Character Animation in Blender

hi there this is some sort of recap video of the streaming sessions i did while animating the brand new character named snow implanter as of right now the snow rig is available for you to download link is in the description i've been collecting bits and pieces of the topics which i demonstrated during the streaming sessions and if you want to see more about a certain topic check the timestamp in the description this will link to the actual stream and you can watch it from there but first let's take a look at the final animation i want to keep talking to you you know i don't know what your situation is but uh i feel like we got some kind of uh connection right well this is something i came up with um and let me show you what what i i have here i want to keep talking to you you know i don't know what your situation is but uh i feel like we got some kind of uh connection right it's i i gotta say i don't nail the acting fully but i do have uh some ideas from it i do have another shot i want to keep talking to you you know i don't know what your situation is but uh i feel like we got some kind of uh connection right so a bit more uncertain of of his uh approach here uh in terms of like how it's looking you know a bit sideways and there you know with reference shooting reference i always tend to do a lot of takes because i never nailed it the first time even the 50th time i i'm not happy with but i do find bits and pieces that i like little gestures or way i move that i want to incorporate with the animation and i always see the reference pass as a big inspirational pass where you come up with new ideas where you try things out but not necessarily you know let yourself be constrained to the actual reference because you want to push things here and there or maybe combine ideas so this is another take of it but just to give you guys some idea of of what i could go for there's a couple of things we have to consider when starting a shot like this and one of them is that we actually deal with the bar itself so the hand will be resting on the bar and actually let me turn on the as i'm sitting here um my and also the glasses uh been you know pull put down and maybe shoved forward right at the end so we need to think about the actual constraint setup before we start animating because if i start blocking out things now then i have to fight my own mistakes or find my own yeah not doing the any of the constraints so so i always try to kind of figure out a nice setup to set constraints up i want to keep talking to you you know all right and i'm going to just block in some some poses here now the main body movement from here um i noticed when i was sitting at a bar drinking beer and that the main motion is coming from from the actual um torso bone this guy and so i'm going to start blocking the main beats for just moving this bone it's like playing with a lego uh puppet just going up and down going forward and backward simply to get the beat in there and then i'll post stuff from there so [Music] and i'm not pushing it too much on this uh bone because it's our base bone we're gonna do the chest and everything else but this is just to get a little bit of rhythm some beats going on here so we got some motion just to see like does it does the energy flow well does it is it on the right time is the right timing there so a bit boring but very necessary i want to keep talking to you you know i don't know what your situation is but uh i feel like we got some kind of uh connection right okay i want him to lean more to the right here like this maybe and turn on rain because we she's part of it too i want to keep talking to you you know i don't know what your situation is but uh i feel like we got some kind of uh connection right now again staging wise you see the hand is there i might want to do some adjustments there but i maybe want to have him already like do a last sip of his glass put the glass down so we cut in the middle of an action it's always nicer and it feels more organic too to do that instead of wait for the line to start so we continue the blocking pass and another thing i i did because i was struggling a little bit i'm still not fully happy with how this arm kind of turns inward there but at least um yeah it feels better than what i had yesterday and then opening the hand right to the end and there's a little bit of insertion intersection there i want to lead with the the eyebrows here okay i already tried to block out which part of this motion is gonna lead the action it's gonna lead the next beat and therefore i already put it in my blocking i see my blocking i've been thinking about this yesterday and i definitely see my blocking is also putting in notes for myself so even though it's rough in there like this it reminds me later on when i continue to to refine my stuff that i put it in there to remind myself okay i want to lead with the eyebrows here i don't know i don't know what your situation is and that's the same right here this part has been isolated because i want to lead with the head now there are these controls these are pretty neat i find what what they do like their little arrows up and down i only can move them up and down now and these controls they determine how much the corner is following either the jaw or sticking to the skull a little example let me close the jaw here and i push this all the way up you don't see difference now but now when i open the jaw the corner stays up there okay i can go in between but i can also go down now when i move rotate the jaw it's fully rotating with it so you can create a nice organic movement with simply favoring the jaw or the skull and let's say i do it a little bit more in between i can you know it's following halfway which gives you nice shapes so that's new uh and i'm very happy with those kind of tweaks right we got some kind of uh connection right