Original subtitles

- [Narrator] So now let's polish the arms

and the little details for the first chunk

of this animation.

But one thing I'd done before publishing the arm

is that I've input a bit of details

into the toes of the right foot.

So I'm not using the graph editor here,

I'm just directly posing to camera.

When the foot is moving forward,

I'm making the toes dragging a bit

as if they were sliding on the ground.

I will later in the video,

revise the rotation,

timing of the foot as it rotates toward

the pinch a bit too soon.

I will offset it by a couple of frames

at the very end of the video.

I will start by polishing the left arm

and I won't be showing you my curves

because it's not necessary.

What's important is the process.

First I've tracked the elbow

by calculating the motion path of the elbow tweaker.

And now think of what's happening,

the character is dropping down,

so I want the shoulder to drag a bit.

I want the shoulder to raise a bit

when the character is fully.

So I'm just spotting which channel I can use,

which is the extradition channel,

and I just raise a bit the curve,

so that it raise a bit the shoulder.

Then I will do the same with the arm.

I want the elbow to raise a bit

while the character is going down.

And then for the next two frames,

I will fix the pose of the arm

so that it doesn't cover that much the face anymore.

I will push a bit the forearm forward

and check out my camera view

to make sure that I see the eyes of the character.

So while we may rely a lot on the graph editor,

for the root motion of the character,

because it's super important and it reads well,

whenever I'm polishing the arms

or the knees or stuff like that,

I'm just tracking the arcs on screen.

The graph editor does make sense to me,

but you don't need to

perfectly understand everything about it,

to be clever about your choices.

So now that I've fixed the few initial pose,

I will track the rest of my character,

and it feels like it's popping too much.

To double check that I will simply select the wrist tweaker

and calculate its motion path.

So what I will do by working

on the different controllers of the arm

and not really caring about the graph editor,

is to reduce the gap between those two frame,

especially the ups and down

because it's breaking the flow of the punch.

So if we focus on the shoulder of the character

between frame 12 and frame 13,

there is a big gap of shape.

On frame 12 the arm is overextended,

and so does the shoulder

while it's compressing on frame 13.

So I can find some kind of in-between shape on frame 13

by moving a bit the shoulder,

moving a bit the arm,

moving a bit the forearm

and try to flatten a bit the motion path of the fist.

Again, I'm not relying on the graph editor to do so.

I tweak the pose through graph editor,

but also directly in the 3D view.

Next, if we follow along the tracking of the wrist,

we can see that there is a arch angle here

and the fist of the character disappear on the next frame.

All of these from the camera view,

not in our space.

So what we can do to fix this

is that we can make the elbow diving little more down.

So I will slightly twist the arm

so that I get more of an angle with the hand.

This way, I will be able later on

to create a smear into a C-shape from the camera view.

Now in the next pose,

I will try to show as much elbow as possible

so that the arms read well,

and it will also extend the current pose of the character.

I'm sure checking my character from all angle,

I'm tweaking the pose,

but as you can see,

I don't work that much directing to the graph editor.

I work a lot directly on my character

a little later on in the animation,

same issue, same solution.

Here you can see from frame 19 to frame 22,

I have a flat motion path.

So it will be better if we add a nice arc.

So the point here is not to know

what all the curves are doing into this motion,

but choose the right curves

that will help me to fix this issue.

And if I take the arm controller

and then just check each rotation channel,

I will find one of the curve

that I'll need to raise a bit the arm.

They found the couple of curve

that will all meet to rotate the arm

the way I want from the camera view,

I can tweak them to create the arcs.

I will just regularly update the motion path

and you can see in a few seconds,

I have fixed my issue,

and this is why having a super detailed booking

before we switch to spline was really helpful

because now we can focus on improving the animation

in putting detail and fixing the little arcs.

(sound whooshing)

As I fix the arcs,

I have now a motion path

I can full to bard my smears.

I will enable the tweaker bone in the UI,

and then they will jump to the action editor.

And I will make sure that I have a key frame

on all those controller on the previous and next frame.

Around the current frame,

I want to build my smear frame on this way,

those tweaker bone won't interpolate,

since they are locked before and after the current frame.

Again, here, there is no magical trick,

I'm just shaping the pose.

So I am pushing, pulling the different controllers

until it creates a nice arc with the arm.

