2D animation in Blender with images created in other software

hello and welcome back to another blender tutorial today we're going to be looking at 2d animations using graphics that were created in other software and not just grease pencil drawings created in blender so as you can see here i've just got this little car rolling down the road we got some mountains and hills sliding by in the background and the occasional cloud that goes by there goes one of them and there'll be another one down here that comes across eventually so what i have is several different graphics here the background graphic the car body graphic the tires are a separate graphic and the clouds are a separate graphic and i imported all of those into blender set some motion to each of them and then export it as a movie so how do we do that very simple i have already got a blender file open here and it's set up for 2d animation you don't have to do this but by setting it up for 2d animation my camera is already focused straight at a plane that i can work with and not off at a 3d angle like it would be if you just opened a generic blender document and started with that 3d cube so that just makes it easier to drop things in here and place them directly in front of the camera so now what i'm going to do is i am going to go into object mode and get out of draw mode and i'm going to go to edit and preferences this is very important it makes life a lot easier you can draw some planes and then uv map some images to them but if you go into preferences and go to add-on and do a search for image you will find this add-on here import images as planes make sure that's checked and then go here and save your preferences or auto save your preferences which is even better and then close that window once you've done that if you go to that file menu and you go down to import you will find images as planes is one of your options and then go find your images and bring them in i'm on i double click let's go there we go i've got my car in the in the blender file now let's go get the rest of them so import images as planes i'll go to the assets you know what i'm suddenly inspired to try to get all of those as one at once there we go and now we've got all of our parts and pieces um that is not what i tried to do i tried to actually grab that it's not letting me grab that okay well give me i think i got it that time nope i got the car anyway there's our background image and let's scale it up so whoa maybe not that much come on scale it up so it fills our camera's view that looks like it'll work out pretty well now i'd like to grab the car and put it right about here but the car's gone where'd it go well when you import images as planes they all show up on one plane which means we're getting some overlap the car is setting exactly where this background image is so we need to move the background back and out of the way and move the car forward and the wheels and the clouds and all that so with this background already selected i'm just going to press g and start moving it and i want to move it straight back and if you look at the little widget up here you can see the y is running backwards so i'm just going to go gy slide it back hey there's our car and put that further back like that in the same moment i know the wheels are going to be slightly behind the car as well so let's go ahead and grab one of those wheels same thing gy slide it back a little bit but not so far that it goes through the background and now let's go back to our straightforward camera view now let's go ahead and assemble our objects i'm actually going to get this cloud out of here for now because the clouds don't appear until later in the animation and i can see that my background is still not quite big enough so let's go ahead and scale that up okay and i'll move it a little bit more kind of like that all right i'm going to put the card down closer to the ground and i'm going to notice it's crooked so let's go ahead and rotate it about like that let's grab a wheel put the wheel where it should go in the car boy that's an awful big wheel for that car but we scale that too and that looks about right go ahead and zoom and pan a little bit take a look yeah maybe a little bit smaller and if it's a little bit smaller it probably sets a little bit higher up like that okay let's duplicate that just shift d x to make sure it goes backwards in a straight line stays lined up with that front tire and drop it in right there all right looks pretty good we've got our car with some wheels on it and our cloud all right let's just uh let's get those wheels spinning so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go ahead and spin them both at the same time and you can do that by clicking this little button up here it's the transform pivot point right now it's set to do a medium point so if you select multiple objects they will transform around an imaginary point that somewhere kind of halfway in between them all what i want them to use is individual origins so that they move around their own origin independent of anything else that might be selected because then if i can grab it really okay so if i if i can't grab it i'm going to come up here and get the wheels in the outliner there we go i've got them both now and now if i hit r for rotate the wheels rotate uh around their own origins and not around each other or some various other midpoints so we're looking to be in good shape let's go ahead and set up a keyframe here just i for keyframe and all i'm gonna do is rotation right now maybe in the future i might want to come back and modify this to do um location as well but for now that's good and now we'll jump forward oh let's say 100 frames and we will rotate these guys now i would kind of like to see how much i'm rotating them so i'm going to open up my menu over here on the side easy way to do that is just press the n key and i'm going to rotate and you can already see which number is changing over here that y is changing so now i'm just going to jump in and type in a bigger number so let's say oh i don't know 3 000. and actually you know if i wanted this to loop smoothly that should be a a version of 360. so how about 3600 okay and let's put in another keyframe rotation there we go and let's go ahead and play our animation i'll just go backwards here [Music] ooh that's interesting that one wheel worked fine why didn't the other wheel work now i'm curious so that will work great that wheel not so much yeah not sure why but by the time we get to frame 100 that is not at 3600 so we are gonna go grab that change it to 3600 and we're going to come back over here and set a new rotation keyframe did i really do that on frame 101 i'm meant to do it on 100 okay let's go ahead and delete that keyframe you know that would be a lot easier if i could actually see my keyframes where are my keyframes um that's my dope sheet let's go ahead and turn that off okay now i've got my key frames well some of them i still don't see one for frame 100 let's open this dope sheet up a little bit more um it's treating these as grease pencil objects i don't want that let's go to the timeline instead now we've actually got the timeline down here already let's just open that up and minimize that grease pencil layer all right so i don't need to see that much okay um i've got two key frames side by side did not mean to have that one right there press x delete keyframe let's make sure we are on frame 100 