Mastering the Run Cycle in Blender: Workflow & Animation Tips! #tutorial

foreign [Music] so I know it's been a while since I've made a video my plan is to hopefully start adding more content to this channel I really enjoy doing this there's just been a lot of other obligations that have kind of taken my time so I haven't been able to add as much content as I want to but hopefully I can start adding more more tutorials in Maya and blender to this channel so to start the First new video we're going to be doing is inside a blender and I'm going to be walking through the process of creating a Run Cycle we're going to be using and leveraging a lot of sort of blender's tools as well as just letting blender kind of animate those in-betweens for us that'll allow us to quickly Block in a run cycle and then start to refine and build the poses that we want on top of that if you watch my really quick walk cycle tutorial inside of blender we're going to be using a very similar approach where we just start with a mirrored contact pose let blender kind of fill in those in-betweens and then start refining those individual poses themselves now this will be a little bit longer because this is going to be you know completely real time I'm going to try to go through the process as far as I can and get the Run Cycle to a pretty decent place and I am going to be using the I animate Lisa rig it is a rig that requires you to be in any of the I animate workshops in order to actually gain access to so if you aren't in an eye animate Workshop you can find a lot of really nice free rigs at the blender Studio website as well as the Agora Community they have a really large selection of really nice blender rigs that you can use so really any of those will work for this example I'm just going to be using the Lisa rig so with that let's go ahead and jump into blender and start creating this Run Cycle so I'm going to go ahead and just start with this already made contact pose for our Run Cycle so this is sort of the first pose of our Run Cycle similar to what you would see in the walk cycle and really quickly I'm just going to pull over this reference here so this is just a quick kind of reference I've made sort of the main poses of a run cycle and one of the really important aspects of a run cycle is that typically within somewhere in your Run Cycle your character is going to have both feet completely off the ground so we have our contact here at the beginning which we already have created here and then we have our down our passing our up which is really the sort of push-off pose you can see the the character's leg is fully kind of extended and really pushing forward and then we have this what I call up two which is the actual hang time or in-air pose and then we have back to our contact so right now this is a 10 frame cycle for this Run Cycle obviously we can experiment with timing and play around with maybe we can have a much faster Run Cycle or a much slower Run Cycle that feels almost more like a slow sort of jog if you wanted to add some some time in here it's also important to note that you can really play around with the up two pose or this Hang Time pose um to get a sort of different feeling in your run style you can really stretch this out maybe have the a character like completely off the ground for like four frames and then kind of quickly stomp down to get sort of a different feeling to your Run Cycle but usually around two frames I feel like is a good feeling for your Run Cycle to kind of have your character sort of both feet off the ground for around two frames or so is usually sort of like the good sort of default run to start with and then you can always experiment and play around with it further but let's go ahead and just get started here and we have a contact pose so I'm going to press a to select all of my control curves and what I want to do is just take this contact pose and mirror it for the opposite leg to again start utilizing blender's tools to quickly make a basic Run Cycle so I'm going to go to frame 0 here I like to start my animations always on frame zero so I'm going to go ahead and highlight that keyframe I'm going to go up here to pose copy pose you can see the obviously the keyboard shortcut there displayed which is Ctrl C and then what I want to do is go down to frame 10 and I'm going to choose paste post flipped keyboard shortcut for that is shift control V so now you can see we have our flipped contact pose and there you can see it playing through here again blender is just blending between these two contact poses obviously it's not looking like a Run Cycle just yet but this is actually a lot of really helpful information that we can use and utilizing this mirror tool obviously will allow us to create this Run Cycle much faster but also I like using blender's in betweens that it gives us fora that it gives that it gives here to really start kind of fleshing out this Run Cycle here and I really like to utilize what blender gives us as far as these in-betweens to use this to build our animation on so we know that we're getting a nice clean transition from this pose to this pose and what I can do real quick is I'll just copy the pose on frame zero paste it on frame 20 so now we kind of have our cycle here all right that's working all right obviously it's not really looking like much at the moment so what I want to do now is focus on building out really this first step and we can focus on building this first step get that looking pretty decent and then we can go ahead and use the same mirror tool to create the opposite step for us so what I like to do on this is I like to really layer on this information so I'm going to start with just the up and down of the hips which on this character I believe is the Z location all right and I'll zoom in here and what I'm going to do is jump to frame two I can go ahead and do is press a to select everything press I to lock a keyframe Down and if you get if you try to do that in your viewport by pressing I and you get this menu that pops up just make sure you have your active keying set to whatever you want you could do you know location and rotation on a rig like this I always just use you know selected bones whole character because I like to lock a keyframe down on everything as I'm working so I like to keyframe down on frame two I'm going to go back and select this torso control zoom in here I'm going to start creating this kind of down position as the hips drop not really worried at all about what the legs are doing at this moment I'm just going to focus on getting the the up and down of the hips working well so there is the down position it might be a little bit too low but what I want to do is jump to frame four press a to select everything I had to lock your keyframe down and all the controls I'm going to go forward and start bringing the hips up so once it hits the down position the hips are going to start traveling up and kind of continue traveling up all through the rest of this until it gets back to that next contact position so the hips are probably going to be up here if I look at this graph