Animation for Beginners! (Blender Tutorial)

in this beginner tutorial i'm going to show you the basics of animation in blender so i'm going to go over all of the basic things that you need to know to get started with animation in blender so i'll be going over things like the timeline adding keyframes and using the graph editor to edit your animations and then at the end of this tutorial i will show you how to animate the cube so we're going to add some light to the cube and kind of make it look like it's jumping and kind of looking around and we'll be creating this animation right here now if you want to learn the basics of animation in blender then i would recommend watching the entire tutorial but i will also have time stamps in the video description if you'd like to hop to a certain part of this video and i will also have a free download of the project files for this tutorial on my gumroad store and my patreon links in the description if you want to check that out and i am trying to make blender tutorials and blender content for a living so if you'd like to help support me and my youtube channel then some great places to help support me are on my gumroad store and my patreon page so on my gumroad store and patreon page you can get 3d models and assets you can get the tutorial files and artwork project files and you can also get procedural materials and some exclusive tutorials as well so when you're doing animation you need to add keyframes and those keyframes are going to tell blender what is going to be animated and where it's going to be animated so you're going to be adding keyframes at different time points in blender so right down here under blender's 3d viewport we have this right here and this is the timeline and so in the timeline you're going to be adding different keyframes and you're going to be adding those keyframes to bones or objects or values and then you'll move to a further place in time in the timeline and then you'll add another keyframe and so that's going to tell blender to go from one keyframe to the next keyframe so let's start by adding some basic keyframes now i need to delete the default cube because that's what we always do so i'm just going to double tap the a key and we'll press x to delete and i'm going to delete everything so i'll now press shift a and i'm going to be adding a cube because you know you can't use the default cube you have to always add a new one all right so let's just do some very basic animation to this cube so i'm going to select the cube and then i'm going to click and drag and i'm going to scrub this blue line here on the timeline and i'm going to bring it all the way back to frame 1 so we can start doing the animation all right so we are now at frame 1 and the cube is right here and so i want to add a keyframe to tell it that that's where the cube is going to start so to add keyframes you are going to press the i button so make sure your mouse is hovered in the 3d space and then press i and i is the shortcut key to inset a keyframe now you do have a bunch of different options here and so this is asking you what values you want to add keyframes onto and when you're animating objects in the 3d space there are three main values that you're going to use the location the rotation and the scale so if you press g to grab that is going to change the location if you press r to rotate that'll change the rotation and then if you press s that is going to change the scale so when you press i it's going to ask you what values you want to add keyframes onto now if you want to add a keyframe that's going to affect all three of those values you can just click on this one right here which is location rotation and scale so after you press the i key you can just click on any of these ones i'm going to do the location rotation and scale now when i do that you can see that right down here in the timeline we have this little yellow diamond and so that is blender telling us that we have a keyframe on that part of the timeline and also if you press the a key to deselect the cube you can see that now the diamond is gone and so in the timeline you're only going to be able to see the keyframes with the object that's selected so if i now select this object again then there is the diamond and also in the timeline if you press the a key just like selecting and deselecting objects if you press a in the timeline that is going to select and deselect the keyframes so we have now inserted a keyframe right here so i'm just going to move over to frame 100 so you can just scrub with the timeline just click and drag and move over to frame 100 and i now just want to transform the cube so i can just press g to grab and i'll also rotate it so i'll press r to rotate it and if you wanted to you could also press s to scale and just scale that up now if we move our timeline or if we play the timeline it's not going to keep this and that's because we haven't added a keyframe on this value so if i move this you can see it's going to hop back to the original value so i just need to do this again so i'm going to bring it over i'll rotate it and then i'll also scale it so we now need to add a keyframe right here to tell blender that that's where we want the next keyframe to be on frame 100 so again i'm going to press i and i'm going to click on location rotation and scale so now that i've done that if i scrub through the timeline you can see it's going from the cur first keyframe to the second keyframe now i'm just going to press ctrl z to undo that and if i press i again to add a keyframe this time i could just click on rotation and you can see now that i did that it's moving the location but because i didn't add this keyframe for the rotation and the scale as well it's only going to add a keyframe to the location and so the rotation and scale aren't going to be changed now to be able to visualize this a little bit better if i press the n key that is going to open up this side panel and i'm going to go right down here to item and you can see right here on item we now have this transform tab right here so this is showing us the transform values for this object so as i talked about earlier we have three different transform values we have the location and that is going to be moving it around we have the rotation to rotate it and then we have the scale to scale it up or down and each of these transform values have three values within them because we have the x and the y and the z axes so those are all the axes in the 3d space so i'm just going to press ctrl z to undo that a few times and then i now want to add a keyframe but this one i want to affect the location rotation and scale so i'll press i again and then i'm going to click on location rotation and scale and now it's done it for all the values so now if i click and drag to scrub the timeline you can