nice a little bit too much rotation so let's dive into the graph editor not location rotation and here you can clearly see the rotation of the head the head so rotating down up down up and there's we could even push this yeah keep it there okay so i'm just gonna see if i'm just going to reduce a little bit of this um connection right of um connection right some kind of some kind of uh connection right some cuts some kind of uh connection right we got some we got some kind of uh connection right i want to keep talking to you you know i don't know what your situation is but uh i feel like we got some kind of uh connection right so that's my blocking and if i turn off rain and go to our friend here you see all of our keys are are constant and if we go to the graph editor all of our keys are stepped so stair step all right now if i hit uh spline or like go spline so i select everything and i say i hit t and the installation set from constant which is it right now just with j bump what you get right now is like computer figure it out and there we go brace yourselves oh i want to keep talking to you you know i don't know what your situation is but uh i feel like we got some kind of uh connection right horrible you shall not do that okay that will take you it it becomes very hard to work and recover some of your existing keys so seeing this happening before you do this let me go back to constant what you want to do first off you want to separate your facial animation and your body animation what i mean with that is i still keep my facial animation in constant and start splining the body because my facial animation i will adjust later anyways and it's still holding up it's it doesn't interrupt the um yeah the spline of of of the body so we can basically hide the the face uh bones right now face like that and basically just keep your body um bones visible so when you select those you can spline them and nothing else will be splined so you basically pick and choose which bones you want to spline some of them are not even keyed like for instance i'm using the fk spine control which is working a little bit differently than the ik spine so these these bones i can basically hide or you know get rid of them in some non-destructive sense these two and then so what i do is make sure i put down pillars of my key poses i put down keys on everything where i feel like the pose needs to hold until here because if i now if i only have let's say i go to the to the chest bone and i go here for instance this this key right here if i now i deliberately want this post to hold for quite this long it's not the best example but it will show you if i put this into spline per se it goes like it it it morphs into the next key so what i want to do is say for all these keys let's put a key right here because this is somewhat deliberate and this is not the best example but now if i spline it it will hold that key for a little bit longer it will still be choppy but at least you get better uh representation of your of your uh initiated planning so let's go back and i'm not going through the whole process because it's still a lot of work to clean up your your spline curves but at least it gives you an example on on how to work and how to set this up because the preparation of going into spline is the most important thing now so i have my keys here and i don't want to look at this but basically make it a bit more readable um and i do it a bit more roughly right now basically i don't touch the fingers right now i keep them in step as well so let's hide the fingers and show them again so there we go so first off on frame one that's my that's a that's a pose right there so i key all my all of the bones 398 keyframes and make sure their this pose is locked in frame so no interpolation whatsoever then we go here so so we take this pose and from one frame one to frame eight i want to make this uh motion or like make this pose stay there and it will still move as you can see i put in those keyframes slow look like it's drinking put in an extra pose here so now they're splined this it will hold this pose instead of already blending into this pose so that's why you want to lock your keyframes in that sense that it's it's you deliberately put in a hold so from zero to eight you don't get as much blending now there's a big movement here and and right here is our next key so we key right here so this can be i i'm allowing the computer to kind of do this motion and and interpolate that um i noticed like the hand there's the fk ik switch no ik space switch going on i had to clean that up and also the arc was a bit wobbly and terrible now from here we hold and then we go suddenly into this pose which i want to want it to be a bit more snappy so i hold the pose from let's say 34 and then i want to go forward so within 44 to 47 in three frames it pops a bit more forward so the timing is instead of like going from here to here which gives it creates a slow floaty movement you want to hold the key and then it's moving faster now and that's what you basically do for the whole shot you pick your holds and you key everything so it will being put as a key so the computer knows or like interpolates the right keys at the right time yeah and also this moment here i do want to like the rotation of the thing i feel like it's happening at the definitely the wrong spot there so i do i do want to see we can actually make that a bit more physical i'm putting my 3d cursor roughly around there and let me delete those keys and go there and then blend my keys back so this is don't show 3d cursor here that okay so now we rotate yeah that makes more sense so it's actually rotating from the pivot point that connects to the table i know there's translation now involved so we do need to clean that up but at least it feels a bit more natural connection right connection right um connection the connection right um