CINEMA 4D R13 Character Rigging & Animation Tutorial by Brian Horgan

hi everyone great to be here my name is Brian Oregon my main these two character rigging and animation instead of my work as a freelancer and I have a lot to cover today so rather than kind of show a reel of my stuff I'm just going to dive right in and I will show some examples to illustrate some of the stuff we're gonna be talking about as we're going on so show some examples of things I've animated so I'm gonna dive in so the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna rig a character using the new character tools noir 13 and I'll actually show them a shift with several templates but actually I'm creating my own one they were going to use it's a slightly simplified one I'm just gonna filter and show the joints here so this is our character templates and baseball you do to install this is you load it up just like easy as you would a normal cinema file and then you go to the character menu here character builder save character template as and it'll open up your library folder with the test music folder now and over 13 called characters and it'll save it in there I've already got it saved in there so I'm not going to do it again but I'm not only due to install it I can just close this then and now when you create a character object that template will be available so first thing I do think are loading our own ranked character so this is an this is our character here he's calling there's a very simple little rig to hypernurbs and you can see it's match there is very low poly it's the decimal thousand poly is all together and then I think we recommend starting over something like that ensuring you to rigging and especially the waiting process you know skinning the characters he joins it it's always gonna be tricky when you're starting off but it's definitely easier if you start with something really got a low detail like this so I've got a couple layers set up in this file I've got one first meshes I'm going to use the layers now as you're here you can get it from the windows or is it there manager here you can get from the drop-down list here or it's part of the interface now in our 13 and now I'll just use a little lock icon here which means I can't select yeah my sister's as long as I'm working and I'm gonna go to the character when you hear I just liked this guy robbed it and that's gonna have this new object or scene then the character your object and you can see well if you go to this the first time here the bill you got these different templates and when we want this up when we just added in the Allen rig and when I select that then I got these various options I can choose the first one is a pelvis I'm going to add that it creates and this this master mover control and a pair of control and I joined here throughout the rules of the character then I'm gonna add a spline okay or spine and then I'm gonna add his legs you can actually just couple of Handy hotkeys here you can use if you hold shift and control it'll it'll create both of them at the same time and it'll also keep the selection on the spine so I'm gonna all those and press gardening is you have a boat legs now and it's still selecting the spine here it's not gonna have the last component which is stretchy head which is a kind of an unusual feature you wouldn't have in a regular biped but in a cartoony character like this but I guess he's influenced by stuff like Iron Man and the more put something like that and it'll give us a little bit more flexibility and and that's our rig at it but we need to adjust it a little bit to fit the character I'm gonna press and a I'm sorry actually and be to see the M the Lions you can see there that it's mostly lined up pretty well but not 100% so I'm gonna go to the adjust tab here and you can see when I do that then we got there this display changes a little bit we get Pisa these still cuz all of this we can hover over that allow us to move the rig itself I'm gonna go into a front view a little bit and usually what I do is I positioned the the pelvis first if I right-click on it actually you'll see there's a couple of different controls I can select for I'm gonna select yeah the route no I'm actually gonna move it down a little bit giving pretty low slung hips and I'm gonna gonna grab this left leg wanna move that over here a little bit kind of lining it up with the middle of the knee down a little bit and I go into a side view you know sort of position the legs over the better I just gonna move the pelvis backs like this well is he I select hover over this again and you can see I got a right-clicking us make sure I set the roof rather than the hips on cuz I move everything with us I'm just paint back a little bit just line up with this edge loop here I might paint the legs for the tiny bit and then if you look at the knee you can see we've got this loop running right to air to the middle of the leg line this up with a girl bring it back a little bit from the front but I'm gonna keep it definitely in front of this and then I'm gonna grab the foot I'm gonna bring that down here position is the same roughly around here and this one will determine where the ball the foot is I'm gonna put it on the ground pretty much but kind of lined up with this loop here and then this one will affect where the toe is positioned on the ground it'll it'll be where his foot pivots off the ground so I'm gonna put it again on the ground and got one last control here and this will determine where the heel pivots from so I'm gonna move that put on the ground again and put it back around here somewhere and if I go into I'm actually just a couple more on ones where I'm here gonna enjoy it's just a spine moving up this just a little bit and then the head controlling I'm moving right up to the top and you'll see what by just in BM left leg there everything is mirrored over to the right so that's pretty much a rig set up I'll go back to the build mode one thing though I would like to do is I would like to make the freaking fellows a little bit more visible der Heyden a little bit by the mesh so I'm gonna go back to just mode and go to controllers and I make sure I mean a model tool mode I'm gonna select his left foot controller and I'm gonna select the scale tool I'm just gonna scale it out a little bit and again you'll see it's mirroring across and I can actually position that a little bit sometimes I just make a little bit easier to to select go back to the character tying it back to the build mode and that's all looking good and to bind then I'm actually just gonna unlock the mesh layer again so when we open the buying time we've got this empty field here which basically just drag the mash into and you'll see it automatically I had to skin the former and that's a wait time with all the joints added into it and and that's how character rig basically one thing we need to look at though is getting his eyes and his horns to follow along with the rig so that's one situation where I'm gonna open up the hierarchy a little bit you'll see what the the or thirteen Carol JV it kind of simplifies the the object manager a little bit you've got this things are unless there's components rather than all the objects that make up the rig but in this case you want to see them just for a moment so I'm gonna go to the character table again and I'm gonna go to to display tab and this man just wanted usually fold it up by default but I let me select that I'm gonna change it from components to full hierarchy that's gonna show me the entire rig so I'm gonna close up these make it a little bit neater I don't need to see the spine but I do need to see the head I think it's head for yeah head for I go back to object mode he's kind of and there's a few different ways you could approach attaching the eyes and the horns to the mesh but in this way I know just just keep it very simple and they're just going to constrain them to this joint people often use naturally kind