Don't Let Your Character Die! Keep Alive Workflow

one of the things I always struggled with a lot as an animation student was keep alive what to do with a character when they're not actively acting or remoting or doing something I remember being told a lot as a student that things shouldn't just move because you need motion and you need movement in your shot you should be able to take a breath pause and just let things be still and then you can move after that but I didn't know what to do in those moments it wasn't until much later that I realized oh like what all of us do when we're not actively doing something while we're breathing and breathing is just one example of how to have your character idle and just kind of hang out and not do a lot but not just totally die on screen with no pixel motion or feels like the screen just froze and nothing's working so today I'm gonna show you how I animate a breathing / idle animation cycle if you follow me on Instagram or Twitter then you've probably already seen this linked animation that I did a couple of weeks ago I did this for the link rig which if you haven't seen this already fantastic from the same guy who did the Zelda rig link below to download both characters now what I should have done is just hit record on my screen capture software and then animated which would have allowed me to just time lapse it for you and show you from nothing to the end product what happened but I kind of forgot to do that so instead we're gonna take the finished product I'm gonna break it down with you and show you how you could go about animating something like this from scratch let's do it and in case you're new here hi I'm sorry I do a ton of animation stuff on the channel and if you've just found me recently or you've seen a couple of my videos and just you know cherry-picked here and there take a look through the channel hit subscribe so you don't miss new stuff but browse around there's a ton of stuff that I'm sure can help you with whatever it is you're working on or if you want to talk about this stuff live you can hang out with me over on Twitch 3 days a week on Tuesdays Thursdays and Saturdays or hop on the discord where we have over 3,000 artists hanging out helping each other giving critiques on work it's a great community and the last thing is that if you enjoy my content and you want to help support this channel a link to my patreon down below or your animation tutoring bunch behind the scenes stuff links to everything are in the notes below and without further ado let's do a breathing animation all right this is the link idle animation and if I turn on all the controls you can see everything that's going into it obviously you didn't start out like this it started off with link in a tee pose and so what I'm gonna do here is just show you how I've kind of structured this shot now I'm using animation layers which if you haven't already seen my video on animation layers I highly recommend checking that out you don't need that to do this but I do recommend considering it if you've animated an entire shot and you want to add a breathing on top of it layers alright so the absolute first thing I did when setting up the shot was taking from a tee pose and put him in the pose that I wanted him in for the shot so I kept a camera perspective window open the whole time so that as I made adjustments on the right I could see my changes reflected from the cameras point of view and also keep in mind the 2d pan and perspective tool that this is the actual camera view but by using the forward slash key and zooming in using that you can zoom in on your character without actually moving the camera if you are confused as to what I'm talking about check out my attempts videos again linked below and with this character specifically when I was setting up the pose I thought about the fact that okay he's gonna have his hands resting on the sword I'm not gonna want to animate both hands independently and then the sword and all that stuff so I actually set up a constraint system very quickly so the sword is actually constrained to this locator down here which controls its position and it's oriented to where the hands are so as he moves his hand the sword follows so with one control I can manage all of this stuff without having to worry too much about it down the road I've got this control with three gets the sub control and this is actually designed as an IKE a kind of spying bender thing so my plays get in just the right position and then moving it back and forth you get this kind of back in forward motion which go too far and adjust a lot of things it's just be very subtle and this is what I landed on where it does move the hips a little bit but it mainly moves the chest and that's fine for now I just need to block it in so that was step number one get the forward and back rotation of the chest and also make sure that the timing isn't too even if you look over here you can see that there's actually a slightly shorter amount of frames when he breathes in demony breathes out next on my list was to go to the shoulders in his case the clavicle controls are here so in this case what you're looking for is to have the shoulders rise and fall with the breath because when you breathe in your shoulders should also work with that same connected action of everything that's going on in your chest and your torso in your diaphragm and all that but here's the thing where we start to get into level 2 of constructing a breathing thing most of the time you think about rotating stuff like this and not all rigs have translate controls but have you ever considered translating or scaling something that you've only ever rotated for whatever reason when I was a student I thought that you were not allowed to scale things you should never touch scale controls and animation I don't know why I thought that like I was gonna break something in the rig people animate scale all the time people translate rotate and scale things