WEBVTT 00:00.610 --> 00:06.430 Hi and welcome to this first lesson where we're going to cover a bouncing ball now, I want to record 00:06.430 --> 00:14.170 myself actually talking to you because I wanted to connect a little more than typically me sitting behind 00:14.170 --> 00:19.990 the computer here and talking, because I want you to understand that I know your frustration when you're 00:19.990 --> 00:23.290 learning animation, especially when it's three animation. 00:23.440 --> 00:25.840 You're basically learning several things at once. 00:25.840 --> 00:31.150 You're learning animation, which is its own thing, and then you're learning a specific software. 00:31.360 --> 00:35.790 On top of that animation has its own principles that apply to any software that you're going to learn. 00:36.580 --> 00:39.010 And then on top of that, you're trying to learn a specific software. 00:39.020 --> 00:41.100 So I totally understand your frustration. 00:41.110 --> 00:45.910 I've been there myself not that long ago and I'm always learning anyways. 00:45.910 --> 00:51.910 But I wanted to make this quick video at the beginning to let you know I know where you're coming from 00:52.150 --> 00:54.120 and hopefully that you'll trust me. 00:54.130 --> 00:59.830 And the reason why I'm teaching you the things I'm teaching you and the order in which I'm teaching 00:59.830 --> 01:00.010 them. 01:00.730 --> 01:03.370 That being said, I'm specifically talking about the bouncing ball. 01:03.400 --> 01:10.270 I was super excited to learn animation when I first started and was frustrated pretty quickly by these 01:10.270 --> 01:14.110 very what I thought were basic exercises like the bouncing ball. 01:15.100 --> 01:22.330 But the reality is they are very, very important and they are the foundation of animation and learning 01:22.330 --> 01:23.050 animation. 01:23.380 --> 01:26.380 It's going to teach you wait, it's going to teach you timing and spacing. 01:26.680 --> 01:32.050 These things are going to be what you're going to apply to animation from day one till the day you die 01:32.050 --> 01:32.680 animating. 01:33.280 --> 01:39.720 Hopefully that's a long career of enjoying it, but it's fundamental and you really need to learn it. 01:39.730 --> 01:44.200 I was frustrated when I first started because I just thought it was too basic and I wanted to get into 01:44.200 --> 01:45.760 doing character animation right away. 01:46.150 --> 01:50.920 But what you'll find is if you do that and you skip these foundational things is you're going to be 01:50.920 --> 01:56.530 even more frustrated when you go into character animation, because if you can't animate a bouncing 01:56.530 --> 02:02.170 ball very well, there's no way in the world you're going to be able to animate a character very well. 02:02.530 --> 02:04.290 So just accept this journey. 02:04.300 --> 02:07.390 This is part of the journey and you'll move through it quickly. 02:07.960 --> 02:13.420 The more you do it and the more attention you pay to actually, you know, understanding these fundamentals 02:13.780 --> 02:18.580 and taking seriously these early kind of lessons and exercises like the bouncing ball. 02:18.590 --> 02:21.050 So with that being said, let's take a look at this. 02:21.100 --> 02:21.760 Thanks for watching. 02:23.160 --> 02:29.920 So hopefully you've downloaded the scene file, the ball animations start and you're following along, 02:30.180 --> 02:33.750 or you will follow along in your second viewing of this video. 02:34.240 --> 02:39.450 But basically, I just want to talk through what we're going to do and a little bit more about animation 02:39.450 --> 02:40.920 in general and specifically in. 02:41.580 --> 02:48.180 So there's a misconception, I think, in animation that, you know, there are limits to where things 02:48.180 --> 02:50.320 can go and everything works nicely together. 02:50.320 --> 02:54.330 And what I mean is, like, if this, you know, we're going to do a bouncing ball, that this won't 02:54.330 --> 02:59.060 go through the floor, that somehow we're going to simulate this or something like that. 02:59.070 --> 03:02.580 And so there are these boundaries that, you know, the ball can't go through. 03:03.030 --> 03:04.210 That's totally not true. 03:04.230 --> 03:05.400 That is not true at all. 03:05.400 --> 03:11.010 And you as the animator have to be the one to precisely place everything. 