Original subtitles

- [Instructor] It's now time to switch

to spline and polish our climbing cycle animation

and then will be to remove the linear

feeling of the cycle and get this hopping motion.

So as usual

the first thing we will do is select all of our controllers.

Then in the action editor, select all the keys.

Press the T key and switch to busiest

so that we are now in spline mode.

You can then press control tab to switch

to the graph editor, enable the display all filter,

press alt+H to make sure that there is no curve hidden

and press shift E to apply the make cycle modifier.

Now the animation will be cycling forever.

As we have seen in the previous cycle,

we need to clean the root spoon, meaning

that we want a linear interpolation of the root ball.

The first thing to do is to select all the key frames

of the root bone and remove all of them

but the first and last.

Then you can either press the T key

and switch to linear interpolation

or select all the key frame

press the V key, and switch to vector handles.

This way we will also have a linear interpolation.

To enable the linear extrapolation,

we first need to get rid of the cyclic modifier.

Select all the keys of the root bone

press shift E clear cyclic modifier.

Then press shift E again, and choose linear extrapolation.

Now our character will be moving forward

in a linear fashion.

At this stage, you probably have some foot sliding

and that's perfectly normal.

We will fix and place the feet later on.

As explained in the beginning of this video,

the big deal here will be to get rid

of the linear feeling of the motion.

All contacting frames for the feet will still be linear.

Also the root motion will be linear.

So we need to play with the body,

the chest of our character, to input some hopping

and contrast into this climbing animation.

As usual, I'm working with the main controller of the body.

I will start with the location channels first.

And while I generally start

with the Z location channel,

the up and down, here I will start

with the Y location channel

because since our character is rotated upward,

the Y rotation channel kind of become

the up and down channel.

And this is the one where we must input

as much contrast as possible.

So the first thing I had done was to push the pause.

Push the Y value higher so that the character

is pushing backward more.

Since we are working on the cycle, I make sure

that I always duplicate the first key frame

and move it onto the last key frame.

To bring contrast to the motion,

the thing to avoid is to create a perfect sinusoidal shape.

This is why I have almost a plateau

between frame zero and one.

And I will also push

from eight to slightly higher.

This way I'm pulling my character back upon eight frame.

And then I transition forward on the other frames.

I can even increase the contrast

by lowering the value of the curve on frame three.

In the end, we get the fast variation

from frame two to frame four,

then some kind of lower plateau

and then it transitions smoothly to frame nine.

And these back and forth motion will be amplified

by the back and forth motion

of the chest, head, and hips.

Regarding the Z location curve,

the amplitude of the motion is more subtle.

I'm mainly cleaning the shape

of the curve so that it's a little smoother.

And don't forget that when your character

is pushing forward his body

is getting closer to the tree trunk.

So he's losing altitude.

And when he's grabbing back the tree trunk

then he's getting more altitude.

At some point, I flattened the curve to make sure

that the belly of the character

wasn't clipping with the surface of the tree trunk.

For the X location channel,

I just got rid off any variation by flattening the curve.

I will input a little bit of twisting on the chest

of the character in the final stage of the polishing.

The rotation motion is also pretty subtle.

As usual, I'll start with the X rotation

because it's the most influential.

And I've mainly been polishing the curve,

making it smoother, and making sure

that the character is diving down into the jump.

As you go along again

don't forget to duplicate your frames

in row on your last frame.

And don't forget that when you're ready to curve

you might be going back onto it whenever you are polishing

other controllers, because everything is connected.

So modifying the torse now might quite have

changed the behavior of the chest, of the head, et cetera.

And when you're polishing a specific part of the character

don't forget to isolate it

to check the motion this way you will get rid

of all the visual noise

and will get something more readable.

The animation now looks less linear than before,

and I'm slowly getting the "oomph"

of the pushing of the character.

Another way to see it is obviously to calculate

the motion path of the main controller of the body.

And from there, we can clearly see

that the spacing is getting bigger whenever

our character is pushing forward on this straight line.

And then I have a tighter spacing.

The character body is kind of slowing down in space.

Whenever it's catching up.

I can now switch to the chest controller.

I'm first clearing the motion path

from the main controller to have a cleaner workspace.

And as I oftenly do with the chest controller,

I will work first on the X quaternion rotation channel.

I won't be polishing the Y and Z quaternion on rotation yet.

This is something I will do at the very end

of the polishing stage,

based on the contact pose of the feet.

To get a better readability of what I'm doing,

I will select the neck bone and calculate the motion path.

The neck controller is directly attached to the chest.

