One Lesson i Learn from Sony Animation 

I worked on marvel movies and you don't want to know how many corrective shapes the hulk had to have. Yes he did use a psychotically crazy muscle system. But he still needed to have this type of system at the tail end of everything. Your advice is pure gold for incoming animators.

For those working in Blender: Blend Shape -> Shape Keys Rig -> Armature Controller -> Just another bone with a custom shape

My life was so grey until this amazing tutorial came into my life. I tried it just now. I wanna cry at how beautiful the animation world just got for me. GAME CHANGER. Thank you so much for this!!

And that's why animators should know a little about rigging! :3

I know next to nothing in 3D animation, but watching Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs made me realise how Sony was willing to go the extra mile for its animation, getting really cartoony and not being afraid to deform meshes, redo the character geometry for like a ten frames pose or things like this instead of just animating a rigid 3D rig. I think this comes down to your explanation. So yeah, the bottom line is that it does matter in the end product, even if we can't quite pin-point what it is as a general audience. Thank for the video!

this is SO important and does not get any attention in schools. there is a common phrase in conventional learning, "don't break the rig". I can't stand when animators think they are limited by the rig. thanks for sharing ur experience from Sony

Even from the pose, I can tell that's supposed to be dracula. haha. Thanks for the tutorial! Even though I'm using blender, it's giving me ideas on how I'll be using this technique for my own animations!

If you were an internet ad, yours would read, " ONE trick to improve your animation that they didn't want you to know! Technical Directors HATE him!" Thank you for this video. Will be doing this in the future.

Great tutorial. a follow up tutorial to show issues you may have encountered animating in and out of these heavily adjusted poses would be very useful . Keep up the good work

Thanks for these tutorials. FYI pressing B and middle mouse adjusts the soft selection falloff on the fly. That particular pose is an adaptation from the Animators Survival Kit where William's ask Milt Kahl if he ever listens to anything while he animates I think ;) (Page 40-44)

When he capitalizes almost every word but "i"

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING

This was amazing, so many times I ran into the "I can´t get the pose like I want it". This is incredibly helpful, thank you!!!!!

amazing!!! I ve always asked myself how sony got those sharp cartoony perfect poses.. But how does that work with the keying of all? when u change the geometry and then key it, in the next frame wont you need to change the geometry again? Ur videos are making me more motivated then ive ever been ! thank you and keep it coming! best regards

Hint: if you pick the "Global" falloff mode in the Soft Selection palette, you can edit multiple meshes at once.

How much suffering only of thinking in correct a lot of poses by blend shapes ;A; Thanks for sharing it!! This explaing why pro animations looks so cool!! Sometimes I was stuck in don't breaking the rig, and that was so irritating!! Because it limit you much

I was looking for blending for past 2 days. I'm glad RU-vid actually recommended something useful

Great video and very useful but a little too long to get to the point. For those of you wanting to learn the technique he used at Sony, jump to 6:53 in the video. :)

Utilissimo tutorial, non pensavo che si potessero fare certe cose senza andare a modificare troppo il modello di base... grazie mille!!!

I'm not sure, but I think B is the hotkey for soft selection and M controls the falloff. Great video anyways. I thought that rigs in big studios had more controls over the skinned surface, like selection sets that could be changed to achieve greater control over the character.

Just noticed the captions recognize Allesandro's Italian accent but decide to try to auto-generate in Italian, despite him speaking English...

very helpful video. super quick posing of body and face of Jules rig. Thanks Alessandro

It wpuld be god to see how you blend in that pose in your animation, Thank you for the tutorial :)!

Even thoungh I’m noob to 3d this video is helpful and fun to watch :) Keep up the good work!

omg, this is super helpful! Thank you so much for sharing this with us! I wont complain about rig's limitation anymore.

Amazing advice Alessandro! I just used your advice to push some marketing stills at work! Thanks for posting!

i dont even animate but i watched this.

i love the pushed pose so much!

Ha I knew it had to Be Hotel Transilvania!

