5 Ways to Make Looping Animations in Blender 3.4 (Blender Tutorial)

infinite animations are also called looping animations is a skill set that is extremely important for you to know as an animator especially if you're going to be doing Motion Graphics you know infinite meaning you can't actually tell when the animation starts or stops you can duplicate that clip down the line and you'd never know you see it a lot in concert visuals advertisements those canvas animations on Spotify looping animations are everywhere but the issue is knowing how to get different components inside a blender to actually Loop so if you want displacement or emotion or a movement how do we get that to actually animate in a loop in those different situations and that is the challenge so in today's video I'm going to show you five different ways to get things in Loop and the fifth one is going to save you a lot of time now that is true but I really only said that so you'll watch the whole video so it'll boost my video of the algorithm because uh social media people were a slave to the algorithm and whatever it asked us to do we do it so watch the whole video because you'll get something out of it now with that being said my Christmas sale just started use the code D3 holiday on blender Market hit the link in the description the link is there the code is there you can get real-time materials my animation course my shading course all that stuff right now 25 off until the end of December you can check that out Linked In the description um now let's get into these tips and tricks alright so in the description um you're gonna get the project files for these examples so that we don't have to spend the time setting them up so open up the file that says example one and it is going to be a couple nodes in Geometry nodes but specifically we're just looping the noise texture so if you're using um it in the Shader editor you have a noise texture in um you know the creating a material the exact same process works uh this is something I did in a recent video but I wanted to highlight it here which all of these effects all these tricks have been done on my channel before so if you've been watching them you already know these cool so anybody new to the channel these are some stuff that I've been doing all the time so check out older videos to get even more kind of in-depth on these so what we're animating right here specifically is the W because the W is going to drive the animation for the scaling of the instances you don't really need to understand that the whole concept is just looping the W on a texture you'll see that pretty often in the Shader editor as well but the issue is it's just this random seed it's w what do you do so here's how we do it all right so what we need to do is here get your noise texture set it up how you want your texture to look how you want it to Loop here so we're happy and bring your W to zero now if you can hear my neighbors upstairs moving their entire house so what we want to do is we're going to take this noise texture we're going to hit shift d changing no components here and then what we can do now is get in a mix Shader or a mixed node here used to be called The Mix RGB they changed that now it's blue it used to be yellow um so I guess it's beneficial that we're going over this now so you can see when you change this Factor nothing changes you want to make sure that that is the case and I'm going to go ahead right over here see this little plus icon bring that up and we're going to go ahead and get a timeline that's super important let's just do 120 frames now this part is applicable in all looping animations you need to go to your preferences and in the animation tab be sure your default interpolation is set to linear so that the start and stop speed is exactly the same the default is bezier and that the start and stop speed is not the same all right so here we go we need to animate some stuff now always go back to frame zero so we're going to write over here we're going to hit I for the keyframe on the top noise texture here on the w and right here on the factor bring your factor to zero and then we're going to go to the end bring your Factor over to one and then bring the W I'm going to try five that might be too quick but we'll see now that we're here at 120. start this next noise texture here at the end at zero so hit I now remember we used five here go back to the beginning and then go back to frame zero type in negative five and then hit I and what's going to happen is you'll notice the start and stop are exactly the same which means this is going to Loop in a this is going to animate in a loop or infinite so watch what happens when we go to frame 120 go back to zero there is no discernible start and stop and that is what we want so mission accomplished when we're animating the W notice this is 4D so if you want to get another texture so if we want to go get another texture here say like uh the vornoy texture you go to 3D to 4D now that opens up that W socket I forgot to mention that so that W is now animating and you can animate the W on any texture in any instance here this is we're using geometry nodes the instance here geometry node but you can also use it in shading so that is example number one let's go ahead and open up example number two all right here we are we set up these two things right here this is on this is called all right so this is called example two and three because we have two looping techniques to deal with so say I have this