Time to talk animation layers, a super handy workflow that I see a lot of games animators use,
but I often see feature film animators really not use all that much. I'm not sure why,
so let's check it out. So here I am in shot 55. This is the one where he, you know,
made a rips down this door, goes and runs, and we get this awesome little slow motion moment.
Now we're going to talk about two uses of animation layers in this video. One is for
characters and one is for cameras, and that's where we're starting right now. This animation
actually has camera shake.
It has a bunch of great camera animation
that we can dive a little bit deeper into.
Inside of Shot 55, down towards the bottom,
we have the camera itself, but we also have the camera rig.
So if I leave the camera view, come over here,
and I'll show you what's going on.
So here is our camera right there, camera actor.
And we also have the camera rig skeletal mesh,
which is sort of its own asset to be able to control the camera.
Now the camera rig itself, if we twirl this down, has a space for animation sequences,
which we don't actually have anything on.
And then we have the camera control rig, which is the controls, right?
These little actual grabbable things.
And if I twirl that down, you'll see that we have three different layers inside of our sequencer.
The base animation layer, the cam shake layer A, and the cam shake layer B.
You're also going to see these three things up here in the animation layers panel,
which if you don't see this by the way i can close this and i can reopen it with this little
layers button if i'm in animation mode i'll see this little you know collection of buttons
hitting layers pops this open so the base layer and the camera layer a and b these are referring
to these instead of this character uh camera rig control rig thing so if i go to the base layer
and go ahead and go into my curve editor you can see that the base layer has some animation data
and this is basically the camera motion.
Wee!
Just doing its thing.
Then we have the shake layer A,
which has a bunch of shake data.
And then camera layer B only has data
when the character starts running.
And this is kind of a handheld motion
that happens right around here.
But you'll notice something really interesting.
And the best way to look at this is
if I want to sort of isolate
and see which parts of this are doing what,
I can take these different animation layers and I can mute them. I can say, all right, let's turn
off camera layer shake A, boop, and B, boop. And let's just jump into the camera right here. And
let's take a look at the base animation layer. So camera rig base animation looks like this.
We have just smooth camera motion, camera tracks backwards, and, you know, he does his thing.
Camera's nice and smooth, looks great.
But let's now amp it up a bit.
If I unmute camera shake layer A, unmute that,
you can see right there when I unclick it,
we see we have a little bit of change.
And what this is going to do is it's going to add just a little bit of noise,
a little bit of motion on top of our camera motion.
So that extra layer of data, that was this additional animation.
So that's playing on top.
Now, if I wanted to look at each one, I could keep unmuting them.
You get the idea.
But the thing you'll notice is we actually don't have any camera shake during this slow-mo motion.
Nothing.
The reason for that is because each of these layers actually has a weight slider.
And if you look closely up here on the top, during the slow-mo motion, these numbers here, this 0.4 weight, goes to zero.
Right?
So the animation within these layers actually gets disabled during the slow-mo motion, or part of the shot.
And so if I go to my sequencer and I select actually I do this I select my camera control rig go to my sequencer and you can see we have the camshape layer B camshape layer A the weight and the weight I can switch the view mode to stack so you can see both of these
And here you'll see we have two curves. The keyframes here on the weight is basically the
0.4 value we see up here. And when we go to the slow motion, both of these get set down to zero.
And that's what's turning off the use of those layers in this part of the animation.
Really, really handy way to work because it allows you to have easy ways to adjust the
note.
If someone says, hey, the camera shake feels weird, can you adjust it?
You don't have all of your animation of the regular camera motion and the shake all happening
at the same time.
You have them separated out so you can easily modify just those assets or just those attributes
of your camera one thing at a time.
the other thing that's really nice about this is because of the layers you say you know what
i want more camera shake and i don't even need to change the actual animation data i can just go
back to the weight of that animation data and say you know what i want to dial this up i want
the the weight of the animation instead of being 40 or 0.4 dial that up to 100 let's say give me
all of the animation for uh for that particular layer so now when i hit play i'm going to have a
much more aggressive camera shake. More. I can dial this up beyond one. I can say, give me a
weight of four. And you can see already the camera's going crazy. Now we have a really intense
camera shake animation. And so you can basically add a multiplier on top of whatever that data is.
