 All right, welcome to the animation tricks of the trade panel at beacon 2023 That goes there. Okay. I'm gonna be your host for today. My name is Raymond Luke with me. I have some amazing animators We have Tony Garcia and Dylan goo from Dylan goo studios my co-workers as well as Pablo for near and healthy homicide from the blunder studio here Now I hope I said your name right If you don't know what this panel is about hello Welcome, it's gonna be about animation tips and tricks that we use in our day-to-day workflows To help speed up and improve our work while animating Hopefully doesn't play yet Most of the knowledge that I've gained over my career was when I was able to watch how my co-workers did things Whether that was in studio beside them at their desks or online through screen share. I find that Watching how other people work is imperative to Developing your own workflow and figure out new things and new tricks And if you are a fan of this kind of content, please check out the animation talks at the GDC because this talk is very inspired by them and As always before we do anything else in blender So here's my contacts if you want This is a random selection of stuff that I worked on from Pokemon to Mandalorian from a soca to a lot of the anime stuff of Dylan My first tip is gonna be something called mouse muppeting Blender has a cool thing if you just turn on auto key and hit the spacebar You can kind of like live record your your mouse movements to location data And this is very handy if you grow up playing with toys and just acting out scenes like with your hands So you can get like a quick Approximation of like what you want that in 3d space and the timing and the arcs and This is also helpful if you want to do camera handheld if you're just doing like a name constraint So this is some random footage I shot of a little rumble my girlfriend gave me and Like a rough Matchup in blender with my mouse. It's not like good animation per se, but it's like a good enough for an idea this is what it looks like with eyeballs and feet and what the live camera aim looks like and you're just recording the data and You have something moving if you want to do like a muppet animation or like just want to talk to you on an idea It just took me like three minutes So this is handy if you just want to like play around with ideas and you can just very easily iterate by undoing and just recording it My second tip is gonna be curved manipulation with proportional editing You can turn on proportional editing in the graph editor with the oh hockey and it lets you move keyframes around with falloff You just need to increase or decrease the fall off with your is your scroll wheel And it lets you very easily edit big blocks of data. Let's say if you're doing baked animation or mocap So for the example here, I have a character run circle But I don't want it to keep all the the ups and downs of the chest But have the the start the run start more exaggerated lean down so I just sculpt in the the more lean then the overshoot into the upper post in the settle and You very quickly can modify big blocks of data like that Here is a breathing cycle that I quickly animated which is just scaling the chest Moving the shoulders up and down and the head so the default Cycle is pretty basic then if I was to edit that into a Shot context if I want to exaggerate the acting she could start off more leaned up Then as the end of the shot and she'll reserve and go down like that It makes tweaking animation very easy And here is a shot example of something subtle you can do with like said breathing cycle I just know this is a mouse and that's not over the screen hold on Here is an example of two bouncing balls Hopefully you'll be able to feel a difference, but not necessarily to see a difference My next tip is going to be about manipulating graph editor handles to get variable spacing So the run the ball on the right is something I call burst spacing And I do that with using free tangents in the graph editor So here's a breakdown of the the bouncing balls. The only difference between them is the one frame before the The contact with the ground it favors the frame before it This is not necessarily realistic, but it's good for snappy animation and stylized stuff where you just want the impact to feel harder Because the viewer's eyes is going to stick to that frame Then there's going to be a big blob of missing data and your brain is going to interpret that as a harder motion hit I'm done. I'm doing this with the v-hawk key you bring up the the tangent types and Set it to free and that one lets you edit the tangent handles left or right without Disturbing the other handle. This is another handle technique you can use It's just flattening the handles and this is really good if you're doing robot animation and you want something to chug for say it generates a Mechanical moving sensation Because the animation is staccatoing upstairs Here's an example of a Shot that I just splined and if I wanted to feel more robotic I'll just let the plate for a little bit On the rotation up and down curves I've added the stair-steppy feel so it chugs as it's going up, but the weight and the timing is the same So hopefully some of these help Next up is gonna be Pablo for me Hello, I'm Pablo. I'm and I am an animator at the Blender studio. I work in all the stuff And