Original subtitles

- [Pierre] One thing I'd like to do early on

is to determine the tempo of the animation.

I'm still using blender default frame rate,

which is 24 frames per second.

And my ultimate method to figure out the rhythm

it's to do noise with my mouth. (mimics bouncing)

So we can argue this is ridiculous or not,

but if you've ever animated before,

I'm sure you've done this also.

And this is currently a very good method

because animation is about rhythm.

So don't hesitate to sing your animation

or to make noise with your mouth

because you will input natural tempo that fits you,

that is appealing to you.

And when I was doing those stupid bouncing noise,

I was almost into a perfect two time per second.

So don't hesitate to record yourself or do whatever you need

to be able to make the sound and measure the tempo of it.

So this scientific method

pushed me to set my animation loop to 12 frames.

So I've set the error extreme on frame six.

As we are doing a cycle,

our character will move forward at a constant speed.

So to help us figuring the position of the root bone,

I can select all its key frame,

press T and switch them to linear.

This is not something mandatory.

If you prefer to go ahead and move the root bone by eye

and figure out the spacing, that's perfectly fine,

but it will help us figuring the foot position

on this first breakdown that I will set on frame one

and it will be the pushing pose.

Going back and forth

I'm trying to match the position of the back feet

on frame zero and frame one.

But again, don't worry if it's not perfect,

because when we will be polishing the curve,

there are methods to make it match.

Here, the important thing is to focus on the silhouette

of your character and the goal of this position.

So I'm currently adjusting the edge rotation,

but before I was adjusting the main torso controller.

The idea is to make these torso controller

pointing toward the target,

the target being the highest point in the air.

So most of the power of the jump

is due to the pushing of the back legs.

So the front legs will be dragging toward the initial point,

the point where they come from.

And they will drag or point toward this position,

both in their location and rotation,

that's why I'm rotating the hands backwards.

I will try to shape a bit the tail, but again,

I won't put that much in the energy into it right now.

I will mainly work on the tail

during the polishing stage.

I will also try to break a bit the position of the back feet

by rotating one of them a little bit.

Again, the idea is to break the twinning.

One of the foot is leaving the ground

slightly after the other.

So there will be a bit of back and forth with the back legs.

Because even if I want to avoid twinning,

I need to keep them tight timing wise

because they are influencing the bounce.

They are giving power.

Now I'm comparing my new pose with the next one.

And I see that I need to revise the orientation of the torso

because my character was diving or pushing too much forward,

not high enough.

Then I will slightly lean the head forward

because if you watch the reference,

the head is pretty stable.

So we will give it a bit of overlapping motion,

but we will try to keep it stable,

looking at its target point.

While I've started stretching the hips,

I keep the chest pretty squashed

throughout the middle of the torso.

And since the root interpolation is a bit annoying to me,

I will switch back to constant interpolation.

From there, I will scrub a lot into my animation.

I will try to fix a bit the feet orientation,

especially the front feet

that need to be oriented a bit inward in the front view.

So that's also a mistake to avoid

when you are animating a character, especially cycles,

you will tend to animate them from a side view

because it's more natural for us

to feel the motion this way.

But don't forget to check your character

from the front view, that's very important.

You should turn around your character as often as possible.

When animating a character, it's like sculpting,

we are sculpting the pose.

So you need to rotate around the model.

When sculpting, you spend half of the time

rotating around your character and watching how it behave.

This is the same with animation.

If you want to create good poses,

you need to check them through every angles.

At this stage, you can shape a bit the ears if you want,

that's not a problem.

It will help reading the silhouette of your character,

but it's a secondary motion

so you don't need to do it right now.

It's a bit like the tail,

this is something that will be easier to figure out

when we are polishing the animation.

So I'm still struggling a bit

with the position of the back feet.

I've kept one of them flat on the ground

because I feel like it looks more grounded,

which is the case, for sure.

So (indistinct) let's jump into the next pose,

the landing pose.

To start to working on the landing pose,

I will duplicate the last pose

so that I have the position of the feet.

This way I know where they will be landing.

Then I will roughly give the orientation

to the torso controller.

So I will push it up and I will rotate it

toward the landing point

or toward where our character come from.

Beware as I have made a little mistake

that I will fix later on,

but if you called avoid it, that will help.

Don't forget to move the root bone a little backward.

It will offset the whole character a bit backward,

and then you can place the feet and the torso as you want.

If you're like me and you forget to do it,

don't worry, it's not a big deal.

That won't be a pain to fix afterward.

So the first thing I will do

is to give the right orientation of the whole body.

I will also pull it back

so that I get a very stretched pose.

The idea is that the front feet

are just about to touch the ground.

So our character is stretching between the target point

and the previous position from where it comes from.

As I did before, if I can't feel the pose,

I will press Alt + R and Alt + G on the chest controller,

for example, to cancel any rotation or move I did before.

And I will just sculpt the pose of the character.

As for the other poses,

you have the reference on the target pose we want to match

in the lower right corner.

Since I don't have that much to comment on this part,

I will see you at eight minute and 50 seconds.

(serene music)

One thing I've input into this pose

and that we need to input

into the other pose while polishing

is this slight twist on the torso.

So since the left front leg of the character

is the first that will touch the ground,

I slightly twist its chest toward this left hand.

And a very common rule that we will see

when we will work on humanoid character

is that when the chest or the shoulders are twisting

or leaning toward the point,

the hips are twisting or leaning in the opposite direction,

giving a nice curvature to your character's

spine and balance.

