Tricks to instantly improve your Blender animations - live critique by Wayne Dixon #3

it's Wayne Dixon here for CG cookie welcome to this live stream it's the first one that we've done in many many years because the internet in the country that I am from Australia is one of the crappiest in the world but they've just rolled out the NBN in my area so I am able to connect to you guys so I just want to check his everyone can hear me okay oh yeah I was watching the chat and you guys were saying what t-shirt is Wayne gonna wear I am wearing a black t-shirt but it is actually cold today so I'm wearing a jumper over the top of my t-shirt sorry about that I know you guys really like what t-shirts we're gonna wear I'm not wearing one well I am bother if I wasn't wearing one it would be somewhat nude yeah beautiful worries if I did it nude okay so what are we doing today well we are doing some live critiques of some animation and hello to everyone who's joining us now from around the world I want to focus on the people who who are here first and the ones who are where it's in the middle of the night so I know that spiky is here spiky can we just have a round of applause for that how awesome spiky is spiking you are a champion it is people like spikey who's always on there on the chat and on the forums and stuff trying to help other people we just love those members we absolutely love those members so I want to start with with spikey but I want to give him some props because he's a bloody champion either but that's what we say in our country is a bloody champion I think he's from Germany so he'd probably say dust bin good bloke enough I'm really good at languages all right so let me change over I'm gonna make lots of mistakes today so hopefully you guys are gonna just bear with me it's been years since I've done this so I'll do my best I'll do my best so let's go to turn this off we already started see I told you my first mistake so um you're gonna start with spiky if anyone has any questions I know that you can use this tag in the in the thing and it'll pop up blue so that's the square brackets put a cube around it around it and that will pop up blue I'll try and keep one eye on the chat although it's down there so where you're seeing but it's over there in my real world so let's get spiky up here spiky spiky is here he'd better be here okay so what I've done um hopefully what I want to do is show you his little thing let's just see if my if the audio plays first Seth have a look at his little video here you Merry Christmas I also yeah York is in the middle of the night so I'll make sure I speak critique yours too as well so well done Merry Christmas to everybody hopefully you guys knew that it was Christmas already last year you guys didn't miss it yeah well well done to two spikey here I love it when people do their own thing like they're just like I want to make something and then they just go ahead and make it so this little animation it's got it's got a lot of charm spikey I like it because it's got that that I want to make things and and and I do love it let's bring up I've got blender here to do some critiquing it's quite a long piece and what I want to do is just kind of focus on one thing all right so when you're learning I think it's great to like put put a whole thing together like he says the whole entire animation that I want to make but when you're trying to improve if you're trying to improve everything at once you're not going to get very far all your progress is going to be like incremental it's gonna be really really slow so what I want to do is just focus on one kind of area which would be just the start bit with this one so that's what I would focus on my computer saying you need to restart no remind me tomorrow so let's get out our free pencil here so with this one I I'm just looking at a couple of the weird little flickers here and I would just try and make that that smooth so I don't actually know how you've animated this and put it together but I would say you may have used the NLA editor is that is that right I know there's a little bit of a delay so let me know just right out in LA yes or no when you do character animation with blender it's really difficult to use the NLA in fact we tried to do a tutorial about it months ago and we just couldn't find a good good use for it so we we abandoned the whom we abandoned the the nla tutorial so it looks like here wink what's going on here well duck I keep calling it a duck but you know what I mean it's a swan I'm a beautiful swan he is jumping backwards here and then forward so where was that that was around frame 239 so let's try and bring up our draw mode here so what's what's going if there's a duck and then he goes backwards or he stops and then goes forwards so I would look at that and go okay how is that oh no NLA good you're doing it right so just have a look around the animation curves around 245 and just try and figure out hey what's what's wrong with that with my animation it's probably a key framing issue where you've got some key framing keyframes doing stuff that you didn't want it to do and then also with the little walk out we've got the little walk out here now there's some body mechanic stuff that are not happening here so what I would do is I would actually get some reference of a duck walking or a swan I keep saying I keep saying let's just say that in Germany if you speak Dutch that is the that is the German word for Swan okay so every time I say duck I'm actually being correct what movie Black Swan no it's a white one it's a white duck it's a white duck so what I would do get some video of a duck walking and what I would focus on is the way that it waddles its feet right so it goes it tries to put its weight over the the leg that is planted and it turns its body so guess what if you watch ducks and you watch swans walk they're hilarious so actually if you can go out and film a live one you'll have a great afternoon so that's what I notice here with our walk ear and also when we're doing body mechanics you it's the order in which things need to happen so I can see that this foot is planted on frame you know four hundred and sixty-four and then this fort lifts up on four hundred and sixty-five see so there's no actual transfer of this body body weight so when the foot gets planted the weight has to go across before the other foot can lift off so that will all happen with with the twist of the body right so look at the look at the way that it's transferring of the weight actually this is a bit dark let me see if I can raise up this might be just off you can't see what I'm doing but let's go to my edit mode for my camera select my camera and I'm trying to make it more visible so let's go to object mode aha there we go so now you should be able to see a little bit better just had the opacity down to fifty percent all right let's jump back to my stroke and do some drawings draw mode yep so the thing is when the foot foots planted then the body mass right this this thing here needs to come over to that side before the foot can lift off and also as its lifting off leave the toe right and raise the heel so that way I try and get it on camera let's try and go down there so it is like peeling off the ground like that rather than you know a lot of beginner animators they do walk cycles of anything like ducks swans giraffes unicorns humans everybody who does a walk cycle the foot will just like if that's my leg it will just lift off like that and to me that says beginner you know but if you roll onto the toe and the webbed feet are really really bendy so you'll just if you do that and then roll off it's going to look like ten thousand times better don't quote me on my math said but it's going to look a lot better so that's what I would focus on I don't it looks like you've rigged an animated this yourself so I would also have a look at the head where's my pen I'll have a look at the head and try and keep that in I K to the world so when he is when he's walking in he's waddling around you don't want the head to move with the body right you want the head to kind of stay still so he's going to be doing walking actually I'm gonna make these bigger you guys see did see this I can't believe I'm doing this on the stream so he's walking his head's gonna stay straight but his foot gets planted his body weight comes off over that foot it rolls off and then plants down to the other side so hopefully that has made it a little bit clearer to see what I'm talking about this one's even put their toes on the floor first I say it sounds like you've actually looked at some some reference of the of a swan walking yeah so that's good so yeah maybe yeah so the weight here ah why'd it wanted to jump there so each of these steps feels weightless and even if you're watching the body so let's go from this frame here oh I'm just going to mark the center of the body on this frame right this is our extreme so if you think about it in 3d space that's where it's it's getting going over to the right even though I'm leaning left in the camera there and it's changing direction but have a look at how sharp that is so let's go here that's a frame there and see how it bang jumps so if you look at that I'm just gonna draw it here the path looks like that you've got a sharp bit there but you actually want the white transfer well in that corner to be rounded alright so that's how you funny video of a swan walking on ice so now good on you can so now everyone's going to be watching like swans falling over instead of this guy's ugly mug cool so that's yeah that's what I would focus on for this one and also yeah I mentioned the head so when when he was swimming here just turn his head to where he's going first you know so you want to anticipate where where he's going to look and that tells the audience what's going to happen next most of the time you do want to show the audience what's gonna happen next sometimes you don't but you know for a little bit of surprise and stuff like that but just go with its most most often you want to show what's going to happen next yeah cool so that's that's some notes that I have for you hopefully it helps you you out but keep doing what you're doing spiky because having you on the slide is definitely it's really valuable to to not only the people who you're giving advice to but everyone else who comes along and sees your advice it's really it's really heartwarming to see you help everyone out and to everyone else what spikey is doing then he's trying to answer everyone's questions right and that's actually how you get really good at blender because I remember when I was trying to learn I would jump on the blender artists forum back then it was called Elysian but I would see someone would have a question and then I'll be like right how do I help them and figure it figure it out so I figured out what their problem was and then I tried to help them which made me feel good for two reasons well one I helped a person so that's very altruistic but also I added to my skill set and I started to understand blend her a little bit more so that was back when I was kind of a generalist now I kind of focus on ringing in animation is what I do but if you really want to get good at blender help other people with their problems so well done spikey you're an inspiration to us all all right so York is also in the middle of the night so let's get your archer let me say this spiky crit I don't know whether you want to keep these little scribbles but maybe it'll make sense to you but let's get yorkers is in the middle of the night oh okay this one I haven't already done a I just show you what I'm doing so you guys don't go what is why I'm doing York just posted he's tonight so I'm gonna paste this here I'm going to rename it York quue then I'm going to open it in blender open I'm going to jump to the clip editor I'm going to delete all the clips that are there and then I'm going to drag in so I'm just dragging in this one here Pacho isn't that good so my clip is 200 frames long so I'm going to change my in frame to be 201 why did I add an extra frame because we're starting at one and if it's 200 frames long 1 plus 200 equals 201 you can quote me on on my maths there that is 100% correct first jump back here this is going to say what are you doing this is broken so I'm selecting my camera and I'm gonna change it to be an active clip let's choose this stomp kick and there we go let's also change it to be 1 so now I can jump over into my stroke now York is here oh yeah I use a hackintosh don't tell you on that so basically I got all the parts and I built the computer myself and then installed and then installed math on it yeah it's not it's not easy but it works great and it's a it's a Macintosh it's a super beefy Macintosh for like one third of the price but I do not recommend it to anyone who is trying to build their own mm-hm hackintosh it's really it's quite difficult at say York is here I gave him some notes yesterday let's see and watch this yet let's see if we can play this animation oh yeah it's a lot smoother so yeah it's better but bill now York actually went and he did his own video reference for this and that's what you need to do if you want to get better at animation you've got to watch and study your own a video reference so let's have a look at this in closer detail it's going to draw mode what am I going to draw with I'm gonna draw I don't want to draw a red I'm gonna stick with black my black plant pen so just scrubbing here this is the spline version four four four York hopefully I'm saying your name right I've it's yes it's I apologize if I'm getting it wrong and it's like yuck or something something like that so here we go I'm looking here when we're pushing off everything in animation is about the the illusion of weight right because it's not a real character its I've just got distracted by the chat then it's not a real character we have to bestow all the attributes of real life on to the character although we can tweak it to make it more cartoony or more believable or better than real life here's a better way of saying that so here what we need to do is sell the fact that he's pushing off so at the moment I can see the knee kind of popping a little bit there so I would look at the knee spacing and see if I can even that out how would I do that I look at the the the heel control and I would see whether we can go higher a little bit sooner or maybe lower and then higher what if I just adjust that because the more you raise the heel the it actually affects the knee but the big issue here is I think you need to go up onto the toe just slightly on this frame so let's a little bit smaller so just raise it up a little bit there before he lifts off and that will that will give a little bit more illusion of weight and he's actually peeling off off the ground there so in the same deal here remember how we saw we saw spike ease foot come down and there was no feeling of why you should plant a toe first so get the toe down and then get the rest of the foot so toe flatten out the toe and then the heel comes down so for Joe there we go and that'll also you have to have a look at that knee control there so probably I would rotate that foot pivot up the toe bovitz re just to get a little bit off the ground and you'll take care of that pop there let's go a little bit further down is that a pop in the knee can you guys you