Original subtitles

- [Instructor] In this video,

I will show you how we can use shapekey

to be creative with our animation

and generate additional effect on top of it.

I will publish a free tutorial on YouTube

on how to create the effects of the current final animation,

but you will find the link in the documentation.

Shapekeys allow you to deform an object

into another shape.

They are also known as morph target or blendshapes

in Maya or ZBrush, for example.

Shapekeys are often used to create facial expression

for your character that can be triggered later on.

It's great to create advanced facial expression

or quick test for your character.

Then the rigger can create controllers

so that you can trigger those shapekeys at will

in your animation.

(air whooshing)

shapekeys are a modification or a transformation

of the mesh,

so you will be able to find the shapekeys panel

into the mesh data of your object.

To create a shapekey, we simply need to click the plus icon

on the right of the panel.

The first shapekey to be created

will be automatically named basis.

It's some kind of snapshot of the current position

of each vertices in your mesh.

Whenever we jump into edit mode with a vertex selected,

in the properties panel

we can see the current location of this vertex.

The basis shapekey will record the position of each vertex

for our mesh, and this specific basis shapekey

is going to be the point of reference for the next shapekey.

It's a bit like the rest pose for a character rig.

From there, we can create another shapekey

by clicking the plus button.

And now render is no longer naming the shapekey basis,

but key number one.

Now, to be able to animate this shapekey,

we need to create a first deformation.

You need to be in edit mode,

and the most important thing is to make sure that

the key is currently selected.

To select it, you just need to left click it

and it will be highlighted.

From there, I can move one of the vertices of my mesh.

You can move as many vertices as you want.

And as soon as I will press tap to exit edit mode,

my mesh will return to the shape it had

on the basis shapekey.

From there, I can activate my shapekey

by simply increasing the value of key number one

from zero to one.

Blender will automatically interpolate the shapekey;

one being the shapekey we have currently built,

zero being the basis.

To understand how shapekeys work,

I will create a new shapekey,

then I will enter edit mode,

and I will rotate my whole character.

Note that you can rename your shapekeys

as any other data in Blender

by simply double-clicking its name.

As we have rotated our object in edit mode

by triggering the shapekey,

I'm expecting it to rotate in space,

exactly as I'm doing here in object mode.

I'm going back onto my model,

and I will trigger the shapekey.

What's going on here is that it seems that

my object is getting scaled

while I'm triggering the shapekey,

but this is not the case.

This is currently how shapekeys work,

and to better understand it,

I've tracked one of the vertices,

parenting a small sphere to this vertex.

If you carefully focus on this vertex,

you will see that it moves in a straight line in space,

and this is because a vertex only have location coordinates,

and Blender will simply move each vertices

in a straight line from their original basis position

toward the key frame position

over the key frame values that goes from zero to one,

so you can't perform a proper rotation using shapekey.

You can only perform translation of individual vertices.

So even if the final output looks a bit like a rotation,

this is not a rotation.

Each vertex is moving in a linear fashion

from its current basis position to the shapekey position.

(air whooshing)

Now, to better understand shapekeys extrapolation

and their behavior,

I have created this arrow shape,

and I will create the basis shapekey and a first key.

From there, I will jump into edit mode,

and, with my shapekey number one selected,

I will move by one Blender unit

the top vertices of the arrow.

Now, when I trigger my shapekey,

those vertices will move in a linear fashion

by one Blender unit on the Z-axis.

But since the shapekey occurs at the mesh data level,

I can rotate my data container, my object,

and trigger the shapekey.

and the shapekey will behave as expected.

Now, if we have a closer look to our shapekey's information,

we have a minimum range and a maximum range.

This will allow us to either clamp or increase

the interpolation range of the shapekey.

If I count the maximum value to 0.5,

I won't be able to go further.

If I now allow a maximum value of two,

the vertices of the arrow's head

will move two times further away

in a linear fashion.