we know the up position that hip is going to be still kind of pushing off so it goes into the down the hips drop to start to rise up and hit the highest point on that sort of up Hang Time pose so I can play around with this press a to select everything jump to frame eight press I to lock keyframe down and this I want to make sure I do higher than that contact so it's going to hit this up pose Hang Time pose and then drop back down to that contact so we're getting something that feels a bit like that and that down might be a bit too much might do something more like this and the amount of up and down we can always tweak that I kind of just want to start to establish the basic up and down sort of path of the hips through here and then once we actually mirror this over for the next step we can actually further refine you know the tangents and how these are flowing together but again right here I'm kind of just focusing on getting this first step kind of working so what I want to do now is start flushing out the legs a bit more so here I'm going to open up the side menu and go to the translate Z kind of zero all of these out because I know the foot is going to be flat on the ground and I might go ahead and add a bit of rotate Z on this so the feet aren't you know completely straight on we still want to have a bit of angle to them but I want to make sure the feet are actually you know flat on the ground for a lot of this transition through here so again go to the translate Z to make sure it's flat grab the foot roll control zero that out and I want to take this value on rotate Z Ctrl C to copy it and then paste that there on frame four and you can see that really all we're doing is still utilizing the blending that blender is giving us and kind of just making sure the feet are flat on the ground but they're still traveling in a way that actually works really well for this Run Cycle kind of getting all that information in there for free which is nice all right so I'm gonna go to frame six and this is where I still want this foot on the ground I believe zero out this foot roll for now but I do want to make sure I get this foot in that really extended kind of push-off pose because this is the pose right before she actually you know leaps off the ground so I want to make sure I get a nice kind of extension I can look at this graph again and kind of see I want to make something similar to this that we see there and then here obviously I want to push that foot back so I can press G to go into the translate and then double click X or excuse me click y looks like it's in the y-axis so I'll click that and just translate this foot back so I get a nice extension make sure that foot feels like it's pushing off and kind of following through there into that contact position so on frame eight I might even push this back a little bit more as it swings back and then starts to fly forward into that next contact all right so now what I want to do is take a look at the Translate Y through here and it looks like we're it's interesting looks like we've got like linear tangents on a lot of these so we want to make sure what I do is let me try to select everything make sure I'm just using a bezier tangent on that should I fix some of these some of these tangent handles looked a little bit weird just making sure I change them to you know Auto clamped something like that works and I think that's just because this is a file I had worked in previously so I probably tweaked some tangent handles so it's kind of kept that information but what I want to do is all the way up to this push off I want to make sure that this is just a a flat linear straight line from here from this contact all the way to this push off here so I'm going to select this key here and press V and let's see I'll go to free and then I'll select this tangent handle and I'll change it to linear should get a nice straight linear transition on this foot moving back something like that all right and then on this foot I'll just quickly tweak the path through some of this so I think here I probably want to bring the foot down maybe a little bit here I want to go ahead and zero out this foot roll I don't want any foot roll on these poses here I'll probably take this and rotate it back and just have a bit more drag on that foot looks like I'll need to tweak this knee control here maybe start moving that foot back here as well so the foot might be kind of moving out this direction as it flows through and then kind of swings back forward I think as it swings forward here it's gone a little bit too far inward so I'm going to ease out on that foot roll I'm going to zero out here because I don't need any foot roll on that pose I can just rotate that foot again this is the sort of Hang Time pose there all right and I think we're getting something that feels decent for this first step still not perfect what I want to do now is go in here to should be the rotate X on this control here I want to fix some of these tangent handles all right so this I believe I want to start rotating the chest down through a lot of this I just want to start adding a bit of kind of back and forth rotation on the chest here this should be a pretty simple curve for this so it goes down continues traveling down so the chest is rotating down along the x-axis all the way up to frame four and then starts to rotate back into where it's at in the contact position so it should be pretty subtle and I think I could probably increase some of this and let me jump into the y excuse me translate Z it's up and down for this all right and I feel like this down might be a bit too harsh I might need to just ease out of it a bit more something like that all right so now what I want to do is do a bit of work on the chest control and add just a bit of rotation on that as well all right so I'm going to grab the chest control here and I'll jump to the rotation X My Graph editor and I'm going to just jump forward here and go to frame six and I'll start bringing this up and I'm just like rotating the chest downward and these keyframes here on two and four I'm just gonna probably bring this one up and create a curve a bit like that and then on frame 8 I'll grab this keyframe and kind of just bring it up something about like that so basically what's going to happen is this chest is rotating down as she lands even on this push off we're getting even more rotation this way and we can increase it if we need to later but I'm kind of just starting with just some basic movement I might actually go ahead and grab all these keyframes and just start shifting them up a bit to increase that rotation just a little bit that might be too much but we can think that's working okay now what I want to do is grab my torso control and go to the rotate X here and I might tweak what this curve is actually doing here so I think I'm going to go to the keyframe on frame 2 and I'm actually going to rotate this back a bit so we're kind of getting a bit of counter animation between what the this torso control is doing and what the chest control is doing but that is giving us a nice feeling of kind of