guys can probably hear the slack check going on sorry about that it's one of the projects I'm working on and they're chatting about it during the middle of my stream and I have to have it on because I'm also chatting to Kent who I don't know if you guys know cancer bloody champion as well God we love Kent all praise praise can again here we're looking at the toe so plant the toe first York and that'll really sell the way and also look at this foot lifting off right it's just lifting off so make sure you peel peel that off even just a subtle amount to get it onto the toe to push off is going to make it a lot more believable all right so let's have a look here I'm going to play our animation yeah also the knee let's get rid of that guy he's in our way who's in our way so knee pop here so what you can do just raise the heel a little bit and that'll keep the knee forward knee pops are a massive odd they're not a massive problem or they are a massive problem they're really difficult to to get a handle on but once you can see them you see them everywhere and you notice them and you're like ah they become super problematic for you and then you've that's at a certain level of your your learning and then you get past that and you start to get a handle and a grip on how to control them and then they don't become a problem anymore so you've got to just bear through that period where it becomes really really difficult to deal with it with a knee pop because it does get easier on the other side once you once you break through so that's the the knee pop there let's have a look I think here as he's going back doing these weights or about I use 7 I think here is a bit where are we so we're from about 81 to 89 I just put that there we've got the foot see how the foots raising up let me just delete that key so you can see it let me delete this one just watch the foot there I'll zoom in for answer they can see this is a stuff when you when you're polishing so these are the stuff that you look for you're like what is it why does my character feel weightless and it is in this instance it is because the the foot is kind of sliding it doesn't feel weighted to the ground so get it get that heel down before you get the heel down and leave it there so leave it like there and don't raise up I'd have to look at there the curves your animation curves to see whether your Trent accidentally translating up or whether you're penetrating through the ground or or what's going on there but just have a look around what is that around the eighty ninety ninety mark let's zoom back out again okay and this here it feels a little bit I'm going to say the word feels a lot today because I don't know it's a weed way of explaining it but yeah animation is about seeing but when we're seeing we're also feeling the motion so sometimes I'll say stuff like it feels a bit fast or it feels a bit it feels a bit slow or floaty or whatever like that so just yeah it means something but you have to kind of look past the literal meaning of like hey how does he feel animation of course I feel animation runs through my veins okay so what lost my train of thought but yeah here the weight is moving forward which is good but it's too far forward so if he if he's dropping forward like that he needs to start pushing sooner I think I feel like it's just taking a little bit too long to get started around here so around the the 180 mark oh sorry 108 mark he needs to to start moving forward more otherwise he's gonna fall over you know there's a silly drawing for you all right here is another example of toe so roll onto that heel sir roll onto that heel get the heel to do that and that'll sell the push now this one here I did see your your reference so you were doing a little bit of a hop before you you were jumping but it's still it's too too high so I would say see how you've got this guy here and we're going from here so this is our path I would try and bring it down half half that height of the the circle I mean and then you can also I would look at the spacing on this land right so each body part we need to pay attention to exactly like the bouncing ball so we know when our bouncing ball does is facing here is the top here is the bottom and the spacing gets closer at the top so a vertical spacing on the way down is always bigger let's have a look at the spacing on our foot here let's have a look from here to here that is that is slow right so we want it to slow down so what I think you can do is probably get rid of this frame now when I say get rid of the frame I mean tweak your timing right so keep keep our extreme pose up here although shift it down and keep our contact pose here which is also a key pose so keep keep this guy here but just reduce the timing in between that so we've got one two three five six six frames too many so try taking off one frame but so shift everything forward now everyone knows I speak about this a lot when you're shifting keys in the animation editor any of the animation editors just use the e key right so then you can shift anything if your mouse is on this side hit E and you're shifting all the keys on that side if your mouse is on that side you're shifting all the keys on that side and you don't need to deselect and select everything it's really good it's much better than scaling and if you scale them you're going to select everything so that's what I mean so imagine that this is your key frames of your character I would just remove it remove one frame from that right but you can't just do that then you have to go in and adjust your curves to make sure that your graph editor is still looking like this and and so really I say get rid of this frame here where it's really slow and close to the ground but what I mean is remove one frame and then adjust the spacing so it makes sense yeah hopefully hopefully that made sense probably didn't I am as asked a question I'll just scroll down and see if I missed any questions not okay so Amma's got a question when you do animation on your own do you rewatch it and do the same steps to catch anything that might be off yes yep so when you're it depends on how much time that you have for any animation that you do whether it's personal learning or whether it's a professional job it's always a good idea to leave some time between when you're finished and also when you submit it so so to speak because when you look at something over and over and over and over you become blind to some sometimes the most obvious things so then just by keep taking a little bit of break and coming back to it you got fresh eyes and go ah yeah the spacing on that foot why didn't I notice that it was so so soft on the ground they're all slowing down before it hit the ground and that's when you pick up those those things and just make it polish it and make it a little bit better so yet so watch it REE watch it as much as not as much as you can don't go crazy watching it but yeah it's important to watch your own work over and over but leave some I think I'm saying the same thing twice you know what I mean so let you leave leave some space so you can get a fresh fresh perspective on it okay nearly nearly done with this one he's cheating the leg there which is okay you know what I think same deal here I like this pose I like I think you can get rid of one frame in the kick so he's speeding up right let's have a look at our foot spacing here here is our foot and here is our foot here is our foot so we are speeding up here is our foot and here is our foot so if we look at that house spacings going one two three four so it's four five so there's five five frames about that right one two three this is not quite in the right spot so that one should be like that so we are speeding up and then we're getting even I reckon you can leave this one and then either combine these two frames or just remove one of them so maybe if you're going if you're going to remove one frame and remember what I said about removing a frame it's adjusting the you know reducing the timing and then adjusting the spacing I will remove this one because that's this frame here really bad drawing wing because you're then accelerating from this point all the way to this point it's going to get you a bigger a bigger kick and also on the other side so here maybe remove that one and go or actually maybe combine them so if I say something like split the difference so here is the ankle on the frame for here's here is the ankle on the on the frame after when I say split the difference where you can do is combine those two frames so that you remove one of the frames but then the new position is kind of in the middle split the difference so that way the kick is going to feel a little bit more forceful but then that also might change your your body mechanics here okay body mechanics here I think watch what's happening with the foot here I'm 141 right now scrub forward you guys can see bang you feel that just stops bang it wants to keep going and once the keep going but it can't so how do we fix that well I'm frame 142 we just roll up a little bit onto our toe and then we're continuing that that motion forward and also like we're thinking about this ankle movement as as a bouncing ball everything is a bouncing ball I think I'm going to say that 12,000 times right so we're thinking about that as moving up and then coming back down down like that right so that's here swooping around and then coming down so maybe not like so extreme but yeah we want everything to be nice and and and smooth and follow-through so that's that's one thing that I do there I think you got a bit of a knee issue no that's okay I didn't though there it is okay bang 149 look at this knee joint there but paul kearney pop that's also how you say knee you say canny knee pop loses the weight here again spacing on the foot see how the foot is arriving and even spacing what I would try and do is slow into that so it's it's not going it's going to I would Mir maybe even get it closer like this but this frame here you're landing on the toe and then you also the next frame after you're in the same spot but the toe is rolled down hopefully that little squiggle makes sense maybe we'll maybe won't I better get a move on so I can get through some of these other critiques [Music] yeah also when we get to the end here I'd like to see this wait I like how you're coming down but overshoot so they can go down and then come back up a little bit so in your curve in the the graph editor the the Z location or the up and down the Zed location will look it's coming down like this and it'll go a little bit like that so you just want to overshoot maybe overshoot I'm not sure and then come to a rest and that will give it a nice a little bit of polish on the end there so there we go hopefully that helps you out York I will save that in case you want me to distribute it to you later there's another question from Omar is there any other animation tool you've seen other than in any other software that is that is so good you wonder why it gets it why in god's name it is not in blender the animation tools there's actually quite fond of the animation tools in blender i think they're quite good and i'm excited by the animation 2020 which is the blender foundations project that's happening in i'm not sure what year it's happening in better look that up I'm kidding 2020 it's in the name wait it's in the name just trying to mess with you so they're going to be improving all the animations I think they're quite good they're a lot better too they're a lot better than say the mayor ones that the maya dopesheet it's hopeless right you can't you can't do any of this stuff that I was showing you how to move that the keyframes around there is that Adam bot yes I'm glad Phil posted that the Adam bot looks great there is I know what's his name qual ISM was working on some some curve editor things that kind of does some fancy oh let's smooth out these curves in different ways and then there is the Anna made thing maybe I can look that up or actually look it up later is an add-on which does the same thing it's actually like coil isms here's a member of CG cookie by the way what a champion it's like here's a little script thing that he was running but it's kind of like that on steroids so someone's kind of developing it more and it's just a way of like tweaking the curves to just taking more control of the curves so that'll be nice in there but I hope it's funny when you learn a certain way and you come into learning a software in a certain era then that's the way that you're always going to do it becomes harder to actually learn the new ways because it takes a long time to actually learn the new ways and oh well this way works so why do I need to change my way of working so that's why it's good for when the younger people come in and start learning because they've got access to all these tools that us old folk will never get get a grip on so time to move on I've done two in half an hour holy Wayne you're taking too long alright so who is anyone else here who is after a critique I know feels here feels a champion as well I love feel Oh Marcia let's do oh man oh ma okay what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna play Omar's video I was only able to get the 360 version of the really really small one of yours oh man let me play you I'm are you are one of those people who doesn't you're at this level right and you think that you're at this level you're not man you just gotta believe in yourself believe in you yeah you're great my biggest creep about this show real is how do people contact you like if someone emails this to someone oh hey check out this dude it's like you need a link on there to your website or yeah you'll contact your email or something like that so I would I would put that that on there now I'm a character animator so I can't could take much about you know the models and stuff that you've done like the modeling and texturing stuff to me it looks it looks great my favorite bits actually did I do yeah I set yourself already have I saved opening Oh My yes open I should say this at one so yeah my favorite bit is all these tiny animation stuff that you I can notice that that's good or when the car stops is it here this this bit here that bit there I noticed that man I noticed that bit it can over it just raised raises up it rather than like overshooting so in the graph editor just like I did before let's jump here and this time to draw mode so every in draw mode no I'm Scott my can't Scott what isn't there so I'm watching the the front of the car what's a good way of drawing this so here is out front of a car that's not easy to see so I'm gonna choose green all right here's the front of the car see straw you see it pop up here if there was some bad drawings Wayne kind of covering what I what I wanted to show so I think you know what I mean but that that popping up make sure that you go past past where it where it's going to go so in the graph editor is your extreme go past it then go here is the the level that you want to be out come back and then do a little bit and these are microbes so this this one here and this one here these are micro movements right just just get that tiny tiny little bit in there yeah this is great I love this model I want to animate it that looks really cool the the bit that I think is the weakest and I think it's just a camera angle let me let me delete that get