Animation and Video Creation Tutorial

you hello everyone welcome to another clove webinar this webinar is going to be extra-special as we're going to be showing you how to create garment animations and videos and clothes this video has been highly requested by our users and we are so glad to finally bring this to you this webinar will be divided into four parts animation using the motion files in the claw library custom animations using Mick Simone treaty video captures of animations and then animation rendering if at any point as we move through these tools if you have any questions please leave them in the chat section and my colleagues will do their best to answer them this video will also be available as a tutorial after the webinar is over so if you miss anything you'll be able to watch it again later so the first thing we want to do when we're creating an animation is open a garment file so I'm opening a very simple dress that we can animate now that I have this garment there are a few parameters about this garment that I need to check so we'll just go through this short list and make sure that our garment fits into all these criterias all the layers should be assigned to 0 the stretch and Bend values of the fabric should be below 60 the particle distance should be between 8 to 10 additional thickness collision of the garment should be 2.5 if the animation is too bouncy we can take a few extra measures like increasing the avatar static friction and increasing the fabric friction and lastly we can also delete patterns that are not visible for example if we're making a jacket we can delete the lining of that jacket just to make the animation smoother so I'm gonna check all those parameters against my garment the first thing I'm going to do is select all my patterns and you can see that the particle distance for all of them is 8 and the collision is 1 so I'm gonna select a few patterns like the underskirt here and I'm going to change the particle distance to 10 because the skirt is underneath another layer it's not going to show as much and we can change the particle distance to a little bit higher value to speed up the animation process and it won't affect the final quality of our garment I'm going to do the same thing with the cuffs of the sleeves as they're quite stiff patterns and finally I'm going to change the coalition 22.5 I'm gonna simulate quickly to make sure my garment is stable I'm also gonna check the fabric properties so you can see that all the stretch values and Bend values are below 16 so this should give me a stable simulation now so once this is done I'm gonna go to my respective avatar folder so for example this avatar is Fifi I'm gonna go to the version 2 folder as Fifi is a version 2 avatar and I'm gonna go to the motion folder and assign the first animation you can see that the avatar has now moved off the grid to the starting position of the animation and I've just gone to the animation mode using the menu at the top right corner and I can see that the motion files are applied at the bottom here if I press play you can see that there is a transition file that transitions from the attention pose to the start of the animation and then it's the rest of the animation of the catwalk so this is a great way to view your animation before animating your garment I'm gonna go back to the beginning and I'm gonna press this record button and this is what creates our garment animation so now you'll see that our garment will move along with the avatar this process can take some time so for example this recording for this garment took around 13 to 14 minutes however we've sped up that recording just to make it a little easier to watch so if at any point that you you notice that your garment is having any collision or problems you can always stop the recording and delete the garment animation and start again with some different settings for your fabric or your avatar so now that the animation is complete I'm going to go back to the beginning of this recording and now I can simply press this play button to rewatch the garment recording that I've made and you can see now that it's much smoother so for the second part of this video we are going to be able to create custom animations using mixable to start with I'm gonna be using the Avatar Fifi from the claw library and actually going to export her as an FBX so I'm doing file export FBX picking a folder and just naming the file and I'm gonna click Save so the settings that were using here are single object unweld and I'm gonna stick to the scale of millimeter throughout this and the FBX version were using is 2012 and I'm going to check save with extra files as a zip and then press ok so I'm gonna go to my browser next and open mixed-mode calm so Maximo calm is a free site by Adobe this is a great place to animate your avatars so you can see that whenever you open mix them all you'll see your last used avatar in the folder in the screen I'm gonna press upload character and select my zip file actually to upload here using a zip file means that it'll contain both the FBX of the Avatar as well as the textures that are on the avatar meaning the skin and the hair textures so the upload of the avatar can just take a few minutes sometimes depending on your file size as well as the speed of your internet the first thing we do when we've uploaded it is that we use the auto rigor so these points are just a few points that we have to place on the avatar some of them are symmetric if your avatar has a kind of weird skeleton and the joints seem like they're not in the right place it probably means that you need to do this process again and this rigging process skin again take a few minutes but then you can use it for multiple animations so once the avatar has been raped you can