breakup in the spine there you can see as she lands this kind of lurch forward but I'll probably dial off this movement that goes up to frame four so I'll probably grab this keyframe bring it down a bit and I might bring this up that see how this looks something like that so we get this backward movement then she starts to kind of lean forward as she pushes off and then coming back to the contact her chest is actually rotating her torso is rotating back as she you know pushes pushes her left leg forward and it's going to continue rotating back through here so we get something that feels a bit like that and already we can start to see this kind of run cycle begin to kind of take shape one thing I do know that I want to do for this run cycle is since we mirrored this pose directly to frame 10 it's just a mirrored image but for this Run Cycle I want something that feels a little less kind of basic with the arms kind of just going and mirroring their animation just going back and forth I actually probably want to have this arm holding the gun kind of hanging out behind her as she's running so she's still like during the entire Run Cycle she's kind of holding the arm behind her that's holding the gun and then this little left arm will probably have kind of similar movement to what it's doing but probably dial that back quite a bit to where it's not going you know all the way back behind her which means we'll probably dial back the amount of rotation that we're getting on the chest but I do still like to have just a starting point like this kind of this straight mirrored animation where the straight mirrored pose and then actually start kind of refining it further once I'm kind of happy with the basic kind of results that we're getting here and on this control I want to try something where I know as she lands and puts her weight the hips should shift this way as their hips kind of take that that weight on her right leg so the hips are going to move that direction and then start to even out in bits and then on this push off get a bit of kind of stretch there more rotation inward toward that leg that's pushing off and then kind of tweak the amount that's rotating here until we get something like that so I might jump into my graph on the rotate Z and kind of look at this curve and make sure it's kind of doing what I want let me change that to Auto clamped this oops should actually be in the rotate y I believe yeah so I'll grab this I might increase that just a bit so I'll bring that keyframe up this I might dial back how quickly it snaps over so I might just grab this keyframe and bring it up a little bit to kind of ease into that transition to where we have this sort of you know push off with the hips kind of rotating down this direction and then it's going to start moving to the position on frame 10 there and one thing to keep in mind is that this might just be too much movement for this let me see if I can maybe bring this keyframe up and do something a bit like that so we kind of have just this upward rotation on this curve then it starts to travel down all the way through this try something like that and that's looking okay and it might just be something where I think at this point of a Run Cycle where I've kind of really just focused on this one step through this whole section I want to start adding in the other step real quickly though I'm going to take a look at my translate X on this take a look at what this is doing all right something like that should work one thing I do need to make sure I do which is always important to check on the foot that is planted you want to make sure you don't have any you know side to side sliding as the foot is actually moving back and you can see I have a lot of that like as soon as she plants her foot her foot should not be sliding back and forth like this but you can see I have it like sliding inward all the way into the push-off position so I think this pose on frame six let me take a look at this curve yeah you can see this curve is not doing at all what it should be so I'm going to grab this keyframe and have this foot positioned a bit more like that because I don't want it to be quite as far inward there and then here let's see I want to take the value on frame six of the translate X so I'm going to see what happens if I just paste it on frame two here paste it on this Frame as well so now we have the foot kind of moving in and then it stays you know completely flat until we get a transition kind of like that there I think that should work for now cool all right so what I want to do now is go ahead and do the kind of mirror tool to basically take all this animation that we created here and flip it over so we have the opposite step so we have a full cycle here and then we can go in and kind of further see how our animation is looking and just continue to refine it so I'm going to take the keyframe on frame two I'm going to go up here to copy pose I'm going to go to frame 12. again pressing a in the viewport to make sure I select all my controls and going up here to pose paste pose flipped and now you can see we've basically just got the opposite step now you can use the shortcuts for this I have found I don't know if it's just a bug it's just something I've noticed that sometimes if I use the keyboard shortcuts to do this paste post flipped like it doesn't flip it properly and it could just be it's most likely just user error but it's just something that I've gotten to the habit of I've experienced that a couple times to where I just just go to this drop down and do it there it's just something I've gotten in the habit of so I'll just copy the pose on frame four go to 14 please post flipped so now we've got this opposite pose here select the keyframe on frame six pose copy pose go to 16. let's post flipped all right so then finally go to frame eight copy that pose all right so now we've got a nice full cycle here and once we got that extra step in there we can really see kind of how this is looking with a full cycle so that's that's the animation we have so far and already you can see it's starting to to take shape with this animation we've really kept it simple and just kind of figured out the main poses for this run cycle and started to kind of just layer on layer on that detail for this something I do notice is it it feels like I'll need a tweak this here I might actually just go ahead and go to frame two copy the translate X go to frame zero and just paste that there so it kind of stays flat for that whole cycle I might bring it that direction just a bit and then maybe copy this value paste it here even that little bit of sliding at the beginning I feel like looks a little bit strange and then we'll just need to copy this from frame zero to frame 20. and then here this transition from here to here feels like a little bit too much so I'll probably bring this keyframe up all right and then this I need to do the same thing we're getting quite a bit of sliding here that I don't want I might push this keyframe back to right around here then take this value and copy it on frame 12. I'm going to make sure that