I'm going to give you my tips Tips number one, the use of grease pencil Since We did wing it I start to use more grease pencil on my workflow and I use it in in two different stages First is the planning animation and later is doing the smear frames in this case in wing it we could do it Planning my animation I usually start with a simple shape is easier Doesn't take too much time to do in this case. It's a ball with two legs It was good to find the timing and the action beats is really cheap to do you can try like different approaches and but at the end when What you want is a fast interaction with the director So this is way faster than just taking the leg and posting the leg and posting this and that just draw some stuff in there and then And then When it's approved you post your character following the same animation that you did already with your grease pencil and Save you a lot of time Yes You can use the same method, but with more complex drawings This I don't know if you can see it's really good. It's really thin, but These are for production for a for pets. We didn't have the characters. So we did took I did some poses Having a more complex drawing it helped you to post a character more because you have more to play with and it's a really good to explore different Poses and then make it more cartoony And Later that will help you to push the rig trying to find that Poses you draw before always trying to pause and to push your rig with them in 3d is more difficult to do than doing with today It's simpler to do line of action with the stroke that trying to pose Trying to pose up full column for example So A smear frames The smear frames depends on the project if he's you have something Hyperalistic like charge you don't do it if you have something like funny as as we need you can go as crazy as you want You have a different type of Of a smear frames. They can be lines. They can be multiples. They can be blobs. They can be shapes There but the main idea is making your animation Flow better between poses between fast poses this is so that I worked I Is the cat panicking and pushing buttons and In for this case, I use a line approach so the They were like a scribbles trying to imitate the arms I put the different colors in this case It was like the blue and the red and the gray trying to match the different colors of the arm itself of the geometry I Try to use the the smears to complement the movement that means that They initiate they have to follow the the first the post before and post after otherwise, it's gonna be like really weird arcs and you're not going to be able to register the movement and And Most of the time is this would be one frame in the screen It's something that you need to feel some not something that you need to see in some cases you can add two frames But most of the time is just one frame Yes In this case I have a shot from a sprite flight They it's a day in the bath has some smear frames. Probably you don't see anything, but I'm gonna slow down for you Slow down for you Yeah, in this case the the approach it was more like a color shape. I tried to Show the direction by making the shapes farther away for the movement smaller and then the bath That's they were going closer to the but they are growing in size If you can see anything otherwise, so you can see it on YouTube Tips number two is the post library post library is Really important for us to try to keep the consistency between the different shots and the different animators we Each animator has his own style to animate and You need to unify it because the character. It needs to be the same character So post library it helped us with that Also, it helped us to be a model Yeah, it's difficult to work with different animators and Keep like Ellie being Ellie all the time or the dog being the dog all the time and the most important is save us a lot of time While we are doing the process like that image and process is easier to just mix poses or Clicking poses that have to recreate a lot of controllers like do it just with a lot of controllers The creation of poses Ideally should be in preproduction Not always happens, but then you have to be faster Doing the poses that they you want to do How we do it is we define and stream a ray of emotions as Far away as we can and as well Stream away that we can so if we have like a surprise It's gonna be a like really big surprise if it's a smile. It's gonna be a super big smile Later, it's gonna be easier to mix between the different poses if you have more range to work with We add leapsing if it's needed most of our movies. They don't have any leapsing, but if you have to Put them in there and hence, please put hands it takes too much time to animate fingers And is how we use it. We have here our beautiful cat And that's how it looks so the thing is Not always the Resting pose that comes with the from the rigging is the pose that is the best for the for the character So you need to create a default pose for the character in animation and later is easier to apply the different poses just by clicking if you need it We used to do all the poses favorite one side of the face later is super easy to just mirror the pose or Yeah, copy and post and paste it And then you have your cat smiling in a sound in a sort of environment when you're working on a shot most of the time you Work with that with