Blender Animation and Modeling in 2.8: Escalator

imagine yourself slapped on the first floor of a tiny 3d mall you're starving but the food court is on the second floor what will you do ladies and gentlemen I'm Derek Elliot from der calm and I need an escalator for an animation I'm trying to do so I figured I'd make one I tried a couple methods and like with anything in blender there's multiple ways you could do it but I found this one and you know honestly I thought it worked pretty good so that I'd record a short tutorial showing you how to do it so let's do it I'm gonna go hold on to my default cube here but I'm gonna use it to basically build a step so in edit mode I'm going to scale it out on the y-axis a little bit maybe something like mmm and I'm holding ctrl to snap to increments and staying you know for this method that I must show you I'm keeping everything - nice increments really does help you a lot so so yeah try to do that if you can okay so that's that's pretty much 1 step right there now I am going to just add a little bit of detail of this and you'll see so escalators have this little curve on the front and actually I I kind of knew why but when you're when I was doing this animation I could really see you know exactly the reason for that so we're gonna we're gonna actually recreate that because it does add just a little bit of detail that's nice to have so I'm just pressing ctrl R adding a few edge loops and then I'm just going to manually kind of kind of move move these points you could you do proportional editing and stuff like that but I'm just gonna do it this way because it's only gonna be a few points and I think this will work just fine and I'm pressing C to a circle select which is my favorite method okay so we've got that little curve thing on the front now to give us a little more detail let's also add a bevel modifier just to kind of break those edges make it a little more realistic this is really in have a pretty low poly look but that bevel really helps out a lot especially where the steps coming together it can kind of differentiate them now in wireframe view I can see I'm getting extra geometry here from the bevel so I'm gonna just change this limit method to angle and then that means only only angles greater than that will get the bevel which in this case I'm looking for basically these 90-degree angles so I'm so thirty covers this good we could even bump this up a little bit but I want that one down there too okay so we got that looking cool now we basically need to just create some duplicates of this now so I'm going to do that with an array modifier so I had modifier array and I don't want to use I don't want to use the relative offset what that does is offset relative to the size of the object somebody's constant offset and you know with an escalator we know this needs to go forward and down so let's move that out I'm adding one of my side view so I can see a little better what's going on let's move a one-unit down and again this is a good reason to kind of stake and strain to your grid here you don't have to but it just makes things a little easier so and then we need to move this over I'm just going to go about 1.5 units so we've got a little bit of an overlap there and now you can basically decide how big you want your as clear to be I think for me I'm just clicking and dragging to bring up this count I think something like Oh 12 that looks good to me now basically have all the steps so what I want to do next is I want to animate it so we basically need to animate this step moving into this position so I'm gonna hang out here on frame 1 let's move this up a little bit just so we can kind of see better so I'm frame one I'm cool with it right there let's go up here so I press the end to bring up the sidebar so I want to move this you know I know I need to go down and over so that's my X location of my Z location so on frame one well let's go ahead and say insert keyframes for the X location in the Z location and then I think over the course of maybe 18 frames or so I want this to go down one unit cell insert a keyframe and then over 1.5 units so that is another reason why having the kind of constrained values are good because we're basically just doing what the array is so we know what those values are so like I said that needs to go over 1.5 so let's insert a single keyframe on that same 18th frame okay so now when I press let's drag this down just a little bit so I don't have a space bar I'm gonna right-click at this point here to kind of we can kind of see the animation effect we're going for basically like when it resets it gives the illusion that you have the same step or you know like that like the steps are continuous but being able to see the end obviously really messes that up so let's do four one if we move over here into our curves you know and you know obviously I'm not gonna be able to right click to keep doing this and we don't want to insert a ton of keyframe so we're gonna actually do something in the graph editor to duplicate that motion so I'm gonna go over here I'm going to drag another window over just click on that corner I'm gonna change this to a graph editor and so a couple things here for one I don't want this easing going on that's kind of what this curve is but I want I want I want it to be at a more constant constant rate so what I'm going to do is change this to linear I'm just Inc T to do that so now it has a little bit more of a mechanical move to it if you will so now what I say I was gonna do next I need to repeat it so I'm gonna click on this X location press n to bring up my sidebar and then in modifiers I'm going to add a cycles modifier and that's just going to repeat that motion but you can see it's only repeating the X so we need to do the same thing on the Z but instead of doing