Animating Blinks in Blender

hi and welcome to blender clinic today i'm going to be talking to you about blinking a subject that is close to my heart because i love blinking i do um if you know me personally or you've seen any of my youtube videos you'll probably be very aware that when i'm tired and stressed i blink more um and and i'm frequently tired and stressed when i'm doing these videos because that's when production is busy but it's busy busy so um blinking it's something i do a great deal of and unsurprisingly when i'm animating it's saying i also do a great deal of blinking and animation is actually a really versatile tool for expressing and emoting me a character and it's so much more than just free keyframes which is you know what we're going to take a look at today so i've got a very unusual rig and it's a little bit broken um so it needs a bit of love so i'm just doing these blink tests to to figure out what it can what what what it needs so let's take a look also it is currently i'm using the simplify modifier so it's not what it actually looks like when it's rendered this is just you know for zippy animation so let's take a look uh so we've got these two blink controllers i've already set uh i've selected all hit i and put keyframe on my whole character i've got auto keying on i'm gonna go forward ten frames i'm gonna just i'm gonna hit alt g and alt g on those two um and actually on these tweak lids controls just because my default position is but the eye being closed so i've just reset their translations and rotations to achieve that and then on frame 20 i'm going to grab the initial keyframes with all those controllers selected and grab those initial keyframes shift d and duplicate those keyframes over to frame 20. and now we have a blink and most people would probably stop there well maybe not most of not most animators but a lot of beginners will sort of stop at that point i'm just going to set my uh loop down to uh 30 so we get a little blink okay so is it good enough sure for some things i'm sure that is good enough but we want to take this slightly further so what i'm going to do um i'm going to take these two blink controllers and i'm going to shift d to duplicate keyframe move it forward two frames and then on that frame i'm going to create some anticipation by moving the upper lid up a little below a lid down a little and now rather than go directly from um from open to closed it'll go a little more open first and then closed okay now i don't know what i did on this i don't i think i've accidentally added some keyframes here which i didn't intend to do so i'll just delete those at the end and what we're going to do now is we're going to look at the last keyframe what can we do with the last keyframe well again we could do overshoot so where it opens too much and then settles so in order to do that well i'm just going to duplicate those keyframes i just made and put them before my last keyframe so now it goes open so it's open more open closed more open open and i think that overshoot is too hard so i'm just going to drag my keyframes here a little bit further along i think most of that hardness is actually comes from the uh the geometry being a bit too sharp there we go so yeah that looks fine um what else well you're probably going to want the eyes to remain shut a little bit longer so let's take our central keyframe shift d and duplicate that and that's nice what else can we do well when you've got when you've got two eyelids making contact with each other that is an impact so um rather than going like this and then decelerating and stopping you want it to go slow fast hard stop yeah so just like if you uh you have a hand slamming down on a table it doesn't decelerate into it it it's a hard stop it accelerates until stopping so that's what we're going to do easiest way to do that select your keyframe mousing over the dope sheet hit v change it to a vector as you can see there in the curves it changes instantly and now we've got so it accelerates into that which also allows it still to uh just come out slowly of that second keyframe so accelerates in holds and then eases out so that's that's pretty perfect for what we need um what else can we do uh well i'd like the actual eyelids to push let's say the upper lid as it closes pushes the lower lid down now normally i build this in with a floor control a floor constraint into my rig but for some reason in this um this prototype rig that didn't happen so i'm gonna have to do it manually so on this keyframe actually they can make contact and then on the second of those con of the closed keyframes i'm going to pull this controller down slightly and unfortunately this upper constraint that's as far as it goes but fortunately i do have this tweak these tweak bones which allow me to manually pull that all in okay so i think that is that is a much more um appealing blink from what we started with other things you could do with that is actually i mean with this rig in particular we've got quite a lot of control here we've got all these little tweak bones and what you could do is start adding individual um individual sort of uh tweaks so that the eyelid peels away from the center first and stays closed at the edges initially yeah um now again many rigs will do this well not many rigs but some some more advanced rigs will do this automatically and just god knows why because i love god knows why i haven't built that into this rig i mean i do know why lack of time just uh wrangling the fact that these didn't have key frames at the start so blop by this point i think we'll probably want them to be reset they'll have relaxed again so i mean the sticky lid sort of animation there is it's a bit excessive but seeing as you can take all of this and put it into an nla strip and reuse it and recycle it time and time again and retime it it is quite it's quite useful you know i mean you can do more um and and you know you do more at the start and then re recycle it and then you've got this this reusable asset that gives you this really quality sort of um piece of animation that is used so much throughout the piece so there we go um in fact you could bake all of this into an action bone in fact i might do that for this rig because i would say me having to actually build a whole new eyelid rig um he said lazily trying to be efficient with time it's efficiency not laziness uh right what