Pose to Pose : Blender Animation Workflow for beginners

everyone in this family hates me everyone in this family hates me everyone in this family hates me hi everyone welcome to Alex on story my name is Alex this video is all about animation workflow specifically post to pose there are three main workflows in computer animation post to pose straight ahead and layered this is the first video in a three-part series with each video looking at one of the workflows first let's talk about what is workflow and why it is so important to your success workflow is the way in which you do a task the steps taken if you do not have a workflow you're lost you're guessing workflow provides structure the better your workflow paired with your skill the higher quality you can produce workflow is such a broad and vast topic that it is hardly talked about I've come to the understanding that workflow has layers you start broad at the top and work your way down to Greater detail at each layer you have a unique workflow with each workflow you should always be pointed towards quality meaning your workflow should always have a desired outcome if it doesn't you're pointed in different directions and will miss out on quality a simple workflow for me always starts at the top with the question how do I want the audience to feel happy sad excited once I had my answer I know what I'm aiming at so if I'm setting up a scene my staging Framing and composition are focused on achieving the desired feeling if I'm blocking my character the posing is created to support that desired feeling let's move on and talk about post to pose pose to pose is a method used to block out your scene specific to character animation it is the posing of a character from one idea to another with each new idea represented with a new pose the true strength of this method is its communicative power the better you are posing the better your quality the concept A post to pose was created in the early 1900s at Disney it was cemented as one of the 12 principles of animation by the nine old men in the early 1930s post to pose is over 100 years old and has withstood the test of time and the changing of mediums the one side effect of post to pose is the end result can turn out stiff meaning your animation can lose that spark of Life I'll provide solutions to this problem as we build scene together now before we jump to blender and the demonstration I want to tell you about this video and this Channel's first sponsor skillshare I can't think of a better company to partner with than skillshare they are driven to providing the best learning experience do you want to learn to model improve your lighting and rendering learn to script or learn a new skill using a new application let skillshare help I've used skillshare in the past to learn and improve my design and coding skills and have seen my work and understanding improve next I will be diving into social media storytelling making videos that connect really excited and looking to apply what I'm learning from Lily in my upcoming videos I want you to remember this self-improvement is incremental you must take the first step each step leads you to your goal let skillshare help you along your journey the first 1000 people to use my link in the description will get a one month free trial of skillshare here we are inside blender I'm using the Sprite character from the blender movie Sprite fright you can see the post pose workflow here the progression at least on the right we have the final product and on the left you can see the five poses that were created to build the performance I'm going to go over the post pose workflow a little more in detail and then we'll do the steps together so the first thing we do is come up with the idea the best way to do that is to listen to the audio by listening to the audio you're going to come up with acting choices you may or may not have storyboards to follow if you do a lot of the information is going to come from those boards after you've come up with your ideas you enter the blocking stage and the blocking stage is the most important part of any of your workflow it's the area you make the biggest decisions so you want to be most Broad and not commit to any one idea until you know it's working so the blocking stage is the area you're making the biggest decisions and the decisions you make in that blocking stage is going to be felt all the way down to your final finished animation so the blocking stage is to me the most important aspect in the blocking stage you want to hit your keep poses your key poses are the poses your character stays in the longest because your character is in that particular pose for a longer period of time it's an important piece of information so that's why it's considered a key pose those key poses are your storytelling poses some poses are more important than others you know which one's important like I said by what pose stays on screen the longest you want to come up with pose ideas and not commit to them quite yet what's important is that you know what poses are important by how long they're on screen but equally important is knowing that this pose relates to this pose relates to this pose in this pose because one pose says something but we're working with all the poses that say something broader about the shot in general so you need to spend time on all the poses so that you know they relate to each other when I was first starting out I would spend so much time hours on one pose only to find out that that pose that I spent a long time on no longer relates to the whole scene to the other let's say handful of poses and I would have to redo the pose I've spent a long time on instead of being rough at the beginning seeing that the whole shot is playing and then committing to the Quality once you know the ideas play I think that's a better approach in the blocking stage you're starting to play with timing to me timing and posing are the two most important principles of Animation the combination of these two principles have the biggest impact on your performance we can start to add appeal in our poses even when they're rough by how they're relating to each other so the shape and size of the pose in relation to the other poses around them it makes a big difference it's maybe small small big small medium small small big you want to vary up the shape and size of your poses so that the viewer is entertained so keep that in mind as you're blocking depending what studio you're working for or if you just want fresh eyes on your work the blocking stage is a great time to share with others because you haven't committed that much time so changing your ideas at this stage is the best time to do it next we move on to the second pass you know the idea is working now because you can see it visually your poses are working they're communicating together the timing is working you're happy with the blogging your second pass really is a cleanup of all your poses now you're going to spend time adding the detail strengthening the pose the silhouette Clarity of that pose the communicative power that's really what the second pass to me is is just strengthening what your blocking is and making everything more clear maybe tightening the timing Now we move on to the third pass the third pass really is about adding breakdown keys and settles so we have our key poses they look good and the breakdown keys are the keys that are between the two key poses an idea and an idea and what's happening between those ideas is your breakdown key typically the breakdown key does two things one it helps to identify the arc because when you're going from one post to another it's a straight line so the breakdown key happens somewhere in the middle and all it really does is Define The Arc how we get into that next pose the second thing the breakdown key does is affect the timing of that body part if I move let's say the center of gravity that main control the Cog if I move it in space Not only am I affecting the arc the path that it's taken but also the timing so I'll demonstrate that as well so keep that in mind the breakdown key the biggest thing you're influencing is the arc secondary is the timing then we go into the saddle typically when we do a post to pose workflow we go from one idea to another one post to another and then we have