Blender Path Animation - How To Speed Up and Slow Down Curve Animation in 11 Minutes!

hey this is Kent with blender binge in this short video I'm gonna show you how to animate on a path inside of blender 2.8 there's some cool little shortcuts and little tricks to use and we're gonna address a few problems that people have with slowing things down and speeding them up while on a curve and I'm gonna show you two different ways to go about animating on a curve ready let's go [Music] so if you notice first thing here is I have this little triangle thing it's really not a triangle it's a spaceship it's Hollywood baby spaceship super cool alright so now I'm gonna do is we take this super cool spaceship and I'm gonna give it something to animate on so for that I'm gonna go to add I'm gonna go to curve I'm gonna go to Bessie I and you see that mine is at 15 yours probably looks like this it's that one you can't see it it's hidden inside super cool spaceship so I'm gonna go and I'm gonna type in 15 boom there we go okay so I have a curve and I have my spaceship so the first way to do this is to set a constraint so that this follows the path so to do so I'm gonna go here to constraint which I'm already on and I'm gonna say add object constraint and I'm going to say follow path and when I hit play nothing happens because it doesn't have any idea what we want to do so first we have to say target target being the Bezier curve boom now it snaps it to the beginning of the Bezier curve and it did so because it's at zero zero zero again you want to make sure your object that you create is at zero zero zero so you want to snap it there before you do anything else but this snaps to the beginning and if I hit play nothing still happens if I hit follow curve and I hit play still nothing happens alright and you see that I hit follow curve and automatically had pointed the wrong way so to fix that I just hit X now it's following the right way so with all that setup that seems to be fine I hit animate path and now if I hit play it goes on the path it animates how we thought it would pretty cool right now I don't see anything set in here so I'm playing this and it's playing but it's doing it arbitrarily meaning it's just making it follow the path in the timing that it thinks feels right which isn't what we feel is right because we don't we don't want that so what we're gonna do is we're going to make it slow down and speed up and here's how you do it with this add object constraint thing we're gonna say fixed position and now you'll notice if you hit play nothing happens again okay this thing really doesn't want this thing to animate on the path but now we have this thing off set and we can scrub this and we can see that zero is the beginning and one is the end right so we could keyframe this so if I'm at frame one okay I can just right-click on this thing and I could set a insert keyframe okay so now I have offset one and they got keyframes over here let me expand this so you could see it better you have keyframes and if I go out to say frame 90 all right I'm gonna change this to one right click say insert keyframe and now between 1 and 99 amay 'td so now what I can do is I can I can speed it up by clicking and dragging these keyframes in and now you'll see that it goes really fast okay frame 1 and frame 29 or I could slow it down by dragging it all the way out so here you can see I can slow it make it go slow okay now other things I can do with this is I can have it kind of slow down and then look for something and then speed up again by changing this over here from keyframe for timeline over to graph editor and graph editor you see we have this offset factor that's now keyframed and if I hit home on the keyboard you'll see I'm gonna make this bigger so you could see it okay and I'll make this over here we have this nice little curve between 0 and but where is this 200 or something right so I can play with this alright and you could see here that you playing with the time the curves okay and you can make the curves go faster or slower you can also go in here and you can add in keyframes in the middle so I could go here okay and I could say insert keyframe and now over here okay I have a keyframe now at 77 right I can pull this up I can flatten this curve out and I can kind of have it sit here for a little bit okay so I hit play you'll see it goes up it slows down sits there a little bit and then fires up and speeds off again alright so you can play with it by just going in and playing with this offset factor inside of graph editor and that you can you can do and you can set as many keyframes as you want and you can have it slow down stop slow speed up and then speed on out okay that's one way to do this the second way that we can do this is we can parent this and it's a little bit trickier to make it work but you can parent this and have it follow and I'll show you that one now so this is number two alright so I'm gonna pause the video here and I'm gonna go and just go back to where we were at the very beginning of the video okay so here I am back at the very beginning with with my awesome spaceship and my Bezier curve and