Original subtitles

This is the final part of the polishing stage of the idle.

It's gonna be a quick one

because there is not that much of an action.

In the end, our character is getting into its anticipation

before jumping into the run cycle to flee the danger.

You now should know that we are going to track all the arts

especially the head motion.

For this segment of the animation,

the body controller will lead the animation.

Then the chest is dragging, then the head is dragging.

We can really feel that the head is getting

(indistinct) by the hips motion of the character.

And since after the idle,

we have a pretty extreme motion with our run cycle.

The idea was to eat the extreme pose on frame 104.

And on the next pose, we will push

that extreme compressing our character

to a maximum before it goes into the jumping action.

Since most of the last pose were duplicated

from the run cycle,

the handle of the curve might be rotated.

So, I will select them, press V and switch to auto clump.

Then polishing the body controller was pretty fast.

I, (indistinct) a bit on to the rotation curves

so that I get a bit of easing before reaching the frame 104

which is our extreme pose

that we are going to push on frame 105.

Then I've worked on the chest rotation,

the idea was to make the chest dragging.

So, I've slightly delayed the rotation

by pulling a bit the curves down

toward their previous value.

And as I reach frame 103, I slightly rotate the curve

so that I get a natural overshoot.

'Cause I'm getting a nice arc with a nice spacing,

you will see me pushing the X rotation curve

down on frame 105.

This is where I'm really pushing the pose

to have a very strong anticipation before the jump forward.

Polishing the head rotation was pretty simple.

I've made the head dragging

and I got rid of any twisting or unwanted rotation.

The idea is to get a very clean rotation

toward the extreme pose as our character is going to flee.

There is no secondary motion in the head

because it's a very fast transition

to the anticipation before the run.

Then I've quickly reworked the heels animation

to make sure that their timing was a bit offset compared

to the head timing and the whole body timing.

The idea is to change the pose of the head

within one or two frames to get to very snappy rotation,

very snappy motion of the heels.

Then I spent some time trying to create an eye blink

as the character while he's rotating his head

but I didn't kept this additional motion.

Because as the eyes are blinking

it creates a slight glitch into the animation.

And we already have a very fast motion of the head rotating

but the silhouette of our character get a drastic change

and it creates a lot of visual information.

Adding the eye blink on top of this,

make this portion of the animation very noisy in the end.

The other thing is that, this black dot that is the eye

of our character, really help tracking the head motion.

So, it really helps the audience following

the head rotation in this particular case.

So, if you make the eye disappear

while the character is rotating very fast,

it's like, he blinks and then he's in another pose.

That really doesn't read well.

So in end, I've just slightly squashed

the eyes so that we get a different head shape

but I've kept the eyes opened.

So, adding secondary motion

will sure bring more appeal to your animation,

but sometime it will make sure animation worst

by destroying its readability.

So, be careful with this and if adding

this kind of secondary motion then looks weird

and you can't identify the problem on your animation

just get rid of it.

Secondary motion like an eye blink

is here to support the animation.

To make it more readable or more interesting.

When polishing the hips,

I've just make it drag a bit compared

to the main body controller,

and I've made sure that I add some kind of big drop

between frame 104 and 105

to again push the pause on frame 105.

This is going to be our micro anticipation before the jump

so every controller that defines

the silhouette of our character should be pushed a bit.

The feet steps were very fast.

There is nothing new compared

to the previous polishing stage.

Just make sure that you have different timing

for the different feet.

And make sure that your spacing is correct,

avoiding easing whenever the foot is going

to contact with the ground.

This is why I almost always switch my contacting

location channels to vector.

And then as usual, I will polish a bit more

the foot motion by inputting a bit of rotation

to make the tip of the feet drag compared to their location.

One super important secondary motion I wanted

to add was the breathing motion.

To create it, you have to use the chest controller,

and use the X and Z scale channels.

Because the Y scale channel will push

in a way the head forward

while the X and Z scale will make the chest slightly bigger.

To figure this out, I've just been moving the curve

up and down and see how my character behaves.

And once I was happy with it,

I've tried to find the right spacing for this animation.

After a couple of tests,

I found that using six frame to make a full breathing cycle,

kind of marched what I wanted to have for this character.

When you watch the reference, you can see

that the belly of the character is moving very fast.

And this is very common, the smaller an animal

the faster we'll be it's breathing.

I haven't created any breathing variation

on this animation because again,

that will take time and the benefit was pretty low,

but adding the secondary motion

of the breathing was very important

and it really brings something new to the table.

So, in the end on frame 20 and 26, I've slightly scaled

down the X and Z and on frame 23, I've slightly scaled up.

Then I will get rid of all the next key frame,

select those three key frame press Shift

to duplicate X constraint on the X axis

and move by six frame on the right.

And then, I've pressed a Shift+R several time

to repeat the operation.

Just press Shift+R until you have filled

your timeline until a frame 105.

These little secondary action,

the breathing motion really adds to the animation

and I feel like it betterly define the kind

of character we are currently animating.

Adding these fast paced secondary action really

makes our character feeling more alive.

As I finished polishing this idle animation,

I want to isolate it from the run cycle.

So I will insert a keyframe

on all the channels on the last frame, 105,

and on the first frame of this idle, the frame 12.

Then I will select all the keys on the frame 105,

press the V key and switch the handle type to free.

I will do the same on frame 20.

This way we can remove the previous frame and the last frame

without any influence on frame 12 and frame 105.

From there, we can duplicate our action,

make sure it does a fake user by clicking the shield icon.

And then we can remove frame 0 to frame 11

and all the key frame after frame 105.

Then select all the keys and offset them

so that the first key frame starts on frame zero.

And now we have our cleaned up idle animation

ready to be used later on.