In this lesson, we're going to cover a new tool that will help us analyze what we need to polish in
an animation, and for that, we're going to need to go into an orthographic view, because I want to
see and kind of more isolate some of the emotion in the hands.
We can see if we kind of zoom in here for a second that the hands kind of jolt around a little bit.
And, you know, another quick thing that you might want to know about is you can mute channels.
So even though we have this already animated and let's say we want it to actually go back to being on
the spot, and instead of deleting this animation on the locator here, we can just mute it so we can
go to the channel box here and select everything.
Right.
Click and go to mute selected.
So now we play this back, it won't change the values there, so let's take a look at this a little
more.
We can see as the arms go back and forth and in and out, they kind of hit these walls here.
And to see that a little better.
Let's go to an orthographic view.
I'm going to go to the front view and I'm going to zoom in here and I'm just going to watch this wrist.
Just watch this Restoril quick.
So as I play this, you can kind of see it hits this wall and it's pretty much even with this kind of
grid line right here, kind of it like it's almost like bouncing off of it when in reality this has
its own weight and it would swing a little bit past that and wouldn't go up.
Exactly with the timing of the hips and everything.
So we need to adjust that and an easy way to see that as well as we can select the con and we can go
to the animation menu over here.
Let's go to visualize and we can create a little motion trail.
So I'm going to click that.
And just to make sure that you can see it, you can go to show and motion trails, make sure it's checked
on.
So now we can see where these key frames are.
These are the white buttons.
And I'm just going to change the background with ALBE right now to so we can see that a little better,
so we can see the path of that motion.
And because we're in orthographic view, we can kind of isolate a little bit so we can see that it's
not super nice and smooth.
Right.
There's these kind of jagged lines.
They go to a point and then back out.
Typically, you want things to have these nice curves and they kind of float like that and this doesn't
have that.
So we can fix that.
The other thing we can do with this motion trail is we can select it.
We can select any one of these points which selects the motion trail.
And now you can see that's what we have selected.
Let's go over to the ASHMEAD editor here.
And we can have all these options.
We can change all these different colors and everything.
But I'm always interested in is show frame cross'.
I'm going to select that.
And now you can see we can actually increase the frame cross size right below that.
We can increase that and maybe even the color to make it something like bright yellow.
We can see where the frames are in between the key frames.
Those little white squares are only the key frames and you can see the frame number next to it.
But what we want is also the frames in between so we can kind of see the spacing.
There's a big spacing here and very close spacing over here.
So I'm going to reduce the time line so it's easier to scrub and I'm going to go through this animation
and see where there's an opportunity to kind of loosen this up a little bit at least, and translate
X.
I'm going to change to the world axis.
So I know I'm isolating in the world axis here and I'm going to kind of scrub through this and see where
there's opportunity to just make this path of motion a little bit smoother.
So now where before it was pretty jagged and it kind of bounced there, we're creating a little bit
more of a smoother path.
So I drag this over here and.
Now, when it gets over here, this is the one that was the trouble spot for me that kind of stuck out
to my eye to maybe drag this back.
So it gives us more room to move as it needs to go through here, right?
Yeah, it looks way better.
So we can kind of see this spacing here
continues through.
And I might do that for another frame here and now that we're in the Polish phase, I'm not worried
about, you know, where my keys are or how many keys I'm setting because I'm feeling pretty good about
everything.
So I'm just setting keys where I like them to be.
So now when it hits up here, we need to continue going this way.
All right, we have motion like this, it needs to carry through, it can't just like hit a wall, especially
something kind of hanging, like the wrist is hanging.
You know, there's no reason for it to just kind of stop there.
It has its own weight and momentum and it should carry through the animation.
And you know what?
We might even want to do that and carry that through here.
I think what would make sense is it does this big loop and that loop should continue and then maybe
loop down here as well instead of going back in and out, kind of zigzagging.
I think this should actually stay out here.
And again, we'll have to copy this.
A middle mouse trying to the first frame and hitting shift w so that we're copying that frame over here,
because remember, whenever we do that in the first and last frame, they should match because since
it's a cycle so you can see where you zoom in even more, you can see where this kind of zigzag still
right here next to this frame.
So I'm just going to kind of brute force this and make it do exactly what I want it to do, because
this arm is connected to the body.
So it is going to you know what I'm doing.
I said another key.
I'm forty two.
We got actually got to go back to the beginning of the cycle, so undo that.
And now I need to you know, we can see these keyframe numbers two, three.
So that's also an indication like, hey, this is a cycle.
Don't keep going past the end of the cycle, otherwise you're making key frames that aren't included
in the cycle.
So we're on two.
Let's go to three.
Let's bring this down for let's bring this over as well.
So now that's going to kind of have this nice motion here that will carry through.
And let me just get a perspective view and see where our elbows out here and kind of check this from
another angle.
It's a little thing we do is we can go to these side angles.
It's kind of the right view.
Just holding down bar I maybe we need to go to the left view because on the other side and make sure
that the same is true for this other axi.
So, you know, we're animating in 3-D, so we need to make sure all of this stuff is happening in 3-D
properly.
It's going to drag this out and I'm just making sure these are nice smooth curves and this is called
ARC's.
Right.
You want to make sure your arcs are looking good right now.
These do not look good because the momentum of the hand is not being carried through the animation currently.
We just kind of set keys to kind of get in the ballpark.
And now once we're in this kind of zone where we're polishing, we want to make sure that everything
is doing exactly what we want it to do.
It's also to see if we have an opportunity to maybe drag this next keyframe down.
