Blender 2.91 Character Animation Tutorial For Beginners!

hello and welcome to another exciting blender tutorial today we're going to be jumping in and doing some animation with our little droid let's get started [Music] okay so um if you've been following along the droid series um just doing a few simple tutorials we did one you know modeling and texturing this guy and then we did another one about rigging and we've made this little rig for our robot so i thought it'd be really great just to do one more and talk a bit about basics of animation now a lot of people jump into blender uh because they want to do animation you know they see a pixar movie or something and they go i want to do that and so they dive head first into tutorials and they start learning all this stuff and you know what blender is a great piece of software to use for animation especially computer animation um you can do hand-drawn 2d animation all kinds of stuff with it but um it's just really great i use it for all my professional work it's just fantastic so if you're learning blender don't feel like you're wasting your time or you're learning something that's not going to pay off in the long run you're learning a great piece of software and i guarantee this thing's going to be you know even more popular as the years go ahead so very worth your time i thought what we do is we talk a bit about the principles of animation and kind of approach today like basically like a ground like a foundations course in animation how do you think about animation how do you approach it what are the problems you run into and you know what should you be doing when you're thinking about what you want to animate especially when it comes to a character character animation is really specific and unique now there's some little tweaks we need to make to our rig just to kind of expand it so the first part of this tutorial will just do a little bit more rigging and then we're going to get into talking about animation and we might even get to do a little walk cycle possibly for this guy i think that might be fun all right so let's get started now um if you'd like to make this little robot so that you can follow along with this tutorial you can find those tutorials for free on my on my youtube channel here you can watch the modeling the droid so that you can make him and then rigging the droid so you can rig him if you don't want to go through that process and you want to just go ahead and just get this droid and just jump in in the animation you can actually get it right now i've got it up on gumroad so that you can you can buy it there if you want to just have this project file if you don't want to go through the time yourself of building it you can also get it if you become a member of the patreon so you can join up on patreon we've got a lot of great things there and at the 10 level you get project files but only project files for the month so if you're thinking about it jump on it now for the month's over you get it for this month in the previous month so you've got this month and next month to jump on that anyways i'll put all links to that stuff in the description below check it out and uh again if you enjoy this video and you want to see more stuff like it please hit that like button the more people that like it the more people that leave a comment the more others can discover this stuff and my channel can grow and we can keep making more cool tutorials so i really really appreciate all the support that everyone's been throwing my way it's just really amazing so thank you very much now um the first thing we need to do is kind of improve our rig a little bit we've got a little problem if i grab my foot bone impose mode that we made and i move it around you can see that the foot is it's it's kind of dropping below the ground so if i have a ground plane here um in in my scene oops uh add a little plane scale it up bring it down so that it's right at the feet it's right about there uh you can see he's gonna be his foot's always gonna be going below the ground so that's gonna be really annoying for us if um you know we're animating because it means that every time we do something you know where there's a bit of bend or rotation we're gonna have to like come in here and also then rotate the foot and animate that it's just a lot of extra work but we don't have to worry about that so when we are in pose mode we come over and we select our foot bone so not our controller bone so make sure you're selecting the foot bone itself we want to come over here to the bones tab and we want to go under uh relations now relations just it's all the stuff that deals with how this bone relates to other bones and automatically you've got things here like inherent rotation turned on so it's going to inherit the rotation of its parent bone and this uh leg bone is the uh parabone so that's how that's going to work now if we turn off inherit rotation you'll see the foot pops back up into place so that's exactly what we want to do with both these guys so i'll select my other foot and i'll turn off inherit rotation now if i move this around you can see well we're still going through the floor because i didn't actually put it in the right spot but you can see the foot's flat so that's good more importantly if i bring this bone back up so that the feet are on the ground i grab the body here