a hold that hold is important because it gives the audience time to register your idea but it also allows time so when we add the saddle we get into that movement so it's not just a hold flat no movement but it's a moving hold that's important so that's what the settle is is basically a little bit of life so the character doesn't isn't stiff that's the that's the settle depending on the quality required and the animation style the third pass will also start to blend between those ideas so we have the post pose we have the breakdown and the saddle that's really the formula post pose breakdown settle and that's just a repeat pose pose breakdown settle now we talked about the settle it helps to not make things so stiff but another way to then add another layer on top of that is blending between those so I'll demonstrate that and that becomes a little bit more of an advanced um part of the workflow so if you get to the pose pose break down settle I think that's a fantastic place to get to then blending between all those things is that extra quality and at that point things do start to get a little more complicated and the curves do become a little Messier so be aware of that after that we enter the cleanup phase where we add detail and clean up any areas that stand out let's set up the scene together now and start blocking we're going to start with a new scene what I like to do when you've downloaded your character is drag and drop that downloaded file into your blender scene so just drag and drop and open the benefit of doing this is that all the scripts are loaded when you do it this way so it makes it easier in this case as well there's a whole bunch of poses that come with the file that's coming over here to the animation tab and our character is Tiny so I'm just going to select period numpad and we see them over here what I like to do is have the right panel be my camera window and that's where I like to view everything and keep it as clean as possible and then in the left window that's where I like to do my work so I'm just going to switch things around let's actually go control Tab and let's create that camera a shift a and we're going to come in over here camera and Camera perfect and let's also do a ground plane shift a mesh plane and we'll scale that down a little bit perfect if we hit zero on a numpad we go into the camera and I'm just going to frame in a little bit let's come in over here to our output properties and this particular file seems to have the aspect ratio wrong so just be mindful of that another option I like to do with the camera is the this area outside the frame I like to darken that so we need to select our camera you can just come in over here select the camera and let's go over to the camera properties and under viewport display this passport out I like to go 0.99 it darkens everything allows me to focus on my view on my frame but also if I have elements of the set that go beyond the frame I can see parts of those lines and and it helps me inform if I want to see a little more or a little less of the set what we also want to do is frame within the camera window so let's go in and go to view and this camera to view is such a great button you just click it hit n again and now I can frame freely from the camera very powerful you can select the rig or the character or any part of the character and start framing so we're just going to keep this very rough basically we'll recreate what we've what I've already done um in the animation something like this once you have your framing you can hit n and just click this camera to view again and now if I accidentally bump the camera I don't ruin the framing and you can hit zero on your numpad always come back into that camera view okay so we want to clean this up you just click these two buttons right there gets rid of everything and it allows you to look at your your poses and your performance so I love that let's come in over here and now we need those controls back I just click these two buttons it just shows me everything and you saw there I had to update my camera for the controls to show so that's the first time I've seen that but you have some other options in here and what we're actually going to do is turn on this text info click that what's important about that is when you play your animation you can see the frames per second next what I like to do is go control tab in the dope sheet and just bring up a graph editor Hit N I don't need that extra info and we want to bring up our timeline as well and then this extra bit of window I don't use it so I just pull that down increase your screen real estate the last thing we need to get going is the audio here's how I like to set up uh the scene with the audio and if there is a way to bring the audio like there is in Maya to display the wavelength information right in the timeline I think that would be easier but here's how I like to do it I like to come on over here right click let's do a horizontal split and just bring this down somewhere in here then I can change this to the video sequencer and I'm going to add my audio in here you can see that I'm going in and out of Windows pretty quickly I like to do that and that's a hotkey that um that I just did and I demonstrate that in my intro to animation so let's bring in our audio after you download that audio you just drag and drop it and you can see it's right there perfect so I like to bring it to Channel One and you can see when you're scrubbing it you get these values on the two corners on the left and the right and I just drag it right until I get to frame one and another thing it tells you how long the audio is 47 frames one other thing I want to do is hit n and go display waveform awesome so it's down there I'm also going to drag this over and now what I'm going to do is just frame within this window in the way here a little bit but just drag this and make this waveform as big as I can that's all I'm interested in here there it is so that's that's what we're doing or that's what I'm doing and um and then you can see the scrubbing and so what we want to do now is as we're scrubbing it's also valuable to hear the audio as you're scrubbing last thing we want to do for the audio is hear the audio while we're scrubbing so coming over here to playback and go scrubbing so that's great so let's make the end of this shot 47 frames and now we have our scene ready to start blocking we have our length we have the audio we have the character and everything is set just the way I like it let's go into post mode select part of the Ring hit control Tab and that takes you into pose mode I'm going to select everything and I see some keys here I'm not sure what they are but I'm just going to select everything select everything by hitting a in your timeline and x and delete keys I don't know what those are don't need them so even before starting to think about the poses and my performance my acting I like to put the character in a neutral pose instead of this T pose right now the rig is in ik mode for the hands and I typically work in FK for the hands let's go n and under the cloud rig we're going to come to layers and one important thing for riggers out there if any rigors are listening is I think in the visibility of the rig you can add more functionality more options right now there's only an on and off for ik and FK but it'd be great to have an on and off ik for hands and feet having more options I think is valuable so I need my FK and I need my ik so those are going to be turned on the face the only thing I need for the face and the blocking is my I do like to block the eye line as well here and that's attached to the face so that's why I keep the face rig options on even though I don't need any face controls at this point I do need the fingers so that's great and that's the only options I need when I'm blocking the scene let's come in over to settings and under fkik switch that's where we can decide what's what so for the hands I like to be an FK and we can test it right now it's this thread control and you can see it does nothing and I can leave it with some value on it and then just scrub and you can see the hand moving to the FK control so I'm going to do both the left and the right now my rig is set up the way I like to work so know that those options are here with