- [Jim] Hello everyone,
this is Jim for cgboost.com and in this video, we're gonna have a look at how we can animate our
characters really fast. Now, for some, the whole idea
of animating a character, making the poses and making
this all blend together can be quite overwhelming, but it doesn't have to be like that. We can use very simple
tools like, for example, this mo-cap to create this
very simple running animation. In fact, I use a lot of this free mo-cap for this demo animation that we did for the Cubic World Challenge. So in this video, we're gonna
have a look at the workflow of using mo-cap. To start off, we'll have a look at how we can prep our
model for exporting. Next, we'll have a look at a site, such as Mixamo to find
mo-cap for our character. After that, we'll have a look at how we can transfer
this mo-cap animation to our original rig, after which we'll have a look at how we can make our
transfer rig modifiable so we can modify the mo-cap
animation to make variations. We'll have a look at how
to make these variations of these animations. We'll also have a quick look at how to fix any centering
issues we might get from these mo-cap animations. And then finally, we'll have a look at how we can bring all of these mo-cap animations
together in a single animation. Now, I'll be continuing
the Cubic Worlds style from the challenge. If you're interested in
learning how to use this style to create your own scenes and animations, then have a look at
the Cubic Worlds course by Zach Reinhardt as
this will help you learn how to use a very simplistic style to create really amazing scenes. So if you're interested in that, have a look at the description below. There will be a link to this course. Now, with without any further ado, let's have a look at how we can use mo-cap to create fast animations. right, so let's first have
a look at the character that we have for this video. This is the Joel character
I used for my submission for the Cubic World challenge. Now, if you wanna follow along, you can download this model
directly from CGboost.com at CGboost/resources. There should also be a link in
the description of the video leading you to where you
can download this model. Let's have a look at the model itself. It's a very simple model
following the cubic style. If we go to our rig and
we go into pose mode, you can see we have a
very simple IK setup. So this is very handy for animating and this is also something
we're gonna be using later to adjust our animation. So this is very handy to have. Now, we want to export
this rig over to Mixamo. So to do this, let's have a look at what bones we want to export. Let's have a look at our layers over here. Let's enable all of our bone layers. As you can see, we have quite a lot more bones to our rig. So let's now go back into object mode. Let's select our Joel character model. And let's have a look
at our vertex groups. So having a look over here, we can see all the bones
that are causing deformation to our character. These all the vertex groups
that are weight painted to our bones. So these are the bones
that we want to export out of Blender into Mixamo. So let's create a duplicate of our rig, as well as our model and let's use this as our export model. Now, to keep things organized,
let's rename our model. So if we look in our outline over here, we have a specific suffix,
the duplicate suffix of .001. So let's use the batch
renamer to rename the suffix. So let's press Control + F2. That will bring up this
little window over here, which is our batch renamer. Now, under find, we're gonna put is the .001 from our suffix. And under replace,
we're gonna put _export. Now, with that we can press OK, and all of our objects will be renamed. So everything that had
0.001 will now be _export. So let's now select our export rig. Let's go into pose mode. Now, here in pose mode, we wanna identify all of the bones that are not deformation bones, basically any bones that isn't
directly moving the mesh. So all of our IK bones,
here are the face bones, basically any bone that is not
directly deforming our mesh. So let's select all of these bones. Let's now go into edit mode
and let's delete these bones. Let's now jump back into pose mode. So let's go to pose mode. Let's check that we have all
our deformation still working. So we can just move these bones to check that we haven't deleted any bones that affect our deformation. Let's now go back into object mode and let's also select our character model. Let's now export this. So let's go to File. Let's go to Export. Let's export it as FBX. Now, over here, we'll
get our export window. Over here we can set the
name of our export file. So let's name it joel_export.fbx. And here on the right-hand side, the only settings that we wanna
select is that we only want to export the selected objects. So now with that, we can press export. And now we have exported our model to FBX. Let's now head over to the Mixamo website and let's upload our character. Alright, so here on the Mixamo website, we have to log in to our Adobe account. Now, if you don't have an
Adobe account, don't worry, you can create an Adobe account for free. Just sign up here with your email and you get a free account. So here we are in Mixamo. You can see we have a wide
variety of mo-cap animations. So if we click one of these animations, it will send this animation