i can move him around and his feet are going to stay planted you know and he could dance and that's great you know because why not have a dancing droid you know all right so let's uh i'm gonna select all type f3 and i'm going to type in reset just to reset my post now next thing i want to do is i want to give a look control to my robot so it's really handy when you're animating you know you want to have your robot look at something it's great to actually just use a bone for that because you can actually position that bone right where you want it to go and it's just really effective so i thought we'd do that as well so let's go into edit mode because we need to add a bone and i'll just grab the big master bone and i'll hit shift d to duplicate we don't need to do that we could also just delete that we can hit shift a and that's just automatically going to add a bone because there's no other options to add like you couldn't can add mesh into an armature that's when you hit shift day it doesn't give you a menu like it does everywhere else it just gives you a new bone anyways this phone's not parented to anything whatsoever but we could just stick it out here somewhere like like so make it as big or small as you want um i will line it up so let's see we'll pick it dead on the um the y uh oh wait why did why did it do that oh no x that's what i meant so i'll zero out my x value for both of them and then i'll just grab them on the y and bring them out so that's why he's just like he's right in the center of our scene right down the middle of our guy and then we can do is we can take this bone right here go into pose mode so take our master controller because this is the one that controls you know kind of how he's turned and like the way he's looking and stuff and we can create uh a constraint so we come to the bones constraint tab there's all kinds of toys in here for you to play with these are a lot of fun i encourage you to just run through them try all kinds of stuff but what we want to do is we want to go for a damped track now damp track is a constraint that basically points one bone at another that's the simplest way to do this you can use it for like you know gun turret or you know eyes or a robot head like we're doing anyways we're going to just grab a little picker thing and click on this and then we need to set what what is the axis that needs to be tracked so it's set automatically to y and the reason for that is because we it's kind of logical we put this thing way out in front on the y-axis so it's it's probably correct let's just have a look uh no it's not correct um so oh sorry we need to actually select the phone so it the target selects the rig i always mix that up it's really important remember if you when you first thing you got to select the target is actually the rig itself because it might actually you might be tracking to another rig so a good way to think about that is like say you've got a character with a you know he's going to pick something up you know so he's got his hand and you've animated his hand and there's a cup you might have that cup uh rigged to one bone right so that whole cup is controlling is being controlled by that one bone but that's a different armature it's not the same armature as your character so when he brings his hand down to pick up that cup you could actually use this to uh to cause him to like look at it like to point um you know point towards the cup so wherever he lifts the cup his eyes would follow that cup so that's how that works that's why you got to kind of do this both so let me i'm going to name this one as well we should do that so instead of just bone i'll call this look control so it's nice and clear and i come back to this go back to my constraints tab and now i can just type in look control as opposed to scrolling through the whole list and hit enter and boom he's going to bow down in reverence to the look bone which you know that's fine but uh we can also move these around to get him in the right position so there we go zed is the right access so again i didn't know that i just clicked them randomly until it looked right so i don't feel like i'm you know no more than you because i don't really in fact you know the best way to find out you don't know anything is to start making tutorials on on youtube because everybody in the comments tells you what you should have been doing in the first place it's great to learn i mean it's very handy for learning i learn a lot anyways now we have a look control you can see the advantage of it it's really nice it's just something we can animate easily all right great so that's that's it for our rig i feel like we've got some really really great controls so i'm gonna hit a again f3 reset just gonna keep resetting my pose now this pose this guy's up a bit high so i might just just you know i just might might bring him down a little bit in edit mode i'm going again bring it down a little bit more there we go now he's not looking up cool okay perfect now let's go into pause mode and start talking about animate i'm going to switch from my timeline view i'm going to go to my dope sheet dubshi is very powerful it's actually kind of similar to the timeline because in the timeline you can you know open up a summary and get all the different things that are keyframed sorry coffee break so how do i want to break this down i