this character under the cloud rig I'm going to hit a just alt R resets the rotation all G resets the translation back to zero so let's set up the pose just so we're not in a t-pose that t pose is typically what a rig comes in and then we'll start we'll start our posing together right here in the top corner you have this x mirror on and I like using that only at the beginning so let's select the upper arm here and just rotate it down we're going to grab that shoulder control and down a little bit also and all I'm doing is trying to build a bit of a neutral pose and then start thinking about the performance with the fingers as well we'll do a simple little neutral hand pose one thing as well is you can see how dense the controls are here here's one of the options you can also turn on for this so here's the the character ring and you can come in over here to this data properties and under viewport display you can turn off in front and I like to do that so now what I like to do is if I do need to see through my model I can always do alt Zed and I still get the same option but when I don't want to see it alt said just hides that so let's select the fingers on one side just like this group select and then by hitting control you can minus selection so just those six fingers in this case and let's curl them up you can also see that I am also using my translate and rotate tool maybe a little differently than some others and how I like to do is by hitting spacebar and you can see you get this option here GRS so what I do is spacebar G spacebar R spacebar s and it's just a quick motion and I like using the GUI to actually rotate and translate so we're just going to curl the fingers a little bit giving them a little bit more of a natural pose cool so here's my default menu pose and so let's turn off the xmir and now let's start to think about the first pose we want to do your first pose usually is the strongest pose in your performance so as you're thinking of ideas and you can stand up and act your performance out and you just start hitting some ideas some poses and the pose that you're in the longest typically you'll start there that might be at the beginning of the shot middle shot or at the end in this case it's at the end everyone in this family hates me and it you know hates me it's that exclamation everyone in this family hates me and he kind of stands his ground on that last word so to me that's where I'm going to start the posing and then I'll work back and how do I get into that pose sometimes that's a nice way to start I have how I end the shot and then you can work backwards and sometimes that's easier sometimes the beginning is the place where you're starting so it depends where where with the performance of the audio is and what pose you're going to stay in longest let's go ahead and do that and as you saw in the finished shot it's a pose that's down like this and I thought that was nice nice and simple and even fitting to a character that's maybe you know early teens I'm not too concerned when I'm starting to pose yes the pose is more here where the audio is but I can do the pose anywhere and adjust the timing after not a big deal but let's go ahead and just select a select everything hit a and then we're going to insert a key by hitting I and so when I'd hit I you can see that I hit I and it Keys the location rotation and the scale I don't need the scale information right now so I'm going to undo I'm going to go out of the pose mode into object mode and coming over here and go object animation change key set and all we need is location rotation a selected so now let's say I and let's check it so now it's just location and rotation so know that that's an option and you can decide when you hit I what it keys so let's start posing I'm gonna say that my character he's coming forward a little bit so that's what I'm thinking about and that's what I'm going to try to achieve here and this control right here that moves pretty much your whole rig minus your feet that's called the center of gravity your Cog center of gravity because it influences the largest number of controls to me it's the most important control and just like with your your workflow you want to start Broad this is how we start broad by using the Cog so that's an important control here and to me he came forward into that pose so I'm just going to pull that cog4 that Cog control and rotate him forward a little bit just like that and maybe even a little higher next I'll just start working with the feet a little bit and just giving them a little bit of offset so they're not the same they don't look the same I think that's important and already you can start to add appeal in your poses just by doing that nothing is the same on both sides just offsetting them a little bit the weights a little bit more on the left foot so I'm just going to move that hip just a little and what I'm doing is just adding or just trying to think about the idea mainly I'm adding a little bit of detail but not much I'm trying to keep it rough that just is up and he's forceful everyone in the family hates me so that's what I'm trying to achieve here just by pulling them forward a little bit and rotating his chest up he's mad on this pose as well I'm going to get the fingers in a fist and really just clench them nice and simple so this is the most important pose simply because we're in this pose the longest so I'm going to spend maybe two three minutes just as I'm roughly blocking this idea out so there's my fist pose doesn't even have to be of quality yet because I know the next pass I will do that just going to key everything make sure everything's updated and those wrists are going to come back a little bit just like this again not too worried about the quality just yet more the idea is it communicating and currently we're getting there so fist is like this and the arms could be a little more straight a little more forceful down shoulders at this point would come down nice yes there's crashing I'm not too worried about it I'm not going to go crazy with the crashing but again that's always that's all going to be fixed as we clean up the scene and I think he's talking to someone older than him and so that person whoever he's talking to is also taller than him and he's looking up and no one in this family likes me awesome so here's our first pose a very rough first pose and let's do the other poses to see how we can get into this idea and then how all those poses are communicating together if we're happy then we know we're on the right path we have that pose already I know I want to maybe hit it around frame 33 just before the audio really spikes I want to be in that pose so I'm just gonna already move it roughly where it needs to be I'm going to go to the beginning actually now and I'm not sure exactly what's in the middle of the poses that's the benefit of pose to pose is we want to go as Extreme as possible and start to figure it out uh in in um just how the poses relate to each other we have the performance because I can act it out so I have an idea of what's in the middle but I'm going to go back to the beginning now and work on that pose that's the biggest extreme and furthest away from the last pose so that's what I'm going to do now with everything selected awesome so let's go ahead and do that so this is the first pose and because of the way the audio is I'm into the performance right away and I'm not sticking in this first pose that long at all so in that regard it's not that important but it is how we're starting the shot so he's come forward his left foot is forward and so let's pull that CLG back right now I'm going to do alt R alt G and maybe even a little further back something like this and I'm going to force that character to to come forward I'm going to reset the hips perfect and also reset the chest control awesome on bigger post changes I do like to reset some of the control values back to default as I feel it's easier for me to think about um just the changing of the pose so sometimes I do sometimes I don't same thing as before I'm just going to give a little bit of an offset in the foot control just drag that foot back perfect this back make sure the weight of his body is under his feet good nice and maybe he is a little more legs together and then by the end he spreads out