see it is rotating and scaling the cube as well now you may have noticed something and that is that these values right here have different colors so if there are no keyframes on these values they're just going to be the default gray so you can see all these different values here in blender they're just normally the default gray color if there is animation on those values then they are going to be green so green is basically telling you that there is animation on that value but there isn't a keyframe on that exact frame if i move over to frame 100 where there is a keyframe they're going to turn yellow and that is blender telling you that there is a keyframe right at that part in time so you can animate the cube in the 3d space but you can also animate these values so let's say i want to go over to maybe 150 and then i want to change the location and rotation so what i can do is i can click and drag and i can drag these values so let's just move the cube over and then also maybe i want to rotate the cube so we're going to rotate that over so now what i can do is i can just add keyframes to these values because these are the only ones that are changed so to add keyframes to these values i could press i and then insert a location in rotation and scale or in this case just a location and rotation because i didn't actually change the scale but instead what i can do is i can just hover my mouse over the values and then i can press i and that is going to add a keyframe to these values so i can hover my mouse over this value and press i that is going to add a keyframe to the values and i can also just right click and i can right click on these values and then you can see i can add a keyframe or in this case i can replace the keyframe because i already have a keyframe at that value and now if you scrub through the timeline you can see that it moves up here and then we have the other keyframes and so the cubes moves over and i will go over this later on in this tutorial but you can animate pretty much any value in blender so just like we animated these you can animate pretty much any value in blender all these different values in blender but i'll go over that in a moment so i'm going to press the n key now to close that side panel so i wanted to talk a little bit more about how to use the timeline so if you just click and drag right up here on these numbers then that is going to move the timeline around now if you want to play the timeline you can click on the play button right here and that is going to play the timeline and then you can see there is also a pause button so you can click on that pause button to pause the timeline and then there also is a play backwards so you can click on that button and that is going to play the animation backwards and you may also see me just clicking and dragging right down here that is because i'm using the right click select so i can click and drag right down here um but for most of you who are using the left click select you'll just click and drag right up here on the numbers now there also are some other buttons right here so these buttons jump to the next keyframe so if you click on that it's going to jump to the next keyframe in the timeline and you can also click on this button here and that is going to jump back now these buttons right here on the very outer edges those are going to jump to the start frame and the end frame so if you click on this you can see it's going to go to frame one and if i click on this it's going to go to frame 250. so depending on how long your animation is you can change the start and end frame so for instance i could just have my animation end at frame 160 but you can see the default is 250 so if i just click on this end value right here i can just type in 160 and then hit enter and you can see now the end frame is going to move to here now another thing you can change is the frame rate so if you click right over here on the output properties let me just make this a little bit bigger you can change the frame rate so the frame rate is basically telling blender how many frames are going to be within one second so the fps that stands for frames per second now the default is 24 frames per second and for most things 24 frames per second is gonna be just fine for your animations i am recording this video in 60 frames per second um because i want it to be nice and smooth i'm using obs my screen recording software to record this um but for most animations and things you're just going to use 24 frames per second if you want to be more smooth you could turn it up so for instance i could turn it up to 60 and that's going to be a lot more smooth so basically now if i play this you can see it's much faster but it's also much more smooth so if i change this to 60 frames per second there's now going to be 60 frames within every second and you can see it's much more smooth now than 24 because there are more frames in every second i'm just going to change this back to 24 which is the default um for most animations usually animations are 24 frames per second now if you've added some keyframes but you want to edit those keyframes or change them or maybe you want to change the timing then you can do that so let me first show you how to change the timing so what you can actually do is you can actually just select the keyframe you can press g to grab in the timeline and that is going to move the keyframe so if i wanted this to move up much quicker i could press g to grab and then move over and i could place it right here and now if i play this you can see it's going to move up much faster and i could also just select this press g to grab and bring it over and that way it's going to move much faster and then if you have a keyframe selected you can press x to delete and then you can just click on delete keyframes um you can also press the delete key and then that's going to delete the keyframe so i'll just delete that so x to delete and now if i move through this you can see that because we deleted that keyframe in the middle it's just going to go from this keyframe to that keyframe now let's say that i want the cube to pause in this location and i just want to pause for a little while and then we'll have another keyframe and have it move over so what i would want to do is i would want to duplicate this keyframe so that it stays right where it is and it doesn't move so you can just select the keyframe and then you can press shift d and so shift d will duplicate the keyframe just how shift d will duplicate the object in the 3d space you can press shift d and that's going to duplicate the selected keyframe now i'm just going to delete this keyframe real quick and i want to show you another way that you could do this so you could just simply move over to frame 90 or wherever you want to move it to and then you could press the i