Original subtitles

- [Instructor] In this video,

we will polish the moment our character

is making his head turn and smell the air.

He's sniffing the air.

For this one, the body controller motion is quite subtle,

because in the end our character

is not really changing stance.

He's rotating a bit and raising a bit.

So as usual, I'm trying to make a nice arc

when I'm doing this kind of motion.

This time, the arc is more subtle than usual

because the motion is subtle.

As the character is shifting to its left

and rotating to its left,

I'm first slightly lowering the whole body

and then raising it.

It will create this arc.

This lower stance can be used as some kind of anticipation.

One thing I should have done and you should do

is that just before the character smells the air

as he push his body a little upper

you could add a micro anticipation on frame 60 for example,

just lowering the body attached before raising it even more.

This is something I've explained before

when we have done the walk cycle

something I like to update early on or polish early on

are the contacting controllers.

So as our character's shifting his weight onto his left

I want to move his foot controller too.

As the body was polished,

I have reworked the spacing of the footstep

making it a little faster

and then I've changed it's timing

so that it starts just after the body start rotating

but it lands before the body hit it's extreme pose.

Motion-wise it's pretty simple for the location.

The X and Y axis are using vector handles

so is that I have a linear interpolation.

As for the other foot contact animation we have done before

for the Z location,

the contacting frame 49 and 53

are using vector handles

and on frame 51 I've created a slight bump on the curve.

Keep it subtle, don't forget that we are lazy

and we won't be raising the foot that much.

What will really improve this footstep

is the rotation in the foot,

this is very important.

It's a very subtle motion

I don't say that I'm doing it perfectly

but what I'm sure is that animators will look

at these kind of details.

When the foot raise it's dragging

so the outer part of the foot is pointing down.

Then it's raising so that the ball of the foot

is facing the ground.

On the contact frame the foot is still rotated

and on the next frame,

I will make the foot flat

so that I have this slap motion on the ground.

From the side view,

it's even more obvious the foot's raised,

the tip of the foot is dragging.

Then just before the contact frame

the tip of the foot is raising

on the contact post the tip of the foot is still raised

and on the next post it's flattened

to get the snap effect on the ground.

The chest motion is here to support the head rotation.

The head is leading the animation

meaning that the chest will be slightly delayed

compared to the head.

In the end they arrived almost at the same time

on their extreme pose.

The little extra information regarding the chest controller

is that I've been using the location

to emphasize the smelling motion.

I've used it to pull the character up

and then I've added a slight bump on the curve

to create the smelling motion.

It adds an extra up and down motion to the chest

which is connected to the head

and the head will be rotating

or moving this up-and-down motion

that translate our character smelling the air.

As usual, when I'm polishing the head rotation

I'm tracking the motion path of the nose.

To create the smelling motion

I've just added a couple of bump on the X rotation curve

of the head controller.

Keep it subtle, you don't need the head to nod that much

and test different spacing.

In my case, having the first bump on frame 66

and the second on frame 73 was the good call.

After I finished polishing the head rotation,

I've added a bit of extra motion on the nose

playing with its Y curve.

The idea wasn't to make the nose dragging

but instead moving forward and inward

so that we can feel the breathing of our character

while he's smelling the air.

This is why the Y curve was working great for this one.

You can pause the nose by hand

if you're not comfortable with the curve

and try different timing.

Another detail I wanted to add on top of this

are the eyes slightly closing

while our character is smelling the air.

That's a pretty common thing when you are focusing

on when you are smelling something good,

you tend to close your eyes

to focus on the sense that is used to focus on your smell.

There's only the Z curve that controlled the eyeopening

so editing this curve is very simple.

The ears are also pretty important

to support this specific animation.

If you watch the spacing between the head rotation

tracking the eyes and the ear rotation,

we can see that the spacing is more important

on the left ear

and this is because I wanted the ear to lead the animation.

The character rotate the ears towards his next move

because the ears communicate his center of attention

and as he's going to smell the air,

the ears, the eyes, everything is pointing

in the same direction

because he's focusing on smelling the air

in this very direction.

For this part of the animation

I've also softened the hips rotation.

So they are still there.

There is still a little twisting

as the character is pulling his left leg

toward the contact point.

This is why I spent a lot of time

on the Z quaternions rotation curve.

Between frame 52 and 56

the leg is getting pulled and on frame 58,

the pose settle.

So we can see the curve changing direction.

It's getting down between frame 52 and 55,

and after that it's getting up ever so slightly.

The next thing I have polished

on this segment of the animation were the arms.

Since they are not contacting with anything

try to draw nice arcs with your arm motion.

The second thing we have pointed out

during the blocking stage was using the arm

as a counterweight to keep our character balanced.

So as the body is raising

for the smelling segment of the animation,

the right arm is dropping.

It lowers the center of gravity of our character

and it's also a nice contrast

with the left arm that is raised.

In the time-lapse you will also see me a bit fighting

with the right tail board character

because there was a bit of intersection

and wobbling in the right arm.

This is the kind of problem and limitation

you can get when using inverse kinematic

without a pole target as we are for the legs.

There is a little technique to fix it using constraint

but this is something that we will see in the next chapter

where I will introduce you to space switching.

On the time being I'm a bit fighting with the curve,

that's not a big deal, honestly.

And if you have the same kind of problem

just try to fix it but don't waste too much time on to it.

Regarding the time motion, there are two things to consider.

The little wiping animation a bit nervous,

again, to translate the character of the squirrel,

the root of the tail doesn't move that much,

there is just the middle and mostly the tip of the tail

that are moving.

Again, this is not a big motion

as during the run cycle or to recover from the jump.

It's just a little something

to give personality to our character

and to transition into the next pose,

which is very important.

If we watch the silhouette of our character

we can clearly see

that he seems to be slightly bending or leaning forward.

This is the pose where he's smelling the air

surrounding him.

So he's trying to reach as high and as far as possible.

And it seems that he's going to fall forward.

So in this case,

the final pose of the time is very important

because it serves as a counterweight.

So those are all the details you need to look for

when you are going to polish the segment of the animation.