Blender Tutorial - Book Opening Animation

hello everyone and welcome to another blender made easy tutorial today i'll be showing you how to create this book opening animation in blender this is actually pretty easy to create and we're going to be covering a variety of topics including constraints animation and a couple other things so let's go ahead and get started the first thing i'm going to do of course is delete the default cube so make sure it's selected and delete it then what you can do is shift a and add in a new cube we're going to be modeling a very basic book right here it's not going to be a very complex it's just going to be three different cubes so with this first cube selected i'm going to press n and go over to the dimensions tab the dimensions of this cube is going to be 0.2 for the x and .05 for the z this is going to be a pretty thin cube and this is going to be the spine of the book next up i'm going to go into top view and shift d it this is going to be the right cover so i'm going to name this cover and then right and we'll select the other cube and we'll just call this spine with the cover right the x dimension is going to be a little bit bigger we're going to go with 1.5 for the x then let's move it into place so press g and x holding control and shift you can place it right next to it just like that let's shift d this and place it on the other side and we're going to call this one cover and then left now that we have all of our objects in our scene let's work on the rotation of the book so it can actually open and close to do this it's actually going to be pretty easy we're going to select the spine of the book and we're going to create two different pivot points for the spine to do this go into edit mode and go into the edge select mode and select this top edge right here i'm going to press shift s and go cursor to select it next i'm going to press shift a and add in a new empty object and it's just going to be a single arrow let's add that in and scale it down i'm also going to press ctrl a and apply the scale so everything works correctly and then let's duplicate that and place it on the other side so press shift d and then x type in point 2 in the negative direction and enter to actually get the spine of the book to rotate around these two points we're going to select it and then add a new constraint the constraint that we're going to be adding is a pivot constraint this allows us to select a new pivot point for the object even though the origin is in the center this will act like a new origin point so for the target it's going to be the empty on the right you also want to make sure that the rotation range is set to the positive y direction so make sure it's positive y and select it we'll add in a new pivot point and it's going to be for the empty on the left side so for the target it's going to be the empty on the left and the rotation range this time is going to be negative y so now what happens is if we select our object and press r and y you can see it's rotating along that point just like that now before we continue creating the book animation here is a quick word from our sponsor once again this video is brought to you by skillshare skillshare is an online learning platform with thousands of classes taught by professionals they have a huge variety of subjects and topics that you'll never run out of things to learn some of the topics include animation illustration graphic design music and they even have a lot of blender classes one class i can recommend is character illustration by gabriel piccolo he goes into depth on the process of creating a character drawing it out on a piece of paper and it's actually really good if you're wanting to get into character design and learning how to draw faces and illustration and things like that this class is perfect with the premium membership you get unlimited access to every single class on their platform this also means that there's going to be no ads and you can study without any interruption i've been using skillshare for a really long time and i can definitely recommend it so here's the deal the first 1000 people to click the link in the description or the pin comment will get one month of the premium membership for free so what are you waiting for click the link down below and start learning something new today thanks again to skillshare for sponsoring this video now let's get back to the tutorial next up we're going to work on the two covers on each side this is also going to be pretty easy what we're going to first do is select the cover on the right and we want to make sure the origin is right at that empty point so with it selected i'm going to right click set origin and then the origin to the 3d cursor let's do the same thing on the other side select this empty press shift s and go cursor to select it then of course just set it right here origin to 3d cursor how this works is we're going to add in another constraint and it's going to be a copy rotation constraint we're going to change the mix to the add function and this will add rotation so when this object moves around it's going to rotate this object as well i also want to parent both of the covers to the spine so select the spine at last hit ctrl p and then parent it to the spine so now what happens is if we select it and then rotate it you can see they're rotating both the covers going back over to the left cover the target for this constraint is going to be the spine so select it and then i'm also going to limit the rotation of this i don't want it to actually go underneath the ground so we're going to make sure it stops rotating right at this point so to do that with the limit rotation we're going to select the y and the max value is going to be set up to 180 degrees also make sure you turn on effect transform let's do that exact same process on the other cover as well so select it click add constraint and copy rotation the target is going to be the spine and then for the mix mode we're going to select add then of course the last constraint is going to be the limit rotation because i don't want it to go underneath the ground so select the limit rotation y and this time for the minimum value we're going to go with a value of negative 180 degrees also make sure you turn on effect transform now what happens is if we select our spine and rotate this along the y you can see the book will close and then if we go on the other side the book will close on that side as well now before we add in the pages let's do a little bit of animating on this book cover first off i'm going to rotate this along the y till 90 degrees and you don't want to go past 92 degrees because you'll see this is what happens make sure whenever