Now, we have some basic animation here in our scene, let's take a look at how we can manipulate how
this is actually being animated.
One of the major, major places that we will do that is in the graph editor.
So let's open that up or we can go to Windows animation editors and go to graph editor.
You can also get to this window by going to the panels up here and changing the panel to a graph here.
You can see it's great out because we already have it open, but that's another way to do it.
If we wanted to split this window.
That'd be another way we can go to we can use panels as well.
I like to hold down space bar for the hot box and go to panels this way.
But you can also get the panels here, like I like to go to layouts and go to panes stacked.
That means vertically.
So now we have two panes and then we can make this one be the graph editor panel so we can have the
graph editor and this view open and at the same time.
And they're doctored, nicely organized.
We can also switch just to this view by hitting space bar one time while our cursor is over this view.
So now we can take a look at what is the animation that we have, what it looks like in the graph editor.
So the graph editor is going to be your best friend.
What we have is a representation of time, which is across the bottom here, as you had expected, because
our timeline is across the bottom two.
So you can kind of see I'm holding down alt and middle mouse tracking to navigate around the same type
of navigation you do in the viewport.
The only difference and thing you might want to do is hit command shift and right click and drag.
We can scale the type of view that we have here in both X and Y directions.
It might be alten shift if you're on a PC.
I'm on a Mac.
So it's command and shift for me so we can also have a an F and frame up on stuff.
But you can see these little black dots or are going to represent our key frames and these lines in
between them are basically saying this is the computer interpolating between point A to point B to C
to point D. and how it's going to travel along the time and how the values are going to change the y
axis here, the vertical axis are values.
So we can see with this key frame selected, if we look over here in this little menu, that kind of
looks like the outliner.
But for the graph editor, we can see we have translate y selected because it has a little green square
here.
If we select something else, that will change.
So we have y translate, why select it?
And if we go back into our viewport, we can see translate.
Why is the vertical axis and we can see that on our manipulator here, which it's yellow right now.
So if I click on the middle it will change it.
And on isolate that it was yellow because it was isolated.
So if I start middle mouse trying this, no matter where my cursor goes, it's only going to go up and
down.
So to d isolate that, you can just select the middle box here so we can see the why is indeed green
and it's translate why here is the vertical axis.
So that correlates to this right here.
So we can actually manipulate the keys from the graph editor so I can shift middle mouse, drag these
up and down.
And even though I'm not on the actual keyframe itself, you can see because I'm at this point in the
timeline where this red line is, I am at a place where the value is going to change because where it
is interpolating from is is changing as well.
So let's take a look at the beginning of this.
We have one issue that's happening here.
We have it's crashing through the cliff here.
So we need to drag this over a little bit and add a couple more key frames.
So I'm going to shift select everything and move this over to keyframes and go back to the six key frame.
And I'm going to add s or actually just undo that and hit W just for so that we can only key the translations.
And I'm going to move this over on this second key frame so we can see what just happened.
I change the Z translate here that this is the one that moved and again I could shift middle mouse,
drag this and manipulate the object here from the graph editor.
So you also have to be careful when your shift middle mouse dragging, it's going to take the first
direction you move in.
So if I'm moving the mouse up and down, you can see the cursor changes and it goes up and down.
Now, if I accidentally go right to left before I start moving the mouse up and down, it's going to
get locked and this this direction.
And that's just moving the key frame to a different point in time so we can undo that.
But so just know that the first movement you make with your mouse is going to be which direction it
isolates the movement of these key frames.
And so now we have that problem kind of solved so it can go off the cliff here in those first two frames
and it is going down to the ground.
And if we watch it, it feels kind of soft, right.
So let's play this back hitting all be it kind of feels really soft.
And why is that?
Well, it's because it slows down before it hits the ground.
We can see.
That it is kind of going fast here and then it slows down here right at the end, and then it picks
back up speed and then it slows down and then it slows down again when it gets close to the ground over
here.
So we can change that type of speed through the graph editor as well.
We could also make individual keyframes here to make this continue to go fast at the end here so it
doesn't slow down.
So let's just take a look at that.
That already feels much, much better just putting in these new key frames where, you know, it's going
to keep it speed up when it bounces here.
