Blender 3D Animation - Mastering Key Frames

today we'll be looking at 10 tips i wish i knew as a beginner that helped make my animation process easier by mastering how to use keyframes in blender so i'm currently in the middle of the move so you'll notice that my background is undecorated and actually quite messy so first of all i just want to apologize for that but let's move on to the tutorial i've been getting a lot of requests to do more animation content on this channel so here we are so one of the hardest things for me starting out with 3d animation which just how overwhelming the key framing process was not necessarily how to insert keyframes i found that simple but then when i wanted to go through and adjust them or change them or modify them to add any action to my characters it just became extremely overwhelming and the key is keyframe organization now keyframe organization may not be the flashiest or coolest topic to talk about but i promise you that these 10 tips will make managing your timeline much easier and will actually help you animate better just because you'll have a cleaner timeline to work with and thus be more efficient in your workflow so with that being said here are 10 tips to improve your keyframe workflow and to become a blender keyframe master what if i told you you might be inserting keyframes wrong so there's a lot of way you can insert keyframes let's go ahead and let's grab our character here move into pose mode we're going to grab one of these bones here now what a lot of people probably do is they probably just go down here turn automatic keyframe they grab it maybe press one key move forward press another key and that's great look now we have a leg animation but look at how many keyframes we just created that we didn't need we just rotated on the x animation and we just created nine keyframes that we don't need and then if we come over here to the graph editor and we look at our just our rotations here we can see that we have all these unnecessary rotation data so i'm going to go ahead and delete that and show you a couple different ways that we can improve that so first up you can pretty much insert a keyframe any onto anything on blender if you kind of right click it and hit insert so if i go ahead and right click here i can insert a keyframe now by default when you insert a keyframe on one of these transforms what it's going to do is going to apply a keyframe to all three channels which may be what you want but i often times don't use that what i do instead is i right click and insert a single keyframe which will only insert a keyframe on that axis that i am utilizing so in this case the x-axis and then if i move for 10 frames and i go here and i type in 0 and insert single keyframe again it will then only give me a keyframe on that axis and this is incredibly important when you're doing complex characters in complex backgrounds because if you have three characters in a scene with environmental assets animating this graph editor over here is going to get very hard to manage very quickly and also it's going to bog down your scene if you have all these extra keyframes you're trying to kind of manage making it harder for playback so whenever possible try and use the single keyframe option now it's hard to deny the convenience of the automatic keyframes but we don't want a messy timeline so what we can do is we can utilize keying set so i'm going to turn on this key option here and we're going to come over here to keying and you'll see that we have active keying sets and there's a lot of different options here already and we'll mostly stick to the top options so you can set it so that it only works on rotation it only works on location and rotation or whatever is available so you can choose any one of these and a lot of these are self-explanatory available will only apply key frames to channels that already have keyframes on them now location would of course only apply to location rotation would only add rotation keyframes and so on but let's look at how available works because i find this one quite useful so if i go ahead and click available here and then i come up here and i click rotation we'll use this x axis again insert single keyframe and then i move forward then what i'm going to do is go up here i'm going to insert negative 50 and then i'm going to insert a single keyframe again there and now we have two keyframes there now if i want to move forward and rotate it should only add keyframes on the x-axis so i'm going to go ahead and rotate and you'll notice that that's not the case that it adds all nine keyframes back in and that's because there's one extra step we have to do so i'm going to go ahead i'm going to undo that and then we come up here next to the auto keyframe we have the option here to add and replace keyframes or to only do the active keying set so i'm going to go ahead click only active keying set and now when i rotate you'll see that it only locks in on the x-axis and i can keep playing with that and that makes it much easier to animate so you can go through and insert keyframes on just the channels you want or as you saw before there's all these available keying sets that you can use as well so if you don't plan use the delta rotation or the scale or things like that you can use this to keep your animation cleaner now another great way to keep this organized is with the selection toggle so up here you'll see this if i check this off it will show every single keyframe on the graph editor whether i have it selected or not but if i