that same process what we can do is just press this little clipboard button to copy the modifier and then on the Z I'll paste it and now you can see we're getting that same animation repeated over and over so it basically need to fill in you know these the steps so that we you know we'll put kind of a little floor at the top and the bottom to cover up you know the the repeat but we do need a couple of flat steps that kind of help sell this effect so I'm going to I'm going to get rid of this graph editor here now what I'm going to do is I want to duplicate this object this step object some of our shift D and then for one I can I can get rid of this array modifier well onto the belleville though so that the stuff looks the same obviously and then I need to okay so this actually when I press shift D it got that it took the animation with it too so let's let's just go to frame 1 here where it's all evened up and that's clear keyframes and ok so that left them on the other object but got rid of them on this object okay that's perfect so back at frame 1 okay so let's actually show it frame let's see what is it frame 18 yeah so frame 18 we want that top step to be where the first step was to kind of like fill its place so same thing except we only need to animate the X location so I'm going to insert a single keyframe there so I'm frame 18 it ends up you know right where it's supposed to be and then on frame 1 we'll slide it over a little bit and so you kind of think it'd be 2 or sorry 1.5 since that's what our offset was but in this case it'll be 2 because you know there's no overlap here so I'm going to insert a single keyframe right here and then it's not lining up because it's got that same effect going on so let's change this back to a graph editor and press T to change it to linear so now we're getting pretty much what we want up and then of course we need to duplicate it so let's do the same thing in our modifiers just like that modifiers and should still be copied yeah it is okay so we just paste it cool stuff and you can see this is why there's that little curve so you could go back in there and edit it if you wanted to but that's why that you know if that curve wasn't there then there'd be even more overlap so I didn't get it quite right but I'm not too worried about that for now you're depending on how realistic you want this to look you might want to go back and edit that I mean you can add as much detail as you want really the only thing though I'll make a note now the reason this works is because all these steps are exactly the same so if you were gonna have like you know a really grungy texture or something that that wasn't the same on every single step this effect wouldn't work quite as well but in this case you know I'm going for kind of a low poly look so that's good but when you do the same thing at the bottom and we need a few more steps at the top so what I'm going to do actually is just since it would have the same motion of just moving in the X what I can do is just keep it all in the same object so I want to press a to select everything shift D to duplicate it and then just drag that over to units and then let's do another one for good measure and then at the bottom we're gonna have the same thing so I'm going to press shift D drag this down there and then let's a let's make sure this gets into position properly so that would end up right there okay so let's move this down to the proper location there nice and you can kind of see how it's duplicating itself there so that stills the same animation won't have to do anything again there and yeah now we've got basically our effect is done so let's just get rid of this let's just add let's let's just kind of build out the rest of this real quick if you were mostly curious about the animation part pretty much done with that but uh stick around and we'll do just a little bit more modeling maybe some lighting and kind of try to tidy this thing up make it ready to go so I'm gonna add a point I'm gonna make kind of my railings first so in edit mode I'm gonna press our X 90 to rotate that up and then in edit mode still I'm gonna drag that over the reason I'm staying in edit mode is I it's because I want my origin point to stay right there in the middle because now I can add a mirror modifier and put it on a y-axis mirror now it mirrors nicely on to the other side so let's let's just drag this up let's just leave that there for now and now I want to add I want to make this big kind of turn turn style handrail things on the on the top and the bottom so I'm gonna let's so let's just snap my cursor to my selection there and then I'm gonna add a circle and you know do as many versus you vertices as you want here but 24 I think I'll kind of keep with my low-poly style here numbers bar X 90 and then scale this up by maybe 2.5 is that what good I think that's good and I'm gonna move this over just to kind of where I would want that to start maybe like right there and now what I'm going to do is select this other half duplicate it and then put it somewhere down here kind of where I want that to start or finish whatever which over what you're looking at it so got my semicircle there let's let's make this one a semicircle as well delete those vertices and then a circle select this press F circle select this press F and it's probably also gonna be easy just to get rid of this kind of changed my mind in the middle of it there so let's move this over until kind of right where it starts to go down let's do the same thing on this side I guess right about and probably right there maybe right there I guess I don't know and you can you can move these around if you kind of change your mind but I think that looks fine so then I'm just gonna select those two press F to fill it and maybe we better even this up I think that