You can already feel the difference.
Hopefully you can see this in your scene as well.
So that already feels good.
But it adds a lot of keys here.
You know, we have we're already starting to add keys on almost every frame in this little section.
So to prevent ourselves from doing that, I'm just going to.
Right.
Click on these key frames and go to delete here to get rid of those to prevent us having to set keyframes.
Let's work a little smarter.
Let's go back to the graph editor.
And we don't want to affect the translate Z just yet.
Let's go to translate.
Why now we can see what the culprit is.
We can see visually that indeed the ball starts slow and it speeds up here because this this ramp,
this kind of slope here means it's going fast.
Right.
It's changing value quickly over a short amount of time.
OK, and these are concepts you just need to start to kind of get comfortable with understanding, seeing
motion represented in a graph form.
OK, so we have it going fast here and then it starts to slow down.
See how this kind of gets flat here.
If this was totally flat, right, the ball wouldn't move at all.
OK, we can and we can see that here in these first two key frames.
See how it's totally flat.
The ball is moving, but not in the wider action, staying totally even in the Y direction.
So if this is flat, we know that it's not going anywhere.
So if it's very steep, we know it's going somewhere very fast.
And in our case, it's the Y translation because that's the one we've isolated here and are focusing
on.
So when it starts to flatten back out, we know it's slowing down here again.
So we need to keep that speed all the way through to this key frame, because if you think about the
physics of a falling object, the object doesn't know it's falling.
OK, so when it's coming close to the ground, is the object going to slow down or is it going to keep
going the same speed?
It's going to keep going the same speed because it doesn't know that's coming close to the ground.
So why would it slow down?
It doesn't have a brain to know that it's slowing down.
So even though the is trying to help us here by interpolate between these two key frames, it doesn't
know what we're doing.
Right.
It doesn't know what the thing we're animating is in the context of it.
So it's always up to the animator to control all of these things at the end of the day, OK, whether
you're drawing it with a pencil and paper or it's on a computer, this is your responsibility as an
animator.
The computer is not going to do all this stuff for you for free, which is a very common misconception
that you will eventually painfully learn is not true.
So let's how do we fix this without adding more keyframes?
Let's select this keyframe and you can see we get these little pink handles here and we can actually
change the direction here.
If we go to a keyframe where this line is going through it, we can see that we actually change the
kind of graph of this object.
So let's how do we get this to go straight, though?
We need to break this somehow so we can keep this line to go straight and but have the other side to
stay straight as well, going back up to this key frame.
So we need to break these tangents.
And this is this little button here that looks like a V, and we can click that.
And now you can see this changes to a blue and yellow basically line.
So now we can isolate this and translate that up.
A middle man selected this in a middle mouse dragging it.
So I'm going to get it up into a position that makes sense for what an object is going to kind of travel
a distance and fall and do the same thing.
It's going to have a kind of a recoil here and bounce back up.
I can go ahead and do that to this other side as well.
I'm going to go ahead and break those tangents.
These are called tangent handles and get that to balance properly.
The other thing we can do real quick before we hit play is to look at translate Z.
We can see that it has an inconsistent kind of speed.
But if this thing is going across a way here, it's probably not going to change speed in this direction.
Right.
It's going to keep going, traveling this direction in the same speed.
So let's get rid of these keyframes for now and then let's make this.
Linear tangent, we could move this and try to eyeball it and get it straight, or we could use these
little nice shortcuts up here to make this be linear.
So right now, the default is an auto tangent, meaning it's going to try to make everything smooth.
But we know we want this to be a straight line and we don't want to slow down at the end.
So let's hit the linear tangents button and it's going to straighten that out for us.
Cool.
So let's get back into this view and play.
So already we have a bouncing ball that feels much, much more realistic, it doesn't slow down when
it gets close to the ground that we've learned about the graph, Ed, and we have learned more about
framing and tangent handles and so many things in this short video.
So the next lesson we are going to continue to refine this animation, make it look better and learn
a few more principles of animation in general.
So I would encourage you to maybe make a few more bounces here and we will clean those up in the next
lesson.
Thanks for watching.