Animation For Beginners! Learn to Animate like a PRO in blender

hello and welcome to another exciting blender tutorial today we're making this cool drop animation for beginners let's get started okay so we're going to start off by deleting everything so we hit a and X to delete and then we're going to create a ground so shift a mesh plane and going to hit s to scale and we're just going to scale up this ground a little bit then I'm going to go shift a mesh UV sphere and grab Z and just bring it up probably have to be here right click shade smooth what we're going to do is we're going to have this thing fall and hit the ground and Splat and we're going to talk about how would you animate something like that the idea is to do this in a way that is really beginner friendly so if you've never animated anything before and blender this hopefully will be a really useful and helpful tutorial for you so I'm going to go shift a and we going to create a camera you don't always have to use the hot keys by the way you can create this stuff up here with the ad menu so you can create a camera there like that so there's a camera we can hit G to grab and just move it around now we're going to look through that camera so I'm going to hit zero number keypad or click the little camera button just to jump into the camera view I'm going to click this tiny little arrow that you see just next to this XY z um cardinal corre directions um we click this and it'll pop out the side panel you can also hit in on the keyboard that's the way to do that and we're going to go to view and we're going to click on underneath view lock you can see we've got this option lock camera to view I'm going to click that and I can hide this again by just dragging it back and now the camera will stick with my view so I easily frame this up now to help me focus on the shot itself and not this extra stuff I want to darken this outside area just visually for myself so if I click on this camera tab I can come here to viewport display and under this value here passport 2 we can turn that up and it will just darken out everything we're going to do is split the view we're going to create a custom layout for ourselves so we've got access to all the windows we need to do the animation so I'm going to hover my mouse in the top left corner of this uh timeline viewport and click and drag down that will split my view now I've I've got two timelines and this one bottom one we can switch to the dope sheet okay now that I have everything in place let's do some basic animations so I'm going to set a key frame for this ball so it starts up at the top of my screen I'll select the ball and I will hit I which brings me up the key frame menu and I can key frame the location and rotation I can also come over here to the object properties tab for the object and you can click one of these little circles and these set keys for each of these different channels at this point um likewise you can right click on these guys and insert key frames hit I and do a key frame for the location and rotation of this sphere and then I'm going to come forward now what I'm want to do is block this animation out I come over to 36 so if I click the sphere and then G to grab and Zed to lock it on the Zed and just bring it down so it touches the ground here and then I location we don't really don't need to set a rotation key because we haven't changed it so now blender is going to move the sphere down over two seconds right now it's not quite fast enough it needs to be like it's actually falling so I'm going to click this key and I can hit G to grab and this will allow me just to move this key around so I can move this thing right over so now feels a bit better I might move it a bit more now you might be able to tell that it's actually speeding up and slowing down so it starts motionless and speeds up and then slows down as it reaches the bottom which isn't quite what we want because if something Falls it goes faster faster faster bam right so let's have a look at what this thing is doing if we switch from the dope sheet to the graph editor we're going to be able to see these position values that it has over time drawn out as a graph so let's click on the graph editor so here we are with the graph editor now we've got some stuff here under the word sphere under the name of this object this was called something else like ball for example you'll see that it updates here this is that object if we open up the object transforms we've got the X location the Y location and the Zed location you can see the Z location is changing right we've got this curve now before we go any further let me recommend you make one setting let's go up to edit preferences animation we want to come right here and this value right here only show selected fcurve key frames turn that on so by default this is off and if this is off if I draw a box if I select the Z location and I want to like select the Zed key frames and draw a box around it it's going to select everything right all the keys from all the channels and that's really difficult because you can't select stuff if they overlap so it's much easier to come up to preferences turn that on and now first you select the channel you want box selected and nothing else will get selected so that's really useful so we can see here that over time it's speeding up and slowing down so you can think about this you know curve as its position value at each moment each frame now I want this to just go straight down right so I could do this two ways I could decrease the length of this handle see as I drag this in I grab that in that line gets the curve gets smaller and smaller can also scale it so I could grab the key frame itself and hit s to scale and then just move my mouse in it's going to get Tighter and Tighter and Tighter until it's got nothing at all in fact what we could do is just hit s and then type in zero say scale this value all the way down to zero now you can see it speeds up and then it's going to have a hard stop now it still doesn't feel quite right so let's pop back to our dope sheet and let's