out of my way is here it looks like the it doesn't look like it's racing around the track it looks like it's it's sliding and if it is sliding maybe maybe skied out the back a little bit you know so it kind of looks like it's sliding around yeah get some real action in there we want to see and maybe even some smoke I don't know how to do smoke but with all that stuff I go ken can you add smoke to this and Ken yeah man it'll take me two seconds whereas if I was looking into it take me like 28 days to figure that out I don't know why it's counting in my hands then yeah this model is great yeah I think Miranda actually gave you some notes or sent you to a video from the fourth normals one so maybe they had some really great stuff some advice in their video on like how to present a video show real like like this but yeah I just want to I want to animate this see how this bounces I'll make that even more bouncy and when we're doing in here right I would make the car do stuff like it's trying to like it's about to skid off like he's like now I'm gonna wait I'm gonna wait till the the starter's pistol they don't even have starters pistols in races what is it the lights you know I mean he's waiting for the lights to change you know just a little bit of movement in that but if I'm looking for and it it depends on what your reel is is for right if if I'm looking for someone and occasionally I do need someone to to model or texture or all-white you need to show on your reel but that's what you do so most of the time I'm actually just looking at still images all this guy's good like and then I email him to go hey you available to work or whatever so keep make sure that you get your stuff up on the blender Network has changed so where is it it's moved over to the blender community I'm not actually haven't checked it out since to move there make sure that you get your stuff on there and have your contact details on there but with this stuff yeah still still images is great or even in this like video stuff it's always nice to show okay what did you do you did the lighting you did the texturing you did the modeling so you can do the the compositing passes of like where it fades over and goes here's the the one the wireframe here's the the texturing and here is the lighting like you don't need to you can you can be creative about the way that you show that so this is Capote okay you're really supposed to focus on modeling yet so what I would do well I miss one of your questions will there be trouble with YouTube because of the music probably yes it depends on the copyright owners because they just shut them off I think most of the time YouTube will Wayne secretly has 28 fingers I do everyone from Australia has 28 fingers isn't that normal yeah so if your sound might get stripped off from YouTube so most of the time people aren't worried about that like if you're watching it you turn the sound down because it becomes really quite annoying what does that thing so people recruiters and whatever are just turning a sound down one other thing that I was going to say yeah it depends it also depends on what you you want so I think at the moment you're working in an office where people don't appreciate I mean you had some something like negative comments is not quite the right term where you've someone's looked at your artwork on your desktop and said hey who's made that and then you've gone I did and then they've seen the they've seen the actual actually I'm gonna I'm gonna talk straight to your heart man and then they've seen the the the what is it the the concept art and they're gone well that guys made it if this guy who's made that comment doesn't understand like what's involved don't take any of that to heart he's an idiot right don't listen to idiots it's always good to get advice from people who are outside the 3d industry because sometimes they have some really great advice or they might put their finger on something and not know exactly what it is but they might help you help you out like sometimes I show my wife he's not an animator I do some animation and then she's like ah the the eyebrows look a little bit weird or when she sees like you know the CG cookie Flex rig like she's like why does what all the men have boobs and you're like and once you see why don't you say that you can't unsee it you're like yeah there's that model does have boobs on every every character so sometimes I do have some some great advice but in that case it sounds like they dude who made that comment is just an idiot right don't don't worry just laugh at him and go he doesn't know what he's talking about he doesn't know anything because it might be like when I had a real job right I say real job as in I worked somewhere that wasn't what I wanted to do I didn't that wasn't my life that wasn't where I wanted to work that wasn't it wasn't where I lived and a lot of people worked there I worked in a call center if you if you stop your questions now I worked in a call center IT support and there's a lot of people there who were just unhappy right but their life that was their life like they were there being there doing whatever but if that's their fault right that's not your fault if you're working there as a way to get money and then you're having fun and you're doing some awesome artwork on your own time if just keep doing that man it doesn't matter if they're like trying to bring you down they don't know how good you are like okay Omar give me their address and I will figure out a way to go over there and smash them smash them in the face that's not true I won't smash them but yeah don't worry about them dude you're awesome keep it up make sure that you put your contact details on there that's what I've got okay major props a Kent for the real yeah and your reel was rendered by the community the CG cookie community so if you helped out Omar good on you your buddy champion Oh Jake's here hey Jake cool who did I say was next fur fur fur fur so Chris Chris is done they really cool should I say this I don't need to say this one for you I'm sorry I'm just going to copy over that it's gone you don't need my help you need your help just believe in yourself okay it's where are we here but we're looking at further also known as Chris now you're no problem Omar no problem right so he's done an awesome actually can I show the beauty render I think it has sound does it have sound all right no it doesn't have sound mm yeah I'll just play that again play and then we'll watch it in blender and I'll do a little bit of draw Rovers so this is his treasure chest animation mmm it's funny when I see stuff without sound effects oh when I watch animation without sound effects I had sound effects at play in my mind and I know I know I'm not the only one that it happens to I can't be the only one that happens to especially if something is bouncing or character is doing something in a rhythmic pattern working I hear the sound effects happens like we like it and this is just like when he pops open it's like so let's let's critique this I love that Kent and I made this treasure chest course and firfer is doing exactly what we hoped people would do with it they would learn from it and they would adapt it into their own thing I love it I love it to see people do that make it make it their own like if if you're one of those people who cannot only follow along with the tutorial but that's that's fine as well but I'm gonna challenge I'm gonna create a challenge for you it's like I do this as well like if I'm following your tutorial or I need to learn something I learn it at its most basic level so I just follow the tutorial and I go great now I've made it that that's cool I've made a lot of mistakes I can focus on what I need to focus on and then adapt it into your own version and that's where the real learning and challenge comes from it's from when you're taking what you've learned and putting it into practice and in this case it's within the constrains of what he's already learnt and that's exactly what we want so well done Chris on that I'm I just rather than focus on this version I will jump to the other version which so this one's just rendered out excuse me this one's rented out in random colors just so we can see the spacing a little bit more so yeah you giggle when Kirby popped out saying here like it's funny so zooming in oh one thing that I was going to say about so I'm just I'm jumping backwards a little bit so my apologies for that Chris was probably on the edge of his seat guy he was he gonna say just with camera stuff I've noticed it now because Chris is zooming in and he's done a great job with the camera a lot of beginners just actually animate the camera itself right but it becomes that's when you need to focus on the spacing of the camera so if we go back to should I go back let's have a look at Omar's camerawork right see how it's like he's thought about it as a not really as a character but it's always moving and it's the spacing is is nice and it's thought about then if we go to spy keys sorry spiky I'm not trying to pick on you or anything but it's maybe it won't one extra thing that we can work on if we're looking at the camera work it's always very jerky from one one place to the other and that's when we also need to think about the spacing of the camera especially rotations so you don't just start and it becomes linear you have to like slow and then move move the camera so start slow and speed up and with every camera move that you do like that it's going to make it look a lot better so I know there's an easy way to do that if you go to file you go to your preferences go to your add-ons and then type in add camera rigs you will see a handy camera rig which creates a free camera for you to use it's already shipping in in blender so if you go shoot a add camera you've got two rigs here right and then you can actually animate our camera around and then you Adam Amy's rig it makes it so much easier to get nicer camera movements now the one that's shipping with blender 2.8 and 2.8 one is a slightly broken version there is an update up-to-date version on my github so if you go to get Wayne Dick's in there we go you will see ad camera rigs this is the new 2.8 proper version I've rewritten it to there's a few issues that are in the one that's been adapted to 2.8 by automatic script this one has been fixed so you can just grab it there way low github.com way low add camera rigs and that will install that add-on okay sorry Chris let's go back to your critique I'm going to look at this Basin here when your treasure chest I'm going to zoom right in a barrel okay so this is just a bouncing ball up we're going to think about the top of it of the chest as a bouncing ball we're gonna think about the bottom of the chest as a bouncing ball so when we pop off with this type of thing sometimes we do want anticipation and sometimes that we don't so for a monster that's inside a chest we probably don't want any anticipation so that's when you would pop the spacing so we're going from here let's just draw look draw mode that is way too big I'm going to draw in readies my red okay red red is the color that I choose and we're gonna zoom it down so just looking at the bottom here the spacing pop pop pop that's good good spacing there nice slow outta top and then we wear down again so what you can do what I would try an experiment with is having less bigger distance with less spacing so just pop it pop it further at the start I would make sure that I'd save it and then and try this out just to give it see if you can give it more like excitement popping out and saying with looking at the top spacing I like that spacing I like that you're not going straight up you're twisting it to the to the side okay here okay here is an example of where we don't want to slow down our the top of our of our chest so where am i from ninety nine right frame ninety nine looking at the top of the chest here then we go to here and then we go here right so this means our spacing on our top is actually slowing down before we get airborne right so I would think about this as the whole character is stretching and jumping so what I would do is probably get rid of frame 100 and goes straight to frame 101 so that we jump into the air straight away this is where I was talking about you want to you want to accelerate and then pop off the ground you don't want to decelerate the top before you get off the ground otherwise you've lost that momentum if that makes sense because you've got to think about it like a character trying to do a jump like this so you don't go up jump like that you make it all part of the same movement you didn't I'll just try that again actually maybe I'll go bigger oops so we don't go up pause jump we go yeah all together there we go that was worth making a big screen or immediate lane so yet look at the top of your spacing there let's have a look here you might be doing the same thing in other spots no that one's done one's better um this one here so we're at frame 112 now just to the center of our chest here do we have we are jumping to the screen left with no kind of pre warning so here either you've got too many frames from 1:10 like slowing into this position here or okay I'm just thinking now you see me thinking in real time okay I try to explain what was sticking out to me it was the fact that he's just jumping jumping dead but maybe that's okay okay ignore that I'm okay with that one this is a good one this one here at 138 see that he's stretched and then you jumped perfect good job that's some nice pop there that bounce is great don't think I can't see that I can see that you know what I like I like that you're slowing down some some of them when I mean slowing down I'm looking at the top here up spacing slowing down before you take off I like it on some of them so not making all of them the same but on the big ones make sure that you don't slow down you just popping popping off so this one pop too many frames I would get rid of this one here so frame 170 remove well that's meant to be in our but I momentarily forgot how to spell that's good I love it okay before we explode here you can do a little bit of a stagger now what do I mean by that okay here's your extreme right I'll try and draw our pose here you can do a stagger on ones maybe where you go bigger so I'm going to just edit mode this is try and select look select everything and then put my cursor there try and scale from my cursor and then we do this this jitter back and forward right so we're going to copy this move it two phones forward select them duplicate and the first frame is the same as the last frame is that right or is this the frame okay so what I've tried to do there these go to judge it to JA before it before it opens and so you do that on ones but you you stagger it I'm not sure if you own the it's survival guide to the animator survival kit by the Richard Williams book survey recently passed but that has a great a great way there's a cat doing doing a stagger and that's the type of thing that you're going four so if you're thinking about it in the curves right you want to animate it like let's jump back to draw mode let's just say we want to animate getting not existential that I forgot that the right word this is that curve going up our scaling bigger row with we're looking at it like that and then we're King all the way along and we're dragging every second