Become a PRO at Animation in 25 Minutes | Blender Tutorial

if you don't know anything about 3d character animation and want to become a pro reddit well you found the right video today I wouldn't be taking you from complete noob to look out Pixar here I come welcome to a new CG geek tutorial my name is Steve also known as Steve Lucci and because you guys voted for it today wouldn't be learning the basics of character animation and the fundamentals of how to animate characters inside of blender because one is free and awesome and as you guys know since I'm like the best at animation why not maybe I don't want to put that in my demo reel and also I'm excited to announce the new CG geeks discord server where all of us geeks are hanging out answering questions giving critique on our finished projects like animations for example so if you want to hang out with me along with that wasn't-- develop artists go ahead and follow that link in the description to the discord and I'll see you over there the 3d character models that we'll be animating today is from the blender cloud there is actually two really cool models that you can download on the blender cloud there's rain and then there's Vincent there's a completely free finished models that are great ready to go for animation so go ahead and download what are these two models there'll be a link below and actually character creation has been something I've wanted to do on the channel for a long time it's just kind of hard prioritizing what to do next but if you want to see that sooner than later leave a like on the video to let me know oh what is this 80% of you guys aren't subscribed that's just a little hurtful do you guys want to make my day smash that subscribe button to join the geek squad I mean with that said let's roll that intro and start animating oh yeah same old intro still working on that new one but hey let's watch it anyway this is taking too long and this video is brought to you by skill share the online learning community for creatives where millions of people are already taking the next steps in their creative journey Skillshare offers thousands of courses on exciting topics like illustration design photography video and a whole lot more I've been watching a course on Skillshare by Tom throws on illustrating expressive stylized characters because I'd love to take my pencil art to the next level in 2020 and this course has been a lot of fun with some really creative tips on how to draw characters and more exaggerated stylized expression as this skill share is sponsoring this video you guys actually have the opportunity to watch this course or any others free yep the first thousand users to join with my link in the video description will get a two month free trial of skill share premium so you can explore your creativity so I'm using rain the character from the blender cloud and I'm just gonna go ahead and open that up inside of blender here and then you just want to click allow execution to let you character fully load up into blender I've been playing around with this rig for a few days now doing some basic character animating getting familiar with it is it really easy Greg to work with and not hard to get some good looking animations with so I'm gonna assume that you know just a little bit of the basics of navigating in blender for example the middle mouse button to kind of paint around in 3d space and then G to move bones R to rotate s to scale these are just a few of the very basic navigational things and if at any point you're not sure which button I'm pressing I have these screencast keys set up down here so you can see what button was pressed to in the corner there so let's get into some animating this is the rig settings here you can turn on and off things like the controls for the hair and the bones and the fingers this is great for turning on and off different bones depending on what you're animating you don't want a whole bunch of bones kind of crowding your space getting in the way when you're trying to animate and actually we can turn off the FK bones for now and just leave the I K enabled but that's really all I'm going to touch in these settings and you can just hit and then to close off your properties tab there so the first thing I want to do is bring in my timeline so I'm just gonna grab the corner window here and pull it up to make a new window and I'll change this window over to the animation timeline right here and as you can see we now have a time line this will show us what frame wrap so where we are in our animation really necessary for doing any sort of animating and blender and it can also do some basic keyframe editing inside the timeline which is again really necessary so to jump right into how key framing works in blender on frame 1 here I'm just going to grab the foot bone there and we'll just pull it up so it's like in a stepping position there and if I hit I this will allow me to insert a keyframe so I can choose location rotation right there and as you can see we now have a orange diamond marking that there's a keyframe on frame 1 and if I scroll through you'll see that there's no animation because you need more than one keyframe to have motion so let's go ahead and add one more keyframe just scrolling through our timeline to frame 20 here I'll grab the foot pull it down to the ground somewhere like that and then if I hit I and choose location rotation one more time I'll insert a second keyframe and now if I scrub through the timeline you can see we have our first character motion and like I said here you can use some basic keyframe adjustments then by grabbing that keyframe and moving along the timeline if you want it to take more frames to complete the action or maybe less frames to complete the action to make it happen faster and this is where you do your basic keyframe editing if you want to do more advanced keyframe editing you're gonna want to split your window here and switch this one over to the animation dopesheet here if i zoom in a little bit and drop this down you can see we have control over a lot more of the keyframes on this so there's a keyframe for every different access and 3d and here if i zoom in a little bit should I hide it over you can see that I can move a keyframe for just the X rotation for example or maybe I want to move just the Z location keyframes this is for kind