of go for a parent constrain for this kind of stuff but I find I'm using a PS or constraint so the more stable so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna drag these objects out from underneath I've got this head objects root which basically I moved around you'll see it contains all these different objects so I'm gonna take these out of there for a moment it's on parent and an inspector head objects select a head for joint go to character constrain IPS or constraint thing and see that head object no now is jump to put into position and I it's gonna fall down without joins now I can just grab these and put them back under there as children of that roof snow and now if I go to the character and yet again I can switch the display back to I might actually go to controllers a friend that's a nice one you could you go if you see all the different controllers in the rig and I'm going to the other tagging on switch to animate and and that's basically our character Regnery you can you see there but I mean but it's squash and stretch head he's got this bomb controller here will affect his whole body this one here will affect his his hips and his chest and his feet are actually got put some nice options on them actually if he's like this foot controller here because of the controls tab we can see we've got them and these twists affecting his knee direction a tote whist foot roll that will roll them forward I'm gonna his ball his foot and then lift him up on a toe and then the heel and then its whole riddle make his toe and a flap as he walks you vaulter individual controls then for a ball left heel left and so if they give a little more control but often I find the foot rollers enough I've also had some options here for stretchy leg we can squash his leg we can scales make it longer and we can make we can buy a sweater that length happens on the upper or the lower part of the leg and we can just reset everything back to the default and add anything about the carrot relative as well as it creates a buying post we can just go to the I made time let's reset pose and I reset everything back to the default pose so that's a character rigged but you'll notice as I'm moving some of the controllers around oh yeah the deformations and the upper body they're not too bad you know most of this looks reasonable but down around here we've got some pretty messy areas so I'm gonna just jump to a new scene I'm gonna close this one and I'm going to open this one which is weights start scene this is basically the same scene really again but it's just a starting point for doing the weighting so what I like to do with waiting I'm gonna kind of use the old cookery show trick i off kind of skipping forward a little bit here and there to am follows that already finished just to speed things up but they said the basics of my of my usual workflow there really are lots of different ways you could approach it but my usual workflow is to kind of block in things and absolute values first and then smooth it out so the end the upper body as I said it's pretty decent I don't think we need to do too much work there and but do lower part of the body figure if I move these hips control here you'll see some of this stuff formation here is definitely looking good myself the hypernurb as you can see that the poly is a little clearer I'm just gonna press NB again to get that lines showing as you can see there that's obviously some stuff not working here so really it's quite simple what's happening there is um if I select the skin type if I double click on that it opens the weight tool and as I select it's like a nice option now you can actually change the order these are the Stadion I'm gonna switch it to hierarchy so it kind of gives you a better impression of Holliday yeah the joints are related to each other and if I select the hip joint you'll see it's affecting far too much of this area here which is why we're getting those bad deformations and that the tangency the tendon thing might be to em to delete those weights from this but actually I find it's a little bit more stable and if you actually add them to the correct choice rather than subtracting them it's just that there's a concept that we I've been raising called normalization which means that every point on a mesh has to be 100% to add to at least one joint they can be weight you know 70% to 1 and 30% to another and so on but then they have to be weighed hundred percent in total and that's what they call normalized weighting and it'll happen automatically as you as you paint the weights if you have this option on but if you subtract weights sometimes they'll get distributed in ways that isn't predictable so what I like to do is kind of go in and specify exactly where I want them so I'm going to do this times I'm gonna double click this again but I'm gonna hold shift and that will open up a new interface and this is you know our twelve and called a weights manager and it's kind of similar to the weights tool in a way but it allows you to do some extra functions and as you work in sort of an more technical way I suppose in some ways but you can sort of see that the better what you're doing is where it is I can select them the mesh I'm gonna go to edge mode I'm gonna press you and then L which would put me into loop selection mode and I'm gonna select the loop here that's kind of giving us problems and I select a joint that I want to associated to that root of the spine there I want that to be controlling you can see it's controlling these points in the middle and probably - bothers me around here but I wanted to control all these ones in the middle as well so I'm gonna turn this strength up to 100% I'm gonna change the mode to abs which means absolute and I'm gonna press apply and you can see now it's added those it's if I hover over those now they're always 100% to that joint and do the same you know start the next joint here and again it's roughly lining up with this loop here so I'm gonna select that leap and the same thing again it's affecting most of the ones that I want but not these ones on the sides on a apply again and I go up on further one and that looks pretty good but just to be sure I'm going to to apply again you can see some of those got cleaned up a little bit there so now when I select the hip joint you'll see I can set the right or left one you can see it's affecting a lot less of that mansion in fact I'm gonna actually select this loop down here as well I'm weighted to that one which is going to give it a fraidy rigid looking transition now between their the hip and if I I'm also gonna do some lists of can stuff on the foot so I'm gonna go to the toe joint and I know for example that this loop here this one here this one this one here I'm holding shift I can add those in I want those all to wait one percent to this and to this toe joint something for supplying is he just cleaned up a little bit I'm gonna do the same on the left foot the right foot sorry you can mirror the weights across but sometimes I find out a simple character I this it's almost just as quick to just do them like this so again I'm just going to wait those to that and then do the same kind of thing for the first I want this loop here this loop to be weighed 100 percent of the foot apply and then there's a few other points here that won't fall into a handy loops but I can do is I can just use the normal way to summer clothes that actually undid the other foot as well with those same loops just to kind of block that in so I go to the right foot apply and now I'm gonna close this for a second and go back - no way - bit double-clicking on this and I'm gonna go to the foot I'm gonna make sure that visible only switched on so I don't paint through the mesh I'm gonna leave it on on the percent of absolute I know just paint these birds here but on 2% you see one there was kind of a little bit darker so it wasn't controlled only percent for that waiting or do the same with the right