In this lesson, we're going to learn all about antics or what is known as anticipation or Antec for
short and an anticipation, is all about the movement before another movement and anticipation of movement.
So what I mean by this is if we take a look at the example we've already animated and we have this motion
here, it just begins.
There's no indication that this robot is about to move.
It just begins moving.
And most times that anyone does an action, they usually do some type of an antic or anticipation and
good examples of this would be throwing a baseball or, you know, throwing a punch, trying to punch
someone, you know, a golf swing.
There's many, many examples in life where there's anticipation.
You don't just simply hold the golf club at the golf ball and then push it forward.
You have to swing the golf club back before you hit it.
You have to bring your arm and fist backward before you try to throw a punch forward or throw a baseball
forward.
So this is what is known as an antique.
And in our case, we don't have a punch or throw or anything with a character yet.
But antics apply to really any motion because what it does is, is it signifies motion is about to happen.
It's usually a smaller movement that happens right before bigger movement.
So it basically is a kind of signal to the eye of the viewer to say, hey, look over here, this thing
is about to move this way or usually in the opposite direction of where it's moving.
So, for example, in our case, if we wanted to create an antique, we can leave this frame here.
Frame 10.
This is the start frame, right?
If we look at the graph editor and we have to frame it up or we can get a to frame all we can see that
translate X starts here.
Right.
It goes forward from there.
What we can do is actually use that frame ten as an antique frame.
So let's go back to frame six and had a key frame.
So now we have two of the same values.
What we can do is actually bring this value up.
So let's just jump over to that key by hitting the greater than symbol on the keyboard.
Always get the greater than the less than symbols mixed up on the keyboard.
There are the two.
You know what I'm talking about.
If you've ever taken a math class, so you hit those two to switch between different key frames on the
timeline.
So now we're to the Anta Keyframe.
So all we need to do is simply move it backward.
OK, now we can see it's moving in the opposite direction of where it's going to go.
Right.
We can do this in the graph here as well.
Shift middle mouse dragging that up.
So it just depends on how big of an antic do we want.
This might be too big of an antic.
I think that's probably just a little too big.
Let's bring it back a little bit and lets it play.
So it just gives it a signal right before it starts moving towards the box.
This little bit of backwards.
That's an antique.
It doesn't have to be more complicated than that.
Right.
But basically, if we're watching this and we don't know what's about to happen, we can see that that
robot is about to move somewhere.
Right.
There's this little bit of an antique right before it moves.
And that can be very subtle.
It can be even smaller than that.
But that's an antique.
So all we have to do now is now that we have this antique built in, is we need to go down the chain
and do the same thing that we've already done and offset the chain.
So let's click on everything so we can see what the start frame is, which is six s on that.
So it keyframes everything and now select just the chain and they go to frame ten and rotate all of
these back and then I'll frame back and forth with those shortcuts on the keyboard.
The greater than or less than symbols.
You never want this thing to drag further back than where it started from because that wouldn't make
any sense physically.
Right.
If we exaggerate that, we would never want to drag this thing all the way back here with an antique
of that small, that makes no sense.
Right.
It this is trying to stay where it is.
Right.
So the furthest we want to go is really if we look at this point here where this white ball is at the
bottom, if we hold our mouse there and this is what I do when I'm animating just to kind of pin my
mouse to something, I just kind of leave it there and see, OK, is that thing further one way or the
other?
I went too far with the keyframes.
Is that thing further?
One way or the other.
And it's good because it's on this right side of it.
It was on this other side.
We know we had gone too far because rocking back and it's unmotivated, right.
There's no reason why it should be moving back that way.
The ball's moving to the right right now.
So if anything, this heavy piece of the bottom should try to be staying where it is.
So at a bare minimum, it should be exactly where it it.
Was or should be kind of drag starting to drag with the ball, so you just kind of have to find a happy
medium there of where that is.
So the other thing we need to do is, of course, offset the this next part.
And we can do that in several different ways.
But let's just see that little bit kind of helps hold that thing in place.
So it it needs to really start to to follow the ball.
And this bottom piece needs to swing over here because it's still trying to catch up.
Right.
This ball's Antec over here and the bottom part is still trying to catch up, even though the top has
already left and started going the other way.
Right.
The chain has not been pulled yet in that direction.
So we need to continue that motion through the bottom of the chain here.
So let's go a few frames forward and basically where this is straight again, we want we don't want
that to be straight.
All right.
This should be kind of maybe even an s shape that should still be pointing this way.
And this should be starting to swing over there.
So now these are still trying to follow.
Maybe these are still going a little bit that way, so let's see how that looks.
I think that's the right idea and might we might need an extra little frame there.
It feels like it's getting stuck and then it goes here, so we might need to start this this animation
sooner, so I'm just going to grab everything and move it one frame forward.
You can kind of see this in the graph, Ed.
