Cartoon Animator 4, Smart IK Animation Tutorial - End Effectors for Custom and FreeBone Actors

hey everybody in this tutorial we're going to talk about end effectors adding an effectors for custom and free bone rigs so end effectors are essentially kind of limitations or locks that you can put on various limbs of your character to initiate a to utilize by human I came ocean the more realistic motion of your character's limbs I'll talk about that in just a moment is kind of a better better to show you an example rather than to tell you here so let's get right to the start here on the screen right now we have a variety of different characters if we go to our actor tab two characters g3 360 we have GT 360 human Martha here and under animals here I will decide here a little bit just over here a little bit we have animals spine and wings okay so under animals we have Tomba down here okay so your typical quadrupeds character under spine we have mr. mrs. sunflower I'm not sure and then under wings we have the pumpkin bat okay so you can follow along one by yourself here and bring these characters into your scene okay so let's go back to our first character and let's take a look at what end effectors are I'm gonna explain what this character your typical human biped character and we're gonna go over here to the 2d motion key editor alright so once we're in there that's what you over here to image view okay and in image view you can see that our character not all of these bone points here are the same color and that's because the pink ones on the end these are and effectors okay so you're probably wondering what our end effectors well let's take a look notice that first of all these two locks on the hands these are not locked okay but the ones on the feet are currently locked if I take my characters hip hip bone right here the one I have selected in blue if I take this and I move it around notice that my character the the feet will stay in position regardless of where I move my character however if I if I take off stretch bone for example and I move my hip up then those people take off off the ground okay but they will remain stationary at their base point right there okay just like this so that's what stretch bone does in case you're wondering I like to keep it on normally let's just go ahead and reset this for now and we also have end effectors on the hand bones as well so for example if I locked my right hand just by clicking it I move around just like this we're gonna get a result like this okay or you can stretch the hand and stretch the legs out and I have a kind of a cool DJ type motion like that or we can lock the right hand and have the same kind of effect like this okay she's kind of doing like a wave dance let's go ahead and reset this for now but that's end effectors in a nutshell there there's also one thing I want to mention here as well this option here for end effector rotation because most every limb will have two end effectors on it what you want to do is if you if you want to for example rotate this part this bone right here so I see I click on this left foot bone you notice it highlights in purple there and I move it around notice I can rotate the ankle like this so I can have my character kind of like you know do like a weird kind of step like this or just rotate the bone between the two end effectors if I don't have that enabled let's go ahead and select this one if I don't have that enable what's gonna happen when I try and move this bone it'll just move the whole foot okay so just keep that in mind if you have end effector rotation enabled then you can you know rotate it like this and stretch it out and you know do all kinds of wacky stuff that's how you can animate the bones between the two end effectors okay the bone branches here I guess you can call them alright so let's go ahead and just reset that and let's take a look at the other characters as well here I'm just gonna zoom out and head over the tomb by here you can see timba has end effectors on all the limbs right here so you can you know do the same thing all the four base limbs they're like this but if for example you wanted your character to sit down it looks a little bit weird you know for the character to try and sit down like this they we you know rotated back here and and you know moved down here this these two bones here probably want to be rotated so in that case what we do is we you know add the end effector rotation so we move down like this and put into the into position like this and probably these bones can probably be yeah you know lips rotated this way we want to probably want to before we lowered our character and have those rotated before we did that so just take this and kind of we're down this way and this will be done that way yeah and then we can lower our hip and sit on our haunches like this okay and so on and so forth you just get into the right position and there you go okay that's basically end effectors and effector rotation for the quadrupeds characters we're gonna reset good old tomba there and head over to our flower character mr. or mrs. flower the spine characters they have one end effector on the top there generally if I you know select that I move around I can because this is our first bone this is our base bone of our character so we can just you know move around like this stretch it out that one will kind of just be stationary however we can also do the opposite we can add the end effector on here and we can take that base bone and now the base bone now the top bone there will act as the end effector and they can stretch the bottom part out like this if we don't have that locked then what's gonna happen is if we select this base bone here it's just going to move the entire thing okay all right let's go down to our final example here which is a pumpkin batty dude he's very batty indeed let's just go ahead and take a look at his and effectors there's two on that wings okay one on this point one on that point and you can kind of just if I just move them around base this is what'll happen and if i lock those end effectors and this is what'll happen whoops just make sure we have the hit selected there we go you inspect you like this gonna stretch out like that you can do a side to side kind of tantalizing dance like this okay so end effectors as you can see can be very useful for you know somebody natural movement like that okay let's just go ahead and reset this and what I'm going to do now is I'm going to bring in a free Bo nectar because free bone actors the ones that you create custom they don't come with the end effectors by default now keep in mind that you cannot edit the end effectors of any of these