WEBVTT 00:00.180 --> 00:06.240 In this lesson, we're going to look at actually putting this character on a path currently we have 00:06.240 --> 00:07.710 animated the locator. 00:07.710 --> 00:15.030 If we unmuted the locator animation by clicking on it in the channel box here and going down to unmuted 00:15.030 --> 00:24.150 selected, you can see that indeed this person goes off into the distance in one direction. 00:24.330 --> 00:24.710 All right. 00:25.200 --> 00:31.980 So we could try to if we wanted them to maybe curve around and, you know, turn left or something like 00:31.980 --> 00:35.550 that, we could try to animate that rotate and all that kind of stuff. 00:35.550 --> 00:40.980 But what would be better and easier would be to actually attach this person to a motion path and then 00:40.980 --> 00:45.930 we could control the path and instead of this locator by itself. 00:46.380 --> 00:47.130 So let's do that. 00:47.130 --> 00:48.780 Let's delete this animation. 00:48.780 --> 00:51.390 So I'm just going to shift select here and. 00:51.390 --> 00:51.720 Right. 00:51.720 --> 00:52.650 Click and go to delete. 00:52.830 --> 00:57.270 And I'm just selecting just because it's a little easier than, like, getting exactly on that key frame 00:57.270 --> 00:58.700 and and deleting it that way. 00:58.710 --> 01:00.470 So sometimes I just like this shift, select it. 01:00.990 --> 01:02.730 So we need to create a path. 01:02.940 --> 01:04.230 So let's go to the top view. 01:05.360 --> 01:07.520 Spacebar left clicking on the middle. 01:08.090 --> 01:10.550 Hopefully, you know how to do that by now. 01:11.040 --> 01:14.330 We go over to the curves and I'm a click this little epi curve tool here. 01:15.260 --> 01:18.740 And you can see it's also the icon selected here. 01:19.250 --> 01:25.040 When I go over to the tools, actually, and I'm going to dock this, I don't know why it's not docked. 01:25.040 --> 01:30.080 But again, all this stuff is, you know, you can move things around and it's not a big deal. 01:30.440 --> 01:33.200 So Kubic is good because I want it to curve a little bit. 01:34.070 --> 01:38.390 So I have four so I can see the grid kind of through this guy. 01:38.810 --> 01:47.270 Hold on X so it'll snap to the grid while I left click to set the first point and I have them go straight 01:47.270 --> 01:50.810 for a little bit so I'll hold on X and have them be on the grid again. 01:51.650 --> 01:56.510 I'm going to set another point close to that because I don't want the curve to start out here. 01:56.510 --> 01:58.910 I don't want to like round out when you do curve tool. 01:59.330 --> 02:02.900 If I do that, you can see, you know, it starts to curve like this. 02:02.900 --> 02:09.800 But if I was to set another point just in front of this one and then curve, well, it's going to get 02:09.800 --> 02:10.340 a little wonky. 02:10.400 --> 02:16.460 You kind of have to maybe put it a little further out and then do that. 02:16.460 --> 02:18.110 Yeah, it gets a little wonky. 02:18.110 --> 02:18.620 Basically. 02:18.710 --> 02:21.470 It all depends on how extreme you make things. 02:21.470 --> 02:24.380 So you definitely want to be careful about that. 02:26.720 --> 02:33.620 So basically, I can make this, you know, go in circles and let's make him go out here and then go 02:33.620 --> 02:40.400 another direction, truly, whatever we want it to do doesn't matter at all on it in order to save that 02:40.400 --> 02:40.900 curve. 02:41.450 --> 02:47.360 And now I'm going to attach the locator to this motion path here. 02:47.750 --> 02:53.320 So I'm going to select the curve and turn off the tools here so we get a better screen area. 02:54.080 --> 02:56.840 So I'm going to select on the channel box here so we can see what we have selected. 02:57.560 --> 03:05.600 And I'm going to select this and I'm going to first delete all of the animation from this because it 03:05.600 --> 03:13.340 needs to have clean channel box here so there's no keys on it and select the curve and I go to constrain. 03:14.590 --> 03:22.800 Motion passed and attached to motion path cool so we can see that is not pointing in the right direction. 03:23.500 --> 03:28.030 So let's undo that and open up this little option box here. 03:29.020 --> 03:34.630 And we can see we have a few options here and want the front axis to be Z, not X. 03:34.630 --> 03:36.130 That's what's kind of going sideways there. 