foot is staying completely you know planted as it goes through this here I might grab all these keyframes and push it in just a bit all right that's looking decent there something I do feel like I want to do now that I see the full kind of cycle in motion is I want to kind of increase this movement here I'm going to take both of these keyframes really push them back just a little bit take all these keyframes push them in up so that it's kind of a rotating further downward so we're just getting a bit more exaggeration on that back and forth motion on the rotate X and I'm going to do the same for the chest to kind of increase this feeling so I'll probably just grab all these keyframes here and just start to bring them up something like that all right let me take a look at the Torso control the translate X let's see just over all the from the front view the legs are not quite feeling a way that I would want let me try something I'm going to grab this keyframe bring it down grab all these and kind of bring it down a bit more like this and then here I'll probably bring this up because I feel like she's not hanging out on the supporting leg long enough to where her weight should still be kind of hanging out over on this side longer and it just felt a little too even as far as like the back and forth on the hips she was moving shifting her weight back and forth before it really felt correct so like here as she lands the weight should still be kind of transferring that direction until she starts doing this push off to where we see it kind of start to go the opposite direction for that next contact position so move that direction land continue moving that direction when she lands you'll get a stronger kind of shift over this direction here continue that way and then as she starts to push off then it can start going back the opposite direction into the next kind of contact position so we have something it feels a bit more I think that definitely feels feels better there all right next up what I want to do is go ahead and actually cycle this so I can see how the animation is Flowing from the end of the cycle back to the beginning to make sure you know all my curves are flowing nicely if we don't do that then we can get strange like hitches like I know this flow from here to the end of the animation is going to look a little bit weird if I go ahead and let me go ahead and just select this and press a to select everything and I'll do shift e to open up the set keyframe and then I'll do make cyclic to cycle this you can see it's going to produce this weird kind of result where we have the hips moving over and then they're going to kind of almost flatten out into the last keyframe and then we get this slow out where we would probably want something that feels a bit more and looks a bit more like this kind of a nice flow between these these keyframes as much as you can to get something that feels a bit better something like that now what I want to do is press a select all my controls I'm going to select all the keyframes there in the graph editor press shift e to make cyclic that should cycle all of my control curves that I have selected looks like it worked I'll just jump through some of these and make sure it looks like it properly kind of cycled everything cool so I still feel like we're getting a bit of just like shaking this weird kind of just shaking I think I'm feeling that with like her knee movement which is a little bit too Poppy some of that stuff we can really just start to iron out as we go further obviously the this chest movement is not working but I'm not quite worried about this kind of rotation this direction because again this is going to be something I want to tweak because I kind of want her to in this Run Cycle to kind of hang out in this pose as far as her upper body so her arms should kind of stay behind her throughout the cycle this arm should stay more or less kind of in front of her and her upper body should kind of keep roughly this pose through the whole cycle whereas right now it's just kind of looping mirroring back and forth the arms and the chest which doesn't look that interesting or that that great um but we've got a solid foundation we can start to work with really quickly on this cycle um we just really again sorry with the basic poses and just let blender kind of figure out the sort of in-betweens in there and then we started to just refine our poses making sure our feet were moving the way they should and layering on some torso and chest movement so what I want to do now is go in here and do a quick pass on just getting the the upper body kind of working more kind of how I want all right so I'll probably start with dialing back the amounts of rotation on the chest the amount of this sort of like back and forth movement which I believe is on the z-axis so I'm going to go ahead and open that up in the graph editor and I kind of just want to start going through this and figuring out how far I actually want it to go this direction so since we just mirrored the contact pose over or again getting just a mirror pose of zero of the pose on frame zero so frame 0 and frame ten just a mirrored image basically but I don't want the chest to be rotated this far over on frame 10. so I'm going to just grab this keyframe and start dialing it back a bit something maybe a bit like that and then I can come in here and start tweaking the keyframes before it I bring it down even lower I'll go ahead and bring this one down and start creating a basic curve in here and if you don't know this something that can be helpful is when you grab a keyframe and you press G to do this move tool here if you go ahead and press y on your keyboard that's going to just lock it in the up Axis so you don't accidentally change the frame that this keyframe is on if I press G and just try to move this around you can see I can pretty easily actually shift the timing of this keyframe but really I just want to lock it in you know up and down so pressing y will allow me to do that and then X will allow you to shift it just in time which can be helpful so I think already something like that works pretty well and also something that I want to do is come over here to view and I just want to hide the let's see where is it show cursor in the graph editor this cursor is this blue line in the graph editor it's one thing that can be helpful for is if you're scaling you can Scale based off where this cursor is in the graph editor but you can see it's this blue line and it looks like a curve itself which really can be annoying when you always see it in your graph editor like this so I usually actually like to just keep that off until I actually want to use this cursor for something so it just makes it cleaner there that looks like it might be decent there I might want to tweak the rotate y and get a pose a bit more like this on the opposite leg so I'll go ahead and go to my curve and right in here I'll probably bring this up I'm just going to test this out not sure if it's going to look good something I usually like to do when I'm animating is just play around with things test