Blender 2.7 Tutorial #14 : Intro to Animation

hello and welcome our four team of new series how to use blender 2.7 in this video we're talking about the art of animation which is of course the art of making things move over a sequence of time now it's important to know that people go to animation school for a long time to learn how to make objects and characters move in a realistic and believable way everything from let's say a ball bouncing to making objects look like they're moving in the wind or following with gravity all the way up until making characters look like they are acting like they have motivation and in control motions it takes a long time to practice and learn how to do well but luckily actually creating that motion blender is very easy let's go ahead and get started by clicking on the splash screen and earlier in this video series when I set up blender I actually got rid of one of the windows that we need in blender to the other interface that we need for animation we're going to make it again so I'm gonna grab this little cross hatched area and divide this window in two by dragging it down on it with my mouse and we're going to make this very narrow little window into a timeline window so what I'm gonna do is click on this little change window button I'm going to change it to a timeline so what a timeline is if you ever use any video editing software or any other animation software you'll notice a timeline is it's a visual representation of movement or keyframes over a sequence of time so right now our timeline is 250 frames long and by default in blender if you look under the camera tab in your properties window the default frame rate is 24 FPS which means frames per second which is the standard traditional film frame rate in movie theaters and an old film cameras if you want to change it you can 29.97 is the frame rate of North American and TSE TV but 24 frames per second looks really good for animation we need one more window in our user interface so I'm going to grab this little cross hatched area again and i down on it and this next window above the timeline is going to be a dope sheet now a dope sheet is a term used in traditional animation it's very similar to a timeline but a dope sheet kind of gives you a bigger view a bigger kind of scope of what's going on in your whole animation just like the timeline it shows you a sequence of frames but by default it shows you a much longer sequence all the way up until frame 1500 and by default blenders timeline is only 250 frames long there are a few technical differences as well we'll get into that but we should have to to start animation right now I'm on frame 1 of my animation how do I know that well this green bar same with anything with this one is what actually says 1 but down here at the bottom of our timeline we can see that we're at frame 1 this is the current frame indicator if I grab this green bar in either of the windows you can see that it slides along so we can go to different points in time to actually make animation happen what we have to do is turn on this red record button which means automatic keyframe insertion so let's go ahead and go to our front orthographic view in our 3d viewport and I'm gonna turn the animation button on but now we have to decide where an object is going to be but more importantly what time that location is going to be so I'm going to go back to frame 1 and I know in my head that I want the cube to be wait about here at frame 1 so I have to go to frame 1 and then with the red record button turned on I'll tap G and move the cube there and as soon as I tap to let it go you're going to see a few things happen in my dope sheet and my timeline so I'm going to click what happened is that we made a keyframe because this automatic key frame insertion button is turned on whenever we move or rotate or scale any object in a 3 viewport around it makes a keyframe it tells that object to be at that location or at that rotation or at that scale at this point in time but we need to keyframes to make animation so I'm gonna go one frame later and then go to frame 24 and I can actually type down here in my current frame indicator a number and press Enter so now we're at frame 24 I'm actually going to zoom in on the dope sheet so it kind of resembles the same length as the timeline right about there and we're gonna move the cube the other side again I have this record button turned on so when I let go it's going to make a keyframe here and here as well these are really the same thing and please don't get confused that you actually see for here this cube you can collapse it that's the name of this cube go figure it only has two keyframes and this top bar is a summary of all the keyframes of all the objects in the scene so we have two keyframes so we have animation let's go back using our VCR buttons down here and let's press go back the beginning and now we'll press play and it plays the animation now what it actually did is it ended all the in-between frames for us because this is keyframe animation or keyframe based animation which means we don't have to do every single part in between blender is very good at doing the in-betweens for us so we don't have to but right now if I press play it's going to loop through the entire 250 frames of our timeline so what I can do is I can change this end value right now it's 250 we can change it down to let's say 50 and press Enter and likewise you can make the animation longer if you need more time if your animation has more keyframes on this of course you can make it any length that you like well I'll go ahead and press play and so the animation ends and then it loops back to the beginning once it gets down to 50 and I'm going to zoom in here by scrolling up on my mouse or scrolling down depending on what kind of mouse you have and there we go if you watch this over and over and over again you'll notice that the cube is not moving at a constant rate you'll notice that it actually speeds up at the beginning and slows down at the end and that's because of the interpolation of these two frames interpolation basically means the curvature if you look at the movement on a graph of time versus location which is actually what our graph editor window does which we'll look at in a minute you'll see that the interpolation is not linear it's curved in other words bezier if you're familiar with any vector drawing tools like Bezier curves that that's what this is let's go ahead and make our cube jump though so I'm gonna go halfway in between to frame 12 and I'm gonna make my cube go up in the air and because we still have this red record button turned on it made a keyframe before we watch it though I gotta warn you you need to turn this red record button off unless you actually need to do animation what happens is a lot of beginners leave this on and then they do things like adjust the lights or add more lights or move things around and they're seen not intending to animate them but then things start acting very strange when you save and reopen the file things might snap back to their old location we're things just happen please always make sure that you only have keyframes on the object that you intend to have if you don't want a keyframe on something of course you can select keyframes in the dope sheet that's one of the technical benefits of having this dope sheet on your screen and you can delete with the X or Delete key on your keyboard and you can get rid of keyframes that way so let's go ahead and watch this animation so we'll go back to beginning and press play and we have our jumping animation but you know what I think I want a different speed let's say I want this a jumping animation to happen quicker