03:36.580 --> 03:42.400 So let's choose Z and we know what Z, because if you look in the bottom left here, we can see the 03:42.400 --> 03:48.280 Z axis is the left or right, and we want it to go left to right to start because that's how the locators 03:48.280 --> 03:48.700 oriented. 03:48.710 --> 03:53.620 So now we can apply it should you go in the proper direction. 03:54.370 --> 03:55.630 So I'm going to delete that. 03:56.470 --> 04:03.010 Now, the only thing we have left to do is to get the correct type of translation based on based on 04:03.010 --> 04:04.420 the length of our stride. 04:04.840 --> 04:10.720 So if we go to frame 40, we know, you know, that's that's where our all of our animation ends. 04:10.730 --> 04:11.820 That's where the cycle ends. 04:12.100 --> 04:19.900 And that should be I think we had calculated thirty four units based on the distance of these two strides 04:19.900 --> 04:24.850 back to back, I believe were eight and nine. 04:24.850 --> 04:26.470 So that would be 17. 04:26.470 --> 04:30.670 And there's two strides left and right, side B thirty four. 04:31.150 --> 04:33.640 So this should be thirty four units to the right. 04:34.660 --> 04:39.670 So let's create our own locator, go create locator. 04:40.050 --> 04:44.050 It's to close this motion path menu down and now this new locator. 04:44.050 --> 04:50.500 I'm just going to say thirty four so we can see that this locator is not in the correct spot where it 04:50.500 --> 04:56.500 should be based on the speed that this person should be traveling based on the cycle. 04:56.500 --> 05:01.660 So we can kind of see that, you know, the feet are sliding around and that doesn't make any sense 05:01.660 --> 05:01.950 at all. 05:02.410 --> 05:10.780 So what we can do is go to frame 40 where we know that this should be, you know, thirty four units 05:10.780 --> 05:16.000 here, which is kind of the measuring, basically using this locator as a measuring stick here. 05:16.360 --> 05:16.720 Right. 05:16.720 --> 05:19.570 We want this to match up with this locator. 05:20.020 --> 05:23.110 So let's go into our graph editor and space spacebar. 05:23.110 --> 05:26.080 And it looks like I need to set up those panels again. 05:26.530 --> 05:32.920 It's going to go to Layout's two panes, stacked two panels. 05:32.920 --> 05:34.360 Panel graph editor. 05:37.320 --> 05:43.940 And you can also see that the by default, the splines are kind of on a tangent, it's this little button 05:43.940 --> 05:49.060 here and we want linnear because this character is moving at a constant rate with the walk cycle. 05:49.580 --> 05:50.960 So I'm going to hit that. 05:50.960 --> 05:54.500 And now I can see it actually goes way past where it should be. 05:55.190 --> 06:05.090 So what I can do is just reduce this down so that those match up from scrapping the end keyframe here. 06:06.710 --> 06:12.050 And if it's hard to get it on the exact spot, I can hit command and shift and I can zoom in here, 06:12.050 --> 06:13.520 so the values are a lot smaller. 06:13.820 --> 06:20.750 So when I shift middle mouse, drag this up or down, it's over much smaller values so I can get much 06:20.750 --> 06:22.630 more precise movement in the graph. 06:22.640 --> 06:24.890 Ed, when I scale this up like that. 06:25.050 --> 06:25.360 Right. 06:26.360 --> 06:28.730 So we can get it pretty much right where it should be. 06:29.540 --> 06:37.040 So now we know whenever it goes across the motion path that it will be moving at the correct rate. 06:37.070 --> 06:40.010 So it's moving at the correct rate and then it goes around this corner. 06:40.370 --> 06:44.930 And the one goofy thing you have to look out for when you do especially tight turns like this is probably 06:44.930 --> 06:47.720 wasn't the best example, the best example to use. 06:49.640 --> 06:50.690 That's way too tight of a turn. 06:50.690 --> 06:51.530 No one turns like that. 06:52.010 --> 06:54.110 But, you know, it's good for education purposes. 06:54.110 --> 06:55.160 You can see what the problems are. 06:55.970 --> 07:00.110 Basically, the feet slide right there, just rotating around this center pivot. 07:00.320 --> 07:02.270 So this is what's moving around. 07:02.270 --> 07:06.020 So when the foot's out here, it's getting rotated around this pivot. 07:06.020 --> 07:07.730 So the foot's going to slide out here. 07:08.090 --> 07:11.240 So that's the only thing you have to look out for, for these motion paths. 