Original subtitles

- [Instructor] It's time to finally start polishing

our squirrel idle animation.

It will be kind of similar

as when we have been polishing the run cycle.

We will start with the most influential controller

of our character like the torso or the body controller,

then polish the contact paws, the feet

and then all secondary motion

and follow through like the tail and the face.

You can choose whether to polish fully

each controller one by one

but when I work on long sequences like that

I prefer to work by chunk,

like working on the first two paws and polish them

and then go to the paws three and four

and polish them, et cetera.

I think it's a little more motivating

when you do this by chunk

because doing a long shot like that

and polishing only one controller

will show results only on the long-term

and sometime it can be hard to stay motivated.

But this is really a matter of personal choice

so you can work the whole animation at once

focusing first on the torso and then the legs,

and then all the secondary motion

or do as I will polishing each segment of the animation.

(air whooshing)

Just a big warning in here

I selected all the key frame and switch them to busy.

And this is a mistake since my root motion

is supposed to use a linear interpolation.

This is not a big deal, but it leads to some mistakes

into my transition between the run cycle and the idle pose,

so make sure you select your root controller

and press T and switch it back

to linear before going further.

When I play the animation

it doesn't look that bad when we switch to spline mode.

And this is because we have detailed a lot our blocking.

But there is definitely something weird happening

about the head rotation.

The head of our character is twisting

or flipping the wrong way.

This is a super classic bug

whenever you switch to spline

and we will see how to fix this.

I will explain our rotation behavior

in a more detailed video in the next chapter.

So before we even start polishing class

we'll go into the graph editor

and we will fix it when you get this kind of bug, it's 100%

because of the curves as we are using quaternion rotation

for the neck and head, we have four rotation channels.

And when I frame my curve pressing the dot key

on the num pad, we can see this huge drop on the W channel.

And basically what's happening is Blender

using the shortest path to turn the head.

So instead of rotating

with the nose facing the front part of the character

it's going back because the turn is short term this way

and this is the common problem with quaternions.

To fix this I didn't really fix the curve first

and then try to match the previous pose.

So I will simply push this W curve up

so that it has a better continuity.

And then I will slightly tweak the other curve

so that the head is getting back to its original position.

When you get this kind of curve dropped,

you generally have a whole chunk

of your animations that is slightly offsetting.

So I will select the Z rotation curve

and push it a little up.

So I'm guessing it's the Z rotation curve

because I have a huge drop on the Z rotation curve too.

And I can see that between frame 72 and 95,

the head was offset compared to what I have done before.

So the trick here is to test each curve

and see which one is bugging and then offset it.

So that it's betterly aligned

with the previous key frame of this curve.

So I'm just tweaking the position of the curve.

And I just focus on the pose

of my character on the current key frames.

I am fixing the pose.

I'm not thinking about the animation,

the interpolation of the curve or whatever.

I'm just kind of reshaping the poses of my character.

And so if you're happy with the current poses I have

meaning that they are close

to what I have during the blocking stage.

I can move on and start polishing.

(air whooshing)

So this is something that is becoming very common

into this course is that the first thing I do

is work on the torso root of my character.

Because as I've explained before,

this is one of the controller

that will add the most influence onto the character

and to get a good visualization of the spacing

and the arcs I've calculated the motion path.

The first thing I'm working on

is the follow through animation after the landing.

This is why I've pushed my curve down

in an overshoot just after the contact pose

our character has a huge speed going down.

So we need to absorb the impact and then it recovered

and we have our Z location getting stabilized.

So we have just created some kind

of overshoot and now I will switch on to the Y curve

and I will do exactly the same

as our character is contacting the ground

while we're moving forward he's absorbing the inertia.

So I do create a slight overshoot here,

so whatever the trend form channel you are using

you will see this kind of shape in my curves very often.

This is really the archetype shape

of a curve for a follow through or an overshoot.

So it doesn't apply for impacts

where the curve will stop right on the contact pose.

But as soon as you have a lot of verticality in a curve

that means that the motion is very fast or very important.

So as soon as it stop,

you will have a bit of overshoot

or follow through animation,

meaning that there is a bit of inertia

and you can apply it to scaling rotation and location.

The more you will input

and the longer there will be, the more weight

and lack of control, you will get,

the tighter and smaller those overshoots,

the lighter or controlled the motion will look like.

As the main body controller arc start to look decent,

I can now switch to the rotation of this controller.

I always apply the same rule.

I start with the X rotation curve

because it's the most influential into this motion.