I'm also breaking the wrist and rotating

the hand so that it's pointing toward its previous position.

Try to keep the current arch in the arm

as smooth as possible

and focus on what will be seen from the camera view.

On the next frame,

I will also try to cheat

and show a part of the left hand of the character

in the camera view.

Even if it's only on one frame,

the fact that we don't lose track of the hand

will help reading the animation.

Again here, there is no graph editor involved.

From there even if I don't see it from the camera view,

I am bulging the smear on the left arm.

Maybe I will have to present this specific animation

from many angles.

Maybe I will have to tweak the position of the camera,

both learning wise,

and to prevent any rework later on,

you should do this also. (sound whooshing)

I will speed up a bit the video for the right arm,

because in the beginning I'm doing exactly the same thing.

As the character drop,

I'm raising the shoulder,

then from the camera view,

I will be tracking first the elbow of the character,

and I will try to create a nice arc.

Also from camera view,

I will try to show as much of the right arm as possible.

So I'm slightly offsetting the elbow

so that it shows it's not cut or overlapping

with the chest of the character.

From there, I will calculate the motion path of the hand,

and I feel like it's jiggling a bit here.

You can see that the path is not clean.

I have both a problem of spacing,

and my arc is not clearly defined.

I will manipulate the shoulder,

the arm and the forearm controller until I get it right.

And at some point I will also recalculate

the arcs of the elbow.

Since I'm modifying the position of the arm,

I may mess with the position of the elbow,

the arc of the elbow,

the spacing of the elbow.

Once I was done,

you can see that I have a clean arc,

that is easing into frame 15 before he's throw the punch.

From there, I was able to work on the current spline.

so when we have switched to spline,

the right opened a lot around frame 16,

because of the forward kinematic mechanism

and both pose wise animation wise and boxing wise,

this is not super efficient.

And there, instead of using the interpolation of the curve,

I've decided to revert the current pose

and I've boxing wise exaggerated it

using the tweaker bone.

They're used to create like a narrow with the arm

that will bench into the bag.

From there, I reworked each frames of the punch,

working on all the controllers of the arm

to make sure that the motion path of the punch

was as straight as possible,

and that the whole shape of the arm

was following this motion path.

So even the small orientation of the wrist

is important at this time.

And then when the character is pulling back his arm,

the fist is currently falling down

and it feels like the arm is heavy for our character.

While he's supposed to be super bad bad-ass

so it doesn't fit.

Instead of having the wrist falling down forward,

I reworked the shape of the arm,

so that the elbow is leading.

So I've made the elbow pointing down,

So is that I can raise the wrist

as if it was following through

or overlapping instead of leading the arm down.

Those little details will make the difference

because they communicate a different idea.

The initial pose of our character make him lose control.

He feels weak and I don't like that.

We don't want that.

He's a bad-ass character,

so everything he does,

he does it with control.

Why the previous animation might be mechanically correct,

communication wise it's wrong,

because it doesn't communicate what our character is about.

And asking yourself this kind of question

is not a matter of skill level.

You might be struggling with your mechanism

or body mechanism,

but you should beginner or not

always ask yourself those questions.

Your animation might not be perfect,

but if he does communicate

the right information to your audience,

then you're doing a better work

than having a bad-ass motion,

but nothing to say about your character.

As explained in the beginning of the video,

the right foot was rotating a bit too early,

so I just offset its rotation by a couple of frames.

But once I was happy with the result,

I've made a final pass of details

onto this chunk of the animation.

(sound whooshing)

I did a little pass on the fingers.

I was originally planning

to have my character with open hands

most of the time during this animation,

because in Muay Thai,

it's more natural to have the hands open,

to be able to catch our upend.

But I've chosen to close the fists

because it will take forever

to spline in polish those fingers.

But while the educational content would be super imitated,

the fingers are some hold the limbs of the hand.

So they need to move with pupils.

They will help you to define the shape of the hand,

and they can also communicate something about your character

as seen in the posing hand chapter.

What I've done here is that as the hand is going down,

I will the finger drug by bending them a bit backward.

And just before the fist closed,

I have made the ultimate joint

to bend backwards so that it feels

like the fingers are snapping into a punch

more than they are crawling into a punch.

It will make the punching even snap here

to have the opposite hand

to also have a snappy motion.