How to Animate with the Graph Editor

hey everyone what's up and welcome back to how to become an animator I'm Sora and today we are doing the video you've all been asking for for a while the graph editor basics video now I'm gonna be showing you how the graph editor works in my app but this is true for cinema 4d for blender for After Effects anything that has a graph or a curve editor they all have their different features and different things they can do but at a base level they all work the same way but today I'll be teaching you how the graph editor works and how you can use it to animate two quick things before we get started if you're new to the channel and do a lot of Maya videos and not just tutorials but also just a lot of helpful information and if you're interested in downloading project files Q&A is that kind of stuff head over to patreon link the description but for now let's jump into the video alright so here we are in Maya first thing I want to do is I'm gonna switch over to an orthographic view which basically just means left and right only we don't have the ability to tumble around in 3d space we just look at it from a side profile now to get to the graph editor you need to go to windows animation editors graph editor that will pull up the window and you can resize the do it if you want with it I personally like to dock it at the very bottom right above my timeline it also gives me the ability to click on the tab and collapse the graph editor so that I don't have to have it there if I don't want it but I don't worry about moving it around so why don't you grab the ball hit s set a key on all the attributes and all the different controls I'm gonna go to frame 8 and I already have Auto key on if you haven't watched my other video on five tips to know in Maya you should definitely check that out one of the things is Auto key which I've got on and I highly recommend you do the same I'm going to move the ball up it's kind of eyeball it and say that's good enough so from 1 to 8 that's 7 frames I'm gonna go to 7 frames forward to 15 and I'm gonna drop the translate back down to 0 and you can see as I set keys on the up and down we're seeing this green line move around and if you selected me the keys on it you can see over here the translate Y has a little marker next to it meaning that this is the curve that we've selected keys on I'm just going to select translate Y now I'm gonna do is I'm going to grab all three of these keys ctrl C I'm gonna go to the frame where I want a paste right here ctrl V and it will place it down you can copy a key from anywhere ctrl C but I'm whatever frame you are currently at on your play head or that yellow thing that is where if you control B your paste it'll put it in the spot you currently exist at so now I have two bounces up down up down two bounces however if I play from the beginning you can see that there is motion there but it's not a natural Bob out because balls don't move like this they don't have this smooth motion that smooth motion is basically this smooth line that we see here now before I go any farther something extremely important you need to know about the graph editor in this very particular case when you're doing a ball bounce and you're doing the up-and-down of the ball the actual motion of the ball and the way the curve looks happen to a line and happen to look and act the same that's not a normal thing that's not something you're normally looking for in animation don't expect that your rotations and all of your translations are going to look the way they look in the viewport of a character doing a certain thing and then it's going to exactly match the curve of a line if that makes sense these two things represent each other very well this is something animation students struggle a little bit with so I just want to address that we'll come back to that later so let's add a little bit more motion so we can see what's happening the graph editor a little bit better I'm going to grab the ball and I've already set a key on frame one if I move to frame 29 I'm gonna take my translation and I'm going to move the ball in the x-direction over to the right suddenly you can see in the graph editor there's a new curve and a new color everything happening and why whether it's rotation translation or scale is always green or red as the x-axis and blue is the z-axis now if I go ahead and play again you'll see the ball is now moving up and down and left to right so if I click on translate X you can see this line is now these left to right motion translate Y still what it was before now they're just adding on top of each other and it's moving up and down and left to right you get the idea now I'm actually going to delete the translate X motion I don't want it to go left to right I just wanted to show you kind of how that works so I just need to grab the keyframe hit delete and now we're back to just the green thing just the up-and-down now let's start getting into it we have a couple of different types of lines different interpolations or ways that the line is going to figure out how motion works right now the computer is going very smooth so let's duplicate this ball duplicate move a little trick there now if you duplicate an object of motion generally it doesn't copy the motion so it's very quick and easy to do is to take the one object click on translate Y I'm gonna grab this keyframe range copy I'm gonna grab these three balls set keys on all of them and I'm just going to go to the translate Y paste next ball translate Y paste next ball translate y paste and so now all balls now have the same up-and-down motion so copying keys is a really fast workflow tip now if I select multiple objects you can see I now have all those objects over here on left and if I try to filter things I just have to make sure I control click and filter all of the translate wise which will then allow me as I move through here to move all of them at once if you don't remember to grab all of them and you just say oh I won't translate why and you move one it only does the one that you've selected itself so just keep that in mind so here I have four balls if I play it it looks like this now I'm going to take this first ball and I'm going to keep it in what's called Auto tangent so I'm gonna grab all the keys and make sure that Auto tangent is enabled Auto tangent is basically the computer trying to make these smooth this curve it can make without really changing anything that you've done or doing anything beyond what you've expected if I go to the second ball I go to its