foot again most of these are gonna be fine but there's that dark one there just make sure these are all 100% so we went do is I found blocking him with absolute values because I know that that's gonna give me believable results I mean I can smooth it was all sent a little bit later so I'm gonna just say and ganger open there and the weights manager then I hold shift and double click and then I'm gonna look at say to me so I want to go back to you to loop mode ul I want this to be affected by the knee hundred percent when I apply and now this loop here in the middle I want this to be affected pretty much 50% by this joint and 50% by the hip joint because it's right in the middle of them but I'm gonna actually set it up to be hundreds in first and then I'm gonna add 50% to this one and again that's I find that gives more predictable results for gonna changes to 50% I'm gonna hold alt actually which will constrain it you know so 10 degrees and I gotta press applies and I've got 50% there I've actually got 50% on that I just find that gets a little bit more predictable results excuse me and then I'm gonna go to this loop here I'm gonna set that to a hundred percent of the ploy I'm sorry I want that to the hip I'm doing that so on this one and then I'm gonna do the same thing for the other one that the right knee I want this loop to be hundred percent and I set this one up to under percent to begin with and then I'm gonna select a hip and change it to 50% apply and then this one hundred percent and now from here on really it's a matter of refining and this is where I will do some manual painting what I generally do is I go into object mode again and I would select say back to object mode and select say that the the pelvis controller of the character you can see there that movement left to right it's working pretty well but some of the sort of transitions here are looking a little bit rough so I generally do as I am just granted our petition the rotation for record there I'm gonna just add a keyframe in the default position in frame 1 then go forward a few frames a to last frame here and then just drag them over to where it's I'm starting to get that bad deformation you're picking over a bit further and keyframe it there and it just means now I kind of scrub back and forward and see how the deformations working I'm really to clean that up then I generally find out you use the weight tool but I switch to smooth mode and the smooth mode will kind of van kind of blend the weights out a little bit I'll generally do is I kind of go back I'd set this to maybe around fifty percent and I tend to go back and forward between usually two joints like between the hip and the spying zero you can see there the transition is a little hard so I'm gonna kind of soften it a little bit like this and that this is big where it's kind of a little bit more artistic than technical you know you kind of you're really working on what looks good you know what makes your car to deform nicely you know I'm gonna blend in the weights a little bit here and go back to the hip again just really what I'm trying to do is I'm setting at the Polly's to kind of even add side what size-wise so that sort of defamations look good and this takes a little while to do so I'm gonna just kind of skip ahead a little bit I'm gonna open them and then a file here where I put weights done and then you see in this one now it's not perfect you know but it's a lot lot cleaner than it was when I move his feet now you know you can see I can use the controls on his feet knee twist toe twist and all the other controls are working and then that's our carry two ready to animate and we can animate him behind or we can use the C motion system and but I'm gonna take a little break from this guy for a little bit more it's going to look a little rigging concept and then we're going to come back to an some animation principles and actually getting this guy walking around so close all my father's they're just it's a better run and I'm gonna open an example file here this is a basic concept I want to demonstrate by typing definitions from one mass to another so that's good I've got a simple scene fun actually build this again from scratch all I've got really is that this was a sphere which I made a disciple so it's just a mash now I'm added them a bend the former to it American lamb the former is not been the former never I'm gonna do is I'm gonna actually copy this mesh and I'm gonna rename this one render mesh I'm going to lead to the former I'm gonna bring it out here a little bit easier to see and this concept if you've ever read the book stop staring by Jase no super he demonstrates this in it then it's a pretty simple concept really but it's very very empowering really for all sorts of purposes in rigging animation and it's basically said you have having one object points drive another one and I'll show you what I mean I'm gonna just right click this render mesh object and go to character tags pose morph I'm gonna choose points I'm gonna need that's one by default I know delete that one I'm gonna drag into the form mesh as a morph target and it gives me this option which is a little bit confusing it says as deform or deformed mesh has an absolute or relative morph target and then the way I like to think about this is an absolute target will always look back I've walked this match is doing so it'll kind of update it as this mesh updates whereas a relative one will just look at the current state of it make that a target and and that's it then you could actually delete this object you know so for this purpose we need to use and the absolute so I'm going to say yes and I'm gonna go to that object and I've got more further and make sure it could animate mode make sure it's turned up on the percent the other thing I need to do is just adjust the priorities on this so I'm gonna go to the basic time and change this to generators that'll make sure it's all after the former on the other mesh and then result to that then if I go to the bend the former I can actually adjust a bend and you'll see it's actually affecting the other mesh and how do you thing about this is that I can I can move this match completely independently I can rotate it or scale it or do anything like that but the M whatever I do to the southern mesh will get pipes true using the deformation obviously this is a very simple example and you know you might wanna watch the practical use of this but it really has a lot of different uses I'm gonna show you a couple of examples of how you could use this this is an example with say the Allen mesh again and here I've done basically the same thing I've got the rig here this is actually our Allen rig you can see the controllers here are active if I select these I can pose them around and so on and I've got a look at the ground over here and this is a duplicate mesh then like we did with the end with the sphere and this one has got a squash and stretch to form around and just a couple of points about setting this up I actually find it works better if I use a morph to former and on the mesh to transfer the morph across and I also find that you need to when you go to the morph tag you need to make sure it's using correctional that means that it's an solving after the skin the former it's gonna look at the current state of skin for mine-itis on top if you have it just on the regular absolute or relative modes it won't work so you need to cut make sure it's on correctional go back to animation and I've just make sure it's up 100% and that means that whatever I do to this mesh will transfer but it'll transfer them what they call pose space could see this guy is his spine is kind of curved over if I squash and stretch this guy by just in factor parameter here you'll see it's actually affecting this is kind of narrative Ursula the rake is waiting isn't very good there but you can see the end how it's affecting the mesh and it really sort of a nice way you've got the