straight to our model over here. In this case, it's a mannequin. So we wanna replace this
mannequin with our model. So let's click on upload character. Let's drag in our FBX file that we exported before from Blender. So let's just drag and
drop our file into here. It'll start uploading. And just like that, we
have our model uploaded. As you can see, we have
it right over here. Now, we have some normal issues, but this is fine since we are
not worried about the model. We just want to have the rig. So that's have to lad
a bit and look at that. We have our character loaded
in Mixamo, and as you can see, we also have our
animation running smoothly on our character. Now, Mixamo literally has
thousands of mo-cap animations. So to help us find what we need, we can use this handy search function. We can type in, for example, running. We can see we have a lot
of running animations. Let's select this one, for example. Now, if we select in place, our animation will stay centered. So this is very easy to use. Now, some of the mo-cap animation is a bit more advanced than others. For example, if we select
this one over here, we can see we have a few
more sliders over here. We can, for example, change
the style of running as well. So we adjust this slider over here, we can see the style of
running is quite different. We go to the other side, we
can see the exact same thing. So these are quite weird runs, but we can blend between them to find what we are looking for. Now, additionally, we
also have other options. We have the speed option over here, which will adjust the
speed of our character, blending again different animations. We also have overdrive, which is a literal adjusting
of the speed of the animation. So either slow motion or supercharged. We can also adjust the arm
position of our character. So either they're further
in or they're further out. So these are just to adjust
the animation if need be. Now, the last option is
to trim the animation, which is pretty self-explanatory. So let's now adjust this running animation and let's export it so
we can use it in Blender. So to export it, let's press the download button. And here we have our export settings. So for the format, I'll
just leave it at FBX. We'll export it with skin. Let's set the frames per
second to 60 frames a second. As for keyframe reduction, we
can just leave this at none. And let's just press Download. And we should start downloading
the exported FBX file. Right, so here back in Blender, let's make some space for
our imported animation. So let's drag these objects
over here to the side and let's import our animation. So let's go to File, Import, FBX. Now, that should open our import window. Let's select our running.fbx
file that we just downloaded. Let's now go into these settings over here below armature. Let's make sure we
select ignore leaf bones this will remove any extra bones. And let's also select
automatic bone orientation as it will fix most of the
rotational issues with our bones. Let's now press import.
And there we have it. Here we have our imported model. If we move along the timeline, you can see this is properly animated. So let's go to the final
frame for this animation, 36. So let's set our end animation to 36, and let's just press play. So as you can see, we have our animation
imported into Blender. Now, this is all well and good, but the animation is now linked
to our deformation bones. Now, we don't want that. We want our animation to
be linked to our IK bones. So all we're gonna do now is
to transfer this animation from run rig to another. So to do this, let's drag
up our window over here. Let's go to the dope sheet editor and let's head to the action editor. Over here we can see the
name of the current action. This is current animation. So let's rename this to running_mixamo, just so it's easier to find. Now, if we try to use this action on our actual rig over here, you can see we do not get the results that we that we're looking for. This does not look right. Now, this is again because our animation is
driven by our deformation bones and not our IK bones. So what we wanna do is
to transfer the animation to our IK bones. Now, to do this, we need
to select our correct rig so let's select the rig
that we want to use. Duplicate that and let's
move it into the center just so it's on top of our Mixamo rig. Now, to not get confused, it's press Control + F2 again
to get our batch renamer, let's rename these to our transfer rig. So let's find .001 and
replace it with _transfer. Now, we can press OK and this should now rename our
rig and object to _transfer. We can now select the character model, delete it as we won't be needing it as we only need the rig. Let's now rename the rig as well. So let's press F2 and let's
rename it to Mixamo rig. Let's now move the Mixamo rig,
as well as our transfer rig into our own collection. Let's Press M. New collection. Let's call this transfer animation. And so with that, we
have it nicely organized. Now, before we start
doing anything technical, let's make sure we have a
T pose for our Mixamo rig. So let's make sure we have
our fake user enabled. This basically means that our
animation will not be deleted when it's not used by any rig. So with this enabled, we can remove this animation,
we can create a new one, let's call it T pose. We'll enable fake user. We'll