template characters so all of the characters all the g3 360 characters human-animal spine and wings you cannot edit their end effectors alright because their templates so what I'm going to do is a start a new project here and I'm going to bring them create a new character just really quickly here g3 free bone actor and I have this blueprint of a chicken very simple chicken all right and it'll pop up into composure mode here and in composure mode the bone editor will automatically pop up as well because we need to add some bones okay so let's just add a simple bone structure to our character here I'm just gonna select add bone here and the bone editor and I'm gonna start kind of in the center of my character about here we'll go one two three four five and then maybe six bone points and just like right click to stop adding the bones and then we'll add bones for the tail as well so add going again and make sure you start from the same base bone right here okay make sure you click on the little nub there now one we go to maybe three heading for will do this do it for the tail there okay and then right click and then same thing for the legs we're gonna have bones separate bone hierarchies for the legs and for the wing as well okay so let's do one more for the couple more for the legs so again start the same bone point for the one and chicken legs look kind of grew up like this two three and then maybe four and then here's gonna be our end effectors five and six so these two right here kind of be are gonna be our end effectors all right we'll do the same thing for the other leg as well start from the center point again one and then kind of slightly upwards two three four five and then six all right doesn't have to be super accurate but again you can edit the bone position and ever whatever you like later as well let's do one more for the wing and add bone and this time I'll just do like for those two one two three four okay now if you want to preview can preview all of these it's got a preview and what its gonna look like right now it's gonna look a little bit weird because everything is kind of the same image right if I take my little tail there I can wag the tail around like that I can take my feet and move them around but you know the mesh is going to stretch because it's all one image okay so stop the preview mode there and what we need to do is we need to replace those with different sprites so the way to do that was close the bone editor for now we don't need this anymore let's go into the layer manager where you can see all the different bones here their various layers so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to start with the wing bone okay so I'm gonna select this bone right here which is bone 20 this is the bone that's going to control our wing all right so let's go ahead and select bone 20 and we can just press plus here to add an image we want to keep the parent transform position okay and select import and I'm gonna find that wing boom they're good and you came in those a difference it adds right into the same position because the image sizes are all the same if I wanted to you know select it I can you know go to this page here and move it around there you go there's my additional wing and a control Z that and close that down okay so let's do the same thing for the leg so four legs minutes like bone 10 this one here and we'll just add an image for bone 10 import left thigh all right should add right into position there you go and the layers will just change the layer in just a moment here let's do a bone 15 first add an image for that import and there's our right thigh okay and that'll add on top as well so what we need to do now is just twirl all this stuff down we don't need the the child bones available and then finally for the route this one here I'm gonna get rid of the actual image in the background this is just for reference the blueprint so what I'm going to do is just select this we're gonna go to the sprite editor in this case and we're going to replace this original image here by going up here to replace current sprite and then I'm just gonna select the body without the wings and the legs okay again nothing changes just looks the same but now I'm gonna just put the layers back in order here let's take our this layer put it down here this one goes in front of the root this one goes behind the root and the wing goes over top all right perfect so now if I preview what's going to happen is we have this option we can you know have our chicken stretch out its legs like this we don't have the rest of the image stretching out you can take our our wing here and kind of just slap it okay let's flap and flying away you can take the the booty and just shake that a little bit as well okay so that's uh you know the basics there of creating your free bone character really simple stuff let's go ahead and take it into stage mode first of all so we can take a look at what it looks like in the motion key editor so once we have it selected go to the motion key editor over here and because this is a free bone actor you can see none of the bones have end effectors on them none of them have locks on it if they do have locks you'll see a lock right here and I'll show you in just a moment also are an image view we'd have no custom rig GUI okay to modify these bones to select them and what we're going to do is we're going to generate that in just a bit here so let's close this down go back into composer mode once again here so now we're going to do is we're going to add those end effectors and to do that less we can simply go up here to edit end effector and we - you can notice that the the cursor changes to like this weird kind of like looks like an atom or something looks like a chemistry project what we need to do is we need to add end effectors onto the bones we want so you can see it'll highlight we need to make sure we select the bone nodes here like this one right here and it'll change the purple and this will change to purple we can click it again to remove it okay just left-click and click it again to add it so we're gonna add end effectors to all these these two ankle bones here just like we saw previously okay so now if we deselect end effector notice that those the bones look different slightly and if we preview now what we can do is zoom out a little bit here take those bones they'll still stretch like this just as controls you do that undo that or we don't need to controls you at this point but we can move it around like this it's because we don't have any of the end effectors enabled okay so let's go ahead back into a stage mode here and take a look at what it looks like now in the two motion key