You know, it's like there's this kind of emotion here, this slope, and then it's fast over here.
Let's just move this these keyframes over and it starts to kind of smooth out that slope.
So it's it's more similar to the rest of the motion.
And that feels already a lot better, does it feels like the bottom part hits a wall right here.
So you want to continue this motion more over here, so let's grab that and rotate it.
Sitting Alvie on the keyboard.
So that feels a lot better.
And we might we could even maybe push a little bit more even from a higher control.
To favor this side, because that really starts to take off there so we can kind of adjust these even
more and then maybe even actually drag let's drag this one, the bottom one, just a touch more.
So it's it's even it's trying to stay back here still.
That might be a little too much, so I'm not going to use the graph, Ed, bring it back, you know,
I switch back and forth a lot of times I kind of work visually in the timeline and then I'll I'll switch
over here.
And I think what I'm going to do is favor the frame right before this and bring it up.
So I'm using a combination of all the techniques we've learned thus far.
I'm going to scrub through and see how that kind of works.
I think I like that.
That looks a lot better.
And, you know, half of animation, if not probably a lot more, is really just training your eye.
So while I can teach you Maya and I can teach you the principles of animation, it really takes time
to see what's actually happening.
So I like where that set.
And when we look at this motion over here, the claw gets close and it just goes down.
We could have it go up and down.
If you think about it again, just to kind of drive point the home about an antique, it just starts
falling down.
So we could actually drag this motion, this up, this down motion over a few frames to give us some
more time.
And then instead of it just going down like this, let's set a key frame here.
Let's go to translate why so we can see what's happening.
And, you know, like we expect it's just going down.
Why don't we set an antique here?
So it goes up just a little bit and then it goes down.
So it settles and then it goes up and then down, so it kind of tells us.
All right, I'm getting ready, boom.
Right.
Let's see the whole thing.
Up, down, I think that might be a little quick, maybe not, but you get the idea.
So again, what we can do to kind of play this back is to run around a play blast real quick so we can
see what we're doing.
So let me just do that to make sure the timing of everything is as we are seeing it in the viewport.
So let's evaluate this.
And it does look pretty good, it looks like it's going down a little slow, but I think that's OK for
the kind of action, you know, it's trying to be very accurate.
So the robot is trying to be pretty accurate as it comes down on the box.
So it makes sense that it kind of slows down there a little bit.
So we always want to try to think about the motivation behind all of the actions, even if it's something
as simple as a robot and, you know, very, very kind of linear motion here.
It's just a direct kind of a thing that's happening.
So let's take a look at the clock control real quick.
If we select this bottom control, we can see there's a pinch control here and it's already set to zero.
So let's bring this back a little bit because we want it to clamp down on the object.
When it's down here, let's just extend this out to 100 frames now, and, you know, it's sharing key
frames because we keyed it.
Since it has the rotation's, it has keyframes on the pinch for everything.
But let's say that we want to keep this thing open.
And for the beginning part, I'm not going to go all the way to 10.
If we click on this attribute in the middle mouse dragging the viewport, we can see that it has a limitation
of going from zero to 10.
We can't go past 10.
And I built that intentionally that way.
So let's drag these.
So they're just below 10 because we want to leave ourselves a little room that we can play with here
and go even bigger if we wanted to do an antique.
Right.
This is what this lesson's all about.
So this thing stays open and it swings over here.
And then I think it would be cool if it kind of pops open here.
So what if we actually closed it down?
Maybe that's maybe that's something cooler.
You know, this is kind of to me, the fun of the animation is like on the fly thinking of ideas, because
you can kind of plan all this stuff and you and you definitely want to plan your animations out.
But part of the fun is just like getting inspired while you're animating and trying stuff out because
you're not going to know exactly what you want to do all the time.
That's just that's not realistic.
So let's say it comes to a stop here and I want more so we can see the Antec of the claw opening.
I want to move all of this animation later.
So let's give it time for the claw to open some of the middle shift, middle mouse, drag this stuff
over.
So now we have some frames to work with for the claw to open because we want to be able to see it.
We don't want all this action happening at the same time, like the ball is going down as the claws
opening.
The viewer won't be able to see both of those things happening.
They'll see the ball moving down.
They won't see the claw open.
So we're always thinking about staging, which is another principle of animation that that's about clarity
and what's happening.
Right.
So this is staged pretty clear that this thing is going to open or we're going to try to grab the box,
but we want it to open before it does that.
So it pops open here.
What we can do is add a Antec even to this opening.
So let's see, this thing kind of settles here.
I guess we can kind of see this from these other keyframes, let's just match this back up so it settles
there.
It's going to move that one over and let's go forward and have the Antec be here.
Someone I'm going to hit us.
I'm going to drag this down.
If I go past the zero and the graph editor, it won't do anything more, right?
Like if I select this and I middle mouse drag over here, we're limited to zero.
