 Welcome back to another FNA and this is part 11 and the last part of the most common animation mistakes and today it's all about polish. Pollish is tricky if you don't have enough time to get there and this is why I recommend to my students to keep their shots short 3 to 5 seconds 5 to 7 10 is kind of long anything after 10 is very difficult to get to and you do want to get to the end where you really get into the nitty gritty the frame by frame all those little extra details that are going to make that shot really work and sink and what am I talking about well let me show you your animation shouldn't be something where imagine your animation looks like one car and then your polish looks like another car it should technically be your blocking tells the whole story everything is there all the information all the story repeats and the timing and the acting choices and that represents let's say a dirty car but when you get to polish you're going to just add the final detail and as the name says you're going to polish it it's the same car just clean and polished to polish really means that you're going to go into your animation and detail the things out frame by frame it's tedious work but it's necessary you're in control of your character so don't let the computer do the things for you you have to design what the breakdowns are what the in-betweens look like and speaking of which if you have the shot I showed this before in a previous fna but if you look at this blink you can see that it's all very even in terms of how it opens and closes what are you going to do in polish if I move forward here you're going to have one side that's going to be slightly offsets the ease in is going to be ever so slightly different then you can see that there's an offset in these two eyes you have this part that's a bit more open than this section here and you don't want to repeat this on the same side you can always change that into opening it up on this side if you go a step further this is just the eyes for a previous example but if you have something closing like this here you probably want to go in there and add a little bit of influence in the brows depending on how the action is when you have a dialogue and you open the mouth here you can see that only this section is influenced but you're gonna have to think about well if I want to do more you might have to go in there and just move a little bit over that tip of the nose and you have a controller you can also look at moving more of that same thing if you have a smile and this goes up now this is built into the rig as you can see where the cheeks go up but if you want to do this and you really think about the influence of the cheek all of this is going up and is pushing the skin and the flesh up there so what you can do is also move this part of the skin up a bit let's go to another example let's say feet so one of the common things is that if your character takes a step or moves the foot what people do is they activate the foot roll right so you're gonna have a foot roll sure but what if the character is actually moving this way this is what I see a lot of times is that the students just activate the foot roll so again if you look at this this feels slightly off because you do have a force that goes this way the character is going this way but there's a bit of a break in this pose so what you can do is either you take that and you swivel it out so you have a bit more of a nicer curve so it's not so broken and it also depends on the camera angle but that will have a nicer flow the body is pulling this way so this back side of the foot is going to go this way as well but technically you can do more if that force really goes to the right you can start adding like a side roll like this and if you want more compression on the foot you're going to take the tool control you bring it back down and depending on the pressure of the foot you might even have to add a little bit of a squash so now you have this force of the body going over it takes the foot with a little bit there's a slight pivot but there's still pressure on this and if you do a squash you even feel that that pressure goes down so all of this section is still pushing down while the rest is being taken by the body and that's a lot of lines here the same thing goes for hands so let's say I have this character and with this rig you can change it so if I select this back here you can change it to the hand spring right but let's pretend that this is a transformation that the character wants to go through it's kind of signaling to the audience well you wouldn't just do this and then move the hand at the same time to potentially different position in polish mode what I would do is that your fingers would have a slight relaxation almost as an anticipation and then tighten again for then the spring to change in this arm but then the other thing is that you wouldn't just do this on this control where everything's moving at the same time you're going to have to go in there and take two separate controllers and start moving and offsetting fingers a little bit so it's not just all together but potentially the thumb might relax first to give the other fingers room to get out of there and again all of these would move at the same time you would start offsetting these by a couple frames maybe one maybe two depending on how much you do signal this also depends do you see it like this or do you see it like that that's a weird pose from my previous tweak here but you have to think about well how much I need to polish depending on the view if this is this far you're going to have to push it a bit more maybe push the offset a bit more but if it's like this then you can have a lot more subtle stuff in there so even your shoulders might react a little bit as this arm changes to a spring and it might have a little bit of a little change in there and if you're going to be super detailed then again I will put this into the polish is that if your arm changes and that propagates into the shoulder well if you have a little bit of shoulder movement then you're definitely going to have to have a little bit of body movement and because of that your head might also change a little bit just a little bit that the general move of an arm moving and affecting the rest of the body that to me is just part of body mechanics so the biggest change is going to be in here and then there's going to be some fall off where it's going to move a lot more here a bit less here really a bit less here and so on