you're rotating it that you stop exactly at 90 degrees on frame 1 i'm going to hit i and add in a rotation keyframe to the spine next we're going to go to frame a 15 and then press alt r to reset the animation i'm going to hit i and add in another rotation keyframe then we're going to skip to frame 30 and rotate this along the y in the negative direction all the way to negative 90 then hit i and add in another rotation keyframe make sure you hold ctrl when you do this so it can actually snap to the 5 degree increments as you can see here don't worry about the speed of the animation we're going to be changing these keyframes later these are just placeholders next up we are ready to start adding in the paper i'm going to create a new collection on the right side and we're going to call this pages then i'm going to go into top view and then add in the piece of paper so i'm going to press shift a and add in a new mesh and it's going to be a plane let's go into wireframe so we can see what we're doing and then let's go into edit mode we need to make sure the origin is right on the edge of this plane so i'm going to press g and then x and drag it over so it's right on the edge go out of edit mode and then holding control i'm going to place it right next to the edge then you can also scale it down along the x and the y so it's actually inside the book alright so we have the size of the page correct now we need to subdivide this and add a couple different modifiers so what i'll do is i'll go into edit mode hit control r and we're going to add 40 loop cuts so press 40 enter and then right click to make sure they're centered just like that next up the modifier that we're going to be adding is a simple deform modifier this will have the paper actually bend as it's moving up so go over to the modifier tab click add modifier and then select the simple deform modifier for the type it's going to be set to the bend mode and then for the access it's going to be the z-axis currently though this does not look that good and you can see it's rotated along the wrong direction so what we need to do is actually go into side view by pressing three and then go into edit mode select everything with a and then rotate it by 90 degrees holding ctrl i'm going to snap it to this axis just like that go out of edit mode and then rotate it back there you can see it's actually rotating in the correct direction this time now we can animate the angle right here i'm going to be setting this down to zero on frame one and then add in a keyframe next we're going to skip to frame 15 and then we're going to set this to a negative value you can imagine the page actually flying outwards and it's going to bend in this direction yeah this direction the negative value so set this down to negative 45 then add in another keyframe skip to 15 frames later on frame 30 and we're gonna set this back down to zero enter and then add in finally that last keyframe and there we go we now have the animation of this working now let's add in the last modifier and then we can start duplicating the pages there is one problem with our animation and the problem is that the beginning of the page right here is not staying connected to the spine of the book this does not really look good and it totally breaks the animation so how we're going to fix this is by adding a hook modifier to make sure it stays right at the spine of the book to do this i'm going to go into top view and press shift s and then click on cursor to select it then let's add in a new object i'm going to press shift a and add in an empty object we'll just go with a plain axis and scale it down this is the object that we're gonna have the page being hooked to i'm gonna press ctrl a and apply the scale make sure you do that that's very important then let's grab both the paper and that empty that we just added and drag it up because currently it's right inside and that's not very good so let's drag it up just slightly just like that all right so what we need to do is select the page and then add in a new modifier let's go with the hook modifier right here what the hook modifier does is it allows you to take an object and have another object hooked to it and you can manipulate it and it will stay in that exact position and of course the object that we're going to be hooking to is that empty that we just added so click on the eyedropper tool and select the empty right there the other thing that we want to do is add in a vertex group because right at this point right here i want the page to actually be up like this but i also want it to be laying down on its side over here so we're going to be adding in a gradient weight effect so that only some parts of the mesh is actually hooked to the spine to do this we're going to go into the weight paint mode up top here and then go into top view let's restart the animation so it's laying flat and then select the gradient tool in top left if we then click and drag holding control so it locks it to the x-axis we're going to drag it out just slightly probably around there or so looks pretty good only a little bit with that done we can go out of weight paint back into object mode and then select the vertex group that we just created now what happens is if we play our animation and oh we i forgot to do one more thing we need to actually parent the empty to the spine of the book so select the empty and then select the spine last hit control p and then parent it to the object now if we play our animation you can see the paper is actually staying stuck to the spine and that's exactly what we want i'm also going to select the paper right click and shade it smooth alright so now that we've added the hook and the simple deform we are ready to start duplicating the page i'm going to zoom in and select both the empty and the piece of paper and then press shift d and drag it up along the z axis just slightly the closer you have the pages together the more that will be added i'm probably going to go with right about there then i'm going to repeat that action by hitting shift r and holding that down that will duplicate it all the way up to the very top and there we go so now we are ready to start animating the pages actually rotating with the book itself now you might be wondering why we don't just select the page and then parent that to the empty and the reason for that is it just doesn't work that way since i want some of the pages to actually remain on the ground as the other pages are moving up if we parent it to the empty all of the pages are going to move at the exact same time and it's not going to look that good so that's why we're going to be animating them ourselves without parenting them to the empties so what i'll do