Animating Faster in Blender: Breaking Down My Cube Blocking Workflow

[Music] all right so in this video I'm going to walk you through my animation workflow inside of blender it's a question I've gotten asked pretty often especially in my other workflow video specifically the video breaking down my workflow through the two-hit combo attack that I made and then also in other animation walkthroughs like my Hulk animation walkthr and then my Spider-Man animation walkthrough I use the same Cube block method it's a workflow I use pretty often for body mechanics type of shots because it allows me to focus on the movement first and then think about the poses later when I'm creating animation that's the first thing I want to start figuring out as soon as I possibly can is just how is this character or creature actually going to move so this Cube allows me to just simplify the process into one single object and then slowly layer on more and more detail to it so what I've got here is is this Cube and I've animated a basic I'll say this kind of a hit react um that's kind of just what I've created here very simple animation just imagining this character kind of falling backward and getting hit um so what I want to do is get the character to follow the cube so I have this Cube animated the way that I want and now I want to make sure that the actual animation or the actual character is attached to that animation um and I'm actually going to show real to how I actually got the cube attached to the actual or aligned I should say to the actual character rig so I've got the Torso control and that's what I would want the cube to be aligned to so if you can see it's like my Cube you can see it's matched up so what I want to do is shift a press the cube and then I can kind of start scaling it now what we need here or really what makes this much easier is This Global trans transform so you can find this if you go to edit preferences and you can search transform or copy you can see it here so I actually have two tools this is the animation copy worldspace this is a plugin that I had downloaded which allows me to do this however blender added the copy Global transform inside of blender so you don't actually have to download this add-on anymore you can just make sure you enable that and then when you do enable that you can see it here in the animation tab when you press s to open up that menu so that's what we need to make sure that we have turned on so what I want to do is Select my control curve for the Torso I'm going to go to copy Global transform and then I'm going to select the cube and then I'm going to hit paste and you can see that's going to align it with that control and then I can just scale it down and size it up as needed and now you can see it's perfectly aligned with the Torso control so that's what we want and then of course if you want to make changes to the C Cube you would want to tab into edit mode and move the indiv individual points around rather than like rotating the cube because then that's going to mess up your orientation this way we can adjust things like the size if we wanted to we can add an edge Loop like I did with the other Cube and scale it in a little bit closer to the actual size and shape of our character's torso and I'll go ahead and delete that all right so the next thing we need to make sure that we do when we want to get this attached to our Cube is we want to have the legs following the Torso exactly so we get this sort of action figure type of movement on the character where we move our torso around and everything follows you've probably seen that in my other workflow videos inside of Maya so we basically want to have the exact same setup for our character here same with the arms the arms are currently in World space so as I move this you can see the arms are trying to keep their orientation so they're not actually following the chest or the Torso one to one so to do this I want to go to my side tab here and I want to go to item now I'm using the ianimate rig for this and all of the rig attributes are in the side menu under item you might be working with a different rig but most rigs that you download will have the same sort of attributes there well hopefully they do most rigs should have the ability to switch things like the arms from local to World space the ik legs to you know follow things like the Torso or stay in World space so they don't move around when you move the actual torso so most rigs you'll find those properties there they might be in like the properties panel instead of this side panel it kind of just depends so you might need to search for them but we have all the rig properties here for the rig so the first thing that I want to do is make sure that my feet are in ik still but I want to make sure that when I move the Torso around the feet are actually following the Torso so to do that I want to keep the exact same position that the feet are in so I'm going to go up here to the animation Tab and I'm going to choose copy on the global transform to copy that position then I'm going to go back to item I'm going to go to my left leg here and I'm going to change the Torso parent switch to one so it's at zero which means this ik foot is in World space so I'm going to bring that to one you can see it's going to snap the foot to a different position and that's why we want to make sure we copy the position before we change this attribute so now all we have to do is go over here to the animation Tab and just hit paste so now our foot is in the same position and now if we move the Torso around that foot or that leg is following the Torso which is exactly what we want so I'm going to do the same for the right leg I'm going to copy the global transform go to item go to right leg change the parent switch to one go to animation paste and I'm just going to work through this and make sure I get this character set up so the last thing that we need to do is just fix the