grabb that final key frame and hit G and let's move it even closer in fact let's take this key and let's change it let's move the sphere up so it's out of frame now we could do the same thing we did before G grab move it up hit I set a key frame or I could turn on auto key by clicking this button right here on the this is the timeline again so the timeline gives you the auto key button and the auto key button basically will just key everything on an object you move on a certain frame so if I grab this now so G to grab Zed for the Zed location and then move up out of frame and then click you'll see that this key turned yellow and what's happened is it's now set a new key frame so there we go now it's falling down out of frame now it feels a bit too fast so I'm just gonna spread that out it's pretty good now you'll see that the colors change right we start out yellow right that means there's a key frame set for this particular input value at this Frame if I go forward one frame they all turn green that means there's a key frame set somewhere for this property but it's not on this Frame and you can see as we scrub through these numbers are changing and that's the Z position so where is it you can see it's changing as it goes right and when I hit the next key boom these guys turn yellow but these don't because there's no key frame for rotation or scale on this Frame it's just on the location if I open up this side menu and drop down the summary we can see ball listed here I can open up the object transforms you can actually see that you can see that the rotation values the rotation channels and the scale channels they only have keys here at the beginning and then there's nothing keyed here so this is just another way to communicate that makes it really easy to see okay with that kind of basic intro out of the way let's talk about how would you make something like this have a cool Splat animation where actually comes apart what I would do in that case is I would have this thing come down and as soon as it impacts I want to actually make a shape with multiple pieces of mesh that are going to feel like what a drop would look like if it hit and broke apart so let's let's make that so on impact the first thing I want is actually I want this thing to squash down so I'm going to come forward one frame off of the last last key frame and I want to scale it down and squash it down so I'm going to hit s to scale Zed to lock it on the Zed and I'll squash it down a bit now I want to maintain the amount of volume in this sphere that's an important part of animation if you change the size of something you need to think about its volume so we squashed it down so that means the sides should pop out a bit right so what I can do is hit s and I want to scale on the X and Y now so I could do a little bit on the X a little bit on the y or I could come over here and click and drag down on the X and Y and move both of these evenly and scale that out now because we have auto key turned on you can see that the values turn orange right now right and it'll turn yellow when I let go that's because it's just set a new key orange is important that means that you've changed the you changed the value right but we haven't set a key frame yet that's what orange means so keep an eye out for orange if you're tweaks and you don't have auto key turned on Orange is kind of a warning hey you should probably set a key frame you've changed this value if you don't you move your playhead or something it will reset the position or the scale or whatever it is that you've been messing with back to whatever the previous or next key frame value is so it'll kind of move it back to that graph uh so the Z position if you'd move that it would move it back to wherever it would be in the animation you had previously so make sure you set a key or turn auto key on so you don't have that problem now right now it's kind of squishing up off the ground um and we don't want that so we also want to bring it down a little bit so that it's intersecting ground here like this and that should be good now there's GNA be a problem with this right and look at this as I go up the scale is you know it's staying squashed as it falls out which isn't what we wanted we wanted it to be circular here and then squashed here so what did we do well if we come down we can see that here are our scale key frames uh we only have a key at the start frame for the original size of the the original shape of the sphere and then our changed position is here and blender is automatically interpolating between these two key frames well if we want to change that we can actually just drag a box around these scale keys and hit G to grab and we can just move them up right if we move it right over it will replace the keys which we don't want but if I just bring it to the frame before you can see now we've got the sphere and then we have the squashed okay so this will be the last frame that this thing is visible if I was to turn off the eye and not the camera and then go to render my animation when I'm all done this ball is still going to render even though we don't see it right now the reason for that is is this button right here the disable and renders button has to be turned off as well for it not to render in an actual render either an image render or an animation render so when you key frame this you want to be make sure you your key frame the render button we're going to keep frame the visibility as well so that we have a visual reference while we're working of what's happening it can be kind of annoying that these are separate you have to do them individually like this but this is how blender works so so let's come up here to the uh camera icon we're going to set a key for this and then the next room we're going to turn it off if I hide it and hit I to set a key while hovering over it it'll set a new key and here you can see it's added to this list disable and renders this is the the two keys that we set now if we want to come over and do the same thing for the visibility right if I set an i hitting I here to set a key