one so let's select it every second one let's select this one select this one's like this one it's like this one and drag them all down on the curve just slightly so that our new curve looks like like that and that's how you get jitters happening before it goes and you might even try before exploding big so you're you're getting to your extreme there and then just make sure that you have an anticipation so go down and then I would try going bursting open this is the burst hopefully that that makes sense yep Jones Sanderson has put in the link to the book if you can get the the animator survival kit it's it's a really good book except don't take everything as gospel especially the walk cycles so Richard has like it's a massive book I've got it in my little cupboard there but there's like seven thousand walk cycles and a lot of them great like it doesn't work in 3d because he draws his he's passing position with the foot way too high whoops like that's a bad bad drawing but let's just say that this is our foot you know knee this is the passing position before it comes down he's got it way too high off the ground whereas in 3d we won't actually want to swing it through close to the ground as possible but once you know those differences like yeah you can handle it it's if you're interested in 3d so if you're interested in animation get the book it's a must-have it's like the it's like the Bible cool so that is that now I do want to talk about these things being ejected I think you've used the which is which is fine on the way to do I think you've used the simulation which is good but you can try and bake bake the sin and then make it a little bit faster so I want I'd like to see you've got this really big let's get rid of just going to delete some keyframes now sorry they're in my way so let's go delete Oh does only know that the if you want to select everything that is to the right of the cursor you can hit the square bracket if you want to select everything from the left you put the square bracket the other way or and they have also in reintroduced the old way of doing it which was ctrl shift and then right click so that was the old way of doing it which is how I do it because you don't have to take your hand off from from where it is so yeah I just did I delete them yeah I think I deleted the monkey mind the monkey mind easy to be distracted so let's insert a key a blank keyframe which is now going to be shift I shift I there we go I used to be DX really fast but now it's shift I okay so got a blank keyframe there I want to see these stars shoot out super fast right so what's pacing to be nice and being here and then nice and tight here and then bigger here but you've baked it which is fine so what we do we bake it and then we can tweak out animation curves just to make it give it more force as it comes out and also maybe even so you can go into a slow motion at the top here and then go fast again you know what I mean okay and that's the type of sound effects that I'm talking about I hear when I watch these things like I hear that in in my brain so that's what I want to see with your your thing here and last one a little bit this little dude is just a little bit of polish in these change of directions so whoops why did that do that what's going on okay so I like how let's have a look here it's going from here to here good spacing slowing down that's good but then we've gone back to here spend a little bit more time around this post when you change direction so what I mean when I say spend a little bit more time about it that's your pose there stick a keyframe there stick your keyframe there so it slows it changes direction more slowly and then you can go fast again then when you when you're at the bottom same thing right so here it just changes directions a little bit too too fast yeah so just have a look at each of those change of directions and rather than it being I'm gonna exaggerate like that these these are a little bit sharp just round them out a little bit so this is your old and let's make this one a different color this is your new that is a translation on on that guy cool hopefully that makes sense there is a question I missed a couple questions so I can't going down going down going down do you ever feel like you should learn modeling texturing etc so you can handle the money of a freelance job Omar if I know I focus on oh it depends on what what you want to be if you are a generalist then yeah focus on let's get bigger no talking here so if you want to be I actually asked just say that firfer oh and before I get stuck in Chris West's was really loving this animation and he wanted to feature it so if you can make some some tweaks to it after after seeing this then go back and fix it you're gonna get featured so we're talking about this morning so good work okay Omar Jake the name of the book is the animators survival kit by Richard Williams let me get it for you and then Omar don't go anywhere I go survival kit that is what it looks like and it's got a thousand different walk cycles and jumps and skips at it it's really great for learning the poses and then once you get a handle on how things work you can adjust it and go okay I don't need that I'm tweaking it to do a certain thing so it's really great when you're starting out and you don't know how to do certain things it's excellent okay I'm up oh just bang my knee I hope you're happy if you want to get it I don't bother learning texturing modeling lighting or any of the things that I'm not good at because it takes away time from what I am good at and what I enjoy which is animation and rigging you find it if I get a freelance job where I need that done I hire someone to do it for two reasons one because someone else can do it better than I can and then I can also work on something else while they're working it is a great feeling to know that you're asleep and somebody on the other side of the world is helping you complete your job and you're not the only one who's who's who's working on it but having said that if you're going to manage other people on a freelance job so you're going to subcontract things out you need to have a group of people that you can count on because you know you've got your number one person he's not available or she's not available then you go to your second one and what I got so you need to have a couple of people that you can go for in your network and that way you know you're not going to be stuck of like oh yeah we can do it but it's gonna take two weeks before we can start the however if you are a generalist and you want to do everything then that's okay like so you might want to learn rigging and you might want to learn texturing you might want to learn modeling and you want want to learn animation but just remember the the further you spread yourself the thinner that you become was that was almost profound I was just thinking of you know what is it yeah he spreads butter babe bread and butter that's what I was thinking of yeah so don't spread yourself too thin focus on the things that you want to be good at and want to focus on because they're because they're fun and don't be afraid to get other people involved in your project it is a great feeling to be able to pay other people to do jobs to help help you out spread the money spread the love it's a really good feeling I actually like paying other other people to do to make me look good that's a way that I I think about it so when people hire me I'm trying to make them look good when I hire people they're they're making me look good so it's a pay it forward type of situation hopefully that answered your question oma I think I didn't miss any other questions let's have a look at omar's question does the extra person you hire gets paid by the client or does it come out of your paycheck yeah you've got to charge for that so you add it on so you've got a certain amount of people that you can rely on and you know their day rate or how many hour you can actually ask them go hey can I need this model how many how long is it going to take you different jobs will be different so you can either work by the hour you can work by the day or you can work by the project it depends on the scope of the project and how big it is so if it's just a little job just work by the hour if it's a bigger job work by the day you go okay that's going to take me two days to do the animation and then you have your day rate and you charge that if someone else needs to get involved in that the thing you you add their day right on to it so it's like okay we're going to do modeling that's going to be three days of modeling or two days of modeling and then add that to the to the thing so the client pays you and then you you pay them but also make sure that you include the the time it takes for you to manage that because otherwise you're going to get stuck with a certain budget has happened to me quite recently the budgets this much and the client wants more and more and more and more you end up having to pay other people to do those jobs and your cut comes smaller become smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller so yeah I recently finished a job where the scope just blew way out and I worked very very hard to get not very much money and it's not a very good feeling so learn from my mistakes and charge people charge people more yeah so hopefully that answers that question Shawn's here Shawn he uses Devore Dvorak keyboard good on you man what a what a genius okay so is it anybody else here who has submitted for review people delegate the work down to the people at the bottom that's that's right man part of it is delegate yeah so all right I don't think we have anyone else who's here live and we have Oh Tania I love tenure I love to te is yep here we go I've got ten years let me let me bring it up here so let me save her first so I don't accidentally deleted Tania is an example of pure pure joy I love people who actually let me bring I've got the wrong view up so Tania has worked so hard and I love it I love it so this is the way that I work I had a really great teacher when I was at animation school and he said he was like this he goes most people in life that you come across have an attitude where they will say I will you you prove something to me first and then I will give you 100 percent and my teacher was opposite to that he goes I will give everybody from the outset 100 percent I will I will back them I will give them 100% of my attention even more I will do that until you prove me to me that you're not worthy of it so he's default position was everybody is worthy of 100% and then until proven otherwise tanya is a great example of that because she didn't start out great but she has given it 100% and I will give her 100% so I don't know I don't care how many times that she submits something she's giving it a go I'm giving it a go we're going to get there in the end and it's it's the reason why I do I do this it's it's really really great so let's have a look at Tanya's animation I didn't set up a file because I wasn't sure that she was going to be here but she's got some really great things going on here I love that walk I love that walk I love that walk let's watch it again Wow look at him we're gonna be so cute alright so what I'm gonna do is set this up so we can look and do some scribbles over it let's go to file let's I'm gonna reopen this actually I'm just working on the other screen so let's go see okay and now let's drag in to our clip editor delete they're both deleted drag this in 170 jump back to our camera and choose our spline - and let's go hot chow okay teeth okay I just trying to catch up on a few of the comments great philosophy for teaching true yeah Ted T was the name of my teacher if you ever get to learn from him he's working in Canada at the moment yeah he's great you know T just worked so hard I love her I love her right here we go let's have a look at this I'm gonna get my stroke out here so she's come a long way from from where she started so this still feels well hang on with we're running at 30 frames per second when we should be running 24 yes I can see the difference between 24 frames and 30 frames per second with my eyeballs I cannot see the difference between 24 and 25 though I'm not I'm not that good so let's play this this looks better all right so it's a timing and spacing issue you're getting a lot better at your body mechanics I'd like before so there's two things that I say two things but then I will mention like 12 things but the biggest thing that I see is the weight or the lack of weight in certain spots so with body mechanics we need to show as I said earlier we've got to fake fake it till you make it we've got to fake all out all our body mechanics to sell what's happening so here we need to show the push so what I would do rather than go I would start where is he he's pushing with his right foot and it's masked yeah this feels really light I can't give you an exact reason why but I think it is their spacing from 9 to 10 right so where am I am I on draw mode let's go to draw mode I'm just going to draw a circle around our little dude here so that's a little bit big let's go pencil Lane white using the pencil and the pencil is like super big okay let's go a little bit smaller okay let's delete everything it's a frame nine I want you to watch the spacing on our little dude here patch ow that's the spacing pop so if we can actually perhaps get him moving screen right before frame nine that'd that'd be good so shift frame nine a little bit closer to frame ten and that'll help sell sell the push here frame twenty-one foots on the ground and then he's in the air how did how did that happen right that that's where the the illusion of weight is broken because the weights on this foot weights on this foot then it's gone it's like dissipated so they're the things that we need to look for so you need to sell the fact that he's got all his weight on this foot and he's pushing off so keep it stuck on the ground on 22 and straighten that leg out right so it's gonna look a little bit like that and that'll sell that push which I'll have a look at the center of his head on these ups and downs I'm just holding to the right I think this one here this is your extreme right so if I was to draw the location this is the extreme this is that position there it's too too sharp right we want it to be more more rounded so you graph at it up round out these these corners here right to make it smoother down there okay here frame 33 what's happening with your foot see this here there's no weight there we need to show that way all right and the other thing is he's popped down let's draw the path tell me which frame goes wrong so if I was to draw that it looks like that right so we want we want it to look more like actually that's a little bit too rounded so let me just undo that so we want it to be more like that all right so shift this guy back a little bit and then round it out pachow here is too fast 69 popping down here right so you probably need a frame before frame 71 in the middle right and we want it to be slowing down so when we're doing spacing it's like where will we fire somewhere we slow so this is our contact frame we can tell because these toes on the ground excellent for that then he's coming down but he's still decelerating so we want him he's facing to be kind of if here are your three spacings of these ear