also enable the recordings. So we'll record whatever we do and create a keyframe for that. Let's undo the rotation and
location for our rig over here. Let's go on to pose mode and do the same for all these bones. So undo the rotation and location. And with that, we have our T pose created. So let's now undo the recorder. Now, we can easily swap
between running and T pose. So for now, let's hide our character object
over here just so we can see all of our bones better. Let's go into pose mode. As you can see, both rigs are now in pose mode and we can now easily create constraints between the two rigs as
we can select both rigs at the same time. So let's first start by
selecting the hand bone first, and secondly, our IK bone over here. And let's give it a constraint. So Control + Shift + C, let's select the constraint we want, which in this case is gonna
be the copy transform. So now we have the constraint assigned. If we now select one of the
bones of our Mixamo rig, we can adjust the animation. We set it to the running animation. We can see our hand is
following along the animation. So no we do the exact same
for all of the other IK bones. So let's reset the pose for
our Mixamo rig to T pose and select our hand bone over here. Then IK bone, copy transform, and then go to the next bone. The exact same thing for our
head over here, copy transform. Now, here for the hip, we have an interesting case
as our bones are inverted. So what we do here? Now, in this case, what I wanna do is make
sure that these bones are the exact same length. So let's go into edit
mode for our Mixamo rig. And what I'm gonna do over
here is to set the tailbone of our Mixamo rig to the
head of our hip bone. So to do this, we're gonna press Shift + S to snap our 3D cursor to
the head of our hip bone. We're not gonna select the
tail of our other hip bone and snap it with Shift
+ S to our 3D cursor. So now they're the exact same length. Let's now go back into pose mode. And let's select first the
hip bone for the Mixamo rig, then the hip bone for our own rig, and it's now select copy
location as a constraint. Now, if we have a look over
here, we have the copy location, but we're not getting the
result we're looking for because our hip has jumped up
to the head of our hip bone. And this in turn resulting
with all of our bones being pushed upward. For example, we do the running animation. Now, you can see all of our bones have been shifted incorrectly upwards. So to fix this, we just need to adjust the
head and tale slider over here. Need to slide it all the way to one, and then the bone will
be aligned correctly. But we're not all the way there yet since we don't have any rotation. If we rotate this bone over here, you can see that our hip
bone is not rotating along. So do fix this, let's just select our hip bones again and let's just give it another constraint. Let's give it the copy
rotation constraint. Now, we can tell it's
copying the rotation, but doing it in world space. So all need to do is set
these both to local space. Now, we're not there yet. We still need to invert these rotations. And remember, we're copying the rotations of an inverted bone. So to invert these, we just need to select our bone
and just invert these axes. So if we invert these axes
and we rotate the Mixamo bone, we can see that our rig is
following along correctly. However, the tip of our bone is still not touching the
head of our Mixamo bone. Now, to fix this, we just need to add another constraint, the damp track constraint. And this will basically
set our tail to be tracked to the head of our other hip bone. Now, to see if this is working, we're gonna rotate our hips over here. And as we can see, it's tracking correctly and our bones are copying correctly the rotations. So let's now finish off by
adding the transform constraints to our other bones over
here with the feet. Now, with that, we have all
of our constraints set up. So let's now select our Mixamo rig, set our running animation and press play. And there we have it. We have our new rig following
along the Mixamo rig. Let's now unhide our character model. And here we can see our
character doing the animation. Now, the keen-eyed viewers of you might have noticed how the arms and legs are not following
100% the animation. If we look over here, we can see there's a shift
between the Mixamo arm and our IK arm. So this is mainly because
of the IK pole target not being set correctly. So we can fix this by simply
adjusting our pole targets. So let's disable our character over here just so we can see how our
pole targets affect our arm. So if I select our pole target over here and I move it a bit, you can see it will shift the arm. So for example, over here,
if I move it to the right, it will line up correctly. But now if we adjust the animation, we can see there are sections
where our pole target is again not where we want it to be. Now, there's actually a easy fix for this. Now, to do this, we want to select either
the upper or lower arm. I prefer the lower arm. And wanna copy the location
with a copy location constraint. As you can see, it snapped to the head of our forearm, giving us the correct
location for our pole target. So let's now do the exact same thing for all of our other pole targets. Just copy location, here as well. Make sure we do it the right order. Copy, location, and our