the base of the post library and later you start to add different flavors of other poses We do that by using a selection set that we are created before most of the times is like upper head lower head and later You separate Eyebrows and eyes or something like that So you can sprinkle some different emotions, but within a bigger motion that you have already Yeah, it's super easy to to apply to different parts if you have the selection sets and Yeah, you can or put the full pose that most of the time we don't do that But it's more like the dragon and sliding and you mix with a with a post that you want to Want to have as a main emotion Tip three and the tools I use I like to use the blend to neighbor is Really easy to create in between once you have already your key poses And I like to create in between almost on tools to show to my directors what or to show in the studio I think it's super Important to have everything already like packed and Being on tools allow you to when you go to spline. It's not a Really headache later to make them Displine version of the of the shot and it's easier to show the supervisor because you have more information With the blend to neighbor is really easy to To delay parts of the body because you have a post before and post post after you can for example Your route can be favoring more like your post B and your arm can be favoring your post a and There's something I like to use is the 2080 rule that is when I'm creating a slowdown. I like to put Favorite in the B post 80% and later again 80% and 80% like this until it's low down and when it's as Accelerating is doing the same but the opposite is doing 20 20 20 and then go fast next Next Motion pass Check your arcs, please arcs are the most important thing to make your animation look good Otherwise, it looks like a robot and nobody likes and I like to manipulate my Motion pass on my view because already my poses are already good in the 3d space, but I want a more graphical representation of the arc I do it in the Camera view and then I can track the arc Frame by frame whatever I want and I used to do The root limbs and the nose to follow the path that the head is doing and I'm done next is Next is Tony Garcia Hi What's up y'all? My name is Tony. So I'm another member of Dylan Goose Studios. I mostly do Animation rigging and a little bit of action design and so without wasting too much time Let us get into the tips the first one I have for you is a collection of mini tips there for performance and Just speed while you're animating to get through your shots faster The first one is about the scene simplify option. So a lot of times when you're working with a studio rig You know, there's a lot of geometry in the rig. There's a lot of you know This the background can be very heavy. There's a lot of subdivision modifiers on the characters and there's a setting in the Render settings the render settings panel to checkbox the simplify and then below that there's a menu for viewport And if you set that to zero, it'll turn all your sub divs off Globally and it can help you gain FPS so that you can Like, you know critique your animation and see what you're actually going to see in the final export So if you look at the frame rate to there five FPS was a one character scene from one of our productions And with simplify on we get 24 FPS. So the difference can be quite drastic The second mini tip is for isolating curves in the graph editor When you're working in the graph editor, there's typically especially in blender. There's a lot of visual clutter and so the Isolating curves is very easy easy way to just take down the visual clutter so you can focus on the curve that you're working on So all you have to do is just click on either the channel name You can click on the key or you can click on the curve itself And it'll be highlighted and if you press shift H It'll isolate that curve from the rest of the curves and you can work on that curve You can make sure you know everything needs is to your liking And then when you want to bring all the curves back, you just do alt H and everything's back to normal next tip is Graph editor filters So there's a search bar in the top of top left of the graph editor and what that lets you do is search By channel name So if you have a bunch of controls So for example if I wanted to tone down the performance of my shoulder animation You could select both of the shoulders and if you type XR Or excuse me X E for X Euler rotation It'll filter and only show the X curves for Euler rotation and then you can you know scale down the curves You can do that for location and scale and so on the cheat sheet there. There's a couple of Just quick things you can type in just to make sure That you can find the curve that you want and then the next thing that I want to talk about is it's another speed tip But it's a little more convoluted And that's what I like to call pivot switching So pivot switching all it really is is taking advantage of this pie menu and blender You can access it with the default hot key of the period on the keyboard not the number pad And it lets you just dynamically switch between median point and individual origins, which I think probably most animators will use When they're animating in Blender But it also gives you very quick access to active element and active element is super useful because