Animating a Blink, Part II: Polishing - BLENDER ANIMATION WORKFLOWS [Blender 2.8]

In this part 2 of Blender Animation Workflows, we're gonna polish our blank. I'm Luciano and welcome to the Adventures of Lollipop Man. We're gonna pick it up right where we left off. We had our animation in step poses and now we're just gonna spline everything and get it to the finish line. If you like this channel, remember to like and subscribe or maybe pick up something from my stores down in the description below. Let's get on it! I'm going to switch to the Graph Editor with Ctrl-Tab. I'm just going to select all of the controllers we have here and make sure that they all go into Bezier, which is basically turning all of this into splines. So first of all I'm gonna do that, T, and then we only care about Constant, Linear and Bezier. Constant is for doing step mode and now Bezier is gonna be all in spline mode. Now we'll be able to change the curves and the tangents. Another thing that I want to turn off is the coloring of the groups, which I really don't like. I think it should be default. Sadly you can't turn this on off forever. I'm trying to get it to be an option with the entire Blender. So once you turn it off, once it stays off. But at this point you have to do it on a per scene basis. When you work in a scene that has it on and you turn it off, it will stay off for that scene. But if you start a new one, then it will start on. So this is cool. It's not too bad, it just needs polishing. First of all, I figure we'll just work on the ones that we've animated pretty much. So I'm just going to select all of these guys here. I'm going to deselect this one because we don't really need to touch those. Yeah, those ones goodbye, and this one's goodbye, and this one's goodbye. So let's shift H and select and hide them all. Out of these ones, oh, I missed that one, H. So shift H is hide all of the ones that are unselected and H is hide the one selected. And now, so for instance, you can see that all of these ones, when you rotate them, they talk too much really. This one does nothing, this one does a little bit, nothing. So I reckon we could actually get rid of all the rotations, because I don't think we deliberately did much to the rotations. For that, we have a filter in here, which we can go rote. And if I press the plus button, I can expand this. So you can see that we're only seeing the rotations to make this big. By control spacebar, you can make any window full screen, which I love. So we'll select them all. Yeah, all rotations, and we're also in quaternion. Like, it's okay, but not perfect. And we can potentially just get rid of the keyframe and just done. We can also delete the channels directly, but this should be out. And now, we can also get rid of all the scales. And so let's do this. Yeah, all of them. So if I press X here, it just deletes the entire channel and keeps the value at the place that you are right now. That's cool, that's easy. And we certainly don't... Did I delete more than I should have? Well, yes, I did, actually. I don't know how. So let's just delete scales. Oh, yeah, that's the problem. If I delete them from here, I also delete the entire animation for each bone. So I don't want to do it here. That's why I want to select them all. I just want to make sure that they're all here, so they're all visible. And then I'll delete them from here, and that should be fine. So now I get my locations back. What else do I want to do with this? I think that's all, right? I probably only want to keep only the Y locations, because all we did is moving them up and down, mostly. But we'll leave it like this for now, I think. But you can see that they all are moving just up and down. This one might be doing something weird there. It's basically all up and down. The moves to the side are because we added those little eye darts. And the eye controller has a little bit of influence. I mean, when the eyeball rotates, it has a little bit of influence over the eyelids. So that's producing those side-to-side movements. But besides that, we just did up and down. So we can potentially go X, and then just select them all, and then go back here. And let's grab this guy. Yeah, that guy kind of goes in a little bit. OK, let's leave the locations in X and Y. But we can get rid of the ones in Z, because those are in and out. So they shouldn't be moving, basically. We've got a clean graph editor now. Did I delete everything now? All of what we need. Yeah, exactly. Just Y and X will be fine now. Cool. So we're ready to get going. So the first thing I'm going to do, because this control drives this one and this one. And it's the same with these two, above this one. And in the eyebrow case, it's this one. It's driven by those two, their positions. This one gets affected by them. So we want to polish, firstly, these ones. And then get on with the secondaries that get affected by those first ones. These ones we could do at any time, basically. Just because they are not like, no matter which other controller I touch, they... Oh, OK. So we want to do this one, this one, this one. And so this one's also coming last, basically, as we get all the other ones ready. So let's try and start with this eye. I want to make sure that it starts slightly slow. I guess we could start with this side slightly earlier than this side. Closing and then opening. Even if this one is smaller, it's just going to be like the lazy eye. So let's start with this guy. Go here. Just start grabbing the curves. A little thing I like to do is, because right now, as you can see, both of my curves are active. Makes it a little bit complicated. I just want to go and only select her keyframes. And the other one gets kind of grayed out, so I can't select it. And so we want to push this guy a little bit. Actually, we can