love animation animation is so much fun it's so exciting it's great i'm so happy to be teaching this to you one of the tempting things when you're animating right uh oh yeah another thing would be really helpful is i'm just going to drag up now if you don't know if you like put your little mouse in the corner of any window you get the little plus symbol you can click and drag and that breaks it into a new window so just be aware that i'm going to switch to my timeline view now the timeline here the reason why i'd like to have this up with the dub sheet is because i like this control right i like to be able to click to the end or click to the beginning um or jump to specific keyframes there's hotkeys for that but i just like i also like being able to change the start and end time of my scene really easily and um anyway so i i keep this up but i just drag it right down because i don't need anything but these controls um and it would probably make more sense to put it underneath that'd be really nice like you'd look good it would be like the bar down there with the controls and anyways you could you could you could do it however you want it all right so first up um the tempting thing that you would want to do right if you're animating you can make a rig you're really excited you want to just jump into it right and so you're like oh that's gonna be great i'm gonna i'm gonna animate this guy he's gonna start here right and i'm gonna hit i it's gonna bring up my keyframe menu and i'm gonna go i'm gonna do my location on my look control and then i'm going to come forward to like this frame and i'm gonna move him over here so he's like looking at me and i'm gonna hit i again for my location and he's like he's like yeah look he looks at me that's so cool then i'm gonna grab my my master controller i'm gonna hit i here and go forward and i'm gonna like bring him down and oh he's a bit he's a bit wonky but um that's all right um i'll uh i'll bring this down too maybe yep that'll look good and then i'll select both these guys and i'll do my location keyframe and then it's like oh this is cool you know and oh it's a bit slow and maybe i'll drag these keyframes and i'll pull this like this and anyways the point i'm trying to make is uh you end up with something right this is something he's he's alive he's moving but you don't end up with a lot of control and you also don't end up with really amazing animation because really amazing animation is planned it's thought through and it's considered the way you do that is you actually need to think through it in the traditional way of going through what are your key frames what are your breakdowns what are your in-betweens now what are those what do those terms mean okay a keyframe is a key pose it's a key moment in your actions so let's say you have a little robot and you want him to look at the camera and take a step back like whoa he's surprised there's a couple of key poses in that right so you have the first pose how's it going to be posed at the beginning it's going to be kind of like looking off the distance right so you want to get that pose and then you want to go forward a little bit and you think all right what's my next buzz so let's let's figure that out let's actually do it i'll show you how i would think about this now everything i'm going to be talking about today is taken from um a book called uh the principles of animation excellent book i recommend looking it up there's a lot of videos online as well like about it this is how we do it in pixar by the way if they're like pixar animators like sitting down to break out a scene this is how they do it so i'm letting you in on a secret because i've worked at pixar for years i'm just kidding i've never worked at pixel i've never even been to i've been to san francisco they've never invited me they will invite me i'm sure if you if you like and subscribe and join the channel today right now first thing i'm gonna do is i'm gonna switch my my keyframe type okay so uh right now if i hit i location go forward and like grab and then hit i right um i've got i've got a slow down it's it's speeds up and then it slows back down right if you look at this in the graph editor which shows us a different representation of these keyframes you can see what it looks like it's a gradual curve i don't want that i actually want to work in a different mode to begin with i want to work in something called stepped so if i take my keys here and go to interpolation mode constant sorry that's what it's called in blender it's called constant now look at it it's actually like a stair step and basically what that means is this keyframe it stays this value until we get to the new keyframe and then it just instantly changes to the new keyframe there's no interpolation going on whatsoever now it's kind of annoying to have to go through and set that for every keyframe so what i do is come up here to preferences and we go to animation and default interpolation we're just going to go constant okay we can leave everything else the same and then close this out now if i set any keyframe it's automatically going to set it as a constant keyframe so now that i've set my keyframes to constant the reason to do that is it just helps you focus on these poses what are the key moments of your animation so uh let's let's let's get a nice first pose so i'm gonna kind