Blender Graph Editor Tutorial (How To Use The Graph Editor)

hello everybody and welcome to the video in this tutorial i'm going to help you get a little more familiar with blender's graph editor now a lot of new animators i've talked to really don't like the graph editor and i i can kind of see why it's a little bit confusing which is why i'm making this video to help all the animators out there who hate working in the graph editor this is to help you become more familiar with it and learn how it works so you can animate fast training and just overall have a nicer experience working within blender or in any 3d program it all kind of works the same so let's jump right into the video okay so the graph editor is simply like any other kind of 2d graph it's taking all this 3d information that's in space and converting it into something that can exist in 2d so this is 2d this is 3d that's kind of the first thing to wrap your head around so i'm just going to go ahead and remove the tan frame 10 move this over i'm going to set a location and let's come over here this is our object now we've created a keyframe and i'm going to hide everything except for the y location why am i hiding everything but the y location pun intended um because as you can see up here the y-axis is the only one that i moved it on and it even keeps the same colors in here so you can see why green green here red is x which is the same here you can select it say that's red and then z blue so it all kind of it's all color coordinated okay so the graph editor has two separate directions has two directions and each of them do something different your right and left so this is your time like the timeline down here is about the same thing as this up here as time wise you scrub to the right you go forwards to the left is backwards as time now the graph editor has a different dimension it has up and down which is your value now what does your value mean so so you see if it's right here we are at a value of zero on a location we are directly in the center of the world we have traveled zero in all directions but when i bring it over here we have traveled 7.4169 and that is the same thing down here it's the same information now if we grab it and press y so we're only moving it up and down we're only changing the value it's um we're not changing time like this if we were to do that we would change the x value right and left and what i mean by y is up and down in the graph editor your y is up and down and your x is side to side not like the 3d viewport so by editing this i can decide we only want to go say about two and we'll drag it down about two bidding and we can see that right up here this is the value so no matter how far we drag it in time it's only going to go up to two this is we're only editing the value when we drag it up and down and let's say i wanted to drag it farther i can bring it up to 12 and voila you also have indicators over here on the side as well now working with one axis is pretty easy but what happens if we were to work with multiple axes so i'm going to drag it over here i'm going to drag it up here i'm going to set a location and now we have all this going in different directions what do these mean so the easiest way to think about this is to think of each of these individually um we still have our y-axis so it's traveling up here in a wire we can look at it here as well if we zoom on in now it's traveling about 12 on the y-axis which in 3d space means on it's moving right about 12 units and then we have the z-axis which is up and down and on z it's moving up 4.3 and then the same thing with x it's moving back but this one is negative now the x is going down instead of up and that means that we are going on the negative axis every every axis has a positive and a negative so for x positive is coming forwards and then negative is going back remember because this is the very this is zero right here so in order to get less than zero in order to travel this way it has to go into a negative direction which is the same thing down here here's zero here's the zero line and then here's the x coordinates this is the x-axis and it's i can tell that it's gone backwards because it's negative okay let's try and do rotation now i'm going to rotate this uh let's just do 45 so we can we can see it okay so basically the same thing i rotated it on the z axis see here so only the z axis has value on it and it's right up here at 45 you can see it bada bing and then if i were to grab this up and down it's going to move it's going to be greater or less than what i put in and then if i wanted it to spin the other way because right now if we're going travel this way it's spinning in this direction what if we want to spin it the other direction well i'm going to take this i want to drag it all the way down here to about the 45 section i'm just going to type in negative 45 just to make it exact and now it's going to spin the other direction so how do we use this information to animate well here's an example of a cube going up and down i use this a lot for examples because it kind of makes the most sense visually um when the value goes up in the graph editor the block goes up so it has a positive value so it's going up negative value makes it go down 0 brings it back to the very center now let's say i want to make this ball or make this cube jump i'm going to make like a nice smooth jump but when i was going through setting my keyframes it looks something kind of more like this it's all kind of but it's out of sync it doesn't even look right it's like that's not a jump that's not what i want in and how do we edit this well with the graph editor it is super duper simple watch this i'm just going to kind of bring these up and down just to try and make it a little more smooth that's pretty smooth and then i'm also going to make these free handles just for fun and i'm going and you can you can grab these handles as well there this is this is like a a deeper step into it beyond grabbing your individual keyframes you can also grab these handles and then if you select the keyframe and make it free then you can grab each of these and move them individually whereas if you have these which are