squashed

and the root of the torso almost horizontal

with the ground.

Starting with the back legs,

I'm slightly rotating the foot

toward the outside of the body.

This way, I'm breaking the symmetry both

from the side view and the front view.

Then I will move its front feet right

in between the back feet.

I'm also breaking the symmetry,

having one of the front leg slightly more forward

than the other, one slightly more raised than the other.

Then we need to squash the whole body

by rotating the chest controller

and the hips controller.

You can also slightly move them toward the center of gravity

of the character.

Just think of your character as a box

and this box has to contain the heaviest part

of the character, the chest and the hips.

The head and the tail counterbalance each other

and if we draw a straight line in the middle

of this pose, we can see

that our feet are more or less framing this contact point

between the vertical line and the ground,

offering a balanced pose to our character.

When blocking a character,

you should always start

with the most extreme position.

So I will now block the airborne position.

I start by moving the root controller

by half of the length of the jump.

In this case, I move it by 30 centimeter forward

and then I will use the torso controller

to raise the character.

In most cases, you will use the root controller only

to move your character on the y and x-axis.

When I do a run or walk cycle,

I generally deal with it

without moving the root bone

as if the character was on a treadmill.

But it's a bit harder to read the shape of the jump.

So during the blocking stage,

we will use what we call a root motion.

And when the animation will be finished,

we will get rid of this root motion

so that our character

will be jumping without moving forward.

This way it's gonna be way easier to use it

as a run cycle

and we will just have to move the root bone

wherever we want in our scene.

Don't worry if you don't get it right now,

we will do it together later on.

Back to our air pose.

You can see that I've slightly stretched the body.

So I've canceled the rotation on the hips

and the chest and then I'm resetting them by hand.

So this is something I advise you to do

when you don't have a major change in the pose.

You select the hips and the chest controller

and press Alt + R and Alt + G

to get rid of any rotation

that was recorded on the previous pose.

And then you create the new pose yourself.

Blocking a new pose from a neutral one

will push you to correctly look at your reference

and force you to work on the shape of the new one.

The back legs are pointing toward their starting point

while the front leg are pushing forward

to pull the whole body in the air.

Both the front and back feet are currently pointing inward.

It preserve balance

and aerodynamism to the character.

You can use the pull target

and the rotation controller

to fix the elbow and the knees of your character.

Don't forget to scrub between your first

and second pose

to kind of feel the motion, the movement.

Then to improve the pose,

I will stretch my character even more

and realign a bit the hips and the tail.

During the blocking stage,

figuring the overlapping motion of the tail

is pretty hard.

That's why I'm just working with the very first controller

of the tail.

We can work on the follow-through of the tail

while detailing the blocking

or even during the polishing of the animation.

To finish the blocking of those extreme pose,

I will have to guess the landing position.

On the air extreme pose,

I will set the root bone position to -0.3

and I will duplicate all the keys

on frame zero and move them on frame 10.

Since the airborne root position on the y-axis

was -0.3, I will set the landing at -0.6,

two time further.

Now I scrub through the keyframe

to feel the motion

and I feel should be a little further.

So I just need to select the root bone

and on frame five,

I will try a -0.4

and now I feel like I need

to tweak a bit this pose

to make the character a little more horizontal.

So this is something important.

Don't hesitate to revise your blocking.

The blocking stage is the most important stage.

And if you don't do it properly,

if you don't spend the time now,

you will suffer even more during the polishing stage.

I can now push my root bone

to the position -0.8 on the landing frame

and now it feels like the squirrel

is jumping too far away for me.

So I will try to find an in between with -0.35 and -0.7.

Compared to the reference,

our squirrel is making pretty large jump to move forward

but animation is not necessarily

about copying the reality.

It's exaggeration.

And this will lead us to a peel.

It's a but like making a caricature of motion.

When you do a caricature,

you try to find the cool feature

of the face and exaggerate them.

We are doing the same here with motion.

In the next video,

we will start adding breakdowns

to detail the blocking animation of our character.