final pole target over here. Copy location. So now if we run the animation, we can see our pole targets
are following along correctly. We can now also enable again, our character model just so we can see how this animation is looking. Now, this is looking pretty good, but this is not what we want. We now only have a rig
copying another rig. We do not have the animation transferred from one rig to another. So how do we do that? Now, Blender has a really nice
feature called action baking. This allows us to bake the
animation from constraints, etc, into a brand new animation. So this is exactly what we want. So let's go into object mode and I'm gonna hide our Mixamo rig since we won't be needing
to see it anymore. So let's hide that. And now we're gonna select our rig again, we're gonna go in pose mode. We're gonna select all of our bones. Now, we're gonna go to pose,
animation, bake action. This'll now open the bake action window. Here we can see our start and end frame, as well as these steps
between each of the keyframes. We already have it set to 36 frames. So this is exactly the animation length. We wanna enable visual keying
as this will basically apply the transformation from
all of our constraints and bake those in, as
well as clean curves. We can now press OK, and we will get a baked
version of our action. We can now rename this action to running. We can add a fake user just
so it doesn't get deleted. We can now go into object mode. We can select our other rig over here go to the action editor
and select running. And just like that, we have our animation transferred
from one rig to another. Now, this is pretty cool, but what if we want to modify
the animation somewhat? Let's now have a look at how we can make our
transfer rig modifiable. Now, the way we set up our rig so far, we cannot edit any of these bones. If we tried to, we cannot edit these. So let's fix this. Now, to fix this, we need to
create intermediate bones. So what these bones will do
is create a bridge of sorts between the world space for our Mixamo rig and the local space for our IK rig. So now I wanna do is
select all of these bones that are now copying the transformation from our Mixamo rig and create
a duplicate of these bones. So now with all of these bones selected, let's go into edit mode. Let's create a duplicate
of all of these bones. So now that we have them duplicated, we want to move all of
these bones to a new layer just so we don't get confused. So let's have a look what layer's free. So we can move into this
layer with the M key. And there we go, we have them
moved to a different layer. So now we are a bit more organized. Let's also rename all of these bones. Let's have a look at what
name these bones have. As you can see, we have the
standard suffix for duplicates, which is .001. So let's get our batch renamer again, make sure this time we're
changing bones instead of objects. Let's set the find to .001, it's set the replace to _int. Now, we're just gonna press OK and we should now have all of
our bones renamed with _int. Now, if we want to organize
our bones even further, we can also add them to
a different bone group. If we go to our settings
over here under bone groups, we can see we have various bone groups. So we can add a new one. So let's go into pose mode. Let's press this little plus over here to add a new bone group. Let's call it int. And on our right-hand side over here, we can add a different color. So let's select this color over here. Now, all that's left to do is press Assign and all of our bones
have now been assigned to this bone group. Now, that we created all
of our intermediary bones, we wanna go back to our original
bones that we duplicated to create these bones and
adjust their constraints. So let's select all of these bones. And now that we have all
these bones selected, let's go to Pose, Constraints. And now Clear Pose Constraints. These will now clear
all of the constraints that we added to these bones. Now, we can use these bones
to copy in local space the transformation of
our intermediary bones. So let's now enable the
layer for intermediary bones. And let's now, for example, select our hand intermediary bone. So as you can see, this is
following the Mixamo rig. Let's now select our hand IK bone. So let's now add in a copy
transformation constraint just like before, but instead
of having it in world space, we'll set it to local space. And as you can see, it's
correctly snapped to the location. We can now set the mix to before original. This basically means it will
apply the transformation from this constraint before
any of our transforms. So if we now select the hand, we can now move it around
while still falling along with the input animation
from our Mixamo rig. So let's do the exact same thing for all of our other transformation bones. We're gonna select any of these IK bones, any of these transformation
bones and link them through local space to
their intermediary bone. Now, after adding all
of these constraints, we have now made our rig modifiable. We can now adjust any of
these transformation bones as we wish while still continuing to use the input from our Mixamo rig. So let's now have a look
at how we can use this to help our character interact
with a handheld object. So I've gone ahead and
hidden our export rig, as well as our Joel rig just so we can focus for
