Animating Assemblies in Blender

Often when marketing or presenting a project  it is necessary to show how it is assembled,   a photorealistic animation can help to effectively  communicate the process to your target audience   and help them envision your idea coming to life. In the following video I will show you a simple,   extensible way to create these animations to  serve as a launching point for you to create   beautiful animations like the ones you see here. The process I will show you today can be extended   to arbitrarily complex assemblies and with minimal  research can get you extraordinary results.   To follow along with this video you will  need SolidWorks (you can also use your   favorite CAD software or an existing model)  and blender to create the animation. The   idea is to leverage the superior capacities  of each software in their suited domains.   Because this tutorial is meant to be extensible,  I am going to create a simple model to demonstrate   the two main steps used in any assembly: namely  translation and rotation. I recommend trying   to follow along with your own geometry but  keep it fairly simple for this first run.   First open a general blender file Press the letter a to select all and then   delete everything from the workspace that way we  can start with a nice clean, empty workspace.   Now we will import the stl files we  created earlier, because we saved them   from the assembly they will be in the correct  relative positions when we import them.   I find that switching from the  timeline to the dope sheet makes   adding and modifying key frames much easier   I am just going to add a keyframe  for every part at this location,   this is the final location I want everything  to be in at the end of the animation.   To insert a keyframe just select the part  and press the letter I on your keyboard,   that will make this menu pop up where you select  the parameters you want the keyframe for.   Because I am just translating and rotating parts,  I am just keyframing the location and rotation.   You may want to animate parts changing sizes,  in which case you could keyframe the scale too.   Now I just slide to a new frame on the dope sheet,   move the part and add another keyframe.  If you want to check your animation just   play the video and visually inspect  that it is doing what you want.   When you are rotating a part it is  important to set its origin to geometry,   this way the part rotates about its center.   Sometimes this reverse engineering  method leads to weird behavior,   so just redo that final keyframe to fix it.   Then I am going to add a camera by pressing shift  and a, then selecting the camera from the menu   Then press zero to change to the camera view  and make the camera follow the view, this allows   you to change where the camera is pointing by  using the controls you use to change your view.   Now with the camera selected we can add keyframes  in the same way as for the assembly, just move it   to the location you want it at a specific  frame and add in the keyframe as before.   Now I am just going to add a plane as  a floor and scale it up by pressing s   and then dragging it out.   Here I just selected the part and switched to edit  mode by pressing tab and I am just going to right   click and set it to smooth shading, you don’t  need to do this. Then press tab again to go back.   I am also going to set this part to smooth  shading, once again, this is totally optional.   I am going to switch now to the render view.   And add a light, much in the  same way we added the camera.   Like everything else, you can move  that light around and add keyframes.   Now I am just going to save the project.   And change some of my render settings, in an  effort to keep this video to a manageable length   I am not going to cover these settings. Blender  has so much functionality that I just cannot   hope to cover it, so in the description I will  link to some videos that cover these topics,   the final quality of your animation depends  highly on your rendering settings and materials   so I would really do some research in  this area. Looking on forums you can find   info on specific materials and a bunch  of other things related to blender.   You can render an individual frame  by pressing f12 to quickly check   your settings as well as seeing the rendering  time which is useful to calculate the overall   rendering time for your animation. Here I am just going to quickly add an   aluminum like material, but once again, I really  recommend more in-depth research on materials   if you want a photorealistic animation. Realize that I have sped up these renders   in post processing, I wish  my computer was this fast   One final note is that I like to save my  animations as a sequence of images, for some   reason this seem much more stable, and blender  does not crash as often when I use this approach.   And that is it, just render the animation.   Here is a quick way to create  an animation from the images we   just rendered using the free video  editing software HITFILM express.   It is as simple as loading in  the images as an image sequence.   Dragging that into the video track   Then exporting the video   And that is all, we quickly have an animation.   And that is it for this video, if you  found it useful don’t forget to like   and subscribe and support me on Patreon. The process outlined in this video can be   extended to arbitrarily complex geometries, and  I would love to see what you all come up with.   The next video will be on a similar topic  of animating mechanical systems in blender.   Once again, thanks for the  support, have a good day!

Channel: Interfluo

Views: 140,721

Keywords: engineering, assembly, engineering assembly, photorealistic, render, rendering, how to render, engineering render, blender render, blender rendering, blender 3d, blender assembly, blender animation, blender tutorial, blender engineer, blender for engineers, cad, solidworks to blender, stl to blender, solidworks, solidworks tutorial, learn solidworks, solidworks assembly, assembly animation, blender material, key frame, video editing, video editing for beginners, cgi, vfx, blender

Id: gAYdVjvSeew

Length: 13min 47sec (827 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 15 2021