of keyframe tweaking and where you're gonna do that for retiming your animation now every time you do any sort of key framing in blender it's automatically done on a linear curve this means that as the animation progresses if I pull this out just a little bit here you're gonna see that it starts off slow speeds up in the middle and then it comes to a slow stop and this is because it's on a curve and you can see this if you switch over from the dope sheets to the graph editor you can see on our animation here that we have it laid out as a curve if I just adjust our handle to zoom that in a little bit and this is gonna be how you tweak your animation to get more the right motion and speed that you want so for example if you didn't want this to come to a slow resting stop but more of a stomp you would grab the handle here for the Zed location so as you can see this that location is selected right there and if you didn't want the other access is visible you could just turn them off with these eyeballs so let's turn off the rotation because we don't need those right now and if I grab this handle and rotate it to be a sharp point at the end now you'll see that it comes down fast boom boom and you might want to do the same thing for these other keyframes just make sure that they come down to a harsh stop and then it's gonna be more like your foot stops to the ground and if I pull this keyframe and to make it happen a little bit faster you can see boom you have it come to a stop instead of come to a gradual stop and this is how you would tweak a keyframe animation now actually what wouldn't be doing today is starting with animation blocking this is sort of going through and every second or so on your animation hitting a key pose and then coming back and adding the in-between frames later this is the process that professionals used to hit the key poses that they want in an animation and then you'll work on the in-between frames to polish that animation later so to do this though what you're gonna want to do is you know want to change this from a linear curve to a constant curve and you can do that by just hitting the T key if you're in the timeline here hit the T key and choose an interpolation of constant make sure all your keyframes are selected when you choose constant and you'll see that it's now a sharp change so this is just gonna change from one pose to the next pose and this is the process of animation blocking and that's what we're gonna start off doing for our character animation so now we know the basics of adding keyframes and adjusting the timing and speed of the keyframes we're ready to actually do some cool character animating inside a blender so for starters what you're gonna need is reference reference reference animation reference is basically the most important part of animating and eating the most professional of professionals will use video reference before going to animate something because it's really impossible to imagine what a natural human movement would look like without first visualizing it and seeing some reference of it actually happening so either go ahead and take a video clip if you self-acting like an idiot in your backyard for some character animation reference or if you'd rather use something that's already out there outlined there's a ton of great character animation reference available online and on YouTube one of my favorite references for animation is Kevin Perry's hundred ways to walk video where he does all kinds of different ways humans will walk it's great for character reference as this kind of exaggerated movements which is perfect for 3d animation and what we're going to be using today actually so I recommend picking one of the reference walks in his video for your animation today and we're gonna be going head and blocking out some of this animation another video that I recommend checking out for some good reference along with a lot of animation tips if you're getting into 3d animation this is still a really great video to watch as there's tons of tips and techniques that will translate over to 3d animation and be super useful so with your reference video on hand you're ready to start character animating inside of blender if you want to match your character animation exactly you can actually add it in as a background image in 3d space by going shift a and then adding in an image background right there as you can see but I don't want to match this animation exactly I'm just gonna be using it closely as reference so what I'm gonna do is start off by clearing these keyframes they're going X and deleting keyframes and then if you hit alt R and alt G it will reset the rig to its original pose which is exactly what we want and I'm going to go ahead and close off our extra tab here for animation because we'll use that later on for tweaking our animation so the animation cycle that I'm going to be animating today is the skip just because it's a bit more interesting and emotive than a basic walk and what you're gonna do is you just want to scrub through it real slowly and pick some of the key poses out of it so as you can see there is the post where he's up in the air his arms are swinging and his legs to move in and then there's the pose where he lands on the ground and his legs are kind of close together as they're switching positions which is basically the two key poses in this skip as well as the basic key poses and pretty much any sort of walk cycle there's the legs up and then there's the legs crossing so we're gonna start off by making this pose here the up in the air arms swing in jolly old skipper ruski so I'm gonna go ahead and jump to frame 1 and what can I actually save you a lot of time and animating keyframes is clicking this button right here which is an automatic keyframe insertion basically if you now move any sort of bone and let go it's gonna we add in a keyframe so that will save you a little bit of time in case you might forget to add a keyframe at some point I always use this option so go ahead and leave that enabled and we're just going to hit three to jump into side view and start making the pose that we see here so for blocking you always best off starting with the center bone of your character in this case it's going to be the hips controller right here and getting that in place and then basically working off there so for this