- [Instructor] In this last video before we begin animating,
I want to talk about the power of video reference.
Video reference allows you to study the movements,
and physicality of your character,
before you begin animating.
It's in this process that we can pick out
how the body moves,
how weight affects everything,
how the shoulders, and arms all react to the hips moving,
everything is interconnected.
So, whether you're animating an animal,
a creature,
or a person,
you can always find some kinds of references,
to ground you in reality.
Now, I've gone ahead and recorded some video references
myself acting out the scene.
And as embarrassing as it is,
we're all going to look at it together, and study it.
Now, down here at the bottom,
I've gone ahead and added that video file.
If you don't have access to the exercise files,
you can always hit Ctrl+N,
go to Video Editing,
to make a new video editor.
And then click on Add in add in your own movie.
Now for our purposes,
I have a 0103 video reference stock blend,
in the 0103 folder.
So, that's what I'm going to be using here.
Now right away, you can see this little black line,
goes right before my video.
So we can click on end, to adjust the timing.
And secondly, you need to click on this tab,
for cache settings.
And just go ahead and check all these on,
you can hold down left click and go up and down.
Let's make sure that they're all on.
And now with that done, I'm going to go back to the beginning
and click on play.
(playing the video)
Okay, so there's a lot to take in.
Number one, I'm never going to win an Oscar.
Number two, there's a lot of awesome physical stuff
that's going on here.
So let's just Scrub the Timeline,
and see what things that we can learn.
The number one thing that I noticed was right about here,
this physical moment where I lean forward,
grab the table,
grab the other side over here,
the armrest,
and I push myself up,
look at that,
that's an awesome thing
that we can include in our animation.
Now, the cool thing about blender
is we can leave annotations,
just by hitting T,
and clicking on this annotate button.
Now if I go ahead and hold down my left click,
I can draw my annotation.
And if I hit N,
I can go ahead and change the color,
or even remove it by going to view annotations,
scrolling down a little bit, and just deleting it.
So, with this, I'm going to actually turn off view,
by hitting N again,
and I'm just going to watch what's going on here.
If I left click and drag this little play head,
I can see I touched the table right about here.
I'm holding down right here,
and I'm lurching forward,
plus I've also grabbed,
this area right here.
And I'm going to get a little bit more realistic,
by left click dragging,
this little border between these two windows
down a little bit.
Okay.
Now let's keep scrubbing.
Now, that's really interesting.
I come forward here, right?
I hold, and come forward right here.
And look what's happening with my shoulders.
They're really arching back over here.
And I'm leaning forward quite a bit.
This is an important concept in animation,
it's called a line of action.
And you can see how generally speaking,
it follows my spine,
and I make this nice C shaped curve.
When I push back off,
it's a little hard to tell from this angle,
but I've actually reversed that curve with my spine,
I'm actually a little bit more like this now.
This is really important because we can exaggerate
those reversals of curves,
to create some really dynamic animation.
So, I'm going to point that out here
that I'm leaning in,
and pushing back out.
All right.
Now the next thing that I noticed is that
when I come forward, I'm actually jiggling a little bit.
For example, take a look at the arcs on this arm right here.
If you were to draw just a little dots,
on say, my watch right here,
you'll see that it creates this interesting pattern.
And when it hits over here,
middle mouse drag just a little bit, to get some more space.
When it hits this edge,
it's actually going to swing down a little bit.
It kind of creates this really interesting arcing pattern.
Fact it looks like it kind of comes out like here.
It swings this way,
and it swings right back down.
That's really interesting.
And we can notate that,
and add it to our animation a little bit later.
There are other really interesting things
that are happening here.
For example, when I'm leaning back,
I'm generally keeping the same pose.
That is I'm not really changing the shape, or movement,
but I am shaking my hands a little bit,
and they are bouncing.
You'll note that if you follow the arcs,
and say this thumb,
they come down, and bounce a little bit.
Let me undo that by hitting Ctrl Z,
and let's just look at what's happening with my thumb.
See that, just my hands and thumbs,
that is called follow through,
and overlapping action.
Those are really important things
that we can add to our animation,
to add a lot of life to it.
The last thing I can do is hit N,
go to View again,
and scroll down to annotations, and turn on onion skin.
And much like our onion skinning from to the animation,
I can go ahead and play with these numbers,
to see all of my other sketches.
Now this might be a little bit overwhelming,
but it is helpful to see
the transition from one pose to another.
You could spend a very long time
studying the video reference that you create,
and I highly recommend that you do so.
Animators from Pixar, and all around the world do this,
as a way to understand the mechanics,
and movement of a body.
And it's going to be essential to your journey,
as a character animator.