key again and you could insert location rotation and scale and you can see now it's just going to stay where it is and it's not going to move now you can see that in between these two keyframes there is a little line here and if you press a to select the keyframes you can see that that line is orange so this line here in between these keyframes is basically telling you that the keyframe is exactly the same and so nothing's going to change because i didn't move the object i just moved over here and then added another keyframe and so these two keyframes are exactly the same and so you can see that the cube is not moving so now i'm going to move over to maybe frame 110 and i'll press g to grab r to rotate ns to scale kind of bring that over there and then again i'll press i to insert a keyframe and we want to do location rotation and scale so now you can see that the cube moves and then it just kind of stays and it pauses and then it moves over now maybe i don't like where this cube is and so i want to override the keyframe so i don't want to delete the keyframe i just want to move it and then replace a keyframe so basically overlap a keyframe on top of this and replace it so how you do this is you just change this to whatever you want so i'm just going to like rotate the cube move it over and then just make sure that the timeline is on that keyframe so it's exactly on that keyframe i can now press i and then we're going to insert location rotation and scale and that is going to override the keyframe so now we just have a new keyframe and it's been replaced and also the orange line isn't there because these keyframes are both different now this workflow of manually adding keyframes by pressing i is a little bit slow and so there's actually a much faster way to animate in blender and that is by using this button right here the auto keying so if you turn this button on you can see now it's blue and so when this is on it's going to automatically add a keyframe whenever you transform an object so let's just move over here i'm just going to move over here and then i can press r to rotate just click to place that and you can see that because the auto key was on it automatically added a keyframe there and i can also just edit this keyframe by maybe scaling it and moving it and when you transform the object you can see it's going to tell you that the auto keying is on and so when i'm doing animation i use this most of the time because it's much faster and it will just speed up your workflow quite a lot because you don't have to press i and then manually insert keyframes now i still use this some of the time if i want more manual control and also i'll sometimes animate these values here if you press the n key as i talked about earlier in this tutorial but for most of my animation i use the auto key because i can just animate objects and it will automatically place a keyframe right there just make sure that you turn it off when you're done animating because this still happens for me sometimes as well i'll be animating with the auto key and then i'm finished animating and so i'll start to go do some other stuff in blender kind of set up the scene and then i'll realize that this entire time it was adding keyframes because the auto key was on so just make sure you only turn this on right when you're gonna start animating and then once you're done then just make sure you turn it off alright so i've showed you the basics of animating objects in blender but there are so many other things you can animate in blender because as i talked about earlier in this tutorial you can animate pretty much any value in blender so i'm just going to double tap the a key and the timeline to select all the keyframes and then i will press x to delete and i'm just going to delete the keyframes i'm going to show you just a few different things that you can animate so let's first go to the shader nodes so i'm going to click right over here on the shading tab and we can edit the shader nodes so i'm now going to click on new here to add a new material and let's just go into rendered mode so i'll just press z move my mouse up to go into the rendered view i'm going to press shift a and i'm going to add a magic texture you don't have to follow along with this if you don't want to or you can do whatever you want i'm just going to add a magic texture also press shift a and i'm going to search here for an emission and then i want to plug the emission up to the surface and then i want to delete the principle and then i'm going to take the color and put that into the color of the emission so now you can see that we're previewing that magic texture now i want to be able to animate this so i want to add a timeline down here so i'm going to move my mouse right up here when the crosshair appears and then i can click and drag down and that is going to add a timeline and then i'm also going to click right here when the crosshair appears here click and drag out and then let go and that is going to bring that window out now right now it's the shader editor so i want to click on this button right here right next to my head click on this button and we're going to change this to the timeline and so i'm going to start by going to frame one and then i want to add a keyframe on the scale value so as i talked about earlier you can right click and then just click on insert keyframe that's going to insert a keyframe on that value but you can also just hover your mouse over the value and press i and that is going to insert a keyframe so you can see right down here we now have a keyframe on frame one now you may notice something and that is that there are two keyframes and so this is blender telling you that there is a keyframe on the cube but there is also a keyframe on the material so if you don't see this little thing right here you can kind of click and drag to pull it out it might be closed but you can just click on the arrow and drag it out and so this is basically going to tell you where there are keyframes on the different parts of the object so we have one key from here because this is the keyframe on the cube but then right down here it's going to tell you there's a keyframe for the material and it's also going to show you the shader right here in the node tree because we added that keyframe within the materials here real quick i'm just going to hop back over to the layout if i click and drag and open this up you can see that it's right here as well so if i press i and we're going to insert a location i can now move over here press g to grab we're just going to bring this over and then i can press i again and we're going to insert a location so i've now added just a simple animation of the cube moving if i open this up you can see that it's going to tell you what is actually animated so we have the cube and then we have