WEBVTT 00:00.210 --> 00:04.320 In this lesson, we're going to learn all about constraints, and if you've watched the rigging portion 00:04.320 --> 00:08.630 of this course, you'll have already gotten a pretty good understanding about constraints. 00:09.030 --> 00:12.180 But in this case, we're animating we're not building a rig. 00:12.180 --> 00:19.350 So how do we use constraints in this instance where we have the robot and it goes down and the arm needs 00:19.350 --> 00:21.120 to pinch down on it? 00:21.120 --> 00:24.600 So let's create that pinching effect and then it needs to pick up the box. 00:24.600 --> 00:26.350 So we're going to do that with constraints. 00:26.370 --> 00:28.650 So let's get this to pinch. 00:29.520 --> 00:32.010 Should close around frame Harish. 00:33.110 --> 00:37.820 And we can make an antique here as well, because we're not all the way to 10 yet, so we can have it 00:37.820 --> 00:44.450 open all the way and then slam shut and we can make this linear. 00:44.450 --> 00:50.630 So we keep the consistency of what we've established already for what the robot, how the robot moves 00:50.630 --> 00:51.190 with the claw. 00:52.070 --> 00:54.440 And let's just give ourselves even more time here. 00:54.500 --> 00:55.540 Drag this thing out. 00:57.640 --> 01:08.830 So let's say we have it go down clamps and then now let's see maybe eight frames after it's clamped. 01:09.180 --> 01:11.420 Let's count one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. 01:12.070 --> 01:14.140 Or we could just do the math, eight plus six. 01:15.190 --> 01:20.140 Let's have this robot go up and pick up the box. 01:21.280 --> 01:26.050 So let's have it go up, and I think it should go up slower because now it has a little weight. 01:28.210 --> 01:36.120 So we'll drag it up and let's compare the kind of wide translation motion we can see, it is slower, 01:36.160 --> 01:38.500 you know, this would be super slow, right? 01:38.530 --> 01:41.770 This slope is longer and not a seat. 01:42.610 --> 01:47.890 And so we want it to just be slightly slower than it was before. 01:48.190 --> 01:53.400 And we could even because these are weighted tangents now, we can actually minimize drag this out. 01:53.410 --> 01:54.850 So it has a really slow start. 01:54.850 --> 01:55.280 Right. 01:55.330 --> 01:57.040 We could drag a super out like this. 01:57.910 --> 02:01.120 So now we'll have a pretty slow start. 02:02.140 --> 02:03.250 Yeah, I like that. 02:05.620 --> 02:08.390 So now the only problem is the fact that the box isn't going with it. 02:08.950 --> 02:13.660 So how do we animate that constraint that we're going to make? 02:14.320 --> 02:15.910 Well, that's pretty easy. 02:16.520 --> 02:19.220 Let's find the frame where we can kind of set this. 02:19.240 --> 02:25.960 You basically need to choose one frame and it needs to match, you know, where the box is going to 02:25.960 --> 02:28.660 exist on the thing it's constrained to. 02:28.840 --> 02:29.140 Right. 02:29.150 --> 02:31.360 We don't want to constrain the box to this. 02:31.360 --> 02:32.440 And it's not on it. 02:32.470 --> 02:32.860 Right. 02:33.030 --> 02:35.620 It needs to be where it's going to be when we constrain it. 02:36.760 --> 02:38.680 So let's select this. 02:39.040 --> 02:42.040 If we click on the box, let's kind of see how that's set up in the outliner. 02:42.040 --> 02:43.150 We've got a windows. 02:43.310 --> 02:47.620 Let's go to outliner so we can see there's a box geo group. 02:48.160 --> 02:53.560 And in general, whenever you're constraining things, if there's an opportunity to constrain it to 02:53.590 --> 02:56.890 something other than itself in a hierarchy, you always want to go above it. 02:57.280 --> 03:02.080 So we have this empty group here and we can use this to constrain it because guess what? 03:02.110 --> 03:04.050 This controls the box, too. 03:04.660 --> 03:09.250 So instead of using the box constraint, we're going to use the group, because if you remember from 03:09.250 --> 03:13.180 rigging, as soon as we make a constraint, it's going to lock all of these channels. 03:13.450 --> 03:17.890 So for some reason, we wanted to animate maybe the box slips a little bit when it is getting picked 03:17.890 --> 03:18.130 up. 03:18.610 --> 03:21.300 We wouldn't be able to do that if we had controls here. 03:21.310 --> 03:21.700 Right. 03:22.810 --> 03:26.980 So we want to put this on whatever is above this in the hierarchy. 