arms so they are in local space following the body so we just need to do something very similar I'm going to go to Global transform and hit copy and I'm going to go to item and I'm going to go to the left arm and what I want to change is the FK isolate for the left arm so at a value of zero it's in World space at a value of one it's in local space And depending on your rig the rig that you're using these might be named something different so in this particular rig it's just called the isolate value the rig you might be working with it might be called like the world or local space switch and just keep that in mind you might need to fiddle around with your rig at rutes to find the exact one but here I want to bring this to a value of one I'm going to go to animation paste so now we've kept that same pose but now if I move the control around that arm is following exactly with the torso's movement so I'm going to do the same for the right arm copy go to item right arm bring that value to one and then go back to animation and paste so we've got everything following the Torso so now the next step on this process and the the next step in this workflow is actually to get the character attached to the cube itself because we want to make sure that this character is following exactly with the cubes movement so to do this I want to go to my torso control here I want to go down to the bone constraint properties one thing to keep in mind is that you want to make sure that you aren't adding this constraint on the object constraint properties that's a mistake I make pretty often in blender is that I'm not paying attention to the constraint property panel that I'm in and I might be actually in the object constraint properties you can see they look basically the same it just changes from object or bone if you're in object constraints and you are using a rig like this the constraints aren't going to work so you want to make sure you are in bone constraint I'm going to go to the relationship and I'm going to do child of and then I'm just going to pick the cube object and then there we go so we've attached we've attached the control curve to the cube and now you can see it's following the Cube's movement and this is the sort of like action figure movement that we're getting we're getting the entire character moving so the feet you can see here are going through the ground but we are getting the overall movement that we want so this is exactly what we want for this so we're almost there into sort of finishing off this workflow so with this workflow once I have the character rig attached to the cube which you've probably seen in my other videos is that the next step that I want to make sure that I do is I want to get these feet back into their normal ik World space but I want to keep all the information that I have here so all the position information that it's giving us with the feet in local space you can see it's following the Torso so we're actually getting you know the position that we want the feet even though they're flying in the air they're still following the Torso and you can see they're Landing in that exact same it pose at the end which is exactly what we want if the ik feet were in World space and we did this the feet would be staying where they're at they would not be moving off this and then the body would just be moving and you would have your have your feet stuck in place um so we definitely don't want that so we still want to keep all this movement but we want to make sure that we can bring these back to legs behaving as they should so if I move the Torso I still want the legs to St stay planted so to do this we need to add in a few empty objects or locators so that we can take the information that we're getting from the control and then getting it back onto the ik foot when it's in World space so to do this I'm going to press shift a in object mode I'm going to go to empty and I'll just do plain axis and then I can name this L foot for left foot and then I want to do the same thing I want to go into into pose mode here and I want to copy the global Transformer that foot I want to paste it on the empty and I can actually scale it down a little bit doesn't need to be that big I'm going to press shift a add another empty I'm going name this R foot and then I want to grab the foot control on the right copy the global transform and then I want to paste all right right so we've now got that pasted I can scale it down as well so now these locators are in the exact position of the feet as well so now what we want to do is get the locators attached to the feet so I'm going to select this left locator and this is a locator so we're going to work with the object constraint properties I'm going to go to child of I'm going to go to my picker and I'm going to choose the Lisa rig and then I'm going to type in foot and find the let's see the ik foot left and you can see my locator is going to pop off I just need to choose set inverse to snap it back and I'm just going to double check and make this work make sure this works so now you can see if I move my foot that locator is following along I'm going to do the same for the locator on the right foot object constraints go to child of and then I'm going to go to the Lisa rig and then I'm going to type in foot and choose the ik Foot Right set inverse and now we've got that locator following the foot so the next thing that we need to do is Bake Off the animation that's currently on the locators so you can see the locators are following the foot's movement but we don't have any key frames on here if we look at the location under the transform properties you can see they're staying exactly the same to where they were constrained so they're moving in 3D space but we don't actually have any values for that and we need to use these locators to basically get the feet back into to World space and then attach the feet to the locator movement to get the same information