of get him a bit of a natural um or try and get like a bit of a natural looking uh rest position that's maybe a bit more uh natural than what we already have best to use the the ik the pole so you can see if i do that it's going to turn this one here a little bit and i could do this maybe a little bit like that and i might even just offset him a little bit on the side and then i might just turn his head a touch and then i might even like rotate on the y a little bit so you can see that we have this little natural pose um you can click off to kind of see how it looks and um it's also really important to think about your camera where's your camera going to be for the shot so let's make a camera just so that we've got that as a constant reference because it's good to animate to your camera otherwise you're wasting you don't want to waste time you don't want to waste effort and animate to something that's not there it's the same like with materials or whatever like you want to make sure that um it's all good all right so we got a nice first pose so i'll select all my bones i'll go into pose mode sorry deselect everything back to edit mode object mode deselect everything back over to pose mode now let's select all of our bones and i'm going to hit i and with everything selected i'm just going to go right here whole character and just click there and that's going to keyframe the entire character but even keyframe bones if i didn't have them selected but i had everything selected so and boom you can instantly see everything appears here um so you can see you know what we got what are we working with i might even drag this up a little bit more so i've got just a bit more room to see it all these are all of our bones listed out each one has a keyframe for its position and um it's uh rotation everything um so you can double check that by just opening them up and you can see all the different values there all right now this is the first key pose so i want to go forward a little bit just kind of guessing i'm not really sure where i need this next pose to be but i'm going to set up my next key pose which is the moment he looks at us and so we're going to grab him like this and we'll put him here right there and then let's see i might uh rotate this one a little bit like so um and maybe maybe grab this like he's kind of pivoted his um i thought i'll turn his foot a little bit like this maybe even grab the foot and slide it out some um and bring him down a little bit that's a nice that's a nice pose feels a little surprised a little bit like he's caught off guard so again i hit i and i'm just going to do my old character again you can do individual bones a bit cleaner that way but in this case this early stage i'm just kind of doing everything i'm going to come forward again and then i want to do like his surprise moment so he's like pulls back right so you know it's really helpful actually to act out your animations even if it's a robot i sometimes what i do is i'll accept a little camera and i'll film myself and i'll run act it out and like a complete idiot and then i'll watch that because you'll catch these little motions that you wouldn't think of when you're just kind of doing it like this you know so you got to think of like what are the little little nuances that's what sells animation all right so uh let's let's do a little surprise thing so we're going to pull him back um i'll pop out of my camera come over here so he's going to go back i think i might even like put one of his his this foot um back uh like that um i hit shift z there when i grabbed him so that say g and then shift z so that it wouldn't um it wouldn't uh move on the the up and down the z level and do it again so grab shift said pull him back like that go back to my camera so i can look at the pose um let's see i might i'll keep i'll keep that one out there um [Music] actually i'll make sure he's still [Music] it's kind of fun having him like down like this it's kind of nice keep him looking at us just have a look at that pose all right and then we hit i again whole character boom you can see with our constant keyframes it's just popping to these different moments right and then let's do maybe uh be funny if he like jumped up right like jumped up so let's do one of those let's go uh let's grab this and grab him on the zed grab him on the shift zed bring it back bring is uh actually do i wanna i don't wanna do this um let's see i'll grab the the poles that's what this is and make sure that they stay behind the legs so that it doesn't twist and get weird on me i'll bring those up [Music] line up his legs a little bit with them and then um grab this i might rotate the foot down like that um and rotate the foot down again i think i'll keep the look control in the same spot let's go and i and then let's go to i and then whole character bingo all right all right so now that we've like laid out these these poses right we've used these hold keyframes okay now hold keyframes again they're not giving us any in-betweens but it helps us just to think about now the timing of our animation this is super important and really helpful your animation is going to become so much better if you do this stuff so let's think about the timing how do we want this thing to play out now that we've got these main key poses well we've got this first one and we want him to turn