How to Animate 2 Characters in Cascadeur | Contact Pair Animation

[Music] hi everyone today we're going to be looking at how to animate two characters in a single scene in cascader as a reference I'm going to be using this video here the reason this example is useful is because the two characters move separately at first then they grip together and then they separate again so our goal is to see how we can use the cascader physics tools to make animation like this first let's set up the scene with the characters I'll use the characters from the sample scenes so let's open one I guess we'll use both Unreal Engine 5 Manny and Quinn for this scene so let's open the first character the character is loaded and now let's add the second character to do that go to file import scene let's go to the sample scene folder and here I'm going to select the other character the u5 Quinn now we've loaded the character into the scene and uh the both characters are now located at the same place the best way to move characters is to drag their Center of mass by the way the fastest way to locate the sample scenes folder is to right click your scene Tab and go to show in folder then you can copy this address and paste it to the address line whenever you're going to import something so now that we have both characters in our scene it's time to add the reference but before we do that let's save our scene first go to file save as and choose the folder to save the file now the reason we do that before we add the reference is that cascader will have to process the video and create an image sequence which it will then place in the same folder where we saved our scene just to keep things organized really now let's import the video go to file import reference video and let's select the file so we have the reference in our scene now we can move it uh the best way to place it would be that you would see both the reference and the characters at the same time you can also scale it using the scale tool and by the way let's create a separate track for the reference video click add track button here which will create a track and include all the selected objects in the scene I guess we're all said we have both of our characters in the scene along with the reference video so let's get to animating first let's place the characters into their initial poses I'll just move them around uh roughly place them as we see on the reference at the beginning of this animation I'm going to be working with one character only so it may be a good idea to lock the track for the second character so it doesn't receive any key frames we can hide the track or lock it by clicking on these icons here once the track is locked it will turn gray on the timeline and will no longer receive any key frames I can also hide the second character so it does not get in the way while I'm animating the first one and now we get to blocking at this stage I'm only going to be roughly sketching the poses since we're going to be using Auto physics anyways which will definitely help us improve and may suggest better poses but it's no use spending too much time at this point trying to fully replicate the reference what we need here is a rough sketch of the movement and the timing I'm going to speed up this part of the video cuz there's nothing going on really except for posing and we all know how much everyone enjoys them posing a Miniatures don't they but the general advice I can give for the blocking stage is that since we're going to be using autop physics it's important to set the keys where the feet leave or touch the ground because it's going to be crucial for autop physics to correctly determine the fulcrum points and the intervals between them as for the jump I'm going to be creating additional key frames when the character is Airborne because we have quite a complex rotation there and without those additional key frames the interpolation may not work correctly and finally on this Frame we have to grab and get a hold of the second character so it's time we unlock it and make it visible but there might be some nuances when working with two characters at the same time at the moment of recording this video the version of cascad we're using does not allow to simultaneously select the autop posing points of two separate characters so for some specific poses I will have to go into the point controller mode instead you have to be more careful when working in the point controller mode since you have to adjust every single point there manually but in some cases it may prove really useful in our case I'm going to be using Point controller mode to rotate the points of both characters around a certain pivot here for example I select all the points of the characters except for the fulcon ones then choose use the rotation tool and right click any point to make it a pivot also in the version of cascad that I'm using now some changes that you make in the point controller mode May reset if you then choose to use autop posing tool on the same frame so it's either that you have to activate additional points in the autop posing mode before you make changes or just don't use autop posing after the point controller [Music] mode so I guess the blocking is done now let's go through the keys one by one and see the result the first frame are the initial poses of the characters now the next frame is is actually the last frame before the foot of the first character leaves the ground next frame the right foot is back on the ground then the left foot takes off in the next frame the right foot uh leaves the ground and then the last frame before the jump a couple more frames when Airborne just to get the poses and then finally the frame when we grab the other character so here we have keys for both characters in this Frame fr the hand touches the ground and then the foot as you can see then the first character stands on their feet while the other character is airborn in this Frame the other foot is now placed firmly on the ground in this Frame the second character fell and touched the ground and the first character makes a turn and gets to the final pose we can click this button here to limit the timeline to the last created frame now we have to interpolate so I'm going to select all the frames and choose the bizier clamp method so now that we have stuff happening in between the frames we can set ik or FK for different body parts on different intervals It Is ik by default so for the hands you can either leave it as ik or or choose Global rotation which is actually something in between the ik and FK Behavior but make sure that on the frames where the hand acts as a for Chrome you only use ik also in some particular intervals like this one or in other intervals where there's a lot of rotation involved it is best to switch to FK to get a better result so we switch the legs to the FK behavior and of course you can set different interpolation for different limbs separately for example here the left leg has already touched the ground while the right one is still rotating so we set FK for the right leg only on the intervals where the character is fully Airborne you can choose to use AFK for the whole body meaning uh on all the tracks on the timeline for that particular character uh before that actually we also have our first character fully Airborne on this interval so switch that one to FK as well also check out the second character here um it does something really weird with its arms on this interval and that's because the interval is really huge and the interpolation doesn't really handle it that well so I'll