click this selection up here and then i select a different bone you'll see that it'll isolate us to the keyframes only shown on the selected object making it much easier to tweak the animations per object or per control now you're probably already familiar with how to kind of navigate the timeline here but one quick little shortcut you can use to kind of quickly snap into what you're working on is the period key or you can go up here to view and frame selected i prefer to use the period key but if i go ahead and click this let's say that i shift h and i show this and then if i double click this it will select the entire curve and then i can hit period and snap in and then it'll be much easier to work on that as my view has been adjusted to this quickly it's also worth noting that that works down here in the timeline as well if i select all these keyframes and hit period or view selected you see that it fills it up here making it much easier to kind of snap and zoom in whatever you're working on so if you're new to animation you may not understand what all these curves are so let's kind of take a look at what that is and what interpolation means so i'm going to go ahead and grab one of these here that has some animation on it and then i'm going to snap zoom in and this is the left foot over here's z rotation and you can see how that kind of rotates as they hit the ground so what we have here is each of our keyframes and in between those keyframes we have what's called our interpolation this is how blender is deciding to move from one value to the next so here we have a rotation value of zero and up here we have one of about six and this is determining how we get there so if i do this and bring this over what that will actually do is if you look at the foot over here that will actually kind of snap into that foot much slower and then suddenly it's just gonna speed up to six so this is called a bezier curve so if i go ahead and select everything by pressing a and press t we can change our interpolation type now there are three main types there's the bezier curve here where we have the option to kind of smoothly transition between the two with ease in the knees out you can see how it slowly eases out speeds up and then eases back into the next value so we can also change that to linear so if i go ahead i'm going to select everything in our scene here so we can get an idea what it would look like if i go ahead and select all the keyframes and press t and linear you'll see that everything snaps in a linear fashion to the next keyframe so that's going to give us a much more robotic looking kind of animation you can see that there's no easing on any of those keyframes let's go ahead and undo that now let's go ahead and change to constant so if i change constant that keyframe value won't change until it reaches the next keyframe so if i go ahead and hit shift here you can see that it's only showing the main keyframes this is kind of how stop motion works so this is one trick you can use to get stop motion of course you need to insert a lot more keyframes in order for that motion to look somewhat fluid so that's a quick overview of the interpolation types and how to access them in blender again access them by pressing t and changing here most of the time you'll be working in bezier so one of the most important parts when you're editing your curves are the handles so the handles are whenever you select a keyframe here we get these handles that allow us to grab and move and that allows us to kind of adjust the easing of our animation so if i go ahead and drag this out we'll be able to ease that in so this is controlling the live location of my chicken bouncing so if i do this you can see that it holds at the top longer and if i scale this out you'll see that it holds up in the air longer so let's go ahead and take a look at that you can see how they're holding up into the air longer as opposed to if i take this back here and move this up and take this back here and move this up we'll see that it hits the air and drops down almost immediately in more of a linear fashion so we can actually change the way these handles work so by default blender is going to kind of have it set up like this that you can select this and rotate this or grab one of these handles and move it and you'll see that other handle moves with it this is called automatic so what that's doing is automatically twisting the kind of control point in a way that kind of matches the curve to try and best guess what it wants to be and for the most part that'll be fine for most instances but you may occasionally want to change that so if you press v it will let you change the handle type now there's a bunch on here but the two you're most likely going to use are automatic and free or kind of vector so if i go to automatic here that will give us this keyframe here and you can see that it's trying to automatically determine how we should do the handle type or ease into the next keyframe so let's go ahead and take a look at what that looks like we can see that's not what we want because they're falling through to the ground too quickly so what i can do is i can actually come in here change this to v go to free here and then that will allow me to move these handles individually of one another so you can see now these two handles are disconnected and to rotate them together i have to grab the center one so what i can do now is grab this top handle move this down grab this top handle move this down and then if i hit play you can see that we get a much