the squash and stretch is acting just opened down in this mesh perfectly along the joint chain there because I'm because it's a in using that correctional type so it means you can rig this up in rather than trying to get a squash and stretch the former to follow along with the spine and to follow the curvature that you that you create when you move these controllers around you could actually just use some expresso to kind of rig that the length of the chain up to the its course and stretch like the skin the former has a squat some scratch built in but for cartoony characters you don't want to push a lot further this will give you an option and get it straight a couple of our examples of using this here's another one where I've got the same setup again but this time I've added I'm a cloth tab are tied to the duplicate mesh so if I press play now you can see this is a piece of cloth now and it's actually affecting our skin the character and again I can move him around but he's now having like a piece of cloth and you can actually use this for blending different cloth seams together and all sorts of purposes like that I'll show you one more example there's really endless ways you can use this but just to show you the concepts this is another example where I've got a cape or a very simplified cape and again I've got a cloth and this one's a little bit more of a complicated setup so I won't go through the whole thing but I'm please like I can now move this around I can pose it and I've actually got these joints in there vilify double-click this lecture I can actually actually pose this cape but I'm still getting a nice cloth effect so I get sort of a mixture of cloth and being able to pose it which is really nice for you know kind of superhero characters and so that's just a couple of examples and say really it's the kind of thing that the more you look at this you can see more ways you can apply it so I really encourage people to play around with that so again I'm just gonna close all my scenes again just to save a memory here I'm gonna gonna look at some animation principles and I'm gonna look at this one and I'm also gonna look at this one over that point first so animation is a little bit like music in that you know if you've never played an instrument before you could pick up a guitar and start plucking away at the strings in a random sort of way and if you have a musical ear you could probably get something out of it but would probably be quite a slow process whereas if somebody used to show you a couple of chord shapes and you know teach a couple of scales you get results a lot quicker it's the same kind of thing with animation but it's a little bit daunting when are starting off because it's a lot of terminology people throw around and one of them is this concept of key poses and breakdown poses some write and then other concepts like drag and overlap I'm gonna demonstrate that here with a very simple scene so I've got this um simple joint chain here that blue red and green joints these are set to a box display so it just makes a little bit more visible and I'm gonna just turn off position and scale for key framing and then switch to rotation I'm gonna just I'm gonna hold shift actually to constrain this I'm gonna go sixty degrees here in this direction I'm gonna keyframe it then I'm gonna go to frame 25 and keyframe and again and then frame 13 I'm gonna keep a magenta when I go hold shift I'm gonna try that once more sure I think it needs to start moving and then hold shift yeah that's it make sure I'm hundred twenty degrees and I'm actually gonna switch my my keyframe type press control D I bring up the project settings I notice it's the key interpolation to linear I'm gonna select I see those keys on that and make sure they're linear as well so now if I press play you'll see about this very simple motion of the caret up there I turn join tweety just going back and forward and if i was animating am a windscreen wiper well you know job done you know but want something a little more interesting than this so I'm gonna keyframe these two joints as well on this first frame and on the 13 frame and on the 25th frame and I know that doesn't change anything for the moment because they're just zero - but I'm gonna go halfway between and basically people talk about key poses key poses are the ones that you need to have in there to get the story points across like so you know just not what's the story to this but you can see that we've got this it's facing this direction it's facing this direction so you could say that these are the two key poses and the last one is just the first key again just to kind of lupus but the the breakdown poses then are the ones that kind of determine the flavored emotion and one way I've heard of pose I think it's a good way to explain it is if the key poses describe what happens the breakdown poses describe how that happens so the moment to break that you know there's nothing really interesting happening it's just a linear transition so I'm gonna go to frame seven and I'm going to bend this one back and that's going to put on all the keys so I can do this and it'll set keys I'm going on so again I'm hold shift I'm gonna go back say 25 degrees at this one and maybe 35 with this one and then I'm gonna go to frame 19 and I'll do the opposite I'm gonna select this one go back 25 in this one 35 another press place you have got much more interesting motion I've got this sort of sensor this is a so more of a floppy sort of tail I'm really that's that's the thing about and great dance in this pose here I'm frame 7 would be a great thing is it's kind of describing how the transitions are happening and it's also putting in some drag and you consider this an overlap as it comes back so what I'm gonna do is actually push that further thing you'll hear people talking a lot about animations is favoring a particular key so these poses you could say are favoring this key cuz they're kind of pointing back towards that one whereas this one right now is kind of neutral it's just kind of halfway between the the first and the last key but Mac's gonna favor the next key I'm gonna push it for maybe say 20 degrees so now this one is favoring the next key so it which means it's more like this key that's gonna push these back for maybe another 10 degrees each notch maybe 15 on this one yeah I did the opposite on this key and I pushed this one forward 20 and I'm back 10 say I'm back 15 and I was like I didn't different motion again I'm very sort of floppy for emotion and these are still linear keys if I open up the timeline you can see that the the key frames are actually just be linear just there's no smoothing there you know if I switch these two spline and polish them up we get a nicer movement again but I think there's enough there to temperature what I'm talking about and that we've basically Byam by adding in this breakdown pose and by dragging back and Bill or pushing forward the so many elements we've added a lot more fluidity but the main point I wanted to make it done I haven't actually changed the key pose at all frame 1 and frame 13 intern and 25 are exactly the same so it's the meeting the key poses that are just kind of blocking things in but the breakdown poses are really the ones that I kind of give you the flavor of the motion so I'm gonna show one more example of this this would be Lomond Riggin is to open up nicely open up the start file and this is showing really the same kind of concept in this file I've got him set up so he's just bobbing up and down it's just this is basically his body is just the only thing I made it really at the moment so he's probably knows if he's walking it but the motion is very very stiff and I don't have time to obviously polish this whole thing and a lot of detail but just to show one example of how you can use the same concept of break down poses so they did his route controller is keyed on frame 1 friend 7 and 13 so I'm gonna keyframe his