for frame or turning it on and off you can see it's not setting an auto key it's not letting me key when I click I and I'm getting this warning right down here Hide viewport property cannot be animated so how do we make it disappear here too so we can see what we're going to see when we render well we need to click on this little filter icon this is a filter for filtering out everything that's in our view here right in our outliner and we're going to come here and turn on this one which is off by default this is display in viewports we just turn that on and that will add whole another value and this one basically is just like the visibility toggle but it's hiding it from the viewport display turn this on hit I and then go back a frame turn it back on hit I and now it will work it will disappear this is kind of frustrating to be frank um it's not very intuitive and I'm sorry that it's like this all right so let's click on this ball again and let's have a look at what's going on now you'll notice if I drag forward it's going to disappear from my timeline and that's really frustrating because now if I go back I don't have those keys and I've got to reclick on the ball which is kind of annoying but this value right here show hidden on the dope sheet so this is the dope sheet if I turn that on it still disappears which is which is annoying we also have to take this which is only shows selected if I turn that off now it's going to show me everything in my scene with key frames and we only have one object in our scene with key frames the ball and when I drag past now it disappears so I've deselected it right but it's still visible here in my dop sheet whereas if I had that turned off I wouldn't be able to see it at all so that is instead of having that disappear I'm going to keep that visible so this is kind of how I keep my dop shei like that just so I can always see everything okay so things Falls it squashes and now let's figure this Frame out I'm gonna go shift a and I'm going to create a mesh uh UV sphere grab it up on the Z and I'm just gonna have a look at the previous frame to see how they overlap and I think I might just make this thing with this previous frame so I can make sure everything lines up I'm going to shade smooth and then I'm going to hit tab to go into edit mode or you can come up here and select edit mode from the drop down now I'm going to turn on proportional editing and I will grab a part of this maybe this bit right here and grab Z and bring it up and if I roll my mouse you can see that it's going to change the size of the circle and will change the fall off of the area that I'm affecting with this grab U this grab operation and so that's pretty good I can hit S as well to scale we could scale the whole thing down you can see like that we've been able to make this kind of drop which is kind of cool now I'll leave edit mode so come back up here switch back out of edit mode and I'm going to rotate this and just kind of position it somewhere that makes sense might give it a bit of curve so I'll come back into edit mode and with proportional editing still turned on I can roll my mouse wheel and you can see that by just dragging down it's like only affecting part of it I can even rotate there we go back to object mode this nice little kind of thing I'm just going to line it up so it looks like it kind of it's coming from the center bit it's good to have a little bit of overlap as well okay now I want to take this guy and I want to set a key frame for its visibility but I want to turn it off visibility from render and viewport now I'm going to go to the frame where the sphere disappears turn this guy back on and there we go so now you can see something's happened what's going on I've I've lost the position that I had for that drop so this will happen to you a lot you need to kind of troubleshoot and figure out okay what just happened and why did it happen thankfully all the information you need is right here nothing's hidden select the object and let's have a look at the dop sheet so we're going to name this drop just so it's really easy to find now you can see here's drop let's come down let's have a look at what's going on I can see that I've got a a location and a rotation value set here and I've got another one set here and if I look at the channel box I can see that these numbers change they go to zero and I know that zero is the default position and it looks like it's been reset back to its default position so this means that I must have had a key set with auto key right here when I made this thing in this original position and I went back to the previous frame moved it around I did some cool tweaks and then turned it off turned off its visibility so what I want to do is probably grab this position and put it here instead so let's try that out I'm just going to box select these channels right here and not bit hard to know what lines up with what so you can also just shift select the channels you want so I can grab these guys and I can now you see they turn bright green and I can box select those green channels now I can hit G to grab I'll just move these over one frame and you can see when they overwrite the other frame the other key frames it's now in the right position so that's exactly what we did we had it in the wrong spot made an accidental key frame there that we didn't intend to make cool all right well let's duplicate this and put another one in the shot so let's shift d to duplicate rotate Zed and grab y bring it over here maybe make this one a little bit further maybe a little bit smaller so it's just a little different and you'll notice that the visibility is key frame so when we duplicated it it kept all the key Frame data on it and brought it along with it so that's really useful so now you can see they both disappear this overlap a little bit better that's a good animation tip is to have like shapes overlap when they're when they're transforming all right maybe one more let's take this shift e to duplicate rotate and maybe rotate Z like this go and maybe make this one small something like like