that you would not expect it to move that way in the real world constantly in animation but this case I can rotate the shoulder but when I go to translate nothing happens it's what's actually locked in the rig I had to go in and try to unlock it myself which I don't recommend you do if you're just starting out Maya that freaks you out don't worry about it this is probably a more advanced tip for some of you guys so I actually went into the node editor with this new locator I created and I just piped in the translation attribute into that Club of control that way by moving the locator it would therefore drive the translation of that shoulder and did that for each side so that allowed me to kind of go in and out and up and down in a way that the rotation control wasn't allowing me to do right and if you're watching this and you're newer to animation and you're like holy crap like what is he doing that looks terrifying what the heck are these things don't worry about it I literally never did this as a student I have not actually done that until this particular shot which is several years after I ever did breathing stuff for the first time so don't panic if you see this you don't have to do this but I'm just showing you different things that I do for different skill levels so cool cool now it's kind of hard to see exactly what this change is doing because it is so subtle I remember that these things shouldn't stand out and you shouldn't notice them they're there for you to feel not to see but for emphasis just to kind of demonstrate to you what I did and why I'm gonna go ahead and bump this up really aggressively so you can see the effect this is how this is obviously way too much but the idea is that the chest is expanding and contracting with every breath and it is slightly offset from the up-and-down forward back of links body which if I where do I go ahead and dial that up you're gonna see that things just get all kinds of wacky so you do not want to push these things too far because it won't look good I wouldn't even look like he's breathing it just looks like you've broken the control and I don't know what this looks like but back to normal again you don't even really notice what I did it's just that there is motion in that full connected area now to be fully honest with you everything else I did from this point is one of two things either me going forward and back or up and down or side to side or scaling up and down it's that type of same thing on different controls for the most part or I'm copy-pasting most of what I did from here on out is take the forward and back of that that body rotation and I copy the curve and I pasted it into the translate y or the rotate X or the scale Z or whatever it is I copy pasted that curve into another attribute maybe offset it a bit maybe scaled it up and down maybe had to flip it in case it was going the wrong way at the wrong time or something when you move the chest that means the shoulders need to move which means the arms need to move which means the hands need to move and going back to the shoulders in the chest the neck is moving the head is moving you're affecting the stomach because breathing happens all through the diaphragm which might affect the hips somewhat everything is connected all the way down to the most polished little details which we'll get to in a second his hair is cloth and so on we'll talk about but I want to point out here that things like I K hands versus FK hands that's gonna change the way you do this so my example is here if I move his entire body you can see his hands are completely locked in place they're not moving at all that's something that happened with AI K which means I need to manually move those and because of the way I set up the constraint only need to move one of the hand for this all to work but I do have kind of a forward and back of the of the and doing a nice little arc that way it is still a part of the overall motion now as we start to get into polishing on the character a few details here is if I didn't leave anything to not move even the fingers the fingers are very subtle and probably could use a little bit extra work as well but if you look here you can actually see the hand kind of closing and opening a little bit the thumbs moving I wanted a little bit of ambient motion now I probably could have offset the fingers - not all go in and out at the same time they should all have a little bit more independence but I did do that on each hand just so that they weren't completely dead and if I were actually doing a full shot it might have been a good idea to have him kind of adjust his hand shift something around maybe you know reset his hand and get a better grip on the sword whatever it is don't forget about these little details when you're thinking about Ovid the shoulders and the chest of breathing that motion travels all the way down to the fingers which continuing on to some more policy stuff I actually made sure that his shaky slate has a little bit of a sway to it I don't know how realistic this is but I wanted to add something here another thing to not forget are these pole vectors kind of where the elbows are pointing for example if he's gonna be going up and down you want to make sure that you've got a little bit of elbow offset so move those off set those with this type of an animation I don't recommend any kind of a pose to pose your stuff workflow at least the way I did it this is something that I would recommend just kind of getting your first main motion and then copy-pasting off setting your keys you're gonna be all over the place do your best to keep track of all of that but don't be afraid of keys being in different places because you kind of need them to be you don't want the whole character at the same time you want everything to feel offset broken up organic so that's important and before I forget what this control does I want to show it to you this is just another locator that I custom grabbed I just connected