So in this next series of lessons, I want us to focus on several different principles of animation.
The first one is going to be follow through and follow through is important because it gives a little
more life and believability to our animations.
You can think about follow through in terms of what is following the leader.
So if we have this robot rig and we're animating this from right to left and eventually it's going to
pick up this box, but if it's going from right to left, let's just start over here on frame 10 and
we will hit a key here and then we'll go forward in time.
And.
Please sit over the box approximately where it will be, and it's very rigid, this tale basically is
not affected by this animation yet.
So if we bring down the timeline, so it'll loop back a little quicker.
So it moves pretty quickly right now.
But we can tell that it's very stiff.
You know, there's no animation yet on the tail and follow through would help loosen this up.
I wanted to take one second to pause the lesson, to correct myself and also clarify some of the terms
I'm using when I'm talking about follow through.
That's actually the action that happens after the driver has stopped.
So in this case, the driver is this top part of the robot, the ball.
And what's happening at the beginning is actually called drag.
This is dragging behind.
Right.
And then as the drag continues and the ball stops, the follow through means that this object, the
secondary motion, which is another term secondary motion, this follows through.
OK, so the secondary motion is really anything that happens kind of outside of the main driver.
So this is secondary motion that drags.
And when the main robot stops, we have follow through.
OK, this part specifically just this part is follow through after the main robot stops.
That's follow through.
That's what I want to correct here.
As I'm discussing the topics, it can be a little confusing, the difference between overlapping action,
which this can also be considered overlapping action because it happens while something else is happening.
This is kind of coming to a stop.
But basically we have drag we have follow through here and we have overlapping action down the chain,
really can be considered overlapping action.
There's rotations happening on different frames.
But I mean, what we call these things definitely makes it sound a little more educated.
But the reality is, if you understand the physics and why things are moving the way they are, you
can call them whatever you want to as far as I'm concerned.
But for someone who's super stickler on having the very correct terms, this is actually drag.
What we're going to do first is called drag.
Follow through is what's going to happen afterward.
All this stuff, it's going to follow through.
OK, thanks for watching.
And let's pick back up at the lesson so it moves pretty quickly right now.
But we can tell that it's very stiff and follow through would help loosen this up so we can use these
other controls here to help add follow through and so we can see what that means here in a second.
So I'm going to shift click the top one in so I can see where the animation is starting.
And I hit a key on everything and then I'm going to hit a key at the end.
So it's still the same thing and actually want to grab the bottom one as well.
Just so we add all of that in there.
And there's several different ways that follow through.
The most preferred way is that we would set a key on everything and add offsets in as we want them going
forward.
But there's also another way that you can animate everything together and then add offsets later in
the graph editor.
So let's let's think about what we need to do.
This thing is moving forward and we want this to drag backward.
We want to follow it through from the animation up here down to the bottom of the tail.
So let's just select all of the bottom tail pieces and then let's go about halfway, which is going
to be frame twenty because we have twenty frames of animation here from 10 to 30.
So halfway is twenty.
So we'll just take all of this and when everything is selected, we'll just rotate it to the right here.
And now we can see that this actually has some kind of loosening of the animation.
It feels like this is actually being dragged by the ball and it's a separate piece and all of these
hinges are working and there's weight to the bottom.
So it makes it feel like there's some life to this.
Now, the only thing is obviously this is all crashing through the box here and it comes to a pretty
hard stop when we get to the box.
So let's fix that.
Let's bring up the main control and we'll bring it down towards the end so it'll be in this end position.
So I'm just going to move forward a little bit, a frame 40 and hit another key.
And I'm going to move this up here.
And now that I've moved this up, we could leave it this way so that it travels upward and then down,
or if we want it to start from the same height, we could go to the graph editor and see that different
height and the graph editor by going to Windows animation graph editor.
And now we can see that there is a height difference and we know translate why is height?
If we look over here, that's vertical and if we look at the manipulator of the control, we can also
tell that it is why it's yellow right now, because we most recently used it.
So if we click this box in the middle, it'll deselect that.
So now we can see it's green.
So that correlates the green curve over here.
So we know this is the key frame that we're currently seeing here in the viewport.
And if I drag this over so we can see the effect it's going to have, I can hold down shift in middle
mouse, drag this up.
And it'll kind of snap to that height so we can just kind of eyeball it and that'll be fine.
We could also like this copy the value command, see select the key we're currently on in Command V,
and it's already the same value.
So that works.
So it starts at that height and then it travels over and then it goes down.
So what we need to do is add some rotation to the tail, and that's really what follow through is all
about, is adding this type of believability.
And we want it to kind of finish up around frame 40, maybe just for now for the start.
And we know that if this thing is traveling, that the end position here, it's always trying to follow.
Right.
It's always trailing behind.
So it's not going to stop at the exact same frame as this one.
So we can keep this rotation back so that it's still being dragged.
And then when it reaches the slowing down point, it can swing forward.
