 Well, hello everybody Welcome. I'm so glad to see you. This is my first Blender conference and it's amazing Now I would love to see some hands. Who are animators in this room? Oh Great well the rest is like, what is this guy gonna say? Let's see Let's get started I would love to get into Some character animation going over the latest Ina rig, so let's just delete the default wait What the what what blender version is this? Come on another cube Well, let's just delete this one. Oh Oh Come up wait. Oh, no How can I it has children? How can I do this? Guys, I think We just have to animate the default cube today now Put down your weapons put down your pitchforks. It's gonna be all right and first off Who is this random guy speaking in front of you? Let me You give me a little bit of track record Do we have audio here? Yeah, I Don't hear it. Well, is there audio or should I? Do something around here? Let me try a different player here and give me a sec Wait Hello Okay, let me try again Okay from the beginning play dumb Who's morale is not that dumb that that's a no-no. We don't like this is fascinating. Okay. That's that's my face You're going to take selfies and you're going to have fun uniform. It's really cute or at least it was I Was pretty happy when I didn't know about the small fun or the SES or how Amazing Nietzsche really is and I'm pretty sure I'd be happier not knowing that they hate me Guys easy easy easy because it isn't true. I saw Me it was my best friend Thank you I knew you'd come around and what dimension are you from that's a bit Bit of a dusty old show real, but my name is Rick's gutter I'm from the Netherlands and I'm proud to you know, say the very very pronounced Now this is the work that I did before I started Blender and I started on sprite fright And I currently almost wrapping up the movie charge Um, but I also would love to show you a little bit of Something else I actually did in Blender in my spare time and that is one sec. Here we go So For me, this was a great like side project to go through the whole pipeline of Blender I did the the modeling in the rigging. It was very eye-opening and painful sometimes, but also, you know the the the beauty of creating your own thing. I think it's Yeah, sometimes very rewarding But let's go back to our Our slide here Why are we going to animate the default cube you might ask because with all these Beautiful characters that Blender provides we go back in time to big buck bunny coming on this Even the sprite fright characters. Why do we animate? For nay wait eight vertices Okay, okay now That's a couple of reasons Let me get my notes ready. Why exactly? And Guys we got to have a little faith in the good old default cube here the most rejected object in history of Blender You know, we got to think about its feelings think about its children it might have been a long longer than some of you guys so That's for once not despise it. Let's not delete it. Give it a chance And breathe some character into the default cube also, I mean we could animate a high triple a top-notch character and imitate Pixar or Dreamworks or you know, but We're common people here. We are the working man working with Blender and also We sometimes don't have the right client We have a client that pays us ten bucks for a ten minute movie or we have You know, some of us who work still in the pension to laptop and work with Blender 1.6 But they have the default cube so and For me the reason to animate the default cube is simply Because we only have 50 minutes and now it's even less so I pick my battle and Let's get into it Well, there you go guys any questions. I'll see you at the bar All right now some of you as animators you know about the 12 principles of animation to make this a little bit more awesome One of them is adding a little bit of squash and stretch Well, that already gives us a bit more information of what the cube how it feels how it goes and let's crank that up a little bit and you know adding some simple Deformation some changing in in the shape is already gives us a different feeling of basically the same animation that we Initially started with just a bouncing cube now Let's see if we this can make this this cube walk. Well, there we go walking cube now let's dissect that a little bit because It's only eight vertices and what are we actually looking at? Wait a minute what's going on? There we go so This is work. Yes, great. So what we're looking at is with these eight vertices we I try to You know imagine what and try to kind of like get to the core of what this walk is about and these Four vertices right here. They kind of like minimum mimic the torso the hips of of the character while these lower ones basically function as As a foot Now we don't have a knee, but who knows who needs a knee, right? It's it's already working So here we have it walking beautifully in World space. How about a run? now if you squeeze your eyes you can see Moana running right here No it's basically, you know the all the principles of of of Animation are applied to either a cube or a very high defined character and One of the main rules with with a run is you make sure that there's definitely that moment where both feet come off the ground and Really pick and choose Especially with eight vertices where to put them. All right Here's a beautiful cube running around. He's so happy. Let's make him more happy