Original subtitles

- [Instructor] This video, we are going

to finish our walk cycle animation, polishing the arms.

If you want to track your arcs on the arm,

I suggest you track the tweaker controller

of the elbow.

Then we can select our arm controller

and we can isolate the rotation channels.

For the whole chain down to the fingers,

we will only be playing with rotation channels

from now on.

The most influential channel for the rotation of the arm

in our swinging motion is the z quaternion rotation.

Again, polishing this curve

is gonna be pretty straightforward.

It is mostly about cleaning the curve

than really reworking the animation

or the motion of the arm.

From view, I will press Alt + B

and frame half of my character

so that I won't be distracted by the right arm

in the back when walking from the side view.

The idea is to make sure

that we hold a bit the arm forward

and backward when it reaches its extreme.

While the arms were leading the animation

during the run cycle,

in the case of a walk cycle,

especially this relaxed walk cycle,

the arm are swinging in reaction to the fall.

So they will be delayed compared to the motion

of the foot.

Just make sure that your arms hit their extreme a bit

after the contact post.

In our case, we have our contact pose on frame zero

and the extreme is on frame two.

Once you get a decent result using the z-quaternion curve,

you should switch to the y-quaternion curve.

My case, it add almost the same behavior

as the z-quaternion curve

and its motion was added upon the z-quaternion curve.

Polishing this curve allows us

to refine the swing motion,

especially on the easing toward both extreme.

That animation is not a linear workflow.

Based on your blocking, you may not have the same result

as what I have on screen.

This is why it can be hard sometime

to follow an animation course

where you may not have exactly the same behavior curve wise.

So your goal is not to focus on the curve

but on the motion itself.

In my case, when I reached the extreme,

especially when the arm was swinging back,

it feels like it was hitting a wall.

It was reaching its extreme back

and then kind of bouncing forward.

Polishing the y-curve did fix the problem.

This rotation curve allows us to move the elbow away

from the chest of our character.

So basically, when the elbow is passing by the chest,

you would move it away

and when it's in the back of the chest

or forward in both extreme,

we will move it a bit inward.

With the arm polished,

we can jump onto the forearm.

As advised before,

if you want to track your arcs on the forearm,

I advise you to track the arcs of the wrist controller.

The cool thing about the forearm

is that generally speaking,

it can only rotate around one axis.

So we will only have to polish one curve,

the z rotation curve.

That might not be the case for a very stylized animation

where you want to break the limbs or stuff like that

to create stylized motion.

Basically, we want the hand

to drag compared to the elbow.

So as the arm is swinging forward,

I will bend the forearm a big backward.

We will reach the extreme as the arm is almost passing

on frame number eight.

As the elbow hits its forward position,

the hand will catch up

and the elbow will bend the other way.

The forearm will reach the other extreme on frame 21

as the arm starts to swing backward.

It's pretty easy to polish this curve

and you should have something quite similar to mine.

It might be offset in time,

depending on the timing of your walk cycle

and also depending on the amount of rotation

you are inputting,

the amount of dragging you're inputting to.

The more the hand is dragging,

the more the forearm will look loose

and the more your walk cycle will feel relaxed.

From there, we can jump into polishing the hand.

It's gonna be exactly the same process

but this time on multiple axis.

Polishing the hand rotation won't be a difficult task.

I'm first trying to figure out

which channel does what

and I will start by polishing the z channel.

Orientate the hand forward or backward.

So from our side view,

this is the first most influential channel.

The goal is to make the hand rotate

with a bit of delay compared to the forearm.

One major mistake you should avoid

is to bend the hand too much backward.

Try it yourself and rotate your own hand along this axis.

You will see that when it comes

to rotating the hand backward,

you are pretty limited in the range

of rotation you can reach.

And it's even worth the other way.

So don't overdo this backward and forward rotation.

Regarding the x-quaternion rotation,

the inward and outward rotation

or orientation of the hand,

the motion range is not really a problem.

From the front view, whenever the arm is swinging outward,

I make sure to make the hand drag a bit

by rotating it inward

and as the arm swing inward,

I make sure to rotate the hand a bit backward

toward the outside.

Note that I have a bit of clipping on my model.

During the passing pose,

the sum is crossing the psi and cut the mesh.

So I will have to slightly open the arms

during the passing pose by pushing the x curve.

So while the motion may feel good,

I need to fix a bit this kind of problem.

So I will increase the x rotation amplitude

of the arms so that it move a bit more away

from the thigh and I will also slightly offset my x curve

for the hand so that I also move the hand away

from the side.

Don't forget to check your animation from every angle.

So animate from the side view,

front view and back view

and often turn around your character.

You should also check your animation in perspective mode.

Not only in autographic mode.

After that, I worked a bit on the y-rotation curve,

which makes the hand twist.

There is not much twisting in this walk animation

but still, it's important to polish it

so that we have a smooth movement.

I've also worked on the W-quaternion rotation curve.

The idea is not that it will influence that much the pose

of our character or the motion of the hand

but I just want to make sure

that it flows perfectly

and that it blends from one cycle to the other.

So the idea is mostly to clean the curve

than to improve the current motion or modify it.

I often don't work on the w-quaternion rotation,

especially for such subtle motion

but especially on cycles,

it can sometime input some glitches

if you don't have a good flow

between your very first and very last keys.

As soon as I add the satisfying hand motion,

so basically our whole arm moving in space,

I decided to mirror the motion

onto the other arm to have a better overview

of our current walk cycle.

I won't show you again how to copy

and paste mirrored a curve

or several curves onto the other side

of your character

since we've been doing this several time already.

And both the arms in action

makes the walk cycle looks really cool.

The final touch will be to work a bit

on the palm deformation and the fingers.

We can input a bit more details

into our motion by slightly animating the palm

and the fingers.

Regarding the palm,

I will only be playing with the z rotation,

compressing a bit the bones

and simply inputting a bit of delay

in the rotation of this pastor palm controller.

So I'm only using the z Euler rotation.

Whenever the hand is swinging forward,

I will slightly open the palm.

Whenever the hand is swinging backward,

I will slightly close the palm.

Then I will just make sure that my curve cycle properly

and I'm done.

To add on with the palm bone can be interesting

to add a bit of rotation in the fingers

and in the thumb.

Again, it's just about making the thumb

and the fingers drag a bit.

So whenever the hand is moving forward,

I make the fingers rotate backward and vice versa.

The only thing you have to check

and figure out is on which axis your fingers can rotate.

And the best way to do it

is just to check your own hand.

Your thumb can rotate along every axis

but the y-axis, you can't really twist your thumb.

You can easily curl your finger

but when it comes to twisting,

it's almost impossible

and they have a very small range of side-to-side motion,

so you can input a bit of side-to-side motion

into your finger as a dragging motion

but it has to be every subtle.

I will favorize the hand close/open motion

of the fingers.

Since there is not that much to explain

about animating the fingers for this walk cycle,

I will let you with a bit of music

to finish this little time lapse

and have our whole walk cycle done.

See you in the next chapter

where we will learn how to create appealing

and convincing poses.

(tranquil music)