let's call it an ear I'm not sure if it's um if it's right you want it to be closer to to this guy so you want it to be here rather than here because otherwise it's slowing down and then it's speeding up if the spacing is like this it is slowing down so he's going from here to here to here it's slowing down so add an extra frame there and then again we're going round so we're going straight rather than round so this is going to chart picture if we can round that out a little bit so maybe you know shift this a little bit over screen right doesn't mean to be able directly I said screen right and I drew an and an arrow down the wrong way let's go ariza let's go draw so screen left I swear I know my left in my rights so this is good now the walk has it feels like he's floating along a string and there's no up ups and downs there's not enough puppet ups and downs and the spacing let's just get rid of that so yeah I love how you are rolling onto the foot that's really good except good good good I'm here you can keep that in the same spot so it's a it shifts a little bit back when it should be you know a little bit screen right and here I think you can probably get rid of a frame now remember when I said get rid of a frame it's like reduce the timing and then adjust the spacing so hear how the foot is slowing down trace track the ankle tell me which frame is out of whack you can see that so delete delete the frame I reckon delete this one frame 122 and this is going to be the same on the other side of the cycle as well pachow here look at the spacing on our on our foot I can't tell which one's the contact frame I think that is right so we're going from here to here to here and that is slow but we want that to be fast us so we want to get rid of a frame here and that is going to be that the flip side of whatever pose that was on frame 22 is it no sorry it's going to be it's going to be a similar spot on the other side of the passing position so it's going to be up you want you want to get rid of a frame here and probably want to get rid of a frame here so you've got too many too many frames take some strategic ones out and make sure you get these the weight of the head down so as these foots gets planted you want the weight to come down right so each step the way the foot has to get there first and then the weight goes on so that's what I'm not seeing and that's where your downs come from and as the way goes on to it that hip pushes it up so that's when you get the twist happening so yeah just a few tweaks to that to that walk cycle and I did most of the time I want people to do shorter and shorter animations because like before you're spreading yourself very thin the longer the animation is the higher it is to keep up the quality over the length of that animation but for this one I actually told T to go longer she was ending it there and it's like he needs to because there's a cycle you can just repeat the key so it's not a problem but yeah he needs to walk all the way off to make it feel like a nice complete piece so he's like yeah I'm really really happy with my walk so I with my kick watch me walk cool so hoping that that's helped you out remember no matter how many times you submit this T I'm always here to to help you out and give you critiques because I want to I want to help everyone if you want to learn I'm gonna I'm going to help you I'm gonna push you further to whatever the next level is that you're at so I think I missed a couple of questions here I'll try and catch up are you adding new features to your camera rig yes eventually like that version that I did which is on github is just the updated I fixed all the issues that were there like he clicked on something in it and it came up with an error so yeah I changed everything to make it work and I will I'm thinking about I know Omar uses it so what I want to do is make it so that you actually if you're moving the camera like lens or anything like that you're only animating the armature rather than animating the armature and the camera it makes a little bit weird I'm gonna try and combine that but I've got so many things going on that it's there it's not it's not an issue right now so it's not a at the forefront right now okay I think I missed another question what is the animation you have done that you are most proud of can we see it I can show you yeah it's on my reel let me see kind of getting away from I think we're going to get overtime but hopefully everyone's cool with that so while I'm trying to find something if there's anyone else who's here he wants a critique yeah we'll let it be known in the in the thing T I've saved that for you so I'll send that for you send that to you so what is my favorite shot that I've animated so many that I haven't finished here it is this is the shot that I did animation school done in Maya was from a guy who doesn't know how to animate in Maya but this is it and that is was done with Ted T and the way we did this because it's kind of working collaboratively with with the instructor is acting acting it out Mike acted it out a bunch of a bunch of times and he's like that shot there because I was actually I'm I wonder if I still got that the acting reference of me I'm actually crying it's doing really good here we go this is the reference that was shot for it I'm so young look at me got old bearded man these were like animation as well you can be you don't have to be stuck to to what you are so this is it here step so yeah did some acting got tears in my eyes and he's like you got to get in there but what I've learned from from Ted was to be able to analyze all the tiny tiny movements that when your I got to that that was the last workshop that I got to write so when I got there it's like I know everything I know how to look at a reference I can see the body mechanics I know what's going on and then I took Ted T's class and it was like oh my god there's so much more that I wasn't seeing and he was showing me it was like look you got some micro movements here you've got this tiny little thing there and it was really really great to get stuck into the nitty-gritty and really after spending however many years learning animation and thinking that I'd mastered something and then to find out ah there is another level above that it was it was really exciting and then also like there's there's always there's always in the next level there's always the next level so that's something I'm quite proud of let's answer some questions are New York do you have any tips of animating someone's standing still someone's standing still is really really hard to animate so what you do is act it out and look at the body mechanics then start even if it's standing no maybe I'll stand up I'm coming to the end we're running out of time but if you are standing up try and do my best what you want to do is watch for the way to the hips right you can actually my feet are planted but I'm moving around quite a lot let's make this bigger so my feet are planted but I'm moving around quite a lot so maybe we just lower it so you can see a little bit better so what if you're going to animate someone's standing still it depends on how realistic that you're wanting to be if you're wanting to be oreal istic act out exactly what you're going to do full body so here I wouldn't do it because you can't see my feet but if it's a shot like this just go from here right and you know that your feet are planted just act it out and then animate it starting from the torso so looking at the torso first looking to see what happens like okay I'm twisting but when I'm when I'm doing that weight shift my chest wants to stay behind and then it catches up watching for those things exactly like exactly like watching in the reference for this one you're just wanting to to look at what's happening in the body starting from the torso working out okay hopefully just looking at the finger my gosh what happened to her oh she was dumped I don't know whether you can see but there's a shadow here she says stay and then the shadow leaves that I put that in there not to make it obvious but it's a it's a subtle thing and it made you see know what happened so I can just imagine she's trying to plead to her partner I'll just stay and then he walks off you just hear footsteps so that's what the shot was maybe she was teaching her dog yeah that's it she's trying to teach her dog and she needed the dog father did to come and tell her that she was doing it wrong question like in a car or a table of furniture how do you make the gaps like for instance the hood of the car where the hood opens up to see the engine how do you model the gaps you know what I mean now I I'm not a model but if you're working on a project only model what's going to be seen right and make sure that that is set out from the start so that you don't end up doing extra work that you're not actually needing to do so I'm not actually model a so maybe if you asked one of the modeling guys that they'll be able to help you out so question Wayne do you have how do you handle micro-expressions they are a lot shorter than the in-between frames aren't they no they're not when you're filming you look at what happens maybe we'll get this up here so when you're doing micro expressions and stuff like that you don't work on them first so for everyone who has done the body mechanics and workflow course you work in the same way so you go planning blockings blinding polish right and you can tackle each of those things you tackle each of those things at the right time so when you're doing a shot like that girl you start out with the most important thing the biggest things first so that is the torso in the head right you don't worry about the eyes of the face I'm just getting down the movements first you're blocking that out and then any like right I've got the timing down exactly now that exercise was he wanted me to do exactly like photo rotoscope as an exercise get as close to the real performance as you can capture as much of the essence as you can but when you're doing a less realistic animation you just need to focus on the big things right so here is the move that we're doing you don't need to do all the micro things you know just capture that move right the feeling of that move again with the feeling so the hidden it's a weight shift this way just capture the feeling of that weight shift you don't have to do each micro or the the the shoulder raised up one degree and then it went back down and it dragged like you don't need to worry about that it just needs to look good when you're doing micro-expressions you doing that when it's time to do them and you've got to sometimes you need to simplify where I know what you're saying where the microexpression might not land right on the keyframe but that's when you as the animator get to make it better than real life where okay it landed in between these two keyframes but if I put it on this position it's going to give this feeling or it's going to arrive at the same time there's another body part or something like that so maybe we need to break it up and we go the other way so we make we decide if we push that keyframe one frame later it's going to look better or it's going to make make it look like the faces he's got some flow going on that's not a good way of explaining it but there hopefully that that's helped you out now we are at the end of our time but I've gone over is there anybody else here who needs a critique who is actually here because the other ones I might just record and then post what do you guys say there's two ways that we can go about this I know it's the middle of the night for some some people thank you for sticking around appreciate that you guys are awesome but if you're not interested in seeing you could take the other ones I can just go offline and do them and because I want to want to help everyone I'm here I'm here to help everyone okay Phil are there any exercises you're making I'm taking after the bootcamp yes actually this was an exercise that I hope - I'm glad you reminded me so Phil you are a champion well you know you know I like Phil Phil was so smart he want to get better at animation so I helped him out on here and he was really really keen and he's like I want to go to animation school and he did that but the genius thing was phil was like spoke to his boss at his work and he got them to pay for his tuition and for me I think that is genius like you are a bloody champion feel like that is that is genius right so getting back to what I was talking about the animation exercise that I want everyone to do anyone who's interested in in it I've lost mine I think let's find it again CG cookie streams 2019 animation exercise so let's have a look at this so I'm going to jump into the clip editor let's drag this in here Omar posted this animate oh you can't see Omar posted this in the the thread and as an as a example of awesome animation and it is it's really really great it's a looping animation so what I would suggest everyone who's interested in learning you you can learn yourself by finding some great animation that you're like oh how did they do that I actually did this with I'm not sure whether you remember the movie Rio the first one when the monkeys are in the jungle and they've got all the stolen goods and they're doing that little dance thing I thought how did they get those little guys to move around like that that is amazing so what I did is I dropped it into a software called foot book or I use pencil 2d at the time because it was so long ago blender I couldn't do do it but then I traced over and I made little timing charts and I studied and it analyzed it and that is the best that's what I suggest everyone try and do if they wanted to get good at up up their animation skills so early on here we're in object mode let's select our camera and so what I want everyone to do is select a piece of animation that lives like holy crap that is unbelievable how did they do that then drop it into blender and figure it out and don't focus on everything at once all right let's get my stroke back let's go draw I'm gonna go to black and white let's go pencil and let's test no that's too big whoops let's go a little bit smaller we're gonna small on our way bigger let's go five let's see strength eight radius hey okay there we go that will do so what I want everyone to do is trace over what's happening so just I make it bigger I spent all that time that will do all right so just trace over the body parts and go how did he how did he do this right and then have a look at it draw a little cross-sections of like here's the middle of my thing and here's my head you don't need to be no one's looking at this so it's it's all you actually that was a bad drawing there I want to draw a line there I just look at the spacing right and go ah okay here here is the next one and pay attention to each of the body parts I'm just going to turn off onion skinning for now so you can see what I'm doing so the body here is the body okay we're turning now that's the middle of my gut oh here is a good pose and notice the flow of it see how he's got a nice action here watch watch this here's the breaking of the joint and every time we do a break up the joint it doesn't mean you know bend the elbow backwards it just means one body part goes before the other so what's the elbow the elbow is going first ah we're breaking the joint there see that and