translate and I go to spline and to actually not have to change all that much but the end will be different Auto will just kind of flatten out if there's nothing beyond the keys there or spline it basically just says that whatever the curve was doing when it comes in or out of whatever keyframe if there's nothing on the other side it'll just continue doing whatever it was doing before now if we look at these two balls and look at where they are keyframed at their bottom and top of their bounces it's the same exact location but the way they get there the timing of which they get there and the spacing that happens as a result of that timing that's what changes and that's the whole point of the graph editor right there so you can see as we scrub frame-by-frame one of them goes slightly faster off the ground than the other one and eventually they catch up to each other where that keyframe is the same so it's that difference of motion that will give you the different fields of what these balls will be clamped is identical in this particular case I don't have enough keys to show you what it really does I'd only get into it but it integrates linear and spline in a different way when keys are close together we're not gonna go there if I go to the third ball and change that one to linear you can see that the lines lose all smoothness they just go from point to point to point to point in a very mechanical motion versus like a smooth ease in an ease out the fourth one here flat actually isn't going to make any difference in the current setup so if I hit flat nothing changes that really quickly I'll show you if I add a few more keys in here if I had Auto it would keep a pretty smooth line if I show you spline you will also try to stay pretty smooth things change a little bit clamped again is not gonna make too much of a dress at this point linear does its thing but if I go to flat tangents you can see how it actually flattened the handle of every single one which in this case is gonna give you a really weird jerky motion so let's just not worry about that one for now so let's just instead first me get rid of all these extra keys I put I'm going to show you step tangents what it's going to do is actually going to hold the position at whatever frame it's supposed to change if I go to frame 1 that's what if that and then that frame 8 it jumps over to what it is supposed to jump to and the motion doesn't change or interpolate or smooth out and it just jumps from point to point on the exact moment it's supposed to go there so when you play them together it definitely stands out as a weird one so you hear a lot of people they say they're in steps mode it's this it's when people are blocking things out and they're just trying to kind of get their poses there and they're not yet tweaking the motion it's just to hold your spot I'm not gonna get into Plateau tangents because I've honestly I've never used it and I'm sure there's a use for it but I don't know I'm gonna skip that one if I add a new key in here and I just move it up and I just create kind of an unevenness how there's kind of a bump here if I grab all these keys with Auto it will smooth it out without putting anything beyond what I've already kind of set for it you'll notice that nothing is above or below any keys that I have manually created undo that or if I go to spline you can see that it's similar it is smooth but comparing that to Auto you can see that not only are the beginning and any ones different but if i zoom in right here see how when I'm in Auto this is still the maximum location but if I've got a spline this allows an overshoot to happen where a new part of the curve is created higher than where I had initially intended so let me show you here if I just create a whole bunch of keys and they're all on auto it'll try to go smooth if I go to spline it'll still go smooth but it will kind of take some liberties and do some different things here but if I go to flat tangents flat tangents have their uses but you do not want to use something like this for most natural organic motions you're going to get this weird jittery almost insect-like motion now let me delete these two balls I'm gonna put them back in Auto so they're both going to move very smooth and computery starts at the ground and it hovers speeds up slows down it gets to the top and then it starts to come down slowly gets faster but then it slows down again and then just kisses the ground and repeats so you get this kind of floating motion up and down gravity is not really a play here now I love physics I'm fascinated by motion and physics and I really liked that class when I took it a lot of people hate physics and maybe never took it or don't want to have anything to do with science or math and that's fine these things can be very helpful if you like math and science and that kind of stuff it can be very very useful to you as an animator which is annoying because I always say I'm never gonna use calculus well the velocity derivative graphs are literally the graph editor joke's on me I use it all the time but if that freaks you out and you're like I never took calculus I don't do math I don't think about like that it just helps me understand it because I already learned it for math and I'm just reapply it here but you don't need to know math to make this work so don't sweat it all you need to think about is what happens when a ball bounces so the idea is that it's slow to begin its descent speeds up with time hits the ground very quickly bounces back up which relates to Newton's law of motion of every action has an equal and opposite reaction so something comes in at a hundred miles an hour Mounce --is it comes off more or less at a hundred miles an hour in the other direction a little bit of energy is lost to heat or whatever but comes in really fast leaves really fast so now we're getting the idea of something that we're animating being visually represented in some kind of a curve here and what does this really mean this is where people struggle so here's my best kind of tips to help you understand what's happening here and to kind of remind yourself what matters to look at now I'd like to give you three rules to keep in mind while you're dealing with your graph editor while you're trying to come to terms and understand what these different curves and splines of motion mean and represent I'm gonna give you three rules three things that can help you keep it all right in your mind rule number one flat means no motion flat is zero no motion no acceleration nothing so here I have a