it does look like we are now and with that object selected let's make 3600 happen here and now it's a new keyframe rotation all right let's play our animation okay both wheels are doing the same thing good let's jump back to frame one and you know what i'm actually going to shorten my animation so it's just 100 frames or actually i'm gonna make it 99 frames and then it'll be a complete rotation uh because if i made it a perfect hundred then frame 100 would be a perfect match for frame one and we don't want that because that would end up being two frames that are identical and it would make your movies seem to have a stutter in it if it did loop so by cutting it off at 99 it'll end up being one frame short of that stutter and it'll end up being a perfect loop so now my car is capable of smoothly driving along the tires get to where they stop and then it starts again without any stutter back to frame one let's get that background moving so with that background selected i am going to make more backgrounds because if i have this background slide along it's going to very quickly slide off camera so i'm going to use a modifier to do this i could just duplicate it over and over and line them up but why not go into modifiers and use an array modifier and you can already see what's happening here it immediately put two backgrounds side by side well how many backgrounds do you want well how long do you want your animation to be we can have as many as we need so 4 should be plenty i would think and i'm not even going to apply that right now i'll just leave that there and now what i'm going to do is animate that so at frame 1 it is there so i'm going to press i and we're going to just keep track of its location at frame 100 i want it to be oh how do we make this be a perfect loop we got to make sure that the same mountains are in the same place bet you i'm going to mess this up a little bit let me go ahead and go back to that camera view oops i guess that was in the camera view let me zoom back in on that camera view then i'll try to put an indicator here like the tip of that mountain is right there and now we're just going to do gx and we'll slide this along to our last mountain and keep moving over because of course the marker i used is something that disappears as soon as i press g that looks pretty good and we'll press i and set a location again let's give this a play and see what it looks like okay so the background moves as the car moves all the timing is exactly the same works out pretty well this is a little faster than the movie i showed you initially but it does work out pretty well okay let's have a cloud slide by so i'm going to back this animation up to frame one i'm gonna zoom out a little bit more so i can find my cloud and let's say on frame one this cloud is whoops somehow i have the background selected undo get off that background just the cloud please okay on frame one let's say that cloud is like there and so we'll set i track its location and then by the time we get to frame 100 that cloud has passed by so g and the cloud doesn't need to go in a straight line so i'm not even going to press x i'll just sort of eyeball it maybe the cloud will even go up a little bit as it's going by and again i location and if we play that now we get our cloud going by as we're driving through the mountain scenes i think we need more clouds just to spice this up a little bit so with that cloud still selected i'm just going to duplicate it i am not going to use the array modifier this time because i want them to each be their own thing with their own timing and so we're going to play through a little bit and let's say oh 25 frames in that feels like about the right timing so 25 i'm gonna have i'm gonna lose what where'd the other clouds go hey clouds did i i have no idea what i just did do i still have clouds in my outliner i do somewhere g oh they all got stacked i have no idea how that happened i did not recall pushing a button to tell it to do that anyway let's go back to frame 25. oh i know what's happening because i already keyframed the one cloud oh yeah why didn't i think of that um how do i want to deal with that i tell you what i'm going to import a new cloud instance rather than breaking that animation so let me undo so we're back to just one 2d cloud and i will go into file import again images as planes let's get a new object that is that cloud sprite again there we go so now if we play our animation there's the one cloud that moves there's the one cloud that's not doing anything yet we'll jump back to frame one if i want more clouds than that i should probably duplicate them before i animate them okay we've got all kinds of clouds here and you can already see what's about to happen so there's frame 25 and that cloud is going to be locked in and by frame let's say 80. that cloud is going to be over here and lock its location in there this cloud let's go back to frame one is going to have its location locked there to start with and then let's say by frame we'll have this one go a little bit slower frame 90. we're going to have this cloud just zoom across the top like that and we'll lock its location in let's jump back we got one more cloud to animate right here and i'm gonna lock its location in on frame one again and then we're gonna go to actually you know what this one's gonna be funny we're gonna just put this cloud right over his head now i wish i had some rain to bring in um and then we could animate it just raining on him the entire trip that's too bad uh we'll go to frame 100 and the cloud's really not going to move much was this in fact we might even have it get a little bit out in front of him and just a little higher up and we'll lock in that location all right let's go back so we can view this camera straight on and not see anything else and go ahead and play through our animation maybe with nothing visible selected there we go and there's our animation and i did all of that with images that were drawn in another program interesting how in the 2d animation view things like to disappear into that background don't worry they don't do that if you render so let me change my render settings real quick um yeah yeah yeah that's fine let's put this on my desktop so it's easy to find let's go ahead and call it uh car and accept let's not have a png file that doesn't make for a very nice moving file you would then have to put that together in some other software and ffmpeg which is good mp4 would be nice and we should be good to go let's go ahead and render the animation a little spinning wheel come on there we go and all right so my computer really needs to have a little bit more power to be able to do this effectively see we're only four frames in luckily it's only 100 frames but we're not going to wait for this entire thing to render because it's not worth it you can see what's already happening here and what that final animation will look like and that's all there is to it you might want to check out another tutorial on how to create these graphics yourself in other software and get them ready for blender because we need some transparent areas to make that work so i may do a tutorial for the next video all right that's all i'm gonna do for now thank you tune in again for the next video

Channel: Rick Kelley

Views: 555

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Id: Op36dVICLdI

Length: 19min 10sec (1150 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 07 2021