And now we have a jolly walk And here we and you already feel the music, you know And then the next one we try to you know, okay the little bit more stereo typical female kind of walk and You know, this is where I wish we had a little bit more curvature, but we only have eight vertices here so I really try to kind of evoke the feeling of of having a maybe a tight dress makes us and and some some heels that come out of it and Oh There we go. And of course We have a tired walk here and all it's all about like pacing pacing timing spacing the posture but And all of these these elements we can apply the 12 principles of animation Can't remember them all but for a cube You kind of pick and choose which one and one of them is make sure that the posture feels like You know a tired cube here and this is me after the first week of learning blender and you know But we don't give up guys we keep on go and And you know, we also animated the snail so we can check that one off now. How about an animal and And I wonder guys what what kind of elements do we need to make an animal run? anybody shout Quadruped we need four legs, right? What else? One leg always on the floor. Okay? Locomotion anybody Locomotion is very important where we have This going on So here we go a running animal and if you squint your eyes you might see a rabbit or Cow, I don't know but it's very And in this in this particular cycle, I really had to With the current rig and we will jump into this this actual rig in a second Rotate the rig around and really Have a different setup to make sure that it feels like it has Four legs and if we go a little bit frame by frame through it I try to kind of like offset the front paws for disease and Go through it and of course like let's say it's a rabbit and you know rabbits. They do what they do and Yeah, you show a little respect for this default cube and it's trying to you know Push push all the vertices to to their limits What else do we got how about a fight so you know I Over the last week. I had a ton of fun Trying out different things and how far we can push push the animation and it's it's all about Trying to mimic posture trying to mimic Certain motion with the least amount of of info info that is there, but it's all Relying on these basic principles like really going into an anticipation trying to stretch the body a bit and then Go up here and this I try to go for some kind of a karate kick kind of feeling I mean, yeah, something like like that and then Here we do a nice twist in the blue Cube turns into a cube so Let's jump into the rigs, but for before we do that You know, I said I animate everything I also animate this QR code for you guys if you want to you can scan it and get the cube rig Including all of the animation. Don't worry. It also will be on the studio website But this is something that you can all try and play with It will be there for 10 more seconds 10 9 so so this is from my local Google Drive, so it might not work exactly, but It will be there on the studio website shortly alright now I would like to close this thing and then jump into Give me a sec here. We go to desktop blender go and then Default cube Which one do we get I think it's this one open? All right, so this is the file that We're looking at and let me just explain a little bit about the rig It's a bit more advanced than the default cube obviously also Let me actually go and reset this keyboard is a bit wonky There you go. So it's basically the all everything from from the torso to to always the whole way down So we're working with a Torso and you know it has a bit more polygons in between so we can actually Do some twists and turn and and it keeps if you want to go really hardcore you go to zero and that's only for You know for eight vertices basically then we have some well What can you call it feet? and within these feet there are some some Cool pivot points that we can place either in the front or the back to create some sort of a food roll I have to mention this Rick has been created by the one and only Demeter one of the rigors at the blender studio and I guess this is one of his One of the most advanced rigging so far And so let's jump into some of these these runs and walks So they're all here Now By default I've turned off the the z-location if you turn that one on I think it's yeah, it's walking walking in z-space and a quick, you know little trick that I do for any walk cycles is Because you know you don't want to Sometimes I do it to eyeball the actual Z The C translation in world space there are different ways to animate a cycle some people animate their cycle actually in world space and then referred their Root bone to to keep it in place but for this I Basically grabbed the The foot bone here go to the graph editor and I take these keys because this is basically the Z translation and For a default walk like this I always tend to keep these Interpolation being linear just so we have that consistency When we animate in world space so I copy these keys and then I Go to the and of course it's already there. So I basically Let me delete those and then select it There we go. It's wait a minute. This is a rotation guys. Sorry Did I delete wait? Oh, it doesn't have a okay? Turn it to linear and now it's walking backwards. So what we need to do we need to reverse it simply I press s and I press y Minus one. Wait, what doesn't that work? Yes