different ideas quickly to see if I will like the way it looks so I basically kind of just want to flip this curve which probably would have been easier if I just grab the curve and actually flipped it then doing this one keyframe at a time but I'll just see if this works kind of too late now I might like that more um that might work maybe let me actually undo that and I think I might like this but I want to go ahead and actually now that I'm looking at it I think I want to tweak the arms first before adjusting the chest anymore because the arms are really distracting and they're not doing it all what I want them to do so I'm going to shift select shoulder the upper arm and the forearm and then the hand control get all of those selected and let's see I'm probably just going to delete all the keyframes between 0 and frame 10. and I'm going to go ahead and go to frame zero press Ctrl C to copy go to frame 10 press Ctrl V to paste so I basically just copied that pose so now you can see this arm is kind of hanging out behind her which I think gives this round a bit more of a dynamic type of feeling to it and then what I want to do is go to frame 10 and I do want to tweak this a bit so I don't want it to be an exact you know copied pose there I want this arm to still move a little bit so I'll kind of bring the shoulder in bring the arm down a bit to maybe have it move about that much and then I want to tweak how far it's coming to the side this might actually be moving too far this direction I still might want to keep it behind her more but I'll kind of see how that's looking I think that's actually looking pretty decent let me go ahead and select the shoulder the upper arm the forearm and the hand I'm going to go ahead and press Ctrl C on frame 0. go to frame 20. paste it there and actually I don't know why I don't know why I did that because I already know it's a the exact copied pose between here and here what I actually need to do is delete these keyframes there so you can see it goes to forward to frame 10 on that opposite foot coming forward and then it goes back so we get this still nice movement on the arm but it's just kind of hanging out kind of behind her there something that feels a bit more like that and I think I like the feeling of this I might go ahead and maybe keep the shoulder back a little bit just maybe bring that arm keep that arm back just a tiny bit more maybe something like that then let's see let me actually keep this rotated like that and see how this feels keep that hand kind of that arm kind of rotated inward or something like that so I think that's working better and then now let's take a look at this other arm so this other arm is moving really far back behind her in the step again because it was just a mirrored pose so this I think on frame 10 the I'm actually first just try to tweak this pose a bit keep that arm rotated in a bit more again I still want it to have movement to it but I don't want it to just swing completely behind her so I'll test this out what I'm going to do is just delete all these extra keyframes in here let blender just kind of blend between this to start to see if I like this flow to it delete all these keyframes here and just get kind of blender blending between these main key poses for me and that's looking decent what I might actually do is I still have everything selected let me just select them all again just to make sure what I'm going to do is go to frame 10. and I don't want this to move quite as far as it's moving so what I can do is go to frame 10 press shift e to open up this kind of tween or breakdown tool in blender and should be able to actually it's not wanting to work at all at all that's interesting hmm to that's really weird never actually seen this happened before where it's just like popping huh I can't probably use the air I'm not sure why it's doing this usually it'll let you know maybe that's it that's weird hmm so it's letting me blend between these keyframes but not the keyframes between 0 10 and 20. so I should be able to just blend this but it doesn't want to work so I'll just go ahead and grab the arm keep it a bit more forward probably keep the shoulder Maybe a little bit more forward one thing I do want to fix is I don't want to have it like swing out like that I want to keep the arm kind of tucked in here so something like this might work a bit better still getting that back and forth but not nearly nearly as much I might be able to increase that now just a little bit maybe something like that cool I think that's working pretty decent um now I want to go jump back to the chest go to my rotate y now what I want to do on this is just press s y to scale and then type in negative 1 to just flip this curve basically and I think that's let me undo that and see if I I like that one thing I do want to make sure I keep in mind is that um this keyframe is on let's see what value is that 2.44 so when I scale this press s y negative one I'm going to bring this up and still make sure I still keep that same pose at the beginning so I'll probably bring it up a bit more maybe bring it down a little bit doesn't need to be perfect to where it was but I remember it was at around like 2.4 so something like that and I think I like the way this is working now on the chest feels a bit more more natural cool all right see what I can do with the arm here to get movement that feels a bit better kind of just playing around with a few different keyframes don't really like how this is working yet don't want to do that all right all right and let's see let's go to my rotate y on this control maybe try a path a bit like this on the forward backward movement I think I might have the arm moving too much now it's definitely moving too far in the motion think won't work I might dial back the amount that it moves back going into the down position it might dial back the amount that it moves forward and do something similar but just go with something a bit more subtle as far as the back and forth movement I think something like that will work now I want to take a look at some of the other axes I think the z-axis and see what this is doing because it does feel a little bit strange I'm going to select this control make sure I make it cycle all right so I think it's coming too far in on frame 10. so I'm going to keep it out a bit think that might work and we are getting a bit of kind of gimbling here which is fine you can see that see and X do pretty much the same thing there as far as like what it's rotating but I think this path might work the only thing is I feel like it's going just a tiny bit too close to our hip on frame 14 so maybe I'll just force that out a little bit something like that yeah I think that works now I'll do a quick pass on the elbow go in here and see if there's anything I can do to make this feel a bit better I might try to extend it out I think as it comes forward maybe around frame 15 I'm going to pull it in just to get like a bit of overlap in there I don't know if I like that let me actually see let me jump into my graph editor should I cycle this select all the curves all