iClone Beginner's Guide: Animating with Motion Clips

hey everybody welcome to our beginner's guide for animation in iclone now in this tutorial we're going to touch on a number of different topics the one thing they have in common is that they all are going to add motion clips to our timeline so essentially we're going to be blending motions together by combining their motion clips and we're going to be trying to recreate this sequence of events we see here this character sitting down and then getting a disappointed look standing up and then walking over and doing a little catwalk thing so essentially we're using a number of different motion tools here like I said but we're going to be focusing on motion Clips and we will have individual tutorials that go into more detail on each individual tool or you can also check our help files or check out the forums as well for more questions so first of all we're going to get started on this I'm going to zoom in on our character you can see this beautiful dress is from our developer selig on in the marketplace you can purchase this in the marketplace or from our g6 empowerment pack and the hair is also from the g6 empowerment pack and the skin I've just darkened from our regular Heidi just to give her a little bit more variety here so if you have a character with animation and you want to remove all the animation on your character the simplest thing to do is just go ahead and right-click your character and then go remove object animation and now if I press the spacebar to play back there is absolutely no animation on my character so we've just removed all the animation for the entire clip we can press stop to go back to the beginning here so the first thing I'm going to talk about here is personas now every character every default character that comes with iclone has a persona and a persona is essentially just a set of emotions that is embedded into your character so if I right click my Heidi character here and I go to a persona here you can see we can import a persona remove or export a persona and then if I go to perform you can see we have motions here like twirl a hair dance graceful air dance and then we have a move walk forward now you can change the persona of your character by either importing a persona from the right-click menu or you can go over here to your motion tab and you can select persona and then if we want to add a persona here we can do chuck or grin which are iclone five characters or we can do heidi in mason which are iclone six characters let's simply double-click on Mason's here and that will apply his and then if I right-click on Heidi and I go to perform now instead of a dance floor graceful dancing in the air dance and stuff like that will have motions like birdcage and saloon door in and stuff like that so some very manly motions for a female character may not be suitable so let's go ahead and reapply Heidi's motion or Heidi's persona rather here and then let's apply our first motion of this tutorial so I'm just going to go ahead and right-click on my character and then go to perform and now we have all of Heidi's motions back let's go ahead and select stand to sit our character will then sit on this crate that I have conveniently placed behind her so basically that's our first motion that's how easy it is to apply a motion from a character's persona now if I press f3 this is the most important hotkey you'll learn by the way f3 to go into the timeline here this is where all your animation takes place so I need to go ahead and find Heidi in my track project list here track list here rather and I'm going to select Heidi from the Avatar section and you can see under Heidi in the motion track there is a motion clip called stand to sit and this is the motion clip that we just applied to our character and be aware that if you have soft cloth physics on your character and you slide back and forth it's going to have a pretty weird result so you might see some wardrobe malfunctions in this tutorial now this motion clip is what we've just applied what I want to do next is apply another motion clip so anywhere after this first motion clip has been applied I'm going to apply another motion clip but this time I'm going to be using a different tool now to find that tool I need to go to the modify panel to the animation tab and we're going to be using this motion puppet tool here so if I click on that the motion puppet window will come up here and I'm just going to move this over here now there's these are a number of different loopable motions and like I mentioned we'll have a separate tutorial that goes into more detail on this but feel free to open up this window and experiment by yourself we have idles we have moods we have a move movement motions we have talking motions and like I mentioned before all these are loopable so they just loop over and over and over again I can even have our character flight I can just press preview I press the space hotkey you can see she'll go into a nice up boxing motion there that's not the one we're going to apply we're actually going to go to the mood here and we're going to go to this female dejected motion and if I press space notice that our character will stand up and she'll have this dejected look on her face now one cool thing we can do is we can actually mask out some of the body so that that animation only applies to the upper part of her body and the original animation of her sitting down will be maintained so let's go ahead and do that I'm going to go over to my mask tab here and I'm going to mask out my legs by clicking them and the midsection and the upper body there and then if I press space right now notice that she'll remain seated and she'll just have that disappointed look on her face again and I can decrease the amount of exaggeration on that I can decrease the speed to make it a little bit slower and I preview that one more time I can see she'll be a little bit more slow with her reaction there so all I need to do to record this is just press the record button and then I can just press space to record so let's record a couple seconds of this get back and forth something like that and then press space to stop recording I'm going to close this motion puppet down motion puppet window down right now like I mentioned there's these other tutorials that are more specific on