just copy the first key frame and place it closer to where the character character actually starts moving and because the key frames are the same the character simply doesn't move on this interval so now that we have the interpolation sorted out let's watch the animation We've Ended up with and it looks something like so and now let's get to autop physics shall we by default autop physics works with only one center of math so you have to select one of the characters Center of mass first before you turn physics on in our case we will need physics for both characters only in the middle of our animation when they actually have contact between them the rest of the animation we can add physics separately to each one of them however check this out see how the physics behaves on the first character it tries to correct Its Behavior in poses and trajectories as if if the second character is just not there so what we can do is limit Auto physics to work on a specific interval to do that go to the physics settings tab and in autop physics make sure that work on interval is checked so now select the required frames on the timeline this would be all the frames before the characters actually grip together and then turn autop physics on now let's see what changes is the Gest that we make so what it's clearly done is that it smoothed out the trajectory of the center of mass as you can see in my case the center of mass was just all over the place really so it smooth it out okay and also it has built a correct ballistic trajectory for the jump so let's match the characters together so we can better see the result we can see that the last frame is fully identical same as the very first one but everything in the middle has been pretty much changed uh which refers to the poses the velocity now let's snap our character to the autop physics but before we do that let's deactivate this button here because we want to snap it to the key frames only and not bake the whole animation and now let's snap it so the first interval is now fixed we can do the same at the very end of our animation we have uh this section here where the characters move on their own so again we do the same thing we select the center of mass of the character we select the frames after the characters separate and we enable autop physics now if we look closely what autop physics has done it's definitely changed the pose of the character here now it resulted in making the character more balanced because in the poses which I made it was very difficult to accurately determine this balance and again we can see that the trajectory of the center of mass has been smoothed out since I agree with the changes it suggested I will snap the character to the autop physics also on this interval we can use Al physics for the second character as well specifically to fix its trajectory uh falling onto the ground so I will only select the interval where the character zborn because I want autop physics to build a correct ballistic trajectory for that interval and once we turn Auto physics on we can see how much the trajectory has been changed along with the speed and rotation of the character and of course autop physics takes into consideration the gravity value and the timing so let's also snap the second character to autop physics shall we and finally we get to the title of this video and going to fix this interval here where the characters have contact and perform these grabbing movement so the first thing we have to do is to create a common cental mass for both characters so shift selects the both characters Center of mass with both of them selected go to commands Center of mass create composite once it's done a new center of mass will appear in the scene and it will be responsible for the both characters at the same time as for the interval we have to select for the physics to work on you have to select a couple of frames before the characters actually get together and then a couple more frames after they separate this will definitely help the autop physics to correctly calculate the speed and trajectories once enabled we can see that the autop physics has corrected the trajectory of the both characters at the same time but there's a Nuance let's take a close look at the second character here on this interval it starts leaning towards the first character this happens because autop physics treats both characters as a single object and the second character sort of compensates to ensure smooth trajectory of the Common Center of Mass to avoid that we can either choose a different interval or set a priority frame this will make autop physics prioritize that frame and try to keep it as close to the original pose as possible and now ready to snap both characters to autop physics here however for this particular Movement we can also use another physics algorithm which can help us smooth the rotation of the movement so I select the frames where the character throws the other one here we do not have to select any extra frames turn autop physics on then in the physics settings disable the physics corrector and turn am smoothness on now select the Common Center of mass and in the object properties under autop physics change the am blending value also make sure that this button is on so the lower the value is the greater the effect of the autop physics will be and also uh don't forget that in some cases it might be useful to view the scene from different angles I'll keep the value at 20 for this animation here and then snap to autop physics also this time I will enable this pin button here to make sure that the animation on this interval is baited normally after using other physics tools like am smoothness or second remotion this message pops up so you just click yes and then yes [Music] again now let's double check the physics um for the characters on the intervals where they perform separately so I'm going to check the first character first on the first interval yep I said that the reason we do that is that we want to make sure that the transition between these intervals is actually smooth and we snap it to Auto physics and I'll do the same for the both characters on the last inall well separately of course the first character seems to be all right so we snap it now with the second character though um physics May behave weirdly where there's too many fulcrum points so I'm just going to select the interval where the character is actually flying through the air and snap that one the frames before the character actually falls on the ground so this way we've managed to use autop physics to help us fix the whole scene now let's see the results shall we so this is what the animation looks like now and this is what it looked like before we used autop physics I'm going to slow down the playback speed so we could check out the [Music] details now let's compare in my opinion the animation now looks much smoother and more appealing actually although of course that's not the final result there's definitely more things you can do to improve this animation for example you can fix certain poses or say add animation to the first character at the beginning of this scene but what we've done there is that we created a solid base for the animation that you can further polish and improve so this is how you can work with multiple characters in cascader hope this tutorial was useful so stay tuned and until next time

Channel: Cascadeur

Views: 76,816

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Id: gumcvLfNnDM

Length: 19min 29sec (1169 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 09 2024