connection right the connection right there's a big whoop jump so we're gonna reduce that as we uh dive into some lip syncing now so the face is on blocking on snapped keys we will uh lay out a solid foundation uh for the for the lip sync so it's gonna be a lot of scrubbing today like audio scrubbing which can get a little bit annoying sorry for that but uh well um yeah we'll jump into that and show you a little bit about how i approach generally a shot with lip sync so lip sync now what i find mostly important is the jaw open and jaw close i want to set the rhythm for the for the lip sync first and then i work with the mouth corners to get the foundation of our lip sync in there and from there once the foundation is established we will refine the shapes so we're going to look at the rhythm of the mouth and a very common mistake with lip sync issue that people and sometimes me as well uh tend to over um accentuate dialogue so on every beat i want to keep talking to you you try to open the the jaw which is generally not the case for lip sync you try to pick and choose your jaw opens so a lot of the time the jaw is fairly stable and you just move it a little bit but on the the main punches on punches on the main words like the main beats you um you open it up more and sometimes blends a little bit in between so that's what we're going to do now okay let's dial that back a little bit so there's some kind of um i feel like we got some kind of uh connection right okay i want to keep talking to you you know i don't know what your situation is but uh i feel like we got some kind of uh connection right okay last part then we'll jump i'll go back into the chat so it's connection right i feel like we got some kind of um first we need to get rid of this shape because this is just um left over from this shape right here so select lower mouth lower face i mean and then lower mouth and then go here connection so we go to a connection connection like that roll those clips out a little bit and then you know post libraries can be super helpful you know we don't have to create all of our poses if they're set up nicely then they blend well together so connection connection now i do want to change it a bit go here and then i i want to create more of a smile there but also move these guys down a little bit so you get a bit more of this kind of shape what's it called kiss i don't know like this okay um kid action right now this smile is not the most appealing one uh so let's let's change that a little bit okay so in the polishing phase we'll turn on subdivide uh turn off simplify and kind of like go into really polishing up the shapes but for now i can already see this is gonna be uh a bit and he's not finishing his sentence a bit a bit a bit of work that i needed to do you get more like closed corners so um we do that with these green green little it's a bit hard to see if i had a picker i could show you more easily but i don't so please if you need a bigger screen on any blender and again i know there are speakers out there we cannot just use them at the studio so it's more of this kind of shape and let me pull back a little bit same on the other side connection connection right um connection so it's a bit too pushed as you can see here and then we go back to to the next shape which is more like this one connection right actually that's that's blending a little bit of that so so the s is there so we want to raise it up a lip a little bit connection right connection right connection right connection connection and i want to close this hope that close the corner there i want to raise this a little bit push it i'm only looking at my camera view for any of this i don't mind that this is borked it's looking weird i'm looking at this view i want to make that appealing and i do everything in my power to have that look nice and this i don't you don't mind the other way around you know it's not a game it's not a video game where you need to be looking on all angles so you only worry about the camera perspective yeah that's better i want to keep talking to you you know i don't know what your situation is but uh i feel like we got some kind of uh connection right so we're going into the nitty-gritty details of um animating the fingers here and what i want to do on this motion is have the fingers settle a little bit a little bit of saddle on that jump but i first want to work on this pose right here and get this finger in a little bit more and then i'm just gonna move these a little bit out so i'm just gonna you know offset them a little bit of course that that lower one is already set pretty much yeah that's nice that's a little bit of you know give to that bone that's connecting and then i want back i want connection right there's so much overlap for fingers fingers never bounced like that they're pretty stiff um yeah they're so this is too much bounce um which i'm gonna reduce same for the thumb when you change the pose on your thumb it doesn't overshoot the like it doesn't drag that much like this part i wouldn't do like maybe a little bit okay let's do it it becomes uh broken soon so be very careful uh to make your hands too floppy sometimes it can help motion right right i'll keep polishing on the shot to make it uh to make all the fingers work and some small tweaks here and there of course ray needs to be fully animated she's just having two poses and then see if there's time to actually put in a funny joke in there like um but yes that's it for this shot i thank you guys for joining me and we'll see each other on another animation stream i want to keep talking to you you know i don't know what your situation is but i feel like we got some kind of connection right

Channel: Blender Studio

Views: 50,942

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Id: zhktftWbumE

Length: 31min 18sec (1878 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 25 2022