cube and what I've done is I have keyed the cube at frame 1 I've gone ahead to frame 20 I've set a key here we're currently looking at the translate X which is the motion left and right from the current camera position the line is straight it is just totally flat left and right you remember on this particular graph these frames represent time these numbers over here represent the values that you could put up here if I come over to here to the middle and I go over to the right it's increasing the number if I go to the left it is decreasing the number changing the slope of the line now flat is zero we've established that that's rule number one rule number two if the line the curve is not flat and it is going up or going down or whatever if that line is straight per quickly straight with no kind of curving at the end no tapering if it's perfectly straight at whatever angle that is a constant velocity a constant speed it's not changing it's not getting faster or slower it's just going on frame 1 it's over here and frame 10 it moves over here now I pointed out it needs to be straight right this is a curved line so I'm gonna change this from auto or other it's currently yet to linear now it is straight from here to there it is one speed it is that same speed going the opposite direction so you can see here the box is moving left to right at a constant speed in either direction so what I'll do is I'll go three frames in either direction I will take this and I will make it linear there we go linear so now what I have is a straight line a flat line and a straight line straight line moving a straight line flat straight line moving straight line flat so you can see it moves it stops it moves it stops now the third rule is where things start to kind of help you actually animate and that is that if a line is going farther away from flat flat being zero meaning it's getting steeper more towards a vertical line you can't get a totally vertical line an undefined line because that becomes steps tangent so quickly if I just jump over here to Maya and I change it to step tangent you can see that a vertical line entirely is this little dotted line and that's essentially teleporting right this is the fastest anything could ever travel it just instantly appears it takes no time it just is in a different location as something is going away from horizontal more towards vertical it is speeding up and getting faster and faster the more vertical the faster vs. is something is becoming more horizontal over time and it's slowly kind of tapering out to a horizontal I mean just decelerating it's slowing down it's coming to a stop it may not come entirely to a stop it may just kind of turn into a more horizontal version of whatever it was doing before for example if I change this to auto I am going to take the straight lines away I'm gonna say that this gets a little bit bent and this also it's a little bit bandar to do both of these so that they kind of sync up now if we look the Bucks doesn't actually stop anywhere it just gets slower so if I go ahead and take this part here this is going from a flatline into a more vertical line and here it kind of levels out for a little bit and then starts to come back towards over a horizontal line this means we're going from slow into a more vertical line meaning this is the fastest that ever really gets and then it becomes slow again this is the dictionary for reading the language of these curves the flatter the slower the steeper the more vertical the faster and it's the transitions between these things that give you the different interpolation types so if we go ahead and take these keys and shift them sooner meaning they happen quicker obviously the motion needs to happen faster snappier and you can see that because the line is now more vertical it's a steeper incline it's going closer to these stepped vertical tangents meaning it's going to happen faster closer to teleportation right so I play this you can see it sound effects are totally essential and this is how you control your time you have to understand how the graph editor works to really go in and troubleshoot to see like why is this motion like feeling slow or swimming it can help you so much to be able to open this tool up to look at this and say okay I like how this is happening really quickly but I want to happen and maybe a little slower like where this goes right over there maybe want to slow that down so how do you do that how do you diagnose this curve well you just go to the part that is really fast that happens right there and say well to make it slower I need to take it further from vertical make it more horizontal closer to zero so what you do is you take these keys and you shift them over move away over now it slowly kind of goes back and forth again versus if I go all the way and it happens over one frame its teleporting it's basically going from this frame to that frame it's as vertical as it can get so those are the three most important rules of the graph editor flat is zero and a motion straight line is a constant speed that's not accelerating or decelerating it's just going at whatever constant rate that that slope would entail versus when something is curved and it's not straight curved means changing it all depends on rule number three which is closer to vertical faster closer to horizontal slower and the changes between those two give you all of this now one last thing with this cube is we've only looked at translate but all of this works exactly the same for rotations and scales and everything else in Maya or whatever tool you're using because if I take the rotations and let's just say rotations in Z which is this if I key this motion then I go to ten and I spin this 180 degrees ish flip it over I'm gonna click rotate Z and you can see it dips down whatever the attribute is you're controlling in this case it's about rotation so don't think about like the position of the corners or any of that just think about it's rotating that's all it's doing it's rotating in whatever direction you told it to which means a steeper line so if I take this over and make this a steeper line it means it's going to rotate really really fast versus a more kind of shallow not so steep line it's going to rotate slower and you can see if we play this at speed you can't even see what happens those first couple frames it's moving so much so quickly we can't even register the motion so if the rotation is kind of broken and you're not really seeing the right things either we need to slow down that rotation so that we can appreciate