Original subtitles

- [Instructor] The first pose we've been working on

was a static pose or a balanced pose.

In this new video I like to tackle motion poses

and we will try to push it to an extreme using smears

and rebel limbs.

So the first thing you need to do and I truly advise you

to do it whatever your animation level is to identify

the line of action on the pose.

Even if it seems very obvious on this picture,

drawing this line will help you whenever you are going

to build your pose because it will be written

in your subconscious.

I know it is I'm the first to rush into posing my character

whenever I'm starting a new animation and this is not

the right way to do it.

But what I'm sure is that whenever I do this work prior

to start posing my character, I generally get a better

result.

Second thing I do is to define the lines of interests.

In this case, we have a nice angle with the right leg,

the left arm, and the overall shape made by the connection

between the two arms and the baseball bat.

Then as in the previous video, I will define the orientation

of the face, the torso, and the hips of the character

by drawing lines on top of the character.

Again, this will really improve my posing process

helping me reading the current pose and the orientation

of the different features of the body.

So I will open my previous file,

I will duplicate the current action and I will rename

it, pose number two,

I will get rid of all the key frame on frame number two,

and then I will go on frame zero, enter pose mode,

select all my controllers and press Alt+R, Alt+G,

Alt+S to reset the rotation scale and location

of all the controllers.

From there in the 2D editor, I will open the new reference

picture.

Since this new picture is not framed as the other,

we need to rework our camera,

the current camera as an horizontal format while the new one

needs to be into a vertical format.

To change the format ratio of the camera

we need to go into our output properties,

scroll up till you reach the dimension tab

and replace the resolution X by 1080 and Y by 1920.

From there, I will make sure that I'm in object mode

and I will click on the outer edge of the camera frame,

this will select the camera and I can roughly reposition

it using our two rotating G to move.

Since the reference picture has probably been taken

from afar, I will increase the focal length to 60,

I guess a focal length of 80 or 90 would be better,

but for the time being we will stick to these.

While our character has no baseball bat,

he's equipped with some weapons.

We can go towards the visibility properties and enable

the two ended sword or long sword.

We can continue these as these are some bad-ass baseball

bat and we now need to enable it's rig layer.

By default these two ended sword is parented to the right

hand, meaning that it will follow any motion or movement

of the right hand.

If we head over the weapons properties tab,

we can change the parenting of the sword or of any

of the weapons of the character.

Changing the parent will whether parent it to the right

hand, left hand, or give it no parent so that we can move it

freely inward space where we can definitely pose

our character using forward kinematics for the arms.

Whenever we are manipulating an object,

we've both and in contact with it,

it's easier to have at least one or both end set to inverse

kinematic.

So in the arm properties panel, I will set the arm

fkik.l and .r to one so that we switch to arm

inverse kinematic controllers.

From there, we can enable the arm inverse kinematic

controllers layer and hide the arm forward kinematically.

From there we can pose the arm of our character by simply

selecting the end controller and moving it

and adjust the elbow orientation using the pole target

exactly as we did with the feet.

There are a lot of animators that prefer to use inverse

kinematic all the way from their arms.

I personally prefer forward kinematic to build nice arcs,

but whenever I have contacting pose with the hands

on the wall, on the ground, or on an object like that,

I generally switch to inverse kinematic.

The first thing I will do is press control tab to jump back

into object mode and I will select the camera and hide it,

this way I can start working in front orthographical view

without having the camera object in the middle

of the screen.

As usual, I can always start posing my character

with the center of gravity or torso root controller.

As we have looped to the reference picture,

our goal is to figure out where the torso is pointing at.

Once I get a very basic ID of my torso pose

we can pose the feet, they are very important

since they are supporting the weight of our character,

they will define its balance and the orientation

of the hips.

When posing the feet, if you have to rotate them forward

or backward, I advise you to favorize the foot roll

controller, it has a pretty natural behavior regarding

the posing of the character and when animating it

it's easier than rotating the feet and compensating

any contact.

Don't forget to pose the toes of the character.

And before you focus on the whole leg,

just focus on the feet orientation of the reference.

For the time being I'm just roughly posing each controller

as seen in the previous video you can hardly get

to the right pose or the right position of each controller

in one shot, you need to refine the pose of each controller

by going back and forth on each of them one by one.

With the feet controllers and the leg I can pose,

roughly post, I can go ahead and work a bit more

onto the torso of the character.

I need to twist the torso even more, twist a bit the chest

controller, make it lean to the side,

basically push the pose a little more.

Then I'm watching the head orientation of the reference

picture and I'm trying too match, rotating the neck

controller will offset the head and then I can change

the orientation on the head using the head controller.

