 Welcome back to another F&A and this is part 10 of the most common animation mistakes and today I'm going to talk about Silhouette. That's right, Silhouette being all clear and frame. So there are some classic things you need to know about Silhouette in terms of staging and blah blah blah but it's not what I want to talk about because this is the most common animation mistake series. So let's go into my and show you what I have noticed the most. All right, so we have these two characters here and I can switch over into the perspective mode and here you have them in all the glory slightly cheated for this view. Now one of the immediate things you can do in Maya is hit seven. So if you don't have any light, so let's go in there and actually create lights, directional light and you can see this is what happens. Turn on lights here. You can see this is where this is and you can rotate around and you can see what happens here in terms of the scene. So if you do have any lights in there, delete and this is what you get. So this is an immediate way of doing just an outline really black on whatever background you have view of your character and then you can start posing things out where you have a bit of a nicer silhouette. So it's not all squished together like that. If it's a general pose, this might not be the best thing. I don't know what that is. This gets a bit better. This is a bit better with the arm and so on and so on. You can kind of look around in terms of what does really read the best in terms of my silhouette. That also goes for hands. If you do something separately, this is a classic kind of a triangle pose. This gets a bit flat and weird. If I grab her fingers and do something absolutely bananas, really nothing, nothing good but illustrating the idea that you want to look at something that's just a bit cleaner like this depending what you got to do. If it's someone that's freaking out or something where it's a robot that goes crazy and breaks down, sure is something like that works. This is a bit more appealing or like a clear outline like that. You have to think about negative space between limbs and something like this. If someone has hair, just it's under one big black block here. So you want to look at negative space and so on. And I know I said this is not going to be general, but this is the general idea for silhouettes. So what am I talking about? The most common thing that I see are elbows that are not turned in a way where you can see the bend of the arm either down or up. The most common thing is to take your elbow and put it exactly towards camera away from us or towards us. And this can be the same thing with the leg which I can show you later. So here's the difference, right? If we go in here, you can see that this arm just looks very, very short. We don't quite understand what is going on, but the moment we change the perspective of it, we understand, ah, this is a bent arm. So if you do this, right, and we have our pole vector, you need to make sure that your arm is like this or like that. Yes, you might have breakdowns every now and then it could be like this, blah, blah, blah, blah, but if you are in a held pose, you need to make sure that we see the bend of the arm so we understand the length of it. Because if you don't, like I said, if you don't, then this happens. And this can be really bad if you put your arm like this. Like, I don't know, is this, could be a wooden arm, could be a pirate, but if you pull this down, even this helps. I know this is a drastically different pose, but again, you just have to think in terms of readability. So you have to adjust your acting pose potentially, the camera perspective, whatever you have, but this is better. Of course, this looks broken, but I'm talking in terms of seeing the elbow either up or down to understand the bend. So let's take this leg here, my Petriki, because it's kind of a stumpy leg. So let's say do this and do that, right? That's weird because it's just very short. Is it again, a pirate leg? I don't understand, but you take your pull vector and you pull it out. Now again, we understand that there is a longer limb here. This break here tells us, oh, this is a bent knee compared to this where we just don't understand what's going on. So again, you have your arm, whatever pose you have, whatever they want to do, they want to wave somewhere or do something. Don't do this. Same thing with this arm. You take this and you want to do this hero pose. Well, what you don't want to do is move it back like this, so that if you look at the arm like that, now you have this. If this is your hero thing and this is a stump with a big boulder at the end, sure, but technically this will have a clear read that this is a bent arm. And of course, if you do this and you just check kind of check your pose in 3D, you can see that. Well, this absolutely looks broken, but if you're not sure, do this and check readability. Arms have to be at least up or down. Of course, it depends what is more appealing, but I need to emphasize this again. This is so, so common. You need to show the break in the arm and not do this where it's a stump. I know it seems extremely easy, and it really is. It just comes down to you having your list and checking that when you do your posing. Oh, did I follow this? Oh yeah, don't forget to bend your arms. And of course, there are exceptions. It might be in a transitional pose. It might be something where you want to do it on purpose for a story point or a gag, whatever it is. But generally, if you do something and you have your arm like this, you don't want to point it to cameras. If I do this, this doesn't tell me anything. But if I do this, I understand the bend. If I do that, oh, I understand the bend as well. And this can be somewhat extended like that. And this can be bent like this, whatever you have again with knees and elbows. Hope that makes sense. And if you feel like this would make sense for your assignments, you know my segue, I have workshops you can sign up at any time, link in the description with all the information, and you can send me a work and I can work with you and make your shots even more awesome. Speaking of awesome, if you're still watching this, you are awesome because of your patience. And if you like this, and you feel like this is cool, I don't want to miss anything, subscribe and hit that bell button to get notifications for all of my uploads. Other than that, that's it from me, and I will see you in my next upload.