study study it and all we're speeding up so spacing is gone from here to here it's gone like that is it still going in an arc and let's have a look at our hand here where's a hand now oh yeah we're arcing around see how we're arcing around on the way there so do your own little animation studies and you will be surprised at how much that you learn from other people's work cool let's go back to the questions thumb up my first PowerPoint ever made I have no idea what that means question from Omar and fuel actually no I just answered the one from fuel what do people mean when they say weight shift you mean finding balance yeah weight shift so let's go back to full full screen so weight shift here is a weight shift we're shifting the weight from my left and looks at the screen right for you but my left hip has all the way and then we're just shifting it across my feet are staying still but my weight is shifting from one leg to the other and this happens in everything so it happens to lift up a leg you need to have the weight over the other leg so now I my weight is over my right left for you I can lift up my left leg if my weight is over my right leg I can't lift up if I try and lift up my my right leg I fall down right so that's what a that's what a weight shift is alright the best PowerPoint ever made will you yeah this one here have no idea what you mean alright folks I think I will just record a little critique for the other ones let's have a look who didn't I get two let's go back to the livestream so further I did further please make sure that you update your your work that'll be good Kenny I know Kenny's probably watching but here's another one Kenny's trying really super super hard and he's using Maya which is fine but I think I want to bestow people some some some more advice words of wisdom from Wayne before we before we sign off and that is I think it's really important to learn things in the correct order to learn them so when people start animation they get super super excited they're like wow I want to make things move and they don't realize how hard animation is animation is really really really hard and we give we get the illusion that it's easy because it's really easy to watch all you need to do is look and you're watching it but to do it it takes so much work and it takes so much effort and skill you need to build up your skill so I think about it as laying down the foundation of piling up a whole bunch of papers right so when we're learning animation where we're piling a bunch of papers down and every day that we don't do animation or every day in general the wind comes and it blows up some other papers off on the top right and if we if we learn at a slow and steady pace we can make sure that our tower of papers papers is nice and neat right and it's a very strong foundation but if we go too fast and we just pile stuff on then our pile of papers is all jagged and it's it's rocky you might get up to here and it and it tips over and because every day the wind blows I'm off it might just topple over your whole entire tower so I think about it as slow and steady wins the race so when you start learning everyone wants to go and do those crazy animated fight scenes and stuff like that but you need to focus on the really simple stuff first because everything is a bouncing ball so start out with the animation boot camp just focus on only what is in the exercise the other stuff comes later you're adding those layers of paper to make a really high mountain of paper and if one goes look at my animation tower right but if you were going too fast it's you're not going to build yourself a strong foundation now Kenny is one of those people who is super super super keen but he's going way too fast and he's missing stuff and so he's putting his piles all crooked and he's not understanding fully what he needs to understand it was like when I applied for animation school I thought it was at this level I'm like oh yeah I can do acting shots I've done the bouncing ball of them all I've done all that and then I said many of my work and the instructor or the leader the director of the of the school was like actually you belong in the beginners class and it was like what I don't understand why I've tried so hard off of read Richard Reeves book book I've tried everything and it was now that I look back I am very grateful that he did that because my foundation wasn't right all my papers were crooked and I didn't actually understand what I was doing so when I went back and I focused on those simple exercises it was like oh my god it was like I had that crooked tower and me and my instructors just went up and we straightened everything and it was like I get it now I fully understand so people are Kenny I will give you hopefully he's not probably not going to watch this thing but I'll give him a special critique because he is wanting to jump to he's wanting to jump too far so here is he's his um oops that's the wrong one here is easy he's little walk cycle he was an example of when you don't need sounds so we just turn the sound down so here's that here's the walk cycle and there's a lot of stuff about the spacing and you know the the foot slipping on the ground and stuff like that where he just jumping too too far so you need to go back and straighten up that that mountain so I want him to actually go back and look at his pendulum all right here is a pendulum and here is a simple assignment when you go okay you might begin or might look at this and go oh that that's alright that's looking pretty good but if we slow it down I won't give her the full critique now just paying attention to what's happening here like the spacing it starts too quick and then it gets here and it bounces off and here now our antenna goes from this is correct correct and then it pops up how did why is it moving in that direction it's just moving in the wrong direction and then it takes way too many frames to change direction because it should be following it's it's the foundation like you need to have a good strong foundation and what I want to do for Kenny is straighten up that pile so then even get back to this walk cycle and go ah I understand it and now and everything is going to make make a lot more sense all right folks well if there are no please could take my eye okay one last one Parra's critique also not parrot Paris no that's this is the wrong one anyone who wasn't here I will critique separately so this is the one I think I want you to you want me to critique is that is that right so here is the here's the eye moving around there's no sound on this one um okay I don't get it to tell you the truth like I don't I don't really know what you want me to think about it but I'm seeing you know the eyes are moving around who if we're looking at this eye this pupil I can't draw on this maybe I maybe I drag it in you know I will drag it in here is a critique let's drag it into a clip editor final one what I could say is I think you're working on rotation which is pretty difficult because you're understanding rotation hopefully you're on XYZ or understanding rotation is a little bit difficult okay where are we let's just have a look at one of these eyeballs okay what I want you to do is this focus on one yeah let's draw so figure out the spacing so here is that spacing here is that spacing here's our spacing is that the one that moves around it's like each change in direction where we going each changing direction I think you can smooth them out Boing Boing Boing there's one really crazy one where is it it's not really much to say man I don't understand what the point is the Gerudo finding gold and lost objects alright cool so what I would suggest is if you're having fun you're doing everything right so you don't need to worry about about about that it's see it yeah each each to their own if you're enjoying what you're doing then you are doing everything right the thing that I notice most is actually the z-fighting which is where you've got the where they intersect everything is is fighting there so what I would do I don't know how the textures work or anything like that just make sure that they're not in exactly the same 3d space you can just shift one slightly above the other and then you won't get that Z fighting there yeah it's pretty crazy isn't it it's just an eyeball I'm looking at you I'm looking at you we're all looking at you but not really looking at you I think I went to school with a guy who had eyes like that but anyway folks I think we're gonna call it quits for today everyone who I haven't done a critique for I will record that separately and post it up to see you guys however however we want however it's possible so - before we sign off I would like to say thank you for everyone who has has joined in make sure that you post your work and if you ever want me to look at something on the site please feel free to mention me so at way low waa y LW and i will be sure to have a look at it if you're doing the animation courses mostly work post your work it's the way to get better I look at it and I'll try and push you to the next level level whatever level that is at alright thank you very much folks I've had a lot of fun we'll do these again in the future and yeah sorry I didn't get to get to everyone but um yeah peace out everyone have a good rest of the day thanks for sticking out there hey Remington it is Wayne here mate sorry I didn't get a chance to look at your work during the livestream today but I thought I would give you a personal critique because you've done a really great in fun animation here so yeah I want to help you out first of all let's have a look at your comments so here's the character I design an animated looks great man we'd love your feedback on the animation your animations are basically taught me a lot on the F curves you know welcome the second link I posted has a flip and I'm curious as to how you handle the flip I've tried similar thing to your box flipping across the ground but it still doesn't feel right to me I think that was Chrismukkah Falls box flipping across the ground but online but that's okay let's have a look I think it's a really cool man I think this is really cool so so cute so so cute I love the stop-motion feel of it and I love you know the to see any thing and I can see that you've got some textures animated on it so it makes it look like they're finger prints we haven't been really really good so how would I improve this I would have a look at the popping of our if he's a volcano I'm not really sure so when he pops from here I'm just going to draw let's get this happening I'm on my lines laughs so let's just do a slight outline of our character with these little feet yeah yeah so there there's our character and our bubbles right here we want it to kind of Bend back this is okay all this stuff this is all good but can you bend the this part back to where it came from so it doesn't pop so big right and then you can slow in to that side so then the next frame can be a little bit further you know like maybe the next frame could be over there so it's just taking a longer to get over there and with your little volcano stuff make sure that that follows where it came from all right so it's going this way then that way and then it can maybe catch up so it's like that and then this frame bend it back this way because you've got the follow through so there that's what I would do pachow and then also when you're going the other way just bend it back slightly always think if you're like how do I do the follow through an overlap it's like when in doubt bend it back towards where it came from and see whether it looks better if not you know try the other way but that's that's what I would do for that walk cycle I do love the bounce when one wing wing wing it's so cute man yeah just that flipping is just way too big there okay let's have a look at the other animation I'm going to turn this one off so I'm going to draw on this layer and going to select my camera so good there's no sound on when I'm doing it here but yeah it's really good so again it's just a little bit of follow-through an overlap on this guy so bend stuff back to where it's wards where it came from so this is yeah see how he's popping forward bend these little whatever it is I don't know volcano bit back towards where it came from let's go pencil so rather than that and then go to there on that frame all right hopefully that make sense again Bend that back towards where he came from you get the idea now when you're doing don't know if you can do if you can do squash and stretch on this guy it'll be nice to squash him on this frame alright so yeah just cut and keep the volume so this frame is a frame before squash him and then as he's trying to take off stretching back up again yeah let's see what that looks like I don't know whether it'll kill the idea that you've got going on yeah you've got a little bit of overlap on the on the thing on his head here but it's not happening all right way so drag it from where it came from and then follow through so go past where you want to go so it should go over sideways drag follow-through like that drag follow-through hopefully that made sense yeah same with that that one there then the flip you're worried about the flip what I would do see how he's he stopped in the same spot again I would try keeping moving up higher right higher higher higher and then squashing down like a bouncing ball but a cartoony bouncing ball so this frame here see what would happen if you can stretch in this way right and then you have to change the timing but then splatting down right so then and then return to normal so bouncing bouncing back so hopefully that makes sense and then pause pause pause which is good now before he pops up this is a good a good frame I like it I like the pose and I even like that papa so let me just mark this one on this frame at least and you want to go lower so squash him down here not hard not that's way too much but if this is I'm going to draw two friends before up now he might move on one frame he might move over two frames might move more you got a judge on on what it's going to be so this is he's held position right after he's settled now before he goes big and popped up into the air go into the opposite direction which will be here so this is this is a frame let me just duplicate it and then I'm just gonna squash this guy so let me [Music] let's grab it if really crude but hopefully you can see so this gives you it's probably a bit much there but it gives the the audience in anticipation before before it happens and it's going to make it pop a little bit more and I like I like to hold a lot he should also come down you should come down a little bit sooner day so I like how he's pop folding in the air but then he should come down like a bouncing ball so and don't don't turn it in the air let him come down facing the camera but if you wanted to turn he needs a gland and then twist if you know what I mean but yeah it's really really cute I love it she's so cute so cute man so cute well done hopefully helps you out make sure you improve on your own work but good work hey Kenny when he may I didn't get a chance to you critique your work during the livestream today I know that you're at work so I thought I'd take my o time into it afterwards because I believe in you man I believe in you so um you've asked me to critique these two walk cycles