head on those same frames this time I just want to keyframe the rotation keyframe 1 7 and 13 so I'm just block and just locking in those those poses we think I got halfway true save the frames for we gotta bring that up not all the keys make a little bit easier and you can see his body is moving down at this point so I'm gonna drag his head back as if he's kind of you know it's lagging from where he came from and then this frame here is frame 10 he's kind of halfway between going back up again I'm gonna call the officer we're gonna drag it down if I press play now you can see motions a little bit ragged because it's it's just got linear keys the moon rocks can't bring up my timeline I know stuck his head controller that's animated and rotation P is what I want and you can see the curve there it's just a linear curves I'm gonna switch it to spline but one thing that happens when you switch the spline is you get these kind of easing on the first one out Francis I don't actually want a good way to kind of visualize this is to go to the fore and switch it to repeat before and after repeat after and now when I said that that F curve you can sort of see why it would look jerky if I played it back now because they've got this Oh like a kink if you like in this plane so I'm gonna select the first one and the last one I'm just gonna adjust the tangent here just to get a smooth transition true and I'm going to just round this off here a little bit I'm down as well all right I could also grab these two maybe stretch them out a little bit just to kind of show it favor those those poses and now if I press play I should I'm gonna actually just change it to frame 12 playbacks I don't get to have a piece of the last frame so I got a much smoother motion and it's it's pretty exaggerated here yeah most of us don't Bob our heads that much and we walk but you know for cartoony character might be definitely appropriate but you can see when I often animated the spine at all yeah you could do the same thing with the rotation of the spine and you know drag it down and as he's coming up and track it back as he's coming down and it's really goes a long way to adding flexibility to the character so the last thing I want to look down is just a concept of spacing this is another principle and this is another principle I am talk about a lot then it's basically the concept of timing and spacing and timing really is how long an action takes spacing is how that action is spread out to the frame so I'm going to grab these three I'm just gonna keep her in the position this time I'm gonna keep friend in a position at frame 1 then I got 425 I gotta grab them over here and keyframe them again I'm gonna go into the timeline then I'm gonna switch the EM the red one to this position Z and keep em in this case two linear keys and now the red one will have a linear key and the green and blue ones will have spline keys so these will have a slight eased if they're trying to start off slowly and then fade in slowly but the thing about the default easing in any treaty program is it's very boring to look at you it's fine for things like camera moves so for that maybe but but if you want sort of more dramatic for dynamic movement 2p4 characters generally you need to kind of put in a little bit more work to kind of make the em what the spacing basically more interesting so you can see the first one there is the most delicate like it's like just a linear transition there's no acceleration at all these two start off slowly and then kind of speed up but there is it's a very smooth transition it's not particularly natural looking so I'm gonna take the blue one I'm gonna go to frame 9 and I grabbed it so I'm gonna go to an all the key again I'm gonna push it back so that it's more like the first pose and then I'm gonna frame say Femmes in nineteen eighteen nineteen and I got a baby now you're in seventeen I go push this one forward so it's more like the last one and I think I a much more interesting motion it's taking him a quite a while to get to this point so they enter the acceleration is a lot slower at the beginning and he's fledged to the middle much quicker and then a lot slower at the end you can see now they're you know did the motion of the street him the blue in the second most interesting it kind of looks like it's motivated by something whereas this green one it's smooth but mechanical whereas the blue or the red one is just a purely mechanical movement there's no acceleration or deceleration to it and it's a simple concept but you'll see this used to get all over the place we did with character animation Brickley would things like when the cars are swinging their arms if you think about a pendulum a pendulum long swing much faster to the middle of its swing and kind of slower at each end so there's just a couple of concepts and so a little bit of animations here suppose I'm a bit of work with demonstrating with cinema so again I just I close all my files and now we're gonna get on to actually doing a warm cycle with taran our kite round so I'm gonna just open this see motion start file and I don't you know unfortunately but in the time we had I don't really have the time to do a fully polished walk with this but I understood the basic concepts a lot of that the identical scientist has been covered by em live presentations on Cinna versity so I don't want to do too much repetition on what they've already done I wanted to kind of just give an overview of getting things started and then maybe have a look at some time some blocks and things I have animated them with just a couple of points that that will help him when he was born in amazing a walk either using C motion or string a pipe by hand and we feel like by using guy regular keyframes so that's like the character object and the object tab you see about this option here to add a walk-on depending on how your character tempted to set up it'll it'll add more or less to the rig in this case it's only really just gonna slide the feet forward and back so I'm gonna add a little bit more to that I'm gonna go to the C motion tab and I'm gonna go to the object tab and very simple actions what I want to call me here in this case you can almost think about these as kind of poses or or different you know like F curves basically in a timeline and I won't want to believe I'm gonna set the pelvis I'm gonna the first action you have by default is lift py or position Y I'm gonna add that and you can see as soon as I had that now it's changed the motion of a little bit he's now lifting up and down and I can select that then I can change how much and if thanks I'm gonna maybe bring up a little bit thinking more of a bouncy sort of feel and I'm also gonna rename if I double click on this I can actually rename this know we name a body uptown I find that's handy to do as you're doing this because it's it's a little bit abstract looking this interface sometimes and trying to figure out what's driving what so I find sometimes just renaming things as you go along they make things a little bit easier to deal with and then the motion did the style of the motion is being determined really by this curve so I'm just gonna open it and a separate V window there's an option there to do that so it's got a little bit more room here to adjust the keys and a couple of Handy options you can you can user you can right click on this and link and tangents and link and positions and that means that if you adjust one of these it'll adjust the other one will keep the cycle smooth it means we won't get a hitch in the motion the other thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna select all these I'm gonna go to point types soft and that'll give me these handles I can adjust very much like the keyframes in the timeline and I think about the motion is it's by default it just creates a sine curve and one of the things people were saying online the forms that's the C motion system was Sam all the motion was very