Original subtitles

- Let's gets starting with the blocking

of the climbing cycle of our squirrel character.

For the previous animation, we will start fresh.

I will duplicate the keying action

rename it off free climbing blocking

and make sure that it does affect chooser

by clicking the little shield icon.

I will select the rig and instead of protecting

the character vertically in pose mode,

I will rotate it in object mode

so that we can have a vertical representation

of the character but it will still be moving forward

whenever we are animating it.

It's also better to create a tree trunk dummy.

So in object mode, I will press Shift + A

and add a cylinder and I will scale it

in edit mode vertically.

I will make sure that its silhouette is aligned

with the z-axis so that it's aligned

with the origin of the document.

The initial pose I will use the squashed pose

of the character in the video reference.

Can use the corresponding then their file as a reference,

all the picture in this video.

First in object mode, I'm make sure that my character

is properly aligned with the tree trunk.

I always start the blocking off of pose

by moving the main controller of the body

and trying to find the contact pose for the feet.

One important thing when you watch a reference

is to see the position of the different body feature

compared one to the other.

If we have a look to the back feet,

they're more forward than the hips.

The hips are currently hanging in the void

and the back legs are pulling the body up.

The tail motion on this animation will be pretty subtle.

So I just place it so that it's smoothly hanging

and not clipping with the tree truck.

Then I'm working on the feet and hand position

so that they are contacting with the tree trunk, why?

You generally aligned the feet with the running direction.

In the case of this animation,

I've opened the feet and the hands in a V-shape.

This way, our character will have a better grab

on the tree trunk.

When they look at my reference,

I would slightly push the hands up.

Imagine you are hanging on to a wall or a tree,

your arm will mainly be stretched.

The main difference here is that the character is very light

so he won't be stretching his arm

or his arm won't be as extended as if he was very heavy.

But this is something I will have to consider

whenever I'm starting to polish my character animation

is make sure that we have the feeling,

he's pulling himself up.

Finally as I felt that the character was a bit too squashed,

I've just pulled a bit the hips and the chest controller.

And we are done with this first pose.

When it comes to block the second pose,

I advise you to go for one of the most extreme pose.

Don't try to block the next pose

in the emotion of the character.

The second advice is that you can choose

whether you move the root bone or not.

I've decided to move the root bone

and try to compensate the position of the feet,

and it was some kind of extra work.

You can animate your character on place

and then during the polishing stage

or during the splaining stage,

we will input some linear motion

of the root bone to fix that.

Important thing here is not to answer any technical issue,

but really to match the references.

As the second extreme pose, I've selected the one

where our character is about to lose contact

with the tree trunk.

The front legs are already not contacting

the tree trunk anymore,

but the front leg are still in contact with it.

The key feature we have seen that

during the reference analysis,

is that the body is getting closer to the tree trunk

as the character is pushing the hips,

chest and head get really extended,

the head and chest extend first

and those three body features gets more

or less aligned into a straight pose.

So one important thing too is that we have to push the pose.

So here I feel like the pose is okay

but not pushed as much as I liked it to.

It's better to push it a little too much

as it's going to be a very fast-paced animation.

So we need quite of a striking silhouette change

of our character so that the animation will read well.

Only to the mistake I've made

and I will need to fix later on,

is that I've used the main body controller

and pushed the character up a lot.

So you can use the body controller

for the left to right up and down motion,

but avoid moving it too much forward and back

because this is a motion that will be mostly generated

by the root motion and the locomotion of the character.

Slightly adjust the hands of my character

and I think we are good to go for the next pose.

As explained before, I haven't made my life easier

by choosing to move the root bone.

So what I'm doing here is that I'm trying to figure out

how much of a distance the character is moving

during one jump.

So I'm trying to figure out a point on the tree trunk

or the back of the tree and the head

and hips position of the character.

In the end, I figured that the character

was moving his whole body

and the hips were getting further away by one head.

So the character is jumping off it's full body length

plus one head.

Since we are building a cycle,

the first and last pose should be the same.

So I will duplicate the first pose and move it on frame 20.

And holding the D key and left clicking,

I will draw some reference point

to measure the position of the head

and then the position of the hips of the character.

So I move the base of the hips,

one head further than the position of the head

on the previous pose.

This is not rocket science,

you can push it a little further if you want

it will make your jumping motion a little more dynamic.

The next pose I want to work on

is when our character is airborne.

So I just push a bit the root bone up

because our character is traveling through space.

And then we can start reworking the silhouette

of our character.

This is the point where the front legs

are fully extended forward,

the body shape of the character is pretty straightened

but the head and the chest are slowly catching up

meaning that the distance between those two

is getting a little smaller

while the hips are really dragging.

When you are posing the legs,

make sure that you look at it from every angles

and realign the knees with the body.

I also make sure that both the feet

and the ends of the character are not symmetrical,

It will look a bit boring.

For this motion, I haven't set any left to right motion

into the spine nor any twisting.

I guess there should be some

but it's pretty hard to figure out right now,

while in the polishing, based on the contacting pose

we might be able to input a bit of it.

As our main key poses or golden poses are now down,

we can go ahead and add some in-betweens or breakdowns.