this to another part of the rig that allowed me to push and pull the geometry on his chest like this which considering you can't really see his back to see it Bend in doing this really aggressively you can see what it's doing if I go subtle you can see it just kind of feels like he's taking a breath in his stuff it's not perfect but it works and I'm actually really happy with the result when the character is pretty much good and you now have to think about their clothes is in their hair and the more polish you type of stuff like that first thing is does your rig have controls to adjust those things and if not you're going to want to add them yourself if you can if you're not quite there yet skill wise as okay don't worry about it but if you can or if you have those controls already in your rig then you should use them here's an example of what that looks like with link you can see his his cloak has this kind of ambient blowing in the wind type of motion just to feel like he's in a space with wind same goes for his hair there's a little bit of motion on his hair at a different frequency and if we look at his hair every section of his hair does kind of the same thing but it's a slightly different time his whole hair is not all moving at once it's broken up into this nice organic when the you know things move at different paces different rates and we even have this little thing in the eyes I've added which is this little eye specular which I did show in my Zelda kind of little short animation breakdown wait Copley if you missed that video that's a good one that shows how to integrate your character and an environment to make it feel all part of the same scene one of the quickest ways to figure out if you need to add that kind of stuff in your shot is to think about where is your character and if you haven't thought about it if it's just somewhere in Maya gray background just basic play blasting of an exercise that you're doing just think about this are they inside or the outside make a decision it's totally up to you if the outside there's probably some amount of wind so consider the environment and location and time of day and weather and that kind of stuff when you are animating even something as simple as a breathing exercise now the last thing to keep in mind as we kind of wrap up the breathing part of this is that you know you may get a character to look like he's breathing but he doesn't look like he's alive if you leave the face just dead so whether you have him doing eye darts whether you have him looking around whether you have him yawning or whatever maybe he's talking while he's breathing maybe you already have acting and you're just using the breathing to plus it regardless the difference between this and this should be pretty clear one of them has I mean obviously he's looking around but you should feel a lot more life from the character in this state than you did before and if you don't then I didn't do a good enough job one little detail that I do want to point out since this is the close-up shot look really closely at his eyes when he blinks and looks away do you guys notice anything about the pupils not to go here it's really quick it's really subtle you would probably never need to do this unless you were really close up but I actually decided to have when he blinks the size of his pupil if you look at the size of his pupil hopefully you can tell he closes his eyes his pupils dilate they get bigger because there's less light when he closes his eyes and he opens and the pupils shrink again they actually do a slight overshoot as well they go small and big it's a very small and subtle detail that may not have been necessary but I felt really good about adding it and it was just something that I added in that polished process that I was like oh yeah this is good no one's gonna notice this especially at the distance that the shots suppose be viewed from but I thought it would add to that feeling of the character just feels real for some reason so really think about all these different things whenever you get a chance and we're gonna make this character feel that even though he's not doing much he's very much still alive so I hope that was helpful and if you have more questions again drop them in the comments below or jump over on discord I mean disparate a lot more than I'm in the comments so if you want to have a conversation with me with other artists this card's a great place to be or three days a week over on Twitch I'm doing this kind of stuff live I do a ton of this type of like short animation stuff over on Twitch links below for everything or if you want me to get in really deep with your shot and help you kind of work through some stuff that's what the patreon tutoring is for but hopefully this video helped to overcome something that I struggle with a lot of the student which was how do you have a character do something while doing nothing and not just die on screen there's lots of other stuff I could talk about moving holds other options besides just breathing in this type of an idol we'll get to that in the future but for now thanks so much for watching this video leave the thumbs up if it was helpful share it with someone who could use it subscribe and turn on that notification belt incase you haven't already and I will see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Sir Wade Neistadt

Views: 53,888

Keywords: link rig, botw, botw animation, link animation, botw link animation, animation breathing cycle, animation idle cycle, idle animation, how to animate idle, how to animate breathing, breath animation, how to animate keep alive, keep alive animation, keey alive, 3d animation, maya animation tutorial, maya animation, maya 2020 animation, zelda animation, how to animate cycle, cycle animation, looping animation, subtle animation, animation workflow, animation tutorial, anim, 3d

Id: P05qRtTwpM8

Length: 14min 25sec (865 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 14 2020