into a bit a bit more of a power pose okay so now let's think of the pose that he could strike at the beginning at the end his hands are straight and he's going to be more vertical maybe at the beginning everything's a little more relaxed and then he builds that intensity okay so let's reset some other controls here I'm going to grab my shoulders reset them and I'm thinking that a nice just pose is with his one arm on his hip here I'm just going to bend his elbow and just force that pose into that idea see what it looks like and then you can make adjustments from there again is the idea working I'm not too worried about the detail or the quality yet but is the idea working cool so this hand is just going to be a little more relaxed by his side and that's the whole idea there and we're getting a little bit of contrast in the pose already awesome so there's our pose now we've built two ideas and you can hit your up and down arrows and you can jump between those poses and already just doing this I feel the contrast the amount of distances moving forward can be larger than it is currently and so that's the benefit of pose to pose here's an idea I like the pose nice and simple and then I'm looking at the last pose and the appeal really isn't there currently I'm not worried about that but really what I'm seeing is the distance between it is not large enough so that's valuable information I'm going to take that and just adjust grab that feet both feet controls grab the Cog center of gravity and coming over here now I'm going to change from local to Global so they're all moving down the same axis and I'm just going to pull them forward just like that insert a key and up and down and that's already better he's physically coming forward more and it feels better so let's do some of the other poses needed to build the performance and then we'll see what that looks like and after that if we're happy we'll move on to the second pass and clean up those poses okay so I like the first pose I like the idea and now let's just play the animation and hear the audio hates me everyone in this family hates me everyone in this family hates me and so he's building up everyone in this family hates me until he gets into that last straight post so I know this last pose is going to be elongated more maybe a little closer to the camera and then building up into that is this just this kind of shrugging and then he's gonna come down powerful that's what I'm building to so then I can get to that last pose and then the contrast of him being at the highest point and then down and back up I think that's going to look good awesome so we're here everyone and you can see the audio starts right away so right away we're moving into some action everyone so already everyone so I'm gonna just kind of pick frame seven and he says everyone and to me the hands come up a little bit everyone in this family and then in this family the hands go even higher hates me so that's the pose I'm gonna do at frame seven I'm already starting to think about timing um awesome so let's do that you can see also I want to point out you can see also I want to point out that I started with this last pose or pardon me the first pose but it's the last pose in the performance and then I went over here back to the beginning and what I did I reset some of the values now as I go forward I won't reset those values because the character moving through space is now more important to me okay so let's go to frame seven so everyone in this family hates me typically what I like to do start with the feet here select that key control C control V that just makes sure the feet are planted where it is originally that's important the Cog so everyone in this family hates me let's take a look at that to me he's going to come forward a little bit and maybe a little bit more over this foot and that's simple that's the pose he's also going to start taking a step everyone in this family hates me I'm going to select this Ctrl C TRL V and maybe bring it back a little bit and the foot can come up the roll everyone he's just starting to take that step he hasn't landed yet but everyone in this family hates me the hands to me are going to start to come forward and he's just gonna gesture forward a little bit you can see here here's a good example within the pose you can decide as the pose is happening you can decide uh the amount of dragon the direction things are coming from and build it into the pose so here you know the hand from is coming from the the waist and it's going to come forward I can decide if I want that wrist to be this way or this way and by by positioning the wrist down I'm adding drag into it and then I can come up so I'm building drag into the pose cool so I'm just adding delay into the pose by simply posing it that way this is a key pose this is a key pose because I'm going to spend a little bit of time within my performance in this pose on screen that's why it is a key pose so I'm just crafting the idea a little bit so everyone in this family hates me we'll leave it like that perfect select all insert a key awesome and so now here we have three poses we're still in the blocking stage but now we're going to do our first hold and what a hold is it allows time for the viewer to read your performance so here we have three poses and if I play it it doesn't look very impressive looks pretty silly but now we're going to start to like I said hold that pose this pose for a little bit of time I'm going to select this key control C and maybe go to frame 13 Ctrl V now that's a hold so we have one idea frame one we have another idea frame seven from frame seven to frame 13 is a hole that hold that idea is being held there Frozen so you can see it and then we're on to another idea those holes are very important okay everyone and now we go into the next idea so everyone in this family and now we're we're building the pose more intense we're curling up getting them higher just so it has a bigger contrast into that last pose so everyone in and again you can kind of see it he starts to speak over here so that's roughly where I'm going to put my next pose so frame 21 is a good place right now to hit that key or to hit that pose so with everything selected a I to insert a key now let's start working on this pose here's what I'm going to do I'm going to select the foot because when when a character is starting to move just thinking about what the foot is and where it is and how it's planted starts to tell you where the Cog needs to be that center of gravity if that foot is planted here and I'm coming from over there well the the weight of my body needs to be over one foot as I'm going to a new pose where are the feet then I know where the CLG is and then the rest of the body follows so this foot was over here and it's taking a step into this last pose so that's how I know where I'm going I'm going to select this key control C and then just Ctrl V that's where the foot needs to be I'm just going to reset the value of the hips just so it's not bothering me and now the Cog needs to be more over this foot bam I just pull them forward and pull them more to the more over his screen right leg his left leg just pull him over and I'm also going to rotate him over so now the weight of his body is over that foot just like that something like that and maybe I start pulling them higher because I know this is the largest pose and then I'm going to come down okay and let's start working on the hands as well this has this is a fun pose because you can I think add in this particular performance at some rage to his uh personality by building it in the pose get those arms up he's had enough of whoever he's talking to not taking them seriously or disrespecting him so I'm going to build that in the pose and oftentimes I would just build a story in my mind so then I can get closer or add what I think the feeling of the shot is and my own context essentially and and that's all I'm trying to do is what looks better does it look better like this or up and down and just seeing what the pose can be let's get that foot up he's taking a step and just like that he's had enough that foot comes up same thing with the foot I can pose it up but I know that when I come down the foot's going to come down so I'm going to add a little bit of delay a little drag in