and then so let's think about that first moment let's just have him turn i'll just click now when you're in the dope sheet remember that if you the first row is the summary row so if i was to collapse this this is going to select every keyframe that happens on this frame right if i was to take one of these random keyframes and then like move it to like right here close my summary you see me now the keyframe here this only represents that one little key from removed because this is the only keyframe on this frame so um just move that back there we go so it's a great way to grab a bunch of stuff now if you wanted to like just move an individual section you want to come down and grab it down lower on the hierarchy it's still going to get highlighted up here that's just telling you that you've selected a keyframe that's on this frame doesn't mean you've selected all of them so just make sure you know what's going on but if you click up here at the top like that you can see now it's selected all of them so that's how that works fold this back in all right let's get this uh let's get this timing right so let's bring this over so he turns and then uh the next one's he's gonna do like the surprise jump so he turns give a moment to register us and then he's gonna go down and then i think it will go pretty quickly to the jump and also pretty quickly to the land so i'm guessing here with these keyframes so let's see how that feels probably a bit too fast [Music] maybe bring them a bit closer to here [Music] and then let's go ahead and get one last pose here like as he stands back up because i think that might be nice uh let's grab him up [Music] bring this one in bring this one in and [Music] i and whole character okay now get this last one now i can just kind of position it [Music] yeah cool all right so i like this timing it feels pretty good so now what's the next step well a couple things you could just you know turn on uh you know smooth keyframes again or what is it interpolate uh bezier keyframes or whatever and it's gonna you know smooth through the animation stuff but we can actually gain even more control if we keep going with uh what we've got so i'm gonna come back over here to this guy and i'm gonna think about the in betweens now the in-betweens are nothing between the breakdown poses what they're called breakdown pose you've got a keyframe which we've just done um and that's where the term comes from by the way when we talk about make a keyframe for this frame and stuff this is where it comes from it comes with this idea of drawing a key pose a keyframe a breakdown is how do you uh move between these keyframes what's the and this is breakdowns are where your timing really starts to like come together so when do we want him to like get down in this hunch like what's the what's what happens in between these and and you know what's the what's the pose that we need to have so we could do this a lot of different ways but if i kind of come here to the middle right and let's think about him he's going to look at us so he's going to turn so i want him to like he gets startled he turns fast so what is that that's a fast head turn to a slow like so he gets here quick so i'm going to come to like right about here and i'm actually going to click this keyframe and hit shift d to duplicate and i'm going to grab oops d and grab it right here now you get this orange highlight in between these keyframes this is blender telling us that the value is the same between both these keyframes for every keyframe on the summary so it's exactly the same between these two so nothing's changed oh by the way if you hit the up and down arrows on your keyboard you can pop between keyframes really really helpful so i've duplicated this keyframe and the reason for that is i want to make a keyframe here a breakdown pose here that is very similar to this pose right because i want him to move very quickly into this pose from here so here to here very fast so i'm just going to change this a little bit so i'm going to think about these two i'm going to bring this this the look control just over a little bit i'm going to another thing that's helpful too although it can mess you up is if you turn on auto king so just if you ever turn on auto king as soon as you move something it automatically sets a key for it so but you can see right here it was off a little bit and so it can really like mess you up if you're not careful so um i'm just going to make sure i'm actually on that key i'm going to keep auto king on i'm just going to move him over a little bit i'm going to pop here let's see what else changes between these two all right so his foot moves so i'm just going to grab his foot just a little bit on the y or the x [Music] there we go might even like lift it up a little bit and bring it back on the x because it looks like he i don't want him to like want him to still be moving over a little bit yeah that feels right so i'm looking at the arc of that motion of his foot making sure it arcs up and down so that way all these pieces are kind of like they're close to their final position they're not fully in it so now if we watch that we get a better sense of what the timing is it's a little annoying with all the buttons you can see it's not quite right it doesn't quite feel right [Music] i feel like there's another set of keyframes that it's not