The Breakdowner [Blender for Animators]

In today's episode, we're going to talk about the Breakdowner. Hello everyone, I'm Luciano and welcome to the Adventures of Lollipop Man. The Breakdowner is a tool that helps you creating your breakdowns or in-betweens. Blender has one of its own, so let's get right into it. You can see I have two poses, they're not really pretty poses, they're just for explanation purposes. The cool thing is that on the first hand, it comes in Blender. And it's here. If you go into pose mode, it appears as this little button. I honestly don't use that button at all because there's a hotkey too, but let me show you the button first. And so what it does is you have pose A and pose B, and you can stand anywhere between them and blend towards one or towards the other. And so if I click this one and I start dragging anywhere in the viewport, you can see that it starts going either to point A or point B. And how does this help? Well, it helps building my breakdown. Say I want to start slow and then fast, or start fast and then slow. So I'm just going to start in the middle, like I'm going to go to the middle, and I'm going to say I want to start slow, so I'm going to favor the first keyframe. And so I'll just do something like 5%. And as you can see at the top left corner of the viewport, you can see this little breakdown value. Boom, 10%, that should be enough. And it's put a keyframe because I'm using auto keyframe, and as you can see now, we get slow and then fast. I could do the same, but to the other side. As you can see also, we're using it in the entire body, and it's pretty fast. I could also use it on parts of the body. For instance, I'm going to select only the arm, and I'm going to make it backwards. I'm just going to do the breakdown, but I'm going to make the arm go fast and then slow. So I'm just going to do the complete opposite. I'm bringing all the way to 19. And so you see I'm mixing up breakdown from one to the other one. So now we get an arm, and then the rest of the body moves. And so this is pretty cool. And as I was saying, there's a hotkey for it, which is much, much better than that. And the hotkey works like this. I'm just going to delete all this nonsense. So I just select whatever I want to break down, like the torso in this case, for instance. And I can go Shift-E, and then you get the exact same behavior. And that's great. So you don't need even to click. You just slide around, and then you click when you are done. So I want to go to 75%, and that's something there. Bam. Now, there's other options for this. So if I press Shift-E, and then say I want to... Well, let's make a different example. I'm just going to move this keyframe like that. I should have done that before. Anyways, so you see now I got translation to the side, and then rotation. But maybe I just want to change the breakdown on my translation. So I can press Shift-E, and as you can see here at the top, I got GRSVC. Those are to isolate the transform. So GRS are grab, rotate, and scale. And then V is for bendy bones, and C is the custom property. So say you have a finger with a slider that you're using to, I don't know, to roll the finger. Then you can work only on that if you wanted to. And so here, if I press G, now as you can see, the only thing that I'm changing with the breakdowner is the translation, or grab. So I can just click wherever I want. So for instance, I'm just going to do very quickly to that one side. And then I can do the same again, Shift-E, but now I'm going to press R. So I only will modify the rotation. And then I press it once, and it stays locked until I approve it. And if you look here at the top, you're going to see that there's also axis. So I could potentially just pick the one axis that I want to modify. So I could go R, Y, and then it will only modify the Y transform of the rotations. And so now I can just go, let's just keep this one slightly there. And so now I get first translates a lot, and then rotates. And so this will help you be much faster when creating those breakdowns. So if you want your character to just get very quickly over there, you just go start earlier and just push it to that one side. Another thing to know is the fact that I could just go here and say, oh, I just want to go 95% of that other post. I just type 95 and enter, and that's it. It's done. So I know exactly that if I know more or less the value that I want to get to, boom, boom, I just punch in the numbers, hit enter, and there you go. And it's that easy. So I hope you find this useful. It's a really cool tool when you get it into your workflow. It will make you much faster. And as you can see, you can use it on one part of the rig or the entire rig. Really, really easy. So that's it for me for today. If you enjoyed this video, remember to like, subscribe, hit that bell button and see me next time.