hide that. And then accelerate a lot. Scale that. Maybe I went a bit too slow. And then smack into the lower eyelid. Continue going a little bit more. And then start going out curves slowly. And then securely get over here. Smack. We will reshape this a little bit, obviously. Smack. Down. So let's do the lower lid. I kind of want to leave this starting slow again. There we go. Actually, no. Let's leave that for the other eye. We can do it a little bit sharper even. And then the lower one. I'm going to grab it again. So it's going to take longer, though. I'm going to just move it a little bit. There we go. Smack against the top one. And then start pushing down. But then when the top one starts going back up, I'm just going to duplicate this keyframe. Move it a little bit. So it kind of gets pulled by the upper lid when it goes up. And then it just goes back to its place. OK. Let's fix the ones around them. Because I'm kind of dying with those shapes sometimes. So when he goes down, maybe we can, for instance, make it just a little tad curved. So it doesn't get that sharp edge there. Here I'm screwed. I think it's part of my terrible way of painting. You get the idea. So yeah, it'll be fine. And then we can push it. Actually, let's just drag this part up. So it doesn't want to close the eye. And then this one, we can drag it down. We get that little shape like that. And then boom. And then we can start opening that slightly there. I don't know how good that's going to look. And then this one is kind of dragging back. And then they get there. I think that should be backwards. It's going to look better if we do it backwards. So we can probably just grab all of these guys here. Sit down in the middle. And then scale X minus 1. Actually, good time for using the pivot 2D cursor. Scale X minus 1. So they will pivot around him. So it goes down. Boom. Yeah, that's better, I think. And then this guy, maybe we can delay all this one more frame. Yeah, there we go. So it's very, very tiny detail. In play, you can barely see it. I think I'm still too exaggerated with it. But it starts adding a little bit of less mechanicalism. I don't know how to say it. Just feels a little bit more organic that it's not the entire lead that goes until like that. So I want to make it just a tad softer. So it's there, just don't see it. But you feel it a tiny bit. And then both of them here. And then shift D and just make sure that they're getting more shape. Yeah, I like it. Looking good. So let's do the other eye. I mean the other eye. Let's do the eyebrow, I guess. I can do the entire eye and the eyebrow. And then just the rest of the other eye and eyebrow could be potentially fed up. So let's do this. So first, we want the eye to start. And so I'm going to push this keyframe. Actually, I'm going to push the entire eyebrow, maybe one frame later. So those guys start moving. Then as they start moving, they pull in and the eyebrow starts moving down. And so this guy kind of feels like it goes down more than it should. And then we also probably want these guys to kind of stay. Then the ease out for it to come back. And then maybe make this one softer. Yeah, something like so. Again, we're trying to do decent quality animation in a couple of minutes. And I'm not the fastest, not the best one. So I'm just going to do the best I can in this half an hour. I'm just going to try and do the best I can. We can also push that middle one to go slightly earlier than the other ones. So it feels like that middle eyebrow is the one driving, like the middle part of the eyebrow is driving the rest of the animation. And then move it down enough. OK, that's not too bad. I do think that we're pushing it too much down. And I'm going to show you this little add-on that I'm using, which replicates a lot of the functionality from AnimBot. And so you can get this for free. The link is going to be down in the comments below. It's a very cool add-on, works fairly well. So I'm going to scale right. And so this is going to scale each curve to the right frame. So it makes it really easy to scale the animation, for instance, in this way. I'm also wanting to do this, push these guys a little bit later. So they start a little bit early. Yeah, that sounds more like it. Yeah, something like this. We can grab a little bit here. I'm not going to touch any of the other controllers. These ones, we could add a tiny bit. But given that it's a blink, unless you were trying to quint and blink, but a regular blink usually happens more in this area and the eyebrows. It's not that forced, I guess, around the rest of the area. My supervisor could be super angry about what I'm saying. But this is what I figure out by hearing and seeing other people. So yeah, that's not terrible. I would say this one is a little bit too sharp. And there it is, too sharp. Push it a little bit late. Yeah, you see now that area is arriving slightly more slow. And this guy here, maybe we could give it Yeah, something a little bit of a curvature there. Yeah, this one now feels like kind of like lagging too much. Yeah, and it completely freezes there. Maybe we should keep him going a little bit down or then have him blow out a little bit more. So we could potentially. Boom, I think it's done. Let me know if you like this video by hitting the like button, or maybe if you didn't like it, just let me know in the comments below why you didn't like it, because that gives me feedback to improving the next one. The whole point of this video was more about showing you how to use Blender's graph editor and curves and keyframes and tools. To use it to their advantage with a simple exercise like a blink. In the future, we're going to do more like this, where we dive into walk cycles and run cycles and fun stuff like that. Remember to like and subscribe and see me next time.