animation I'm going to first pose the hips then I'm going to pose the legs and then the arms and etc and also since we're doing a cycle we're not gonna be moving our character horizontally at all we're just going to be keeping it in one place up and down like it's walking on a treadmill and if you wanted to animate it later you could just animate this master sent your bone for the character so I'm just gonna start off by pulling up the pelvis bone here a bit because we're at the height of our skip in this pose and then I'm going to rotate the hip bone a little bit because this leg is gonna be the one up in the air so I'm we're gonna rotate that then I'm gonna grab the left foot there and I'm going to pick it up in the air for a jolly old skip we'll rotate a little bit position it something like that and then this foot we want to be kind of down this is the one pushing off the ground so we're just going to kind of zoom around our character using the middle mouse button we'll go ahead and rotate the step controller bone here to push it up on their toes a little bit and then go ahead and just pull that back and that looks like a good position for the legs now we'll go ahead and position the hands because this leg is forward the hint this hand will be kind of swinging backwards right along here and you just want to keep this arm nice and relaxed looking we're kind of kind of throw it back there rotate it then positioning the right hand as well this one's gonna be up in the air opposite the leg that's up in the air so we'll go ahead and position this somewhere around there we're doing a jolly old skip and there's our basic blocked out skipping animation we can go ahead and block it out just a little bit more but something like that is looking pretty good for the height of the jump here I might rotate that toe down a little bit like she's jumping off the ground there and there's the basic first pose we're gonna come back and tweak a few of these bones later so I'm just jumping forward to frame 10 in the timeline here I'll zoom in a little bit with my middle mouse button and we're going to go ahead to the next major pose to block it out so our next major pose is the leg cross over as our character lands on the ground as you can see right here so this is going to be arms at the legs crossing over each other so again I'm going to start off by grabbing the center pelvic bone we're gonna pull it down because our character is kind of landing on the ground here this foot is going to come all the way down to the ground and be flat on the ground now so we want to rotate that back to be a nice flat foot and position it on the ground and this is the leg that's going to be crossing over being picked up for the next skip in the animation here you also want to rotate the hip bones because we're no longer jumping off that leg so we can go ahead and straighten out the hip bones for this keyframe the arms as I mentioned have to be swinging down to the waist now because of course we're coming down at the bottom of our skip here so I'm just pulling the arms down to a sort of neutral position along the side of our character and there's our basic crossover pose then you don't want to hit a to grab all your bones and then under the timeline here hit T and choose constant because as I mentioned we're only blocking the animation right now we're not working on the in-between frames so as you can see here now we have our two poses the top of our skip and then the landing of our skip with the next leg pulling up for the next jump now what we can do to save on a lot of time is when you have a character you're walking or skipping the pose with their left leg is going to be the same with their right leg what you can do is you can actually copy our first pose here where our left leg is the one up in the air hit a to select all of your bones there and go pose copy pose and then what we can do is move on to where we want the right leg to be the one up in the air which will jump to frame 24 and instead of having to reanimate this we can just go pose paced posed flipped this we'll go ahead and put our right knee up in the air like it is with the left one here and basically just flip the animation and you can see this works for the most part there's a few keyframes that need to be tweaked where the elbows as you can see right here all right pointing the right direction so what I have to do for this is just go to that keyframe grab our elbow and pointer this is where the elbow will be pointing at and just pull it down so we have the arm at the waist there I'll go ahead and just add a little bit of variation to this one by pulling that arm down a little bit there something like that and that pose looks pretty good to me now we can do the same thing for our second keyframe here just copy it by hitting a to select all the bones pose copy pose jump to frame 30 we're just going by increments of 10 right now to keep it simple and we'll go paste post flipped again and now you can see we have our character in the in-between pose but flipped this time as I mentioned you might have to tweak a few of these bones just a little bit mainly just the hand balance it seems get a little bit messed up when you do this now all we need is one more major keyframe to make this loopable and that is the first keyframe so all we need to do is jump over frame one with all the bones selected again go pose copy pose and we're just going to paste this one not flipped at frame 40 here so just paste pose right there and if I made our timeline only last 40 frames which is all the key frames we have here so I'll just change the end here to be 40 actually we're gonna go 39 because we want one less frame because we don't want that duplicate frame in there from 40 to zero you can see that our animation would cycle to do so this is our first pass of character animation blocking and this is when you want to make some of your more major tweaks maybe to the animation so I might want to take our first frame here and just make it a little bit more exaggerated let's give her a little bit more height in her skip with putting a little bit of extra bounce in her step we'll go ahead and pull this keyframe up a little bit pull it back a little bit like she's really jumping forward into that animation a little bit more and this is where you can kind of go ahead and just push the