there is a feature in Blender where If you select a control and you select it again the control will be deselected so you can't Manipulate it with any of your gizmos or your transform hotkeys But it will still be the active element because it is the last selected control and It's very useful for me if you're like me you animate like 95% fk IK But you can actually move the IK like an fk. All you have to do is select the IK hand Select a control at the base of the arm Selected again, it'll be deselected so you don't have to worry about accidentally moving it But since it's the last selected control It'll be the active element and you can then move it like an IK you can pose it like an IK and it makes doing All IK animation super fast. You can post faster and therefore animate faster And then the next slide is just a couple of more Rather extreme examples of what you could do So in the gift on the left you could theoretically make a character swing around a bar without having to do any space Switching or set up any constraints and you can block it in very quick and dirty The gift on the right is something that I do quite frequently when I'm Making a character flip through the air. I find it more intuitive to have the pivot more in the chest area Rather than down at the hips where the center of gravity or the torso normally is and so with active element you can very easily move the pivot up into the chest and Then you can pose the character you can move it in you know World-space you can rotate it and because the chest is where the last select control is It'll always pivot around that point. So it's location independent constraint independent hierarchy independent and it's very Yeah, it's very useful for disposing things very fast And then the last thing I thought I'd throw in was the only locations checkbox. That's in the top right of that Pie menu I showed you earlier What only locations does is in the name it disables scale and rotation manipulation in the viewport So that means that if you manipulate those channels, nothing will happen But what you can do is if you take two controls and you scale them together They'll get closer together, but they won't get smaller or we'll get further apart But they won't get bigger and so that means that you can very quickly adjust the width of a character stance You can scrunch the eyebrows together Very quickly. It's a little bit more of a niche Use case, but because it's on the pie menu. It's very easy to access and just when I'm animating you to see me Flicking the pie and you'll kind of crazy The third tip is a little bit more theoretical conceptual But since I'm an animator who does a lot of action scenes and designs a lot of action scenes I wanted to talk about depth in action animation and in particular how it contributes to Dynamic movement in your frame and how it makes the watching action seems more engaging and Typically when you're talking about using depth in your animation, you're typically pairing that with short lenses so it's Somewhere usually like 35 30 millimeters and below and what that does is it exaggerates z-space and so You you don't always need a short lens when you're Animating these because there are times when you some productions will not give you as much control over the camera Or there will be for a particular shot composition reason You're gonna be wanting a high focal length because animation I just wanted to as an aside mention that you can you can fake depth with scale and stretch and so when you're looking for Opportunities to use depth. Don't be afraid to distort the rig Because using depth is super important. So these are some examples of fantastic action scenes and Like I said Good probably I would say 50 to 60 percent of dynamic movement in your frame when it comes to action scenes It's just stuff moving toward camera and away from camera And so you can see like in the example of the puss in boots movie When he throws puss wolf puts his face super close to camera. It works great as an anticipation and because it's coming at camera we feel it more viscerally and That's I think because when things come at camera They're coming at the audience point of view and because our brains can't differentiate whether or not it's an animation or actually something Potentially dangerous. I think we tend to feel z-space animation more viscerally and so the two gifts on the right are also good examples You can see in the in the animation there. He slides at the camera In here the attack is gonna hit the camera at the end and Here the face is coming at the camera and in here again. He's sliding at the camera and the gift on the bottom It's very interesting because in that example the characters z-space animation is actually very subdued He's not moving too much in z-space. You can see he jumps here He gets a little bit close to camera like that's a very dynamic Pose but most of the motion is coming from the elements of the background rushing away from camera And also the big thing that he's running from in the back That is getting closer to him and it's also getting closer to camera in the frame and that Slow, but build up of z-space Like when it's getting closer it builds a lot of tension in that scene and that camera angle And so if you're gonna animate action scenes Just try to keep a lookout for where you can use depth to build tension and make