auto clamped which i hope if you're animating that all your keyframes are auto clamped to begin with not automatic new auto clamped but if they're if they are auto clamped and you grab one side the other side is automatically going to adjust to try and make this curve as smooth as possible but i'm going to take this and grab it and move it up on the y axis actually know what i'm going to grab both of these not you just the handles and grab them both up at the same time something kind of just like this and we don't we don't even really need these i'm just going to delete those for simplicity and now we have a proper animation so this is something we can really only do with the graph editor is instead of just creating more keyframes to try and manipulate like i i could try and do this effect right here okay so here's the different curves of our two blocks this is the first one this is the when i did where i edited the edited the handles of the keyframe to make it really sharp and make give it that nice boing this one is just plain keyframes this is just me just coming down here and putting keyframes on the on the timeline don't want those and you can you can very much tell that this one doesn't look like a bounce so whereas i could kind of fix this by selecting about halfway and then doing a location keyframe i'm not going to grab it for this and then bringing this over like almost all the way the same thing here i'm going to about halfway location i'm going to bring this almost like all the way over and then we almost kind of get the same thing almost but it's it's not good this is not a good practice so it's really kind of imperative and very important that you learn to come into the graph editor and edit your curves so you can get these nice bounces you can get these sharps you can get these smooths and as you start animating characters and start getting more and more complex this becomes even more important because you'll have bones you'll have you'll have keyframes just going absolutely everywhere so you'll need to be able to isolate one say okay all i'm going to work is with the z location and i come in here and i can edit smooth it all out and then i can move over to the y location and do the same thing and but yada yada okay let's animate a simple ball bounce to kind of go over everything that we have learned so far i want to make this 40 so we can get a couple bounces i'm going to set a location keyframe and then i'm going to set another location keyframe but i want to bring this up let's say 5 and location i'm going to come back down to 20 and then we'll just put zero location there we go and then i'm going to go up here to 30 just stick with me and we'll make it a little less location and then zero location so then it kind of loses energy okay so first let's fix our oh no no let's make it real confusing let's really confuse you guys and see how well you can figure this out so i'm going to come in here and hide everything except for the x location we're going to add this into the mix and i'm going to delete all of these except for the first one and the second one and the second one i want to bring up so i'm going to grab it on the y-axis and i'm going to bring it oh i don't know let's say 10. let's just type it in here oh no 110. location so now not only is our ball heading up and down but it's going to the right as well so we have two axes to worry about we're and we're not going to work with y for this one once you can once you figure out these two working all three is going to be kind of very similar and it should be pretty easy uh first thing i want to do is let's fix our x location okay i want this to move very fast at first and then slow down so something i'm going to do i'm going to select the beginning keyframe i'm going to hit v i'm going to make it a vector so a vector keyframe is uh how do i explain a vector keyframe a vector keyframe is always going to take the shortest path so instead of making this curve so if we were just to have it like this instead of making it nice and curved and going up here and whoa no one trying to do something like that it's always going to take the shortest path possible so it's just straight from here to here and then it's curved on this one because this one's an auto tangent they're always going to be very straight and it's going by it's going to be very sharp so that's the vector handle i'm just i'm just going to set that down there and then it's going to slow down as we get over here why is it going to slow down because the value is getting less and less and i can actually drag this on the x-axis to make this a bit smoother and now we can see it starts our value starts dropping or going up because we are going up to 10 so our value starts going up really really quickly and he's traveling really fast in this direction and then as we continue the value starts to slow down so like in the first 10 frames it goes from nothing to four and a half 4.5 and then over the next 10 frames it goes up to 8.1 which is a little less and then over the next 10 frames it only gets to 9.6 which is a whole lot less the value gets less and less as we go because i stretch this out so far oop come back please no yes thank you because i edit this on the time it's not going to go farther than what we said it but it is going to get there faster now if i were to bring this way in then it would get there slower okay so that's what we're going to do with our x location for now now we need to figure out this hop whoa come back quick tip if you somehow find yourself lost like this and you can't find your stuff anywhere and you're you're way up here in no man's land how do you get back to your key frames hit you hit your home key just hit home and it'll bring you back to the entire thing okay so what are we looking at this is our this is the same thing it's our bounces but it doesn't have any bounciness they're all smooth they take off real slow it's like a rocket ship like and they take off whoa and then they slow down and then they go whoa now they slow back down again that's not how gravity works that's not how falling works so we need it to go really fast and slow down and they get really fast and continually