what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna do the second way so to do that I'm going to select my spaceship and I'm going to hit shift select my Bezier curve I'm going to hit control P on the keyboard or I can right click in 2.8 here and hit parent okay and I can choose follow path okay I'm just gonna say follow path that's cool follow path and now what I want to do definitely do here is I want to hit keep transform okay and that snaps it to the beginning and kind of makes it face the wrong direction again but we're gonna fix that in a minute alright so you might see something really strange happen if you don't have this checked so before you do anything else check this or just redo that that thing parented again and hit keep transform on okay just it's easier then explaining why not in this video but just do that okay now this is facing the wrong way so I select this alright and I just go over to my object little glyph over here I go to relations and you'll see the parent is the Bezier curve parent type is object that's fine tracking axis is positive Y we do not want that that's facing this direction we want it to face this direction so we just hit positive X boom and now you see that this is in fact a really quick way to just throw an object on a curve and have it animate all right just parenting follow boom done problem though is getting at the animation properties okay it doesn't seem to work the same way with this offset thingy here at least not right now in 2.8 so here's what we do alright we can go to the Bezier curve it's we just go to object data and then under path animation we have frames and here is where we can keyframe stuff so if I want say frame I want this to travel at a hundred frames I could say right-click on there or I could just hit this little thing right here okay and I could say animate property and it throws down key frames and then it's say like frame fifty I want it to go a little bit slower so I will throw this out all right insert keyframe then over here I want it to speed up a little bit so I'll take it down insert a keyframe and then over here I will speed it up to the end hit insert keyframe so now I have this if I hit play you see it like it'll hit here it'll slow it'll go it'll slow it'll go and now you can see that this stuff these keyframes will be on the graph editor as well so if I go here and I click on Bezier curve I go to path length and I'll hit the HOME key on the keyboard there it is not very fun looking all kind of step looking but it's there and you can drag it around and you can play with it alright and you can kind of see what it's doing now I would also go in here okay I can hit a to select all of these and I can go to key hit interpolation mode and I'll change it to Bessie a so now it's a little smoother and now you can see that you can just click on any one of these and drag them around and you can start playing with the timing of this animation alright so if you have like two keyframes that are pretty close together here you can kind of have it coast and then speed up you know you could have it you could have a kind of ramp up and then go faster and slow down slow down speed up slow and then ramp up speed up so that's the second way of getting to this this animation data alright so the first one was key framing in the constraints area and the second is if you use the parenting it's on the Bezier curve and it's under the little curve icon here object data and you keyframe it down here so you lay on your keyframes and then you go over to the graph editor and then you can play with that path length and then you can make it go faster or slower okay does that make sense okay so those are two ways to animate on a path inside a blender and especially blender 2.8 which gives you this might need a nice little right-click functionality and a whole bunch of other stuff but if I were doing this for real I would I would create a little rig and I'd probably eat instead of instead of animating the object directly on a path I would animate an empty on the path and that I would parent this guy to the empty and that way I could have control over this guy and have him Bank and do swords all sorts of cool stuff but I want this video to end at some point I like to keep these videos short for you so I'm not gonna go into that in this video but if you want to see me do that in a future video please write so in the comments and I'll gladly gladly do one for you and show you how I set that up alright so hopefully you got something out of this video and again if you if you did hit like subscribe share it hit that little Bell notification so you see what more of these and I'm just gonna keep going so hopefully you like it see in the next video Thanks

Channel: Kev Binge

Views: 123,104

Keywords: blender path animation, blender path animation speed, blender 2.8 animation tutorial, blender 2.8 animation, blender 2.8 tutorial, blender curve animation, blender 2, blender 2.8 beta tutorial, animation in blender for beginners, best animation schools, vfx school online

Id: HsOSDYTsG7o

Length: 11min 13sec (673 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 31 2018