 Welcome back to FNA and today is going to be part 9 of the most common animation mistake series and today it's all about offset. Alright, so I want to talk about multiple things when it comes to offset. There is pose to pose, there's asymmetry and then there's moving the whole body as one unit. So actually, let's start with that one. Let's go into Viya. Alright, so let's say we have this character here and this is the pose and this is the pose. This is not about pose quality or animation quality, this is purely to explain the principle here. So the couple things. A, all of this is moving from pose to pose, which makes it all look very stiff. There's no sense of what the character is thinking and what prompts that change. So what if the head goes up first, he hears something. So again, this is not about animation quality but the head goes first. Oh, what is this? Oh, how dare you go over there? So that already changes the attitude and the thought process of the character. So another thing that students fall into in terms of a trap is that when you have your arms in FK mode, right? So this moves like that and everything is influenced by the route. So what happens is that students would say they move and they want the character to look over there. This is what happens, right? And you can exaggerate this in whatever form you want. And again, this is not about animation, this is about the idea and the principle behind it. This looks very stiff as if the puppets just has a joint here to move the whole character around. It's like an animatronic where all of this, this whole section here is one piece and this whole section is another piece, which makes it look very stiff. So again, when you have movement like that, you don't have a breakup between the hips, the chest and the head. So when you are in a position where you move the whole route, you got to think about, OK, well, maybe this is my general idea. He looks over there, but then you still have to go in there and move the head first if he hears something over there, right? It all depends on your idea, of course. And then the same thing with the chest. So maybe the chest will react to the sound as well, but then you can't forget to offset the arms too. So they don't just follow along like this wooden puppet. So they're going to have to drag and I have no idea what this looks like. Who knows, but the head goes first. Here's what's going on over there. Then the chest moves with it. And maybe at the end, the rest of the route. Of course, this changes the whole pose, but you can see how things are different. The idea is that you want to offset depending on what's going on. So if the character here, something, then the head goes over this way. Then the body follows because as the head turns, it's going to influence the rest downstream. So the body is going to turn as well because the head pulls it with it. And then once the body moves, the arms are going to move as well. But of course, once you move the body, you're going to see movement in the arms as well at the same time. So it's going to be up to you to offset this. And that's more into the fine tuning aspect of your animation. But this still feels better and tells the story that, oh, what's over there? Now let me lean over versus what we have before where it just removes. And it's this very stiff boxy character where it does everything feels like arms. Apparent it to everything and there's just no life to this. Now let me bring up some examples here. This is a blocking pass from Zootopia. Let me just play this in full here. So here are the exceptions. This is a blocking pass. And you can see there's a mix between things that are leading and things that are moving at the same time. Since this is in step mode, you are of course going to have this and this all move at the same time, right? Even here, but you still have a delay in this arm. But then you have details where in this pose, you can see that the wrist here starts first. This arm goes down, then the body goes over and there's already drag in the head to then settle here. Then on this big move, you got major movement here, but still lockdown movement there. Yes, this is all moving at the same time, this and this, and then pops into this pose to land into this. But then you still have this arm going first that leads into this. And there's no major change in the rest of the body. Yes, you have arm and head at the same time here. But again, in terms of storytelling, in terms of timing, if you watch this, this all makes sense. It still doesn't feel super pose to pose. And there are moments where you have this. You have a reaction in this, like anticipation and squash before the movement over there, moving the whole body with all the elbows. You still have moments of offsets. You have still moments of leading actions. But in early stages, this is fine because you don't want to go into crazy detail because this is a blocking pass. You need to be able to make changes fast so you can present this to your lead, your super client, and present many, many takes in case they need different acting choices. Now here is another example where you can see when you go through this blocking pass, still step mode. Some parts are leading and some parts are stepped and fairly pose to pose. But again, this is an earlier pass where it's okay. An important thing is that you still tell the story in a pleasing way. I love that ending here. Let's go back here. So when you have movements like this, both arms here are moving at the same time. They go up and they stop at the same time as I'm framing through. And as he hits that pose and gets out of it, everything moves out of that pose at the same time. It still tells the story. And there are moments where you see the shoulder leads. And now this arm is moving, but you can see how it has a flow and it works. And again, this is a blocking pass that's solely fine. But you can't stay in this mode forever. You can't present this as final animation. And this is one of the most common things that I see is that this type of blocking gets carried over into final. So if I take this example and now look at the final version. Now when you play this, you can see the offset. So let's go back to that beginning move. You can see how this arm starts to move sooner. Even though he wants both arms to come up. Now they are built in slight delays. This arm goes first and as it goes up, now you can really see how this arm leads compared to this one. And then they get to this final pose again with an offset. Swing out. And now as we hit this pose, you can see how this arm starts to drop sooner and then they go down. So now in the final pass, it feels more polished. It's more organic. There's more offset. There's more asymmetry. Making this for a much more polished and entertaining shot. Speaking of offset, here's an example where the offset is really important because it helps you lead the eye to specific parts of the body. So the