that tool let's press f3 and go into our timeline again and then we see we have this puppet clip right here now what I'm going to do is we're going to take this puppet clip we're going to click and drag it so it's closer to the other puppet clip now if I go over here and I just hold the Alt key and scroll in on my mouse notice that we can zoom in on the timeline here we have this little area right here if i zoom in this area right here if I just scroll scrub back and forth in this area right here you can see this is what we call our transition area so this is where it's transitioning from this motion here to this motion here if I want this transition to be slower I can click and drag this transition area to be a little bit slower it looks like right now so she'll sit down cross her arms in Anjou I'll be really fast where she'll bring her hand up to her head and look disappointed now that doesn't look very realistic so what we want to do is we want to expand this transition area maybe by 30 or 40 frames right there and let's go back to the middle here and then you can see that'll be a much more realistic timing for her disappointed look on her face and then after she's finished that what we want to do is we want to reapply that motion this time we want to apply the sit-to-stand motion in her persona so when I right-click on my character and I select perform I can now select sit-to-stand and then she'll just stand up right here she'll just pop - and then stand up and when that's finished you see we have a motion clip that will appear in our timeline again and this one's after our motion puppet clip so what I can do for this one is drag this one over as well and we can just drag it so it's overlapping the first clip and we can I'm going to blur out that wardrobe malfunction you can also turn off physics as well so we can just play back and you can see our character will snap to really quickly like that and we want to of course cut that or rather expand that transition time but what I'm going to do before that is notice that there's a whole section of time here where she's just sitting and she's not really moving now that area of time I want to cut that out and I'm going to show you how to modify the motion Clips by cutting them up so let's go ahead - maybe about here when she's about to start moving I'm going to right click on this clip and then select break and that's going to break my sit-to-stand clip into two parts let's hold the Alt key and scroll out to zoom out a little bit here now you can see we have these two stands 0 1 & 2 to stand 0 - and what I'm going to do is delete the first clip right here and that's going to shorten my second clip it's going to cut out all that little area where she's just sitting there and doing nothing because we want a faster transition so let's go ahead then and click and drag this one all the way over so it's overlapping the first clip and then let's go a little bit further back on the timeline here and I'm going to expand on this transition area here now let's see this works out here there we go that looks pretty natural so she stands up and after she stands up we want her to begin walking so another way to apply motions to your character another easy way to do that is actually to go to the motion library and that's where this animation tab comes in handy here you can go in here and then we have this motion folder right here and then we have these ji6 motion subfolders I'm going to double click this content window and just bring it out and expand it a little bit so you can see a little bit better we have g6 Mason we have g6 Gwyn or rather g5 grin and g6 Heidi now we want to apply one of Heidi's motions because those are suitable for the Heidi character that we have on the screen here and then I want to go to perform and what we're going to do is we're going to perform a catwalk so I'm just going to double click this content window again to dock it again and click on the content tab and all I want to do now is just simply apply this catwalk motion let's go ahead and do that and our character will jump a little bit forward and she'll begin to walk forward like this so I'll do her little pose at the end of the catwalk there and then she'll walk back now there's a couple things we want to do with this clip and I'll show you what to do in just a moment that will pretty much take up our entire project so that's all the animations we're going to apply we're going to use one more tool in just a moment but before we do that I'm going to press f3 again in the timeline I'm going to scrub all the way back to the beginning of that catwalk and notice that right here our character kind of slides forward let's zoom in our feet a little bit closer so we can see what I'm talking about now between this motion and this motion here you can see our character slides forward so either she's a ghost or we have some sort of animation error going on so the fastest way to fix this it's actually pretty easy so you can see at the very beginning of this second clip here we have this keyframe this this is a keyframe for the position of our character now what I want to do is go to my transform track now try form track basically means where the character is on the map so when you're adjusting the position of the character's entire body or of a prop or anything like that every object in your scene will have a transform track and that just determines its position so I'm going to hold the Alt key zoom in a little bit closer so we can see the individual frames here and I'm going to just double click this transform track right here and that will add a keyframe for that character's position right there and then at the end of this clip right here rather at the beginning of the beginning of the transition right here right at the beginning of the transition the very first frame of the transit transition here you want to make sure that you add another keyframe in the transform track okay and notice that between here and here we have a little bit of sliding which is not what we want so just to kind of illustrate what the transform does let's go here I'm going to press the W hotkey and that's going to bring up my characters gizmo and I'm going to move my character way up here and that's going to automatically add a transform keyframe right there and then if is playback you can see my