attitude so now you can see in the hierarchy we have bone 12 and bone 13 they both have end effector status and we can lock those if we want again the image view we haven't created that yet but we can lock these if we want so let's go ahead and lock those two just like this okay and if I select the bone now that foot is going to stay in place okay just like this you alright and we can rotate it like this okay again and we can you know lock the other bones as well 1718 right here let's go ahead and try that now they're gonna stay in the same spot like that all right cool the chicken can do all kinds of funky chicken dances all right so that's basically adding end effectors pretty simple stuff let's just go ahead and reset our position there and what I'm going to do now is I'm going to create a custom GUI so we can edit this all right and I'm gonna do that really quickly here so with the character selected in composer mode of course you can select the character and go over here to custom GUI okay create custom GUI and once we do that you can just go ahead and you can load an image if we want or I'd recommend using capture if we have all the bone structure are you enabled I can just go ahead to capture here and you can see it creates a capture right here now we can change the background color if we want to make it a bit easier to see the the chicken which aims to like a blue like a complementary color and you can show or hide the bone hierarchy okay just like this you can adjust the bone size if you want generally for a character like this I'd like it to be a little bit smaller you can also select each point you can move it now notice if I move it here in the cust in the GUI it's not gonna affect the actual bone on the character okay so I can you know move these points to wherever I want and it's not going to affect you know the actual characters a bone rig okay it's just for ease of use on the GUI okay so general you know I want to try and keep these a little bit further further away from each other we can probably up a little bit further just so you have a lot of space between the different bones and makes it kind of easier to to see you can also move the lock icons as well just like this okay and there you go something like that should be okay and you know bone size boom hierarchy everything's pretty simple you can also reset it back to normal I'm not going to do that for now I'm gonna keep this rig that I carefully constructed okay let's go ahead and close that down now if I go one into a stage mode one more time we have if I go over here to edit ER now we have our image view tada like this and we can select our hipbone we can select any bone we want just like this okay we can move those around okay you can select our hip bone and move that around and there you go okay reset that so what I'm going to do now is going to add one more end effector on our character's head just to show you can add end effectors anywhere you want now there's a couple of rules that you need to know for adding end effectors the first one is you cannot add an end effector to a bone root so let's go ahead and try and add an end effector to a bone root by selecting edit and edit end effector right there it's a kind of a mouthful there you can see that the cursor will become a disabled cursor here we can't add it to here here or here okay any of these we cannot add because those are bone roots you cannot add to a bullying branch right here so these are born branches you cannot add to those as well and you cannot add to hierarchies with less than two bones okay that's another thing to keep in mind it'll automatically show you where and where you cannot add bone hierarchies or bone our end effectors rather okay we can't add it there but we don't really want to do that in this case let's try and add to the top here okay so you can see this bone branch here from the center from the root has you know more than two bone branches so let's go ahead and just add and effective for the top one here alright and deselect end effector and then if we preview out of preview back into stage mode here and then in stage mode if we go to our 2d motion key editor notice that we now have the bone on the top there as an end effector and if we take our root now we can go like move it around we need to select that bone and we need to add the lock on there as well so in hierarchy view you can lock it this way or you can make sure that and we go into image view again and you know like this so our chicken can do like a kind of a sexy chicken dance just like this back and forth the other way you can obviously is go back into composer mode here and make sure your custom GUI is updated there so we can just press capture one more time okay so then the capture will show the bone lock right there so we can lock it this way so keep in mind you need to recapture every time you an end effector and there we go was go ahead and work with that close that down back into stage mode and now if we go into this mode here now we have that lock we can disable it and like this we can you know move our bones our feet actually further down like this let's just take those off for now and I move the feet kind of in separate positions oops we to deselect end-effector rotation that ok well stretch this bone out like that and I will take this one here and stretch it out this and then we can have our chicken do like a sexy chicken dance with all those end effectors on one more time and then we can like you know do something like this we back and forth and run around like this and grabbing that wing and you know stretching that wing up now he looks like he's in full flight alright so that's really all I want to show you guys about adding and editing and effectors for free bone actors so it's a lot of fun you can have a lot of fun with this on different characters so again make sure you check out our forums over at forum religion comm if you have any further questions or follow-up we also have our Learning Center on our product page and our YouTube channel and I hope to see you in the next video

Channel: Reallusion

Views: 44,316

Keywords: Reallusion, Cartoon Animator, Tutorial, CrazyTalk Animator, CTA, CrazyTalk, IK/FK, Smart IK, IK Animation, IK Motion Editing, 2D animation, muviza, live 2D, anime studio, toon boom, animate in 2D, photoshop animation, 2D character creator, 2D avatar creator, how to make a cartoon, cartoon maker, animate image, animate photo, photo animation, image animation, 2D animation software, animation software, 2D motion, 2D character creation, Category-Smart IK Motion Editing

Id: Zi21bPfqogs

Length: 19min 8sec (1148 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 18 2019