Original subtitles

- [Instructor] Since it's a pretty complex animation,

we do need more poses in the blocking stage

so let's add some in-betweens.

The first pose I've been working on was the pushing pose,

the character is getting almost fully extended

the front legs or hands are just about to leave the trunk,

the back legs are not extended yet,

pressing Shift S I've snapped the cursor

to the leg of my character,

now I can push the foot backward

and then move to root bone forward

or upward since our character is rotated to match

the previous position of the foot

so that we don't have this sliding contact effect.

The trick here is that I input the value

of the movement with the keyboard pressing G then Z to move

along the global Z axis

and press 0.08 to move by eight centimeters,

this way, I do know how much I have moved the foot

and I will offset the root bone,

but also the hands of the character by the same value

this way I'm sure that I will have corresponding motion

for all the parts of the characters.

It's a good way to do this because it's very accurate

but it's also a bad way

because it's a very constraint way to do this thing,

this is why I advised you not to use any root motion

for the blocking of this animation in the previous video

but to show doing so that's not bad

because this is something we will have to do later on,

so it gives us a base to work on,

doing it the hard way here might not be the most

intuitive way to do it

that's what I'm meaning

but I will have a solid base to go into polishing them.

Dispose is the one where the head

has the biggest spacing compared

to the previous pose,

it's one of the first pose

where the character is pushing forward,

so I will extend the neck of the character quite a bit,

it feels like the front legs are a bit too extended

and on the reference we can see

that the front legs are not touching the trunk anymore

so I will put them into a pose

where they just took off the tree trunk.

Since this in-between is starting to define

the emotion of the character

because we have the extreme poses and this is an in-between

so it makes the transition between those two poses,

this is why I'm playing the animation

of curbing through the frames a lot

beyond matching the reference pose

I'm trying to feel the emotion of the character.

Try to fix the orientation of the arms

I'm facing some kind of issues with the rings,

some limitations, this is pretty usual

with this kind of inverse kinematic controllers

so I reset the rotation

and instead I'm using those tweaker controllers

to give a better shape to the arms,

so I advise you to deal

with the shape of the arms using those controller

for this specific animation.

The next critical pose for me is the one

whenever the character is contacting

with the surface of the tree trunk,

this contact frame is occurring between frame 15 and 20

so I will set it up from 18

for example, it really doesn't matter from the time being

we are just breeding the different poses

and then at the end of the video

we will do a rapid timing paths.

The first thing I do to switch

to this new pose is to move the root bone

so I've been trying to move it using the same technique

as for the previous pose

meaning that I'm moving the root bone

entering a proper value with the keyboard,

but since my character has no contact with the tree trunk

it doesn't really matter if shall not really accurate

with the position of the root bone

right now, there won't be that much of the problem

we will be able to offset a bit the position

of the root bone during the polishing stage.

What's important here is that

since there is no contacting frame,

no part of the character contacting

with the tree trunk or with the ground

for example, the fact that the root bone motion

is not perfect, doesn't matter,

we won't have any sliding foot effect here

because there is no contact with the ground.

So in the end, because of this foot motion

and the squeal to have everything perfectly aligned

and to try, I spent most of the time trying

to figure out a way to position the hands properly

while it wasn't important,

the only thing important is to make sure that the position

of the hands are correct compared to frame 20

and even if there is a bit of a challenge

a bit of a difference this is something

we'll be able to fix when we are polishing

by moving the curve or duplicating the curves,

what's matter here is really the pose of the character,

so the front legs are almost fully extended,

the back legs are catching up pointing

toward their landing pose.

And finally, we have still the hip sat down

dragging a bit, but they are slowly catching up,

while the chest and head are getting very close

to their final pose or to the pose we have on frame 20,

so you can see on the reference

that the curvature of the body

of our character is slowly getting back into it's S shape.

The next pose is more of a breakdown

that in in-between onto this breakdown

between frame zero and five, because on frame five

our character ends a normal angle contacting the tree trunk

with all my read controller selected,

I'm pressing a Shift E,

then when I moved the mouse left to right

I changed the value of the breakdown,

I will set it to 50%,

then they will left click to confirm

this way blender has automatically interpolated

all the controller of my character by 50%

between frame zero and frame five,

now I don't want to move the hand controllers,

so I go back on frame zero select one of the hand controller

press Shift S snap the cursor to it,

then I go back onto frame two my break down pose

and press Shift S selection to cursor

the hand will be snapped on to the same position

as on frame zero,

I will repeat the process for the other hand and this way

my whole character body and root has moved by 50%,

and I can work on this pose and the feet position is fixed,

thanks to this little manipulation.

So now I can work on the torso controller to refine the pose

and offset the different element

because if everything is interpolated by 50%

I will have a very robotic motion of my character.

So here, as we have explained before

during the reference analysis

I'm pushing a lot the neck and chest of my character

while the hips are dragging a bit back,

from there what I did is that I have taken

all the key frame of each pose

and I have set them every two frames,

so one on frame zero one on frame two,

four, six, eight, 10, and 12.

I feel like this cycle should be 12 frame long

so I'm just kind of distributing the different posts evenly

for the time being because I'm not working

on the timing of the animation right now

but it does help reading the animation.

The last pose I wanted to create is the one

where the back legs are contacting with the tree trunk

as explained why we were locking the idle animation

you should create a bring down pose each time

there is a drastic change in the pose of your character

meaning that here the back feet are abohm

and then they are contacting with the surface

in this regard, their mechanical function

and the way they move is changing a lot

because when they are floating in the air

you should be looking for arcs

while when they are impacting with the tree trunk,

you're not looking anymore for arcs

but mostly for a linear interpolation

as the foot is sliding along the surface.

So it's better to add a breakdown

to this pose than trying to figure this out

during the polishing stage,

this pose was pretty quick to achieve

because we have already depends

on the front legs already contacting the tree trunks

and the only thing we had to do is to make sure

that the back legs are contacting and the hips catch,

I've made a quick timing paths here, but I will show you

how to get a better timing paths in the next video.

Lastly, I couldn't help polishing a bit to tail motion

but honestly, at this stage it's mostly a waste of time,

don't work the tail for the time being since it's ending

and following the body, we will work on it

during the polishing stage once we have finished

the whole motion of the body.

What was a little more important here is to rotate

around your character, check out all the poses

and then fix a bit the pole target to give a better

orientation to the knees and also check

out the elbow tweaker bones,

you can see that my elbows are pointing in word

and it doesn't look super natural,

so double check each poses and check that the silhouette

show character, the shape of the arms of the legs

et cetera, looks good from every point of view.

In the next video, we will revise

the timing of this animation is still

in step mode before jumping into spline.