Yes, thank you. Thank you. I mean, thank you man. I appreciate it. So s Why? We go minus one there we go and then we put on the modifier And turn on the cycle and then repeat with offset and that should basically get us a solid walk cycle within world space all right, so Let's go over some other so we have the jolly walk and then Animal run and here you can see like I turned around the The the body control and basically animated it upside down you could make it is into You know a rig setting where you switch, but you know, I'm a simple animator And I love to have the freedom to do that my myself one other fun thing here is to Actually have the subdivision after the armature. So right now we see this and then we turn it on And now of course we need to turn this one on and now we have some some curvature Interpolation and there you can like have a bit more sense of the actual local motion going on from the back to the front And you know, you can you can play around with the timing and spacing whatever you need So that's that Now let's jump into some actual animation here Let me see we have Animation demo open now Mind me. I already did some animation. I didn't want to start and struggle from scratch It's like putting down my pants and I rather do that in the bathroom. So I animated this cube and it Rolls into screen Wait, how long is this? Let me actually Go here timeline Cube runs in falls into screen comes alive and farts his way out of the screen. So It's kind of like, you know, just having some fun here I want to add some texture and what I mean with texture and animation It's not the checkerboard. It's really adding a little detail to make the animation more tangible like if you add That's a small texture into somebody who was afraid you might do a little bit of shaking Just to add a bit more resolution to to what is there now what I want to do here is When it's going up, I want to have This cube he's jumping up and then he has to fart. Okay. I want to have him compress his butt cheeks and Then release the fart and then have a bit of, you know, jiggle going on with So let's get started and try that. Here we go I'm just selecting these four vertices that we can control individually Before I do that, let me go over some of the existing animation and just, you know Explain a bit of how I kind of like get got there What I really like about this You know rick set up what whatever it's it is at is some of the features like a Hold on a Dynamic pivot point So you can place this pivot point wherever you want and that way you can actually roll the dice on a different pivot point And then you could either use this or the three cursor which I also use But it's a nice way to have this roll like a dice basically and have a little bit of Overlap overlapping animation when it's it's settling down settling down Also, I found out when I was animating I ended up With the feet on the side, but ultimately I want to actually make him jump up So on run frame, I mean all the render people here with motion blur are gonna hate me, but this is not gonna be rendered It's Basically within one frame. I switch the the whole rig 90 degree And one great tool with that is the global transform tool where you can basically With any constraint going on copy the global transform and paste it And that way I could easily do that Now what do we see here is basically the up and down The up and down motion of the cube and I Do a little bit of a anticipation here. I didn't animate the feet We can do that in a second and then we jump up here and as you can see like I try to make that as Smooth as possible and there in the fart is gonna counter way Launch him up into the air right here if you have some time I might do some grease penciling Because I love to add some to the animation into it, but let's see how much time Yeah, we we still have left in a in a bit. So first off but cheeks So I won't make sure we have the bounding box center so I can scale them all at once So Let me look to the camera I'm a bit spoiled with having two screens at my desk So normally when I have a setup I have my camera view on one screen and my work space on one on the other But hey, we got to work with what we have here So he jumps up and then I want him to Compress like that So I'll delete this key Just Yeah, let me let me go over some of my settings here. I basically always Have the local location rotation skill and custom properties. I want to keep everything that that I can't key I don't want to have the pop-up every time, you know When whenever do you want to key this this and this now? Just I don't want to be distracted by too many micro management of that I just put in my keys and I would like I'd like to animate drunk and add it sober. So that's kind of like my my motto So we go down and then Go big like that and then Go a bit smaller and let's see. I'm just gonna copy these keys over a bunch of times. Oh Until it kind of like lifts off. You might think what? That's this guy doing. I'm the same You know with animation you You try things out and you see how it works. Let's see and turn off everything You feel that fart you feel the fart All right, let's add a little bit more anticipation on well, it might be a bit too much. Let me I Love the blend to neighbor. I said it as my default shortcut shift E Basically blending between frames. This is the tween machine of Maya basically and