So let's get to maybe this position and swing it forward and see if that helps so we can see that doesn't
look as believable as the start here.
So you want to, you know, take a cue from the curves in our graph, Ed, we could continue to eyeball
this and move these keys around, hitting shift, click on the timeline and moving this around.
But let's take a cue from the graph editor.
I'll go to Windows animation graph editors and let's take a look at the rotation curves.
Currently, we're only animating the rotation and we can see that, you know, this steepness of this
curve is much steeper than this curve.
And we liked how this follow through was following the motion here, the house dragging behind.
So we want a similar type of a slope here that we're seeing on this side.
We want to be reflected on this side.
So we could do is select all of the keys and just drag it back until we kind of get something that's
closer to this type of a slope.
So we know the speed of it going forward is going to mimic that speed we have when it started.
So it's already looking a lot better, but it's it's still a little late.
So what we can do is, instead of choosing it from the graph here like we've done, and shift middle
mouse tracking it over, we can shift click it in the timeline just as well and move it over as well.
And we can see the graph ed update as well.
Let's just move that over.
And now we can see that this is starting to look a little more believable as this goes over.
And let's give this some more time before it goes down, because now we can see that the swinging is
crashing into the box before we're ready for it to go down.
So likewise, we can just move the the translate y and we can isolate that by clicking it and we can
move it forward in the timeline.
Let's just go to frame 40.
So it is right there.
And now we can see that it goes to frame 50 at the end when it is going down.
Cool.
So now we have this kind of motion that looks, you know, a lot more believable that this has some
weight to it now when this stops and the tail continues.
It needs to resolve this, this this swing, this follow through, right, that we're learning about,
and we want it to continue that motion until it's resolved and being straight up and down.
So we might need more than 10 frames to do that in.
But for now, let's just take a look and see before we move the translate.
Why much further, let's select all of the bottom controls and then we can go forward in time and kind
of see how many frames we gave.
This one here, we can count them holding down AWALT and less than symbol.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.
So it's nine frames.
I'm just going to hit the greater than symbol and I'll jump to the next frame and then I can say, one,
two, three, four, five, six.
So there's a three frame difference so we can move these three frames forward.
So these are equidistant, key frames apart.
And we can also take a cue from the graph editor again, that, you know, look at these look at this
value.
We have something that's approximately, you know, 15 and rotation and this goes past 15.
Well, if you think about the bouncing ball example where as the ball bounces, it will gradually decrease
the energy.
And we need to consider that as well when we're talking about follow through that this follow through
that we're getting on this side, I'm just going to hold down K and click on the graph editor so we
can scrub in here.
This can be also considered like a bounce, but it's more of a follow through of the swing and this
value that goes down here to past negative 15, it shouldn't really pass this amount unless it stops
really hard.
So just take into consideration, you know, the slope that you've already established here, because
these are the kind of physics you're setting up, rules for how things move as you animate and you just
want to stay consistent.
So I'm just going to drag this below negative 15 because I don't think it would go past where you have
the extreme point that we already created up here.
So I want to drag this down so it feels like it's losing motion a little bit.
It's losing energy.
And then we can drag this up past zero because we know we want zero to be much later.
We need to resolve this so we can go past the zero a little bit.
And again, it's kind of like that bounce.
You know, each kind of swing is going to get less and less energy, just like each bounce of the bouncing
ball is going to be lower and lower.
So, you know, again, that bouncing ball example know, we can see carries through to so many other
examples as well.
So let's move forward some key frames here and let's just say maybe negative two here and then let's
go forward a little bit and say maybe point five, let's go forward a little more and say zero.
So now we can kind of see this swinging motion already shown in the value change here might be a little
extreme, how it reduces so much so quickly towards the end.
But let's just take a look.
It's pretty it's pretty good, actually.
Just kind of eyeballing it from the graph editor.
You can kind of see how that all starts to make sense.
Now, this starts to go down too soon again.
So let's just drag this out and let's give ourselves maybe let's like these and see in the end, these
end on 60.
So let's let's have that end on sixty.
So I'll just grab translate why and have that start to go down on sixty.
So I want this keyframe to be there and I'm just shift middle mouse dragging again.
So let's play that back, see this thing resolve a little bit and now go down.
And you know, we're just learning the basics of animation.
So it looks a little robotic and stiff still.
But, you know, this is important.
You want to get down these concepts before you start to add a lot of detail.
So this is very crucial stuff, even though it might seem simple.
You want to dial in these concepts before we get into more complicated things.
So this is a good progression that we've built, that we have gone on to using a rig.
We've added some more principles called follow through.
And in the next lesson, I'm going to show you one more called anticipation.
And then we're going to go into learning how to do constraints so that this robot arm can pick up this
box right now.
If it moved it around, they're not connected.
So we want to go from the state of it not being connected together to being connected together and have
this continue traveling and picking this up and doing whatever you want it to do.
So the next lesson, we'll continue this animation.
Thanks for watching.