07:11.240 --> 07:16.100 But typically, you know, you're not using motion paths and this kind of crazy way. 07:16.400 --> 07:20.660 You're using it in a very gentle, much more gentle way than I used it here. 07:21.020 --> 07:22.370 So let's adjust it. 07:22.370 --> 07:26.720 I'll grab the control vertex and we're going to run into another problem here. 07:26.720 --> 07:28.640 I'll show you what the problem is in a minute. 07:29.240 --> 07:36.170 It's going to drag all these points out and make this be a more gentle kind of a curvature to this turn 07:36.170 --> 07:36.620 here. 07:37.490 --> 07:42.860 And I'm going to get this point over here when I click this little isolation. 07:42.860 --> 07:49.610 So I'm not going to I know I'm not moving it up or down vertically, and then I move these over. 08:05.110 --> 08:11.110 So basically, we have this character walking in a circle now, but what if you noticed, was we changed 08:11.110 --> 08:12.390 the length of this curve. 08:12.910 --> 08:18.540 So what how motion paths work is they use a zero to one value. 08:18.550 --> 08:23.410 So if we select a locator that's actually attached to this motion path and we go to the inputs over 08:23.410 --> 08:25.690 here, we see motion path, we have a new value here. 08:26.110 --> 08:26.490 All right. 08:26.500 --> 08:33.640 So if we go to the graph editor and we can see this key frame over here, it's on frame two hundred. 08:33.830 --> 08:35.170 We can also see it over here in the timeline. 08:35.170 --> 08:39.270 If we go there, you can see that actually has a number associated with it, right? 08:39.290 --> 08:42.160 It has the frame number is written on the on the motion path. 08:43.120 --> 08:44.290 So it's going to stop right there. 08:44.680 --> 08:46.480 Well, why is it stopping right there? 08:46.510 --> 08:48.510 Well, because that's the key frame we have. 08:48.910 --> 08:54.130 So if we were to you know, we have the rest of this curve, what if we wanted the character to go all 08:54.130 --> 08:54.980 the way into the curve? 08:55.540 --> 09:01.980 Well, basically, a motion path will say the beginning is zero and the end is one. 09:02.190 --> 09:07.870 OK, so when we have the locator selected and we're looking at these values on the left side of the 09:07.870 --> 09:13.450 graph here, we have zero down here and we have, let's see, like point eight here. 09:13.630 --> 09:16.660 So point eight is correlating to the length of this curve. 09:16.660 --> 09:24.100 So point eight, you know, of this curve, if it was zero to one, it beginning to end, point eight 09:24.100 --> 09:24.850 would be right here. 09:25.360 --> 09:32.650 So if we drag this up to point to one one point zero and we go to the end of the curve. 09:32.650 --> 09:32.950 Right. 09:33.610 --> 09:45.550 So the main takeaway here is if we change the distance of this curve, it will affect what that graph 09:45.550 --> 09:45.820 is. 09:45.820 --> 09:46.150 Right. 09:46.390 --> 09:51.160 So it doesn't matter when it's at one, but let's say it wasn't at one. 09:51.670 --> 09:54.510 Let's say we did want to end right here. 09:54.970 --> 09:59.890 But then we change the length of the curve like, you know what, we want them to go further over here. 10:00.490 --> 10:00.960 Watch. 10:00.970 --> 10:02.480 He starts to move, right. 10:02.530 --> 10:05.830 He slides because the length of the curve is changing. 10:05.830 --> 10:09.760 So the zero to one value relative to the curve length is changing, too. 10:10.660 --> 10:13.330 So you want to keep that in mind when you're using motion passed? 10:14.350 --> 10:20.740 One way to keep that in mind and to always keep track of the proper length. 10:21.520 --> 10:22.960 This is we're getting it. 10:23.770 --> 10:27.340 This is an intermediate thing, but we've already gotten this far. 10:27.340 --> 10:28.360 And I want to show you this. 10:28.390 --> 10:30.070 This is a really cool trick, OK? 10:31.000 --> 10:33.150 Not only not a lot of even experienced animators. 10:33.160 --> 10:37.780 Now, this is something I I discovered and I've used on a lot of projects. 10:39.250 --> 10:43.450 If we take an arc length so we can go to object mode, it's like the curve. 10:43.960 --> 10:49.300 Let's go to create measure tools, say arc length tool. 10:49.470 --> 10:51.430 OK, on the left click. 