showing me that's odd you know why that was going on ah right okay that's a really important note so i just got myself caught up there and this is really helpful for you if you ever so when i deselect all my bones all my keyframes disappear right so what i was doing was just then i had i had like what the look control selected or whatever one of these selected and and i said okay i'm going to move this these whole keyframes i'll move all these keyframes forward a bit um what do i have i had this one selected maybe i don't even know anyways so you can see it showing me these keyframes but i was just in summary mode so i was just grabbing it and i just moved it here but i can tell there's this extra motion what's going on these keyframes haven't moved really important to remember this whenever you have the dope sheet open this little icon here only shows selected that can really mess you up if you're not careful so if i select all all these things appear and you can see i didn't have these selected because they weren't highly they weren't in the dope sheet when i was moving those keyframes around so i like to actually turn this off when i'm animating so that if i deselect everything they just stay there so i always know i'm grabbing what i want to grab it's probably also a good idea to keep your summary open so you can actually you know see everything and verify that it is moving so anyways i'll move those there now i should get the timing that i was wanting to see [Music] now one thing that i'm feeling and i see this little motion is it'd be nice to have him kind of dip down so he stays at the same he stays the same height on the z plane right here between these two keyframes but i feel like i want him to have a bit more weight now creating weight in a character is really important for creating great animation and to do that you want to think about making sure you have things kind of sink into their weight whenever you have rest poses [Music] so i'm going to grab this one and i'm going to grab down i still have auto keen turned on okay so just keep aware of that now you can see he sinks down a little bit i might even go a bit further on [Music] that all right now how are we going to get to this pose let's think about that so now his feet actually scoot back see we've set this pose up so like he kind of you know does a little move back and then he does the jump this may not actually work for us it might be better if his feet stayed in the same position and he just did the jump from here i think that would make more sense than this because now we've got to have like him step back and then jump but i feel like with the the action that we're creating he needs to be surprised and kind of leap back so let's uh let's let's fix that so what i would do here is i would go i want the feet to be in the same position so i could just come here and i could go all right so what's my my foot control my foot controllers here they are so foot control um i have named these really bad foot control right that's zero one sorry i should have named everything left and right but i didn't anyways um so i will shift select which one is it this one right so these are the actual feet right um if i just grab this one and this one and then i should be able to shift d and just bring these over and that's going to put the feet back in the same position and now what i can do is i can grab the main controller bring him forward a little bit and then we can look at yeah that's a bit better [Music] now we just need to make sure that this one's not too far yeah i know that works that feels like a decent arc back into my camera view let's have another look at our breakdowns now blender's got a really cool feature um you can actually highlight stuff and we can set what kind of keyframe it is this doesn't really um do anything at least i don't think it does it's more visual just for you to know so i'm going to label these a breakdown keyframe right all right so let's keep moving so uh we've got this nice kind of you know let's uh let's figure out how we're gonna go do we need a breakdown for this um i think so because i wanna i wanna just clarify uh as i'm animating here i wanna clarify that he's gonna hold this position for quite a while and then he's gonna start moving into this one um and it's gonna be quite sudden right so um i'll do the same thing or what i do is i'll take this and i'll shift d drag it maybe right to here and i'll grab this and i'll move it up a little bit and let's just i'll jump between these two keyframes just to see what's moving [Music] there we go so you can see this pose is kind of similar to this one so we're gonna go from here to here and then down and then we're gonna have the jump so i can label this as a breakdown and now when we get to the end here i don't think i really want breakdowns for these bits um i think that kind of makes sense i don't feel like i need any more they're already really close together breakdowns are useful when you have like a long gap between keyframes um and let's see for the stand up at the end i want this to be kind of a slow like he's kind of calmed down and he kind of eases his way back up so i will come to right about the middle i think and i will um i'll shift d again i'll bring this group up and i'll just kind of raise him a little bit like this and bring this one in a little bit and this