Let's discuss another principle of animation called Squash and Stretch, and we've already covered timing
because we've looked at the difference of frames it takes to go from one key frame to another.
That's the timing of it.
And that that would be reduced between these bounces.
OK, that's timing.
We've learned about spacing because we've turned on the ghosting and we've seen where the spacing is
between each key frame and the position of the ball.
That's spacing.
And in this lesson, we're going to cover squash and stretch.
It's one of my favorite principles of animation because it can add so much to an animation if done properly
can it can very easily be overdone.
And that's usually something that is going to happen when you're a student is, you know, pushing things
too far.
And that's how you learn.
So let's jump in and learn a little bit about squash and stretch.
So what I want to do first is select a ball, go to a contact frame where it's on the ground.
And I also just want to briefly mention kind of a quirky setting in my so I'm going to turn off ghosting
real quick to talk about it when I have the ball selected, if I select an attribute over here, like
translate translates, maybe I wanted to move the translator around my middle mouse dragging it or something.
We can see that my timeline keyframes have kind of disappeared.
We would expect to keyframe right here, especially looking in the graph.
Ed, we can see one.
You know, there's one right there.
Why is that not showing up here in the timeline?
Well, that's not showing up because the default for Maya is to only show what attribute that you have
selected if you haven't an selected.
So because we have translate this like that, it's not showing these Y keyframes.
We can see there's two different types of red here.
And the darker red means that there's actually a key on that attribute, on this frame.
So if you want to see translate why keyframe?
We need to select that one.
And now we have a display in the timeline.
But if we want to turn this feature off, we can go to right.
Click up here and say sync timeline display and turn that off.
So now, no matter what, we have selected an Ashry Ed.
We will see all of the key frames here.
So that's just something to keep in mind when you're working.
It can be nice to isolate in the timeline.
If you want to only move certain keys around or something like that, you can select them from here
and isolate them.
So I'll leave that up to you, whatever you're comfortable with.
You can also do the same thing.
It's on by default, but you can do the same thing in the graph.
Ed so if we wanted to only see one of these attributes, you can see the graph ed update as we click
on them.
So it's another kind of little feature to be aware of and we're going to leave the defaults on for now.
So what we want to do is isolate the keys that we've already made.
OK, we don't wanna screw up these tangent handles.
So if I were to go in here and it s you can see that this curve, which was once really nice and smooth,
now has this little divot in it because this is trying to do an auto tangent.
Wiggins's blue auto tangent button is selected because that's the default option that it tries to choose.
So it screws up the standard handle.
Well, how do we how do we work around that?
There's another tool called an insert key.
So let's click that in the graph editor.
It's over here on the left.
Click that.
And now with the Curve selected, I can actually just middle mouse click along here and I'm going to
set two key frames on either side of this contact keyframe.
So now we can set a key frame on all of the keys I wanted s and we can see that everything is keyed.
And when I go through here and set a key on everything for all of these keys and the reason why I'm
doing that is I want to lock all of this in because we're going to only affect one little portion of
this animation with the squash and stretch.
So I don't want to mess up any of the other animation we have.
And so I want to lock that in.
So because we've used the insert key tool, we know that we've kind of saved this custom tangent handle
that we've adjusted.
And the auto tangent thing isn't trying to screw that curve up.
Cool.
So let's take a look at this through ghosting the turn back on ghosting.
And I'm going to go to this kind of frame right before it hits the ground.
And this is where we're going to scale it up.
And if we were to just scale this up, we can see we're just making the sphere bigger in volume, right?
It's just getting larger and larger.
Well, what we want to do is maintain the volume of this object.
So if we scale in one direction, that means we need to scale down in another.
So to do that, it's a little difficult to scale because there's two different directions here.
But what we can do is scale up.
I'm just going to do it just a little bit, scale up in one direction, and then we can hold down control
and select the axes that we do not want to scale in and then scale.
So it'll it'll you can see both of those handles coming in at the same rate.
So it's nice to do that kind of uniformly.
And we're maintaining that that scaling up that we did in the.
Y-axis, so now what we can do is see the path of motion, which is another concept in animation, we
can see the path of motion here and we want to keep this in line so I can rotate this so that it's going
in the same path of motion towards the ground.
I'm going to favor the ground just a little bit.
So it's going to kind of almost look like it speeds up here, I think, right at the end, because we're
increasing the spacing.
Right.
Another concept in animation.
So get familiar with these words and how I'm using them and what they mean.
So now we're going to look at the contact we need to squash this thing down.
It has weight and it's going to get flattened a little bit.
So let's flatten this thing a little bit and then let's scale it out in the other two.
So we're going to hold down control and scale this out and maybe scale down just a little bit more.
So I'm going to push this back down to the ground in the next frame.
I'm going to have this stretch back out.
It's going to stretch this out and then I'm going to hold down control and bring that in.
I'm going to rotate that.
So it's kind of following the same direction here and I'm going to pull this down just a little bit.
So it kind of favors the squash position here.
We can see it's kind of nice to not have things uniform.
Like we don't want the bottom of this, both of these to evenly be touching this.
It's nice to kind of have things offset a little bit.
It makes it feel a little more natural.
And plus that we have you know, you can see the spacing here.
The tip of this thing is still touching this ball.
And you can see this one isn't so it's nice to kind of keep that, you know, we want this to go slower.
So this one should be touching this one where this one's coming in faster.
So it should so that all this kind of makes sense, right.
Why we're doing what we're doing.
So let's turn off ghosting and then make a play blast and see what we've created.
So now we play back, we can kind of see just for a brief moment that kind of squash and stretch and
it makes that first bounce feel different than the other bounces, right.
It feels like it kind of has a little more impact.
Right.
It squashes there for a second and then the other ones are just more stiff and they just kind of bounce,
bounce, bounce.
So depending on the feeling and the type of ball and the type of animation that you're going after,
squash and stretch can be a very, very cool thing to start to apply to your animation, and it can
be applied to everything.
Again, this is you know, this is the bouncing ball.
It can be applied to facial animation, you know, the Joske washing and stretching the cheeks, you
know, bulging and stretching as the mouth moves it.
All parts of the body can squash and stretch when you're even when we're talking about character, animation
or any other type of animation and can really have a lot of impact on what you're doing.
So consider that in the animation you're doing.
And I will say that, you know, just to prove the point of squash and stretch, I would say in this
example we maybe went a little too far.
But I like that it's very clear, you know, this first bounce is much different than the other ones.
And it's just very, very quick.
It's very subtle.
It's over a couple of key frames, but it does make a difference.
And that's animation.
So let's move on in the next lesson and talk about an exercise I want you to try out.