 Welcome back. It is Friday. That means FNA Friday. And today I'm going to talk about weight, two specific tips about weight animation. One tip has to do with constraints. And the other one has to do with a visual cue about weight that I can show both in Maya. So let's get straight to that. All right. So switching over to a different mic and different setup. So this is my Maya scene. Now I want to talk about the principles. This has nothing to do with actual animation. You can see it is a very rough pose, intersections on fingers and all kinds of things. I don't really care. Why? Because I want to talk about two things. This stemmed from a tweet that I wrote a while back with a, of course, spelling error because, you know, me, it's me. But it talks about objects that your character is holding and especially the size of an object. So, you know, something really, really big versus something really, really small. Basically, the idea is that again, this is, you know, very rough here. But the idea is that if you hold something heavy, let's pretend you are selecting your hands and then the box and I'm going to do just a regular parent constraint, take this away off screen. So what happens now is that when I move my wrist, you can see that the box is moving. So the idea behind this is that if you do your box lift, and let's say I'm moving this whole thing back, you can see how everything moves very quickly. The problem with that is that this box is supposed to be heavy, right? Really heavy. So if I do my animation and I have ever so slightly little tweaks and bumps and pops in my chest, or if I do an adjustment in my hands and I have an ever so slight again, this is not constrained on this end doesn't matter. The idea is that if I lift this and I have ever so slight jitters or something in my wrist or anywhere in the body, it's going to translate right away into the box. So if I have the hand holding the box and the problem is like I showed before, if I have anything in the wrist, anything in the chest, anything in the root, all of that, all of that everywhere, all of this goes straight into the box, meaning that any imperfections in my animation will be visible in the box and make the box really, really light. But if you do the opposite and I select the box and then I select the wrist, and then I do my parent constraint. So now you will see the difference here. So if I move my chest around, obviously nothing happens here, because everything is stuck to the box, right? I can do all of this and nothing happens. But what are you going to do now is that now you're going to animate the box. So now you can have very smooth control in terms of how the box moves around. And obviously not going to have some crazy animation in the box, hopefully, because the box is just going to go, it's going to go up and you're going to adjust the wrist and everything else to make this animation work. But the better result is that you can still have all kinds of jitters here in your roots, you can have messy animation which you obviously will have to clean. But if you have anything messy in the chest here, and I'm exaggerating with all of this here, any of that will not transfer into the box, the box doesn't move again, just like I showed you before, because it's constrained like this. So the idea is that anything that's heavy, heavier than the hand, I would constrain the hand to the box, meaning that the box drives the hand as pretend that your hand here is holding, like in the tweet, a little match, but in the scale is actually correct. If you move that hand around and that'll match or a cell phone or whatever is in that hand moves with the wrist, it's okay, because it will look light, but the object is light. But in this case, this is supposed to be heavy. So if I move my hand around and the box in turn moves around really quickly, it's going to kill the weight. But the opposite is that because I have the hand constrained to the box, I don't have to worry about all the jitters and I can concentrate on making that box animation really smooth and heavy, and it's not going to betray the weight. And since I have this constraint like this, here's the second tip. Here's a very, very common mistake that I see in box slip. So I'm going to switch over to this here, no controllers. And again, I don't care about intersections, this is just the idea of it. Let's pretend your box is actually on the ground, right? So there's ground contact right here. And again, your box could be completely on the ground, whatever it is, but the box is touching the ground, so all the weight is here. He doesn't have to lift the box just yet. The problem is that if you lift your character up like this, it feels like he has tremendous power in those arms. The muscles are massive. Why? Because he can lift that box while that angle of the arms persists like this. So what happens? Again, let's ignore my horrible pose, but the moment you lift up the box, the arm has to go like this, right? Because you have contact here, the box contacts the ground and the moment the box gets off the ground, gravity kicks in. So the arm cannot really stay in this position anymore, because gravity goes straight down. So your box has to swing back down this way. Unless your arms are really, really strong, have massive muscles. Now then again, with this model, it might even be plausible. But lifting a box like this, where you go up with your root and the arms stay like this, that's just a sign that it's not really heavy. And again, I'm not buying that this character is really, really strong and can lift something heavy. Again, the point of your shot is to do something heavy. So the moment you lift it, your arms have to go back down because gravity wants it to go back there. Everything has to go straight back down. There you go. Hopefully two tips that will help you in your future weight animation journey. And if you feel like you want to take that journey with me, this is so cheesy. I have workshops. If you feel like this is helpful, and you want me to help you with your shots, we can work together on your work. There's a link of course in the description with old information about my workshops, and you can sign up at any time. And as always, if you watched the whole thing until the very end, I really appreciate it. Thank you for your time. And if you don't want to miss anything that upload, you can hit the subscribe button and hit that bell button and subscribe to everything that I upload if you so want to. Other than that, that's it for me. I will see you in my next upload.