mechanical that well it will because it's you know a sine curve is a pretty mechanical sort of motion and in real life we don't really move like that you know we've got things like gravity inertia and muscles and all these different things that are driving our motion so I'm going to just make this look a little bit more interesting they're gonna grab these I'm gonna stretch two handles out and that means now it's going to favor the top part of the of the curve so it's gonna spend more time in the uppers when it's slow into the opposition and slow back down again I can actually even push that further a you if you're animating something a bouncing ball you might addition might make this tangent really small so that it really hits it's a little bit unnatural here for but is purpling I make both of my tabs you can see now you can see they're kind of like bouncing off the ground almost like it's hitting the ground aids on each dissent obviously for a character that that it's not exactly what you want but first let me make a bouncing ball it would be I give out more natural to the movement but then let's go with that I'm also going to add a little bit of side-to-side and I'm a shift position X oh so I need to select the pelvis chip is next and hard no I'm also gonna maybe add a little bit of a twist rotation Y so now he's twisting is really long and the other thing we need to do is to look at his feet because right now they're just sliding back and forward which isn't particularly interesting so I'm gonna cook content on one foot again it's like his left leg and I'm gonna add a position Y and now you can see is lifting his foot up as he as it moves along but it's not really enough so I'm gonna select the am that position Y I'm gonna change it to maybe maybe around 20 gonna call that lift leg lift it up weight make it a bit more 20 further than I even yeah that's all I got you bad Freyr again this is where you read kind of decides you know what kind of character is this like was his personality you know if he's a kind of a sign I mean even watch his mood in this particular scene you're animating if he's you know sad he's gonna drag his feet were if he's optimistic and happy he's gonna pretty raise his feet up a lot that's really our side of I'm you know animation thinking about your character and thinking about the scene that is in and what he's gonna do but he wouldn't think when Louis normal is that his feet are staying completely level as he's different but she doesn't look very natural but if I am if I select his left leg again go to the options you see that Thea any of the user data options and they're on his foot these are I'm gonna appear here as well so don't select a foot roll one and by default or sheriff out there actually hazards as well and it's like that by default it just comes in the value of one I was gonna bring this up and separate window again to make a little easier to see I mean on foot there and what we want for this is and they're actually it's handy acts data comes in with one because right now this particular point I want it to be at zero so I'm gonna actually just gonna put a keyframe in here and bring back down to the zero line I can do this more accurately but actually entering at numerically there and then actually I wanted to be I don't want to be zero here I wanted to have a somebody so I'm gonna actually changed the value here to to say around search degrees so that's gonna determine the angle there as I was at the back at that part of the stride and then as he's foot lifts up side around frame five another control click here and I'm gonna key and again I was gonna set that to zero and then I'll just foot comes true here I wanted to kind of stay zero for a little bit longer I'm gonna key here and just 0-60 standing up in a moment and then as his foot lands I wanted to actually go the other way so I want this foot to kind of come back on his heel and then after a couple of frames I wanted to flop down on the ground again so I'm gonna put that down to zero and then again I'm gonna do what I did with your old come on they're gonna link end positions and link and tangents it's no it means I can just grab this and set this to zero and I'm gonna push that a little bit further I'm gonna maybe have him come move this a little bit so he comes back on his heel a little bit more a little bit too much it's not got a sense of his foot kind of flapping you'll notice though that it's gonna be a bit messy here because the interpolation so we're gonna select this one I just gonna stack them all and go to points point type soft let's go actually gonna switch off break tangents as well I know it just flatten these ones out again I'm doing this very quickly really here just to kind of get a rough idea but you know this is really where you spend a time to kind of polish the motion and get exactly the result you're looking for and I'm gonna have one more parameter to it as well I'm gonna add there's another one on his foot little user data control called toe real sorry I had that and do the same thing again I should have a separate window and the toll rigell is the front of this toe it kind of adds a little bit of flexibility so at this frame I want it to be zeros on a key inside that zero and then as he lifts up here say on this I want this to be the kind of full amount but I have not set up any amount yet so I'm gonna I just out here I wanted to come back like this say around there and then as he comes forward as he comes to kind of put his foot down I want to actually go the other way so I'm gonna like that I'll bring it back and then I just foot lands don't maybe have it just come up just a couple of frames after give him some real floppy sort of feel and then a gang on just to the in-game tangents link and positions I'm gonna change this one back to zero so now it's a little bit exaggerated and I could definitely polish this a lot more but it's Sam I could clean up the splines if we do the other one but just in the interest of keeping things quick I'm gonna just leave it like that so that's the basic tenant move it was foot and we notice obviously that is left foot hasn't got any this stuff on it so what we can do a nice option is actually we're add a different type of action to these ones called reference and I'm just going to add to them and the first one I'm gonna add the toe the foot roll from the other one actually I'm gonna treat him I need to add one more because I've got actually got three that I need to add I've got the the foot the leg lift and this one I'm gonna add the foot roll and this one I'm going to add the toe riddle and I think with the reference was he had no adjustments here for them because they're all driven by by these ones they're kind of clones them if you like but they're offset how you just the offset is actually by selecting the leg and it's just in the phase by default you know the left leg will be minus 25 this will be 25 so they kind of sync up so the cycle is kind of match on both sides and that's an important thing about getting a walk cycle smooth is that you keep everything symmetrical you know unless your character is gonna limp unless he's deliberately limping you want the promise to be the same on both sides generally so the same very simple animation and what I would do to make this more organic will be to add motions to do today hips and the chest and the head and offset them using the face but just to keep things quick I'm gonna skip over that I'm just gonna look at a couple of examples of what you can do as well you could you can make of Jesus walking on the spot movement but if I go to say I had a few more frames 0 and if I know I deserve and that's gonna spline the set up here in the scene at the moment his said Walker said static I can put up a path and go to a spline path I've already got explained crazy in the scene and Sousa do that then he follows along with that path but you notice he's pretty much trudging along there you know