Original subtitles

- [Instructor] As in the previous videos,

after I polished the torso on the center of gravity

of my character, I like to work on the feet.

This will help us to figure out how to polish the hips

and, later on, the upper chest.

As our character is pulling his right leg,

I want to slightly raise the foot from the ground.

So I will duplicate one of the keys of the Z curve

and then slightly push it up.

From there, I will move the newly created keys

around frame 21 when the foot gets pulled from the ground.

Then I will convert the contacting frame.

The key to vectors is that we have a hard hit

of the foot on the ground.

This is generally my go-to when it comes

to the Z location curve of the foot when it hits the ground.

This will ensure that the food is accelerating

before it touch the ground.

I'm not saying that you should do this

every time your foot is going down,

but most of the time, this is true

so I generally just switch to vector

and then if I have to revise, I revise later on.

From there, I will revise a bit the rotation of the foot

so that the ankle gets more aligned with the knee

and the foot does drag a bit while it is pulled.

Basically, I want the foot to lean toward its next pose.

From there, I will just slightly tweak the heel motion

so that it hits the ground a little harder

when the character is shifting his weight

on top of the right foot.

I will raise it, touch the heel before the hit,

and on the hit frame, I will convert the curve to vector.

Finally, as an extra detail,

I will work a bit on the toes of the right foot.

I will simply make them drag by rotating them down

while the foot is getting up

and rotating them a bit up while the foot is getting down.

And then I will slap them on the ground

a couple of frames later

by switching the handle to vector.

From there, remember what I've said

during the blocking stage that the feet

are always moving while on the ground?

As the leg is pulling onto the right foot,

I will slightly rotate it toward the hips.

As I'm reviewing the leg motion,

I can see that there is a little glitch or pop on the knee.

Since the leg doesn't get fully extended,

this is not a problem due to the rig

or to the inverse kinematic mechanisms.

So I will just double check my pull target

as there must be a very quick change in its position.

And this is the case.

I have a couple of keys close one to the other,

with different position for the pull target.

To fix the issue, I will simply get rid

of the in-between keys so that Brendan

will automatically interpolate from frame 32 to frame 36.

And this will smooth the knee motion for free.

During the hook, the right foot get pulled

but it feels like it's hitting the wall

whenever it's getting to its final pose.

Has a hard stop and I'd like to smooth this a bit

so that I get a bit of feeling as if the foot

was sliding on the ground.

To do so, I will simply offset the keys

from frame 45 to 47 and then I will push the values

of the keys on frame 44.

This way, the value of the curves on frame 44 and 47

are almost the same, but not the same.

This way it will a feel like the foot is stopping,

but it will still move a little bit

as if it was sliding a bit on the ground.

Then I revised the rotation curve

to make the food drag toward its previous position.

So basically I'm rotating the foot

toward its previous position based on the speed.

The faster it moves forward,

the more it's rotating backwards.

And as the leg is pulling the foot,

I'm slightly raising the hip.

As explained when we were polishing the torso root

of our character, we need his weight

to be supporting on one leg to be able

to easily raise the other leg.

And on frame 26, it feels like the weight of the character

is centered between the two feet.

So I will offset the movement of the left foot

by one frame so that the foot

start leaving its current position

once the weight is more on the right foot.

Then I want the foot to move fast in the beginning

and then ease into its final position,

so I will scale the curve.

And then, as we did for the right foot,

I will input a new Q frame in between the two position

and push a bit the Z location up,

so that it feels like the foot is raising

before it hits the ground.

Then, using the heel controller

and the foot rotation controller,

I will make sure that the foot opens

toward the next position, meaning that I will make it slide

onto its inner edge.

And after it hits its contact pose,

I will make it tilt to the outside

so that it flatten on the ground.

From there, as we did for the right foot,

I will work a bit on the toes to make them drag

so whenever the character is moving his leg to his left,

the toes will slightly drag to the right.

If you are beginning in animation,

and this is the first time you do this kind of exercise,

note that those details are not that important.

They will sure bring some interesting information

to your animation, but you should always focus

on the broad motion on the center of gravity,

the chest, the position of the foot,

the position of the hands.

Works on those little details only at the very last moment.

Basically always work from the root of the motion,

in this case, the center gravity, to the tip of the chain,

the tip of the feet, the tip of the hands.