right and that's interesting so again I don't know what is going on let me select my curve shift e all right that's a weird some weird bug I had to clear it and then make it in order for it to actually show up interesting let me grab the two keyframes here and maybe add a bit of Bend to the Elbow the first and last pose then this width back I can dial that back something like this might work hmm starting not to like the amount of movement on this arm probably just want to dial this back a bit so what I'm going to do is just press s and Y to scale this whole curve this rotate y curve on the arm in so that I can just reduce the overall amount of movement that I'm getting on the arm I think that might work a bit better yeah I think that works I'll do a quick pass again kind of just layering this detail on on the arm kind of just moving down the arm chain and here let's see on the z-axis I will bring that wrist up to get a bit of kind of like drag as it pulls forward and then after frame 10 probably when the arm starts to swing back maybe around frame 16. I'll bring that rest in so we get a curve about like that which looks pretty similar to the curve that we had on our elbow control as well so we want to create something a little bit similar to that and then on this I'm going to press s y and scale all that in because I feel like it's a bit too much movement on the wrist keep it pretty subtle I'm gonna grab this elbow and I'm going to scale this movement in because looking at it I just feel like it's just moving too much maybe dial this back this keyframe back here that down I think that works a bit better all right now on this arm I think it might still be moving too far back so I'm going to tweak this with this elbow up like that I have it traveling around this Arc after that change but I don't think I like that let me actually just try tweaking the elbow a bit through some of this I think loosening up that elbow helps because I don't want it to feel like too kind of bouncy on that forearm all right so I think kind of like this movement that I'm getting on the arm but I think I just basically want to dial back that amount on some of this that so create a bit of a kind of an arc through this but that makes a little bit more sense with what how she's actually running and what foot she's using to step because the way I had it before the arm was kind of doing the opposite back and forth that it's doing now whereas now it's going out as the knee is coming up so it makes a bit more sense that she would you know kind of make that room for that knee coming up so she'd kind of Swing her arm out and then back in on the opposite step and do that as kind of the loop take a look at some of the other curves and just make sure I'm getting curves that flow a bit better so this I can see it's not flowing the greatest between these two keyframes it kind of goes up and then kind of hits a wall goes down so I'm going to just grab this keyframe and tweak it maybe just grab this tangent handle and create a flow that works a bit better I think that's working what I want to do now is take this shoulder and add a bit of kind of bounce on it along the x axis so here I might try to go to frame five I'll just add a keyframe here and see what happens if I actually bring it up so shoulder goes up here it might drop like all that cool I think that works let me grab this wrist play around with a bit of into it nice all right so I think the arms the chest is working a bit better definitely a more interesting run than just having a straight kind of mirrored arm and chest pose what I want to do now real quickly is just tweak the the foot here so as soon as she goes into the pose on frame one I want to zero out this foot roll control because I want to make sure her foot is completely planted on the ground through that same on this side work foreign the feet were kind of easing into their their planted position cool and if I feel like I might end up I keep looking at this arm and wanting to come back to it just because I feel like the the amount of movement that it's doing I think maybe just the keyframe on frame 10 like I might tweak this and really kind of have it just hang out behind her I think I do like that more just simplifying it quite a bit more I can grab this upper arm and frame 10. I'll bring it down a little bit but I just like the feeling of her this arm kind of holding back as she's running versus having like a big kind of like swing through like this like it was doing before which I think can work but it was just I think it was giving a strange feeling with the left arm too where it feels like now with it holding off it's still moving forward a bit so there's still some nice like overlap in the arm some weight to it but it feels more like this left arm is actually helping sort of like Drive the run a bit more while this right arm is kind of hanging out behind her I think that works a bit better all right so looking at this now I kind of want to go in and start refining a bit of the legs and the hips and just make sure they're working a bit better for the most part they're working decently but you can see there's some some big like pops and Jitters in the knees that we want to fix I might go in and maybe exaggerate some of the up and down of the body we can loosen up the hips and the chest a bit more too this all kind of just we're fighting men that we can do like already this is you know a pretty decent Run Cycle for the time we've spent on it there's definitely a ton of Polish and stuff we can do but again we could work on this forever and continue kind of tweaking things in our fighting things but I think right now I want to kind of go in and focus on some of the major issues I'm seeing first which are just the legs and the knees so we'll go ahead and do that now all right so for the legs I think what I first want to do let's take a look at the hips and make sure these are working how I want I don't really like what the hips are doing as far as the side to side I've got too much movement too much jittery movement I think I just need to simplify this side to side movement so I'll take a look at my curve and see what that's doing and right away I can see it's not doing it all what it really should be doing I'm not exactly sure what I was trying to do here it looks like I want to have I definitely want to make sure I have this kind of nice Bend this way as as the weight is planted on that right foot but like this extra movement here is just I think I just need to simplify this I'm going to go ahead and delete all these keyframes here all right and then I'll probably just delete these keyframes and now I've just got this simple simple curve here um that hopefully should work so we've got this kind of back and forth all right I might try something like this so I might just kind of reverse this curve here let me actually take see I'm gonna go to frame five I'm going to drop a keyframe down and I want to bring this up like this so we get this nice kind of compression on the hip then here go from 15. should be able to bring this down let's try that this direction and what