Original subtitles

In this lesson,

we're going to talk about animating a complex rotoscoping

mask and how to do it really easily.

OK so I've already gone ahead and drawn out all of the

different roto shapes that you would need to completely roto

out our figure from the background.

So if I just hit play, you can see that she's standing pretty still here.

We have just a little bit of camera movement, and then she's waving her hand.

And the way that she's waving is a little bit different maybe

then from just keeping your hands straight.

She's kind of flexing her fingers around a little bit.

So it's very necessary in a case like this to make sure

if you want to have a really nice, crisp,

clean roto, that you get different pieces for all of the fingers.

I also have a different piece for the hand,

a different piece for the forearm,

and then the upper arm that's connecting to her shoulder.

Then we've got a piece for her other arm which is staying pretty still.

That possibly could have been combined with the whole torso,

and then we have the head shape, and then also these two little pieces of hair.

So the hair is going to be flying around a lot and that's

going to be a little bit of a challenge just as far as getting

those to animate the hair blowing.

But the main point here, to pay attention to,

is how many different roto shapes I have.

I can't stress enough to you that is of paramount importance that you

get all of the different parts that are going to move independently from

each other with different rotation points,

joints on bodies like this, and make them their own roto shape.

So without taking up too much more time stressing that point,

let's go ahead and get started animating this.

Now once you have drawn out all of these shapes,

you may have a little bit of a hard time deciding where do I start.

There are so many things for me to click on here.

I don't even know what to animate first.

And there's really not a wrong place to start but I have found that

animating the stillest part of your image is going to be the most

beneficial because a lot of times-- in my case at least,

with this body-- the stillest part is going to be the

torso because she's just standing there.

So that's going to require fewer key frames and then as I

move out to the area that is moving more,

I'll be able to see if those larger areas are going to overlap with my

fingers and it's just going to save me a little bit of work from having to

go back and move any points on the larger pieces.

So let's go ahead and get started with what we have here for her torso.

So it's a very simple mask.

We've already got our frame set on zero,

so I'm going to go ahead and move forward to the last frame,

frame 89, and it looks like it's barely changed.

So let's go ahead and we'll just scoot this point

over a little bit here to the left.

This one as well.

It looks like she's almost just maybe swayed a little bit.

And this one still looks pretty good.

You could get a little bit closer if we wanted to and this one

overlaps with her arm pretty much the whole time so I'm not

concerned about moving this edge at all.

Let's go move over here to the middle, to 40,

frame 40, and it looks like again, we're pretty close.

So really not a lot of moving going on here.

So let's go ahead and play through this and just see if there's

any big animation that we're missing out on.

So it would appear that between frame zero and 40,

we get a little bit of sway in her hip kind of here,

and this bumps out just a little bit more.

So I'm just going to go right in between those two keys that we've

already set up and just pull this handle out a little bit and

actually maybe pull this forward a little bit,

turn that back down,

and we're just trying to get the best curve on the edge of her sweater.

OK so now let's go ahead and play that and we'll just watch this through.

Much better.

So that's following along really nicely with that contour.

Let's see what happens up here on her shoulder.

So it looks like her shoulder might drop down just a little bit

towards the beginning so we can change that as well.

It looks like between frame 20 and 40 is where that's happening.

So let's go ahead and pull this handle down just a bit there.

And it looks like on frame 40,

it kind of pops back up so let's go ahead and we'll

move this back into position, just down a little bit.

And that looks pretty good.

That seems to stay relatively consistent throughout the rest of this.

Now you could go over here and do some more but I don't want to

spend the whole time rotoscoping that one piece so let's go ahead

and move on to this area over here.

So now we've got this arm.

It's got just a little bit more movement and you'll notice

once I click a different roto shape, even though it's all on the same roto node,

it's going to show the lack or addition of those key frames.

So you can see all my key frames are here when I have the torso selected

because that's the only place we've set those key frames.

Just represented by those little blue lines.

And then when I move over to her arm,

we don't have any key frames present because we

haven't set any for this shape yet.

So let's go ahead and we've drawn this on frame zero,

so this is pretty much going to be right in place on frame zero.

So we'll move forward to 89 at the end of our animation and it looks

like her elbow might move down just a little bit here,

maybe up a bit on the side,

and it looks like her shoulder is a little bit lower than it was.

And then let's just move to 40, just right about the halfway point.

Can move this down again, maybe come in down here.

Looks like her arm has moved pretty considerably so

we can move this point back down.

Maybe pull that handle out just to make that follow a little bit better.

Just like that.

OK so now we have a few keys set for her arm which it

has a little more movement than that.

You definitely want to go in in between here and add some more frames to this.

So you can definitely see right about here her arm really kicks out.

Let's go ahead and add a key frame right there.

And you can see my method for doing this.

I'm really trying to maintain my point consistency but also I'm really

trying to make this have as few key frames as possible.

So that's just to help keep everything as consistent as it can be

in spite of having so much movement in her arm.

The more movement you have, actually,

sometimes it's a little bit more difficult to tell if you have a

good roto shape because it moves so quickly,

like in that bobble head lesson.

But here,

this is one of the most difficult rotos to achieve because she's

standing still but then she also has a lot of movement in her arm

and we have really slight sways.

So it can be really obvious if something is going a little bit wrong.

Now let's just play that through again and for the most part,

at the beginning, that's sticking with her arm.

Let's go ahead and let that play through one more time.

And it looks like it's catching up here.

Maybe right in between there we need to have another key frame.

We'll just have to keep going through and adding these.

Now this is going to take quite a while to do so I'm

going to say in between lessons,

you'll finish whatever we don't get finished here and we're

going to come back in our next lesson and I'll have the

whole thing rotoscoped for you.

So once you have this outer extremity key framed then you're going to want

to move on to one that's further away from the body.

So let's go ahead and of course, again,

we already have our frame zero set because that's the frame we drew on.

So we'll go to 89.

And this time,

there's so much rotation that I'm going to need to rotate the

whole mask instead of just moving a few points.

So I'm going to select all those points,

grab that rotation up here in the corner,

and then we can move that back down into place just like that.

And then let's click off to the side over here to de-select.

And that still looks pretty close on her wrist,

so I'm just going to leave that there.

And then I would just continue that process of going through and adding

keys where needed to make those fit along with her arm.

Then we would do her hand and then move on to the fingers.

So usually on the fingers, I start on the outside and work my way in,

starting with that little finger or with the finger

that has the least amount of movement.

So if they're doing something else with their hand, you could start there.

Or maybe the finger with the most amount of movement.

It's really up to you, but definitely I would say start in the middle here,

work your way out, and then you can start setting some key frames on the head.

So we've gotten this shape started.

It's definitely looking better than it did when we very first began,

but there's a lot more to do.

So in between lessons,

I want you to go ahead and try to set key frames for each

of these different roto shapes and get her completely

rotoed out of our background.

And then in our next lesson,

I'm going to show you how to use this rotoscope to completely isolate her from

the background and we'll drop in a completely different background as if she was

shot on a green screen or really just make it look like she was in the footage

that we are dropping her into all along.

So we're going to learn how to do all of that in our next lesson.