now on our transfer rig. So let's add in our rifle. So let's go to File, Append. Let's go to our rifle.blend file, object. And let's double click
the rifle to append it. So now we have our rifle
appended into our Blend file. Now, obviously we want this rifle to follow along with our animation. So let's first set our
cursor to the world origin and let's add in a armature. Now, this is gonna be
the rig for our rifle. So let's go into edit mode. Let's adjust this bone
just so it lies flat along with our rifle. Now, I find this animation
quite distracting, so let's disable that and
let's now select our bone. Let's rename it to rifle. Let's now go back into object mode and let's also rename the rig itself. F2 and let's rename it to rig_rifle. Let's now select the rifle
itself and then the armature. Let's now press Control + P to get the parenting options and let's set it to armature
deform with empty groups. So now if we select our rifle
and we go onto edit mode and we select all of our geometry, we can assign it to
this rifle vertex group. So let's now press assign and
now it should all be assigned to our bone. So let's jump over to our bone over here. Let's go into pose mode,
and as you can see, it controls our rifle. So let's now go back into edit
mode for our bone over here and let's adjust the head of
our bone just to where the hand would be holding the rifle. Let's now also adjust the tail a bit. Let's just try and get out to about here. Let's now go into the display options. So viewport display, let's change the display type to stick. So now we should be able to
see our rifle a bit better when we're trying to animate it. Now, we have a rig for our rifle. Let's now adjust the
animation for our character. Now, the current animation of the character running won't do. So let's import a different animation. Now, I've gone ahead and
downloaded some animations from Mixamo of our character
holding a rifle while walking. So we'll be using that animation. So back in Blender here, we
have imported our animation. Let's now make sure that the
last frame of the animation is also our end frame, so
let's set our end frame to 83. So let's now have a look. If we play the animation,
it should loop perfectly. That's looking pretty good. We can now rename this animation. So let's rename this to walking_rifle and we can now delete our objects, both the rig and our character model. We can now just simply
select our Mixamo rig in the outliner. And now with that selected, we can go to the action over here and set the action to Walking_Rifle. And as you can see, we have set the action to our Mixamo rig, which then sends it over
to our transfer rig. Now, back in object mode. Let's make sure we
select both our rifle rig and our character rig and
let's go onto pose mode. Now, I want to have our
rifle bone over here follow our hand bone up here. So what we can do, we can
simply select our hand bone, then our rifle bone, and now press Control + Shift + C and add a child of constraint. So now if we press play, we can see our rifle is following
the animation of our hand. All that we need to do
now is to align our rifle to our hand. Let's just move it into place up here. Make sure it aligns nicely with our hand. If we now press play, we can see that it nicely
follows along with our hand. However, we can see another problem. We can see that our other hand over here is not following along correctly. Now, if we move this into
place to follow along with our rifle, so let's
drag that over to here, we can see we played animation. It does follow along a bit, but we can see this nasty
wobbling along with our hand. Now, we can fix this by
just adding a different bone to our rifle over here. So let's go into edit mode for our rifle, let's go to our rifle bone over
here and let's duplicate it. Let's create a new bone with this one. So let's move it down
just a bit like here, scale it down as well. Let's move it into roughly
where we want our hand to be. Let's now rename this bone to hand. Let's now select our rifle and let's press Control + P to parent our hand bone to our rifle bone. Let's now select our hand bone and let's go into a pose mode. Let's now go to the constraints
for our bone over here. And let's remove the child of constraint. Now, all we need to do select the IK bone. Now select the hand bone and add a copy transform constraint. So just like that, we have our bone now following our hand bone. We can now adjust the
transformation of our hand bone and adjust where our hand
is gonna be on the rifle. And just like that, we have our hands holding on to our rifle. Now, if we adjust the
IK for our right hand, we can move the entire rifle
around and our left hand will continue to grip on to our rifle. Now, once we're happy with the animation, we can bake the action. So let's go to animation, bake action. Over here, we wanna make
sure we have visual keying and clean curves enabled
and then we press OK. Now, this looks weird, I
know, but just trust me. Let's rename this action to Walking_With_Rifle. Let's add a fake user. Let's now remove it. Now, we can undo all the transformation that was caused by the baking. Now, the only thing we still
wanna do is to add a keyframe for our rifle. So let's go to our rifle rig. Let's go into pose mode. Let's add the Walking_With_Rifle action. Make sure we're at the first frame. And let's add in a keyframe. So location, rotation, and scale. Let's do the exact same