it is a little bit of a long process inside a blender Maya does have easier ways to do this with animbot or the world bake plugin that you've seen me use inside of Maya but this is a little bit more of a manual process so what I'm going to do is go and select the locator here on the left foot I'm going to go to object and I'm going to go to animation bake action all right and there's a couple things that we need to make sure that we do we need to make sure that we turn visual keying on that way it will'll bake this properly so since this is constrained to the foot since you saw that we don't actually have any change in values in any of our transform or rotation this wouldn't Bake Off properly because it doesn't have any values to bake so we need to make sure that we turn on visual key and you can see it says with constraints applied so if you have a constraint and you want to make sure you bake that information you want to make sure you turn on visual keying we can go ahead and do clear constraints as well so so we'll just remove this constraint and everything else should be fine one thing that we can do is that by default it's set to a value of one on the frame step so that means it's going to bake this off every one frame so we can keep this like this although it's going to add a ton of key frames into our timeline the animation is pretty simple we don't actually need that many key frames so we can just type in a value of four and I'll just bake this on every fourth frame you even could do maybe like every fifth frame every sixth frame you can just find what works for you and I think I actually I think I accidentally removed that so let me open that up popped off there visual key and clear constraints I'm going to set this to value four and then I'll hit okay all right so that should work now you can see that we have key frames on this locator and you can see that baking it off on fours it's not following exactly with the foot's movement but that's completely fine we really just want to get the basic movement of the foot we don't need to have it attached completely one to one one we are working really rough with this too so having fewer key frames is I find a little bit simpler to work with so I'll just keep it like that and then I'm going to right foot I'm going to go to object animation bake action visual keying only selected bones frame step clear constraints and then all right so bake that off clear the constraint all right so there we go so we've got these locators where these empty objects moving the next thing that we need to do is we need to get the foot controls back onto World space and then attach them to the constraint so it follows their movement so I want to come down here to the left leg now before I change this torso parent switch to one I'm going to go to animation do what we did before I'm going to copy its position go back to item I'm going to go to the left leg turn that to zero go back to animation paste and then I'm going to do the same on this foot so I'm going to copy its position go to item right leg torso parent switch to zero animation paste so now you can see the feet are back on world space and if I play this you can see the feet are doing what they would be doing if they were in World space right at the beginning the feet are staying in their position and the body is moving but now we just need to get them attached to the locators so what I want to do is go over to the left foot I want to go to Bone constraint properties and then I'm going to go to add bone constraint child of and then I'm going to select this left foot locator and now you can see the control is following the locator movement same for the right foot bone constraint child of choose the target pick the right foot empty your locator and then there we go so we've got the foot or the legs following the locators but they're actually in World space so we've kept all that same animation but now we can actually animate this in the way that you would expect with the legs in World space so the last thing that we we need to do is bake this animation off of the foot control so I'm going to select this foot control shift select the right foot we can do these together I'm going to go to pose animation bake action only selected bones visual keying clear constraints on fors click okay and then now we can actually delete these empties should keep all that information we've actually put these to key frames but now we can move the Torso around and have it behave how we want now we can come in here and actually start animating the feet so we can come in here and go to pose and then maybe go to frame two paste pose and those feet are going to stay locked on the floor and then you can actually go in here and start animating the legs so this is the process inside a blender to work with the same workflow that I use for a lot of my body mechanic shots you can see it's a little bit longer of a process than in Maya because Maya has things like anobot and a few other plugins that make it just a little bit easier so this this is more of the manual method but you can see you can do it just fine inside a blender it just takes a little bit more time to set up so if you found this video helpful please leave a like and don't forget to subscribe for more future content thanks for [Music] watching

Channel: Mark Masters

Views: 6,835

Keywords: blender, b3d, animation, workflow, animation workflow, how to animate, animation tutorial, animation for beginners, tips and tricks, animation for beginners blender, body mechanics, blender animation, blender tutorial, how to animate in blender, blender for beginners, blender animation tutorial, animate faster, pose to pose, layered, principles of animation, master blender, animate in blender, animation tutorials, blender workflow, blender tips, spider-man animation walkthrough

Id: d8Udsmr5hPY

Length: 17min 17sec (1037 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 15 2024