whole setup here and I want the camera to go through it like that so I'm going to hit the tilde key go to the front shift a and get my camera and I want to you know animate the camera through this too but I want to make I want this tube to look like it's infinitely going but notice I didn't make this massively long tube I only made this little one so how are we going to make this look like the camera's going through this really cool too forever and this is something I came up with a really long time ago and I'm calling it the box method essentially if you get a plane here I'm gonna hit S8 so whatever is in my scene I want it to be able to fit within this quote unquote box it's a plane calling it a box because it's Square so when you're setting up your infinite environment and you can go say instead of eight we'll do it again S2 now it's 16 and you can make it clutter it with as many objects meteorites and objects and set them up and keep them in here and so what's going to happen is now we know this was sized by eight by because I hit S8 so that's going to help us with the little bit of math that we need to do so I'm going to call down control and just bring my camera to the very edge of my box here then I'm going to go to the properties and notice it says negative eight and that's going to help us out so remember that negative 8 I'm going to highlight this hit M new collection and I'm going to call it Loop and then what we can do is hit shift a collection instance Loop and then you can hold down control so it snaps and just have those boxes just touch right there and I'm hit alt D to make an instance so that it's easier on a computer alt D and you can bring these as far as you want and make them far enough to where it's not super discernible till the end and then now we have this big long situation and whatever you change in here changes in there which is great so here's our camera let me hit the period key to make that the center here now remember our camera was set to negative eight so I'm going to hit the back arrow and you can hear my cat ding jingling in the background but it's Christmas so I guess it's appropriate we're gonna hit the keyframe and then I'm going to hit this Arrow to go to the end remember negative eight because this is eight by eight if we go to positive eight we are at the exact Edge so if I press play and notice when this this timeline ends the only discernible end to the animation is at this very end when you can see the instances kind of regenerate because we're going back to the beginning but there are many ways to hide that we're not going to get into that today watching my other looping tutorials and you'll see that um but notice it's a perfectly looping Corridor animation because we started at that negative eight to positive eight or you can even do the other thing positive eight to negative eight if you keep all your models within that and just instance it down the line You'll never see the end and this is just animates forever now let's do another thing this is a very very simple technique but you know sometimes you can get lost in the mess this is just a very simple thing to animate and that's rotating things by 360 degrees so what we can do is this this object right here on the outside we're going to rotate it by 360 degrees so we're going to bring that one to zero and I'm going to click the keyframe go to the end and type in 360. and now it's really fast I wouldn't it's kind of dizzying to look at but it's rotating infinitely but the reason why I wanted to show you that seems like it'd be obvious is here's a really cool trick I'm going to clear the keyframes say you want it to rotate much faster and so you'll need to do more than just one 360 rotation well what you can do is hit the keyframe go to the very end and you could type in 360 asterisk 5 360 times five which would be five rotations that's now 1080 and now I mean it's just Bonkers but you get the idea you can actually speed up rotations and that's a really fun way to add variety if you have multiple things rotating your scene one can go faster the other creates this level of Randomness all right so we finished that example two and three let's go to example four so let's open up that project file all right so this is the age old let's Loop some displacement and that's going to be in your modifiers so what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you the project file with no empties just this guy displaced the heck out and so this is my modifier stack here to create this but the only thing we want to worry about is just a displacement modifier so just you could take an object and displace it also if you hear some weird noises my neighbors I think are rearranging their entire apartment so there's gonna be a little banging can't do anything about that all right so so we have our displacement here with a strength and you can play with the strength here but we need to go ahead and animate this and but we need to animate in the loop because doing this is boring and then going into the texture you can't really Loop that you can just change the scale which is annoying you want to keep just one scale so we're going to go ahead and use some empties we're going to set up a little thing so we're going to go ahead and get in a curve Circle and we're going to go ahead and get an empty plane axis make sure that empty is selected go over here to your constraints here we go add constraint follow path and we're going to select the circle and then this circle we're just