BASICS OF ANIMATION in Blender 2.8 | Part 2 | Graph Editor

hello and welcome once again to gabot media I'm grant Abbott and today I'm going to be going through the graph editor I'm also going to explain the different windows for animating and we're going to do a very simple ball bouncing animation this is the second episode in the series of the basics of animation in blender 2.8 do remember that there's the animation challenge in the month of May so join the Facebook group or the discord server and you can go to my website for more free courses like this one all the links are in the description so this is what you should first see when you open up blender I've enabled my shortcut keys on the bottom left here in case you get stuck I'm going to click on the cube delete it and shift a to add or I can go to the add menu up here but shift day is the same add a UV sphere this time and I'm going to right click on that and shade smooth so it looks a bit better I'm also going to shift a and add a plane so this is going to be our floor and I'll scale it up just a touch and I'm going to click on my ball with left mouse button grab in the z-axis gz1 so that's one blender unit which is a meter so our ball is now standing on top of our floor so first of all let's animate our ball you can see I've got the timeline down here and the timeline is just a basic version of the dope sheet which you can see there so if I go back to the timeline the difference is that I've got my record button here which is very helpful so I can press record now click on my UV sphere press G to grab and just left click so I've not actually added any movement but I have inserted a keyframe because I've got record on all so let's get our tools up here which you can get by pressing N or click on the View panel and that will give me my location so I can see what I'm ki framing so let's go along 15 frames so I right click on my timeline G to grab in the Zed axis and move it up slightly and like a big and I can be more precise and type in 3 here so you can follow along easily so I should have a simple animation of it going upwards now I can copy this first keyframe by clicking it and then shift D to duplicate and pull it across to frame 30 and now I have a very basic bouncing ball what I'm going to do as well if I go to my output settings over here I'm going to change the end point to 30 so that when I press spacebar it will loop these output settings here are the same as these so I could have changed it in here as well so at the moment it's a very poor bouncing ball the reason is the interpolation between the keyframes I'll go into that in just a moment but let's go through the different options we have down the bottom here if I grab the middle between my two viewports and pull it up we have the timeline which you can see here and that gives us this extra record button and a bit of information about the frames we've also got the dope sheet which I talked a bit about last time and that's a more complicated version of the timeline and I can click on this little arrow here and that will give me my information and their specific channels the top channel is a dope sheet summary and I can select all the channels underneath and move them all at the same time by clicking that top one so I don't need to Alt a to deselect B to Bach select and grab them all like this I can just grab that top one and it will grab all the ones below it the same for the sphere but that will grab all the things below in the sphere and then I can go to the specific channels here and grab these individually and can you see how they're selecting individually but if I grab my sphere that will select them all because that's grabbing the whole sphere keyframes I can use the wheel and middle mouse button to strafe along my timeline and move in with the wheel so that's the dope sheet which we'll come back to later the graph editor I'll talk about in a moment and that's how we can change the interpolation between our keyframes drivers are when you set up controls for your animations and have almost like buttons that control certain movements for example that's quite complicated so I won't go into that and the non linear animation if I click on that this is like a timeline you'd expect to see in something like Adobe Premiere or or windows movie maker or iMovie and that breaks down what are called actions into segments and you can put in things like walk cycles and run cycles and idle animations and you actually blend them together but again that's not really for a beginner but what you will find useful is the graph editor which I'll go to now so the graph editor is much like the dope sheet but it shows the information in a graph so if I go to the object transforms here you can see all my channels and the only thing that's actually moving at the moment is the Z location and if I click on that it highlights that curve there I can also isolate that with shift H so it hides everything else except the Zed location and you can see if i zoom in here that it starts at 1 and goes up to 3 now I can hold down control a middle mouse button and move upwards and it will expand it out upwards or I can hold ctrl middle mouse button and move side-to-side and squeeze it in and that can be very helpful so if I look at my curve and the detail you can see the 3 on the side there and the one on the side starting point right mouse button to move across again so it moves up to 3 and back down to 1 but what you will notice is that the curve starts off slow and then slows down again and slows down again so these are what are called Bezier points so if I click on one you can see the Bezier handle so if I press R to rotate not that you need to do that at the moment I can rotate this curve and change the way it interacts so if I play my animation you can see that it slows down as it comes to the floor and it slows down as it goes to the top now this is great if you want smooth motion and it's going let's say from side to side and it slows down that's good but for balls bouncing that's not very good if I select all my keyframes with a and press T that will give me different options for the interpolation so there's linear and you can see it creates a very sharp point which in some ways is better but not at the top here it should slow down as it goes up but it should bounce on the floor so it's correct for these two but not for the middle point if I press T again there's also a constant and that goes along and then quickly changes and it goes along quickly changes I'll show you what I mean