Blender Graph Editor Tutorial | 15 MUST KNOW TIPS | Animator's Guide to the Graph Editor Blender 2.8

hey guys welcome to the 3d animation hub my name is brian 3d animator and today we're going to be talking about the graph out of it now the graph editor for some people is this mysterious thing that they don't know too much about they don't really touch it they just kind of like move their keys and set their keys and do everything in the viewport but then on the other side we have people that are very familiar with the graph editor and they do half or more of their work in the graphite edition so this video is kind of directed at both people i'm gonna just lay down everything i know about the grandfather all the hot keys all the tools that will help you increase workflow and just everything i've learned over the past year animating professionally in blender at a big studio there are things i learned right at the beginning from co-workers there are also things that i learned very very very recently like last week that i'm like holy crap you can do this in the graphic so we're gonna be covering all of that we're gonna be going from the beginning to the end just everything i know from setting it up to a little bit more advanced stuff that you can do with the graphite with the graph editor um there's actually some stuff you can do in blender that you can't do in maya which i'll be covering at the end of the video so make sure to stay till the end feel free to follow me on my socials i have instagram i got twitter i got twitch which i'll hopefully be streaming soon and of course if at any point you learn something or you like something i say something i say is friends or whatever make sure to smash that like button and if you don't like it then you can hit this like don't do that don't hit this like anyways it's all out of the way let's hop in i can't wait for this video all right guys so we're gonna start this off with uh the first thing i do when i open my graph editor so as you guys can see all the colors here are black we got some gray on yellow we got some red on gray we got some i don't know it's just all these different colors that it's just not nice on the eyes first thing i do is i go to view show group colors and i uncheck that and then now we got something that's a little bit more familiar to me that's a little bit closer to maya and the next thing i'm going to do is let's say for example i select this key right here and you know it's highlighted here but the issue is we have all these other controllers here where i only just selected the arm i just want to see the arm controller you know i just that's that's the only thing i want to see here and this is kind of distracting and sometimes it's even like somewhere in the middle you got to go find the highlighted one and it's just not cool so how you fix this is by clicking this little cursor button right here it says only show selected so once i click this if i go change controllers as you can see the name changes here we get just we just get the controller that we're selecting and it's a lot easier to work with it just makes your workflow a lot faster and then uh the next thing is you know i just double click on the y location and let's say i want to move the y location but then i'm selecting multiple different channels right now all i wanted was the y location channel that's what i double clicked on but i can still select everything else the way you can fix that is going to view only selected curved keyframes you check this now once you double click on you know let's say the y boom none of the other keys are showing up here i can just go and move this one in particular so a few other things let's say i want to select all of my controllers i'm going to press a on my viewport here and now i'm going to press a on the channels to select all the channels and then i'm going to press a on my graph editor part where the curves are and now we've selected every single key on every single curve on every single channel on every single controller and you know if i was doing this real time it would look like this so it took about i don't know one to two seconds and i selected every single curve every single key every single channel another cool thing you can do is let's say we select this uh cog right here inside of gravity and let's say we just want to set a key on the translate y here so i'm going to go to translate y so that what i just did to zoom in was to press the number pad period you can see it right up here so on another part just press period and that focuses on what you have selected so let's say i just want to set a key on my location y i can do that inside the graph editor so i can come here press i and get presented with all these options and so this is where you can select you can say i want to set a key on all the channels or you can say i just want to set a key on the selected channel which is my y location so i'll do that and now if we go to x there's no key there if we go to z there's no key there and the only key is on our y now you can individually move this so i'm selecting this and i'm pressing g and y and so what that does is i can move it vertically up and down if i go left and right it doesn't really move left and right if i do want to move the key left and right i can press g x and it would just move this inside the graph editor so since we're still talking about selected keys uh another thing you can do another way you can hide certain channels is you can select whatever channel you want let's say i want to just see the locations and i can press shift h now everything else is hidden and if i press on the center of gravity for example which is what we have selected rotation and scale is hidden and all we see is location okay and so to undo this you can just press alt h so again shift h to hide alt h to unhide everything again okay let's move on to some more hotkeys uh so in maya you can have things in step mode you can have them in bayesia you can have them in you know spline and auto and clamp and all that stuff so let's say we want to have our animation here we got a very nice animation we got very nice animation right here let's say we want to have this in stepped so i'm going to press a here select all my controllers a a so that lets me select all my keys again and now i press t to bring up the keyframe interpolation now we got several options here we have constant which is for blocking this is uh what makes your animation into step mode now what's happening is when we go through this we have just our different poses here so there's nothing in between it's just step mode so just like maya we have linear and um that's pretty self-explanatory and bayesia is essentially auto so that it's on auto spline and so that's what we have here the thing is with blender we have more options so here let's go ahead and go to our cube right here i'm going to press ctrl tab on my viewport and that allows me to go into object mode so i can select this because before we were on pose mode so i'm selecting my cube and let's look at a nice animation we have here okay that's what we have cool so it just goes from here to here and you know what let's uh let's reduce this down to there we go so now uh when we go to let's go to our location x this is the cube going from left to right and i'm going to press t and we have this thing where it says back so when you press this we have something like this the