audience is not confused. So as we finish this, I want to concentrate on the end. So you have this whole move. You can see everything is moving here. The whole body comes down. The audience really looks at this. There's also a nice color contrast. And once it's done, you could technically go from this pose to this pose. This tells a story. I'm looking at this. I'm bored. But the clever thing in this one is that now the hand is moving first. As you can see, the rest is not moving. It's the hand that goes first. And once the hand is down, you can see the elbow is going down. Once the elbow is there, we can see that the jaw goes up and then the face. There's a succession of movement like this that leads the eye over there because you want to look at the face. So how do we get the audience back to the face? If you move everything, you might miss it. Now this is not extremely complex. So it's not like you're super confused if you only look at this end pose, but it's very, very sophisticated in terms of how that action flows back into here. So again, offsets are there for a more organic and asymmetrical feel, but also there to guide the audience to specific parts of the frame where we want the audience to look. So here or here or where we want it to be depending on your story. The last example here, you can see the offsets where it's really important when it's a bit more cartoony and really going pose to pose. So you can see at moments where, and it's not during transitions where you have overlapping actions like with this head, but there are a lot of moments where things just kind of hold and you just have the head moving. And now as it looks up and is ready to make another move, look at the lower left foot. It moves out a little bit as a slight dissipation. And then that leg goes first, then this goes up with a drag on the head. Hits this pose. We hold, hold, hold with a nice moving hold. Then what happens? Even though it's subtle, the head goes first and then the foot goes and all of this leads the action over there into that moment here. Then it recalls into that moment. Again, we have a hole, but now look at this. We have just the face moving. There's nothing in here. And again, as we go into this moment, shoulder goes first, the head, then the foot into that step. And then as it moves over here, you could hold into one pose, but you can see how this is already dissipating that whole change. This arm goes first, then this arm goes up here. And you can build all those offsets, like I said, into more overlapping actions where as these arms are going up and recovering, the root is already going down for the next action. Here's a great example where he's holding this and then he wants to push it off and look at what anticipates. What goes first? What's the offset? The muscles. I love this. You got the shoulders, the muscles engaging and the scale of the body really anticipating the whole thing of, I need strength before I throw the whole thing there. And again, we're in somewhat of a held pose and you can see how this goes first with the shoulder, then that arm leading that action there into this moment. And even this transition here, you can see how jaw goes up, head goes first. Yes, you have this action as well, head and that, but it's still mainly this move into that action. It's not like all the body parts are moving in an extreme way, making this super pose to pose. Now, the more cartoony you get, the more you will have pose to pose action where really things are moving at the same time. So again, you have to kind of look at where does your style fall and where is it appropriate to do massive offsets or not. Lastly, when you get back to this example here, I'm going to zoom in a bit. So when you have a face like that and your character smiling, right? Maybe you want to favor one side and because this side is going up and you can see nicely in this rig, it pushes the cheek up. So you only have asymmetry in the cheek and the mouth. Because of that, you might want to tweak the nose a bit just a bit because this section in the face is pushing everything up. So now because of that, you got the nose, potentially want to move the lid up a little bit. You can close a little bit of that. You can bring up the eyebrow a little bit on this side. You can bring the eyebrow down a little bit on this side. Depending on the action, you might even want to change the jaw a little bit into that. You can even bring up that ear a little bit, a little bit lower. Take this ear, bring it up a bit higher. And this is not extreme. This is not super appealing, but you still see the difference. So if you draw that line here, it's not mirror. Not that this is a great pose, but again, this is different than here. This goes up. This is all pushing over here. Changing the eyes, potentially all of this. So this is different depending if you need a certain line of action, depending on the look. But whatever you want to do, you don't want something like this. Press your things out and it's all extremely mirror. So again, you can draw a line and look at everything is kind of the same. The only thing that helps here is the hair. The hair gives you asymmetry, but these are the same. Eyes are the same. Mouth is the same. This is all the same. There might be a story pose for that, but generally you want to avoid this and make this a lot more offset in terms of, like I said, timing, when something moves, depending on which action has to lead. Offset in terms of the general shape of the face. And offset in general breakups, you don't move like some animatronic at Disneyland. So you want this to be more organic. Of course, all serving the story, serving the style of your animation, that's going to change things as well. So if it's more realistic, you're definitely going to have all those changes and then offsets and then the details and subtleties. And if it's super cartoony or Cuyo style, where just things move in one axis and pose to pose, then it's okay because that is the style and it's cute and totally works. So you have to look at the style, what is your style you're currently animating, and what is the intent of the story, what is the intent of the acting choice of the character. And all that flows into a more interesting, more organic potentially, and just a bit more fleshed out and complex character. Now, if you want to take those complexities and apply those to your shots and you want me to help you, you know that takeaway at the end. I have workshops, workshops are open. You can sign up at any time. Link in the description with all the information. If you like this and you don't want to miss any of those things that are uploaded, you can subscribe and hit that bell button so you get all the vacations. You know the drill. Speaking of drill, if you drilled yourself into being patient and watching this till the very end, I say thank you. I appreciate that. Well, that's it from me and I will see you in my next clip.