that foot and then it's going to really snap over maybe two three frames and um and I think that's going to look better so I'm going to add a little bit of delay just by rotating that foot down just like that and this camera is not fully set but already let's say it is I'm gonna already start to think even at the blocking stage a little bit about the silhouette so instead of these lines intersecting there I'm going to pull that foot a little bit more and just strengthen the pose even at this stage okay I feel like that Cog can be much more aggressive up and get a mad and angry and just bigger and taller forward and now I'm hyper extending that leg and you can see I'm just moving all over um to different body parts that that um that what I think is more important so I'm going from one part of the body to another just as I feel what's more important in this pose awesome let's add a little bit of anger into his fingers yeah I know this idea can be much more strengthened but let's keep moving on cool so there's our pose for now a select all insert a key same thing as we did with this pose there's a hold I want to see that told that this pose is important so Ctrl C TRL V so here's the pose we have we have one pose two posts which is a hold so two pose three pose which is another hold and then four poses let's just play what we have cool so slowly we're getting to the idea this pose I can already see is not very strong so that needs to be cleaned up that's okay and then and then I know when we come in from one extreme to another the body typically uh overshoots so overshoot is when you're going from one post to another and that physical movement in order to stop on your mark you you overshoot you go past your pose and then you come back into that pose that's called an overshoot so [Music] um he's coming down and I'll show you how I build in that little overshoot pose and sometimes not as important of an idea but I do like to sometimes block that in so here we go with this blast pose I'll just insert another key and now come back to this original one and here's how easy an overshoot poses bam awesome so let's see what we have cool so the poses are relating to each other and the blocking pass I think is is looking good let's do some cleanup let's do some refining of some poses and then we'll start to add the breakdown Keys the Saddles and then I'll show you some Advanced um how we blend between them or at least how I blend between um those parts of the animations awesome let's refine the last pose together let's see what we can do to clean up the pose and make it a little stronger so one thing you can do and this is the first thing I do is I select all instead of key make sure everything's keyed and then I go one frame over either you Ctrl C Ctrl V and now you have a duplicate of that frame and what we're going to do is work on improving the pose and then we're going to flip back and forth did I improve the idea did I improve the clarity if it's a yes then I replaced the original pose if it's a no that's okay at least I tried so that's the first thing I do when I now refine the pose so I think for this one what I'm looking at is maybe the shoulders can be less less kind of boxy maybe even a little more stretched everything can be a little taller that's what I'm looking at to do to upgrade the pose so let's do that together I'm going to start with the Cog the center of gravity and I think it can still be a little bit cleaner a little taller awesome and then that shoulder to me stands out just going to rotate that down a little bit and into the body a bit more trying to not draw attention to that part of the body for me and maybe even don't be afraid to break the rig essentially you can elongate parts of the body as well don't be afraid to do stuff like that I'm going to select a eye to insert and then we can see if the pose is better so now I can flip back and forth between the pose update just by hitting the left and right arrow keys and the pose is stronger it's wider a little it's more aggressive and he's up straighter so not a big change but enough that the pose now is more clear the the the communication of that stance I've had enough is more clear so um it's a good pose change so with everything selected I'm gonna just insert a key one more time and now I'm going to control C and Ctrl V and that pose has now been updated it's been refined and it's now communicating better it's stronger okay one other thing I like to do is is once I've done this maybe once or twice we find the pose and I'll do it for all poses just the same method compare and then if it's better replace another option that I like to do as well is with that key the same key I'll just space it out a little bit I'm going to select both of them and hit V and go to auto and what that does is it overshoots so if we look at the graph here it's the information is coming from this key right there it's moving into this key and as it's moving it's overshooting and coming back into that pose and I use the computer the overshoot um to help in the pose so you can see the pose now gets pushed and elongated so I've crafted the idea and now I'm allowing the computer to now further push that idea and it does it in a nice way so even something like this he's taller that's what I wanted so he's coming from there and I can pick something even frame 42 is nice so I like that I'm going to with everything selected I to insert a key and now same thing as before Ctrl C and I'm going to replace that pose Ctrl V and now I've strengthened that pose one more time and like I said that's the step I'll do for all poses and that's my cleanup pass that's my second pass where in my in my blocking I've identified the poses the key poses the timing I know it's all working second pass is now I'm refining and making the performance that much stronger so let's go ahead and play what we have awesome cool so let's move on let's move on now to our third pass where we add the breakdowns between the key poses the breakdowns to define the ark and play with the timing a little bit and then the settle so the settle is this portion in here that hold that we built in to allow the audience time to read that idea that pose that hold once we do the breakdown keys we're going to take part of that hold and just make it a moving hold we're going to settle into that idea and that allows the performance to be less stiff so the settles is one way that we remove stiffness from your performance let's go ahead and start right at the beginning with the breakdowns one other thing if you're looking at the keys and how I've spaced them you can hopefully maybe pick up a pattern when I set up my key poses I like to build all my poses my key poses on odd frames so you can see I'm on frame one then frame seven frame 13 is the hold that whole thing then the next idea the next pose is frame 21 odd number frame 29 frame 33 frame 37. and then the spacing between all those keys are even so my I build my poses on odd frames and then the spacing oops and then the spacing between um those poses are even and I've been doing this a long time and so that's part of my workflow so when I look at a graph editor it's very easy for me to understand what I'm looking at because I always do the same thing and I started this right at the beginning maybe a year into my career and I was before I was laying Keys wherever it didn't matter I just I'll lay it over here and over here my spacing was never even or I shouldn't say never even it was all over the place sometimes it was even sometimes it was not even and and so there was no structure to my workflow in terms of laying the keys and then doing a little bit of research into the old traditional animators you can see their timing it's written at the top of their paper and I noticed that their timing for the most part their key poses were on odd frames and their spacing typically was even and so they figured out a structure that worked for them and I just copied them and um and I think it works well I think regardless of how you lay your keys the spacing between the keys I think is valuable to have the spacing be even because now I can go between those two keys and know I'm in the middle I think that's useful so just be aware of of of the pattern there okay let's talk a little bit about the breakdown now