the cube transforms and you can click on this little arrow to open this up and it's going to show which values are animated so that's why there are sometimes multiple keyframes um to tell you where they're animated so let's go back over here to the shading tab and let's now animate this so i'm going to just move this over i'm going to move it over to frame 41 and then i'm going to change the scale so i'm going to make the scale much smaller so i'll make it really small all right so i've set the scale value to a much smaller value so i'm now going to hover my mouse over the value and i'll press i and that is going to add a keyframe and you can see that we have the material so if i move this over you can see here is the material so here is the material values and then here is the object ones so if i select this and press g to grab this is going to move around the object's location and then if i click and select these ones and press g to grab that is going to change the scale because we have two different values of keyframes we have the magic texture scale and also the location so it's going to show the multiple sets of keyframes all right so i can now just play through this and you can see that the scale is actually changing so that is super cool so almost every value in blender can be animated pretty much all these values can be animated the strength value and all of that i'm also going to animate the distortion so i'm going to go back to frame one and i can hover my mouse over this and press i to insert a keyframe there and then i can move over here let's actually move to frame 50 and then i can just turn the distortion up and then i will hover my mouse over this and press i again to add a keyframe there so if i now play through this you can see that that distortion value is being animated and what's really cool about blender's animation is that it can also animate colors as well so i can just unplug this color here i can unplug the magic texture from the emission and then let's just select the magic texture and i'll just press x to delete it to make it a bit more simple so i'm just going to move to frame one and then on the color here i can just make this like a blue color so i'm going to move it over there to a blue color and now that i've set that to a blue color i can just hover my mouse over the value and press i and that is going to insert a keyframe on that color value and you can see it has the yellow there because there is a keyframe right on that exact spot so i can now just move over here move to the end and you can see there is a green outline and the green is telling you that there are keyframes on this value but it's not on this exact time in the timeline so now i can just click on this and i'll make it a red color just like that and then again just hover your mouse over the color value and press i and that is going to insert a keyframe so if i now play through this you can see it's actually animating that value so it starts out as blue and then it kind of gets purple and pink and then it goes to red alright so that is how you animate other values in blender i'm just going to hop back over to the layout now so the timeline does have a lot of options that you can use to edit your keyframes but if you want even more control over your keyframes and your animation then you're going to want to use the graph editor in blender so the graph editor is a new window in blender so we need to open it up so to open it up i'm going to move my mouse right over here when the crosshair appears and then i'm going to click and drag and split the window and now we can just change this to the graph editor so i'm going to click right up here to change the window type and under animation we're going to change it to the graph editor so the graph editor is a really great way to have more control over your keyframes so just like down here in the timeline where you can see all the different keyframes you also have that view right up here in the graph editor so i'm just going to close this one and we can work with this one up here in the graph editor so it's going to show you the cube and this is this object this cube object right here and then it's going to show you some different things like the material and you can see there's the different color values because we animated the color if i go into the rendered view you can see that we animated the color so it's going to show the colors values right there and if i open up the cube action you can see that we have the cube transformation so if you click on the arrow to open it up we now have the x location the y location and the z location because i'm animating this cube to move over now if you want to change the size of the graph editor you can hold down the ctrl key and then click and hold with your mouse wheel so just ctrl key and then click with your mouse wheel and hold it down and you can change the size of the graph editor so i'm just going to make a little bit bigger maybe just pull this out so we can see that a little bit better now right up here on the graph editor the top row right here that is going to be the timeline so it's basically going to show you all the frames so we have all the frames up here and going back and forth that's going to change the time now up and down that is changing the actual values so i'm just going to select these keyframes right here and i'll press x to delete and i want to delete the keyframes so i'm now just going to move this over to a frame 100 and then i'm going to press g to grab and let's bring this up on the z-axis and i can also just like rotate this cube over or rotate it over and then i can press the i key to insert a keyframe and i want to do the location rotation and scale so now that i've done that you can see that we have these keyframes down here and then we also have these keyframes up here so all of these little dots right here those are all of the keyframes now if you want to just edit a specific keyframe like for instance let's say i want to edit the location i can just go right here go over here to the side panel and you can see that here is the z location so i can just click on that and whenever you click on these values it's going to highlight those keyframes so i'm going to click on the z location and you can see that now it's highlighting that so we have the first keyframe which is right here and then we have the second keyframe which is right here and you can also see those keyframes down here in the timeline and so at frame one the cube starts down here and then as we move it up you can see that the cube is moving up so again going back and forth is going to change where it is in time and then up and down that is going to actually change the value so you can see it starts at zero and then it goes up here to about five so what's really cool about the graph editor is