it's quite slow so what other ways you can do that you can just display his stride length I'm gonna just have everything a bit long as he's taking bigger steps in a bit more even I'm also gone just a time that's a really nice thing right to see motion systems you can very quickly to experiment with different timings further the characters not gonna make them to be very quick failure and 15 frames snow he's really moving along I maybe make this stride a little bit longer as well kind of both of these will sort of affect how quickly progresses alone so now he's about sort of life sort of I say very very simple but I'm a cartoon you are looking to look to the walk I'm really that's why I would recommend starting with a character at this as well apart from the the rigging and awaiting me easier you can actually get away with a lot more with a character like this then you come with a realistic human you know if you've got a really realistic character and you you really got to have a realistic motional is if you it's a great item animator called a Keith Lango who's got a series of tutorials on the web and when the concept talks about this content of visual or harmony which means that you know and the motion has to suit the character and the character has to suit the environment and all these things have to kind of be in balance you know if you look at something like say South Park know the walk cycle some matter or anyway naturally and the characters just literally Bob from side to side as they move but we accepted because the characters don't look realistic when if we looked at avatar or something like that you know the motion for that was largely different by motion-capture because they needed that ultra fine level of detail and because the characters were all too ultra detailed and you know apart from being a foot tall and blue they were they were realistic in many ways so that's really a lot of thing to think about really is that your your character will determine the motion in a lot of cases and another thing we can do as well just to show you again this is one of those things that was covered by University or some of the tutorials I've done on the cafe is well I looked at this already he said you can add them Ruth you can add them I've got a landscape object as its seen here and you can add that into this surface tab here and now he'll actually walk along that surface you can press on the align tabs are our hubs option here which would mean that his body be looking there will actually a kind of an angle as he walks over the uneven surface we can even adjust this interactively and you'll see a little bit more extreme there he's walking along and he's don't think we can adjust this how you see his feet are going through the floor there a little bit we can adjust the offset to control that because you got to bring him up a little bit it's getting more realistic motion so we how you how you am adjust Istanbul will the terminal will depend on one your purpose like if you want something that's that's easy to reuse you might just keep it like this and you might go to the object and you might save out yeah you can go to the base you can actually say this as a preset and then reuse it on the character another scene or you could thank this too you can set all the controllers and bake them two keyframes using the I go to the timeline if I select one of those controllers okay am I going to full a hierarchy I'm just gonna stop and walk in there for a moment and just turn off so animated and I can it'll be easier if I just go to a character object and go to display object controllers and say if I try again his left that's right like there's no animation at the moment but I could go to functions baked objects and turn off create copying clean trucks and just bake it for the keyframe rains and then I can do that for all the controllers and then I can turn off to see motion tag object and then he'll be driven by the keyframes or you could do the same thing with the motion Clips system and that's the way of them then blending different images together or refining them further in the kind of more traditional keyframe way better than the C motion system so it's a great system I think we need for blocking things out quickly and the kind of experimenting but my for my own purposes I I find out more of a keyframe guy so I like to kind of bake things back to keyframes and just in that way so I'm running low on time here of a couple minutes left I just want to look at just again just to go over a couple of other principles that might help you if you're trying to put a walk together and you're wondering you know why doesn't it look natural what should I be looking for that's what I think what animation did you know you can sort of try and you can kind of fiddle with settings and but if you know what you go it really helps you the me that comes down to looking at reference and I'm going to look at a couple of example files here I've got a walk reference movie here and this is just a simple movie just some people walking by the camera here and you can see if you look at some books a great book actually on the subject is that Diana made a survival kit by Richard Williams and then he talks about he divides a lot of I'm an assistant if I had to walk into four key poses and the first pose most of the blocking first is what they call a contact pose which is basically this poet here and this this guy to the red t-shirt he's AM his heel is just contacting the ground here it's not coming down yet he's not really showing much weight yet his leg is kind of straight his back leg is just lifting off the ball of the foot so that's kind of first pose people put in and this left leg is forward or his right leg in this case and his left arm is forward if he can't see his right arm is back and his his left foot is back to the arms and fees the hips and chest as well will tend to to oppose each other then the next pose that's kind of important to get in there is what's called a down pose and forces with a motion blur there but you can sort of see what's going on his front foot is flattened down the ground his knee is starting to bend his hips are kind of coming down as the waist is coming down on his leg his back foot though is still on the ground that's one of the things that the see motion system won't do by default usually if you cut just a sine wave his foot will already be off the ground on this at this stage which that's one of the things that that doesn't make it look natural so you've got to kind of put that in there I got the keyframes to kind of make sure his foot stays on the ground a little bit longer and it kind of rolled forward on the toe might go to another frame here where you can see with less blur yeah you can see it there you see where his foot is still on the on the ground there but it's kind of rolling right off the toe and continue to do that you know it'll you know you can say it's fighting the war against gravity if you like it it's gonna resist lifting up until the very last moment and then it's gonna lift up then we get to our next main pose of the walk which is kind of arbitrary here or you could say it's here but basically what they call this is there is the passing pose which is kind of important pose it's basically the leg is pretty the planted leg is pretty much straight your leg is lifted off the ground the arms are kind of in the middle letter of the swing and the next post and it's kind of important to put in there is often called the peak pose you can see on a human we don't really lift our feet up very high but on the cartoon character you putting exaggerate this I'm bring his feet right foot right up you have to kind of show kind of energy and excitement enthusiasm I kind of that kind of quality so that's often called a peak or the up pose and then it comes back into the down pose again and then you see the girl there behind him sees her leg her stance is gonna be a little bit different obviously