before you move on to the body mechanics course and looking at this there's quite there's still some work to do on the basics other in the foundations before moving on like in the in the live stream I explained it as a when you're learning to animate you're building a tower of papers like a ream of like a4 sheets of paper and you need to go at the right pace because if you try and go too quickly it's like you're flapping down these things papers and they're all jagged and crooked and every day that we don't animate or actually every day it's like the wind comes and blows some papers off the top and if we have a really strong foundation where everything's nice and tight less gets blown off off the top of the of the pile and of course if you slapping it down too fast in the wing comes along and blows it off and you've lost you've actually actually haven't learnt a lot you know what you don't understand because your foundation wasn't solid and everything's fallen over and yeah you're animating you're making stuff move but you're not really understanding the reason it's behind it while it looks good why it looks bad so for you looking at these walk cycles I I'll give you some critiques but I want you to go back to the other one which I'll explain later on so let's have a look at these these walk cycles so everything should be you should be aiming to move things in an arc and I can see you're using I cave for the arms which is fine so you've got you know your eye here you just have a look at what's the path of these these wrists you know so just track them so that kind of goes like this right and we want to avoid that we want the arm to be nice and smooth and there's actually on the torso you're just walking straight ahead like like this like there's no upper there's no movement of the hips side to side and there's no rocking lot on that so that's why it's probably better to work on the on the stomp character you know just the legs which I'll go over in a minute because once you've got that down right it becomes a lot easier because it's like Sun in the background there right so we're back sorry about that so yeah it's better to work on the everything from the torso down first which is actually the the stomp once you get the the stomp walk working all you need to do is add the top half of the character on top of that and it's as I said it's the rotating and it's actually moving the arms you know in a arc rather than been in a rather than you know straight line it's like the icao gives you so with just speaking about the hips and down like we need to make sure that everything is happening at the right time at the moment if we look at our hips like our hips are going down low yeah that it's not connected right so like this one actually I think either side of the cycle isn't the same so the downs on the left step and the down on the right step is not actually the same because this one is quite low let's go I'm just mark the hips there I know it's the same but it's not it's the same height but this spacing must be different let's have a look at it from the front okay let's play this yeah can you see well I will just end it there guys let's go front view can you see how maybe you here so I don't know what frame we've got 439 - 440 so 439 - 440 there's a pop down and then it pops back up and then this side this step is much smoother so do you see how it's not even on each side and this do-do-do-do-do-do so we need to make sure that our curves are even and then also there's actually no no weight shift like yeah he's leaning over but it's not kind of making sense so what I think is pause on this one and go and go earlier to get that foundation correct and then this one's going to be so much easier so let's go back - that's that one let's do this one what I want to do is go to the camera again go to object mode and then change the other one here is your stomp walk cycle right so the same deal here we want this to be a schedule made you know no feet to be sliding we want our feet to stick on the ground right this foot has the weight on it so I can't move forward posture it has to stick on the ground but you can see it's flopping all over the place see how it's just sliding sliding sliding sliding sliding sliding sliding sliding sliding and this yeah so once this hits hits the ground there it needs to stick in the same spot and then and then we've liftoff also you want that to be twisting so his head is actually his hips right so you want to be twisting towards the foot that's coming down and then once it takes the weight that side so say if I'm stepping on my right foot that side is going to push up just like in the video that I did so this hip here he's about to take the way it's going to push up right push it push it up so we're going to rotate the whole head and also what I'm saying is this is his his right foot it's going to twist around that way so that he the whole thing for if you're looking at the top he's going to twist that side and then when he steps on the other side it's going to twist towards that way hopefully that makes sense but the biggest thing is I can see that it's an in place walk where you're just translating the root forward but he's feet are sliding all over the ground so what I suggest for this one is we go back even further so let's just add a new layer let's move this one down and I want to focus on let's hide that one yep hidden let's go camera and let's go object mode and change this one to be whoops-a-daisy this is what we got yes here is we where I think you're at so what I want you to do is go back to this one and then move forward from here because there's a lot of in there's a lot of lessons to learn in this one here so I'll go stroke or color I should I do this one Ian let's do it in green so going back to the start here I think I've already given you notes on on this one but we want to make this platform pause for a play that's two pencil you want to make this platform pause for at least you know maybe eight to ten frames I'll hold it before it even starts so you can see here I just draw that one there so this facing just starts really big so I just draw a timing chart it's like it's going from here to here right how does it get there so we want to hold in this position and then we want to speed up so we need to speed up so the spacing should be like slow getting bigger getting bigger and then slowing down and then coming back the other way you know so see here we're just hitting a wall and bouncing off and then we're hitting a wall over here it says remove that Bangor hitting an imaginary wall and bouncing off so when we get to these positions we want to really every change of direction you want to slow out so we want to go nice and nice and slow out actually what the the graph editor would look like imagine okay this is the x-axis right so your X curve will look like this look like that that is the extreme so this part here is going to slide in and out nicely this part here is going to slow in and out nicely and then we come to a little bit of a settle at the moment your curve will look like this too sharp here too sharp here make sense some grab your handles pull them out make it nice and round here okay then let's have a look at the actual tail the pendulum you do have a lot of you go some nice things going on here it's going to shrink this down so here so we don't want it to this is petty this isn't powered by anything it's just total follow-through an overlap so we can't go past see how it's jumping backwards here let's turn on our onion skinning so turn off that onion skin yeah so here is our start here is our second part and here's our third frame so what we're actually doing I'll just draw it over here is we are going up and then popping up like that but no we shouldn't we should be nice and smooth so this should be straight and this should be a little bit bent and then this should be it can't be further past there oops so it's probably going to be like that right and then when it changes direction it's going to start going opposite direction so this is gonna because it was heading that way it's now going this way these are going to start bending back this way but it takes way too long see it actually reverses when it's all the way over here so it just needs to happen faster but this is going to change after you do your after you change your platform here so this is what I want you to focus on now just do the platform in first and then get the follow through correct so it can't go past where it came from right everything should be start at the top and work your way down but like this should point back to where it came from back to where it came from like and and then yeah start from there hopefully that's been clear yes sorry I couldn't talk about it in in the livestream but I yeah I think you really came but go back to these ones and you'll do a lot better you'll be seen you'll surprise yourself people like everything starts to make sense now everything's falling into place I call so good luck hit me up on the site just @mention me if you need any more help cool hey naked it is Wayne here mo sorry I couldn't get to your critique in the livestream but what I'm going to do is record it live for you now so let's have a look at the two animations that you have done I'll just bring up the comment so you like having us practice as much as I should shame on you but I struggle making the characters feel alive what things what things you do to make your character feel alive here are some links the animations are done outside the courses with the bonbon rings first of all well done on doing your own stuff with these rigs that's why we made them so you can animate in practice so let's have a look at these two ones here so just play it so I can't remember if you have done the the body mechanics course or not but how do you make it feel alive this is a good excellent question the first step is to look at reference to actually look what's happening in the real world so and then we base our animation on that we can either like rotoscope isn't the correct word for it but we can borrow those poses and those the timing etc and and actually what's happening from our real-life reference and then we apply that to our care and you'll be able to see ah lots of things are happening here that that we wouldn't think about to animate just off the top of our heads which is why we look at the which is why we look at animation sorry which is why we look at video reference so I'm just gonna zoom in here and just start doing some some drawings so the thing that I noticed the most is just the poses so this looks like blocking which is which is fine but it is in spline so it's spotting which is a weird word but that's that's what it what it is so this pose here I have to start it doesn't feel very natural like I don't know who weighs or kind of like this so I think this foot needs to be back back a little bit so that we've got you know he's leg a little bit like that rather than all the way out there and that's gonna help make a pose feel more natural but make sure you feel reference so this is what you want to do this sorry this is the action that you want to do so just get in your backyard or your garage and in film it to see what what happens and then pick your favorite your favorite pose so you'll pay favorite take of that okay the next thing is I see it's really hard to know with your blocking it's really hard to know what are the key frames that you've put in there and what the computer has given you so in this stage here it just looks really really messy so how it's this foot is just moving by itself I just cleave clean that up turn off my onion skinning for the moment so this leg is just dragging across there but and yeah it's going across in the air and then down without any spacing then when we're jumping so frame 38 we are just lifting up here is our character and our feet right this is our character and we go to this pose here but how did he one of the body mechanics that got in there so he's going from the ground to the air so you I'm trying to jump now without without doing any type of squash or anticipation beforehand all right I'm trying to jump I can't but if I crouch and then come up AHA I can jump so this is what you're missing here you're you've got to go down but the part that's missing is the push off so your feet are just jumping up in the air without pushing off first so you need to show how he's getting into the air so show the push off which will be something like around here all right get these feet back on the ground and then work on the timing as well so and then he's jumping now I want you to look at what's happening with this with the spacing here look at your arm this arm is going from here to here to here to here to I'm guessing there so first of all where is it the fastest and where is it the slowest she'll try to punch stopping when you're pulling back you're gonna and then start going forward it's going to start slow and speed up but what you're doing is you're starting fast and slowing down before the before the punch so just make sure look at that spacing all the way over there to there that is a huge pachow and then you'll instantly slide down slowing down slowing down slowing down so that's what's wrong there and it looks like he's actually head-butting it rather than rather than punching it because he's he's not extending he's he extending his arm back but he's not extending his arm forward so yeah again reference look at some video reference and then study it and you'll be able to pick out the poses and go ha I know what's happening so that's what is happening in that PO sorry in that animation just make sure you're also key or you're in betweens the moment as I said it's really hard to tell what you've animated and what the computer has given given us so maybe go back to the body mechanics course and watch the other bit of our workflow so that you can see ah we're looking at a keyframes put our keyframes in there first figure out our timing and then go back and do in betweens and all the more important poses so start with the most important stuff down to the less important stuff that's going to help you out in that one now in the other one now let's have a look at the colored lines here object mode camera and head show so with this one let's just play this guy easy yeah again just missing a few poses so here how are you getting from the ground into the air right so here is actually I should be let's undo that let's go into my stroke and draw so I want to draw this layer in a different color let's draw this one in blue okay we've got our squash here and then we want our hips to accelerate alright but our feet need to push off on the ground so we want to show our feet on the ground maybe here keep them on the ground so that we've got our stretch happening which shows our push off right and then have a look at this arc I bet if you I'll draw it kind of offset but it goes up actually it goes up across and then kind of diagonal like like that so that I'm trying to draw the hips butt off offset just track those hips they are not traveling in an arc again when we land we want to be landing in the stretched position so when our feet to land first but it'll kind of be more up like this right we want our feet to land and then we want to squash down like this so that's going to help help you out now if you can what you can do I don't