within the post pose workflow so the breakdown Keys again the breakdown key defines the Arc of the movement and so the breakdown key for me on on the Cog is going to be in the middle so I'm going to go into the middle of these two poses and all I'm going to do is pull that CLG down Boop not much just like that and then I'm going to favor the weight over this left pardon me over his right leg so it frees up some of the weight for that one foot to move as easy as that okay and maybe I'm going to delay the rotation that way just a little bit you can see how subtle this breakdown is it's not a big breakdown cool so you can see the Cog is just going down a little bit and we're building an arc between that pose [Music] awesome let's move on to the foot breakdown for the foot I keep it very simple I'm going to select the foot controls and everything related to that foot and then the the heel and all I'm going to do is copy this pose right there at the beginning Ctrl C and I want that foot planted for a little longer Ctrl V now that foot's planted and then it's going to move and then in my cleanup pass I'll add the detail of how does the the foot and the toes maybe add more drag there that's that's more of a detailed thing so I'm not going to build that in quite yet let's add a little bit of a breakdown on the hands so same thing I'm going to go right in the middle of of those two poses right in the middle frame four and I'm gonna delay some of the movement perfect I'm going to delay the hand a little bit and so the breakdown now here in the hands I'm just delaying parts of the motion and when I'm doing that and when I'm delaying the arm in this example when I'm getting into the pose by delaying it back I'm adding more movement to that part of the body so when I do my saddle the overall movement of the whole body there's going to be more movement in this part of the the body because I've now delayed the pose and so it's going to travel more within that shorter amount of time so there's going to be more speed there and typically wherever there's speed your eye gets attracted to that part of the body so I'm saying this hands important by delaying the pose and then adding more speed more movement your eye your body pardon me your eyes are going to be attracted to that part of the body more so that's how we can also then direct the viewer's eyes to where you want so keep that in mind as well let's add a little bit of breakdown on the other arm on the other arm and it's going to be very subtle much more subtle than the other one so the wrist is going to be delayed and then the fingers can be delayed a little bit as well just basically adding a little bit of drag as the hand moves forward the fingers can delay and I'll go one frame over and by going closer to the end of the pose and then affecting in this case the head again I'm going to add more movement to the end of the action drawing your eye to that part of the body so that's the idea of when you do your breakdown Keys key key breakdown Keys is somewhere in the middle doesn't have to be always in the middle but the closer you get to the end of the action and affect the breakdown affect the pose the more movement you're going to add the more your eye is going to be drawn to that part of the body so usually it's the face you want to be drawn to and sometimes the hands so that's why we delay those a little more or one of the reasons we do that cool let's grab the head and just down a little bit not much and maybe a little translate down that's it cool so let's select everything a and you can see what's happening here let's zoom in here a little bit it's a bit messy in the graph editor it's a little hard to see but we can see in the in the timeline so we have pose and pose what we built before and then we have these three keys here that those three keys are our breakdown keys on certain parts of the body the breakdown Keys Define the arc between the movement and we've also delayed parts of the body so now we've added more speed to parts of the body so those are the two things the breakdown keys do okay so I'm happy with that and it's a very quick move so that's what kind of makes it a little more difficult here as we build this breakdown together I think it'll be a little more clear but let's do the settle together so a select all and I can see my keys here and so now the saddle is just a way to get into that pose and then there's the hold and that hold is very stiff so the settle is going to make things softer while still retaining a lot of the feeling of that pose so here's how that looks frame 7 to frame 13 as a hold and I'm going to come in at let's say frame five everything is selected I'm going to insert a key and then I'm going to come in over here and move this Frame over maybe to frame 11 for now I'm going to go V and automatic cool and so if we zoom into the graph editor you can see now it's just settling easing into that pose okay so let's play you can see how soft that is now Okay so we've already loosened up the animation and we're still retaining the ID of that pose while moving into it in TV animation this is where you'd get to pose pose breakdown settle pose pose breakdown settle pose pose breakdown settle and you can do some pretty cool looking things and even in some feature films let's say the style of Lego or even you know the latest Spider-Man where it is more pose based this is that style and then what differentiates the Styles is the pose the aggression of the pose and then the timing is it four frames of two in or is it 12 frames between and how sharp is that and then your breakdowns really help influence the style as well okay let's move on frame 13 to frame 21 it's a bigger pose change so let's see how I handle that okay so now the foot's Landing so that's where I start with I'm going to select the foot and I'm going to come over here Ctrl C and I know the foot has to land and I want it to land actually quite soon so I'm just going to do the very next frame control V oh and so that's what's happening is on this pose the heel goes up not a big deal I'm going to select the heel control and reset it perfect select everything and now Ctrl C and I don't want the heel to go up right away and Ctrl V just dictating how long that heel stays on before it goes up cool so that foot's now planted and now I know the timing of the foot a little better I then move on to the Cog the center of gravity and so I'm just going to scrub the the weight I'm looking at this red portion of the body the Cog that center of gravity it's over here and now moving over I've come up I'm stepping and now it really goes up but before it does the character steps down so my breakdown is going to be somewhere around here maybe frame 16 maybe frame 17. I'll go 17 right in the middle and I'm just going to pull that Cog down so he takes the weight of the step I'm going to push him a little more over that leg and I'm going to rotate him into that pose a bit more cool so there's my breakdown key for the Cog he goes down before he goes up cool and I'm going to push that a little more perfect and that's it next let's take a look at this one that foot goes up right away it doesn't need to this easiest thing to do is just select those foot controls and just tell it to stay there longer Ctrl C and maybe control V on 15. maybe even longer awesome and then I can I can work on how that foot comes up and let's go maybe two frames over and already I'll build in now the breakdown for the foot the breakdown for the foot to me all it is is well I want the toes to come off the ground last so all I've done there is rotate the toes and then if you want to get a bit fancy in your posing you can add a little bit of weight on the toes if you wanted to get even more fancy then you can spread the toes a little bit like you're taking more weight there in this toe spread out that's something you can do in your cleanup pass but even this is the idea working let's see so the foot's on the ground and then it does come up nicely there's one framework crashes we just fix that but not a big deal but the drag is looking good and then as the toes come up I'm going to select that toe reset the value and again I want that toe dragging and so all I do is is is make the body get into that pose cool so let's take a look at the breakdown of the