fast and then slow down and then get really fast again and also there is an extra key that's not doing anything why is it here i don't know we don't need it i'm going to make this free and then i'm going to select this keyframe and this keyframe at the same time grab it on y and bring them up and this is not going to be even because these are not the same so this one's going to get a little more something kind of like that and what i'm doing is simply trying to make this as smooth as possible and i'm going to do this again here and what i'm doing is i'm trying to make this arc look as much like an arc as possible so like this this is broken arc this is this is not good this is not what we want so we're gonna make it free i'm gonna select this i'm gonna bring it up and make this arc look as symmetrical as even as possible so again we have like we could do before with the bouncing that's going to start off really fast and then slow down that's going to get really fast again it's going to ping hit and then take back off with the same speed and then slow down and come back down and fall again let's actually play this and see how it looks [Music] it looks okay um something i notice is that because this one is in the air it doesn't go up as high it shouldn't be up in the air as long so what i'm going to do actually is bring this in two and then bring this in one so that it's still the same amount one two three four five six seven eight one two three four five six seven eight whoo okay he wants us to be so we can have 8 and 8. now it's looking better but something's still off what's off about it um we did too much to our x location so what i'm going to do is i'm going to take this handle if it'll let me and i'm going to dial it back okay that looks a little better awesome we have our ball bounce yay that wasn't so hard now we take it to our supervisor and he's like that's good i wanted 10 units to the left oh my gosh i have to reanimate that entire thing and move it to the left no no no no no no i don't i know that's okay it's okay it's easy you know why because we know how to use the graph editor it's so simple we don't have to reanimate anything not zip no we need to do he wants it 10 to the left so on the x axis that's going to be negative because this way is positive you can tell because the arrows are always pointing to the positive so we need to take these x keyframes because we don't we don't need to do anything with z he didn't say anything about it being bad up and down the up and down is perfect absolutely how we want it he wants it 10 to the left so i'm going to grab all these keyframes press y to lock it to the y axis so we're only moving up and down we're only changing the value and then we're going to come all the way down here and move it 10. you can see right here and we're just nope negative 10. and look at there we didn't have to reanimate anything the ball is 10 units to the left our supervisor is happy and we didn't have to do any extra work oh yeah nice this is the power of the graph editor the ability to reanimate and readjust your stuff without actually having to re-animate anything setting no extra keyframes all you have to do is edit your handles or move it move the value of it or even you know move the with the time if you need to do that this is the power of the graph editor so if you still feel unfamiliar with it do stuff like this go and just animate something real simple and instead of putting in extra keys only use the graph editor to edit your animation if it's too cluttered we can select all the channels we don't need so we don't need this one this one this one we don't have any rotation and we have no scale and i'm going to delete channels and they're gone and all of a sudden our graph editor looks clean and beautiful again now this principle carries over to any 3d program whether it be blender or maya the only difference is some of the axes are different so for example in blender z is up and down and then in maya y is actually up and down so so basically all the the names are just basically off they all do exactly the same thing it's just for maya you'd be editing y to do up and down and then instead of z like you are in blender all right one more thing before we go just for kicks we're going to do rotation just to make it you know look proper so we're going to start here we're just going to press a we're going to insert a rotation i'm going to go all the way actually not to the we're going to go to the end of the of the animation and actually adjust that ping so right at the end and i'm going to rotate this on the y-axis uh we'll say that's 360 that's all the way around uh we'll just do 360. for simplicity okay and we automatically know that it's going to look awful why because they're on auto tangents and that's not what we want we want it to rotate at the same speed as we go so i'm going to select all the keyframes down here on the y rotation press uh v going to press v and move to vector and now it's going to rotate as we go and it looks nice alrighty that's basically all i have for this uh this video is just supposed to be a short and sweet example not a lecture so i'm gonna go ahead and wrap it up now if you have any further questions about the graph editor or anything that we talked about today put them down below i'll try and answer them as much as i can if there's too many i'll make another video and explain the topics that i might have skipped because there's there's a lot more to the graph editor than what i have showed you here but anyways guys i hope this helped you anyways guys i hope i hope this helps i hope now you have a better understanding of the graph editor and um don't be afraid of it just jump in and play with it do something really simple and then you can work your way up in complexity anyways guys i'm gonna go now i'll see you in the next video take care bye

Channel: Navillus Studio

Views: 1,962

Keywords: Navillus, Studio, animation, family, friendly, Kaleb, Sullivan, CGI, Cartoon, Blender, Computer, Graph, Editor, Tutorial, How to, Animator, Animation Tutorial, Blender Tutorial

Id: EBKyfal8Ju8

Length: 23min 32sec (1412 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 10 2021