one in a little bit um so it's so now if we play i can also just bring my timeline down to here and i'll turn all that off so you can actually see it give myself a little bit more time at the end so you can see that in pose that looks pretty good so you can see how we're building this this performance we're sculpting it with the timing we're thinking about how does it feel at this level it's much easier to control where you're going when you're looking at it like this in this sort of step keyframe mode okay for like worrying about curves and everything right so one thing that i'm seeing is he does his jump is that i feel like it could be a bit more extreme um so i think what i want to do is take this foot and just extend it down a little bit more like that and i think i'm going to bring the look control up like this and i want to kind of straighten him up i think maybe even raise him up a little bit higher see how that looks yeah so you see how that is really elongated there so now one of the principles of animation is called swatch and stretch so the idea behind that is when you move something you can squash it so you can actually swell and but squashing is not just like scaling it like down like this if you scale it down like this it's also extending it out like this because you want to think about the total mass of your object right the total volume of your object sorry if you squeeze your object down like this it's not going to lose volume it's going to just move the volume so it's going to shift out right so when he jumps right he's going to be kind of elongating out now he's not like a squishy sphere so uh you know we're not actually like deforming him or anything but we're using the same principle he starts kind of squashed his legs are out and he stretches out gets really thin and elongated so dragging his feet out for that jump so that they're even more long and he's even more extended really really brings out a contrast between that frame and then when he's landed he's really hunched down the greater the contrast in moments like that the better your animation is going to look so you can see how that feels better seeing his legs stretched out like that we've got our nice little basic uh keyframes you know blocked out it's looking good i'm going to turn off autoking just to be safe because i'm liking stuff and now is a good time for me to go ahead and turn these into curves and see what it looks like so let's find out what happens so i'm going to hit a to select all i'm going to right click these keyframes and i'm going to go interpolation bezier right now it's going to automatically interpolate between all of my different keyframes so let's just jump over here and let's just watch wow it looks pretty good so one thing you'll notice is when you switch to bezier you'll you'll find some driftiness uh to some of your animations so what i mean by that is your keyframes like when you're looking at it in step mode it's like rock solid it's like ding ding when you switch to bezier of course it's interpolating between everything but you have these little moments like the jump for example that loses some of its bite right it just feels a bit weak this jump now that it's sort of all being interpolated but most of it feels pretty good especially this beginning bit and you can see all of our breakdowns and stuff everything's like working to kind of maintain the character of the animation that we came up with but really helping to smooth it out so all right let's keep going alright uh so how would we begin to improve this well let's switch over to the graph editor now the graph editor has a similar thing to the dope sheet which is only showing selected so i'm going to untick that these are all the curves of our animation you can see that they're a lot and they're quite spread out uh it's uh it's a bit of a mess it's hard to work in this mode um to try and like affect things right unless you get specific and start looking at just the bits that you want so yeah if i hit a to select all and hit the full stop or the period key on my keyboard it'll focus in on it and it'll show us the curves that kind of scrunches them all down but a lot of these look straight now but remember they're not actually straight there's actually a lot of motion in these um it's just that in order to fit all of it um it's it's had to really kind of compress the view so don't get tricked into thinking this there's not a lot happening right here if i select these keyframes and hit the full stop key you can see actually there's a lot going on there so um it can be a bit confusing so let's find the moment where he does the jump and let's go slowly through it so what's happening is his feet are leaving the leading the ground the same rate the same time as his body right and they're landing at the same time his his body's hitting that final pose and that's not what happens when we jump right our feet actually stay on the ground the body goes first as the legs push up and then the legs go so we could fix this in a lot of different ways i will actually just jump back to my dope sheet um one way to do it would be to switch back to the stepped keyframe interpolation and just add a new breakdown in that corrects this but we don't have to worry about doing that as much so i'm going to come here and i want to go probably right about here and turn all my