it more engaging and and dynamic and Then the last tip I have my favorite tip is use a vertical mouse so Vertical mice are they keep your arm in a more ergonomic position as you work, you know, they don't have your Your arm bones twisted So it helps prevent RSI's and carpal tunnel And of course as an animator and as just as an artist in general your your wrist health is very important So if you're not using a vertical mouse or at least a stylus or something I recommend at least trying it and seeing if it works for you But then without said I think that's it. It's time for Dylan. Yeah, I I take credit for the vertical mouse thing just saying Yeah No, that's great. It's great. Please do tell tell more people about it. So my name is Dylan Gu I am an animator And also the founder of Dylan Gu studios Technically, I'm the animation director now. I used to do all the animation myself, but these guys are fantastic So yeah, but yeah, so I help out. I also did the the Blunder fundamental series if you guys are familiar with that That's just a tutorial thing. It's fun fact and I have a YouTube channel called Dylan Gu surprise surprise All right Just a warning to you guys I pronounce it jiff Not gif so you're gonna hear me say that a couple of times It's better. It's okay. Cool. Come on. Yeah. Okay. All right, whatever Yeah, yeah, that's a flamin there. It's a lot better. Yeah, so my first tip is layered animation So this is something that I sort of Self-taught myself on what I preferred to do myself when I wanted to work a little faster And this had a lot to do with Like I didn't really learn blocking which you know, it was probably bad But that's okay But I did this and I thought it was actually quite intuitive and the main thing was leading with the action bone What that means is what action is being performed by what bone first and then everything else kind of follows And so in a lot of cases for body mechanics, it is typically the cog or the center of gravity So if you move that first and you get a good arc down and you get good movement down You can understand sort of how the center of mass is supposed to work and from there You can actually move the legs and the arms and stuff like that afterwards now for acting just to add a tip here It's usually the head or the eyes the acting is sort of led by the eyes What do people see what are their inputs and then they sort of react? So you want to start with that instead, but anyway This is sort of after Animating the cog then you do the legs and you can kind of understand like intuitively how they're supposed to balance out with the arcs of the cog and stuff like that and In this case for example, it is the legs Sometimes it can be something else if it's like a cartwheel or something maybe you want to do the hands first For example stuff like that. So it's it's it's a very dynamic process, but you can figure out what you want to do first The important thing is as you're working on it You want to make sure that this is a conversation between the bones So you start out with the cog and then you add the extra bones on top and you realize, you know Okay, so this will affect it a little differently Maybe you want to place the leg a little differently and then you adjust it as you go But in this way you kind of have a good understanding of how the weight distribution is the entire way through You don't have to worry about guessing anything in particular if you move the leg first and then you have to move the torso later It's a prevention of like wasted work essentially. So this is how I typically work. It's a very Intuitive work for me. I also do blocking but for body mechanics. I actually prefer this method personally We also have this this is one of my favorite tips because not a lot of software has functional and beautiful dope sheets like blunder does and Blunder's dope sheet has this amazing feature where you can just drag and drop keyframes wherever you want and this is a feature that I've taken advantage of in the dope sheet offsets workflow for FK chains So I don't know how many people know about this. I think it's a pretty popular thing to do But maybe it doesn't have a name. I call it the stair step method But essentially what you can do is you can offset these animations for an FK chain to get something that feels kind of like Follow-through something that feels a little bit more natural where you like a tail or ears or hair or something like that And so you can get something very workable right off the bat for a simple animation Now obviously if you want to make something more complicated, you should have a better rig than an FK chain But if you only have that to work with you can actually get quite far Which I think is pretty cool and you can do this for other things too like just offsetting stuff in a chain itself Or in like the hierarchy of the body you can get a lot of a lot out of that as well so That's dope sheet offsets and then we have handle types. We talked a little bit about handle types from Raymond over there. There's there's a free handle type I really like the vector handle type and I wanted to talk about how you can use the handle type to actually avoid Using the graph editor as much as you have to so full confession I used blunder for six years before I knew the graph editor was really a thing Okay, so I used the dope sheet Exclusively for a