limits of what a normal character could do because we're going for more of a stylized cartoon animation and make it just a little bit more exaggerated at this stage so we're just giving her a lot of energy in her step a lot of energy in her arms maybe we'll rotate those hips forward just a little bit and if you're happy with your more extreme pose then you can go ahead and of course copy it to those other locations again by going copy pose jump into frame 20 and pasting the pose flipped you might want to tweak that elbow again right there but otherwise it's pretty good and ready to go and then of course you just need to paste that pose again on frame 40 so now we have our major poses sort of blocked out here we need to work on our in-between pose for the in-between pose I'm going to pick the frame where both feet are on the ground and one arm is up in the air this is sort of the transition pose between the two poses we already blocked out here so jumping back into blender you'll see that at frame five we'll want to go ahead and make this pose so starting off with our hips we want the character to have landed on the ground because all feet are touching the ground at this point so we're gonna pull that Center pelvic bone down a little bit grab the feet and land them on the ground as well if you accidentally hide your bone you probably put eh and is alt H to unhide it that's something that I tend to do a lot because it's right next to G so I thought I'd mention that placing the feet of the ground pulling the center hip bone down to give a nice sort of landing position this arm should still be up in the air just pull that elbow down a little bit this arm should be kind of swinging to the side that should work is a pretty good in-between frame if we kind of scrub through here you can see we have that in-between pose so now that we have these three key frames these are the only major key frames we really need in this skip walk animation cycle that we're creating so all we need to do is copy and paste these frames now as we were doing earlier to make it a walk cycle so I have these three frames and I actually want to pull frame 20 in to be a little bit tighter so now we can kind of work on the timing of these key frames so we have these first few frames and it takes a little too long to get to frame 20 so I'm gonna go ahead and pull this in a few frames maybe you drop it at about frame 16 right there so you can see we have that do to do perfect and now all we need to do is copy and paste our landing pose flipped for the other side so I'm going to grab key frame 5 grab all the bones on key frame private go pose copy pose now I'm gonna jump to frame 20 or 21 here we'll say 21 and go pose paste posed flipped perfect all we need to do is correct those two elbowing bones because those didn't flip properly and that looks pretty good with all of our bones selected we can grab these frames here pull them in about five frames after twenty-one so we're gonna go to 26 with these and then grab our last major keyframe there and we're gonna position that at 31 now we just need to make our finish timeline last only 30 frames because that is the number of key frames we have now and we should have a nice cycling keyframe animation and we do so this is happening a little fast right now and I mainly want it to hold its key pose of the character being in the air longer so I'm gonna grab all the key frames after frame one and we're gonna make this last until about 10 frames there so the jump in the air lasts a while and they're gonna move all of these frames forward to frame 30 so we have those gaps where our character is in the air that looks pretty good and if we adjust our timeline for those key frames now you can see that we have a better looking skip animation so now that our basic key frames are looking pretty good it's time to add a little bit more of those adjustment key frame that I was talking about so here's where you can spend a lot of time sort of perfecting your animation a little bit starting by adding in a few more keyframes to different bones so I'm gonna hit end to bring up our character layers here and turn on the FK bones this will allow me to sort of rotate and stretch these shoulders with on frame 1 when the left leg is up we might want these shoulders to kind of be rotated to match that a little bit so what I can do is I can grab the waist here and rotate it to kind of match the swing of the hips there a little bit as well then we go ahead and jump back down to frame 15 rotate that back to be more in the center there and then I frame 20 we rotated the opposite direction because our character is now jumping with the other leg there so we'd rotate that along the way that ways we might have to move the hand balance a little bit to match that movement and there you can see we have that little extra skipping the shoulders as they're kind of rotating you can see if you look straight down a little bit more the bone you might want to just in some of these frames is the chest bone when our character is at the top of her jump there might be a little bit more stretched out and when it lands on the ground you might be a little bit more hunched over here you might want to work on the hair animation so in the character properties tab here you can turn on the hair we can go ahead at frame 1 and position the hair from however we want it at the top of the skip the hair we kind of be blowing back here so we can go ahead and grab these keyframes position it so the hair is kind of blowing back on the head there as you can see here jump forward to the landing keyframe here the hair will be kind of coming in at frame 15 the hair shouldn't be kind of bouncing against the back of the head a little bit pacing that first frame at the end again we can see we may now animated the hair to kind of go with the animation and this is where you can see the animation blocking just makes it a lot easier to make sure you're hitting those key poses but now we're done with the blocking and we can tweak some of the curves on the animation so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hit a to grab all of our keyframes under the timeline here I'm gonna hover my mouse and hit T and switch it back to be easier curve now if I play it you can see we have our character animation with those curves so the animation looks pretty