And so this is a really good example of how layers can be used. In the case of a camera,
it gives you a way to break up different parts of your camera animation and also control when
you're using those different parts, things like shake. But you can do this with anything. It doesn't
have to just be cameras. So what I'll do is I'm actually going to leave this sequencer, just exit
all together, and I'm going to navigate over to shot 70, which is right here. So here's how to
shot 70. We've got some robots hanging out, getting crushed, and overall not having a great time. But
what we can do now is we can actually add some animation with the character rigs into layers so
we can maybe make some adjustments in a very non-destructive workflow. So I'm going to adjust
my baked animation. I'm going to turn off the baked animation, and I'm going to re-enable the
control rigs because I want to work with the actual control rigs and live keyframe data in
this shot. So here I am in my sequence anim work. Here we go. And I think this is robot number one,
if I select him. Yeah, robot one. There we go. So here's what we'll do. I'm going to make sure I
select my robot control rig and that'll ensure that I'm in my animation mode. You can see that
there are already a bunch of animation layers present from the original workflow, but I'm not
going to worry about any of that just yet. I'm going to once again add my own way to get in and
out of the camera really easily. I'm going to add a camera cut track and that will let me exit and
re-enter the camera right there. Here's my characters over here and I'm going to let this
thing go whoosh and crush those guys. Now there's a lot going on to make sure you hit G if you need
to get rid of some of this stuff that's visually in the way.
But maybe what I want to have happen is this robot,
he does not get crushed.
He turns to the side and then he turns back
and he points his gun forward and then eventually,
or not eventually, very shortly after, boop, there he goes.
Now, what I'm going to do is maybe I want to have him come up,
look to the side, and I want to keep him looking off to the side.
I don't want him to turn back this direction.
So what I will do is maybe let's just say,
I'm going to grab his head and maybe this top part of his torso,
these two controls here.
I going to add a layer where I going to make a change to just those poses What I do is I select those two controls I say new layer boop and that will put the head and that particular control
on his chest into their own layer where that's all that's there. And I'll call this a robo turn.
Sure. Now, if I look a little bit closer down to my sequencer, just to show you how this is broken
down now, I can collapse all these different layers and you'll see a few things. We have our
robot one who has a control rig, which is, you know, on the character. He's got base animation.
He's got an additional layer here for keep alive. And then we have my new robo turn layer. And inside
the robo turn layer, just the head and that chest control. Those are the only two things that are in
there. So those are the only two things that I can key in that layer. Now, if I want to be really
careful, I can also maybe lock these other layers, like the base layer or whatever. If I don't want
to adjust the existing animation, that might be a good idea. But in this case, I'm feeling confident.
I'm feeling reckless.
Let's not worry about it.
I'm going to go ahead and just set a key.
So maybe right here, he turns over here, hit S.
I'll hit S, I'll set a key on these two things,
and he goes over here, he turns.
Nope, you're not going to turn.
You're coming back this way.
Maybe I'm going to have his torso turned over here,
and I'll keep his head even more turned that way.
Maybe I'll even change the angle a little bit.
so there now what i've done is you know he comes up does his thing it looks a little bit weird
right he has kind of this jerky motion to it and that's because i'm counter animating something in
the base layer i'm not doing a very good job of it but my point remains that now i've added some
animation that keeps him doing his thing and maybe what i could do is just retime this a little bit
just move some of these keyframes i'm messing with that way it's not quite as aggressive
I don't know. It's not great. It's fine. It works okay. I'm just, you know, I'm counter-animating
here, so it's not going to look awesome. But either way, I'll go ahead and just hit S on my
head control and my, what do you call this, the end control. Boop, key those. And now I've made
a change. Now, it feels like his gun is getting jerked forward away from him. So I go ahead and
turn all this off. It feels like he goes, whoop, and he gets pulled. Because now it feels like
the body motions are feeling very separate. So let's go ahead and add that to my layer.