So I'm kind of tracking the head,

when I'm rotating the whole body

because this is what will give you the curvature

of the whole body.

And as I polish, the X rotation,

which shows the most from a profile view,

I also rework the Y location.

So when I'm polishing my curve,

it happened that I offset a lot of them.

This way I'm retiming the animation.

If I feel like the landing animation is too long,

I can offset a bunch of key frame by one frame back

and it will happen a little faster.

In front view, I'm working on the Y rotation

which is the twisting of my character.

When he lands, I twist toward the left hand

which is the first contacting the ground

and where the character will put his weight

and when he's raising on the right hand

I'm twisting toward this point too.

With the Z rotation curve,

I'm creating the side-to-side rotation

and what I will do here

as I have a drastic change in the orientation

of my character is input a very slight overshoot.

So creating those overshoot, or follow through

in the curve is not an automatism,

but when you see this kind of shape in your curve,

meaning that it's going down or high very fast

and then it stopped creating a plateau.

Just try to add a bit of an overshoot

and see if it does fit your animation.

Again, I can't tell you this is the way to go

because animation, as any form of art,

is about experimentation

and what we work for this specific squirrel animation,

won't work for all the squirrel animation

you're going to be doing.

This might not fit the type of style

you are looking for into your animation

whether it's super realistic

or it's super stylized.

But what I want to say here,

is that it's a matter of experience.

I'm giving you the foundation

to create this kind of animation,

and then you have to train your eyes

by animating and animating again.

But this is a cool tip you should keep in mind

and when you get more experience

you will know when you have to dial

the intensity of your overshoot, get rid of them

or add even more of them.

On the specific pose I'm rotating the body controller

and lowering it and also rotating the chest controller

to avoid the right leg

contacting the ground to be overextended.

This is something you can also fix

in the second time using the little tweaker controller

the small sphere on the elbow of the character.

Unless this is something you are looking for

if you're doing on purpose

having a stretch, lean on your character, very straight,

will look stiffened, won't look that natural.

So here I'm not saying

that you can't have this leg fully stretch as I am here

but I will not all the pose with the lean totally stretched.

So I've done whatever I could to fix the shape of the arm.

But if I can, then I'm totally fine using the tweaker bone

pushing it back a little to have a slight bend in the arm.

Even if in the end, it's a little longer than it should be,

we won't see it

and the silhouette will look better.

(air whooshing)

When polishing the head,

the first thing I do is to track the nose.

So here I have a controller for the nose, so that perfect.

I will calculate the motion path onto it.

As usual, I start with the X rotation

because it's the most influential controller

on this part of the character.

And the idea here is to make the head dragging

compared to the rest of the body.

So since the head is further away

from the center of gravity of our character,

that is represented by the main body controller,

it will kind of drag, it will be delayed in its motion

but I want to make this subtle again.

We are working on the very light character

so I don't want its head to wobble all the way around.

It will drag, but just a touch.

The overshoot must be as short as possible.

If we were animating a baby, for example,

it would lack of control in its head.

So that will be a great moment to make it drag a lot more,

build stronger overshoot,

and even made the head wobble.

But this is not the case for our character

is currently very agile.

And I want to show that he's controlling his landing

and his head is more driven by curiosity

than its own weight.

As soon as the rotation are fixed

and I've done it also on the chest controller previously,

I work on the location curve of the head.

The idea is to squash the head inside the body

whenever he is raising very fast.

And then when he get curious

or when he hit its final poses, I push the head forward.

One very important thing

is that squash and stretch

is not only about scaling something

or really squashing it.

It can be represented by the distance

between two controllers in this case,

the head getting more into the body

but the head doesn't get squashed.

The neck does get squashed a bit

but we currently don't really see a deformation

but the silhouette of our character overall get shortened.

So it gets squashed a bit.

So here you can see that I'm playing in the plane

and throbbing through my timeline,

playing with the Y and Z location curve,

just to get this slight head bop

when it comes to its extreme pose,

creating the slight shake of the head

using the location instead of the rotation,

as we explained before,

won't translate a lack of control

because our character eyes are stable.

He's looking at a point in space.

While if we were doing this overshoot with the rotation

the eye will be kind of jiggling

in the space, in the screen space,

on what we are seeing in our animation.

And it will then look like our character is controlling

what he's doing.

As I'm getting close to having the head polished,

look at how I slightly move this point on the curve.

So I don't want to get a perfect plateau of the curve.

I want to keep very subtle movement

that we call moving holds.