see that this default kind of animation is applied just so you can see if the avatar has been rigged correctly if the movements look very human and natural that generally means that your avatar has been rigged well and you can just click Next so the next thing you're gonna do actually is download this immediately in this original pose without any animations so I'm just gonna select FBX as the format and change the pose to original pose this will maintain this a pose that there already once this is done I can actually apply any of the animations that are available here so things amor has a lot of different animation options they have you know combat animations dance animations so you can really experiment with them some of them are quite funny there are a few things to keep in mind with the animation you choose specifically that you are gonna be putting a garment on this so you want to avoid something that's gonna cause collision so for example I have this walking animation now I need to make sure that the arms are not touching the thighs or the hip while they're swinging back and forth so there's an option there called character arm and space so if you increase that slider um you're actually gonna see that the space between the body and the arm is gonna go up and that's a great option because you can avoid any collision in the garment so I've just selected this file I've selected this room by dance motion and now I'm just gonna download this and these are the options that I'm using these normally work pretty well for an animation so now that I've done this I have two downloads I have the fifi FBX download which is the original pose and then I have the rumba dance file so the first thing I'm going to do when I go back to close I'm actually going to delete my Clos avatar and I'm gonna import my the file that I downloaded from mix them all and I'm first gonna import the one with the dance animation I'm gonna again stick two millimeter and then press okay so you can see that the animation has been imported in the start position you can go to animation mode and press your play button just a view it and then you go back to simulation mode and save this as a motion file so I'm gonna go file save as joint motion and I'm just gonna name this we're gonna stick to entire region and then I'm again gonna import now the other FBX file that we downloaded from Maximo so now the next step is we need to bring our garment now into this file so this time when I open this garment I'm gonna select the option add and I'm gonna check off avatar this way I'm not gonna import the clove ATAR I'm just gonna bring the garment so you'll see the Avatar doesn't match the pose that's there of the garment so I'm just gonna use my skeleton view which has a shortcut shift X and I'm just gonna use this to move the arms down so that it can match that the garment this way we can avoid some major collision it looks like we still need some minor adjustments to match the garment to the Avatar so I'm just gonna do that and then simulate so now that my garment is placed on the avatar I'm gonna do the same thing as I did in part one which is make sure that the garment matches the parameters that are required to animate a garment so I'm checking the particle distance in the collision and I'm checking the fabric properties so everything seems fine and now I can apply my joint motion so I'm gonna do file open and joint motion I'm doing this since this time that motion may not be available in our library I've selected the motion file and I'm gonna press ok and now I'm gonna go to my animation mode so now you can see in the timeline at the bottom of your screen and animation mode you have the rumba dance motion that's applied to the avatar as well as the transition file so you'll see when you use an animation from Maximo you have multiple of these rumba dance motion files so these are basically motion files for different parts of the avatar and you shouldn't delete these you need all of them so you can press play now and view your animation and then go back to the beginning and again press your record button to create the garment animation so again this recording has been sped up but usually to record an animation like this it would have taken around 10 to 12 minutes so now that my recording is done I'm going to I can go back to the beginning and rewatch it just to make sure that the garment has animated properly so part three of this tutorial is gonna explain how to record our animations using video capture so basically what video capture tool does it records the garment animation in the 3d window you need to have a codec installed to record animations in clos either lacquers or exited closed redirect you to the installer page if you do not have one once you have it installed navigate to the main menu and select File video capture and animation however this option will only be active in animation mode so when we go to animation mode I already have the garment file from part 2 of this video and I'm gonna click on the video capture and animation and a window with the video capture settings will appear you can choose the video Kadett codec that you have installed define the video size from the presets and so you can choose either fullscreen or you can choose a custom size so this can depend on the kind of the final output of this video what you're going to be using it for and you can also pick between landscaper or or portrait so once you're done you can click on the record button and this will start to record a video of your animation so you just have to click on the stop button in your window and this will automatically complete the animation and then you can click play in this pop-up video to view your completed animation so I'm not gonna save this video as I want to