It makes this motion path relevant.

The idea here is to emphasize the previous motion

we have created with the main body controller, making sure

that our character is kind of sliding along the tree trunk.

And making sure we emphasize the pushing motion.

If we watch the final cycle again, just check the distance

between the hips connection and the shoulder connection.

This way we can clearly see how I stretched

the body of the character to show

that he's curling his whole body using his shoulders

and his chest.

And this is something I've achieved

by reworking the Y and Z location curve.

I advise you to work on both curves at the same time time

because we are working on the chest controller

which is a child of the main controller.

So we are working on local space

so you will need to play

on both curves to get a straight motion.

The Y location curve will have the main influence

on this animation.

I have, I can trust that frame zero to three,

this is the pushing motion or pulling motion

as you wish, where the body is stretching.

Then as the character is airborne

the main body is slowly catching up with the chest.

So I'm reducing the stretching

by lowering slightly the curve.

And finally, we have a more radical squishing

or compression of the chest when our character is contacting

with the tree trunk.

And I get a fast modification of the curve value.

The Z curve is mainly here to correct

the orientation of the chest.

Finally, I flattened the X location curve

because I don't want the chest to move left to right yet.

Next I've placed the head controller.

So it's a pretty classic workflow again.

And the curve editing from the head will be very close

to what I just did for the chest.

As I always do whenever I'm tracking head,

I will use the nose controller to calculate the motion path.

The idea, as usual, is to keep our arc

as smooth as possible.

Again, I'm starting by working on the X,

what's our normal rotation of the character.

The idea is to make the head slightly diving

or dragging into the jump forward.

But as explained during the run cycle

I try to avoid too much rotation

because I don't want the head to wobble up and down.

This will communicate a lack of control from our character.

And since he's very light and agile, we don't want this.

I play on the Y and Z location curve early on

because I do want to get this compression

and stretching of the head as soon as possible.

And I'm using the X quaternion rotation

to fix the arc of the nose.

In the end, I get almost the same curve as for the chest

but with one frame of offset.

In the end, I was going back and forth onto the head

and the chest controller to get rid of

this little glitch on the motion path of the nose.

Since I have a bit of physics lag

on the last frame of the motion path,

I spend some time

on the three last frames to try to smooth this out.

Then I add the loop to my animation in front view.

And I saw that I got a slight rotation left to right

on the motion path of the nose.

So I've made a first pass

of polishing onto the chest and the head rotation

on the left and right axis, the Z quaternion rotation.

Those are very subtle modification.

I've kept the curve pretty smooth.

And the idea is to rotate the torso

toward the contacting point.

And when the character is pushing, for example,

with his right hand, you push the chest

in the other direction, in the opposite direction.

So when he's contacting with the right hand,

you push the chest toward the right hand.

And when the hand this pushing, or pulling in this case,

to get up there, the chest is getting moved away

from the hand, just make it super subtle

and keep the curve as smooth as possible.

On this specific animation, the hips are very important.

Hips controller is generally something you have to

spend time on because it really defines the way

a character is contacting with the ground.

The way he's gathering energy,

pushing and pulling his body off the contact surface.

Think of the hips as a catapult for the legs.

Starting with the X rotation curve I will make sure

that when the character is projecting his leg backward,

I have a very aggressive motion of the hips.

And I tried to push the curve as much

as possible sometime it kinds of look weird

so I will tune it down a bit.

But I want really to push the paws as far as possible

because we do need to see this rotation

of the hips backward whenever the character is pushing.

And then when our character is contacting with the ground,

the hips are really rotating

inward toward the contacting frame.

And these very contrasted motion does translate

on the curve.

You can see that the curve goes down and up pretty quickly.

The next channel will obviously be

the Y and Z location curves.

We have already seen our squash and stretch was important

into this animation.

So I will just emphasize this.

And then we do need an offset between the stretching

and squashing of the hips compared to the chest.

The hips are dragging backwards.

So on the first two to three frames

the hips are kind of squashed.

And as our character is jumping, they get stretched a lot

and they will slowly catch up during the airborne position

but mostly on the contact frame.

The hips curves shape are slightly smoother

than the chest and the head

because since the head and chest are leading the animation

this is where we need to bring the most contrast.

And as the hips are kind of following, are dragging

and catching up, we can give them a slightly smooth curve.

They are kind of following the main body controller

chest and head motion.

With have the whole body of how our character

polished the animation does look way better already.

So in the next video

you will have a full time lapse of this polishing stage

and then we'll start polishing the legs in the next video.