While working on the pose,

I felt that the timing was a bit off

because the change in pose between frame 11 and 12

was too dramatic.

So I've offset the pose to the frame 10.

This pose was the hardest to make right so far.

So I'm going back and forth a lot,

I'm modifying the position of the legs a lot,

I want to avoid twinning.

I'm reworking the torso orientation,

a lot of different stuff.

There are very little chance

that you're able to match the perfect pose,

which doesn't exist at the first time.

So don't hesitate to come back on it,

don't hesitate to even modify the previous poses.

And since we are starting to feel the motion,

it's a good moment to display the motion path

of the torso controller.

This give us a rough idea of the motion of the body

and it makes me confident enough to shape a bit the tail.

But don't worry, you don't need to do it right now.

Again, we can do it during the polishing stage.

Nothing special to comment during this stage,

so I will leave you and see you

at 11 minutes and 38 seconds.

(serene music)

As I told you a little early on,

I forgotten to move the root bone.

So I will move it backward in the position it should be.

And then I just need to select the chest controller

and all the foot controller and move them all together

to fit my previous pose.

Since all those controllers are child of the root,

moving them together is like moving the root bone.

And again, I will fight and fight refining this pose

until I'm satisfied with it.

And as soon as I am,

I will add a last breakdown or in-between on frame 11

because we can figure the position of our character

from frame to frame six.

There will be specific error motion,

but we can track the position of the feet,

the position of the torso, and try to get a smooth motion.

And this is a big strength of the graph editor

and the fact that we are using a computer

to do the animation.

It's perfect to create a smooth interpolation

between two poses.

But since we have a big difference of pose

between frame 10 and frame 12,

you can't let the computer do the guesswork.

We need to build this new breakdown or in-between ourself.

So this time I won't do the same mistake

of forgetting to move the root bone.

And since it's supposed to have a linear interpolation,

it's position between frame 10 and frame 11

should be right in the middle of those two poses.

And there is a tool that we haven't used yet,

because I didn't want you to use it

and it's called the Breakdowner.

You can select it with the tool panel

and with any bone or group of bones selected,

when you left click and drag,

you will see a breakdown percentage

appearing in the top left corner of your screen.

It currently gives you the level of interpolation

you are performing.

So if I left click and drag

or press Shift + E to activate it

and set the interpolation value to 50%,

I'm sure I will be right in the middle.

You can constrain this tool to rotation,

move and scale by pressing G-R-R-S.

You can also concentrate it to specific axes,

and there are two other tools under the Breakdowner's menu

that we are going to see later on.

With my root bone position,

I can press I to insert a key frame for every controllers.

From there, the first thing I will do

is try to match the feet position

so the feet are targeting the landing position.

It's exactly the same workflow as before.

Then I cancel the rotation and move on the torso controller

and I rework the pose.

So I did a bit of twist by pressing R,

then Y twice to rotate on the local y-axis.

And now I will push the root of the torso toward the ground.

The right leg is the first to contact the ground

as it is the first one to be raised when leaving the ground.

So I can have the left arm slightly bent,

and they wouldn't put a lot of squashing,

both in the chest and hips,

by moving them toward the ground.

I also make sure that I rotate the foot

so that the plant is facing the ground.

It's like the food are dragging

so the tip of the food will later

than the base of the foot or the heel.

That's also a form of follow through.

If you animate a hand or a foot moving,

you want the fingers of the toes to be dragging

to have an overlapping motion.

One important thing I've learned through my classes

is that says is that you should track your motion

as soon as possible.

This is why I've calculated the motion path for the feet,

so that they can see their trajectory and timing.

And this will be the perfect tool to double-check ox.

We will talk more in depth about the ox in the next video.

I will also add a bit of squashing on the head

by moving it a bit backward.

And to counter this I will slightly rotate it up

so that our character is watching towards its next step.

I will also calculate the motion path of the head bone

and while I'm posing it, I'm trying to create a smooth curve

between the different position of the head.

This is the arc of the head.

So try your best here to get a smooth transition

between the different poses.

But if it's not perfect, again, don't worry,

we will see that in-depth during the polishing stage

and by reading the curve, it will be even easier.

Once I'm done with that, I can check my animation.

So we really start to have the feeling of the emotion,

but the problem is that my character is jumping forward

so I would like to see it looping.

Just uncheck the route controller so that your character

will be jumping and looping without moving forward.

Now, as for the bouncing ball,

since frame zero and frame 12 are the same

I will just read the animation from frame zero to frame 11.

It already looks very good.

But one last thing I'd like to address

is the squashing of the character on the very first frame.

I think we can push the pose even more.

So I will just push the test controller a bit backward,

the hips a bit forward,

and the root of the torso a bit lower,

Since we are animating on once here,

meaning that we are creating a key pose on each frame,

there won't be any specific interpolation.

This is why I use the motion path

to make sure that I have a nice spacing.

With this pose on frame 12 updated.

I'd like to duplicate all the key frame on frame 12

and move them on frame zero.

But I don't want to duplicate the root key frame.

So I will lock the root,

press Shift + D with all the key frames selected on frame 12

and moved them on frame zero.

And that's it.

You've just blocked your first character run cycle.

It's not something easy so if you have failed, don't worry,

just restart from the beginning.

I'm here to give you the method,

but it's only through practice

that you will become a good animator.

Don't stress out, watch the video again.

And if you're ready,

I'll see you in the next one to polish this animation.