you can just select keyframes and you can press g to grab and you can move those keyframes around so if you want to speed up or slow down the animation you can press g to grab and then you can click and hold with your mouse wheel and constrain it to the axis going back and forth and i can just change that and now you can see that that line there is taking longer to come up so if i now play this by pressing the space bar to play you can see that now it's coming up much slower or i can also move it back and you can see that now the cube is coming up much quicker now every keyframe has these things right here and these are handles now in the timeline you can't actually change the handles manually and so that's why the graph editor is so useful because you can click right here to change the handles you can just click on these handles and then you can press g to grab and that is going to move the handle now the handles are going to change the shape of the animation so you can see right here if i just play this you can see that the cube starts to speed up and then as it gets towards the end it starts to slow back down but you can actually change the handles and that is going to change the animation so if i press g to grab and move this handle you can see now it kind of gets faster and then it kind of actually goes back down because i moved that up and so it actually went up before going back down or for instance if i wanted the cube to come up really fast and stop really quick i could press g to grab and i could move this handle down and i could make it much sharper so you can see now that is much sharper there unlike this one where it slowly starts to get faster this one stops immediately and you can see that if i play that the cube gets faster and faster and then right there at the point of the next keyframe it just stops instantly so let me just show you an instance where this might be really useful so i'm just going to delete the cube and then i'm going to press shift day and i'm going to add a monkey head and then let's also press shift a and i'm going to add a cube here and i'm going to bring the cube over so i'll just bring it over on the y-axis like this and then i'm also going to scale the cube up and i'm going to scale it up on the z-axis and then i'll also scale it up on the x-axis just like that all right so i'm now going to have the monkey head slam into the wall so i'm going to select the monkey head right there and then i'm going to go over just drag this over to frame one so i need to add a keyframe here to tell the monkey that's where it's going to start so i'm actually going to turn on the auto key and that way it'll just automatically add keyframes so i'm going to just turn on the auto key by clicking on that button and then to add a keyframe here i can just press the g key to grab and then i can just click to place it right there so i'm not going to move it at all and you can see that it's added those keyframes right there so now what i can do is i can move to let's see here how fast it's going i'll move to frame 50 and then with the monkey head selected i'm going to press g to grab and i'm going to click and hold with my mouse wheel to constrain it to the y-axis and i'm just going to stick it right there until it hits the wall okay just like that and because we had the auto key turned on the auto key feature it automatically added a keyframe so now if i go back here i can play this and you can see the monkey head just moves but then it kind of slows down and stops right there at the wall let's say the monkey head is moving really fast and i want it to look like it's slamming into the wall and then stopping really quickly well that is where changing the handles could come into play so you can see right here here is the y location so what i'm going to do is just select this handle right here and then i can press g to grab and i can move this up and make it really sharp just like we did earlier so now if i play through this you can see the monkey head moves faster and faster and then it just slams into the wall there that brick wall and it stops moving so this is just one very simple example of how the handles can be used to edit the animation now you can edit these handles manually but there also are some handle presets so if you press a to select everything that's just going to select all the keyframes you can also just select them here and i want to change all of the handle types at once so if you press the t key make sure your mouse is either in the timeline or in the graph editor if you press the t key that is going to bring up the keyframe interpolation and this is basically presets for the handle type so there are a bunch here and there are some different ones you could play around with but right here these are the most common three ones that you're going to use so i'm going to click on the consistent one first and this consistent one there's not really going to be any smoothing it's going to be very very sharp so you can see if i play through this you can see up until the next keyframe nothing is going to change so it's going to stay at the exact same point but then when we go to the second keyframe it's going to automatically hop to the next keyframe so that is the first one that is a consistent one now if you press t again that is going to bring this up and i'm going to go to the next one which is linear and this one here this linear one it's not going to have any smoothing so it's not going to slowly speed up and then slowly stop it's just going to go exactly from the first keyframe to the second keyframe so it looks very robotic you can just see that the monkey head moves over and then it just stops very quickly so that is the second one the linear one let's press the t key again you can press the t key with your mouse over the timeline or over the graph editor and i'm going to click on this one down here this last one which is bza so i'll click on the bza and this is the one that we were working with earlier this is the default one in blender so you can see that it starts to slowly speed up you can see right here on the monkey head if i play this it starts out very slow and then it slowly goes faster and faster and then because we edited this it's now going to be really sharp but i could just bring this down and make it much more smooth and now you can see that it starts to speed up and then it's at the fastest point right here it's going down those values on the time and then it'll slow down and then slowly stop so this is the most common one you're going to use the bezier because it makes your animations look very nice and smooth alright so i'm now going to open up a new blender file and we're going to create this animation right here i will walk you through the entire process and we're going to be creating this animation right here