would look a little bit better let's uh let's drag this whole oops no not that I want to drag just this face out something like that oh yeah that's cuz I had wait are there four there's three at the top three at the bottom okay whatever I think that looks good maybe that there we go okay I'll stop messing with that mess with it as long as you want to get it looking good okay so now we can use the same object to just create a few more pieces but those pieces will all have a couple modifier so I'm gonna go ahead and pad those for one is the solidify modifier I'm going to use that a couple times here and now let's change this offset to zero so that it kind of goes from the middle everything will be nice and aligned okay so that's about the thickness I'll want the handrail yeah something like something like that and then in edit mode I'm pressing alt so you go into that kind of x-ray mode I'm gonna press I to inset and then this is gonna be basically what would be like glass you know something like that and then let's do or actually let's make this like I'm the metal piece oops do a little subdivide okay so we got that inset so let's say that would be a metal piece so let's press P to separate that by selection okay so now the hand rolls its own piece and then we have the middle part as its own piece okay so that would be the metal which would be just a little bit narrower so let's like drag that in and I think if we turn on I was free to turn this on and Evie we are sorry butter 228 we have these really nice effects here so I can kind of increase this there now it's a little easier to see those edges okay so so we've got ya so that would be a little bit thinner let's go back into edit mode here let's inset again and this will have this be the glass okay and then let's separate the that by selection and then okay so we've got this so this is the so this is the metal part this is the glass and the glass obviously would be pretty thin so we can go back into our solidify move that in I'm just trying to get a feel for how thick this is here yeah so the glass would be pretty thin and you know maybe we want there to offset with the glass so let's just in this glass object let's just do inset again and then I'm gonna alt and right left click that edge and delete that those faces and that I'll just create a nice little gap for us there I think that looks cool so let's um let's save our file you can see I've got a couple attempts here I'll save that one ok so let's play looking pretty cool and now we just need to kind of fill in those edges so let's go into our and we're not gonna animate this handrail because you know technically it would be so like consistent you wouldn't really be able to tell you would be more work and I think this tutorials long enough so I'm going to press tab go into this object and then I want to select a couple pieces here so let's do and face like my lists like this piece this piece in this piece let's shift D to duplicate it P to separate by selection and then with that object selected what do I want to do I want to select this bottom edge here and then maybe move that kind of just down something like that and then we can do this again just with the solidify really makes things pretty easy just move that out a little bit to kind of create those nice edges and then let's move you bring this edge up just a little bit so it kind of has that nice kind of is like that you know how it usually kind of pinches it right there so it goes in we're not going to do the cutout because again this is pretty low detail but we get a pretty cool looking escalator model there maybe for the glass we want to add a couple like panes here so let's uh just pressing ctrl R to do a you know to cut it a little let's just do like that yeah it's just three panes that should look decent so now I can to cut those let's see what I want to do I want to select this edge of this edge this edge and this edge and then press control B to bevel and that'll just kind of add an extra edge and then that'll leave our faces selected so I can just press X and delete faces now I've got some nice little panels here you may want to make them kind of go like that direction or something but you know I think for what I'm doing that's going to look fine and it would be nice to have a little bit of a gap though so maybe let's this is one cool thing you can do in blender 2.8 you can select multiple objects here so let's select everything except that and that and then let's go into edit mode and then we can select everything all those objects at once and just drag this out just try and get myself a nice little gap right there so unless you look straight on you wouldn't really see that but it's gonna be it'll kind of create a little bit of a shadow there look a little bit more realistic okay I like that now we just need to cover up these you know kind of bottom steps so we don't screw up our effect so I'm just gonna go into this same object right here honestly and just select this edge shift D to duplicate it grab up and then E Y to go over and I need to turn on clipping here so that those don't cross each other right there should be good and then let's just select this face and kind of bring it yeah we want it to be just just barely even so people wouldn't so people wouldn't trip on that are imaginary people cool so let's let's just move this out I guess you know technically the floor would be like let's extrude again maybe extrude this out right here yeah just kind of making a little bit of BA a little bit of a floor action going on there I think that looks good maybe move this up a little bit give ourselves plenty of space to drop us in whatever model we're doing and yeah I think that's about it let's say maybe maybe we select these same faces shift d RZ oh god no let's do it SX negative one I want