chest The Head and the two arms for this action so I'm going to come over here to my chest control and the middle is frame 17. is it one two three four yes one two three four to my chest and the middle is frame 17 and all I'm going to do is maybe delay that chest a little bit he was coming from over here to lay it this way a bit too awesome because he's then curling into this position and you could even have a breakdown you could have two breakdowns um sometimes I do it on the head and sometimes I do it on the arms if I want the arc a certain way I'll do a breakdown closer to the beginning of the pose change and then towards the second pose and now you're describing the Arc of that part of the body more the chest in this case doesn't need to but if I wanted to let's say I wanted to compress you know that see oh that chest here and I just wanted to for whatever reason I could then add a breakdown here and then there's more contrast but just know that you can have multiple key breakdowns keyframe breakdowns cool I'll keep it simple on the chest next I'll go to the Head the end pose is the character kind of scrunched up a little bit and the head looking down and so he's coming from over here he's stepping down the middle is frame 17. I'm going to go to frame 18. one frame over I'm going to delay the head this way a little bit and back a little bit so now his chin is delayed and maybe I'll also pull that head up just like that and now what I'm doing is adding drag into that bond that part of the body and then he's gonna um go into that last pose and so by doing the drag and and pushing the breakdown key one frame closer to that last pose I'm adding more movement on that part of the head and so your eyes drawn to that part of the body cool and let's do breakdowns on the hands and then this this breakdown for this gesture is done and so let's just scrub I like scrubbing I start from the pose and then I'm getting into this idea and what I'll do is just delay the shoulders not much there we go cool I'll really start to add more drag as I get further out in the limbs cool and now let's really bend that wrist so here we're kind of up and now we're turned over in this next pose so over here I might even go one frame over because to me that's important adding more movement on the wrist I'm going to just drag it down build in a drag into my breakdown key just like that and then it's going to come up and you can see the wrist then kind of gets back into that pose and I like the way that looks so I'm just gonna push it even more really drag that wrist so then it has somewhere to come up into cool so let's go ahead and play what we have so far and then we'll do the subtle awesome I think it's looking really good I'm going to push the Cog a little more for the breakdown key and all that is is down that's basically it okay let's select everything and now we can see the breakdown keys are these ones right here these highlighted ones and normally I wouldn't have a breakdown key so close one frame from the original pose but what these two frames are is the foot control Just Landing so that's included in the breakdown keys but really what it is is pose frame 13 and frame 21. everything in here is the breakdown Keys let's go ahead and do the saddle like we did at the beginning and so we're getting into this pose and you could have the saddle be one frame two frames five frames you decide how soft that saddle is going to be and the softer it is the more away from that original Last pose you get so if you want it soft you go four frames typically I only go one or two frames but let's say let's see let's go frame 19 in this case let's give that a try I have everything selected I'm going to insert a key and then let's move this key over G and maybe we go to frame either 25 or 27 perfect let's go V and Auto clamped there you go so that's feeling pretty good and this is the settle frame 19. to frame 27. you can see how soft that is and that's how you can loosen up your performance awesome let's do the breakdown on this key I think this is a very interesting breakdown so let's do that together as well it's only four frames the distance before it was eight frames between the two poses there was eight frames between those now there's only four so the timing is much more aggressive and then the contrast between the two poses also are pretty aggressive and we're going to do some fun stuff I think in the breakdown so let's take a look let's start from frame 29 in the original pose and we come down perfect so let's start with that COG perfect in this case I'm going to even push my performance more in my breakdown to even go higher and then it's more aggressive coming down so this is one of the fun Parts here instead of maybe making a breakdown whatever it's going to be I'm going to delay it up high and I'm just going to go one frame really favor this uh first pose I'm just going to pull that be aggressive about it make it fun perfect so you can see he goes up and then he's going to come back down cool let's now add the breakdown key for this foot so I'm going to really delay that foot and now really turn it over cool and this knee can come in a little bit awesome nice and you can see even from this pose I could have and I will when I do my detail I will add the delay more like this so then the contrast is even snappier but for now that's what the pose is cool let's delay um the the toes even more select these deselect everything perfect perfect awesome so the toes are really now delayed and that's the in in that direction cool let's go to the Head actually let's go to the co or pardon me the chest the chest is going to start to go up I'm adding drag to that uh part of the body perfect boom he's opening up maybe it's a little much but that's okay we can always tone it down let's go to the Head the head I'm going to come one frame to the from the end pull that up delay that head tilt that just like that something like that again if we don't like it we can undo delete it and you can see even just there the drag we're building in the head I think that's going to look good so um while I'm building the poses it's like yes the contrast is good and even with experience you know okay in this part of the um from the post pose in this part of the breakdown I have an idea what the breakdown what the arc is going to look like and I know I'm going to exaggerate past the point of that pose that I built so this is one example of that and this is how we can add extra power to your performance uh let's work on the hands quickly together because it's a cool breakdown this is a breakdown that does require multiple Keys here so let's just go two frames over and and I want that pose in the hands just to come close to the body come up and then and then basically straight down instead of arcing off to the side so let's do that I'm still going to bend the elbow awesome I want this shoulder really to go up I mean it's up there so you can see I'm crashing into the head from this angle and because of the speed of the shot you just don't notice it but it does sell um more the intensity so that's what I'm after cool and what I want is those hands to really oops to be turned over and a high cool I think that's looking good and we'll see what the wrists look like after those hands are coming up high and he's mad and now I'm going to do the breakdown over one frame between these two keys and you can see how the hands open up and then come down all I'm going to do is get the hands close to the chest foreign you can see the the height of the hands aren't the same bam and he comes down awesome so that's the breakdown awesome there is no settle in this one because well we're going into this pose and this pose is the overshoot where we're pushing past the original pose and then we're coming up into our last final pose awesome so let's let's work on this a little bit and um and so here's what I'm going to do as well I'm going to select this last pose and go V and just make a vector just so it hits harder it really just snaps into the BAM and I can see the feet this foot here the screen left foot is slipping so I don't want any slipping so I'm just going to select the foot Ctrl C go to that pose Ctrl V perfect so once it's on the ground it's on the ground there's no sliding awesome so I'm going to hit a