know if you can read this or not but what I would do is try and rig it and have the space and go see how is it's here and then it's here we want this spacing to be fast we wanted to get to the ground in in one maybe two frames all right so this is taking too long one two three three frames to get to the ground is way too long I would go for one frame but before you get there say this is the the contact frame right bend it right and keep keep stomp on the ground squash him down because we want to anticipate before we go up and then stretch it up stretch him stretching big right let's have a look at that yeah it says ignore this part here so that's what I would try and do and one thing that I saw in my mind when we played when I played this is I expected him to either at the end look up so he's kind of looking to where he's coming for wood where he went or he starts to walk off and then the thing hits him in the butt and he only flies off or something like that that would be kind of fun yeah so that's it they're the two animations hopefully you got something out of this sorry I didn't get to it in the time but keep doing what you're doing you're awesome thanks man hey Mark Wayne here mate sorry I didn't get to review your work during the livestream today but I thought I would give you a short video and do it record it live anyway so this is I've already got this set up inside blender and we are looking at your notes here which is this the first animation that you tried doing the 2d stick figure animation exercise well done it's good to see that you are doing your own interpretation on things that's great I think it's a really good wait wait for learn so they're just stories in progress with crude drawings and a lot of in-betweens and missing but let's let's have a look at it here it is okay so yeah I kind of like you you stick figures man they've got a got a certain charm to him the one thing that yeah the one thing I don't know whether you're going to add sound to it or anything like that but it looks the unfinished parts to me it seems like it could be a loop right so you know how we start at the start there's a I'm assuming this as a man and we've got the woman over here and woman catches the baby puts it down she passes away then he becomes old I don't know where the son I don't know why he goes away and comes back that bits unclear to me whether he is forgetting like being a bad parent because he's focusing on himself and his own pain rather than taking care of the of the child and then he comes back big so maybe we could actually see him transform on the screen into the big person and then he dies oh I've said so here maybe he could be sad right and then a woman comes along I'm assuming it's a woman and then we're back at the start where then the woman were together I'm saying so it's so it's a looping thing so yeah maybe that's an idea for the story I can't critique you too much on the actual animation because I know that there this is obviously a work in progress it's not that's not final or or anything like that but I can see a few things I think when we are blocking stuff out I'm going to get a little bit I don't know the correct word but we've got our keyframes here up so imagine that we're holding a keyframe holding the keyframe actually let's just change our pen let's go black pencil all right so holding the keyframe holding a keyframe and then this is the the same keyframe and then he is here as a changed keyframe right when we're blocking things out and we're working in a stepped mode which is what happens with when you draw in grease pencil or whatever it's going to display that until the next frame comes along right so it's a hold what we need to do is copy the same pose for as long as we want to hold but I certainly want to hold from here to here we won't copy it at the start position and at the end position even if we want even if that end position is going to change only because it looks like everything's happening in in fast-forward and this I think will help you block out your timing so rather than thinking about it as this is my beat here here is here is my second beat here is my second third beat we want to have here's the start of my beat and here is the start of the the end of that beat so we want to hold it really long now this won't make a lot of sense in 2d animation but when you work in 3d and you're holding that it's going to make perfect sense because we are holding in the same position all the way to here so say let's pick some arbitrary numbers this is frame 1 and this is frame 100 right and we want actually that's too high let's just say it's frame 20 all right so we want the same position to be held for 19 frames and then we want a new pose to have been on frame 24 so then we've got 24 frame sorry 4 frames of transition right hold transition new pose in 3d we want to position this keyframe here otherwise it's going to go and we get all these changes here so it might help you in your time I not this is just an idea but if you're drawing in grease pencil put your pose here which is your drawing and then put a duplicate of that pose on here right even though it might change or whatever just to help block out your timing so that you can get an idea of okay this beat is going to happen for this length of time because if I watch this it's all just actually that beats that beats nice but all this stuff just it's too fast everything is happening too too fast it needs to be you you want to work on your timing first and watch it again then there might help or it might might not I think in the transitions you can also take more time so by a transition I mean he's angry angry angry and then all of a sudden patrol he's become an old man I would take a lot longer for that to happen so double triple maybe even quadruple the amount of time that happens so it becomes a bigger beat and that's what I'm talking about with like holding holding it and those transitions it's a timing of which should be should be longer so I think that should be longer and yeah well what only one other note that I've got here are two more notes for you to monitor the spacing for our baby if we're falling right we want the spacing should always speed up so it should go you know put our charger speeding up but if we look at our spacing we got here we got here we're slowing down and then we'll speed up again so it's just a little bit of a spacing issue we could work on that but it's rough you know but that's one of the comments that have and the final one is this bit here isn't clear that she is sick and dying so I think you need some more drawings there or to make it obvious and he needs to kind of react and when you've got many people on many characters on on the screen you need to direct the audience as to where they should be looking so the way we do that is we can you know make them pose like oh what's wrong makes her make him like more aware of direct his attention towards her and also only have one person doing a big movement at a time so if she's dying the other guy is not moving very much so the audience is going to look at what's moving more but yeah just that that their death part there it's not clear I think you can make a bigger bigger bit of that but yeah anyway they're the thoughts that I that I have for you you know really lucky drawings it's it's got a little charm it's a nice little story even though it's very sad but hopefully it's not from personal experience fingers crossed it's not but cool hopefully they stopped yeah I'll see you in the future get a parrot it's Wayne Dixon here so I didn't get a chance to look at your work during a live stream today but I will thought I would do a personal video for you critiquing your work and yeah hopefully that'll help you out but let's have a look at your comment here hi Wayne hello he was a short animation I made in response to the Amazon fires I know isn't that terrible my first big project besides tutorials including your treasure chest oh cool I'm have I seen your treasure chest I'd like to see it if I haven't after starting to learn blender only a few months ago cool well done congratulations and welcome to your journey of learning I'm Keith coupe I'm curious about this method to keep the trees arm bone attached to the bendy bone and the squash and stretch pulls the mesh away from the arm bone not entirely sure I think I know what you're talking but let's see let's see what we're talking yeah when we get there okay so I'm looking at your your animation so it's obviously about the this steak so I think it has a certain beginners charm to it I think it's really good like that one thing that can benefit you is a couple of the camera transitions so often beginners will will move the camera and the camera is very jerky and it moves in a very linear leaning away in the live stream I spoke about the add-on that that will help you a help he said turns around that's funny and he's eating meat while everything is burning okay so this is big project well done on getting it all done when you're learning I don't want to discourage you because you everyone's going to start at a certain level but don't try and improve everything at once just pick one area to improve on and then that that's what you focus on and trying to improve that so one thing you could do which actually moving forward will be helpful is to use a camera rig now included in blender is the add camera rigs add-on which I coded so if you go to your add-on so that I just went to the Preferences go to add-ons and go to add camera rig you see this guy here this is the one that I coded with some other people and let's just close this down what does it do well when we're in object mode we can go shift a add a camera let's have a look at the dolly camera ring remember animating we can then animate our camera moves using these these controls and it makes it a lot easier to get smooth transitions especially when the camera goes when it rotates or when it moves from one position to the next so if you're looking at I don't know how advanced you are in the Indy animation courses but when you are advancing oh yeah when you when you get to the graph editor bits be the thing I want you to pay attention to is there we go object mode let's draw imagine we're in the graph editor right let's when we do a transition so a camera is whole he's being held and then it's it's changing to a new position let's just say this is the X location or whatever this curve here is really really linear and strike which gives you even changes right but if you just edit it so that our curve looks like that so I'll draw it like that you got a nice smooth transition here and that's going to get rid of this like even spacing and it's going to make your transitions a lot better so that's one thing that I would suggest that you start on first because that's going to help everything so let's get back to where I was was that power grid so yeah just focus on one thing I think yeah these dudes are really funny man they're really funny the been deboned so I think it's this that you're having issues with so I think you've got a bendy bone in this thing here let me know if I'm if I'm right so I think you have a bendy bone right that's meant to be a bendy bone and you've got your arms stuck on there right and their bones like that and when you bend it like this they don't stay connected to that when you twist a new turn and whatever I mean you have to manually update it well there's a way that you can actually do that in blender there's a new feature in 2.8 it's actually called the armature constraint let's see what's the easiest way I might just draw it for you all right let's just draw it any different programs it makes it a little bit easier so here's your been deboned this is the one that does all the crazy crazy bending and this is your arm bone I'm just going to draw it like that so what you do is you add a an armature constraint come straight to this one and you remove the parent right if this is it can't be parented to this guy if it's parented to that guy you get double transformations so when this one stretches around and does all crazy things so say if we do a bending like that what happens is this with the armature constraint will warp with it it will follow these it will follow the the bend of our control here so there we go armature constraint and then make sure that this isn't parented to anything except if you have a route control in your rig so this is a loop control here it can be parented to the to the route control do to do parent to the route control parent to the route control right a can't it cannot be parented to that guy so let me just show you back in blender what that is let's go file let me just mmm do I need to save that for you maybe yeah I'll just save it and I'll let you download it in case you want so let's go file new and let's delete everything and you're chopping to the front so imagine that this is your armature I'm going to jump into your edit mode this is our been deboned right I'm going to change the way that is displayed so let's go viewport display b-bone let's just also not open then debones to connect our segments right this is our defamation bone and let's call this one our arm bone right so this is the tree trunk and this is our arm bone right so at the moment you can tell that this bone is not parented to anything although if it did have a root bone in the in the armature parented to that and let's use a an armature constraint right so let's go into pose mode we want to you can't automatically add the target to the this one but all the other constrains you can so let's go constraints and let's go armature constrain this is a new one here then we need to add the target bone and select the name of our armature in this file it is called a mature and the bone it is trunk so now that has added the constraints to it so if we do a say let's twist this bone so let's go roll out ha ha you see that it stays with it and let's just do scale in scale out this this all so that's where that constraint does except if we accidentally parent it I'll show you what happens so let's like this and then that one ctrl P who is your whoops ctrl P select offset and then I might need to scale this one see how you get if I scale this see how it's good ee big that's because it's getting double transformation it's taking the transformation from the constraint and it's taking the transformation from the parent and if adding them together and you got crazy deformations here but if we go back into edit mode and delete our parent then jump back into pose mode you'll see when we scale this how it's working working correctly so let's just well let's just remove that so yet obviously this is a crude example because you'd add some controls to be able to do the bending and stuff that I said but that's maybe this is is helpful for you for file save as armature Quan straight then hopefully that's helped you out keep doing what you're doing and remember don't try and take on too much learning at once just focus on one thing so keep keep making your projects and stuff you just focus on improving one area at a time and you will get to where you want to get to cool peace out

Channel: CG Cookie

Views: 89,761

Keywords: blender, critique, animation, curves, keyframes, principles, blender tutorial

Id: oAbzCKXKaPQ

Length: 162min 18sec (9738 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 15 2019