thing for our hand. And just like that, we have finished creating the
Walking_With_Rifle action. So now that we've finished
creating this action, let's unhide our Joel rig. Let's select the rig itself and let's add the
Walking_With_Rifle action. As you can see, now we
have the original Joel rig with the new animation. Let's now quickly duplicate
the rifle as well. So that's select rifle and
its rig, let's duplicate it. Let's drag it over to our Joel collection. Let's make sure we're
not just moving the rig, let's make sure we also move
the actual rifle object. Let's now select both of them
and rename them correctly. So rig_rifle and rifle. Once we've renamed those, we just simply have to
select our rifle rig, go into pose mode, select
our rifle over here, and let's just change the target
from the Joel transfer rig to the Joel rig. And as you can see, it directly
snapped our rig across. So just like that, we
have created a animation of our character holding a rifle. Let's now have a look at how
we can create variations based on this animation. So here we are back with our transfer rig. Now, if you wanna make an animation, we can simply animate on top
of the original animation. So for example, let's create a shooting animation. So our character's walking
and it takes a shot. We can use the same techniques
you would normally use to create animation from
scratch to animate on top of the imported Mixamo animation. So let's get started. To make things easier,
let's enable our recorder so when we make any adjustments, it automatically creates a
keyframe for this adjustment. So let's have a look at the animation. We want to have the shot
roughly around the middle, so about 40 leading to 16. So somewhere in this area. So let's start with our first keyframe around roughly frame 10, just moving our hand around
just to create a keyframe for our hand. So just like that, we create a keyframe. Let's now have a side look
at our rifle over here. Let's move our timeline along
to roughly around frame 30. And let's just move our rifle up just so it looks like our character is aiming down the rifle. So if I look now, we
go across the timeline. We can see it looks like
our character's bringing the rifle closer to the head. So now we do the same for the head. Let's create a keyframe
over here at frame 12. Let's go closer to where
the rifle's closer. Let's just adjust the rotation
of the head just so it looks like a character is really
looking down the rifle. Now, we can press play
to check our animation and we can see our character's
looking down the rifle. Now, with our hand again at frame 43, let's drag the rifle
even closer to his eyes. Wanna really get that impression
that our character is ready to take a shot. Now, just a few frames along, let's drag our gun back. Let's rotate it up slightly as well just to create this illusion
of this gun being fired back, this recoil of this gun. Let's now select one of
the earlier keyframes and let's copy, paste
them over to later on just so our gun will settle again. So let's do the same with this keyframe and just copy it over here. Now, if we play the animation, we can see that our gun is being fired and it's settling back. Now, to add a bit more impact, let's get the recoil keyframe and let's track it a bit closer to the last aiming keyframe. And just like that, our gun
feels a bit more punchy. Let's now do the exact
same thing with our head. Let's get closer to just before we fire, let's make our head a
bit closer in on our gun just so it looks like our
character is focusing. And then just right after,
our head's tilted back because of the impact of the gun firing. Let's now just copy across
our earlier keyframes. And just like that, we have animated our
head as our gun fires. Now, the final thing I wanna
add is a bit more weight to the shot. So let's add a bit of recoil to our body. So let's create a keyframe
for our body over here. Let's drag the timeline
across just before it fires. Let's create another keyframe. Let's now move along the timeline and let's rotate our hips back a bit. Let's also move it back a bit just to create this
illusion of this recoil. Let's now copy over one
of these earlier keyframes just so our animation settles back. And just like that, we've created a variant
of this walk animation with our character shooting. Now, once we bake this action, we can apply it to our Joel rig and we have a new variation
of this animation. So now we know how to make
variations on these animations. Now, this has been relatively easy since all of our mo-cap has been centered. So what happens when one
of the mo-cap animations is not centered? So let's have a look at
what we can do in this case. So here I've imported and
applied the jumping animation to our Mixamo rig. And if we look at the animation, we can definitely tell that
our character is not centered. So what we want to do is
to shift the Mixamo rig to center it. So to do this, let's add in a empty. We will rename this empty to center. Now, we might be tempted
to parent our transfer rig to our empty, but this won't work. We need to select our Mixamo rig and we need to parent that to our empty. So now when we move the empty, we move the whole rig. Let's now go to the first frame