going to scale it out and we're going to use this empty to animate this here's a really cool trick if you've never done this before there's another thing I've been doing forever I have to acknowledge that because sometimes people yell at me for teaching things up top before but there's always new viewers to the channel alright so let's go here and we're going to click on this object go back to your modifiers and we're going to go this first displacement whether we have two but that's just to change the shape this first displacement on your coordinates go to object and that's going to allow you to select an object that when that object moves your displacement is going to move object empty and so what happens if I click on this I'm going to hit R twice now that's driving the animation so very simply that 360 degree concept we're going to take that and I'm just going to go ahead here in the transform settings I'm going to click and drag go to the very end click and drag here and type in 360 on both axes and that's going to animate that there but then we can add another level of detail which is rotating this guy so we're going to go ahead click and drag here make sure we're at frame zero go to the end type in 360. and then now there's no discernible beginning end to this weird displacement animation but it's an endless loop that we can use so using those empties and having them animate around helps you create Randomness in your motion and visual Randomness in the displacement you can use all these different examples here for different projects all right the last one which I mentioned is a Time Saver so we're going to go ahead and open up example number five so here you have a timeline with 80 frames and let's just imagine you have a scene there are several different things looping you don't just have three objects you have a lot of objects so let's just imagine and then say you're working with a client or you decide hey I want to add more frames because I want this animation to slow down it's too quick the way to do that add more frames but the issue is it's already animated we already have these rotating by 360 Degrees say we want to add over like a thousand frames right this is Bonkers but trust me when you're doing client work or whatever it can get that crazy and so say okay well we can just drag the keyframe out right well we just drag we're dragging now 360 degrees and maybe you could do 360 time blah time down time die but then what if you want to keep the same consistency of speed I'm giving you all these use cases I promise you they come up um here's what you do so you have I'm going to go ahead and select both of my keyframes and I'm just going to select this guy out here now notice at frame 80 boom they stop so let's go here to the animation Tab and I'm going to pull up the graph editor if it's not already open um I didn't know it's default open so now so click on the animation tab right here it's going to open up what's hopefully the graph editor if you don't have it click here and click on here we go um graph editor so I'm going to click on this object here and it's going to pull up X Euler rotation Z Euler rotation so I'm just going to click on the Z rotation I'm going to hit the in button it's going to bring up the end panel and click on modifiers add modifier and add Cycles which this Cycles has nothing to do with the Cycle's render engine this means a cycling motion so they want to cycle over and over and over and over again so Watch What Happens we're going to go all the way to frame 80. I'm going to press play and notice this object is just going to keep going and of course it didn't so let's click on the X Euler rotation as well and add the Cycles button okay so now add these Cycles modifier to both and I'm going to press play and watch what happens at frame 80 right here keeps going and what happened is it's going to take this animation literally whatever you did and wherever it stops it's going to keep that going and just forever and ever and ever until you decide for it to stop and so in this case you can make a longer Loop and because it's 80 frames use that math and so we'd stop at what 116 say we wanted to make this I'm sorry 160 yeah let's hope my math is right so let's stop our frames at 160. please Loop okay it does so say you wanted to just go for longer you needed to have other things um now that's looping forever now that that is another example say we wanted the camera to move I remember once specifically one time the uh animation was looping but the camera was going too fast when it slowed down the camera but keep everything the same motion I was able to use this Cycles modifier in there to keep that going and I can introduce more things to the animation so this is going to save you some time to not have to reanimate every single little thing just go and add the modifier just add that Cycles modifier to everything that's gonna save your life it's going to save your time um that's it that's all five things I hope this helps you with your projects um these are just really fun and things I have to deal with every day with my animations there you go don't forget about the Christmas sale Linked In the description check out all the details on that 25 off uh but with that being said thank you guys for watching and I'll see you in the next tutorial

Channel: Ducky 3D

Views: 98,930

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Id: GbkFn2yaOgg

Length: 16min 18sec (978 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 23 2022