 Welcome back it is Friday that means fna friday for new animators and today it's going to be part 10 and the last part of my blocking series and today i'm going to talk about roto your reference if you go all the way back to part two i said this bonus controversial tip roto your reference i know i don't know mind blown heresy how dare i say this that's right how dare i but again this is purely just to save time now i want to show you how to go through this setting up the camera and the reference and you can go very detailed where it ends up being very life action-y or you take just the main poses and you stick within the stylized approach but again this is purely for saving time purposes all right switching to a new setup different mic and everything and i have this rig here hotkey here on just for that and usually the way i work i have my outliner here and then i have my graph editor here i actually want to collapse this and what i'm going to do now i'm going to set up a new camera so create camera new and i shall rename this to render cam and then what i'm going to do is i want to have an image plane so create free image plane right here with this now i want to see it here so image planes there you go and you go into the attribute editor and you say movie and i want to choose the reference that i have here which is an mp4 format so go all files and it is the ref black and white i have a couple different versions but that's what it is once you have it here you can scrub and you can see what i did here now you technically if i go back here you have some options here to change the size then you have options to actually go one by one you can do all of this right all of this here you have frame in changes if you want you have frame offsets and so on and you can change all that good stuff here so if i look through my render cam i'm going to go out and i want to see my rig and i want to see the footage but the footage does not stay to the camera now technically you can go in here and you can say look through camera and i'll say through render cam it only looks through this i don't see it in here you can also just choose it in all of them just in case you do want to look around and still see the reference and what i like to do and this is you know everybody has different ways here i want to take my image plane i'm going to group this and you can say ref plate not late but plate if you want and then i'm going to select those and do constrain point and orient and because this is grouped i have now the possibility to change this and move it back and because it's constrained to the camera if i do anything in here you can see that the plate stays to the camera so i can place this now and put this where i want to behind the rig or next to it however you process is so as i have this i want to play through this is what i want silly but broad and clean so if you want to keep this fairly stylized i'm going to play this quickly here you got boom you got step mode very rough that's kind of what i want to take from this plate or you can stick to something a bit closer with lots of keys it's going to be very jittery you'll be playing like that but that is not real time so let me take a look at this in play blast form and you can see that it's a lot closer to the footage but at the same time also retains all the jitteriness in the head and the arm and hand so again if it's something that is photo real then that is something that you might want to have but in terms of looking at this here that in a stylized animation is not really desirable you want some cleaner curves you don't want all that jitter that comes when you do all those details here again this all depends on your style but that is the pitfall if you stay too closely to the reference so there's a lot of cleanup needed and again that is all dependent on the style there you go so i use these at work a lot mainly because obviously our style at ilm is much more realistic so sometimes i can stick to reference really closely sometimes i have to stick to reference really closely especially if it's some digi double type of animation but even when i did more cartoony stuff at home i would act things out and then do different takes bring that in and then block it out again not to use that as my animation but it's mainly does this what i just did the the acting choices or the way i have myself in the frame and with the set pieces and maybe actually the camera that i want to use is all of this working so instead of then starting to block things out roughly and taking time i can take whatever i shot put that into my roto it and then check it with this rig maybe to switch another rig again block it out very quickly using the reference check that with my sets and the camera and i can say okay well this is going to work this is not going to work and then if needed shoot new reference and you know exactly what to do the like how far i can go in terms of walking around using the space or you don't shoot reference again and it's your really rough guide of what you want to do and then you go from scratch do everything keyframe from scratch with that reference kind of a somewhat of a as a guide in terms of when what happens with very broad strokes and who knows maybe go kind of in between where you use very broad poses and line of action and just the way your stance is or your look whatever it is and then maybe there's a section where you really like a certain head turn or an arm gesture or a blink or i darts you go very detailed and you shoot reference just for eyes so again this can be a mix and match type of thing very loose stylized or very close for more live action stuff especially if you use reference for animals and that is for a client and it has to be photo real then you're probably going to stick to multiple sections of the reference very closely and then take a keyframe approach to bridge certain elements where it's this is a plate you have nothing here you do it by hand and this is a plate again and so on there you go that is the last tip for blocking so this is purely time saving this is not something where you should rely on reference for your actual stylized animation because if you do it's going to look like you stuck to reference and it's going to kind of where it doesn't have that that snappiness that look that a certain feel to your animation because it's going to rely way way too much on realistic timing and that doesn't look good even for a project that's photo real you still have to tweak things and push things here and there you can't just go 100% based on footage and that concludes the series I will continue on with other FNAs but for now that's it in the blocking series if there's something else then there will be a part 11 if you do have any questions or suggestions you want me to add something in terms of blocking let me know in the comments and then I'll do it part 11 based on your suggestions of course and of course if you are sure think till the very end thank you so much I appreciate that you take the time to do so subscribe if you haven't yet hit that bell button to get all notifications because I do upload a lot and if you feel like all of this is somewhat helpful and you want to apply this to your own shots I do have workshops you can sign up and we can go and work together to make your shots better take them to the next level so let me know and the link in the description to all those sign up details and there you go that's it I will see you next week if you choose to tune in again