Such an easy thing to do yet so different! THANK YOU!

Aha, so you can create blend shapes for specific poses. I was under the impression that you have to create the blend shape while the character is in bind pose, which would be extremely cumbersome.

Super valuable, Thanks!

Very nice. I've learned a lot. I am going to apply my methods to my animation work in blender 3D. I've never really thought to use blend shapes in this fashion

These are golden gems Alessandro! cheers and thanks for sharing!

damn, you really got in and dirty to achieve the best possible pose. but how do you spline it once you've messed with the vertices?

You are a crazy Boss for this!! Thanks.

It’s kinda coolSony has the animators do this work. In other feature/vfx studios it’s passed off to a shot finaling department to sculpt those fixes

Insane! Thanks for sharing your insights!! :D

Great stuff, I really appreciate you taking the time to create these videos!! Thank you, very helpful!! :D

So if you have a bad rig the fix is to go a level deeper and remodel the mesh

I wouldn't have the legs directly perpendicular to the floor like that. If you try standing in this pose, the legs naturally tilt back slightly and the butt sticks out to balance the forward lean of the upper body. Otherwise, you'd fall over.

Thank you sooo much brother...i m from india and i m very happy to learn it... Thanks again

Alessandro great to find you here in youtube. You might know me from AM. Great work here!

Thank you for sharing these amazing tips!

Really helpful!!

this is amazing. thank you so much

awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Nice tip .. would add push the rig to its max first to reduce the amount of tweaking

THIS IS BEAUTIFUL! Thank you so much!

I hope they will work on a Knack movie or animated series.

Good point! Thank's for sharing mate :)

awesome Tutorial :) thanks ...more tutorials on cartoony animation would be great :D

Wow, Thanks for showing off some great information! The difference between the first and second pose is pretty incredible! I have a couple of questions if you don't mind? Do you run into any technical problems when doing things this way? such as weird motion blur or bad blending between key-frames? Do you find yourself getting into creating a lot of blend-shapes per shot? or Do you find you can often get away with only one or two? Do you ever get push-back from Technical members of the team? This seems like a bit of a brute force workflow, and I can see techy people having a problem with it. Thanks again for making this video! It goes a long way to explain how Sony Animation gets their amazing unique look. Cloudy and Hotel Transylvania are such standout series for animation.

I've never thought about using blendshapes like that. Really thank you for your tips and tricks. Sony is recently doing amazing animations. How do you interpolate this blendshape in the graph editor to avoid too strong transitions between a normal pose and the sculpt one?

That character looks pissed, lol. Great video here.

This was SUPER AWESOME! thank you so much for the detailed and (somehow) short breakdown of this process. I'm still in the game industry so these kinda blend-shape methods tend to be expensive on engine reserving the space primarily for main action blends instead of 20 correctives but this work flow has a lot to ponder about.

Question for you. How do you select the vertices in the blend shape? I am going to the geo for a rig and have unlocked everything, but still when I try to select by vertex and translate I can't select anything, much less translate. Would really appreciate your help.

I had a shot where a character with a huge upper body, big pecs and small head, was supposed to be flat on the ground on his chin and chest with the feet upward.. took me hours to get it right and I'm on show schedule

Grazie Alessandro! Essendo nuovo in Maya, cercavo da tempo un tutorial su come usare i Blend Shapes in questo software. Sto usando il rig gratuito di Franklin dell'Artella, ma odio il fatto che non ci sia un controllo per le pieghe della maglia all'altezza gomiti. Ero gia' a conoscenza di come usare questa tecnica perche' uso anche Blender e grazie al tuo video ho visto come usarla anche in Maya e raggirare il problema!

First comment! 😊 love your tutorials keep on making more tutorials

You should write "I learnt," Im not pulling anything with correcting you. Loved your video, keep up the great work!

While we add different poses through this type method If animation has any problem like the poses playing Like the poses are moving the edges

This is new for me! (Don't know about rigging) Doesn't it f-up the model & adjacent frames ? Is it non destructive?

