Original subtitles

- Finally, the polishing stage of our run cycle

or gem cycle animation, as you wish.

With all of our keys selected, I will press T

and switch to Bézier interpolation.

This is what we call splining the animation,

because we are just changing the curve

from constant to spline.

And I must say that from our blocking

it already looks pretty cool.

I will quickly clean up the ROOT bone.

So I will select it

and use the only selected option in the action editor.

When doing a locomotion cycle

it's better to have a constant speed.

So I just need to keep the first

and last key frame and switch them to linear interpolation.

Linear interpolation means constant speed.

And while we are polishing the animation

we can enable or disable the ROOT motion

to check the motion path of our character,

while moving forward or in place.

For the polishing stage,

it can be interesting

to use the properties I have created on the streak.

You can access them

selecting the property bone on top of the character.

The hide properties are not supposed to be keyed.

That's a mistake I have made.

So I will just try click on it

and choose to clear key frames.

Hiding the legs and hiding the tail

while we are polishing the torso,

for example, will help a lot,

because we won't be distracted

by the legs motion nor the tail motion.

And so we can approach the animation

of the torso of our character as a bouncing ball.

A very common rule in animation

is that everything is a bouncing ball.

That's why the bone simple exercise is so important.

Whenever you are learning animation.

Finally, as always

it's very important to use the motion path

as explained before I've added to my quick favorite

so I can rapidly access them, pressing the Q key

but you can also find it under the armature properties.

Let's starts by polishing the torso controller

or the root of the torso, if you will.

I've hidden the tail

but I advise you to also hide the legs

because they are a bit distracting in the end.

I've hidden them a little later on

but it's better to hide them right at the beginning.

I will first work on the Z location curve

since it's the most influential curve in the motion

of this controller, it's pretty straightforward

because it does really looks like our bouncing ball curve.

There are two main differences.

I've slightly scaled the upper vector.

So that my character is kind of

floating when it's reached its highest point.

So it brings a bit of style into my animation.

And the second thing is

that we have a slight easing on the contact frame

because the legs of our character are absorbing the shock.

So we don't have a broken vector

on frame zero and frame 12.

Remember that frame zero and frame 12 must be the same.

So I will basically revise a bit

the position of frame one and 11, and then they I will scale

my key frame on frame six,

when I'm editing the curve,

especially this kind of broad curve.

I often only press the cue key

in the 3D view port to access my quick favorite.

And I update the motion path.

Don't forget to check the animation

both with the ROOT enabled and disabled.

Here the video is sped up twice

but you have the curve in reference on the top right corner.

And at this stage

you should be able to polish the curve.

Again as an art form,

I can't teach you everything about animation

because a lot of it is about feeling the motion.

So you have to feel if you want to hold your character

a little more in the air or make him jump a little higher,

a little lower, that's about you.

The thing I'm pretty convinced here

is that the leg are really distracting.

So don't forget to hide them right now.

I'm now switching to the X rotation curve

and the weird thing here is that we have our XYZ rotation

but also W your rotation.

And there is also this strange quaternion name.

Don't worry about that for the time being

we will be focusing on the X, Y, and Z rotation curve.

We can kind of ignore the W quaternion rotation curve

for the time being.

And I will explain you Euler and quaternion rotation later

in this course,

the X rotation curve allows us to

lean our character forward and backwards.

We can see, we have an important change on the rotation

or orientation of the torso of our character

when it's contacting and leaving the ground.

I've created a little plateau in the middle when

our character is floating in the air

the key on zero and 12 are identical

and I've rotated the angles

so that we have a continuous flow of the curve.

When I'm editing this rotation curve,

I'm thinking of how I want my character to behave.

It's a very light animal with a lot of agility.

So I want a very smooth motion.

So I want to shape the body

of my character so that it follows the flow of the jump.

And I curve the body even more

when the character is landing and pushing to jump again.

When I got this feeling

I fixed the first and last key frame

aligning them using the individual origin.

It allows you to rotate both key frame independently,

and then I've created this little plateau.

To have my character slightly flatter

or horizontal while in the air.

It will make it float a bit more.

And here is the result after polishing the X rotation.

The Y Location, motion of our character is barely noticeable

because most of the forward

and backward motion is generated by the ROOT bone.

And I've used the Y location

of the body control during the bulking

only for very subtle adjustment of the pose.

So I've zoomed on the curve

because the value are very subtle.

And what I will do is just to align the curve

on frame zero and frame 12.

This will remove any jitter during the cycle.

We can enable later on the cycle modifier

so that you will see the continuity of your curve,

and it might be a little more intuitive to edit them

to align them.

I will apply the same process to the Y and Z rotation curve.

They are here to slightly twist the torso

of our character and slightly rotate it side to side.

So they just communicate a bit, the fact that we

haven't been using tweening when our character is landing

meaning that his front legs don't land at the same time.

So there will be a bit

of twisting in the shoulders and in the torso

because everything is connected on our character.

And this is something super important

when you are animating a character,

remember that everything is connected.

So if you move your hand, it will, at some point

make your legs move.

I know it's a bit extreme, but just keep this in mind

so that you won't forget to kind of polish a bit everything

or think about it whenever you are working

on the extremity of your contractor.

So what I will do for the Y and Z quaternion rotation,

since those are very subtle motion,

I will just create a subtle flow in the curve,

making sure that when the curve is going

from one extreme frame 12 to the other

frame zero, it does flow properly.

So I create a slight overshoot

by pushing the key number two, a bit down.

The idea's to get smoother changes in the curve

instead of adding very brutal changes in the curve.

So it's a bit the same with the Z curve.

When I zoom on it,

we can see that we have a peak at the end.

I will smooth the curve down,

rotate the very last key frame,

duplicated it on frame one.

Now my curve is diving between frame zero and one.

So I will just push down a bit the key frame number one

onto the front two

to get a smoother curve on its whole shape.

We haven't used scaling so those curves are perfectly flat.

So the first pass of polishing is done

for the body controller.

Those curves will probably be adjusted

when we have polished the chest,

hips and head of our character.