10:52.690 --> 10:57.310 And you can see now we have this length we can see and left clicking. 10:57.310 --> 10:58.870 It just gets stuck to this curve. 10:59.300 --> 10:59.650 Right. 10:59.650 --> 11:01.870 So where I drag it'll stay stuck on this curve. 11:02.200 --> 11:04.870 But the number is changing because it's a measuring stick. 11:04.870 --> 11:10.600 Basically it's saying this curve is, you know, two hundred and eighty units long. 11:10.930 --> 11:12.610 OK, why is that important? 11:12.760 --> 11:20.290 Because what I do if I'm going to put someone on a motion path, what I do, I make the motion path 11:20.290 --> 11:21.100 crazy long. 11:21.490 --> 11:23.020 I say, you know what, screw it. 11:23.500 --> 11:26.470 We're going to go the motion is going to go way, way over here. 11:27.250 --> 11:33.300 And the reason why I do that is that I want this value and change this background. 11:33.340 --> 11:34.290 You can see the number. 11:34.810 --> 11:37.930 So now let's say it's let's just go six hundred just for fun. 11:38.890 --> 11:39.280 Right. 11:39.640 --> 11:41.730 But I want this person to stop over here. 11:41.770 --> 11:47.950 So what I'm going to do is, well, first I need to get the locator to. 11:49.090 --> 11:54.200 Be accurate to the length of the cycle, so it needs to go way down. 11:54.270 --> 11:58.810 Someone grab the end keyframe while I'm on the in the cycle, right. 11:59.030 --> 12:02.410 I'm manipulating keyframe that I'm not actually viewing. 12:02.410 --> 12:03.430 I'm on that frame. 12:04.180 --> 12:05.500 That's the beauty graph editor. 12:05.500 --> 12:05.820 Right. 12:06.280 --> 12:09.940 So I'm going to drag this back to where it should be. 12:10.360 --> 12:13.140 So the cycle is as the corrective. 12:15.670 --> 12:20.680 The cycle is the correct length here as far as where the animation is. 12:20.830 --> 12:27.910 And again, I'm I'm zooming in so that I can get a finer control here on where it's meeting up on the 12:27.920 --> 12:28.420 most part. 12:29.020 --> 12:31.000 So now I've set it right. 12:31.030 --> 12:34.910 OK, I've set it to be where it should be for the cycle. 12:35.620 --> 12:37.780 So when I play this back, the feet shouldn't slip. 12:38.970 --> 12:39.930 And it's going to turn. 12:40.730 --> 12:42.700 He's going to do a little turnaround. 12:43.200 --> 12:44.380 He's going to stop right there. 12:45.180 --> 12:45.570 OK. 12:47.210 --> 12:53.750 So if we look at the curve now, remember when we were like point eight or whatever, you can see the 12:53.750 --> 13:00.140 buffer curve up here where one is, look how far we had to drag it down because the length of the curve 13:00.140 --> 13:01.430 is so long, right. 13:01.430 --> 13:02.570 It goes to 600. 13:02.600 --> 13:04.100 We pulled it all the way out here to 600. 13:04.400 --> 13:09.440 So now the zero to one value and the graph editor is crazy. 13:09.650 --> 13:11.720 You know, that relationship is way different now. 13:11.730 --> 13:15.560 So we had to accommodate for that and pull this keyframe way down. 13:15.560 --> 13:17.990 So it's on point to now, remember, we are on point eight. 13:18.380 --> 13:19.310 That's on point two. 13:19.550 --> 13:21.290 So it's all relative to the curve length. 13:21.650 --> 13:26.390 OK, now here's the fun part, the tricky part that I, you know, hesitate to even teach because it's 13:26.390 --> 13:28.190 more of an intermediate thing, just these concepts. 13:28.670 --> 13:33.130 It's hard to it's hard to stop at a beginner level because it just kind of everything plays into it 13:33.140 --> 13:34.580 into the next piece. 13:35.240 --> 13:37.660 So we can see it says six hundred. 13:37.700 --> 13:38.120 All right. 13:38.480 --> 13:40.550 Now, let's say I've got everything set right. 13:41.030 --> 13:42.740 The walk cycles working. 13:42.950 --> 13:44.300 It's going at the right pace. 13:44.930 --> 13:46.370 The feet aren't slipping too much. 13:46.370 --> 13:48.950 I can fix these curved ones that are slipping later. 13:48.980 --> 13:49.730 That's no big deal. 13:51.560 --> 13:53.120 But later on we were like, you know what? 13:53.270 --> 13:54.170 I want to change the path. 13:54.680 --> 13:58.490 I want him to not turn all the way around. 13:58.490 --> 14:03.860 So I'm going to go to the curve and added the curve ahead of the curve. 14:04.190 --> 14:09.260 He's going to be over here now, but it's changing the length of the curve, even if just by a little 14:09.260 --> 14:09.590 bit. 14:09.620 --> 14:09.980 Right. 