03:27.340 --> 03:30.070 And if this wasn't already there, we could make it. 03:30.070 --> 03:30.850 We can make another one. 03:30.860 --> 03:32.020 We could have two groups above us. 03:32.020 --> 03:32.820 We can just take command. 03:33.550 --> 03:36.970 And then we have another group and we can call this number two. 03:38.140 --> 03:44.980 And now we have a group within a group so we can make this hierarchy for ourselves if we want to. 03:44.980 --> 03:49.690 This is what's important about having a little bit of a technical knowledge, even as an animator, 03:49.690 --> 03:54.610 because there might be instances where you need to create your own tiny little rigs, even if it's just 03:54.610 --> 03:57.100 like an empty group there above a piece of geometry. 03:57.430 --> 04:02.230 It's important to understand the concepts and how these things work together because it won't always 04:02.230 --> 04:03.040 be handed to you. 04:03.040 --> 04:03.370 Right. 04:03.370 --> 04:07.750 Even if you work at a studio with some of the most talented people, even though they could do this 04:07.750 --> 04:11.350 for you like a rig or something, they just might not have the time. 04:11.590 --> 04:16.150 So you need to have a little bit of understanding so that you can do the stuff for yourself. 04:16.600 --> 04:20.650 Even as an animator, if that's all you're interested is animating, you still need to know this stuff. 04:21.070 --> 04:21.600 OK, cool. 04:21.610 --> 04:23.380 So let's actually make the constraint now. 04:23.380 --> 04:26.470 Let's go to the we can go to the rigging or the animation menu. 04:27.070 --> 04:27.880 They're both there. 04:27.880 --> 04:32.710 We could also hit spacebar in the middle of the viewport or not in the middle really anywhere in the 04:32.710 --> 04:33.190 viewport. 04:33.940 --> 04:37.000 And now we have the same menu here. 04:37.000 --> 04:38.050 We have constraint here. 04:38.410 --> 04:40.990 So I like to keep it in animation. 04:41.050 --> 04:41.950 That's what we're doing. 04:41.950 --> 04:43.660 So let's let's go to the animation. 04:43.900 --> 04:46.630 It's the same menu and we can tear that off. 04:47.110 --> 04:53.770 And again, you know, if you followed rigging in the earlier part of this course, then you are familiar 04:53.770 --> 04:55.660 with all these different types of constraints already. 04:56.080 --> 04:58.030 What we're interested in is the parent constraint. 04:58.040 --> 05:00.580 So let's open up the option box of that and close this little menu. 05:01.270 --> 05:06.730 So we have only really one option we need to be concerned about, and that's maintain, offset or not. 05:07.120 --> 05:12.130 And typically you want to maintain offset because like I said earlier, you'll have placed this thing 05:12.130 --> 05:13.180 where you want it to be. 05:13.750 --> 05:16.360 So when you want the constraint to turn on. 05:16.540 --> 05:21.190 So first we need to select the thing that's going to control it and then the child. 05:21.190 --> 05:21.540 Right. 05:21.730 --> 05:23.640 But remember, we don't want to select the geometry. 05:23.640 --> 05:25.120 You want to select the group. 05:25.540 --> 05:29.560 So let's go up here to the outliner and hit command click. 05:30.280 --> 05:36.940 And now we have the group and we can apply with maintain offset meaning there's an offset between these 05:36.940 --> 05:37.690 two pivot points. 05:37.690 --> 05:39.760 The pivot point for this control is up here. 05:40.090 --> 05:42.280 The pivot point for this box is over here. 05:42.640 --> 05:47.680 If we don't have maintain offset on, it's going to snap the pivots to each other and we don't want 05:47.680 --> 05:47.830 that. 05:47.830 --> 05:52.750 We want to maintain this offset between this pivot and that pivot, the distance between those. 05:53.120 --> 05:54.700 That's what the offset means. 05:54.700 --> 05:56.790 Maintain, offset, maintain that distance. 05:57.220 --> 05:59.350 So when we hit apply, it doesn't snap over there. 05:59.350 --> 06:06.460 It stays where it is, except for the fact when the parent here gets moved by its own parent, really 06:06.460 --> 06:08.230 in the hierarchy, this is its parent. 06:08.530 --> 06:11.890 But when that moves in the animation we've already made, the box goes with it. 06:12.630 --> 06:16.360 The problem now is the fact that it's constrained. 06:16.360 --> 06:17.860 So it's always going to be following it. 06:17.860 --> 06:22.000 But we only want this to, you know, get picked up around here. 06:22.000 --> 06:23.530 Let's say frame one fifteen. 