a little bit more so there is a faster and a slower spin you can see the timing here fast then slow fast and then slow fast and slow now what really starts to get tricky is when you start introducing different rotations in different directions and we start really playing with this and all axes like that's where these things start to get complicated so if we start looking at all three of these rotations that this thing is moving around in all different directions you just really had to diagnose this because you start to wonder like okay which one is making it spin what direction this work gets tricky and this is why you want to block things really smart and have lots of keys before you let the computer do any work now finally with those three rules under our belts we can go back to our bouncing ball and we can just do the one thing we need to do to make this look more natural and like it's actually obeying gravity so we have two balls that are just kind of floating around but they look very floaty they don't look real I'm gonna take the right one and I'm gonna correct it no what we want to start with is something starting up here and slowly falling down we actually kind of already have that it starts up here and it slowly starts to come to a more vertical speed the problem is will we get to the ground when something goes to hit the ground it doesn't cushion and touch the ground it just falls right so the curve should be flat at the top and more and more vertical as we start to fall in it starts to pick up speed and it really won't flatten out it'll just reverse so it should be this in the same way that the ball is actually gonna bounce to make that same kind of arc it's actually what its gonna look like here so if we fall down with our graph and here we can see it starts to go back towards horizontal going back toward zero stopping its motion we don't want that now just moving this handle isn't going to work because you can see it's moving both sides and we don't want that we just want to control the down and then the up separately which is what this little V is for break tangents this little thing means that you can separate the left and the right besides of the handle if you don't see this button it might mean that your graph editor is too small and you need to scale it out so that you can see more of the buttons so I click on this key and break tangents you can see that they kind of turn into these little dotted lines but now I can grab the left side I can change it so now what we have is let me stretch these out really quick so now we have is kind of a flat line as it slowly gets sharper and it falls quickly it never slows down it just gets more and more vertical and then it hits the point of contact and it has to reverse and bounce up so it has to go the other direction so we go from down to up or whatever it is in this in whatever case you're dealing with and it flies up and then it slows down and loses it to vertical miss it goes to horizontal as it loses the speed I'm just gonna copy this key and paste it into these other two spots rather than having to do it again that's a good tip for you it's a copy/paste when something's working so now if we look at this a little bit more natural so if you instead of wanting like boom boom boom boom when you wanted to be more stylized want to be and you want more of this kind of a rhythmic thing happening or you can do is just say well we wanted to stop for longer bam bam and I just have a sharper more vertical fall-off so what we'll do is we'll just stretch out this curve and I'll crack this a little bit I'll copy this guy move over there make sure that this line is working well on each side copy paste and paste now so now it spends more of its time up than it does down it has this hang time and you can really take it even farther if you want we can really say that by this point it's like up there up there and you can really push this as much as you want that's the whole point of animation is like you can change the physics of it by changing the curve sound the ball spending most of its time up in the air and the only thing left to do is to add the squash and everything else so if we compare the graphs of these two balls you can see the difference of one of them being very smooth it's the other one having SharePoint to the bottom which give it kind of that aggressive change of direction which a ball has when it bounces comes up that's that aggressive change of direction giving you that pointy line but either way I hope this was helpful and don't forget that I will be making more graph editor videos in the future that go deeper into the tools and the menus and all the different things for workflow and how to use this really really efficiently if you already kind of understand how this works and you just need to figure out how to be like a monster of efficiency using the graph editor to animate your shots now if you're still having a hard time and this wasn't enough to kind of get you up to speed with the graph editor I highly recommend checking out my patreon down below we do a lot of Q&A s and review sessions and things like that or I teach a lot of this stuff and it's a lot easier to teach in person over Google Hangouts over QA than it is on a video you would believe how much footage I have to edit through this videos hopefully not that long I've been sitting here for two and a half hours trying to figure out how to explain all this the right way so if you like forget to drop some questions in the comment section down below or if you need more in-depth help head over to patreon but that's it for today I hope this video was helpful for you guys I hope I did a good job of explaining and that you can take all this and use it to be more effective as animators in Maya or cinema 4d or blender or whatever tools you're using ah all right I think that's about it thank you guys so much for watching and I will see you in the next video

Channel: Sir Wade Neistadt

Views: 96,165

Keywords: maya graph editor, how to use the graph editor in maya, how to use the graph editor after effects, maya graph editor tips, graph editor tips, graph editor tutorial, how to animate with graph editor, maya graph editor animation, graph editor animation, animation graph editor, animation mentor, animation tips, animation workflow tips, 3d animation, 3d animation tutorial, graph editor for beginners, animation tips and tricks, graph editor curves, how to animate 3d, spline

Id: RQ31vjgJM2c

Length: 21min 3sec (1263 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 06 2018