03:11.010 --> 03:11.330 Right. 03:11.730 --> 03:14.430 So so this can go straight through the floor. 03:14.520 --> 03:14.870 Right. 03:14.940 --> 03:18.260 I can just move anything, anywhere I want to. 03:18.810 --> 03:22.200 There's, you know, no respect to those boundaries. 03:22.200 --> 03:24.720 So it's all up to us, right? 03:24.720 --> 03:27.750 Every frame where we are going to be responsible for. 03:28.290 --> 03:31.020 OK, so let's dive into this. 03:31.020 --> 03:34.380 And with that responsibility, start animating this ball. 03:34.830 --> 03:36.630 So we have this generic ball here. 03:37.200 --> 03:38.410 It's labeled generic ball. 03:38.410 --> 03:38.940 In the outliner. 03:38.940 --> 03:46.070 We can see it has some translation here where it's above the ground a little bit. 03:46.680 --> 03:50.940 So I've created this set so that we can all kind of start from the same place. 03:51.660 --> 03:57.930 I'm going to turn off this grid because we already have a floor here and I have a. aliasing on. 03:57.930 --> 04:00.030 So everything looks a little nice and smooth. 04:00.570 --> 04:05.520 Going to get rid of this outliner because I want more screen space here. 04:07.260 --> 04:09.360 So when we're animating, we have the timeline. 04:09.660 --> 04:11.880 And right now nothing is animated. 04:11.880 --> 04:13.590 So nothing's happening when we're scrubbing it. 04:14.280 --> 04:16.020 But so let's animate this thing a little bit. 04:16.350 --> 04:20.340 Let's take this and put it on top using the manipulator here. 04:20.430 --> 04:26.750 I have w pressed on the keyboard so I have the manipulator tool available to me. 04:26.760 --> 04:33.240 So like I said earlier, we're going to be responsible for placing this thing exactly where we want 04:33.240 --> 04:33.420 it. 04:34.440 --> 04:40.930 And for this first lesson and exercise, I don't want you to worry about rotation, OK? 04:41.430 --> 04:47.910 Even though we can kind of see the ball here, totally ignore this rotation. 04:47.910 --> 04:55.770 And in fact, if this wireframe is kind of distracting to you, let's go to show and we can actually 04:55.770 --> 05:00.840 turn off selection highlighting so you don't see that wireframe view. 05:01.770 --> 05:07.500 So now we can definitely just focus on the position of the ball and not worry about the rotation, because 05:07.500 --> 05:14.850 we want to start, you know, and build up to other aspects, just like translation rotation and all 05:14.850 --> 05:16.470 the way up to animated character. 05:18.240 --> 05:22.460 So what this ball up here, we want to set our first key so we can do that in several ways. 05:22.500 --> 05:27.060 Most animators just use the shortcut s on the keyboard. 05:27.060 --> 05:29.850 And as I do that, you can see there's a result 10. 05:30.270 --> 05:32.700 That means there are ten things that were keyed. 05:33.060 --> 05:36.270 And if we look over here in the channel box, we can see all ten. 05:36.690 --> 05:41.700 We place the key on every attribute that is in the channel box and that might be fine. 05:41.700 --> 05:42.900 That might be what you want to do. 05:43.320 --> 05:48.120 Or in our case, we know we're just going to be working on the translation right now. 05:48.390 --> 05:52.350 So I'm just going to hit undo a couple of times to get rid of that key frame. 05:52.350 --> 05:54.620 And we can see that little timeline tick. 05:54.630 --> 05:58.440 Got a race down here that was that little red mark. 05:58.920 --> 06:07.510 So if I just want to ke the translations, I can hit shift w and this makes sense because we know W 06:07.530 --> 06:08.850 is the manipulator tool. 06:09.120 --> 06:10.470 E is the rotation tool. 06:10.470 --> 06:15.180 So you guessed it, if we hit shift E, it'll only key the rotations. 06:15.690 --> 06:19.650 But for us let's just do the translations for now. 06:20.220 --> 06:21.720 So we have our first key. 06:22.140 --> 06:28.140 Let's move to somewhere in the timeline, maybe ten frames and let's put this on the ground here on 06:28.140 --> 06:28.650 the floor. 06:29.610 --> 06:35.490 It's going to move this some distance out here and place it on the floor and it to frame up on it so 06:35.490 --> 06:41.770 I can kind of get a better look at the floor and now I want it to bounce. 06:41.770 --> 06:45.810 So I'm going to maybe move, let's say, five frames. 