06:24.070 --> 06:26.650 So what we can go to is the actual constraint. 06:27.130 --> 06:31.000 And in this constraint, we have the pincher control over here. 06:31.000 --> 06:35.440 And this is why it's also important to name everything properly when you're rigging, because it's easier 06:35.440 --> 06:37.510 to identify when you do constraints like this. 06:37.930 --> 06:41.290 So what we can say is right, click and go to key selected. 06:41.590 --> 06:43.210 So one means on. 06:43.510 --> 06:47.050 And if we go to the frame right before it, we can say zero. 06:47.650 --> 06:52.550 And because we have auto keyframe on over here, it's going to automatically set a key when we change 06:52.550 --> 06:53.180 that value. 06:53.200 --> 06:59.620 So when I close this and when we scrub backward now, we can see it stays there until this key frame 06:59.620 --> 07:01.210 that we made for the constraint itself. 07:02.020 --> 07:04.750 Now, the most important thing to remember with. 07:04.790 --> 07:12.400 Constraints is when you retiming things, it's really easy to forget that you have things constrained 07:12.670 --> 07:18.340 when, let's say we wanted to move all of this animation over like 30 frames or something. 07:18.340 --> 07:18.650 Right. 07:18.970 --> 07:20.560 We moved all this stuff over. 07:20.970 --> 07:23.500 I didn't move the animation of the constraint. 07:23.920 --> 07:27.480 So the constraint is going to get popped on before we want to see right there. 07:27.490 --> 07:28.360 It's already started. 07:28.660 --> 07:32.820 And let me just exaggerate this even more so you can kind of see it more clearly. 07:33.520 --> 07:39.370 We moved all this animation way over as we scrub through and we get to that key frame, I think was 07:39.370 --> 07:39.970 one 15. 07:39.970 --> 07:40.270 Right. 07:40.540 --> 07:41.670 It'll pop up there. 07:41.710 --> 07:42.850 That is not what we want. 07:43.150 --> 07:44.770 You know, we wanted to retime everything. 07:44.780 --> 07:49.600 So the key frames are going to exist on this constraint. 07:49.600 --> 07:50.800 Note here that we made. 07:51.100 --> 07:57.980 So if we're going to select everything we need to remember to include this little group here, this 07:58.000 --> 08:01.270 are not the group, but this node is really what it's called a node. 08:01.990 --> 08:06.940 So we would select all of the controls and accidentally selected the box, but there's no keyframes 08:06.940 --> 08:07.120 on it. 08:07.120 --> 08:10.570 So it won't really matter because there's no you know, there's no keyframes on it. 08:10.570 --> 08:12.730 So there's nothing to select on here in the timeline for it. 08:13.210 --> 08:18.000 But if we command click this, we can see that we that little extra key popped up here. 08:18.010 --> 08:19.120 Let me come in and click that again. 08:19.540 --> 08:26.370 Look at frame 115 and we can see now there's that frame and we know it's selected. 08:26.380 --> 08:33.640 So if I click and every time this whole thing slide it over here again, we can see that when we scrub. 08:35.200 --> 08:37.270 It is actually still following along. 08:38.950 --> 08:39.350 Cool. 08:40.000 --> 08:45.730 So in this lesson, we've learned about constraints and how to have things, you know, follow something 08:45.730 --> 08:48.880 else that we already have animated or animated, too. 08:49.360 --> 08:52.960 So definitely I would encourage you to have fun with this. 08:53.380 --> 08:58.420 If you're kind of bored with this example and you want to make it more interesting, then I challenge 08:58.420 --> 09:01.810 you to make to make it more interesting. 09:01.810 --> 09:06.700 You know, when you look at this animation and you're always kind of evaluating, OK, this looks boring. 09:06.710 --> 09:07.840 I don't really know why. 09:08.170 --> 09:10.120 Start asking yourself questions. 09:10.120 --> 09:10.960 Well, what could I do? 09:10.960 --> 09:11.160 Right. 09:11.260 --> 09:12.760 What can I do to make this more interesting? 09:13.240 --> 09:19.960 Well, I can tell you for this example, you could, you know, the path of motion, which is another 09:20.150 --> 09:21.520 it's not really a principle of animation. 09:21.670 --> 09:22.720 It's more of a concept. 09:23.980 --> 09:25.720 But there's this path of the motion. 09:26.020 --> 09:31.000 The path of motion we've created for this thing is very linear, meaning it's very straight. 09:31.450 --> 09:31.810 Right. 