Yeah, I think we need to drag this down and maybe it'll straighten arm a little bit.
But I don't like how it bounces low here and goes right back up to the same height as this frame.
See how these two frames are the same height.
Want to keep this down?
Just a touch.
And you know, I'm checking to make sure I'm not hyper extending the elbow that actually have room to
do that.
And I'm going to go to the next keyframe and drag this back out and drag that animation and let's make
sure we're not.
Yeah.
So the elbow gets straight pretty straight there and we want it to get even more straight so that it
doesn't feel like it's just kind of popping over one frame there that that's actually supported with
the frames around it.
So I'm trying this back a little bit, maybe drag this down.
Looks like we're we're starting to hyperextend the elbow there.
So I need to bring that back vertically a little bit.
And I think that should work.
That already looks way better.
So you can kind of see we made this figure eight pattern here, except for this little kind of hits
right here, which I think we could make look even better.
And I'm going to just drag those out, kind of smooth out that out.
It's going to go back to shift middle mouse, drag this first frame to get those to match.
And I go to the end.
It's going to drag this down because the spacing between these, you know, kind of back to the bouncing
ball stuff, it shouldn't speed up between these two.
It should be pretty consistent through here.
And it was the spacing.
I didn't like that.
So just dragging that stuff around to be exactly what I want it to be.
Cool.
Girl 39, maybe drag that one down, just a touch.
So it's looking pretty darn good in that angle, I go back to the front of you and revisit this so that
all the in and out, it still makes sense, maybe even get this arc going a little wider.
So it's not all straight up and down.
See, through this section, it was just like straight up and down.
You always want to try to find opportunity to create arcs.
So everything doesn't move very linearly because that'll make it look like a computer.
Did it want to have these nice arcs throughout the animation and see we, you know, need to follow
up with this.
Want to get the worst of that?
Uh, let's see.
One, two, three, four, five.
Let's go to frame five.
I was just getting confused on, you know, I was working on the cycle part that time outside of the
cycle that rather.
So I'm just going to drag these in and get this stuff working and these nice arcs.
Right.
We're looking kind of four figure eights again, maybe drag this back in and have it continue past that
one.
Now we're making these nice figure eight arcs, right.
The arc of the curve we can see here is looking a lot better if we can drag that out and just kind of
make it look nice.
Right.
This is kind of the most fun.
This is the most fun part to me, because you can really get after making these arcs nice and not have
to worry about where the key frames are and all that kind of a thing.
It's.
It's one of my favorite stages of animation when you get to Polish, because then it's kind of a free
for all and you're not concerned with, you know, keeping everything organized, because up to this
point, we've wanted to keep everything organized if we wanted to retime things.
But now that we have the timing down, we can kind of go in here and really finesse these things.
So I'm going to show I'm a turn off motion trails and hit play.
And you can see how much better you can compare the left and the right hand right now.
And you can see how much better this left hand already looks.
I think we need to go further on the out.
It feels like it's kind of getting stuck around this grid line here.
Where it goes down here, I think we can continue that.
Let's turn back on the motion trails and see where why that's happening, I think it's that.
Yeah, it's all this stuff I think we could bring all that even further out, so doesn't look like it's
going up and down as much.
Just bring this all the way out.
Bring that out.
Go to these other keyframes, get a middle mouse, click to frame one hit shiftwork so that we match
those frames up and.
I go back here and make sure this stuff is in a nice arc.
Now, the one the one thing you do have to look out for is when you're making these changes.
You know what?
You know, if you might if you're going to make more changes, that it's just going to be more the more
keyframes you have, the more you're going to have to change, which, you know, I'm not too worried
about.
This is what I do for work.
So I'm used to these very tedious things.
But, you know, starting out, you might kind of get bored with this or frustrated.
So, you know, just be aware that's that's normal and.
You know, this is just part of the process is getting comfortable with spending time on these things,
that doesn't seem like it's that big a deal, but it really will make the difference between OK looking
animation and pretty pretty darn good looking animation.
So I want to turn off the motion trails again and I'm going to play.
Alex is way better than when we started, it's way less stiff and we can see it's not really hitting
a wall anywhere, that's very obvious and it feels like, you know, the arm still has its own weight.
And, you know, we need to do that to this other side, see, not compare this other side on the right.
Watch this.
This wrist just kind of stops over here on this gridline.
I don't know if you can see where my mouth is right on this gridline.
Boop.
It just hits this wall, whereas over here the arcs are nice and flowing and everything kind of makes
sense, you know, there's still maybe a little bit of a bounce here, but it's not like it hits a wall
over here and sticks there.
Right.
If we look.
You know, going left to right and just go, it stops going left to right for for several frames and
it's right here, right.
We have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13.
It's almost half the animation.
It sticks on this wall over here.
Whereas on this side, when we look at it, there's never really twelve frames where it's just stuck
or hits a wall.
It's all nice flowing and has these arcs.
So in this lesson, we learned about motion trails and how to visualize our animation and turn on the
show keyframes and show frames for it, how to controls visibility to play back and look at it from
different angles we get.
We still haven't looked at it from the top view, which is something else we could do.
Doesn't look too bad.
But in general, you know, this is kind of one of the last stages.
If you're having, you know, a problem not you can't figure out why is this not look good?
Click one of your icons and turn on the motion trail for it.
And to delete it, you can actually just go to your outliner windows outliner and it's actually an asset
over here.
So we can just delete that to get rid of it and we can make another one again if we wanted to.
And it's just a tool for us to use.
So I'm going to do that for this other side and I encourage you to do the same thing.
And I will see in the next lesson.
Thanks for watching.