Using the Inheritance Effector: Playful Titles - Animating the Reference Object

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In this video, we'll see how to animate a cube in a playful manner, using only Position, Scale and Rotation animation.

In this video, we'll see how to animate a cube in a playful manner, using only Position, Scale and Rotation animation. We will use this to create our title animation in the next video.

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Transcript

In a new scene, I'm going to integrate a cube. Press C to make it editable, and then go to the mesh menu axis center. Set the Y to minus 100%. Execute, and this will move my axis to the extreme of the Y which means the bottom of the object. Then I'm going to double click here. Type zero, so I will have a floored cube. Now, let's make this a bit better looking. Get my skill tool and make it a bit shallower and a bit skinnier. Fantastic. And turn on my line so I can see the edges better. Now, what I'm going to do is create an animation that is not going to be more than 20 frames, so 20. So I have only 20 frames here, and basically what the cube is going to do is do some sort of twitching motion. Then it's going to anticipate and go boing, jump, and then come back. And then it's going to bounce and do some sort of squishiness, and that's just about it. It's going to take us a couple of minutes to do. So, let's go to my rotation tool. Select the cube, and let's first change the name to animated cube. And what I'm going to do, because I need to work on my coordinates pallet, if I select another tool, you'll see that it disappears, because now we see the attributes for the tool itself. So what I'm going to do is go to my animated cube and click on this padlock. So now this panel will be locked regardless of which tool we select. It's a very helpful thing to do even if an object is not selected we can still see its parameters. Excellent, so, we can go to frame zero and say, "I want zero degrees." Then we're going to advance three frames. And what I'm going to do is change this to 36 and add a key frame. If you want to see the key frames here on the panel slider, your object needs to be selected. Now I'm going to advance by six frames, and I want to do it one frame at a time. So, I'm going to press G on my keyboard to advance. So two, three, four, five, six, and I can go back if I want using the F key. I'm going to type minus 36, press enter and add a key frame. And then using G one, two, three, four, five, six. Let's go back to 36. Enter, add a key frame one, two, three, zero and add a key frame. And we have our little twitch, okay? Twitch, twitch, twitch, fantastic. So, the next thing I want to do is create the jump. So, I'm going to set a key frame at frame zero, and this is going to go slightly downwards. So, let's go minus 50. I'm going to add a key frame. Then right in the middle it's going to go all the way up to something like 300. Excellent, and then back here minus 50. Add a key frame and then here back to zero, excellent. Now, there are other ways to do it using the dope sheet and copying key frames. If you ever open your dope sheet, and you don't see anything here, just drag your object here and it will appear. So, you can untwirl these and see all the key frames in action, but that's for another tutorial. So, rewind, press play, and you can see this guy goes boing, boing, boing, excellent. Now I'm going to add some squishy squashiness by using my scale tool. Now, what I'm not going to do is scale using this scale tool. I'm going to scale using the scale parameter, or if you want to do it using a tool, just switch from model mode to object mode. And it's got this little film strip which means it's for creating animations. Excellent, I'm just going to work here, so don't worry about it. So, over at frame zero, we're going to have all these set to one. When this guy goes downwards... Let's assume this is made of jello. When you move jello, parts of it wants to stay where it was, so this is going to be taller. Now, you see because of habit, I use this tool to do this, and that's wrong. So undo and go here and say 1.25, add a key frame, and what happens when things get taller? Well, they get skinnier. So I'm going to go here and make it skinny. Point 75, point 75, press enter and don't forget to add your key frame. So now it goes like this, downwards, and it becomes skinnier. Now, maybe I made it too tall. So maybe I change this number, or I can always make it go lower. So I'm going to make it go minus 75, so there's a bit more of a dramatic move. I shouldn't forget that this needs to be minus 75 if we need to have any kind of symmetry, so go downwards. Excellent. Now, when it goes upwards exactly the same manner, it needs to become shorter, so I'm going to make this point five. Add a key frame and make it wider to accommodate for the preservation of mass. Excellent, so now it goes down. Skinnier, then it becomes shorter. Then it's going to come down here, so because I'm too lazy to copy these values, I am going to use my dope sheet to do that. So, I brought it up. I'm going to move it here. Make it a bit smaller and move this here so I can see it, so, let's see. We are here. It goes down, becomes short, and somewhere around here I need to do something else. So, what do I need to do? I need to go to the scale parameter and take these hollow key frames, indicate all the axes whereas each and everyone of this indicates only the specific one X, Y, or Z. So, I want to copy all three, so I'm going to go here, press command and drag this little bugger over here. And then I'm going to press command and drag this little bugger over here, so I've made copies of this and this key frames. So, now it goes up, becomes smaller, elongates, comes back down. So, it's not the perfect animation, but it's interesting enough, and I'm going to put a bit of a gap here. So I'm going to put 50 so we can see this with a stop. So, boing, boing, okay. Boing, I think it's fun enough, excellent, so we have our animated cube. And in the next video, I'm going to show you how to transfer this animation to your MoGraph setup.
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