good but again we have those keyframes that kind of look like they are floating because everything is on a Bezier curve so here's where you can tweak your animation using the graph editor so I'm gonna split my window like I showed earlier and I'm going to switch this window over to the animation graph editor and as you can see you have all these confusing keyframes that might kind of intimidates you a little bit but we're only going to focus on a few bones to tweak here so I'm gonna grab the pelvic bone in the center of the mesh first and we're only going to be focusing on the Y location of this bone so I'm going to turn off all of the other axes of this bone so we just have the Y location making it nice and easy to see what we have selected and here you can see this is where we want the character to kind of gain some momentum falling so she comes to a faster stop once you kind of lands at the bottom of her skip all we need to do is grab our handle and pull this to be a much tighter landing for that bone right there and as you can see now our character lands with a little bit more weight so we want to go ahead and do that for the first time a character Lance as well making it nice and sharp so our character lands with a little bit more weight to her body the other thing we want to do is adjust the timing a little bit of a few of the bones not all of them just the center pelvic bone because right now is taking five frames to jump in the air and then ten frames to come to a landing which is pretty fakie looking because gravity will be pulling you down on a jump just as fast as you're going up so we need to adjust that and that is where we want to go to the dope sheet like I showed earlier so we'll switch from the graph editor here over to the dope sheet zoom in here a bit drop this down so to make our character float a little bit less in the air we're gonna grab the Y bone here in our dope sheet and on our first jump here it should land on the ground a little bit quicker than ten frames so what we're gonna do is we're gonna grab the falling animation there and we'll pull it over three frames so it's landing at frame seven now instead of frame ten and I'm gonna go to the next jump here and when do the same thing where we're gonna pull this frame over about three frames so our character lands on the ground a little bit faster after her jump so just with those two key frames offset you can already see that the animation looks a lot better now the other thing that you can actually tweak in the graph editor that makes animating really easy as I can see here I think maybe her feet a little bit too far spread apart I think it might be a little bit nicer looking if they're a little bit closer together so what you can do is you can switch now from the dope sheet back to the graph editor foot bone selected to make it easy we'll just turn off the visibility of all the different locations except for the X location over here leaving just the X location the one selected so then on the graph editor I can hit a to just select all of the X location keyframes and then if I hit G and Y you can I can move the location of that X keyframe anywhere wants along the x-axis and this is really great because you keep all of the keyframe animation data and you're just tweaking all of those keyframes along one access so by hitting G and Y and then holding shift to make just a very minor change I can pull that leg in a little bit closer and I think that just looks a little bit better I can do the same thing with the other foot there and just pull that leg in a little bit tighter there something like that and now you can see as our character moves the legs are a little bit tighter together and I think that just looks a little bit more natural so now you can spend as much time as you like going through and tweaking this animation if you maybe want the head to kind of rock with the animation you could rotate that a little bit at the peak of the jump and now you can see you have a little bit of head movement making that look a little bit more natural adding a little bit of rotation along the Y to the hips to kind of have them twist a little bit as the body twists with the legs can look nice and what's just doing a little bit of tweaking on your character you can see that you now have a nice sort of skipping animation going on and if you wanted to turn off the rig just hit the little eyeball up there so you can see what the character looks like without a rig so there's our finished basic character animation we have a nice little skipping character jolly Jolly skipping along the road here and this was a lot of fun to do so that's the basics of character animating inside a blender this is just a simple animation that we whipped up in what twenty thirty minutes not too much work at all and as you can see it's a ton of fun to play around with if this is to normal of an animation for you though you just grab a center bone and really get the character stretch and going on but I hope you guys enjoyed this video created some cool animations and as I said we now have these CG geeks discord server so if you created some animation and you want some feedback on it go ahead and join our discord server hanging out with me and thousands of others CG artists where we're all creating cool things together and sharing what we creates over there so now I encourage you to go ahead and create some more extreme animations here's one that I worked out in an evening the other day and as you can see it's just a lot of fun to get some more extreme animating and that's where you really need the character blocking to make sure you hit all those key poses throughout an animation like this and here's another walk cycle that I made using the character rig just a lot of fun to play around with different styles of walks and whatnot so I hope you had some fun learning how to animate characters in blender if you did I appreciate that thumbs up and let me know if you had any comments in the comment section below but now I must go so I will see you all at other time mother

Channel: CG Geek

Views: 1,571,422

Rating: 4.9091215 out of 5

Keywords: Blender, Animation, Tutorial, Game Engine, UnReal, How to, Animate, Beginner, Easy, Free, unity, pixar, animating

Id: _C2ClFO3FAY

Length: 26min 2sec (1562 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 17 2020