of this cube and we're going to kind of give some life to the cube and make him look around and jumping around so i'm going to just click on file and i'm just going to click on new and i'm just going to open up a new default blender file so just double tap the a key to select everything and then i'll just press x to delete and we are just going to delete everything i'm now going to press shift a and we are going to add a cube i'll press g to grab and we are going to bring this up on the z axis and i'm just going to stick this right here so i'm now going to press shift a and i'm also going to add a plane just a ground plane for our cube let's press s to scale and we are going to scale this up just like that and then i can also select this cube i'll press g to grab we're going to move it and i'll just click with my mouse wheel and i'm going to bring it right over here so that is where the cube is going to start and then we will animate the cube and then in the animation i also want the cube to like jump up on a platform so i'm going to press shift a and let's add another cube and i'll just like bring this cube over here i can scale this one up and then maybe also i'll scale it up on the y-axis like that maybe bring it down a little bit something like that i'm also going to select the cube and i'm going to tab into edit mode and i'm going to select everything and i'll just press ctrl b to add a bevel and i'm just going to scroll my mouse wheel out so it has a lot of cuts click to place that i can tab back into object mode and using the object context menu i can just shade that cube smooth all right so i'm now ready to animate so i'm going to select the cube let's make the timeline a little bit bigger alright so with the cube selected i'm going to click on this button to turn on the auto key and so i first just want to place a keyframe right here so i'm going to press g to grab and then just click to place it and you can see it's added a keyframe right there so i can now play the timeline by pressing the space bar and i just want the cube to kind of stay where it is for just a short while so i'm now going to press g to grab and then just click again to place another keyframe right there all right so i am now going to press one on the numpad and that is going to go to the side view so i can go on side view and just animate the cube jumping so i'm just going to move over maybe about five frames and then i can press g to grab and r to rotate let's just bring that over and then let's move over another five frames or so and then i'll press g to grab and r to rotate and we're gonna bring that right down there um so just put it right down there on the ground plane bring that down a little bit more all right so i can press one on the numpad again to go to the front view and we can just see how that's looking so there you go you can see now the cube jumps so if you want to edit anything you can do that so you can see that the cube goes way too far over and then just kind of goes much more straight down so i'm going to go back to frame 25 and i'll press g to grab and i'll move that back a little bit and because we have the auto key on it's automatically going to override the keyframe and that is looking much better and then also the cube would probably fall down a little bit faster so i'm going to select this last keyframe down here and i'll press g to grab and i'm going to move it over so it falls a little bit faster so it'll just come up and then come down just slightly faster just by like one frame or so so if we play that that's looking pretty cool the cube kind of jumps but it doesn't look very realistic because the cube would probably slide a little bit on the ground so i'm going to move over just a few frames maybe to frame 35 or so and then i'll press g to grab and i'm gonna bring this over on the x-axis so now if i go back here and play this you can see the cube jumps and then the cube just slides a little bit and i think i'll select this keyframe and move it over just a little so now the cube jumps and then the cube slides so that just makes it a little bit more realistic it really adds a nice touch to the animation alright so now i want to duplicate this keyframe because i want the cube to just stay exactly where he is so i'm going to press shift d bring the key keyframe out and just place it right there so then it just stays where it is for just a moment all right so i now just want to move over and i want to have the cube kind of look around so i'm just going to move over to maybe frame 55 i can press r to rotate and we're going to rotate this on the z-axis and just rotate that over so now the cube is kind of looking over maybe i'll move that a little bit farther to maybe frame 60. the cube kind of looks over and then i want to duplicate this again and just have the cube stay where it is so i'll press shift d to duplicate we're going to bring that over so now the cube just kind of looks over and he just stays right there all right now i want the cube to look over kind of over to here so i'll move over to maybe frame 85 and i can just rotate this again so press r to rotate i can rotate this over on the z axis and bring that over and you can really see the power of the auto key because it's just adding keyframes and so i don't have to manually add them it's automatically adding them every time i move the cube all right that's good so we now move that over now if i press one to go to front view the cube isn't gonna move exactly forward or exactly sideways he's gonna move over like this so what i'm gonna do is press five on the numpad and that is going to take me to the orthographic perspective and that way we're not going to be able to see as much perspective and it's going to be much more flat and then i can also just move my view and i'm going to move my view until i can see exactly the side of the cube just like that all right now i want to select this keyframe again and i'll press shifty to duplicate it maybe bring it over to frame 90. so now the cube kind of just stays where he is maybe move that over to maybe frame 95. let's go right over here and now i'm going to have the cube jump again over here so i'll press g to grab move it up and r to rotate just stick it up there and then when he moves there we go the cube is now jumping let's maybe rotate that over a little bit more alright and then i'm going to move over to maybe 106 and i'll rotate that over and bring it down and you can just press period on the numpad to zoom over to the cube and just stick it right there so it's just going onto the ground there maybe rotate that over stick it into place right there all right so let's press 5 on the numpad that'll take us out of the orthographic view and let's see how that's looking so again it kind of looks like i made the cube go too far forward so i'm going to