And you know what? Maybe I want to take his, I think it's going to be his FK or what do you call
it? His IK wrist. The IK wrist is my guess as to what's actually driving the gun. That's how I
would animate it. This hand right here is the thing in charge. So I'll go ahead and just say,
you know what? I want to add animation to that hand. So I'm going to click that control,
right click on robo turn add selected and that will now add that ik control into the layer
allowing me to animate it within that layer so if i go look at my robo turn i now have
the end control the head control and the right arm ik i'm going to go ahead and just set a key here
hold it in place and now when i get to this frame let's see how this works
let me go ahead and just find a frame or a position where you can see this a little bit better
and now you can see i can move this hand sure enough the constraint is still active that's
awesome and i'll go ahead and just rotate that's looking a little bit better and maybe what i'll
do is i'll have him move his entire arm this way so he holds it out sideways right so now that's
what i have happening you know he ducks down he comes up and he turns his whole body including
his gun sideways.
He looks a little ridiculous, but he gets hit.
Doesn't look great, but you can see what my layer is doing, right?
So all that turning and those changes now exist here inside the RoboTurn layer Now I can easily just say you know what let look at what I had before this and see if I actually even like this In fact I actually just gonna make one little tweak here
Maybe I'll go like this and change the angle
just so it doesn't break his arm quite so much.
There we go.
There we go, he lifts his arm,
pulls his gun, does his thing.
Let's turn this off.
I can just take this layer and mute it.
Boop.
Boop, right, before and after.
So here's what happened before, lifts up,
goes back to this thing, gets crushed.
Here, turn my layer back on, comes up,
goes to the side, gets crushed.
And so this is what layers can do,
is it allows you to take specific parts of your character rig,
put it in its own little section,
and animate it with clean curves
so that you can just animate on top of what's already there.
And what's also cool is if I say,
you know what, I like what I've done here,
but I don't want them turning all the way over to the side.
Maybe I only want like half of that change.
I can actually take this and say, you know what?
Give me 50%, 0.5 weight.
Now he'll allow himself to turn partially, right?
So he can turn kind of at an angle.
So he comes like this.
He turns partially at an angle
as opposed to the original animation, straightforward.
Now he's at part of an angle, part of an angle.
He's at an angle, and boom.
And that doesn't look too bad, right?
It almost looks like he just kind of
aims down his sights at an angle.
Pretty happy with that, actually.
So that's a really good example.
Now, one last little tip I'm going to give you here
is if I select, say, the head control.
That's one of the controls I was using, right?
If I select the head control,
I can look over here at my animation layers,
and you'll notice something.
If I select this once again,
I have a little blue dot on the base layer,
the keep alive layer, and the robo-turn layer.
And that is basically telling me,
hey, that selected control exists in whatever's lit up here.
So I can actually see that my head control, I might need to edit the animation in one of three different layers, depending on what it is I'm looking to change.
It's not in the gamma offset or these other animation layers here, but it's basically just letting me know, hey, you have this control in a few different places.
If you're trying to look for some of your animation, heads up, that's where you might find it.
So that can be just really good to keep in mind.
So for example, you're like, I don't think I have this hand anywhere.
I select it.
Turns out the hand animation is also in those three layers.
But if I select maybe a shoulder control, it's in the base layer and the keep live layer,
but it's not in the robo turn layer.
So if I'm trying to key it and set, you know, robo turn keyframes, it's not going to work.
I've got to right click and add it to this layer before I can add keyframes to it within
that zone, which is going to matter a lot.
If I've got these other layers locked because I have base animation and keep live locked,
then I can't set any new changes on that control.
Anyways, you get, you get the hang of it pretty quickly.
Layers are a lot of fun.
This will, you know, get a little bit busy if you keep adding a ton of layers.
So make sure you name them well and make them intentionally.
Don't just throw stuff in layers because you can.
Try to keep specific actions or specific changes relevant to whatever it is you're trying to do.
And one of the best things you can do is just explore.
Just play with them.
Just try it and see what happens.
And always adjust things like the weight and, you know, try that out.
See how that feels.
If I select the RoboTurn in general, it'll easily bring me down here to where my RoboTurn is down here.
And I can see all of my animation curves currently set inside of it, which in this case are just those three things.
Crunch.
So hopefully that gives you a little bit of an insight into animation layers.
This is only talking really about the additive layers.
We haven't gotten to override layers.
That's something I'm going to cover more over on my YouTube channel or in my independent courses.
So if you like this stuff, if you want to go even deeper, we're going to have more videos here that we're providing for Unreal Engine.
But also you can check out the stuff on my YouTube channel and in my classes.
But thanks so much for watching. I hope this was helpful.
My name is Sir, and I'll see you in the next video.