long time and the reason why was because I got very familiar with how handle types operate in the dope sheet So if you understand how handle types work and how like, you know The bezier interpolation and stuff can be manipulated in the dope sheet itself You can get away with a lot of things just with how great the dope sheet is so in this example You can actually change the handle type in this bouncy ball You have the key frames there But without going to the graph editor editor at all and not looking at like the actual curves You can actually just set these particular key frames as vector Which will add a sort of like sharp point at the bottom Which makes it bounce and you can get a very natural looking bounce very quickly without having to worry about the actual handles themselves You're not going in there. You're not manipulating anything. I'm only showing you so I can prove that it works But that I didn't even see what it was doing when I was working on it six years ago But here you go So that's how handle types actually work and they can be very very helpful now. This is a bit of a bonus tip I Found this out last year actually apparently you can animate even faster with a bouncy ball if you just use the balance interpolation It's just two key frames. It's done. Anyway, if you're in school for animation, don't use this It's don't tell me those for me. Anyway, so there you go And next we have the legendary Hjaltee. Yeah, I'm a sin Hey guys They left me with three minutes and I have 42 tips to go through. So let's let's do this Okay, so Yes, where am I looking this? Yeah, so this is this is like a thing that it doesn't matter if it's blender or whatever software as you Start off You're gonna have a lot of shortcuts in the beginning that probably make a kind of sense, you know, there's Like in blender for example, there's all the arrow keys are kind of Transferring through time and the timeline and whatnot, but as you get better just have in mind that it makes sense to To not move your left hand too much because that's what you're actively doing if you're using the entire keyboard with all the shortcuts all around and You are constantly also looking down on your keyboard And this is like the worst part is that you're letting go of your mouse as you're working because you want to hit some shortcut So don't do this right away when you're starting out but just have in mind that if you want to be more proficient and Efficient at what you're doing just start migrating everything to the left side of the keyboard and How to do it? It's up to you because everybody here uses You know blender for different things and they even the animators here are using different methods And you know, they have different muscle memories for what makes sense to them Tip number two That being said, I do want to give you like Little glimpse into something that I did that I found really useful and nice. So let's say you just have some animation that You know something simple and you want to go through the frame stepping I just did it I made one and two on my keyboard be that so it's very within reach and I wasn't really taking away anything I was using But then I have three and four as jumping between keys So I can like easily verify the posing that I'm doing but then on top of that five and six are markers So if I want to kind of a B test something I'll just slap a couple of markers there and now I can kind of go through that It's kind of the equivalent of old-school animators where they have their pieces of paper And they're kind of flipping through the paper and also only choosing the extreme poses of their papers and flipping through them So it's very handy and then so you have all of these and then the question is Aren't you gonna get confused? Because you're gonna have to look down and be like oh where are my fingers So, you know how like you want to buy a keyboard or a mouse or whatever And it seems like everything is made for gamers. Everything has like really edgy Design and whatnot. So like my keyboard was completely broken at the studio So they bought a new one and it's this, you know, razor-ass or whatever that has like LEDs and whatnot Whatever, but it came with these like weird little buttons tactile buttons So you can swap them out for the buttons and you know, it's meant for like gaming or AESDF and all that stuff But I like let me just try something. So I swapped out my scale rotation Grab and so I always feel tactily where my fingers are as I'm working and then for that tip that I just Told you for the three and four. I replaced it with I don't know They didn't have a G so there's two F's now and whatever who cares I'm never looking down at the keyboard anyway So I always know if I'm at a one and two and then there's like a little hill and then three four and then five six number four The I kind of like doing having shortcuts that do similar thing, but in different ways So For this to like kind of tick tick tick tick go through. It's great when you're doing something very precise But when you do want to do it really quickly, I think everybody here knows that If you use the if you hold down the old key and you're scrolling It'll kind of just scroll through the frames. This is a thing. That's already in blender It's counter-intuitive to me because it goes the wrong way how my mind works So I had to flip it, but I think