Hey! Great video man! I was wondering if this may cause any trouble if the character is referenced and its used in many other scenes. (?) I mean like in a short film or something. Thanks for sharing!

Wow it is rigged so well!

Thanks man wonderful information

very nice tutorial! Now I following you and like this. Keep going!

Tutorial fantastico! Grazie mille :)

I think the plugin ‘Shape Animation Tool’ will help。

Thank you so much

Good stuff!!

something tells me Hotel Transylvanian used this a lot

Hi! I have a question: Let's just say I am able to re-create that pose from the director's note by using this method, but how do I animate all those vertex around the model? How do you keep every thing under control and the shape change smoothly between poses? Because I feel like even if I'm willing to do this for one pose, making it work for the entire sequence would be a problem since those vertex would move unpredictably

Very useful tutorial. You changed his body mesh. But result is perfect. Likr.a mesh animation.. do you have another experiences ???

How blend shape can use in animation? Could you make a video on this?

Would love to see you do some basic animation using this technique. I've never used blendshapes during animation before. What happens if you have go back and retime or adjust poses?

Do you have a video that goes a little more in-depth on blend shapes. I don’t really understand how you get from pose to pose with this method. I know very little about blend shapes and I’ve never used them like this before. I can’t really emulate what you are doing because it’s unclear to me how you did it. I can’t find any videos other than people making multiple shapes out of spheres?

Great work, thanks for sharing. BUT, how would you know if you've reached the desired silhouette if you don't have the camera locked, then adjust your silhouette to camera? Very useful nonetheless, so thank you 😊

thank you! but do you have to animate it in bend shape in each frame ?

Subscribed. Thanks!

thank u so much

Awesome vid

Subbed. Good stuff.

What if the rig does not live inside the scene, but is referenced in?

Great video! But how do you do this in an animation? I can image how you can hide the blend in a snappy transition but how about slow and more fluent movements?

Very nice! I think i understand 3d animation better now. I have a question though. If you have to animate poses like this, is that the fault of the rig, or could you do this no matter how good of a rig you have?

Wouldn't editing the mesh mess up the rest of the poses though? or do you edit it as a shape key so you can turn it on and off?

Hello Alessandro Camporota Nice tutorial... i just have a question.. do you create your blend shapes in the beginning with blocking or do you add it at the end in polishing ? Thanks :)

Can you tell how you locked the Outline/Grease Pencil, because i tried it and when i zoomed into my model,the outline remains on it's default place. Thanks!

Hey could you make a video on how to study a rig so you can learn to create your own? Thanks. anyone you could recommend to learn?

Hi Alessandro, I followed your tutorial and it works great. However, is it possible to apply a blend shape to a part of the body after the animation is done as polish? When I try applying the blend shape, the character stays at that blend shape and doesn't move. Thanks in advance!

How to fix it during spline stage?

Hello! Im an animation student, thanks for video! I was wondering, for example you broke/modified everything so much for this pose, to go back to "normal" you do this in a different file to change it or how do you not "mess it up" afterwards? thanks!

It seems to work great when applying this method on a rig with no animation keyframes. But when applying the same method on the same rig while it has a bunch of animation, it crashes on pressing the Add Target button. This even happens on a simple cube with just 2 keyframes. Do you have any experience with that and how to fix it? So far it looks like you can only use this technique on posing still images, but I would love to use this technique during the animation process. I'm using Maya 2019 BTW

Grazie mille Alessandro molto molto utile :)

Wow, impressive! Just a question, if rig department changes the rig, would those blendshapes still work?

but it can be animated by this method? or it is just for the pose?

thank you;]

thanks for this! Would you do these shape corrections in blocking or Polish?

Hey did you ever do a follow up to this video showing how to do this on an animated character? i do the exact thing you do in this video, but then when I scrub the timeline maya crashes. every time. no matter if it's DG or Parallel evaluation mode. Wondering if you have any tips for this.