 Welcome back to another F&M. I'm gonna talk about the most common animation mistakes and today it's about ARCs. That's right, ARCs. We talked about blocking. There's a series about that. So we're there, link in the description. And we talked about ease in and ease out. For ARCs, it's not quite a very specific thing. It's literally taking the time to track everything in your scene so that your ARCs are clean and fantastic. So the first tip about ARCs is take the time to track your ARCs. Animation is a lot of work. You have to go in there and track so many things and watch your spacing and ease in and outs and silhouette and appeal and acting choices and so much. But you really also have to track your ARCs. And that's not something where you can shoot reference and think about creative choices. It's very boring. And that's probably why a lot of people don't want to do it or they don't have the time or they don't want to take the time. Many, many reasons that I don't know of. But usually when I see a shot in class and the ARCs are messy, my first reaction is you didn't take the time to really track those ARCs. And again, it's nothing glamorous. It's very boring. Put out some music, grab a sandwich or a ginormous glass of water. Just water and track those ARCs because everything moves in ARCs. Unless, of course, it's something mechanical. There's always some exception. But usually, you want things to move in ARCs. Even if it's a very shallow ARC, unless it's a robot that goes, but then you have other things that can help you with overshoot and some rur and some cute little things that make it extra special. But generally, especially for organic elements like any characters or creatures or humans, everything has to move in ARCs. And that's especially important when you use IK arms. Because if you take an IK arm, when you just move it around, it's going to be a straight line. So you have to make sure that it really mimics the FK approach of moving an arm. So the FK arms, you get ARCs for free or with IK, you don't. So that's another thing where you have to really pay special attention to. But that's going to be a clip for another FNA, IK versus FK, and the pitfalls about that. So when you do your character animation, track things that would immediately stand out if an ARC is wrong. I mean, like I said, arms that would move around. Nose, if you're a big French nose that moves around, you can track this and you can follow that nose tip. Same thing with elbows. Anything that stands out, like someone has a sword, you're going to track that sword tip. There's so many things. Just track your ARCs. Now, I say all this, track your ARCs, but how, how do I track my ARCs? Well, you can use the built-in motion trail in Maya. There are many, many tools out there and there are some more hands-on things I'll show you, but generally, right in there, motion trail. That being said, motion trail, it follows the character, whatever object you've selected that moves in a 3D space. And sometimes that might be quite confusing, but sometimes you just want the very clean view of what is my sword tip or my elbow or my knee or whatever doing at that point and what is the ARC. So what I use for that, that's right, dry erase markers. So I take these and draw on the screen. So with one color, I draw what is currently going on. I can go frame by frame and track, let's say, in our movement. And then with the other color, I go on this should be probably red or something else in a black, I track what I really want to do. And then I go back in there, frame by frame and readjust until it works. And that way, I don't have to depend on other tools that might break or might be slow. I can just take this frame, frame, frame, frame, frame, track, track, track, track, draw the line. And that's it. That's my ARC. Well, like I said, there are other tools in Maya 2020, you have a new ghosting tool, you can use grease pencil. And there again, there's so many other external tools that you can add to your workflow that will help you track ARCs. But the general thing is you have to just track ARCs. Let's say you have a character that's kind of just not super clear in terms of what you want to follow. You can also add helper objects. So what I do is I take a sphere or whatever object you want to use and add a very bright color to this hair and tattoo the element that I want to track. And then go from there. Do I know this is the thing I want to track and I go frame by frame and I track that sometimes you can't add a motion trail or you don't have that tool, whatever it is, sometimes you just want to go in there just quickly with this and track very quickly what the ARC is right now and what I want it to be eventually. It really sounds very, very simple and it's something really track ARCs. Yes, it's one of those things that when you do your animation, once you've added your ideas and you shot reference, you look at thumbnails, you're done implementing all your ideas, you still have to clean up your animation so that your ARCs work and the spacing works and he's in and out. It's just one of those tedious things that you have to go through and make the shot from a mechanical point of view and from a technical point of view, clean and awesome and smooth and just fantastic course if that is the style that is asked for. So it sounds very simple, but it's one of the most common thing that I see in student work is that there might be a cool idea hidden in that animation, but our arms just move in a very clunky way or our heads move down like that and like you got those one frame direction changes. I'll talk about that later. It just generally just doesn't look very polished and it's an easy fix by just tracking ARCs. Easy as in everything's no quote unquote easy, just take the time, maybe use any of the tools, maybe you have other tools, comment if you watch this and you're like, Oh, I use this and it's great for tracking ARCs. Let me know that other people know we can have a collection of tools in the comment section, but whatever tools you have or if you don't have any tools, you just have to consider that extra step and taking the time to track ARCs and build that into your workflow. Speaking of workflow, if you feel like this is helpful, you want to take that and build that into your shot and your shot workflow and work with me on a one-on-one basis on your shots, let me know. You can email me. I offer workshops you can sign up at any time. And if you feel like this was helpful, you can hit like if you feel like you want to subscribe, hit subscribe if you don't want to miss anything, hit that bell button with a do upload almost every day. And if you watch this whole thing till the very end, as always, thank you so much for taking the time and I will see you in my next clip.