I don't think that's a problem for anybody else But what I did add to it is yeah, hold down control and now you're skipping through keyframes and hold down control And alt and now you're skipping through markers. So it just made it very handy to you know, do that flipping very quickly and Number five this is gonna be my Me on a soapbox with my animation snobbery. I'm so sorry So like take this with the pinch of salt because shots are different So depends on what you're doing but this is a thing that I keep seeing again and again and again, especially with junior animators and it's basically They get too eager going through the steps of animating a shot So there is you know, this is kind of roughly like you have kind of the planning phase and then blocking blocking plus blinding These are you know kind of cliche ways of doing it, but yeah, I don't like the terminology. They're blocking plus What the hell does that mean? but Thing is what I see way too often is that You know usually shots are different. So, you know when it comes to how long each part takes it kind of depends The thing I see a lot is this which is where you know, the planning goes, okay they start blocking out and They get approval from the director and then they add a few more poses and then they get so eager they start splining and now That ends up being this horrible thing that they have to rain back in and try to get that Snappiness back that they used to have their director has some notes But it's really hard to address them now because everything's kind of swimming around So oh my god the font has Okay, imagine that you can read this So is this just like kind of You know, this this is where the kind of snobbery comes in So I like please stop splining too early because what will happen is you'll get these You'll get these poses in between that are coming from the computer and not from you. You didn't craft them so as you As you go for a feedback session you give it to the director and the director sees a bunch of shit Like your poses are somewhere in between other poses that are not really representative of what is supposed to be happening there And you know, so I kind of call them like unintentional interpolated poses Which is kind of what's cluttering everything up But in real life, it's just shitty poses, but it's not your shitty poses. It's shitty because it's not coming from you It's not your intention to show these poses It's really hard to get feet give feedback with them cluttering everything up Everything is kind of swimming. You have to kind of get your snappiness back and it can take forever It's really hard to make changes Or let's just say harder at least and then yeah Your eyes get really numb to it. So as you are looking at it again and again and again I think that's one of the reasons why so many people have a hard time kind of regaining the snappiness that used to be there in the previous step in the process so Yeah, it takes longer to pause but then this is what I would do on a typical shot and The thing is I spent way more time investing in the blocking plus phase It was basically just means that I've blocked out my shot everything I've gotten a thumbs up from the director and then as I go into the next stage I just keep adding critical breakdown poses in between my kind of key poses and In and I go from there again and again and again until I've honed the entire performance And there were a couple of instances where I Gave a shot away to the next team that was rendering and they were yelling at me because The motion blur wasn't working and it turns out that my animation which was on once Wasn't splined underneath the hood. I had never taken it out of the stepped constant thing So but it was just animated on once. I had just done all the every single Pose in between which is fine. That's that's due diligence. That's how you do it So the kind of the upside of doing this is that you have way more solid foundation as you are moving along It's way better for feedback. It's way better for Like kind of stronger poses because as you are looking at the poses and as you go along You might want to go back to a pose and strengthen it and it's very easy to compare poses now because you're only dealing with the Most extreme poses at any given moment It is easier to address notes. So if you know all of a sudden it's like all that activity I don't know if that works. Okay, that you know I'm only having to deal with a couple of poses instead of like these kind of 20 poses that are half mine and half not It's yeah faster in the long run. That's actually the thing, you know Once you once you get really eager and you want to spline really quickly You have the illusion that you're actually going great like your timing is great Oh the deadline is way over and it ends up being that you just burn through your time and now you're way late with your shot Yes, okay, thank you Oh Yeah, you know our biggest worry with this was time and we have eight minutes left. So I think we did good Yeah, we had a like a hundred and six slides so things work Since we have a bit more time, that's a wrong direction This is a crowd question. Would you like Q&A so we can repeat stuff if it went too fast Or would you like like a speed round of tips speed round speed around? Okay Um, I made a few slides, but you guys can make speed rounds if you have anything