(air whooshing)

As I'm pretty happy with my head motion,

I will now be working on the nose of the character.

The idea here is to create a secondary motion.

So the nose will simply be dragging a bit

while our character is raising the head.

If we watch the motion path from frame 14 to frame 17

we can see that we have a lot spacing

meaning that the head is moving fast.

So this is where the nose of our character

will be dragging the most.

And it does show onto the curve here.

So I'm not using the graphing tool to control the nose.

I am moving it directly into space.

And then I may use the graph editor

just to slightly polish the position of the nose.

On frame 19, I've created a little bump in the curve

so that we have some kind of bouncing motion of the nose

as our character reaches its highest point with the head

all those little element give texture to our animation,

small details and I will be doing the same with the eyes.

I won't be animating the night blink

but then we'll very slightly close the eyes,

our character is raising his head.

All of these little details are like squash and stretch.

They are supporting the animation.

So I haven't been using the squash and stretch controller

on top of the head of the character

because it doesn't really fit

what I wanted for this animation,

but using the eyes and the tip of the nose

and slightly dragging them backward kind of input

this squash and stretch feeling of the motion.

I will proceed the same with the ears.

I will make them drag whenever there is a fast motion

and I will create a slight overshoot

or jiggling of the heels.

Very subtle whenever there is a stop into the motion.

So I've been animating the nose,

the ears and the eyes using the straight-ahead method.

And it's ideal for this kind of secondary motion

where you can't really predict

where the heels are going to be rotating,

where the nose is going to be,

while you have all the other controllers to polish first.

This is the kind of motion that is really hard to block

or to predict.

This is a technique that I use a lot

whenever I'm animating fingers, for example,

I will shape the end ring, the blocking stage

but I won't necessarily put a lot of detail

during the breakdowns and stuff like that.

Since a lot of things can happen in the animation

of the eyes, the fingers, the ears,

the ponytail, whatever,

all those secondary elements of a character,

I oftenly animate them using the straight ahead method

meaning that I've blocked my character, or least most of it.

And then on top of this, I will add those additional motion

or additional animation

that are currently following the broad

and main animation of your character.

And you've probably, haven't seen me working

on each curve of those controllers

and that's perfectly fine.

At some point you don't need to polish each curve.

You can simply watch the animation and watch the spacing

in the 3D viewport and see if it does work.

Curved editing is super important

but it's not mandatory for every controllers.

So I rapidly polish the hips

because it was mainly compensating

the motion of the character

or the movement of the character.

And I can now switch my attention

to the feet of the character.

(air whooshing)

I tend to be kind of lazy whenever I'm working

on the feet of character.

And that's a very big mistake.

So this is one of the thing

I'm trying to improve in my animation.

Feet tend to have a lot of motion

and a lot of beginner tend to keep them still on the ground.

So you should avoid it.

Whenever you feel like your character is losing balance

maybe offset a bit the foot

and create some kind of very small step.

One of the very important thing regarding walks

and whatever kind of steps you are doing,

is that any character, whether it's an animal

or a human being will try to put as less

energy into it as possible,

meaning that you will raise your leg as less as possible.

When we see the original motion path

shown on the screen right now,

we can see that I had the very eye position

of the foot on frame 14.

This is why I edited the Z curve

of the location of the foot.

And when I update,

you can see that now the curve is looking a bit better.

The forward spacing is a little weird

because I have a big acceleration on the Y curve

and then it slowed down.

So I'm kind of flattening them with the Y curve

and also lowering the foot just before the contact pose.

When the foot was moving forward,

I edited the rotation of the curve

so that it just drags a bit backward.

And then when it's contacting on the ground,

I will slightly raise it to have this kind

of slap motion only on one frame.

That's perfectly fine,

but we will feel this is a very important tip

that will make your animation looks a little better.

Whenever you are doing a step

whether for a whole cycle or an animation like that,

you should avoid flat curve on the rotation channels

during the contact pose on frame 16.

Having it flat on the next frame is totally fine.

There is always a bit of control of foot slapping

on one or two frame, and then the curve get flat.

So as this first step is polished,

I can work on the elbow joint of my character

as the front leg get over extended.

It seems to be bending the wrong way,

so I will just frame by frame, push a bit back

this tweaker your controller, just to get a slight bending.

I don't need to care about the curve here,

I'm just caring about the shape of my character.

(air whooshing)

All right, let's move on the left front leg

or left hand if you will.

The first thing I will do as usual

is calculate the path of this hand

and it has really become an automatism

for me to use the motion path in production.