and let's create a keyframe for the location of the empty. Let's now go to the end of the animation. Let's go to the side view and let's use our empty to center our rig. Let's now create a keyframe
for our empty over here. Let's now right click over here and let's set the
interpolation mode to linear. Now, this will have a linear animation for our empty over here,
centering our animation. We can also use another draw rig to help us line up the start
and end of our animation. Now, we need to do is to bake the action, and with that, we have a centered
version of our animation. So now that we know how to make variants of these animations, as
well as how to center them, let's bring 'em all together
into a single animation. So to start off, I've appended our
character into a new scene. So let's now have a look at how we can blend these
animations together. So let's drag up this window over here. And just like before, we want
below here, the action editor. So let's drag up another window and let's set this to
the dope sheet editor. Let's then set it to the action editor. Now, if we go over here, we can see all of our
animations or actions. For example, here we have
our walking animation, our jumping animation. Here's a look around the variant I made and then here's the shoot
variant that we made together. So let's now have a look at how we can blend all
these animations together. Now, if we look over here
in the action editor, we can see all these keyframes
and trying to mix all of these animations in the action editor will be very difficult. So instead, we have a different tool. So let's drag this window up over here and let's open the
nonlinear animation editor. So here with the NLA editor, we can blend our animations together. So to see how we can do this, let's first enable the view selected only just so we can only see the rig
over here in the NLA editor. Now, you might notice that
we have these two buttons that look the same with the push down. What this does is pushes
down the animation into the NLA editor. So if we click this, we can see we created
a strip of animation. Now, the same goes for the
button in the NLA editor. If I press this, it will
also create a strip. Now, these strips are
different from actions as they're easier to modify. So to demonstrate, let's set the end frame
to about 500 frames. Now, if this was an action, this will be very difficult
to extend this animation, or at least to make it repeat. Now, with strips, it's quite easy. We just select our strip. We go over here to the side
panel, we go to action clip, we go down over here, and under repeat, we just set this value
to say, for example, six. And we have our animation
instantly repeated six times. Now, since we don't have this last bit of our animation coverage, let's
make it repeat seven times. And just like that, we can quickly adjust the
length of our animation. Now, this is cool and all,
we can repeat our animations, but we want to blend
our animations together. So let's have a look at how
we can blend these actions into this animation. So let's start, for example,
with the shoot action. Let's push this down into the NLA editor. As you can see, it has
now frozen our animations so when we get to the end, it freezes. So we want to blend this
strip into the strip below. For this, we have these
blending options over here. So these are the amounts
of frames we want to blend. So let's set these both to 15 frames. Now, as you can see, our animation has blended back
into our walking animation. So if we set this back, we can see here we
transition nice and softly from the shooting animation
back into the walking animation. We can also now quickly adjust
where we want our shot to be. So we can just drag this strip around and we can now change our
animation on the spot. And just like that, we have our shot a bit
later in the animation. So using the NLA editor, we can easily start blocking
out our longer animation, using these shorter animations. So let's now add a different action. Let's add the looking around action. Let's push this down and let's set this animation
roughly around here. We can now start blending
these in by 15 frames and blending them out by 15 frames. And if we now hit play, we can see that animation
is nicely blending from this looking around
back into our walk cycle. And again, we can easily
modify these animations. For example, we can swap these around. Let's put our looking around
first and our shoot after. So let's just move these
strips over like so. Let's make sure we line them
up nicely to our walk cycle. And just like that, we have
adjusted our animation. So let's hit play. And look at that. We have swapped around our animation and it blends nicely together. So let's now add in our final animation, our jump animation. Let's go to our actions over here. Let's get our jump animation. Let's push it down. Let's move it over here to the end. Now, let's not forget to
blend the animation in. So let's add 15 in, 15 out. And just like that, our animation will blend
into our jumping animation and then back into our walk cycle. Now, this is all pretty cool, but now our character's
basically moonwalking. So let's add in a curve and
let's use this as a path. Let's now go into edit mode
and let's adjust the shape of this curve so we
have a interesting path for our character to follow. So just adjust these points. Let's move them like so. Let's now go back into object