handles back on i'm going to grab these guys and i'm going to grab both of them and i'm just going to drag them down so that we are still touching still flat on the ground i think and i'll take my feet and i'll rotate them up on the actual switch my little controls here bring the foot up bring the controller up a touch just like so this upper touch bring this up like so [Music] all right and then i'm going to select that that that that that and i'm going to hit i and i'm going to do the location and rotation of those keyframes i don't worry about keyframing everything because i'm just focusing on these guys but now you can see he slides his body goes first and then his feet go now we need to do the same thing over here so we need to have the feet kind of find their resting position before the body another way of doing this is to actually shift select these guys [Music] so i've got those four selected [Music] and then what i can do is i can turn back on only shows selected and that'll just narrow my view downs i'm just looking at these guys and then i can grab them and i can actually bring these like this just forward a bit so that what that happens is the feet actually kind of move faster than the body so they come in and land first you can see how that makes a lot more sense the feet make contact and then the body scrunches down but now one thing that we've lost is that sort of squash and stretch right so as we go his feet kind of stay fully extended so what we might want to do let's see he leaves the ground that go up is find a moment in between these two where his feet are actually way up high in the air so i'm just going to turn on auto keyframing and i'm going to hit shift z just to kind of bring these guys right up like that and let's see what that looks like this might be a bit too tight too close together yeah a little too tight so i'm going to turn off keep all selected and uh now i'm going to select this and all the keyframes after it i'm just going to drag them out just a little bit just to give us a bit more room for our jump [Music] to happen and i think maybe this one is a little too extreme [Music] so i'll just grab this one and this one grab these guys down a bit and we'll do their location again location and rotation see if that looks any better kind of does [Music] turn that off let's watch the whole thing see this right yeah sweet i think it looks pretty good now naturally when you get to this in here you know he feels so dead as soon as the animation stops so you know it's like uh it's good to kind of you know add in little bits of uh animation when you've got a hold pose so this is a hold pose which means she's just going to stand here for a little bit so what we might want to do is just grab i'll turn on auto keyframe again and just just you know going through maybe he kind of moves his legs and don't have to like all do it on the same frame right you can do these little like uh turns and stuff at different different frames different points [Music] that's a bit too it's a bit too extreme so i'm gonna take these keyframes and i'll just hit s to scale just to scale them out [Music] there you go just gives him a little bit of life our material is not set up for animation look at that sliding all over his body let's go to our shader editor real quick i'll just show you how to fix that problem well there's a gotcha sorry guys should have should have taught that from the very beginning if we switch to generated it's not gonna mess up the droid just as a note if you switch to render view if we're using the object coordinate in a for our mapping node if we animate the object it's actually going to move the texture coordinate so based on where it's at so you'll see the texture sliding over as it moves so you need to use the generated coordinate like we did down here uh in the sh in the texture so that's that's important don't forget to do that thank you so much for watching i hope this is a really helpful introduction to how to think about animation when you're approaching it yourself how do we you know break it down into your keyframes how to think about timing how to think about uh breakdown poses um and how to put all that stuff together so that you end up with an animation that works really well if you enjoy this video and if you liked this little animation lesson hit that like button leave me a comment let me know please subscribe to the channel i'll make more of them um let me know what you'd like to learn next maybe a walk cycle could be a fun thing for us to do with this guy next um we could do a little scene of all kinds of things so just let me know what you want to see and we'll put it on the list so thanks again for watching thanks again for engaging with the channel and for helping support it in all the different ways that you are really appreciate everyone in this community you've been amazing and uh so exciting to see the channel grow and uh yeah just keep continuing to put these out so that uh you can learn more and more so thanks again for watching and i'll catch you in the next tutorial see ya bye

Channel: CBaileyFilm

Views: 36,685

Keywords: blender, blender turorial, blender beginner tutorial, scifi, create a short film, create a fan film, animation, character animation

Id: duGHtPOL7VA

Length: 42min 33sec (2553 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 01 2020