select all this is now V for vector so it's sharp and then we're coming up into this pose and I'll just do auto clamp make sure it is it is and I'll do a breakdown here as well so we're going to hit sharp hit hard and then it comes we're going to hit hard we're going to hit hard and sharp into that overshoot pose and then we're coming up but even between those I can add a little bit of an arc so let's do the breakdown here as well and I'm going to start with the Cog and all I'm going to do is just delay that pose down and that's it that's subtle so we've hit into this pose and we're just staying there longer before we come up cool I'm gonna go to the middle now one frame over and I'm going to delay the chest just by pushing that down and I'm compressing that part of the body not much there we go and then he comes up and he comes up straighter and I think that can be pushed awesome let's go to the Head one frame over down rotate and again because this breakdown is so close to that last frame that last keyframe there's going to be the most movement on the whole body is going to be on the head bam and your eyes cannot help but look at that part of the body bam it's the most movement you can see that the spacing over one frame if you look right here at the nose one frame and I go over let's go over one frame right there so it's a big jump there's no other place on the body that has that much movement over one for m so that's what I mean when you're when you favor your breakdown to one side or another you're also dictating the amount of movement on that part of the body I'll do a little bit of a breakdown on the hands so we snap down I think right here we can push the shoulders down select both Global and I'm just going to push those shoulders down you can see the delay or the overshoot in the shoulders now too that feels good let's play what we have you can see how aggressive this part of the body is and it's going to loosen up a little as we um just add some subtle so let's do that select everything because I still want to keep some of the power you can see how much I pulled and pushed in such a short amount of time that that last part really is Snappy so maybe I went too far but I'm going to play with this with the saddle and I think it'll just come out right so let's give it a try here's what we have so far we've done our little poses we've added the breakdowns and the saddles and if you get to this part I think that's really good so good on you if you followed along and and and posed out your character added the breakdowns understanding that when you do a breakdown you're defining the arc and affecting still the timing and then you've added your saddle and so now the next thing I'm going to show you is how we further blend between some of these and so let me show you that so I have everything selected and and let's start at the beginning we're going from the original pose break down into the saddle here and then we have a little hold and then on to the next idea so here's what we're going to do I'm going to go one frame over insert a key and what I'm doing is just one frame over from that hold and then I'm going to maybe right at frame maybe six seven somewhere in there insert a key as well and I'm just going to deselect the foot because I want to keep that timing and everything else is still selected and I'm going to select those two keyframes those those holes X delete so now there is no hold at all the body is always moving cool let's go on and do the same thing over here so we're going from this breakdown this idea this pose breakdown saddle all this is a settle and this is a little hold here a little hold and now we're going into the next big idea so here's what I'm going to do I'm going to select a again select everything I'm going to go one frame over insert a key perfect maybe even right as we're leaving frame 20. let's give that a try awesome so you can see how it's starting to blend between those ideas and when you're doing what I've just done where we have the post pose breakdown set up post pose breakdown subtle and now I've inserted keys on either side of those poses and then deleted those key poses and the hold and now I'm blending now effectively between these things it's hard now to go back so before you do this you want to save you want to get the approval or just go to bed wake up get fresh eyes yes I like what I'm doing I'm going to continue now because once you past this point making fixes to to the shot it becomes difficult because you've started to lose your foundation um so just know that with the post to pose workflow after a certain point it becomes hard to fix so that's why the blocking is so important and the cleanup is so important and even up to the point where the post posed the breakdown in the saddle all that is still good because you can affect things still pretty well there if I don't like something I can delete all the breakdown keys and just move my timing back and I still have everything there but once you start deleting the original key pose then it becomes hard to um to fix if there's any notes that come in so just just be aware of that let's give the face a little bit of a performance so let's come in over here and and let's just pick a little bit of an angry face shape you can just double click and already that looks good so let's see what that looks like cool don't mind the eyes we would be able to fix that hates me everyone in this family hates me awesome I think it's looking really good and the fact that this part is that aggressive I think is actually a good thing because once you add the facial performance and then the overshoot of the the mushroom um you can you can soften that a little bit with overshoot and secondary action so um yeah and then the facial performance is going to read well but this is the post pose workflow um and then this is the final result if this kind of Animation is desired like I said I think getting post-opposed breakdown subtle is a fantastic place to get to and then even within that how you do your poses the different sizes of the post is the the spacing and the timing between them it's uh it's endless so that's really the word the magic of post pose lies is in the power to build those ideas and compare them to each other and make adjustments until you're happy with your performance I'm not going to do any facial performance in this tutorial I'll do another tutorial specifically on facial performance um but I'll just give you an idea how I would approach it at this point I would then after start with the eyes and I would do post to pose on just the eye performance at this point in time I like the expression to be so and so I'm going to key the eyes and then over here I want the expression to be this I would key it and then again you can do a breakdown you might add a blink but pose to pose on the eyes for myself that's how I approach it and then on the mouth I do a layered approach I start with a jaw do a pass of the of the dialogue if I'm happy with the way the dialogue is reading the mouth is reading the jaw and I'll do the corners and then I'll do some shapes but it's all based off the timing of that jaw so that's the approach I would do on the face I'm going to show you the final result now every family hates me everyone in this family hates me everyone in this family hates me Here's the final result I hope you enjoyed the process of the post opposed workflow if you did please like the video so that I know this content is useful stay tuned for the straight ahead and layered workflow videos when ready I'll provide links to the videos if you want more animation material sign up to my newsletter through my website all right everyone take care bye bye

Channel: Alex on Story

Views: 114,618

Keywords: character animation, animation, blender animation, blender tutorial for beginners, animation tutorial, pose to pose animation, 3d, 3d animation, blender, maya, maya animation, pose to pose animation blender, pose to pose animation maya, pose to pose and straight ahead, pose to pose animation tutorial, pose to pose animation tutorial maya, pose to pose, animation pose to pose, pose to pose animation example, pose to pose animation 3d, how to do pose to pose

Id: p8Bi7k60IS0

Length: 79min 45sec (4785 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 16 2023