this right here cool all right let's go to the next frame and let's think about how is this shape going to move now we could try and you know move our playhead down to here to frame 20 and like move this over like that and then let blender do the work to move it but that's not really going to give us a very realistic result because what we're doing is actually kind of like working with Clay like we're kind of sculpting out individual frames of how these drops should evolve and change and move so let's let's try and let's try and create something a bit more handcrafted so I'm just going to go to the next frame and I'll move this thing up and I'll put it here this one this this and I might scale this down scale this down not that much that's a bit much now what's important about this is we want these to move in arcs really clear arcs might rotate it a little bit and scale it right down this one again I'm going to rotate remember I've got auto key turned on so it's automatically setting Keys whenever I do this and I'm trying to get them to move in a really clear Arc like the top one has moved too far so I'm just GNA do that AIT less now this little one's quite small now so I might turn it off so I'm going to come over here to the drop I will set a key frame for the viewport visibility and the render visibility go to the next frame and turn it off and set key frames there let's have a look at what this looks like when we play it might come here and scale that one down I just drop it below the floor that's another good way to hide things I feel like at the timing of this is too fast the animation looks cool but it's too quick it's like so what would I do about that well what I can do I can minimize in the dub sheet minimize the three drops and now I've got this nice little summary of all their keys and I could take each of these right here and I could box select them and I could s to scale and this will let me expand them out so they happen over more frames now you can see blender is interpolating in between those key poses that we were setting and this is really important when you're doing animation it's important to maintain control so thinking about things on that frame by frame basis is really important to get the exact movement the exact feel and then you can let kind of flesh out the timing by interpolating now I don't want this to evenly move the whole time like it is like I want it to kind of go right so I want to go up and then I want it to take a little bit longer here for dropping down so what I might do box select these guys and move them out a bit so now we have more of a now I'm going to change the timeline to end at frame 30 this will allow my animation timeline to play back easier now let's take a look at what these look like in the graph editor so let's pop over to the graph editor I'll grab one of these drops and I'll open them up and let's grab the X Y and Zed location I'm using control and my middle Mouse button to drag these around we can also click normalize and this will take all the curves and kind of put them in the same relationship to each other so that if you have values that are really different makes it really hard to see all the graphs at the same time because you have to like move around a lot to find them if you normalize it'll kind of bring them all around to the same space without changing the animation it's just a visual representation of the graphs so you can kind of see them in relation to each other now we got a couple of things here if we select One of These Guys these curves we want them to kind of be want these drops to move in like really smooth arcs and you can see that there's some wobbles in these curves like this good example here is these green Keys see how they kind of wobble now these curves aren't necessarily like the path that it's taking through space but it is a representation of the shape and curve of this motion right so if we make these Curves in the graph feel smooth it will automatically translate to the animation that we're looking at so what we can do is try to clean this up a little bit so for example we can take this x uh value here and I go to this Frame and I can bring it up and you can see that's affecting the rotation now it's going to rotate a little bit more uh gradually let's take this green value here which is the Y position just bring that more in line with this key so that curve just feels a little more gradual we look at the Zed location for this particular drop you can see what happens it's actually plateaus and then it starts to drop which isn't very realistic we wanted to kind of curve up and go down so might grab Y and bring this particular value down so there's more of a a nicer curve you can also rotate keys to change the angle of their handles now let's take the sphere and let's go into edit mode with it and let's just grab that topmost vertex we can pop out of the camera to make sure we've got it turn on make sure you've got poral editing turned on and then grab Zed and let's roll the mouse so make more of a teardrop shape which just kind of feels feels a bit better I think for a liquid that's falling and there you have it we've got a little water drop animation I hope that is really useful for you in thinking about animation and how you don't have to use just one object to do a set of Animation you have to use multiple objects to create cool uh patterns and interesting shapes thanks so much for watching please hit that subscribe button if you want to follow this Channel and find out what happens when it happens and hit that like button if you enjoyed this tutorial and don't forget to leave me a comment as well let me know what kind of tutorials you'd like to see in the future thanks so much for watching I will catch you in the next one until then see you later everybody get up woo [Music] woo

Channel: CBaileyFilm

Views: 9,882

Keywords: blender, blender turorial, blender beginner tutorial, blender 3, blender 4, animation, eevee, graph editor

Id: RUdiAb0jETA

Length: 23min 11sec (1391 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 02 2023