mode and let's select our rig. Select our curve again and
let's press Control + P to enter parent options. And let's select to path constraint. Now, our rig has snapped
to the start of the path, but it's not following the path. So we need to go to our
constraint settings. We need to make sure
we select animate path, and just like that, our
character decided to vanish but either way, we're just
gonna select follow curve. And just like that, we can see our character
is moonwalking backwards, following the curve and now
fading into the background. Now, to fix this issue, all we need to do is to select our curve, go into our curve settings and
set our path animation frames to the same amount of
frames as our end frame. And just like that, our character will no longer
run off into the distance. Well, our character's still
moonwalking, so let's fix this. Let's select our rig. Let's now go to the constraint settings. And over here at forward axes,
let's set this to negative y. And just like that, we have our character following
the curve that we have set. And now we can just go into edit mode and we can adjust the curve as we want to adjust the
path of our character. So this is a very fast way of quickly adjusting the
animation for our character, as well as the path that our
character is gonna follow. So now we know how to
blend these animations. We also know how to make
our character follow a path. But what if we want to adjust one of these animations strips directly? Let's have a look. So here I have the jumping
animation from earlier. So we wanna adjust his jumping animation and make our character look
down just before he jumps. So let's split this window over here. Let's adjust our camera just so we can see our character better. So let's increase the focal length just so we can see our
character a bit closer up. And let's set the other window
over here to a graph editor. So if we now go back to our NLA
editor, and if we press Tab, we'll go into edit mode
for the selected strip. And as you can see in our graph editor, we can see all of our
graphs for our animation. So let's now go to the 3D viewport and let's enter pose mode. Let's just select only the head. So if we now go to our graph editor and we expand this area over here, we can see all the animation
graphs for our head. Now, in this case, we only want to animate
the x-axis of our head so we can hide all of the
other animation graphs. We can now press the period
key on our number pad to zoom in onto our graph. We can now make very quick and
rough edits of our animation. We're using this graph, so let's select one of these keyframes. Let's go over here and
enable proportional editing. Now, we can use the scroll
wheel to increase the influence of our proportional editing,
and we can now adjust the pose. So let's now find the
place on our animation where we want our character to look down. So I think about here,
select this keyframe. Let's just drag it all the way down so our character is looking down. Let's have a look now at the animation. So our character walks up,
looks down, looks back up. So I think we can make him
look down a bit longer. So let's drag another
keyframe down over here, just about the same level, and let'd select this rough
area of the graph over here and let's press Alt + O to smooth it out. So now if a look at our animation, we can see our character's
looking down for a bit longer and then he jumps. Now, as soon as we're done editing, we just go to the NLA
editor and press Tab. And just like that, our
strip is back to normal. So now at the end here, I just wanna quickly mention
some interesting features of the NLA editor. For example, we can use these strips just like any other strips in Blender. We can, for example, press
S to scale up or down. When we scale down, we get a
fast version of our animation, or if we scale it up, we can get a very slow
version of our animation. We can also use, for example,
modifiers with our clips. So over here, we can add modifiers. We have several options. For my submission to the
Cubic World challenge, I used the stepped interpolation
modifier to add a bit of pizzazz to my character,
make him stand out as I gave a bit more of a stop motion vibe to the animation of my characters. And just like that, as you can see, we can easily modify these
animations within the NLA editor. And just like that, we have figured out how to
make a very simple animation in just a few minutes. So I hope that this tutorial
helped you in one way or another to figure out a way to make fast animations
for your character. If you want to create
characters just like this one in the Cubic World style, have a look at Zach
Reinhardt's Cubic World course. Here you won't only learn
how to make these characters or how to animate them, you also learn fundamentals
about animation and how to set up cool mechanisms. And if that wasn't enough, we can also learn how to
make these really cool scenes with a very simple geometry. So if you think this is
something you'd be interested in, head over to the CG Boost website or simply check out the link
in the description below. So this is the end of this
video. I hope you enjoyed it. This is my first video with CG Boost, so let me know how I did. And if you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below. So don't forget to like and
subscribe and hit that bell icon and see you in the next video.
