ANIMATING in Blender is EASY

as an animator who absolutely hated using blender when I first started to not having it be my favorite animation tool here are a few things I wish I knew and I knew to avoid when I first started number one is using simplify simplify is the easiest way to get your scene to run faster with a single click of a button you want to make sure your viewport is set to the lowest it can be when you're animating and your render you can leave that at number six two if is not setting playback to drop frames and audio sync if your scene isn't running at 24 frames per second which regardless of software with most complex rigs it won't be you won't be able to see the pacing of your animation unless you play blast and so you'll be reliant on play blasting to save you time you can change the playback to drop frames and so you'll see the correct timing and correct pacing of your shot when you press play but you won't see every single frame you can still see every single frame when you scrub through the timeline but when you press play it'll prioritize the pacing and the timing of the animation over showing every single frame three is not using the waveform now because it's not built into the timeline most people don't know that you can use the video sequencer to Showcase your waveform when you have a reference in or if you're animating to an audio clip it's really helpful to see the waveforms and so you can actually use a video sequencer to display your waveform for not saving your workspace preferences and redoing it every single time if you have a certain layout that you love animating in or working in in blender and every time you reopen it you have to remake it just take the time to do it once and then save it that way every time you reopen blender you can have your favorite layout ready for you without you having to remake it every single time and if you work in a studio or you open files of other people this is an issue I had when I was working at a studio I would open someone else's file and the layout would change to their file there's a way to fix this though you just go to preference and check load UI that way every time you open a new file while by somebody else you keep your own layout five is not using free add-ons to speed up your workflow add-ons like Dynamic parent are a much faster and less confusing way to create constraints it adds on off Keys automatically so you don't accidentally have the constraint animating over multiple frames anim8 is also another amazing one where you can make Global changes to your entire animation it works kind of like an animation layer but unfortunately nma doesn't support past blender 3.6 that being said the Creator an is actually working with blender to implement the tools from animade into vanilla blender so still good to use it with blender 3.6 and Below to learn the tools and then blender four and above they'll start implementing those tools into vanilla blender so you'll know how to use them if you want there are also really good paid add-ons you can get for blender as well one is play blast blender's vanilla play blast system leaves a lot to desire so this add-on makes it a lot easier and a lot faster for you to play blast shots there's also blast frames uh set up add-ons the animation kit lot of Cool Tools in there and of course can't forget about the animation layers add-on this is just fantastic it's exactly like Maya's animation layers except better and more features with smart bake and everything you could ask for it's a fantastic tool and I would recommend any animator in blender to purchase the animation layers add-on six is not taking advantage of the 3D cursor because it's not familiar to you if you're coming from Maya and you're not familiar with the 3D cursor you probably don't know how versatile it is and how useful it can be you can use it to bring stuff into the scene in a specific location you can use it as a snapping tool to snap things to a specific location you can rotate objects from a temporary pivot point and a ton more stuff seven the annotate tool if you're one of those animators who likes to draw things on the screen and track things annotate tool can be super helpful instead of exporting ing your shot into syn sketch and then drawing your notes and then exporting it and going through that whole process you can just use the annotate tool and do it all in blender eight not using paspartu and GD lines for composition when you're setting up your scene they can be very helpful to find an appealing Framing and help build a good composition for your shots number nine not setting viewport overlays correctly so that it only shows motion path and the things you really need and hides the Rest by default the overlays are set to show the 3D cursor bones relationship lines grid and all these other things so normally we just turn those off all together to get a clean view however it's worth taking the time to turn off everything except motion paths and annotations if you have any so that you can use those in the camera view to track arcs and make draw overs to camera doing this you don't really need to toggle anything on or off you just set it up once and then you're good to go for any shots number 10 not using the normalized button and the graph editor the normalized button forces all your values to fit within -1 and one in the graph editor for all your graphs it doesn't actually change the value of the key frame for example if you translate Y is 86 it's not going to change the value to 1 or1 but in the viewport it visually shows it to you as 1 to1 this helps you compare the size of multiple curves to know how much each is dial in this is particularly helpful when you have one curve nicely framed in a view then you click on a different Channel and without normalize you probably have to scale out go up or down to find this new curve and it's a bit of a hassle but with normalize you don't need to do this because as long as you have the view calibrated to see everything between 1 And1 all your curves will fit nicely in the view in animation you usually care about the shape of the curve not the numerical value of every single key so having normalized on where you can see all your curves within one View and you can visually see everything and how everything is working out it will seriously speed up your workflow and finally the biggest mistake beginner and season animators make when transitioning to blender is that they don't take the time to fully learn and understand all the wonderful animation tools blender has to offer when I first started using blender it was during the production of my and the 3 where we were told to do the famous donut tutorial to get familiar with blender but the problem is that it's a modeling tutorial it's not an animation tutorial there weren't any good animation resources for Blender at the time so us newbies were learning through Char and error and by watching modeling tutorials and by bugging more experienced uh artists at the studio it was really really frustrating and it contributed to the reason of why I hated blender when I first started working because I was fighting all the settings and I didn't know about most of the awesome animation tools that blender actually offers so I had this Maya mindset going into it and I was like it's not Maya I hate it and because I didn't know any better if you're serious about being an animator I want to maximize your productivity in blender I highly suggest learning all the animation tools that blender has to offer this is something we cover in our blender Basics course which is included in our ultimate animation course it comes for free in the ultimate animation course Course once you purchase that but in that course there's 40 video lessons with PDF handbooks where we talk about all the tools that blender has and how to use them this is a course you can finish in under a week and by the end of it you'll be super proficient in blender's animation tools now blender 4 recently came out and with it a ton of new animation features and updates so what you can do is watch this video right here to get caught up

Channel: BrianKouhi

Views: 23,287

Keywords: animating in Blender, animating in blender for beginners, How to animate in Blender, Switching to Blender from Maya, TOAnimate, animation tips, animation tips for Blender

Id: fvR2LHAGfG4

Length: 7min 54sec (474 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 17 2024