cube reaches its destination but then it balances back a little bit and so there's a couple other cool things so we have bounce here which makes the cube balance when it reaches this destination and lastly we have elastic which it's pretty much like an elastic band and so it's pretty cool like personally i would animate this myself um i don't really want a machine doing that for me but you know if you're looking for something quick this is definitely something you can look into and i i don't think this is something that maha offers so let's say i want to move these two handles separately a way you can separate these is by pressing v and this will bring up your handle type and this way you can have multiple options in my case if i want to move them separately i'm going to press three and that freeze one of the handles from the other so now i can move this one this way and i can move the other one this way and and if you want something that's like a bouncing ball for example let's go to the z location and set a key here and i'm going to press v and make this into a vector so when i drag this down you guys can see when you're making a bouncing ball you want to make this nice v shape this will already give you that so normally it'll be like this and once you go to v vector it makes it into a nice v shape and you guys can experiment with all these options i don't think we have time to go in through every single one but i just want to show you the shortcuts and all the things that are actually possible so another cool thing that i want to show you is being able to scale from cursor so currently if i you know okay let's go to control x if i take this let's say i want to scale this out to go sideways to go horizontally so if i press s which is the scale and then x which i just wanted to go horizontally it starts spreading in both sides but what i wanted to do is start expanding from this point so i'll show you what i mean so i'm going to go ahead and go into to this little square the dot inside i'm going to change this to a 2d cursor instead of a bounding box and now when i press s and then x it starts the keys start expanding from where my cursor is from my where my keyframe is it's not going back this way it's not spreading on both sides i'm using my hands to show you guys that you can't see my hands let's bring this back and now let's say we want to flatten this handle and what you can do this is pressing shift s and then you can come here to the top right flatten the handle and i couldn't find that option anywhere else uh i had a co-worker of mine actually show me that i had no idea it existed but that's i as far as i know that's the only way you can flatten the handle you can just select it shift s gonna hold s and then you can come to flatten handle so i'm gonna show you just a few more things and then we're done so the second last tool i want to show you guys is when you go to channel and you can go to extrapolation the hotkey for this is shift e so i'll just do that so shift e now we have a constant extrapolation so what the constant does is it keeps the [Music] the value of the last key essentially at that it would keep that line flat to the last value of the last key now if i were to change this to linear let's go to linear extrapolation that is really hard to say i'm just going to say x from that one linear x it goes in a linear line infinitely so you know our last key here is that frame 20 but if we play this it'll just keep going past frame 20. so it's an infinite line upwards in a linear fashion now our third and pretty much last option is is cyclic and what this does is it creates a cycle and that's pretty much how you create cycles and in blenders you can press that and the way you can get rid of a cycle is shift e and then clear cycle and that will get rid of that cycle for you okay now the the juicy part that uh we already talked about a few things that maya doesn't have but this is another thing that i really really love that i learned about very recently and that is pretty much the attribute editor for the graph editor so you know how usually you have the you know attribute editor here for in maya and in blender so you can have the same thing by pressing n you can have the same exact thing for the graph editor so here for example um i double clicked on my x location and we have this cool thing here that's called modifiers and chick this schnitzel has to take out uh you could do a lot of stuff with this but right now we're just gonna cover we're just gonna cover noise we're just gonna go into noise and so look at this so when i i added the noise right away and this adds essentially jitteriness to your animation as you don't have it's like baked in you don't have to key anything so i just had you know two keys one like a linear line and this is what we have now now that's pretty cool if you want like a machinery or something you have a machinery in your um in your scene you have some sort of vehicle you have just you want some sort of stutter you can add this in right away you don't have to go and like um you can do the same thing in maya but you have to write it like a little code for it you have to it's like you gotta do all this stuff here it's just a single button you select that you can select which channel you want it on and on top of that you have full control over it so let me just drag this out so you have skill to adjust it in the x-axis so this tells you how fast and like how um how slow you wanted to jitter for example yeah that's a little crazy we have strength to adjust it on the y-axis so that's like the intensity and not the amount of jitters a little too intense for our liking let's do something like that there you go now it's just stuttering and lastly we have depth which increases the resolution of the noise okay and on top of that you can of course tell it um okay i want to start at frame 0 and i want it to end at let's say frame 10 there you go you can just increase and decrease that you can tell it okay i just want the jitter here and do you have you can have it like fade in and fade out like come on this is like insane this is there's like the applications for this are endless you can do so much with this and you know it's not just noise here you have all these other uh modifiers if you guys like leave a comment down below we can go through them uh in a later video but i think this video has gone on for long enough and i think that about covers it for this video actually so if you didn't enjoy this make sure to smash that like button again feel free to follow me on my other social medias if you like make sure you get your two three months of skill share that i have a link down below you can get my premium course for free once you sign up as well on top of thousands of other amazing courses on skillshare and lastly i want to give a huge thank you to my beautiful patrons thank you guys for your continuous support with all that out of the way happy animating and i will see you guys in the next animation video foreign

Channel: 3D Animation Hub

Views: 22,619

Keywords: blender graph editor, blender tutorial, blender graph editor tutorial, blender graph editor modifiers, graph editor tutorial, how to animate with the graph editor, how to animate in blender, switching to blender, brian kouhi, 3D Animation Hub, graph editor

Id: qoNzT78wUDU

Length: 14min 49sec (889 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 26 2020