Original subtitles

- [Pierrick] There is one art pose

I'd like to talk about and work on

before we go into more dynamic and spectacular poses.

It's weight lifting poses.

The weightlifting exercise is a classic Funimation

because it's very hard and you learn a lot.

We'll do the animation

in the chapter I will publish later on.

I've called this video of Fighting Weight

because there is a lot of forces involved

whenever you are trying to lift any weight

or even your own body, and we are here to fight gravity.

And in a good fight, you need to know your enemy, gravity.

So the first thing I will do as usual

is to find the line of action.

It's not that hard to find,

I just have to follow the spine of the character.

One interesting detail here is the position of the head.

It seems that he's trying to lift the weight with his head,

so this is something we will have to translate in our pose.

Beyond the line of action,

there is a very important point to be identified here,

and it's the center of gravity.

And as soon as the weight are leaving the ground,

we have to consider them

as being a part of the center of gravity of the character.

And they think we can place the center of gravity

in the middle of the weight,

as they are way heavier than the character.

Now, our character purpose

will be to pull the center of gravity

in the straight line vertically.

And everything in his pose is meant to do this.

Look how the arms and the legs create a triangular shape

that goes straight up.

So we will have to make sure

that we have this tension in the arms

and the compression in the legs.

As usual, I've drawn some guidelines on top of the character

to get a better vision

of the orientation of the different features of his body.

In Blender, I will do as we did in the previous video,

I will switch to object mode and hide the camera.

Then I will select the weight accessories I have created

and I will place it in space.

You will find the initial file

with the object already placed in space.

Since we will be only posing the character,

I won't be creating any interaction

between our character rig and the current object.

We will see those mechanism later in the course.

In the meantime, as usual,

I can replace one of the 3D view on the top right corner

by the image editor and open the reference picture.

Then I will prepare on the character rig.

I will enter pose mode,

and I will make sure that I add the sword.

Then in the action editor, I will create a new action.

You don't need to do so since I'm providing you the file

with the already created action.

And before we start posing the character,

I will switch the end mechanism to inverse kinematics,

since our character will be in contact with the object.

Exactly as did when we were working on the baseball pose.

This way,

we will be able to position the hands on the weight

and then work the pose around the hand position.

So let's start posing our character.

I will try to position the hands properly.

But first,

I will lower the center of gravity of the character,

not of the whole pose, so that the arms don't get stretched.

But one important detail on the hand pose here

is that they are slightly bending toward the outside.

So this is a little detail we will have to take into account

whenever we are going to polish a bit our pose.

And I will slightly rotate the hand controller

toward the outside right away.

From there, I can press Control + C

and then Control + Shift + V

to mirror the pose on the other hand.

You may remember that in the previous videos,

I've told you that we try to break symmetry into a pose

to avoid twinning.

But one thing we have seen regarding twinning

is that it can communicate stability and strength to a pose.

And this is exactly what we need here.

So this is a pose where we will be able to use symmetry.

As we did for the previous poses,

I will first try to give the right orientation

to the center of gravity of my character.

One key component of this pose

is to have the sternum align with the center of the weight.

Then I will go back and forth

with the bending of the chest controller,

the hips controller, the head and the neck.

Whenever you're pulling a heavy weight,

your shoulders are pulled down,

so you need to rotate them toward the ground.

Don't make the mistake of raising the shoulders

because the character is trying to raise the weight.

Don't think about what your character is willing to do,

think about what forces are involved against your character

and it's fighting against those forces.

The feet will be aligned with the metal bars

that is holding the weights.

Remember what we have seen

when we have built our first pose,

we try to get the center of gravity to be aligned

within the shape made by the contacting point.

So if you have only two contacting points,

then the center of gravity must be aligned

between the two feet.

Based on the knee position on the reference picture,

as I'm posing the character,

I feel like the weights are too high.

So, I will go back into object mode,

I will select the weight object and moving along the Z-axis.

From there, I can rework the hand position,

the torso position and the shoulder position.

As usual, I will progressively shape my pose

by moving each controller one by one.

But one of the most important skill you need to develop

whenever you opposing your character is observation.

Look at the position of the feet,

they need to be under the bar.

Look at the hips, the butt is slightly bending backward.

The sternum has to be aligned with the center of gravity

or the middle of the metal bar.

The head is pulling the weight up

as if it was leading the whole body.

So whenever you are building your pose, sometime just stop,

watch the feet, watch the hand,

watch the shoulder, watch the head,

and watch their relationship in space, their position.

Observation, whether it's a pose right now

or everything in your everyday life,

will allow you to catch the very truth in any motion.

But most importantly, the behavior or the purpose.

Behavior, whether you're working on a humanoid character,

a creature, an animal, or even an object,

will bring personality to your character

and personality will bring life to it.