off the top of your head Say something relevant We're going through speed round This is a add-on by Cody Winchester. He's right there. He's great. This add-on lets you pretty much pin the face To the the camera view so like when your camera movie is moving The character stays stationary and screen. This is especially useful if you have a character running everywhere and you still need to do lip-sync and you're crying Math works in Blender. You can use math and it's good You can You can input commands like gx plus 50 and it'll move Whatever you have in the graph editor or in the viewport by 50 units in the in x You can use this to retime animation if you're if you're scaling animation It's it's best if you turn off frame snapping in the bottom right in the graph editor. There's a little thingy. This is not a directional mic Yeah, if you turn off snapping then you can scale animation and it'll preserve all the animation data you had without breaking anything Decimate keyframes. This was made by Sebastian Barbaug from Blender If you need to reduce your keyframes You can use a deskmate operator and if you combine that with What was it? The the the k-hawk key which selects every keyframe on each column selected then you invert it and run decimate again It'll decimate all the curves based on your original first curve. So everything will be on whole keys This is how I prepped scene for lip-sync because audio files are kind of a pain to manage if you open up the sequencer Pop it up and show waveforms Then if you hit the sync visible range button between the graph editor and the Sequencer when you're scrubbing the the 2d cursor will be aligned So it just makes things a bit easier to for lip-sync And then I'll have a reference on the side and this is usually how I prep lip-sync seems just kind of muddy It'll look like that The time slide tool is pretty cool in the dope sheet if you hit shift T It'll grab the animation that you have and move it based on wherever the mouse selection is But it doesn't change the end the start or the end poses Timing-wise it just moves everything in the center So if you like if you're used to editing videos and like moving keys around like this, this is very helpful That's all the things I prepped for the speed around does anyone have anything to say? No, okay. We're thank you for coming. Yeah We got five minutes for questions if anyone wants questions cool. We good good I think well question The question was is there a trick for the decimate operator if to get it to not change your key frame type The handle type. Oh, no, I think the it works based on like it's trying to match whatever the original curve was But by using the handles But instead of the the decimate operator, I think there's different ways to filter out the curves if you want Like the the alt s hot key will bring up the smooth operators in 3.6 and above though It's a bit of a weird topic for like reducing key frames question Question was if we use casket or any physics-based animation I tried the free demo and I animated a backflip in it and it looked bad and I didn't want to touch it again That was more on me part because I did not use the software Any other question? No question This was a tip that I had to cut because I thought I had no time Please color your key frames. Please please please please doesn't matter which color There's not a lot of colors and honestly, there's like, you know, there's the pink. There's the green There's the blue for me and there's others, but the others just kind of look like the original one So ignore that. There's the yellow but whatever Those three please do it for me, I don't know why but I went with like the pink are the kind of Usually my extreme poses then the blue comes next and then the green And then anything that isn't that that just means that I'm still working on it And as I go along with a shot Let's say there's a shot that I haven't worked on for two weeks or whatever and I have to return to it at a glance I will see which keys am I the most confident with and so I kind of see a slight gradient there of This is stuff I was kind of still trying to figure out and this is stuff that is like rock solid and I feel really solid about it Don't feel in love with your poses don't feel off with your own job. You will have to delete everything Try to so cut the mic Try to show your blogging as soon as possible to Find out if you're in the right direction because at the end is not if unless you're the director if you're animated for somebody It's not your shot Check with your director if you are in the right track, you will save your brains and you will not burn out Think we've got two minutes. Was there another question? I saw a hand Purely color So I was saying that they say in the grease pencil There is an atom that you can filter your poses So if you want to see only Stream poses you color them in one way and then you can filter just flipping between them and you don't have to see the Result of the poses. I think that's it on time. Thank you all for coming Hopefully you guys learned something today because we had a lot of different minds and a lot of different workflows I think some of ours conflicted, but you know it works You can you can choose whatever you want to pick from this But the point is just to share information So maybe hopefully we'll do this again sometime. Thank you