it's sort of like an eye off and it can be quite handy for something but we're not going to use that at the moment so if I press T again and go back to my Bezier which is generally what you tend to use you can change these points individually by pressing V and you can change the way you can interact with these handles so free for example I can click on one edge grab that one inch and pull it in but I'll undo that or if I press V again I can go to aligned and that's what we're more used to if I grab that it will align the two ends so I'll right-click to undo any movement there and there's other different options in there as well which there's no need to go into as a beginner but just to know that they're there so how can I make my ball bounce more like a bouncing ball in reality well we said at the beginning should be harsh and in the middle it should slow down and then increase speed and be harsh again to bounce back up so basically if I click on this one and grab the end handle G and then in the x-axis and bring it right in that will create a harsh bounce so you'll see that when it starts off it bounces quite harsh and I need to do the same for this one so grab the end of that G pull it in so it's quite close now we've got those harsh ends now of course what I could have done is I could have clicked on this and press V and then changed it to free and then move this up so it's harsher like that that's fine but I'm trying to keep things simple and just keep - the Bezier handles so I'm just pulling that in for the moment so let's see what it looks like so it looks a bit more like it's bouncing but it's a bit slow to slow down so in other words we need it to slow down faster a bit strange but if I scale this one up you'll see what I mean and now it looks a bit more like a bouncing beach ball which is great we could make this look even better let's extend it out and make it bounce and then bounce less and then bounce less so let's change it to something like 90 frames zoom out a bit and we can actually add keyframes in our graph editor so if I go across 15 again G then said and this time we're going to move it up to so I can actually type too in there and I can copy this point shift D to duplicate move it across in the x-axis by clicking X cross 260 in the same way as you do the dope sheet and let's see what that looks like so it bounces up but there's a bit more I need to do with the curve so I can click on my curves I can bring this one right in G then X bring it right in so it's a sharp point now that one's okay because it's a copy of this one and this one we need to extend outwards so scale this one let's see what that looks like so it's starting to work and then we'll make it bounce even less on this one so we're going to the middle here this time I'm just going to press I in the graph editor on only selected channels so it's just on the Z location and I'm going to put one at the end as well so bring my time line to the end I only selected channel and then I can grab this one in the y-axis although in this case it would be changing the z-axis so don't be confused by that and move it up just a touch and scale it out and lastly bring this one in G then X so remember this is all happening on the z axis even though I said move it up in the y axis because this is obviously the x axis and y axis of this specific channel the last one I'm going to move this in G then X so that's nice and sharp let's see what it looks like that's good but I need to shorten this one in terms of time so time along the bottom here this is exactly the same bounce as this one even though it's going up less distance so it needs to scale in so I can press B to Bach select select all these and press s to scale now at the moment it's not scaling from my playhead which I wanted to so I want it to scale in from this end towards my playhead so I should be able to click this and choose to D cursor now if I press s it comes in towards my playhead so let's bring it in to about there bring our playhead to about here C to circle select this time and middle mouse button to get rid of these ones and then right-click to come out of circle select mode and then make sure my pivot point is here my playhead is here and s to scale these ones down and let's see what that looks like so that's much better so here I am just doing a time lapse of me adding the last points in so there's a little sort of ripple bounce at the end just to make it look more realistic I think it all needs to be sped up a little bit so I can scale it all remember I'm still on my 2d cursor and my 2d cursor is in the middle of this point so it's just there and I can change this to bounding box Center which is the whole thing but it's the center of the whole thing and scale it in that way or what would be better is from frame 0 and changing it back to 2d cursor and scaling it in that way but just in the x-axis and then it keeps the height so now it looks a bit more like a bouncing ball and I think what would be better I can grab all of these in the x-axis move it across and I think insert a starting point over here I only select the channels G to grab in the y-axis move that up bring this one in and scale this one out and scare that out like that now it's falling for us that looks a bit more sensible needs a tiny bit of tidying up and there we have it a bouncing ball animation hopefully that's given you a good introduction to the graph editor you can see that all my keyframes are still in the dope sheet if I just zoom out here and the only channel that I actually changed was the said location so I could easily go in and delete these channels by right-clicking on them and deleting them or shift selecting them and right clicking deleting channels that leaves me with a Z location and it still all works fine so there's the dope sheet and the graph editor showing you the specifics of that channel so have a go at that and maybe have a go at making it jump and roll it starts to get a bit more tricky at that point good luck do remember about animation the animation challenges for the month of May and check out my website for more information on that thanks for watching and I hope this helps

Channel: Grant Abbitt

Views: 117,163

Keywords: understand, texture, paint, how, to, learn, blender, tutorials, 3d, art, graphics, game, material, guide, easy, sculpting, sculptor, sculpt, painting, animaytion, animation, animate, curves, graph, editor, grapheditor, 2.8

Id: bRM0VYSVeQM

Length: 13min 27sec (807 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 11 2019