Original subtitles

- [Instructor] As our torso controller

is now polished or at least improved,

we can work on the chest.

There is a bit of location variation

in the motion of the chest,

but the main motion are led by the rotation.

So we will work on the rotation, our goal is again,

to bring as much contrast as possible

to the animation of the character,

to better communicate the impact of the punches.

As the center of gravity is dropping down,

I'm raising a bit the chest,

with the X quaternion rotation curve.

Pushing the curve a bit down,

we'll make the chest to drag while the character is falling.

Then as the character push forward,

I will make him lean a bit down, pushing the X curve up.

Now working on the Z curve,

I'm removing a bit of the noise,

and I'm twisting the character

so that he opens a bit before the jab and then

twist his body toward his left arm

to input more power into the jab.

Then, as we did with the torso root controller,

I will open him a bit more when he start twisting to throw

the right cross, and as he throw hit,

I will accelerate the twisting motion

by shortening the spacing on the Z rotation curve

meaning that the changes of value

on the Z rotation curve will be faster or more brutal.

And then we get a slight overshoot

as our character has put a lot of energy to the punch

so his body continued twisting a bit

over a couple of frames.

Now, I'm chasing any pops into the rotation curve

and see what they are doing, see if they make sense.

And as you can see, I'm trying to smooth out

a bit the curve.

What I mean by that is that I first input

the deep contrast into my curve

then I watch frame by frame and I check if my character

is zigzagging or doing some,

weird left to right motion at some point,

and I try to get rid of those.

But I won't be breaking the main contrast that we have

in the Z curve for example.

With those few improvement on the curve,

we have already changed a lot about the animation

and the impact of the punching.

From there, I will make a quick pass

on the rotation curves of the hips.

When it comes to polishing the hips,

I generally fix issues more than I'm trying

to create posies or push the motion of the hips.

For example, here the character is getting down,

so his hips should be tilting a bit forward.

I'm fixing this, now he's getting more weight onto the right

leg here, so using the Y rotation curve,

I will slightly make the hips tilting towards the right leg.

Then we'll tilt up to the right.

Governing the Y rotation curves

that drives the tilt to the left and the right.

Think of which leg is currently pushing the more

onto the hips and favorize the curve

toward the current leg.

Remember that the hips should not be dragging

compared to the feet, because the hips are used

to currently drive the legs.

The Z rotation curve will allow us to twist the hips.

Your key is to keep them aligned with the feet position,

and whenever we are punching, we will drag for example,

here the right foot using the hips,

so there will be a lot of Z rotation, toward the right

to pull the right leg.

But what we can do now,

to input a bit of dragging into the hips

and create a more impactful animation,

is to use the location curve and slightly delay

the position of the hips by pulling them backward

in the beginning of the punch, and a couple of frames

after the hit, pull them forward so that they will compress

with the chest, and it feels like the hips of the character,

have a lot of momentum and have a lot of weight,

and so they are projected forward during the punch.

This is something we've been doing with the head

of the squirrel character in chapter three.

And once I'm done with the hips,

I will do the same with the chest,

as the body of the character is moving forward,

the chest is slightly pulled backward,

compressed toward the hips, and just after the hit,

the chest is projected forward, so you can see on frame 17,

the curve is pulling down the compression,

then it's projected for a couple of frame forward

on frame 18 and 19, and then the chest will recover

with a slight overshoot, and then the curve will slowly,

he's to zero in the rest pose of the chest.

This means that the chest has absorbed it's momentum.

Remember that your audience is going to see your animation,

through the camera view, while we are trying to make our

animation looks good from every angle as an exercise,

you need to often check your animation for the camera view.

And we may input more details into the animation later on,

to favorize this camera view.

What I wanted to show you here is that

you can use the tweaker bone of the chest

on the base of the neck and the base of the hips,

and calculate their motion path,

to see how it looks in the camera view.

And here we can see we have two nice arcs,

we've an ease in and ease out during the step,

and the punch.

Another useful trick you can use is to create trackers,

so I will add the simple sphere and I will scale it down.

Then in the properties panel, we can create a new material.

We will call this tracker and we don't need to play

with the material properties,

but only the viewport visibility setting.

And I will give it a yellowish color.

Then I will create another bone,

I will duplicate the material,

give it another color and repeat the process a third time.

From there, what we can do is add a constraint

to the sphere so that they will copy the location

of the chosen bone.

With the yellow sphere selected, I will add up

to the constraint panel, add it a copy location,

then I will source the trident armature,

and in the bone section, I will start typing chest,

and then search for the chest to tweaker.