character will go from that point to that point so what the transform keyframes do is they set a position for your character at a certain at a certain point so let's just go ahead and delete that middle and we don't need that one right now and let's go ahead and playback you can see that our character slides ahead so we want the character to be at this position or rather at this point what the character to be in this position so let's take a little bit of a closer look at the shoes try and be an act as accurate as possible so she's about an inch in front of the orange behind the crevice in the sidewalk there and let's go ahead to here and let's just go ahead and bring her back its that position about inch I'm kind of just spitballing this here so now if we play back you can see she'll begin her animation right there she will no longer slide now one thing we notice is that she kind of shifts her weight right here if we didn't want that to happen if we wanted her to start from like you know this position and just kind of just begins stepping right away again we can right click the clip and we can break it so we don't have that weight shifting in the middle there and we can just select this part and delete it and then we can just go head and move this clip all the way over again and make sure the keyframes are in the same position the very beginning of the transition area and the very beginning of the clip let's see what happens here so now we have this where she just steps like that maybe we can even just break it one more time where she's almost taking her first step and delete that for a section there let's try that one more time so now we have that root she won't shift weight she'll just step right away that's kind of a fast way to avoid any any sort of foot sliding on your character if you have your character sliding around for some reason that's one of the quick fixes there's other ways to fix that as well which we'll discuss in other tutorials or you can also post on our forum for questions about that as well so when we're going to have our character walk and let's go ahead back at that point we're going to just go ahead and start from the beginning and zoom out and take a look at the masterpiece we've created so far so let's go ahead and close our timeline down and we'll have our character sit down she will do her disappointed look and then she got it gets over it she gets over whatever is bothering her stands up and decided she's a strong woman she's going to do a cat walk so that she does there she is doing your sexy cat walk back and forth and then after the cat walk she just will turn around and this is the complete motion right here now we're going to apply one more motion we're going to use a different motion tool called direct puppet now to do that I'm going to go back here to almost when she's finished her motion right here and we're gonna just play back and about here I want our character's head to move in a different way so she's going to give kind of a sassy sassy head turn at this point here and this is where our tools like the direct puppet tool it'll come in very handy and that can be found in the motion tab right here under direct puppet now direct puppet you can actually modify each individual body part by itself if I press the if I click the head for example and I just click primary rotation which is the heads primary rotation back and forth and I press space you can see I can just whip her head back and forth there don't worry about the dress right now we're not going to worry about that for now that's just some physic stuff that you can find out about in a separate tutorial basically at this point here I want our character to kind of give a sassy head flip so we're just going to go ahead and record this and you should kind of just go back over here and then kind of give a sassy look like that alright so basically that's our using the direct puppet you can modify all sorts of other body parts on top of your Clips and we will have separate tutorials on this tool as well because it's much more complicated than I'm showing here so don't fret about that right now let's just close the direct puppet down and press f3 go into our timeline one more time and hold the Alt key and scroll out and then we have this puppet clip right here you may be able to notice that we have a number of different Clips so this is the first clip this is the catwalk right here and then this is the puppet clip that we added in and the only difference this puppet clip makes is that this is the clip that we are using for our direct puppet so let's go back here playback and our character will just kind of give her sassy you know head flip back and forth now you'll want to make sure that when you use direct puppet you use the REC use direct puppet you record right until the very end of your motion clip otherwise you may have some sort of jittering and stuff like that if you cancel your direct puppet or if you stop it before your puppet clip is finished you may have some sort of weird transition stuff like that going on and it gets more complicated from there on so make sure that you when you're recording with your direct puppet you record all the way to the end of your motion clip alright so there we've combined a number of different motion Clips in a number of different ways this is a basically a brief introduction to using motion clips in iclone just for simple animation and blending them together so again we're just blending that body motion puppet there and we're masking the the legs out she'll get up and do a cat walk which we apply it from the motion library and then she will go and we'll have that direct puppet head flip and everything like that so that's about it for this tutorial we will have a Part B of this tutorial we focus more on keyframe editing and all that fun stuff so stay tuned for that we'll talk about motion key editor right here edit motion layer tool I'll also talk about the look at feature as well so thanks for watching guys hopefully you learn something here and hopefully you enjoy using icon 6

Channel: Reallusion

Views: 125,545

Keywords: IClone, Computer Animation (Industry), Animation (TV Genre), Cartoon, Motion, Tips, Beginner, Beginner's Guide, Reallusion

Id: NAFrMYqLpx4

Length: 18min 6sec (1086 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 13 2015