As usual the shoulder are very important because they will

shape the chest and the overall silhouette of the character,

but they will also change the behavior of the arms

especially when using inverse kinematic.

But before I even try to refine the shoulders

I will position the hands of the character.

You watch carefully the reference, the right hand palm

is pointing up while the left hand home is pointing down.

So I need to rotate the right hand accordingly,

then I will position it in front of the character

and roughly both in space.

Once I have a rough pose for the right hand,

I will pose the left hand and position it on the handle

of the sword.

Here you can see we have a lot of tension into our arm,

and this is because we haven't posed the shoulder yet.

We need to rotate the shoulder inward to loosen the arm

and get a nice angle with the elbow.

Watch out for this nice and smooth C-shape boat

by the shoulder line.

Whenever you are posing the elbow,

double check their position in space,

be aware whenever you are posing,

don't try to guess, just watch the reference.

The left elbow is pointing to the sky making a nice angle

with the shoulder while the right elbow is pushed toward

the chest of the character.

A common mistake you need to absolutely avoid is trying

to reach any weapon pose using only the hand controller,

your hand have a pretty limited range of rotation.

So you can't break the wrist to orientate the plate,

but whenever you are manipulating and object in your hand,

the way you move your finger you open your palm or not

will change the orientation of the object.

So please move the object using the object controller.

Getting back on to our pose we can see that both

end are very close one to the other,

so I fix that and now I'm rotating the shoulder so that

I can reach the same range of motion or range of pose

as on the reference.

When I pose the hand, again I try not to break the wrist

too much and if I need to compensate the rotation

of the sword I will do it using the sword controller.

Now that I have a roughly posed both hand and I want

to move both of them or change the orientation of the sword

at hands, I'm using the active controller as the rotation

point or pivot points.

This way I can select both hand controller,

make sure that I select last or make active the right hand

controller, this way both end rotating around the right hand

pivot point.

And since we are using inverse kinematic, both end get

posed pretty natural,

and I can do the same process by selecting both hands

and then selecting the torso controller for example.

As I'm turning around my pose to make sure it works

from every angle, I will first select both end

and finally the torso controller.

And now whenever I move or rotate the torso controller,

the ends follow, good practice is to test the different

pivot points

so that you get familiar with them and can switch

whenever you think it's more relevant to pose faster

or with ease.

So as seen for the previous pose, don't forget to turn

around your character and make sure that the pose

works from any angle.

Now that I have a better pose or at least a base pose,

I will go back to object mode and they will unhide

the camera by pressing Alt+H.

With the camera selected, I will go back onto the camera

properties and I will set the focal length to 90

and now we have a way better focal length that better match

the current reference picture.

With the focal length corrected I will jump back

into pose mode, select both end and finally select

the torso root controller and I will tweak the pose

of my character to better match or try to better match

the reference pose.

When you're watching your reference, take one feature

like the elbow and try to clearly identify its orientation.

My left elbow is currently pointing up

while on the reference it's pointing down,

so I will simply fix that by rotating a bit the shoulder

controller and lowering the pole targets,

then I will control the other elbow and make sure that

it doesn't clip too much inside my character.

Another good practice whenever you are watching

the reference is to draw straight lines,

to see the position for example, of the head compared

to the foot or the left elbow compared to the left foot,

I can see that I need to push my left foot a little

on the outside.

So there are a lot of moment where you won't be able

to perfectly match the reference because the range of posing

of your character depend on his proportions.

Our current character is more elongated than the female

character on the reference for example,

so his arms are a little longer and I have a lot of time

trying to perfectly match the position of his harm compared

to the female character.

So your goal is trying to match but not trying to match

at all costs, at some point you need to figure out whether

the pose you have, but please you are not.

Again, animation is enough form, so I can't teach you

the perfect way to pose your character or tell you

this is or this kind of pose must be bad.

You are here to learn all to bad a good pose,

not this specific pose.

And then you need to bring your style to the pose,

again I'm comparing the reference pose with my character

trying to find the right balance or at least the right

momentum.

Here we don't need to get our character perfectly balanced

since he's in motion, so its center of gravity is moving

in space.

I could tweak this pose forever, but for the time being

we are going to rapidly pose the finger around the handle

of the weapon.

So I will pose each finger one by one trying to match

a convincing pose, but this is not the main focus

of this video, so I will just let you with a time-lapse

where I'm posing those fingers.

Don't forget that you can also find tweaking the position

of the feet and the position of the toes,

but we will work on and posing in a dedicating the video,

for the time being I'll see you in the next one

where we will push the current pose.

(upbeat music)