 So, you've bland your animation, you've got your hotkeys, you know what all the tools are, you just don't know how to apply them. Not a problem, basic idea is pretty simple, trying to get the best looking animation possible with the fewest number of keyframes. When you're doing things like fighting game animations, 80% of your work can usually be done with about 5 or 6 keyframes, plus 3 or 4 more in between for cleanup. For our example, we will be creating an attack animation of Exa kicking to the right. The first thing that you need to think about is what direction is the camera, because that determines the direction you want to make sure the animation looks its best. If you're doing a fighting game, you probably want to make sure that it looks good from the side view. If you're doing an RPG, you probably want to make sure that it looks good from the top. And if you are doing 3rd person like we are, you probably want to make sure that all the animations look good from behind. You would be surprised just how much of a difference the camera angle alone will make. Here is Exa doing a kick, and it kinda looks like shit. Now here it is from another angle. See that? The exact same animation can look completely different, depending on the position of the camera. You could have animated everything perfectly, but you would never know unless you move the camera to the right place. So try to start with the camera in the right place before you animate. Next, make sure that the first frame agrees with the rest of the animation. If your character is throwing a punch while standing on the ground, the first frame should probably be your character's grounded idle animation. If on the other hand your character is doing an aerial attack, the first frame should probably be from your character's jumping or falling animation. Alright, so we have our angle and we have our beginning. The next thing that you gotta do is create the king frame. The king frame is the most important frame in the animation. And it's the pose that people will most likely remember when they think about this attack. Don't worry about any transitions for now, just scroll somewhere to the middle and press A to select all your bones, I to key frame, then pose your character however you want the king frame to look. Now if you are having trouble figuring out what the king frame should actually look like, a good way to find out what type of silhouette you should have is to simply type in what you think your animation should be into Google images. When you find an image that really clicks with what you had in mind, save it, then in Blender and drag the picture in. From here you can adjust the size and position and then change your character's pose till it fits into the picture. You can also drag video files like MP4s if you wanna trace an entire animation. Press play to try and trace the video at different points on the timeline. But we'll get more into that next video. For now, once you have the king frame, the next frame that you need to make is the wind-up. The wind-up frame is whatever the character needs to do in order to transition from the start to the king. Think about throwing a ball. The image that you probably imagined looked like this. And that would be the king frame of a ball throwing animation. But now ask yourself, what was the frame before that? What pose did they actually do before getting here? Whatever that was is your wind-up. It's the pull before the push, the cause to the effect. The to be before the not to be. To make the wind-up frame, press A, copy the frame, then paste it somewhere in between here. Then pose your character however you need until you get the silhouette of your wind-up. Now, once you have the beginning, the wind-up and the king frames mapped out, the next thing you need to add is extension. Extension frames happen at the end of an action. And their jobs is to exaggerate the key frames and make them more noticeable. The easiest way to make an extension frame is to press A, copy the king frame, and paste it 5 or 10 frames away. Then exaggerate this frame so that it continues the motion of the king frame. But only a little. Do not change the direction of the momentum. Everything should still be traveling in the same direction. Now, generally every action should have an extension frame, so we should make one for the wind-up as well. Press A, copy the original, paste a few frames down, and again, exaggerate it just a little, keeping the same momentum. Okay, once you got the big 5 frames completed, the animation is pretty much done. But if you want to add some icing on the cake, the last thing that I recommend you do is add recoil, also known as snapback or cooldown. As you've probably guessed, cooldown happens at the very end of the animation, and its job is to counterbalance the king frame. You will notice in real fights, when a kick or punch is thrown, there's a recoil motion that happens when the move is over, and it almost always happens in the opposite direction from the main motion. So if the knee came out this way, then the recoil motion is gonna cool down this way when it's over. To create this frame, use the same technique as extension. Press A, copy the last frame, paste it a few frames down, and instead of exaggerating the motion, try to contract it in the opposite direction. When you are done, the animation should start to look a lot better. Now, if you have a beginning, wind-up, king, extension, and recoil frames, and things still don't look right, you probably need to fix your spacing, which just means that some of your frames are too close or too far apart. Now, the general rule is that the distance between the wind-up extension and the king frame should be pretty small. The extension frame should be a little farther away from the original, and the distance between the cooldown and the king frame extension should usually be the farthest. You could have all the perfect frames, but if the spacing is wrong, it'll throw the whole thing off. So, if you were having trouble, be sure to mess with the distance between frames. If you are still having trouble, I'll show you a trick next video that'll probably be able to answer most of your issues, and meanwhile, hope that helps. If you enjoyed this video, please don't forget to like, subscribe, and ring that bell. Hope you have a fantastic day, and I'll see you around.