09:31.810 --> 09:36.270 It's a straight line and it goes from point A to point B.. 09:36.700 --> 09:42.850 Well, what I think would be more interesting would be, you know, take advantage of the fact this 09:42.850 --> 09:43.530 is 3-D. 09:43.620 --> 09:47.410 Always think, am I taking advantage of the fact that this is 3-D? 09:47.710 --> 09:51.570 If you're not, then you might as well be drawing this with a pencil and paper. 09:51.850 --> 09:52.200 Right. 09:52.210 --> 09:55.930 But for for us, we could move this thing in three dimensions. 09:55.930 --> 09:57.340 It could be over here. 09:57.610 --> 10:03.160 And the Antec could be, you know, whatever it is, we could rotate this thing and it could be a rotation 10:03.160 --> 10:03.520 thing. 10:03.520 --> 10:03.880 Right. 10:05.080 --> 10:06.970 You know, get creative with this. 10:06.970 --> 10:08.830 Make the Antec be more interesting. 10:08.980 --> 10:10.000 Add rotation. 10:10.570 --> 10:15.880 You could have this have a more interesting path of motion. 10:16.450 --> 10:19.060 So maybe it travels down and it's rotated. 10:19.060 --> 10:24.300 The whole thing is rotated back and then it goes up. 10:24.310 --> 10:24.760 Look at that. 10:24.760 --> 10:26.080 That's already more interesting. 10:26.080 --> 10:30.970 But again, we need to remember how we've set up all of these animations. 10:30.970 --> 10:36.730 You can see down here, if we got a chance, like why this didn't really like that. 10:36.730 --> 10:42.520 We didn't have a keyframe over here at S, and we can bring this back up to the level that we need it 10:42.520 --> 10:45.790 to be to to kind of have the tail to settle. 10:46.210 --> 10:51.130 But I mean, even in that one key frame, that one little thing, it's to me it's already more interesting, 10:51.520 --> 10:55.660 the kind of little duck, you know, it moves in another axis. 10:55.870 --> 10:56.260 Right. 10:56.560 --> 10:57.670 Previously was moving in. 10:57.670 --> 10:58.590 One axis was moving. 10:58.600 --> 11:00.580 The X axis was going from right to left. 11:00.580 --> 11:01.870 And that's it in a straight line. 11:02.260 --> 11:07.510 But now we made an in-between right in between two key frames. 11:07.810 --> 11:11.350 We added a key and it added some interest here. 11:11.470 --> 11:11.900 Right. 11:12.520 --> 11:21.010 So I challenge you to use this exercise as a chance to experiment and play around with how do I make 11:21.010 --> 11:21.730 this more interesting? 11:21.730 --> 11:23.110 It's a pretty simple example. 11:23.620 --> 11:29.540 But you know that to me, the most fascinating thing about animation is when you can take a simple, 11:29.560 --> 11:33.010 simple example and really make it interesting. 11:33.520 --> 11:35.950 And that will get people's attention right. 11:36.220 --> 11:37.390 Their expectations. 11:37.900 --> 11:43.600 When they see something simple, like a little robot like this, it might be not very high, but if 11:43.600 --> 11:48.290 you if you do something pretty interesting with it, that's what grabs people's attention. 11:48.340 --> 11:48.660 Right. 11:49.150 --> 11:53.950 So even something you know, we took two seconds here and added, you know, one or two little keyframes. 11:53.950 --> 11:55.900 And it already looks more interesting. 11:56.140 --> 11:59.050 And what I would do is, of course, add an overshoot to this. 11:59.380 --> 12:00.430 You know, it hits this wall. 12:00.430 --> 12:03.190 Here it goes, Pop, and it just pops right there. 12:03.580 --> 12:05.440 So now we add this up and down motion. 12:05.930 --> 12:07.960 Should probably add an overshoot vertically here. 12:08.290 --> 12:12.730 So let's bring this up and over a little bit. 12:13.600 --> 12:18.280 And then I'm just going to middle mouse drag this key over here and set a key. 12:18.730 --> 12:20.860 So I basically copy and paste it with that. 12:21.220 --> 12:23.590 So I like super wonky. 12:23.590 --> 12:25.780 I think the Y translates messed up. 12:26.350 --> 12:26.770 Yeah. 12:26.770 --> 12:27.850 Let's just bring that back. 12:32.740 --> 12:38.350 So we have a little bit of a settle there, but anyway, you get the idea to use these principles in 12:38.350 --> 12:41.130 these concepts, make this your own, OK? 12:41.170 --> 12:47.770 And in the next lesson, we'll continue learning animation and some more advanced concepts and practices 12:47.770 --> 12:48.610 and exercises. 12:48.940 --> 12:49.300 All right. 12:49.300 --> 12:50.590 Thanks for watching by.