I can do is grab keyframe on frame five I'm going to copy this Translate Y value go to frame 15. paste it put a negative value in there so I can at least make sure that these are nice mirrors for that so I think a curve like this should work a bit better it definitely feels a lot more simplified which I think works and I can play around with this curve too and figure out maybe get this to flow a bit better so I might just add like a little bit of rotation to it same on this one and just like a little bit of rotation so that curve kind of flows through there a bit better and it doesn't have you know completely flat tangent like that so something like that might work cool yeah I think that definitely works a little bit better I'm going to take a look at the should be rotate X yeah this forward backward on the hip I think I need to increase this obviously I didn't really animate this so what I want to do is I think on this to frame four let me grab this keyframe and probably bring it down I believe I want the hips to kind of compress forward going into the sort of passing pose so something like that so we get like a nice weighty feeling to the hips as it lands and then maybe on frame 10 I can see I definitely want it to do what it's doing here how it's kind of you know going backward because he or she's pushing off with that leg so we're going to get like a nice kind of extension on that I might want it to start to come forward again on frame 10. so maybe you have a curve like this so we get that you know a nice extension on the hips but then it comes back as she's you know bringing her foot forward we might do something just like this just to have a simple curve to it but I'll go ahead and try this first all right I'm gonna go ahead and copy the value on frame two for the rotate X go to frame 12. paste that four keyframe on frame four copy that actually did I copy this correctly no interesting curve knot dating all right let me grab this keyframe the frame 14 paste it that's weird it's not wanting to paste that so I'll just do this see if I can paste copy this value go ahead and grab this I'm gonna make sure it's cycling um I'll grab value here copy it paste it what in the world why is it I don't think I've ever seen anything like this I'm not exactly sure and why it's not wanting to paste this seems like I've been getting some weird issues blender all right I'll just drag that down then there's not wanting to actually work very well yeah I think that works better those hips are working a bit better on that let me take a look at the Z Direction on this let's see if I can change anything I'm gonna go ahead and cycle this which actually let me just go ahead and grab my hips um select everything and just make sure it's all cycling and I'm opening up this menu by pressing shift shift e to open that up and I think for the most part this curve should work I'm just going to smooth some things out fix some of these you know hitches that are happening with position of some of these keyframes so just try to make it flow a bit better through here cool all right I think one thing I want to tweak are the legs swinging through um I might just push them in closer so they don't swing out quite as far same for this leg as it swings through here I might try to keep it a little bit closer kind of just bringing it in a bit more might rotate this foot out on this leg a tiny bit all right I think that works I'm gonna actually take a look at the knees now and fix some of the path through here I think on frame 12 I want to keep the knee out just a tiny bit more something like that actually don't know if I like how much the knee points out on this pose oh you know what I just realized I don't know how this happened because that's interesting no wonder my values weren't changing I don't have auto key turned on so any changes that I'm making are not staying so let's do this again let's bring this in a bit side in so that's what I'm definitely important thing that you want to make sure that you do is having auto key on is very helpful especially if you're used to having auto key on you never you're never going to press I to lock a keyframe down every time you make a post change because because you know it's going to be done automatically cool grab the Nino bring it in I don't like how far it's just like aimed out and you would probably want to stay kind of tucked in through a lot of this that works a bit better on that leg so I'm going to do the same thing on this leg think like this pose I want to just bring that knee in on that contact so I'm going to go ahead and copy from frame 0 to frame 20. and then move forward cool looking decent it's definitely lacks at tweaks I could make on their legs what I actually want to do is let's see I think I'm actually going to go ahead and track the path using the motion pass let me go ahead and let's see calculate frame range cool so this will allow me to see exactly what's going on through here so I think immediately I kind of want to bring a leg up a bit higher through that to kind of oops what in the world all right here I want to dial back that rotation forward so I'm going to still keep the leg kind of rotating back and then through here what I might actually do is start bringing the leg up a bit higher just so it doesn't feel like just a linear straight line into that contact position that's working a bit better cool let me go ahead and delete that do the same on this one update that here I'm going to bring the foot up keep it rotated back jump forward and probably bring the foot up a little bit and you can see at this point like I'm not worried about making this step you know mirroring it and making exactly like the right foot at this point I'm kind of just eyeballing things it's okay to have you know your Run Cycle not you know 100 mirrored for the opposite leg at this point it's also good to you know add a bit of variation to between the steps I might dial back how far comes out on this pose so have that kind of come a bit straight down like that cool let me do the same on the opposite foot so I'm going to calculate this path real quick and yeah it's going too far out to the side so I'm going to bring that in something like that all right I think that's working something I do think I want to fix real quick is take a look at the spacing on the step here so when she's stepping forward you can see that the the spacing between here to here is really small so we get the feeling that the foot is actually slowing down as it gets closer to the ground which is not really what we want I'm taking a similar approach to you know a bouncing ball exercise like as the ball falls back to the ground it's going to speed up as it falls rather than slow down just before it hits the ground so we're getting like the Slowdown on the foot and like this really soft kind of plant and then like a hard um post change from a straight pose into this really big bent pose on the leg so what I'm going to do is just jump into my curve here all right so I think just on this I'm just gonna add a pose in here add a keyframe excuse me um let's see I don't know why