06:45.810 --> 06:48.030 We can change all this timing later. 06:48.930 --> 06:51.180 It's going to move this up here somewhere. 06:51.570 --> 06:54.630 I'm going to move this back down onto the floor. 06:58.180 --> 07:04.960 So I'm going to reduce the timeline here so we can watch just the what we've animated here and we're 07:04.960 --> 07:10.360 animating in 24 frames a second, which is dropped on over here, that you can change the frame rate. 07:11.470 --> 07:17.290 Every film that you've ever watched is going to be in 24 frames a second unless it's Peter Jackson, 07:17.290 --> 07:19.390 some crazy 48 frames per second thing. 07:19.670 --> 07:24.310 So nine times out of ten, you're going to be animating in twenty four frames a second. 07:24.310 --> 07:29.070 So you can just kind of not worry about ever changing that for the time being. 07:29.680 --> 07:33.760 So for us to playback our animation, we can scrub the timeline. 07:34.580 --> 07:38.650 We can also hit the play button over here and watch it animate through. 07:39.490 --> 07:44.260 Right now it doesn't look super compelling and we're going to of course, refine this to make it look 07:44.260 --> 07:44.740 a lot better. 07:45.040 --> 07:49.210 But we're also just still getting familiar with the tools while we're still learning about animation. 07:49.210 --> 07:50.740 So we're doing two things at once here. 07:51.040 --> 07:53.830 And so we're just going to take our time with that. 07:54.310 --> 07:58.210 So we have the animation done, cityscape to stop playback. 07:58.690 --> 08:01.330 And the shortcut for playing back is also V. 08:01.330 --> 08:05.950 I use this all the time, so I have my left hand on the keyboard, on my right hand, on the mouse so 08:05.950 --> 08:10.590 I can always hit Alvie or escape to stop it and kind of see what I've been doing. 08:11.140 --> 08:16.300 I'm also going to turn on the ambient occlusion just for right now so we can see the actual kind of 08:16.300 --> 08:17.710 contact with the ground. 08:18.000 --> 08:24.100 That's a little hard to make out now with the same everything being the same color here. 08:24.940 --> 08:29.440 So now we can kind of see we have this ball that bounces, but the first thing you notice is it just 08:29.440 --> 08:30.880 kind of starts immediately. 08:31.270 --> 08:39.370 And one thing to know about animation is that it takes a person at least six frames to register something 08:40.090 --> 08:41.710 from the cut, basically. 08:41.710 --> 08:47.740 So we never want to start animating anything from the first frame unless we're intentionally breaking 08:47.740 --> 08:49.540 that kind of a rule that we've established. 08:49.540 --> 08:52.360 So we want to move all the animation over six frames. 08:52.360 --> 08:52.960 How do we do that? 08:53.320 --> 08:55.480 Let's shift click in the timeline and drag. 08:55.480 --> 09:00.610 And now we get this kind of red kind of bar here and you see these little yellow arrows here. 09:01.270 --> 09:07.000 There's one over here that's kind of hidden and there's one here at the end of the selection that's 09:07.000 --> 09:09.640 scales all of the key frames. 09:09.820 --> 09:10.690 You don't want to do that. 09:10.690 --> 09:16.210 And also you'll notice that as we scale, it doesn't respect the individual frames. 09:16.210 --> 09:20.740 So we're we're putting things, putting the keys on like half frames. 09:21.100 --> 09:25.870 So to fix that, you can go right click and go down to snap and it'll snap the key frame to a full frame. 09:26.470 --> 09:28.390 But what we want to do is move everything. 09:28.390 --> 09:32.080 So I'm going to create that selection again by holding down shift and clicking everything. 09:32.470 --> 09:38.620 I'm going to click in the middle to arrows here and then I can just slide everything over six frames. 09:38.920 --> 09:41.440 So now we playback hitting Albe. 09:42.010 --> 09:48.370 We can see we can kind of register, OK, there's a ball on a cliff and then it starts bouncing and 09:48.370 --> 09:49.270 falls to the ground. 09:49.600 --> 09:55.720 So in the next lesson, we're going to actually refine the animation and learn more about what it takes 09:55.720 --> 10:00.640 to make something believable as far as animating it is concerned. 10:01.030 --> 10:03.580 So thanks for watching and I'll see in the next lesson.