else could we do well i mean with something like this you can always you know maybe their character starts off angry blinks and then they've reconsidered it's like the moment of realization because you can use blinks to punctuate and uh transition between different things in fact that's a really great way of doing things um so we could have them transitioning as they go they're angry and then they realize oh no what's happened to this person is terrible so they go blink and come out a more sympathetic um kinder character so now we can use it as a transition that's great what else can we do oh actually that's far more sad isn't it angry sword angry i feel like this could be this should reverse actually i feel like it's a better expression at the end but for the readability of what i'm trying to do yeah so there we go what else can we do okay blinking isn't just about the eyes i blink with my whole body because i'm a freak but uh no it's it you can you can add stuff like in emotion so like if this character were you know there they're about to blink in fact actually before we do that let's just transfer all of this over to um to the other eye and we're gonna copy those keyframes move over here and we're gonna paste flipped and immediately i'm seeing some issues there so maybe i've got let's just check these bones are all named correctly hmm yeah seems okay oh i see what it is it's just i thought that there was a misnaming of bones and that's why it hadn't flipped them properly but i'm going to insert keyframes on everything apparently some of them don't want to keyframe i wonder what that's about have i got only insert needed or something ridiculous on animation no thank you i wonder why it wasn't doing that that's a that's a new one on me haven't experienced that before at least not knowingly paste flipped better okay so now we have two eyelids blinking now you don't always have to have them working in concert uh you can you know have one going like slightly slower or off sync and that will typically get you a bit more of an organic feel maybe just move it back a keyframe or scale it back a little bit and then move it back a keyframe again i feel like you know what this is i don't know why this is not adding keyframes properly or why is not but i'm getting very frustrated to find these issues yeah it's not keying all of the bones why would it not kill all the bones have we got something in our have we got a keying flipping nora having to manually just nudge all of these bones and i don't know why maybe it's a bug we are using an alpha copy of blender so these things do happen but what a what an annoying thing to uh to have to deal with uh paste flipped okay that that seems to be working god knows why is that one not terrible i'm gonna have an absolute meltdown in a moment copy paste flipped using ctrl shift and m just to switch between the bones and check but we actually have the same sort of animation going on okay so right now we've got that let's take this and maybe offset it ever so slightly maybe scale it ever so slightly and now we've got two separate eyes working independently um you won't want to put more detail into that uh but yeah what else can we do so typically if my character is is performing a motion so we might start you know at this position i will have them sort of dip with the blink so i will angle the head forward slightly pull it down let me duplicate that so exactly the same sort of motion as the the eyelids in fact including a little bit of overlap except this wouldn't be a an impact but the head down wouldn't be an impact it's all smooth transitions i've got to admit this uh i overcooked that slightly let's take it back yeah too out of sync with each other um for my tastes at least uh ever wacky a character is the more independent you will have your eye you can have your eyes moving i think that tends to work quite well it also says terrible things about me my wacky blinking so there we go so now we've got this bob with the uh with the blink i wouldn't typically include the bob necessarily in the nla by the way that sandwich so it could interfere with other processes and we've got a squash and stretch control so let's make use of that so the character's form is breathing a little bit and again you know i might sort of be tempted to give the mouth a little bit of life even if there was no prescribed animation for that you know for for the mouth just giving it a little bit of uh life into it is is probably a you know a solid idea obviously then once once you've done that much i mean you might as well look at the secondaries so i mean this hair is never supposed to be straight anyway you okay so that would be a blink actually i kind of don't like how i've done those so you so let's just render that out just see how that looks in real time with all the subdiv and whatnot on uh yeah it's not going to be my greatest work obviously but you know but it's just showing a practical way of adding more detail and more life in a blink so it's not these dead eyes it's got something you know even with these unusual designs of um you know the pupillus black eyes that john uh john ball who i'm working with prefers to use is is but there's still life in the character it's not just uh you know uh it's not just clank clunk just waiting for that that's an unusually long render it's because i did not set the keyframes in my render to 35 i'm trying to do 300 keyframes because this is stupid or maybe i'm stupid i'm stupid will be a second okay that's done and here we are obviously it doesn't loop because it wasn't intense loop it's sort of going between those two emotions but it's got a little bit more than just a you know a flat blink in fact i should have like i'll move the character's head angled and all sorts in there but uh i think that's enough for now that's just a little sort of a little idea on how i look at blinking how i look at blinking you can't look at blinking your eyes are closed um and uh and yeah hopefully it'll be of use to you and um you know that's saying you can build on there's so much more which you can do with these tiny micro movements but um you know uh i don't have all day and neither do you so go and explore

Channel: Hollowpixel

Views: 76

Keywords: BLINK, animate, animation, character, blender, b3d, 3d, eyes

Id: Sxqmb5MLBiQ

Length: 24min 8sec (1448 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 17 2021