 Welcome back to another FNA and this is part eight of the most common animation mistakes. And today I'm going to take a look at balance. That's right, balance. And it's not all about center of gravity and the general idea of balance, because this is the most common animation mistake. So I'm going to talk about the most common thing that students get wrong. And for that, let's open Maya. Let's check it out. All right. So I got this character here. As of now, the character is balanced. Sometimes you move things around and that can result in off balance. That's what you would consider to be off balance. It would fall backwards. It would fall forward. It would fall to the side and so on. But what I'm seeing most of the times that's going to this view here is that students do this. They might move the character over to be like this. That leg that's under the body gets more and more and more under the body depending on how your pose is. And the most common thing that I see here is that they end up in a pose like this. And then they want their character to move this way. But the only way for the character to move this way is for this leg to go actually at least like this, if not like this, so that this leg can actually push this way. Ideally it would push this right to left. But you have to have something in the body, in the mechanics, in the posing that allows you to push this way. And it doesn't work if your leg is like this. You would have to have potentially a pose where let's pretend that this leg goes out like this. Now obviously you would have to also kind of change the pose. Again, this is not about the pose. But imagine you have this leg out there. So now with this leg up here, you have the weight of all of this that is going to push the character this way or at least initiate a lean this way and rebalance the character. So you can even have a pose where your character is like this. And again, maybe this is less uncomfortable if it's like this. And if you have your foot out this way, and depending on again what kind of style and stretchiness, at least with a leg out like this, it will feel more balanced. But if you take your character and really push it off balance and you take your leg and let's say your leg is more like this, where this happens, right? I'm gonna grab this guy again and let's say you're like this. Now you're really going to be off balance. And even if you look at it from the side view here, you can see what's going on. So this foot being over here just adds the whole feeling of everything is past the balance. Everything is leaning this way. There's an additional weight with this foot that pulls the character over there. The only way to rebalance this would be to have a leg here, another leg here, and to have your center of mass and gravity here. But as you can see, that is not the case here. So again, to bring it back like this, you might think, well, this is still somewhat balanced, it could kind of work. But you have to think about if your character is moving from here to here, you're going to have momentum where the character moves this way, has to hold a little bit, it has to have the end of your momentum and drive over there. And in order to go over there, it takes time. So a lot of the mistakes are that students move the route over and then immediately move it to the left. That in terms of weight and the balance is just completely off and it doesn't work. So if you're already doing this, give this some time, because you have big mass like the route, this is going to move slower than a foot can move left to right, especially if you have hands or arms. I mean, same thing, if I move again, I did this before in previous clip, but if I move my fingers, they're light. So I can do this, I can do this really fast, hand bit faster, the arm is going to be a bit slower than my body slower and the route really slow. See, if you move something somewhere left or right, right, left, whatever direction, you have to think about the speed, the mass, the momentum and everything. It's like the example of you push a car, you start pushing the car and it starts to roll. If you run, if that, I don't have a car, let's pretend this is the car. So you push it this way and it starts to roll. If you are running over there and you want to push now as it's rolling this way and stop it and change direction, it's going to take a while for the character to go and push it back this way. Because it's so heavy, it has to stop, change direction and move over there. And again, this is much easier if I do it with fingers or something light. So going back, if your route is moving over there, it's going to take some time to stop and change direction to go over there. So the most common mistake for balance is that, A, if your character is getting this way and you want to change the balance left or right or whatever pose it is, you got to think about the momentum and the weight and the time it takes to change direction. But the most common thing here is that if you want to change direction, you have to be able to change direction through either changing the weight and the balance. So now that this adds weight, it will help the character to go this way. But if you are like this, how is your character going to go to the left? This would only work if there is a cable attached and someone is pulling the character this way or an outside force is here and pushing and pushing the character this way. But if you just look at what the character poses, the leg is pointing this way, this leg is pointing this way, there's nothing physically that