14:10.880 --> 14:14.120 Well, how do we know it's changing the length of the curve and by how much? 14:14.820 --> 14:15.230 Right. 14:16.430 --> 14:17.600 Well, what do we have? 14:17.600 --> 14:21.760 We have our fancy little arc length tool that we made over here. 14:22.310 --> 14:25.850 Now we can see we went from six hundred to six hundred and fifty nine. 14:26.130 --> 14:34.610 OK, so if we play this back, you can see on frame 40, he the two locators aren't matching up. 14:35.270 --> 14:37.250 So we know that the feet are going to be sliding here. 14:37.700 --> 14:38.480 Look, look at this. 14:38.480 --> 14:39.200 Feet sliding. 14:39.230 --> 14:41.240 Right, because now the curve is longer. 14:41.930 --> 14:48.260 Well, gosh, OK, now you go back in and do the motion path curves in the graph editor and drag that 14:48.260 --> 14:54.800 back down or what we can do and what we built instead of doing this now, instead of doing this, trying 14:54.800 --> 14:59.720 to line that back up, what we can do is instead change the length of the curve. 14:59.720 --> 15:05.030 And that's why I make it to be super, super long, because it gives me a ton of room to move it if 15:05.030 --> 15:06.950 I decide to change this length over here. 15:07.730 --> 15:09.320 So when I right. 15:09.320 --> 15:10.760 Click this go to control vertex. 15:11.180 --> 15:14.810 All I have to do now is bring this number back to six hundred. 15:14.810 --> 15:15.140 Right. 15:15.410 --> 15:20.510 That's where we set everything and we said everything's locked in and walk cycle works perfectly for 15:20.510 --> 15:21.860 this motion path. 15:22.370 --> 15:26.300 So I'm going to click and drag this and just watch the numbers go down. 15:26.300 --> 15:28.100 It doesn't matter where this thing is, it could be over here. 15:28.100 --> 15:28.580 Over there. 15:28.700 --> 15:30.140 What matters is that number. 15:30.470 --> 15:32.510 So we wanted to get it to about six hundred. 15:32.700 --> 15:33.070 All right. 15:33.770 --> 15:37.280 So when we go back over here and we're at six hundred, we've got a frame. 15:37.280 --> 15:37.730 Forty. 15:38.210 --> 15:38.720 Guess what? 15:39.380 --> 15:44.960 Those locators match up and everything's fine now so we can edit this curved or our heart's content 15:45.500 --> 15:46.490 as much as we want. 15:46.490 --> 15:49.400 Drag this thing over here, drag this piece over here. 15:49.760 --> 15:56.420 And instead of having to go back into the curves of the motion path and the graph editor, we can make 15:56.420 --> 16:01.490 these adjustments to make sure that the walk cycle is moving along this path properly. 16:01.820 --> 16:03.830 We can do that with this distance over here. 16:04.040 --> 16:05.390 Look, look how much we drag it. 16:05.390 --> 16:06.530 Nine hundred and whatever. 16:07.010 --> 16:07.910 No big deal. 16:08.480 --> 16:10.670 We just drag that back to six hundred. 16:13.400 --> 16:23.030 To do I have to delete some points here just to be able to move to go past where I did this in a very 16:23.030 --> 16:30.680 exaggerating way on purpose, so you can see the power of this right in that relationship between the 16:30.680 --> 16:34.510 motion path and the length of the curve, not zero to one value and the length of the curve. 16:34.820 --> 16:41.810 So you can edit the motion path zero to one value in the graph editor, or you can adjust the length 16:41.810 --> 16:42.330 of the curve. 16:42.560 --> 16:43.270 It's up to you. 16:43.880 --> 16:50.450 And they will both get to the same issue here, which is we're trying to keep the feet from slipping. 16:51.140 --> 16:55.680 They should be moving at a certain distance based on our animation of the walk cycle. 16:56.360 --> 16:57.590 So I hope all that makes sense. 16:57.590 --> 17:03.890 We kind of delved into a little more intermediate and really advanced animation techniques with motion 17:03.890 --> 17:05.060 path and walk cycles. 17:05.420 --> 17:06.620 But you know what? 17:06.620 --> 17:08.360 You've watched hours of training. 17:08.360 --> 17:12.370 And if you've made it this far, I think you're pretty advanced already. 17:12.380 --> 17:15.440 So congratulations on making it this far in the course. 17:15.440 --> 17:19.210 And I look forward to teaching you more in the next. 17:19.270 --> 17:21.830 So and congrats on finishing this section.