And this is the whole purpose of this course,

breathing life into our character.

And to build a personality,

you first need to get believability.

This is why you need to observe

and translate what you see into a believable pose.

And then you can push it to input personality,

to make it more appealing.

And if people can connect to something they know

or something they feel they know into your character,

it will become real to them.

And so, you will be breathing life into your character.

Back to the posing,

don't forget to look at your elbows

and the overall arm orientation.

And as I feel the left arm is okay,

I will just copy and paste the pose

on the other pole targets.

Then I will go back into object mode

and I will set up the camera.

So I will give it back a horizontal format

by changing the size.

On the reference picture, there is almost no perspective.

So we can keep a long focal length.

19 millimeters is okay.

And since we can barely see the top part of the feet,

it means that the camera is just above the feet level,

maybe the middle of the shin level.

So, I'm moving and rotating the camera from the camera view.

Choosing its local axis,

as we have seen in the previous videos.

Having this new point of view

does help me to see some of the mistakes I've made.

I need to raise a bit my character

and slightly rotate the hips inward.

One of the issue I have with my character

is the shape of the butt.

Fortunately, if you enable the leg tweaker,

you should be able to find some controller

that allow you to reshape a bit the butt.

So I will lower them a bit

and rotate them a bit inward to reshape the back.

Another thing I did have some difficulties to get right

is the shape of the head and the neck.

As my character is the bit skinnier

compared to the reference,

and don't forget that the rig has also its limitation,

I will be able to get a better shape

by simply pushing the head inward.

I feel like it makes a huge different in the pose.

We do feel like the neck is pushed with blood pressure.

Finally, I will use some of the tweaker inside the foot

to flatten the foot,

as if there was a lot of weight on top of them

and it flattened them.

One interesting thing on the reference,

it's the shape of the shoes.

It seems that there is something to raise a bit the heel.

It's probably to keep balance,

avoiding the foot to get absolutely flat

and falling backward.

Regarding the hand pose,

I start with the pinky because he does a very special shape

whenever I'm looking at the reference.

It feels like it's not totally closed,

that the first joint is not rotated that much.

Another thing that I'm doing

is that I will slightly scale each finger

using the first joint

and scaling them on their local X-axis.

And they will also do this on some of the pan builds.

With the weight and the pressure applied upon the hands

and the fingers, they are squashed against the metal

and it makes them looking larger.

So whenever you are posing the hands,

while you should favorize rotation,

don't forget that you can scale the bone,

you can move them also in space.

The important thing as usual is what we see.

So use the whole range of transformation you have

to get where you want to be.

Once you're happy with your end pose,

select all the bones in the hand

and mirror the pose onto the other hand.

While posing, I did feel like the weight were a bit too big,

so I've scaled them down.

From there, I did some minor tweaking

on the pose of the character.

But I just wanted to straighten a bit the legs

since they are a bit angling backward.

While I wasn't able to perfectly match the pose,

it feels a little better

with the legs slightly bent forward.

But as a final touch, you can enable the face controller

and create a slightly angry face.

And I feel like we can call this pose done.

It's time to push the pose.

And it was a little harder than usual

because we generally amplify the line of action.

We often elongate the arcs

to amplify the motion or the sense of motion.

And the first thing I was thinking of

was to raise the character.

But in the end, what we want to communicate here is weight,

the fact that our character is pulled toward the ground.

So what I did instead was to compress the line of action.

I've shortened the torso,

I've made arm as straight as possible

using the tweaker bones.

And since I wanted my character to be squashed,

I've scaled up most of the parts of the character,

but only to make them larger, not longer.

So I'm inflating the torso.

I will do the same with the thigh, with the chest,

using the tweaker controllers available upon the whole rig.

Increasing the thigh volume better sells the effort,

and we feel like the character is going to explode.

But I've also slightly inflated the neck.

And since I've built a bit of a face pose

on the previous pose, I've decided to push it.

So I will enable the tweaker bone of the face

and I will raise a bit a lower lids

and raise a bit the cheeks.

This way, the whole body of our character,

from the tip of the toes to the eyes,

will communicate the fact that he's pulling on this weight

as hard as he can.

Again, as an animator, you have to communicate something.

I've built this rig

so that we don't have too many facial stuff

that are going to be distracting.

But with those Spider-Man's like eyes,

that will be a shame if we don't try to shape them.

And beyond that, this is another tool

to sell the pose we are currently building.

From there, since I've slightly moved the weight,

I will go back into object mode, select the weight,

add a keyframe on its position

and reposition it on the previous pose

so that I can jump between the two poses and compare them.

And I feel like I can call this posing done.

While the difference between the two poses are pretty subtle

I feel like the new pose better communicates

the fact that our character is trying to lift this weight.

So I'm pretty happy with the results.