to pop this guy at the top and then let's move this up here saving ourselves just a little very little bit of work there I'm not having to duplicate that plane object and that's looking good you know if you wanted to reveal some more of those steps maybe we'll bring this back a little bit something like that can you go all the way no part right here is good so we can't see it so now with this whole thing together I think we have ourselves an escalator so if you're still interested you don't want to leave me yet maybe we can add a yeah maybe we can add a bevel modifier here give that just a nice little bit of a nice little bit of a round cool I like that let's um let's do some lighting just just a little bit of a little bit of a scene let's save again and this is how I if I can get these darn windows to drag over so this is how I usually like to set my viewport up when I'm doing this let's make let's do that let's make this a rendered view down here okay I've rendered for you I think we're an Eevee know where in cycles okay Howie oh no we're not in rendered now we rendered okay so let's just press shift C that's at a plane GZ scale it up a little bit something like that and let's kind of move it up so it to the floor also we could turn off all these overlays and get rid of this so we've already got a little bit of a lamp there and maybe we maybe we make this a little bit brighter a little bit brighter a little bit bigger bigger use nodes I don't really make it like a 2,000 power cool and then maybe we turn this into like a little bit of a backdrop with this uh select these edges mm and of course this s clear needs to be going somewhere so maybe we just add a like uh we'll call the cube our second floor maybe we need to just select this bottom face here make that go down to the floor just like this face let's kind of drag that out nice nice very very beautiful very very beautiful okay maybe we get some cool colors too let's go let's make this a shader editor and maybe the floor let's call this material floor so maybe that's nice and I'm white I think we probably need to add like let's maybe add a Sun lamp or something or maybe just let's just add a huge area lamp sometimes like that I like the way that looks let's bring this up and then this is another cool 2.8 thing so you can just oh maybe that's not working oh there it is [Music] uh-uh we got some type of 2.8 here going on let's save and that's close and then let's open this back up okay we fixed our little Quick Start layer all right so let's let's go back and render view over here and then maybe make this like six thousand pretty bright maybe even more than that let's do like 20,000 nice obviously this is all personal taste but let's select the background color maybe we make the background like kind of like a like a blue something like that would be cool make it kind of rough maybe we make the floor the same or sorry the second floor the same color this might as well do like a little bit of a metal material its name this one metal drag the metallic up just kind of seeing how this is gonna look not too shabby and so that we can kind of see what we're doing let's go into our viewport display over here change that to uh so we know it's metal it's like that like a light blue maybe kind of make it darker a little bit something like that maybe this needs to come up so we don't have such a weird gap nice gorgeous absolutely gorgeous and then this probably must need to come down yeah that's looking a little better now this handrail probably like a black material not gonna bother named it don't tell anyone you should always name your materials it's actually usually shiny isn't it it's like leave it uh something like that cool cool let's make this steps hmm actually kind of like them white let's leave it like that just for a second and then let's make let's make a glass material we'll go ahead and name it let's let's turn this roughness down let's turn the transmission all the way up oh yeah that's looking cool now if we were to bring this value down and kind of give you like a tinted glass a little bit of that is kind of kind of alright and you know I'm really not loving the metal look here let's just let's just make this all crazy cool colors maybe like like a bright bright beige absolutely stunning isn't it and then maybe this material it's like I don't know so if the other ones beige maybe this one should be like mm ooh a lighter blue that looks kind of nice gosh our little uh for screwing us up over here isn't it let's figure that just make sure the animation doesn't clip that up and skin it just a little bit nifty okay guys um that's about it you know take your camera shift tilde do a little flying around I can tell you at this object way too big it's kind of cutting off over there that's pretty much it I hope you guys enjoyed this little tutorial and I've taken a little longer than I thought it would but didn't want to leave you hanging in case you're wondering how I made the cool escalator you're about to see in my next animation hope you guys enjoyed it thanks for watching I'll see you next time oh yeah subscribe and like and stuff from leave comments and stuff like that let me know if you liked it and and I'll see you next time thanks so much for watching [Music]

Channel: Derek Elliott

Views: 50,035

Keywords: blender tutorial, blender, b3d tutorial, blender 3d, 3d tutorial, easy blender tutorial, quick blender tutorial, simple blender tutorial, beginner blender tutorial, derek elliott, derrk, blender 2.8, blender animation, blender escalator, escalator, elevator, blender elevator, low poly, blender low poly, low poly style animation, blender architecture, animation, b3d animation, simple animation

Id: sNysFFRpiW8

Length: 30min 1sec (1801 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 22 2019