And if I click and drag this past zero, nothing's going to actually happen over here that doesn't relate
to anything.
So zero we know is as far as I can go.
So let's see if that's a big enough Antec, so we can kind of see that it's going to open.
I think that's not big enough.
So all we have to do is just drag all of these keyframes, which really, really need this first one.
We can just drag this one and have to frame it up and just drag this up.
I'm going to K and click over here to jump into the time there.
I could have otherwise just kind of click down here in the line.
But I been using my long enough.
I have a lot of the shortcuts and the quicker you pick up shortcuts, the faster you'll be using Miah.
So that's why I will continue to encourage you to use shortcuts.
So yeah, let's just go even more.
Let's see how that works for an antique.
Yeah, it's I mean, I think I think the bigger Antec will be when it opens fully, so I'm not too worried
about this one and you can definitely over Antec stuff.
It's kind of can be too much sometimes, like too much of an animation thing.
I'm actually just going to make this linear.
So it goes straight into this.
Remember, this is a robot, so the motion isn't always going to be smooth so we can have it start very
fast and just pop open.
But again, this is the antics a little.
Maybe we can make this linear to you know, I'm discovering this stuff with you guys as I'm doing it,
but yeah.
So boom, I think this thing just needs more time before it goes down.
Let's bring this way over.
Let's give it a ton of time.
It's going to do its thing so and takes a little bit and then opens what I want.
Is it to be way faster and to have like a pretty hard Antec here at the top.
Let's get to ten.
Let's make this linear.
So it's a really sharp kind of jolt open, like pops open.
I want to make this linear.
Let's see how this linear kind of stuff works, because I think with the robot, it'll work really well.
See how that kind of snaps.
It's it there's all this kind of smooth motion with the tail.
And so it's kind of nice to have contrasting animation.
We have all this smooth, floaty, swinging motion and the claw is a contrast, right?
You always look for contrasting animation and that's what makes it interesting.
So here we have contrast with the types of curves we're using.
And I didn't plan this, but this is really, you know, how you find those opportunities is playing,
right?
This is why I love animation.
We're just playing here and discovering it as we're doing it.
And so we discovered a way to inject a lot of contrast here.
Even if it's I say it's a lot it's it's pretty subtle.
But, you know, this is just kind of an example of where your mind needs to be at.
When you're animating and play with timing, but I think it's so fast, we're missing it actually in
the viewport boom.
Yeah, I'll bring that back out one frame.
So again, I'm just shift middle mouse dragging.
Yeah, I think that looks really cool because it's like we're kind of waiting for it to open.
It's like what's going to happen next.
It comes to a stop and then it's like but I think that that can happen even quicker here.
Oh, yeah, and, of course, feel free to make sound effects, you will not be alone and that most
animators, I would think, probably make sound effects at some point.
So let's get this timing of it coming down and the right spot pops open, pops open, and we want it
to kind of come down maybe right in here.
Might be a little too close together.
Oh, yeah.
I think I want a little more hangtime on this, Antec, so I'm going to do is go to what we we've learned
in a previous lesson about the weight of tangents.
And I'm actually going to increase this middle mouse, drag this out.
So it can go a little faster and let's make kind of an overshoot, so this is another concept in animation
we're covering a lot.
This video is getting really long.
And I apologize.
We're covering a lot.
But I feel like once we're kind of on the stream of things, I hate to segment this stuff up because
it's I don't know if it makes more sense, at least to me.
Let's get this thing down closer and what we're going to do as we're building it, an overshoot.
So this thing is going to go past where it's going to end and then it's going to come up.
It's kind of kind of think of it like an antique.
But at the end, right, like this thing, it is a robot.
So it's pretty precise, but it's going to, you know, go past just a little bit where it's going to
finish and then return boom.
Yeah.
So that's called an overshoot.
And we've covered a lot in this video.
We've covered antics, we've covered contrast and we've covered.
Yeah, look at that, the sharpness of that looks really cool, the claw opening and now we've covered
overshoots.
This is like.
You know, a semester's worth of animation learning and one little video here.
OK, cool, yeah, it looks really cool.
We could even add like another overshoot.
It's, you know, the same thing, like the bouncing ball.
Again, you can do the bouncing ball type of a theory here.
So the overshoot overshoots itself and comes back down.
You know, it's it's really up to you.
This is kind of like the but if he has no Bob Rosten painting, this is like the Bob Ross episode where
I'm talking about painting happy trees.
This is about putting in happy little overshoots.
And hopefully you guys get that reference.
If you're if you're not from America, you might not get that reference.
Yeah, I like that.
Cool.
So in the next lesson, what we're going to learn is how do we actually pick this thing up so we can
clamp down with a claw.
But the box is still going to be sitting there.
If we move this around, we need to attach this box to the claw itself somehow.
So the next lesson, we're going to learn all about constraints.
Thanks for watching.