and so on it's going to fan out that being said you can still add all over this in the polish phase with really really tiny moments what if this is a really really big moment and with the arm and the transformation then you can still take your controls in the eye and have a slight maybe a little bit of a blink a little bit of a squint on the side all those details and I can't get over this pose here all those details are going to make the animation just feel a bit more special there's just a bit more influence they're just having this arm go from this to this and this doesn't always have to be contained to characters themselves so what I did a long time ago here with this test is that with this walker I wanted to do a walk cycle and I wanted to do those spiky claw feet so whatever you want to call them I wanted them to interact with the ground so I started adding details like here where I would animate geometry frame by frame and add a little bit sort of like a bouncing ball rock that will copy paste and scale for scratches and debris that would move so if you play this again you can see the different little scratches as the character goes forward there's another view here where you can see the line so depending on how I move this it has little scratches there and even the underside that is somewhat spiky which is here these little things so as it compresses they create pow pow little holes in here so these spikes when the foot comes down you can see how they hit and then they create that little hole in there and seeing this here at this offset I can go back to that rig the other thing that I see is when people do a plant on a foot so there's a step and take the front view here when they have this here they're going to put the foot up and they're ready to land like this and take the foot down over maybe two or three frames depending on on the step harshness but what I would recommend that let's move the character again to illustrate this if you do a weight shift let's pretend that your leg is more like this right there's a slight angle like that in the leg and generally I would do this even if there's no dramatic angle like this but when your foot goes down it doesn't go down like that I will have a contact point that is slightly like this so if I add a ground plane and select this again you can see that here's the intersection so I would do a contact point like this and over the course of two frames it will go down and compress like that but then of course you have to look at the offset so if this is your touch point this will be your pivot so as the foot goes down you want to make sure that your foot has a slight move so that you can feel that when this happens there is a little bit of a move there so it still compresses but it pivots off that left side but again something like this I would have in your initial pose for your blocking so if that's the angle of the foot you have to make sure that well it has to influence the rest of the leg so that it's not like this so you don't have this break in the pose where it's a bit too harsh here's a shot that I did a long time ago what is this probably 11 years ago something like that so another example where I go kind of nuts and this is something I think I'm gonna post later on Twitter I've just actually found a progress reel but you have this where and this is a longer shot but when you have the bird coming in I just go nuts because I have fun doing this so this is just the play blast of the elements of the set as the character goes up and then the bird comes through so it's a bit of camera move in there but you have a bit of drag overlap in those leaves as it comes up depending on the move and then as the bird comes in you can see that frame by frame I animated vertices you have these guys moving here and imagine the main force comes through here so all of that is going to go this way in terms of the wind and the power and influence so I have these leaves moving first and then it kind of goes over into this way into here and all fends out this way and then of course you got the human as we frame through here crazy poses as he tries to hold on to this you can see some of those scratches in the sand which is this section here so these are just geometry spheres I can't remember what I did here but I just frame by frame moving into which is then spinning and I made it this and I just have a lot of fun animating those details let's go back here when you see the leaf moving and again everything that's being influenced by the bird and all of that good stuff at the end this is something that I showed last time but I always show this to my student as an example of what do you have to put in into your blocking paths now everything's animated sometimes the lip sync is not there at all but everything is there that conveys the right idea the acting choices and the attitude but let's go to another example when you have a finished shot you have to ask yourself did you really put in all those details on every framing through your poses the offsets the asymmetry the line of acumen in the face if you take this shot and we'll put a link in the description with this fantastic shot you can basically stop on any frame and see the detail that's put in in every pose especially on the hand so you can see this here you can go any frame everything is posed out look beautiful again the poses are great you can stop on any frame and you can tell this animator really took the time to just pay attention to everything there's a squish in the cheek look at that I can randomly go onto every frame and it's absolutely awesome so I highly recommend that you check out the shot there's some really awesome animation work in there and a great example of how far you can go in your polish just in terms of again facial poses and hand poses for the whole range of the shot that just makes it such a delight to watch there you go last part for now I might add more things as time goes on but so far these are the most common ones there's one more technically that's about IK stuff but I want to fold that into an IK versus FK separate FNA so to speak so I would say that would be a part 12 I'm gonna add that to that playlist but I want to make that a separate thing just about IK versus FK I don't know how I can segue from IK versus FK to that but if you feel like this was helpful and you liked it and you want to incorporate all those ideas into your shots I have workshops link in the description as always you 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