is i will select all the pages on the right side all of these just like this and then on frame 1 i'm going to hit i and add in a location rotation keyframe then we're going to skip to frame 15 we're going to rotate all of these just like this rotate them 90 degrees and then holding control i'm going to place them right at this point here if for some reason you have a little bit of a gap in between where they're located what you can do is select both of the middle empties right here since i have an even number i'm going to select two of them hit shift s and go cursor to select it then i will select all of the pages up top deselect both of these empties we don't want to select those then i'll press shift s and go selection to cursor but keep the offset and that will make sure that the origins are in the exact same position then i'll hit i and add in another location rotation keyframe skip to frame 30 we're going to do the exact same thing rotate the origins by 90 degrees and then place them right here but you can see they're still offset a little bit so what i'll do is i will select both of the middle empties shift s cursor to selected then i will select all the pages shift s selection to cursor but keep the offset and then we'll add in the last location keyframe now if we restart our animation and play it here is the result so now the question is how do we get all the pages to move separately so they're not moving at the exact same time this is actually very easy with this add-on called commotion if you watch my puzzle tutorial you'll know exactly how this works it allows you to offset all the animation very very easily with one click of a button so to get this add-on click the link in the description download it and install it to install an add-on go over to user preferences underneath the add-ons just click install and then make sure you add that in by typing in commotion in the search bar and then making sure it's checked right there so once you have it installed let's go over to the second collection with all of the pages and then let's select them all i'm going to select the top page last this one right here so make sure it's the active object then i'm going to press shift s and go cursor to active so my cursor is placed right at the top then you can press n and go over to the commotion tab down at the bottom right here this offset right here controls how many frames the animation is actually offset and then you can click on offset animation that will do the entire thing one thing to keep in mind is you don't want to set one for the offset if you do this it's going to look a little bit weird and your animation will look like it's completely static which does not look good so for my animation i'm going to set it up to a value of two then i'm gonna click on offset animation and there you go now if we play our animation here is the result that we're getting you can see all of the pages are moving separately which is looking really good next up i'm going to select only half of the pages right about there and then i'm going to move these keyframes over to the right so we have a gap in the middle so now if we select everything we can see we have two sets of keyframes i might drag these a little bit closer though probably around there now if we play our animation we can see this is the effect at this point the pages stop then they resume right here and it fills out the rest of the book that is looking very good and now we need to fix the animation for the spine itself so let's go back over to collection 1 and select the spine this keyframe right here we need to duplicate it so it actually remains open for a period of time so i'm going to shift d it and move it over to the right then i'll select both of these keyframes and drag them over then all we have to do is line them up so we can see here it remains open for a little bit and then at a certain point the pages start to move and then right there that is when i want the book to start closing so what i'll do is i will select both of these drag them this way and then i'll select this keyframe and drag it a little bit more to the right so it slows it down and there we go and finally you're just going to need to tweak it a little bit you can see here the page is actually inside it so what i'll do is i'll just drag it this way and just like that we can see it lines up perfectly and there you go you can control the speed of the pages if you want it to go a little bit faster what you'll have to do is go back into collection two i'll restart and select them all in the offset what you need to do first is set this back down to zero and then click on offset animation and that will reset everything then you can set it up to let's say if you want it to be slower you can set it up to four then what that will do you can see here the pages are moving a lot slower now if you want it to be faster first you have to reset it so set it back down to zero restart the animation offset it then if we go with a decimal value like point five for example the animation will be really fast but i'm going to leave it at two i think that is pretty good so i'm just going to control z that a couple times just like that one thing that i forgot to mention is if you don't like the height of the pages what you can do is select all these empties down here for the hook objects and then just scale them down along the z axis this will bring the roundness of the pages down a lot lower and i think that looks just a little bit better you can even go higher if you want them to be higher like this or lower just depending on what you want so there you go that is how you animate a book opening in blender the next step is to just add some textures uh one thing that one thing to keep in mind is that the texture will actually be a little bit warped on the piece of paper because of the hooked modifier so you're gonna have to scale the uv map just a little bit to make it look a little bit better but once you add in some textures and lighting and render out the animation you will have a really cool animation of a book opening if you created your own animation from this video make sure to send it to me on instagram at blendermade easy also thanks again to skillshare for sponsoring this video and i will see you in the next one

Channel: Blender Made Easy

Views: 37,694

Keywords: blender, animation, tutorial, book, opening, 2.8, how to, cycles, eevee, beginner, blender tutorial, constraints, commotion, addon, blendermadeeasy, blender made easy, easy, book opening, pages, flying, blender 2.8, blender 3d, blender animationf, blender tutorial for beginners

Id: geyC6FfMFf8

Length: 19min 2sec (1142 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 07 2021