she could be more feminine in our movements but the basic poses are still there her contact pose and be this you can see her because of her high heels she's her foot is still pretty much flower our back foot is pretty much flat there and then it's gonna lift up onto the toe it's kind of obscured a little bit by this guy's like I just come to put her her foot is probably still planted their eyes rolling onto the toe and then it comes into the passing pose and then the peak pose and then the plant again then the contact and then it's really an important thing of animation really is just looking at reference you know you can film yourself or you can go on YouTube and look looking reference for a particular action that you're trying to animate and so I'm wearing very low on time I'm gonna show a couple of examples then I'm these are some walks I can some animated actually the first one we look at is a rolling cycle but this alone this will illustrate some of the m-must gonna turn off an old spline and this is a kind of cartoony kind of run cycle animated this iraq too big this guy during the or 12 peter stage to test out some the new character tools nor twelve and you can see they're a couple the principles we're looking at india india did the animation principles section this where we am actually i had his arm you know his arm is kind of it's bent here and it's then as his arm as his upper arm swings forward his lower arm kind of straightens out it's like it's lagging behind the motion sorta like that tale example then again here this arm will kind of get to this pose earlier than the upper arm will get earlier then we'll enter that opposed earlier than the lower part so you can see that this part is stopped it's almost starting to move back now where this arm is still following true or the distal limbs I should say it's still following true and again it's going to lag behind the motion and then straighten out again as it comes true you'll see that goes a long way to adding a little bit of flexibility today to the arms you notice I didn't do too much with her with the hands because I want him to feel kind of strong you know he's kind of moving with a lot of purpose if he was a more laid-back so loose character I would have loosened his wrists up a lot more and again you'll see his his foot is really stay in contact with the ground and then just pops off on one frame you have to kind of again a spacing issue where you're kind of looking at how the motion current transitions from pose to pose I'm cranking over timers overlooking these last few examples really quickly and just point out a couple little points about each one and this is a kind of a kind of stylized kind of model walk kind of interesting things about this one there's one thing that her her arms aren't symmetrical at all he or her arm one arm is basically constrained to her hips the other thing that's kind of interesting about a female walks at the legs I'm really exaggerating in here butt and legs will tend to follow almost like a tightrope and they won't swing out very much on the passing pose but on the contact and aldi in between poses they'll stay really almost like she's walking on a tightrope you see most of the swing here will come from the pelvis and the hips to give a sort of feminine sort of feel the upper body doe will have very little sway and the head will have very little up and down there was a little bit but in a model walk particularly I looked at some references amongst the heads tend to keep looking forward as well as the whole thing is to illustrate there the close of the word and so they really keep the movement quite quite subdued in many ways and of course this is sort of a cartoon version of that and then couple of other examples this is well I'm did a couple years back and she disses we've got I'm sort of pretty sort of stylized kind of so people have got herself an attitude Walker it's really kind of that it's emphasizing this this first pose and the last one and the kind of swinging through the middle and is a lot quicker he's kind of staying in this pose from most of the cycle almost so that's again a spacing turn I think I'm another one then this is a very different looking one this is another cycle again but in this case he's actually going down on the ball of his foot just toe almost eye landing very slowly then on his heel that he's trying to sneak up on his victim and a couple of quick ones we've got a double bounce walk here this is based on the nineteen twenties sort of feel if you look at some of the really early Disney stuff you know Mickey Mouse all kind of thing there his hips actually going up and down twice per cycle here which is completely unrealistic but in you know in the world of cartoons it gives sort of an I mean optimistic sore a happy sort of field to his motion and the other thing that's interesting about this one is that if you look at his elbows house they swing forward on the kind of passing pose they're actually going backwards his elbows actually leading the motion which looks weird in a frame true but it really is a sense of this is he's driving the motion and this is kind of lagging behind so it gives a nice sort of energetic sort of feel to it so emotionally it works at stake your frame true that looks kinda weird but trying to give a nice sort of happy sort of attitude last couple of examples then we've got this was interesting one this is am sort of a Star Wars model and here you got a lot of side to side to kind of suit the really big stride in the big foot movement that we've done and then they've got a realistic calf here and here you can see one thing that's interesting about this one is how that the idea the pause will tend to really stay parallel to the ground almost and just flip forward on the last moment of her peed on the ground almost and I've got another cat here this is when I rig myself an exactly model who written texture is quite recently and this one we've got a much more cartoony animation so you can see with this one yeah the motion is a lot more stylized and a lot more pushed that wasn't the realistic guy again that's going back to what I was saying earlier about you know exaggerating to suit your character and the last couple of ones then this one is pushing another the cartoony idea even further like this he's not realistic in the slightest but you know with the type of character he's got a displacement map here which kind of looks a bit strange in the viewport but it renders lyceum but you'll see that the motion is that is very kind of stylized no real hippos don't move like this at all but in sort of an argument sort of feel like this guy's kind of works pretty well and then one last one now and this is actually just a movie and this was I was kind of learning how to do much moving a little while ago and I animate into sad dinosaur skeleton and a lot of the principles I've been talking about in the other ones here are I'd work here if you look at his hips his hips are really what's driving the motion and his tail his body and his head are kind of lagging behind there and that helps give a little bit of a sense of weight you know obviously he's only like you know six inches taller but I'm kind of still animating in mice if he's like a full-sized dinosaur you can see is it Sam his feet don't stay off the ground very long that's another thing that kind of shows a bit of weight and then they kind of flop on the ground on his toes and spread out once again it helps show a little bit of weight so I've got a little bit overtime there but I'm I hope that was interesting and I am hope this gives you some ideas I'm going to answer some questions now have you got any so thanks a million thank you

Channel: Maxon

Views: 209,569

Keywords: c4d, cinema 4d, r14, release 14, sculpting, bodypaint 3d, maxon, modeling, modelling, 3d, animation, rendering

Id: hD5wZ8bV-Aw

Length: 65min 31sec (3931 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 05 2013