will allow him to go this way. So what you have to do is you have to find a pose, adjust the pose in however you need to in terms of taking steps or whatever. But your leg has to be even this is tricky because all the pushing is going to be in those toes, that foot is going to technically push down and it's going to be there in your shins and that leg and all of that has to do the work to push the character back this way. So it's much easier if you actually go at least past that vertical line. And when it gets about at least here, obviously, the more the better. So if you go this way, again, visually think that now at least it's pointing to the left. It's not full on like this, but at least it's better than that. And it's definitely not like this. So you want to go to the left, you have to have something in your bottom mechanics that supports that so that your character can actually go back this way because of this leg. That being said, there's a second component to this. The first one is that characters like this, it's going to be really hard to go to the left. Like this, it's going to be easier, like this obviously even easier because now the screen right leg can push it over. So that's part one. Part two of the most common mistake is that so once your character is going over there, and you want that screen right leg to push over, the other thing has to happen. Let's pretend you're doing it correctly, whereas at least like this, what you cannot do is this. Let me select this and this, set a key. If I move forward here, I want to move them both at the same time. And obviously, this is not about animation. This is just about the principle. Look at how this moves. That makes no sense. You cannot, despite the pose to pose aspect that you want to offset obviously for polish, but this does not work. And this is the second thing that I see so many times is that the root and the foot move at the same time. That doesn't work because the moment you lift the foot off the ground, there is no weight anymore on this leg. This leg needs to stay on the ground so it can push this way. So the moment it's off the ground, all the weight is here. But as you can see, it's pointing this way and it's adding to the whole off balance feel of this. And that's a beautiful arrow. So if you have a character move over like this, what you have to do is you have to wait. So I'm gonna grab this, I'm gonna delay the keys of the leg. What you have to do is now the root is pushing first, then the leg is moving. So you have to give the character time to go to the left. And mechanics wise, it makes sense because this leg here is pointed this way and pushing this way. And you have to give it time. And then once there is enough momentum or at least it's balanced or both. However, the move isn't as fast as it is. Once you have that, imagine you're pushing really fast. You might even take the foot off while it's off balance because you have all that momentum where the root is actually going to continue to go this way. If the move is slow, then you have to wait until it's balanced correctly over the other leg. Then you can take this foot off. Then you can do that. And even resting on this pose, this is something that you can do. If you just stand and you lift up your foot, you're going to fall over. You are going to fall this way because you did not shift your weight over. And that's a classic thing when you do a walk cycle or any type of weight shift. You lift up your leg, you have to move over for balance. So you have to think about this principle. This foot moves up, you have to move your root over there so that everything is balanced. And an easy way to control that and kind of do remind yourself of what is my balance. Okay, is to act things out. If you don't shoot reference, at least get up and move around and act out what you want to do. Again, you don't have to film it to study it, but it gives you a sense of the mechanics and how it feels. And one of the tip is to act out your play blast, meaning that you look at what you just animated, look at your movie and then really mimic and replicate what you just animated. Don't act out what you think it should be. Act out what you did. So when you see your pose, act it out and get exactly to that pose and you will feel when you fall over that this doesn't work or if someone takes a step and you move your root over and the foot at the same time, you realize that doesn't work. If I'm off balance and I'm starting to push, but now moving my foot up, I'm going to fall back to the other side because that leg is not there a to push me this way and to keep that balance. So to recap, if you move and shift your weight over, you have to give it time until you can come back. And the way it comes back, it has to be the leg that needs to be this way so you can push this way so you can go this way. So look at the momentum and the timing and enough weight so it makes sense how quickly it goes back. You have to have a leg there or anything that helps that physical move to go the other way. And you have to wait until you move your foot because you have to give the root enough time to move over to be balanced and then you can take your foot off. That is my most observed balance mistake that I see that students make. I hope this was helpful. And if it was and you want to use this knowledge and implement that into your shots, you can also sign up for my workshop so we can work together. Link in description with all the information you can sign up at any time for my workshops. 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