With it, I can see right away

that the motion of the foot is not correct.

The arc as in it's shape

where I'd like it to have more of a C-shape forward.

I'd like to create a foot roll motion

on the next frame from the tip of the foot.

So from the side view,

I shift right click on to the tip of the foot.

Then I will switch the pivot point

to be using the 3D cursor.

And I will rotate the foot forward.

Since this is a pose I would spend time

to get right, using the graph editor.

It's better to pose it directly in the 3D view.

So is that Blender will write the curves for me.

And then I just need to polish using this in-between curve

we've just created.

From there, I have enough information

to start polishing the curve

working first on the Z and Y location,

here I'm building a slight overshoot on the Y axis

so that the character will push his hand forward.

And then the back as it reaches the highest point

and they will update my motion path to see

if my arch is looking good.

And then I will slightly tweak

the plateau shape of the Y and Z curve

to avoid having a pure holding here.

I want to add a slight moving hold

so that the hand feels connected to the body

that is still moving.

The left-to-right motion of the front foot is pretty subtle.

So I will just smooth out the curve

and input a bit of an overshoot on frame 20

and a bit up jiggle on frame 25.

So when I polish to location channel, for example,

I always double check my animation through different angles.

I also play the hold section.

I'm polishing to make sure

that everything looks connected and relevant.

From there, I can work on the rotation.

So why the rotation is the main motion of this front leg

on this part on the animation,

polishing the rotation of the front foot or the hand

of the character will really improve the motion.

So I'm just mainly working on the X

but only on rotation first, adding a bit of dragging.

Then I work on the Y and Z pattern on rotation

just to add a bit of twisting and a bit of dragging

on the left and right motion of the hand.

And the here again,

I will bend a slight overshoot on the curve.

So you can see that curve wise in the graph editor

you will often get the same kind of shape

the same curve behavior.

So don't be afraid by the graph editor

this is something you will get used to very fast,

if you practice.

(air whooshing)

Polishing the tail was pretty straightforward

as it is mostly a follow through animation.

So I do believe you now understand

that I always work with the channel

that input the most motion.

This is why I stopped with the X rotation curve.

So this is a pretty different behavior

compared with the run cycle

or the gym cycle we've made before.

Here, I want faster whipping motion,

meaning that the motion of the tail

is not supporting the movement of the character.

It's not drawing the shape

and the path of the character through space.

I'm using the tail here with fast and snapping motion

to show the attitude of the character.

When we watched the reference,

we can see that the tail move very quickly

and then just stop.

So I want those the little wavey motion to happen very fast.

On the first contact, the motion of the tail

is here to balance the character.

But as soon as he stop,

the tail motion will be mostly used to show the character

the emotion of our character

whether he's happy, curious, or whatever.

And having those rapid change

in the shape of the tail

really translate the fast pace

of the metabolism of small mammals, like the squirrel,

the mouse, et cetera.

If you think of the tail of a cow or an elephant

it can move quickly, but it won't stop instantly.

There will be inertia.

There will be follow through animation.

While on this character,

the follow through might be like

on two or three frame maximum

and you just freezing the hair.

So I'm repeating the same concept again and again

but all of those follow through animation

can translate the weight of your character

or the stiffness.

Here, for example, while the tail is very flexible

at some point it's full of muscle

and our character can kind of hold it in place.

Like whip it's tail and it stop it.

And I think this is a very specific motion

of the squirrel tail that will make it more believable

or at least that will input this squirrel-like motion

to our digital character.

On those fast-paced motion,

It's pretty hard to get a nice tail shape.

And this is why on this specific part

I'm almost animating on the ones.

It means that I have a key frame on almost each frame.

This is what animating on ones means,

is that you will have a different pose

or different key frame on each frame of your animation.

When animating digitally,

we kind of always animate on ones

meaning that our character

has a different pose on each frame

but when animating traditionally or making 2D drawings

it happened sometime that you will keep the same drawing

on one, two or three frames.

In this case, you will be animating on two or on three.

So it's not correct to say that I'm animating on ones

because I'm putting a key frame on each frame

but that's kind of a way of talking

or saying that at some point,

you might need to detail your animation on ones

and insert a key frame on every frame.

And for each of those poses, especially on action motion

or on very fast motion

like the tail motion of your character.

In the end of polishing the segment of the animation

I've been working with the tweaker bone of the back leg

to keep the back leg slightly bent the right way,

slightly bent forward.

That was kind of a long video with a lot of information.

I will keep the next one as short as possible.