just go back here to this perspective let's press 5 again on the numpad to go to the orthographic view and see how it's looking so yeah the cube kind of goes a little bit too far forward so i'm gonna go back to frame 100 where this keyframe is and i can just press g to grab and move that back a little bit so now that's looking much better and then also at the end here he's probably going to fall just a little bit faster than how much he comes up so i'll just press g to grab and we're just going to stick that there and there we go so he lands now if you look at that from the perspective i'm just going to press 5 on the numpad to go back to the perspective view so if i now just play through this you can see that something looks a little bit off he kind of just stops immediately and it would make sense that the cube would just slide a little bit because it has all that momentum so i'm just going to go to frame 110 and i can press 7 on the numpad to go to the front view i can now press g to grab and i'm just going to bring this over just a little to about there and then you can see now if i play this the cube just kind of slides over so the cube jumps and then just kind of slides at the very end there and it just makes it look a bit more natural and realistic all right that's really good so i'm now just going to select this keyframe right here and i'll press shift d to duplicate it and let's bring it out so now the cube can just kind of stay in place for just a little while maybe a second or so and now i want the cube to jump really big and kind of jump up onto this platform so i'm going to now move to frame maybe 35 and let me just press 5 again to go to the orthographic view so i can kind of see that without the perspective and i'll press g to grab and r to rotate let's kind of bring that up there all right so he kind of jumps up let's move over to maybe frame 145 and i'll rotate this and bring it down right there just kind of bring that over so he's kind of on the ledge there all right i can also rotate that over if i need to and just make sure the cube is level with the ground all right so now we can just play through that and see how that's looking so that does look pretty good although it is a little bit slow and also something weird happens here you can kind of see that the cube kind of rotates up a little bit and i don't really want that so let's first change the timing of the animation so i'm going to click on this keyframe right here when the cube has moved up and i'm just going to press g to grab and move it back a little bit so we can now play through this and see how fast i want that to be probably about that and then right here he kind of moves really slowly so i'm going to select this last keyframe and i'll press g to grab and we're going to bring that over there so i need to bring it a little bit closer that's looking better and i think the cube could be a little bit more over this way so i'm going to press 7 to go to top view i want to move the cube down a little bit so i'll just press g to grab move that down a little bit and then right here move that over just a little so that he's a little bit more straight all right so that's looking pretty cool now at the end here i want him to kind of slide just like he did the other ones so i'm just going to move over to maybe frame 145 and let's press 7 to go to top view and i can press g to grab and we're just going to move that over a little bit so now if we play that you can see he jumps and then when he lands he kind of just slides over so there we go that's looking very good now you can see there's a little subtle thing here if i play this you can see the cube kind of flips upwards right here you can look at this corner the cube kind of flips upwards and then comes back down you can see that's a little bit funky so how i'm going to fix this is i'm going to move to this keyframe right here when the cube is all the way up and then i'm also going to press 5 on the numpad to make sure i'm in the orthographic perspective you can see right there it says orthographic so what i want to do is actually rotate it over so it's more rotated over to its ending position so i'll just press r to rotate rotate that over and if i play that now you can see that looks much better and it doesn't have that little wobble there at the very end the wobble is now gone um and that's looking much better all right and then just like the other animations i wanna make him kind of slide along so i'm gonna press seven to go to the top view and i'm going to select the cube and i'm just to move over on the timeline to about frame 145. i can press g to grab we're just going to move this over a little bit so now if i play through this you can see that he kind of jumps and then he kind of slides over a little bit and that just makes it look much more realistic and then i'm going to select the last keyframe and i'll press shifty to duplicate let's bring it over so that he just kind of doesn't move for a little while and then i want to make him kind of look around again so i'm going to go to about frame 70 and then i can rotate this so i'll rotate it on the z-axis just kind of have him look over and so there we go now the cube looks over and then i'm just going to select this keyframe here and i'll press shift d again to duplicate that just kind of move that over so now the cube just stays where he is and then i'll go to frame 205 and i can rotate this on the z-axis so r to rotate z to rotate it on the z-axis and i'll just have him look over like that all right and there we have it so that's going to be it for the animation a pretty simple animation so we can just go back here and let's play the animation so he kind of jumps over looks around jumps over and then jumps on this platform here and then he just kind of looks around now the animation ends at about 215. the animation is just going to end right about here that's where i'm going to end my animation so on the end frame right here i can just click on this and then i can type in two one five four two fifteen so now the animation ends at frame 215 and then if you keep playing it it's just gonna go back to the start frame so let's now add a camera and just do a little bit of camera animation so i'm going to press shift a and i'm going to go right down here to the camera let's just select the camera and remember the auto key is still on so if you want to turn it off you can turn it off i'm going to leave it on and do some animating with the camera so i want the camera to be kind of about here so i'm going to move my view to about here and then i'm going to press ctrl alt numpad 0. that is going to hop the camera to where we are and then i'm going to go to frame 1 and i want the camera to be right here so i can press g to grab and i'm just going to move it up and then stick it right there i can