make some changes I'm actually gonna use this environment display option here to hide the 3d turd of the ground and I'm also actually gonna change the played agent of my video so you can see right now there's this blue bar at the top of my timeline this can actually be edited and you'll see the number of frames in my video is actually going to change and the start frame is changed so you can actually either change it from the start frame over there to 30 or you can change it using the timeline so now when I press record the video is going to be record from the start of the play region that means it's gonna exclude the transition and once that's complete I'm again gonna press stop and now you can see I actually have a perfectly looped video so if I use this loop option you can see that this is kind of a smooth looped video that can be played over and over again I'm just gonna pick a file name and press save and this is the final output of that video so for part four of this tutorial we're now going to explain how we can render out an animation so you can see that I already have an animation in my timeline I'm already in animation mode so what I'm gonna do now is open my render window so you can just do that by going to your main menu and clicking on render and then again render in the drop-down so you can see that this window will now open and I'm gonna start my interactive render and while that's loading I'm gonna open my image and video properties so the first most important change that I have to make is I have to change this from image to animation so this is now when I'll get all the appropriate options for rendering out an animation I'm gonna keep render all colorways selected and I'm gonna check on save video the video will be saved at 30 frames per second so we'll come back to discussing region again but up until then I'm just gonna decide all the dimensions of my video the background videos are always rendered of the background you can't render them without a background I'm picking my image format and I'm picking my video codec again the same as video capture you also have the option to save in HTML if you want to share this render to your browser so coming to region you'll see that you have two options here in Dyer region and player region so in Dyer region is referring to the entire animation that includes the transition and of course the animation that we imported from mix along if I want to edit which part of the animation I'm actually going to be rendering out I'm gonna use this blue bar to do that or I'm gonna use the start and end frames that are on the top so current frame means which part am i playing my animation from start frame dictates the start of the play region and frame dictates the end of the play region so right now you can see I've just removed the transition from the play region but I can also divide my play region into half so right now I'm dividing it into two parts the first part will be from 32 frame 44 so this is very useful if you want to render out your video for multiple angles so I can actually pick a custom view so for example I'm just checking this view using my render window and once I like the way that this looks I'm checking the start and the end frame to make sure that while the avatar is moving it's not moving outside the frame of the render window so once that's done I'm gonna open my custom views and set this is the first frame now for the second half of the video I'm gonna set the frames the start frame to 44 and the end frame to 1 0 1 which is the last frame of the video so now I'm picking a different angle to render this video from so as I did before I'm just gonna make sure that as the avatar is moving it's not moving outside the frame of the the render window so I'm stopping it here just to make sure it's still in frame I'm gonna stop the render again and play the video so yeah this is a good way of just making sure that your animation never leaves the frame if that's what you want if you want to keep your avatar in the frame at all times [Music] so I'm going back to the first set of frames that I had decided that was 30 to 44 I'm moving the cursor to the start of the video I'm starting my interactive render and I'm changing the view to my custom view number one so once I've done this I'm gonna stop the render and then I'm gonna click on the final render button so now this will start the render process for the whole video and once it's completed it'll automatically be saved as an mp4 file as well as the individual frames so once the first half is done I can change my play region and then I'm just gonna check it once and then start the final render again so when you've created these two parts of the video you can actually stitch them together in any external software outside of flow so if your computer has a very basic video editing software you can use that to just put these two videos together and with an animation like this you can also loop the video so that it looks like it's constantly you know the avatar is constantly dancing so this is an example of something that you might get so you can see that the angle switches in-between and then the video loops again from the beginning so this is how you can create animations in flow with the help of mixing law and create really beautiful videos of your garments and really bring them to life I hope everyone enjoyed this video so if anyone has any questions you can feel free to ask them in the chat next to this video me and my colleagues will stick around for some time to answer your questions in the chat and yeah I hope you find this very useful and you're able to try this out

Channel: CLO

Views: 54,704

Keywords: CLO3D, CLO, 3D, Virtual, Fashion

Id: 18dvBwxkAU8

Length: 27min 58sec (1678 seconds)

Published: Fri May 29 2020