blender's doing this all right let's bring this up something like that maybe bring this keyframe up as well so we get a bigger Gap in spacing on that drop and then what I might do I feel like this is a little bit too fast so I might ease into this over one frame so it's you know up and then plants over so we get like one extra frame move the heel up and I think that might work a bit better and then we could add you know like a little bit of Bend to this toe too and then I'm going to do the same on this side so coming forward through here take a look at the Z location curve drop a keyframe and then kind of move it up just so we get a bigger jump in spacing there so it doesn't slow down as it gets closer to the ground same on this side I'll probably keep the heel up a little bit and then plant grab this toe control like a little bit of Bend in that toe and then I can also do maybe like a little bit of toe Bend coming through here as well kind of loosen up the foot a bit on that and I'll do the same on so a little bit of Bend all the way through here all right nice let's go ahead and I think before I kind of end this Run Cycle here there's definitely a lot more we could do I mean hair and stuff haven't even hasn't been touched yet but before we kind of end it I'm just going to quickly do kind of a neck head pass and just get a little bit of motion in the head I don't want too much because um I still want her to feel you know running with purpose social want to keep her head you know looking forward so I don't want to have like a ton of just like overlap in the head and go really overboard with it and just you know start like adding a bunch of floppiness to it so even like this much rotation for it might be too much but I can take a look at that I'm going to delete this keyframe here so her head is rotating her neck is rotating down all the way up to frame six and it's back up here so maybe here I'll grab this delete these keyframes and I'll try a curve like this and see if it I think it might that might work it just loosens up the head just a little bit and it might be might be too much let's go back to frame zero what I actually want to do now is grab the head and add some rotation to this and I kind of just want to counter a little bit what the neck is doing so like here the head might actually be rotating back just a little bit and then forward make extend that rotation back all right I'm gonna go ahead and make sure I cycle this curve it already is so I don't need to worry about that um this actually grab this or to x value paste it here this one copy that paste it on frame 16. that'll be four actually think I want to let's see let me bring this up something like that I think that works a bit better copy this value paste it here now have something like that I think that kind of works so we're getting a bit of bobbing in the head but now what I actually want to do now that I've animated the head maybe I need to go back to the neck and try something where I basically might need to counter bit I think that might actually work better I might just have to dial back the amount of movement I added to the neck I think it feels better to have most of that balance kind of Just Happening isolated to just her head just to kind of loosen loosen that motion up just a little bit something like that and then real quickly like typically how I would approach you know animating hair like this I'd probably just go kind of frame by frame and kind of just feel it out and figure out what kind of works well look at this keyframe so real quickly I'll just rough in the movement for the hair it's probably not going to be perfect so go here start rotating this down so get something a bit like that definitely not the best but it adds like a little bit of looseness to this I want to make sure I cycle this see I thought I had selected both controls to do this but I guess I just selected the base that's strange just to see when do anything all right could be why what I might do is go ahead and select this base control I'm going to press Ctrl C on all those curves come in here and paste so now you can see both of those are moving um I'm getting a bit more bounce to this and then what I might do is grab just the keyframe the curves for this end kind of tuft of hair and grab my all my keyframes and then shift it over one frame to see if I can get like a little bit of offset between both of these so again it just adds like a bit of looseness to it and then I probably would want to go in here and add like a little bit of side to side to this as well I'll kind of just leave it there for now we can't select both sides not working properly oh well and then just same for like the the hair on the side as well just doing something similar just like frame by Framing kind of working through this um figuring out you know what would work well as far as like the the back and forth on the here here same for the the front we could probably add I think they're just one one control here probably similar to the back like have this kind of up down I delete this keyframe this keyframe just to kind of simplify that that movement up bring it down delete that so we get something kind of like that but yeah I think that's actually gonna probably wrap it up for this for this tutorial there's definitely more we can do but this is usually how I approach tackling a Run Cycle I try to start simple try to start with you know letting blender give me you know simple Blends between you know a mirrored pose so we started out just straight up mirroring the pose on frame zero to to frame ten so we got a you know perfect flip of that built a lot of the Run based off that and then went in and tried to refine it a bit further and add a little bit more unique detail by kind of tweaking the whole upper body having the arm kind of stay behind her as she runs keep the other arm forward but that is how I like to approach runs like this is I like to start with almost kind of like a sort of a vanilla basic cycle just a simple sort of mirrored cycle and rough that in get the legs working get the basic up and down the body working and then go in and further sort of refine things and you know add tweaks and changes and changes to it but yeah it's going to wrap it up for this tutorial hopefully you guys were able to learn a few things if you have any questions or comments please be sure to leave them below and if you have any suggestions for any future uh blender tutorials uh drop those in the comments as well so thanks for watching foreign [Music]

Channel: Mark Masters

Views: 14,770

Keywords: blender, blender tutorial, animation, blender 3d, blender guru, blender beginner tutorial, blender animation, blender beginner, blender tutorial for beginners, blender 2.9, run cycle, body mechanics, game animation, learn blender, blender course, blender animation course, blender character, blender 3.4 new features, blender 3.0, blender 2.90, how to use blender, learn blender in 24 hours, blender animation tutorial, 3d animation

Id: kQhq02clmWc

Length: 95min 39sec (5739 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 31 2023