also press g to grab and then double tap the z key and just kind of bring the camera out a little bit and you can see it's added a keyframe right there so now i want to move the camera over to the end which is 215. i'll press g to grab and g to grab we're going to bring this out on the z-axis so you can press g to grab and then double tap the z key just kind of bring that out and maybe also rotate this a little bit so i'm going to press r to rotate let's rotate the camera on the z-axis and then just bring that over now the camera kind of slows down at the end you can see it kind of gets quite slow at the end and i don't want that so what i want to do is change the keyframe interpolation of the camera so that it's very smooth and it doesn't change the speed so what i'm going to do is press the a key in the timeline to make sure both of the keyframes are selected on the camera and then to change the keyframe interpolation you're going to press the t key with your mouse hovered over that and then you're going to click on linear so now if i play through the animation you can see that the camera is just moving and it's not actually changing the speed now you can see that the camera still isn't really fast enough so i can just override this keyframe so i'm going to go to frame 115 and i can press g to grab we can just move this over and i can also move it back a little bit and that's going to override that and now let's just play through this and you can see that is looking much better and there we have it so there is the basic animation now this tutorial is mostly just focused on animation so i'm just going to skip ahead when i've set up some basic materials and done a few more things to make the 3d scene look kind of nice all right and i'm back so i just added some different lights and some different cool materials to make this little like cubic world and then there's like this red cube and he's kind of hopping around the world and as i said earlier if you want to download the project files i will have a free download available on my gumroad and patreon with the links in the description if you'd like to download this file here so now i'm going to show you how to turn your animation into a video file so what i recommend doing is rendering out all your frames to an image sequence and then in blender's video editor you can compile them together into your finished video and i recommend that because if you're rendering this and something goes wrong with the animation if you're rendering it to a video and you have to cancel the video or something is wrong you're gonna have to re-render all the frames but if you render it out to an image sequence you can just throw it into blender's video editor and then you can add music and sound effects and do some things to the video and then just export it real quick to a video file so i would definitely recommend rendering these out to an image sequence so what i'm going to do is right here on the file format i'm going to set it to jpeg images because jpegs are a smaller file size and then i can click on this button right here to set an output and then on my computer i just made a folder called frames i'm just going to click on the accept button so it'll render out all of the frames to images in that folder and then i'll just click on file and save this project again and then to render the animation you can press ctrl f12 or click on render and then render animation all right and the animation finished so we're now just going to throw this into blender's video editor and export it to a video so i'm going to click on file and i'm going to click on new and let's just go down here to a video editing and it's going to open up the video editing layout so right down here on the timeline i'm going to press shift a and let's go down here and add the image sequence and then you're just going to locate to the folder where you have saved all of the frames so i'm just going to press a to select everything that'll just select all the frames and then you can click on add image strip now what's really important is to make sure that the frame rate and the resolution is the same that you rendered it so you can just go back to your other blender file and check what the resolution was a really easy way to set the resolution though is to just select this strip and then click on strip and then you can go right down here to set render size and now it's going to set the render size to what i rendered it as so i rendered it as a 2k resolution video so if you want to add sound effects or music you could do that just by adding it in here um i do need to set the end frame though so the end frame my end frame was 215 frames so on the end frame right here in the corner i'm going to set this to 215 and now that's going to set the end frame now let's scroll down here and we can do the render settings so i need to set an output so i'm going to click on this button right here and i'm just going to save this as final video in a folder on my computer and i'll just click on accept now for the file format i like to use the ffmpeg video i think that works great and then on the encoding i like to use mpeg4 and on the video codec i like to use 8.264 and i just leave this at medium quality and good and then if you have any audio you could set the audio so i'm going to change it to no audio but if you are using some audio then i like to use an audio codec of aac so you can just save this project and then you can click on render and then you can render the final animation and there we have it so there is the finished animation so that is going to wrap it up for this tutorial on how to do animation in blender for beginners so thank you so much for watching this tutorial i really hope this was helpful and i hope you learned a lot from this tutorial and if you'd like to download the free project files i'll have the links in the description where you can download the free project files on my gumroad store and also my patreon page and if you'd like to help support me and my youtube channel i am trying to create blender content and blender tutorials for a living so if you'd like to check out my gumroad and patreon you can get 3d models and assets you can get the procedural materials that i create you can also get the tutorial files for my tutorials and exclusive tutorials as well so checking out my gumroad store and patreon page is a really great way to help support me and my youtube channel so that's gonna wrap it up for this video so i hope this was helpful and thank you for watching [Music]

Channel: Ryan King Art

Views: 1,226,800

Keywords: Ryan King Art, Blender Tutorial, Blender, Ryan King, Tutorial, animation for beginners, beginner tutorial, animation, animate, blender

Id: CBJp82tlR3M

Length: 44min 50sec (2690 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 15 2022