more natural bounce because as it hits the ground it suddenly stops rather than trying to ease up through the ground and back down so that is how you can mess with the handle types in blender and get a lot more control over your curves so a lot of people don't know this but you can actually color code the keyframes in your timeline which can be really useful for kind of blocking out large scenes or color coding keyframes for certain characters but if you select the keyframes down here and press r you'll see that you get this menu that pops up which gives you different options now each one of these has a label so that you can kind of pick per label but you can also just use them as colors here and this won't actually affect how your keyframe operates it just affects the way that it looks and can be incredibly useful for organizing your timeline down here now when you're looking at all of your keyframes on your character that can get quite overwhelming over here and there's a couple ways we can organize that so first up one thing a lot of people don't know about is how you can isolate one layer so i'm going to go ahead and grab the kind of z rotation on this foot here and with that selected over here if i hit shift h that will hide everything except for these keyframes making it much easier to work and then if you hit alt h it will return everything back to normal so that's a quick way you can kind of snap into just one curve next up by default your blender scene will be set to global transform orientation and then what a lot of people will do is they'll hop into pose mode and they'll start kind of grabbing this and just rotating around with this little white axis here which works from like any view so you can go ahead and rotate that around to get it to whatever view you want and this is great but if i move forward and i kind of move over here you see that i'm inserting keyframes on all these rotation channels that i may not need so what i always recommend to beginners when animating is to make sure that you're set to local axis so that when you select these bones it is to the local axis of that bone so for example here we see that the z will move our leg forward and back and then we can add only animation to that z axis which will help keep things over here clear so that you're not accidentally introducing a bunch of unnecessary rotations to all of your bones individually and keeping them kind of locked into per access this will make it much easier that when you go through to kind of like re work on your easing and other aspects in the curve editor it'll make it much easier to kind of manage your character's motion and have control over how your character is moving one other thing you can do is you can actually insert markers into your timeline for organization so for example when you're doing a character like this you're probably going to go forward and animate something like the root or the hip first to get your overall position then you're going to go through maybe animate the legs and then the feet and then the eyes and then the hair and it can get kind of difficult when you have all these keyframes in the timeline to really know where your main keyframes are so one thing i like to do is set markers so you can see down here i have a marker called hit one where i know i'm about to hit and then squish where i hit release where i'm popping up off the ground and airborne where i'm back into the air and that made it so that as i go through each individual leg i can match the keyframes to these critical points without worrying about kind of all the clutter that occurs and you can see that a lot of the keyframes are occurring on those major markers there if i click around so what you can do to insert a marker is pretty simple you just press m in the timeline by default it'll give you a random name but you can hit control m and then you can type whatever name you want in there so here i can type top air as if they're at the top of their air then i can actually grab that and move that around knowing that there is kind of the top point and that's one really simple way if you're moving through a scene especially with a character where you can kind of mark out what they're doing in the scene and keep it a bit more organized and easy to follow as you insert keyframes across all the different elements of your character as usual tag me on anything you create at southern shoddy on instagram i love seeing what you make from these tutorials also please let me know in the comments below what type of tutorials you'd like to see in the future i'm always open to suggestions and if you're interested in learning more about this rig or animation this is actually a rig from a class i have on skillshare where i walk you through your first 3d animation using this rig and by the end you'll create this full bouncing animation i hope you found this video useful and thank you for watching

Channel: SouthernShotty

Views: 11,364

Rating: 4.976932 out of 5

Keywords: blender, animation, blender animation, blender 2.8 animation, blender 2.8, blender tutorial, blender 2.9, animation ghosting blender 3d, blender character animation, animation in blender, best blender animation courses, animation and ghost in blender 3d, endless animation in blender, fan animation in blender, infinite animation in blender, animation loop in blender, 3d animation, blender animation low poly, blender 2.9 animation, blender rigid body animation

Id: iMwjYuyefRs

Length: 14min 10sec (850 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 14 2021