Now, the sphere has snapped onto the tweaker controller,

but we can't see it because it clips with the character.

So we can go into the object properties,

and in the viewport displays, set it to infant,

so that it will be shown over our character.

So from there, you can duplicate the sphere,

as many times as you want,

and change its constraints so that it will snap to the head,

for example, and the hips.

I will then do the same with the blue and red sphere,

and I will snap them onto the elbows,

the fist, the feet, and the knees.

Whenever you are searching for a bone to target,

just search for knee, elbow,

and choose wherever you want the .L or .R bone,

that mean left or right bone.

I advise you to wherever snap to the DEF bone,

that means deformation, those are the bones

that are currently making our character move,

or the tweaker bone, that are pretty low into the hierarchy,

so whatever kind of mechanism you are using,

like forward kinematic or inverse kinematic,

they will always move and follow your character.

From there, you can freely scale those trackers

that it better fits the shape of your character.

Then you can select them all, and in the 3D view,

press M, to move them into a new collection.

I've created a collection called tracker,

and so from there, I can easily hide my character

if I want to, and only see those bone moving.

This will help you to spot any glitches in your motion,

or to have a different view over your animation.

I'm not saying this is necessary,

but the fact that you have a different view of all your

animation, will help you to spot the problem or to focus on

the important part, like the arcs of the end

on the cross, for example.

So let's now get back to our actual characters.

Since we are going to unmake the neck and the head,

we don't need to see the hops.

So I will simply hide them.

Our goal is going to add some overlapping motion

and dragging to the head, by first playing with the rotation

of the neck, and then work with the rotation

and location of the head.

I've isolated the rotation channel of the neck,

and we will start the X rotation,

which is the up and down rotation.

As the body is going down, the neck is raising a bit.

I will hold for a couple of frame, and then as our character

is pushing forward, we will transition and make the neck

dive a bit forward.

Those overlapping motion are going to support

the current animation.

But since they are further away from the initial rotation

point, which is the center of gravity of our character,

the curve will be slightly smoother than the center

of gravity or the chest.

The further away from your region of the rotation you are,

the smoother will be your curve,

and the smoother will be the overlapping motion.

When working on the neck, first work on the X curve as I did

so when the character is going down,

the neck goes up a bit, and when the character change

direction and goes up, the neck drops.

But don't exaggerate too much those dragging,

or it will feel like your character is unable to hold

his own head, and it will look weird.

I will now repeat the process with the head.

I will start with the X rotational curve,

and as the character goes down,

I will slightly raise the head,

raise the chin of the character.

And then when he start to come forward,

I will slightly make the head dive into the punch.

When pushing the curve down,

the head is racing, when pushing the curve up,

the head is leaning forward.

So when the chest of the character is diving into the punch,

I'm raising the head a bit.

And once he's coming back, I'm pushing the head forward,

rotating toward the ground.

Then to tweak the head, tilt and twist,

I will switch to the front view.

And I will play with the Z rotation curve,

and the Y rotation curve.

Between frame 10 and 12, you can see I have a big head pop.

And since my current head curve are pretty smooth,

it means that the problem comes from a controller

previous in the chain.

So it's currently the torso controller.

When you have this kind of problem,

just to double check the previous controllers in the chain

until you find the ones that is big.

So here we can see that on the Z quaternion curve

of the torso controller, we have a big change.

I will just smooth it a bit, and now it looks better.

So from there, I can go back onto the head

and make sure that the heads drags a bit

whenever it's rotating to the left,

to the right up and down.

The idea is not to make the head wobbling around,

but just give it a slight dragging motion.

From there, we can play a bit with the head location.

I will only be using the head Y location,

and when the body of the character will be moving

very rapidly forward, I will slightly push the head

inward toward the shoulders.

And as the second punch is done,

I will pull the head toward the back.

The head is projected forward and backward

based on its weight and its momentum.

And as a micro detail, you can play

with the head tweaker bone on the top of the head,

and stretch a bit the head when it's pulling back

just a touch, and as it stopped,

you can squash it a little bit.

Those are super subtle smiles,

but they will improve a bit your animation.

From there, I will double check the animation

from the camera view.

And then I will fine tweak the rotation of the head.

I'm trying to spot the moments where I could be showing

both eyes of the character.

This will help your audience to connect with the character.

So whenever he's throwing or preparing to throw

the jab hold the right cross.

You can see that by simply pushing a bit down the

the Z quartanion curve, I can slightly twist the head

toward the camera and you'll see both eyes.

That's subtle, that's just a detail,

but it may or might do the difference

between the good and a great animation.