If I allow a negative minimum range,

I will be able to extrapolate the current shapekey

backward or negatively, and the vertices will just move

the opposite direction.

You can combine as many shapekeys as you want,

and this is how we generally create

complex facial expression.

I have created a couple of additional shapekeys,

and now I can trigger all the shapekeys at the same time

or combine different values.

The coordinate modification of each vertices

will be added one on top of each other,

based on the factor of each shapekey.

If you need to edit your mesh,

make sure that you have selected the basis shapekey,

or you will be editing the current shapekey,

not the basis.

We can use vertex group

to limit the influence of a shapekey.

In the vertex group panel,

I will create a new group,

and I will assign at 100%

the tip of the arrow,

and with a value of 50%, the base of the arrow.

Now, if I assign this vertex group to the first shapekey

by selecting it in the vertex group slot,

and I now trigger the shapekey,

you can see that the tip of the arrow is moving

at its full range,

while the other vertices only move by 50% of their range.

If I now select one of the vertex

and I exclude it by removing it from the vertex group,

it will no longer move.

The vertex group value directly influence

the amount of the shapekey motions

that will be applied to each vertex.

Finally, you can use other shapekeys as a basis.

This way you can create complex transformation

by changing the point of reference.

(air whooshing)

So let's now have a look on what we could do

with those shapekeys onto our current animation.

I will hide the background and effects collection,

so that we have a clearer viewport,

and I will directly select my character object.

But since the character was linked into this scene,

I can't modify any of the mesh data.

To be able to edit those data,

I need to make the mesh local,

and also the object of the character local.

With both the container and its data local,

I can now add a new shapekey.

Since we will directly be editing our character model,

I can hide the rig, and I will scrub through the animation,

and I will try to spot the moment

where the character is moving very fast,

like this hook motion, for example,

I've already created smears using the rig,

but now I can add extra details using shapekeys.

Clicking the plus button, I will add a new shapekey.

I will call it hook zero one,

and I will jump into edit mode,

pressing the tab key.

To be able to see your character posed in edit mode,

make sure to enable all the display option

in the armature modifier.

From there, with my shapekey selected,

I can start editing my character.

The process is simply to pull

some of the vertices of the character

toward its previous position,

as if part of his mesh was dragging

during this quick motion.

I need to disable the X symmetry while in edit mode,

and now I can pull some of the vertices back,

and start to create my effect.

The important thing is that those effect will be seen

from the camera view,

so it's important to make them work from the camera view.

You can sure edit your mesh from any point of view you want,

but make sure that it does look good

from your camera point of view

as it is what is going to be rendered.

If you want to create broader shapes

or move multiple vertices at once,

you can enable the editing fall off.

Once you are done with your first shapekey,

you can exit edit mode,

and trigger it by changing its value.

As seen in chapter two,

shapekeys, as most Blender data, can be keyed

by pressing I over the keyframe value.

Then I can edit this value whenever I want

over my animation.

This will activate or deactivate the current shapekey,

or, if you change the value over multiple frames,

Blender will interpolate the value of the shapekeys.

For example, in the previous frame,

I can add a bit of the shapekey

to initiate this transformation

and set it to zero on the previous key.

Once you're happy with your first effect,

you can add more of them.

When working on a shot like that,

that this is going to be the final touch, the final effect.

So I advise you to create multiple shapekeys.

For example, here, I want to add few details on the arm too.

I will create a dedicated shapekey

instead of adding it on the same shapekey as before.

This way, it's gonna be easier for me to edit

whether the shapekey of the arm or the head

delay one compared to the other,

or simply remove it without destroying

what I've done for the head.

Or you will also be able to show different version

to your art director, for example.

In my case, I've also created a shapekey

during the kick impact

to try to blend with the previous shape.

This kind of effect on top of the smear effect

will fake motion blur,

and will help your audience to better read your animation.

And, as explained in the previous video,

whatever you do to improve the readability of your animation

will take it to the next level.

(bag slamming) (man grunting)