this is a tool I use Multiple times per minute So I think that's it's a great tool So let me go back a bit. I did like it a little bit more extreme. I Want to Disappear a bit more so Let's see So we could incorporate that a little bit with with the squash and stretch up the jump right now There's nothing there. It's all quite linear. So and also there's not really a Stretch going on so we could push that as well And also it's going off screen a bit slow. Let me See if I can push that just push those keys around a little bit And that Let's focus a little bit more on those first steps So and also create a bit of more a bit of offset between the two legs And For clarity let me there. There's a double IK bone here. I'm gonna just hide these and work with these guys so Jumping up When it's jumping to this position, I would love to have him a bit more of a broader stance Simply to emphasize the squash and the anticipation in the beginning So here we go right here. Oh I got that enabled no and then add a bit of rotation before we land Actually turn this to local That's a little bit more. Oh wait. There's something about Watching an animator live that's You know can be quite Peaceful or my some might say, you know, langweilig So Let's see And then the other one For the other one I'd rather want it to stay and I'm gonna be a bit quick and dirty here But stay one more frame. So we create a little bit of that offset one going up and then Well, then here also create a bit more like that. Now, let's push a little bit more of that squash in there by just Before we lift off, you know, push it down. Maybe scale it in a little bit see how that looks and you know I'm kind of the trial and error kind of animator Just trying things out Especially with a cube and then right here, we definitely want to Go with extreme and see That might be a bit too much Also, I need to take care of the hope Spacing here might be a bit harsh. So let's see Okay here the lead there and then I just want to see a bit of Let me just grab one of these guys So before takeoff, I always I also want to make sure And these guys stay stay around. There is a space switch on on the the actual IK feet where you can make sure they stay in one place you know, if you're Normally if I had more time I would put in a bit more care into placing these feet in world space have the thing lift off but since we We only got a couple of Minutes while we got how many time yeah 20 minutes left. Let's uh, let's go a bit quick and dirty here so basically I want the same thing what I did earlier Place a key here and then go into the animation tab and copy paste So we got a little bit more stick to it and then also maybe scale it down And basically what I'm looking for is is general shape I don't care really about the And maybe we want that key back I'm looking for especially with this cube, you know, uh, what does the general shape change, uh, gonna gonna do? So Same for this guy. Maybe this guy is still a little bit more on the floor pushing in That's And then we go back. I'll just grab a frame from here Let me just go a little bit into what I like about this or what I don't like actually about this is that this, uh Q this uh, fur to see is So like that And it comes out again. Let me, you know, so it has a bit more, uh, you know, uh volume change going on Yeah The only time to stop animating is when the director tells you to stop or a supervisor so I could Keep on, you know, nitpicking but sometimes, uh There's simply no time left. Okay So let's watch it the whole shot here Cube coming in Okay, let's do some grease pencil stuff. I think it's time to add in some visual farts here I'm improvising. Okay. Um, so from here We basically Go to object mode I always tend to make a stroke because it gives me already some presets go to the grease pencil and then delete And I want to make sure that Whatever we're drawing on is going to be At the 3d cursor in this case it could be, uh, You know the origin because we're working close to the origin For sprite fright we really put the 3d cursor where the character was so it all lines up. So if you Were seeing anything that we did with effects on sprite fright. We Paint it in splashes with grease pencil and then converted that to to actual geometry But it was very important that it was put in 3d space wherever the character was Uh So Let's put it right there And then our pencil I guess it's green because I've turned on Random colors. Yes. Okay. That's fine I mean, it's it's a fart. It can be green so Let's let's try this. Okay bear with me guys And the first pass especially here same thing like animate drunk just get some rough sketches in there see how how that's going you could say like Constrain the actual stroke object to to the To the to the rig basically to make it follow. Uh, that might be a good idea actually So we got a bit Like that Then the cheeks open up. So and then Obviously the puff Oh wait Ah, there we go Get to find the center The puff spreads out and this is where real Fart physics come in like that Let's see and then This will bundle up Let me also turn on onion skinning. Why not? Here And then I got to turn on everything else. I guess Let's see bones there. There we go. So we go a bit more like that and this is like with especially with these effects shots that we did Before you go really into the nitty gritty details of fine lines and whatnot