that currently is or maybe in slow motion well what I can do is I can actually select key frames in this dopesheet window and then move them so I can you know have one selected by right-clicking on it and I can tap G so now the second part of this animation takes a lot longer it's very slow I can undo that but we can also scale an animation as well if I select these key frames with box select in other words I tap B on my keyboard and select those key frames I can scale them now what I'm going to do is put my cursor my my playhead in other words right over the first frame and now I can tap S and that will scale the animation we make it bigger or make it smaller again the S key to scale and I make this longer takes more time and therefore is a slower animation so now that breasts play the cube moves a lot slower and it's only actually going to frame fifty which is only halfway through if i likewise press pause and scale being an animation down let us how it's scaling towards the playhead which is why it's good idea to put your playhead right at the beginning so you can scale towards it or towards the end you can scale up that way as well I'll scale towards the beginning make my animation very quick let's say right there and press play and it happens a lot quicker so I hope you understand that let's talk about interpolation but before we do that let's talk about inserting keyframes manually I'm actually going to leak this whole animation so with everything selected with the a key I'll press X to delete and click on delete if you do not want to use this red record button let's say you don't have a timeline up you probably should but let's say that you have the cube already in a starting position and you just want to say hey I want to keep this cube there but I want to make a keyframe of the cube in this location at this time what you can do is if you want to do it the kind of sloppy wet you can turn on the record button and you can just kind of jiggle the cube and we move it up and down it recognizes that and makes a keyframe the better way to do that though is to have the cube selected and tap I on your keyboard the I key brings up your insert keyframe menu and you can select different kinds of keyframes now the default kind when you have your red record button turned on is it inserts a keyframe for location rotation and scale those are the three things you can animate with so if I only insert a location keyframe and then I go let's say again to frame 24 and I move right without the record button turned on I move the cube it didn't insert a keyframe because I don't have a regret record button turned on but what I'll do is I'll have to I and also insert just another location keyframe the animation will still play by only record of the fact that you know it's location moved if I scaled this cube on just this keyframe it won't scale to be small and then big because this keyframes data only included its location information so if you want to animate location and size and rotation over time you need to use look Road scale so I go back to this keyframe and insert a Lok location location scale keyframe and now I can scale the cube down let's make it really tiny like that and I'm gonna go to this keyframe over here and let's go ahead and move it up now I made a mistake there I actually did insert a scale keyframe right here so it is going to grow whoops what happened there I gotta go scale put it on the ground and tap I look row scale so now it should know that this frame is that size and let's scale it up on this frame and tap I and insert a local scale keyframe in fact let's move it up and cert that keyframe again and now it should grow from small to big there we go I'm going to make my cube jump and do a flip in midair so what I'm going to do is go halfway in between move it up in here maybe make it do a rotation and there we go and I'm going to tap I to actually insert that keyframe we'll use a little crowed scale and so now it actually does kind of a flip and then it reverses back and that happened because this keyframe this third key frame had rotation data we rotated it basically 360 degrees from point A to point B and then it rotated back to the way it was sort of rotate back the other direction for this one so what I could do here if I want to rotate this cube 300 it were actually two times 360 I can go to this keyframe and then in my properties panel you can see under transform and by the way that panel is the N key the rotation at this keyframe is basically 360 so I want to keep going on make it spinning at constant rate so I'm going to type in here and that's the green axis set of spinning leveled is why I'm going to type 2 and I think you can do this a star 4 times that shift 8 360 aha 720 I was alerted to get in my head and so now I'll tap I to insert that location rotation scale keyframe and now we have a cube spinning animation but last thing I want to do is stop this cube from speeding up and slowing down so I'm going to drag this little crosshatch stereo I'll get rid of that window and I'll divide the window in two we're going to turn this side window into a graph editor that's what I was talking about earlier with Bezier curves oh my gosh look at this because we have the cube selected we can see all the lines of direction again on the bottom is keyframes over time and this is distance traveled up and down so you can see that on the x-axis this red line the cube does the most movement it moves from here on the X red axis over to here over time but you can see because it's sticking not moving a lot at the minutes beginning section it's not moving a lot distance wise especially in this first little section here but it's moving a lot more over time that means it's not it's slow in that time and then it speeds up over time when it gets steeper so what I can do is I can right-click on any of these little orange handles and I can right click to drag them around and easy these aren't Bezier curves and I want to change the interpolation of any or all of these points and this does take some practice I'm not perfect at it by any means I tend to just do my animation visually what you can do is select a point and then go down to key and change the interpolation mode which is the T key again key interpolation mode which is just the T key as well and here are the three types of an interpolation constant linear and Bezier the only one I want to talk about is linear by default all keyframes are busying if I change this keyframe to linear it goes from a straight line or into a straight line and therefore the cube will no longer start slow and start speeding up it'll just go at a constant rate which is what you might want there we go the end frame still does slow down towards it so what I'm going to do is go to the this keyframe and then change with the T key my tribulation to linear it does not do both sides sometimes I'm not entirely sure my understanding of of interpolation modes is not that great but I can right click on this little busy a handle and drag it and make it both straight right there click there we go so now if I play it back hopefully it's a little bit more linear over time there we go so let's going to be it for this video thanks for watching and again the warning is turn this record button off if you're not need to animate I'll see you next time Oh

Channel: BornCG

Views: 96,457

Keywords: Blender, Blender 2.7, cycles, animation, animate, animator, 3D, tutorial, digital, media, cartoon, Blender (Software), 3D Modeling (Film Job), Animated, lesson, help, tip, teach, trick, CG, CGI, learn, Tips, Tricks, Please

Id: EcInAv9iHmU

Length: 16min 47sec (1007 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 02 2014