You want to I I'd like to start the conversation with the director as quickly as possible See if this is something that works. So that's why I really kind of like sketch it out on the fly and and and then Show that as a first pass kind of a thing So Okay, and this goes even bigger and we you know looking at Fart simulation it tends to really go into this circular Circular vortex that's going on. Um, you know, I did some video reference, but I'm not going to show Like that so And then go a bit bigger as we almost lift off Quite a bit of frames. I should have done that make it a bit faster Uh All the lines are getting smaller and smaller, but hey Yeah, I should animate them too, but that's the thing, right? It's animated on one So and I should but I want to make that contact on the floor. So that's a bit of uh, so This one is a bit big actually let me uh But I mean, yeah, I really to me what really uh, uh kind of like Convince me or like like really drew me to blender is the the amazing multiple Multiple tools that combine that are combined with including the the grease pencil tool not only for You know these city effects, but also just sketching out a blocking pass or And you can already do it in the shot and that's so amazing. It's really cool And this is taking forever So meanwhile, let's uh We got some room for for questions. If you guys feel free to to uh Put up your hand if you have any questions Let me know and I can quickly slowly draw and continue on this part. Hey Ah, thank you. Uh, it really depends on what style of animation you're looking for Uh, there's a lot of cheating going on with more extreme cartoony animation We uh, some some of the stuff we did on spider-verse It was not even a character It was just a bunch of lines that were that were just smacked against and it really depends on on on how far you can push that If you go more into realistic animation, uh, you might You know, if you have the budget for it, you might add a muscle system that really retains that Uh, that's some some way to to do that, but ultimately Um, um You know, it's it's an iteration process where you feel like oh, this might might lose the volume That's uh, you reduce the amount of squash and stretch going on. So To me, it's a it's it's really about A feeling of something so Yeah, yes Well, as you can see straight ahead I mean there there there's yeah For a live demo, it's I think a bit A bit different than uh, then when I sit down on my own and have a bit of Like to me, it's really going into the The zone as they call it where you you know, go into your blocking and and and and and I'm very much As you as I'm contradicting myself here Uh Blocking my animation in stabbed or in in constant keys and really work from there to get the proper foundation So something like that. Yes. Hi In front of the people. Yes. Yes. It's uh, well first question first answer When I joined the the spider first production, you know The first week you really get time to get used to the rigs and the the tools that were available But but you also rely a lot on on post libraries on and and and what's also very common is to use a character bible Which basically includes Do's and don'ts with the rig like what kind of Shapes to use Where to put the the ink lines and whatnot. So so that's it's we did something similar for sprite frights to really Have the team of animators Have a set of rules that make the the overall animation more consistent and About the farting cube. Yes, that's That's basically what we're doing. So Anyone anyone else And also Now the the whole point of having a character bible having a post library is to share it so so As well as having established poses for By by the supervisors that have explored like the the characters and established the style of of certain poses that's kind of like the that's what i'm I remember that's kind of like the poses that everybody was allowed to Choose from but then there you had your own personal folder where you could put in You know custom poses or poses that you would save to in order to Have a good hookup for the next shot for the other animator So so it's it's generally yeah the purpose of having a post library to really share that and and collaborate with each other Oh, you mean the the poses for the post library. Um, sorry The cloud Yeah, so so you basically store your poses within a blend file and that's a separate file that you can basically pack and and and the post library that I don't think I have it installed here Yeah, I mean Well, it's in there. Where's this the old one? I don't know post mode. Ah, that's it post mode, but then Let's see Edits preferences, I think there was a a I can't remember in this setup, but There is actually a folder that you can link to and in that way you can set up your your folders within the preferences and that will automatically link to The post library what and that you can share to to other people as well. Yeah Well, that's far to ever end. Yeah, my drawings get uglier and uglier Do I see more? Okay, so the time is up. Uh, unfortunately, we cannot we cannot finish the fart. Oh, no But hey This file is included with the package of the default cube. You can animate as many farts as you want Um And next time if you open blender, you see the default cube think about the soul Of what this might be. It's not the cube. It's in your head Now, thank you very much I'll finish this