Blender Tutorial - Jigsaw Puzzle Building Animation

hello everyone and welcome to another blender made easy tutorial today i'll be showing you how to create this animation of this puzzle building itself this is actually very easy and i'll be showing you some tricks along the way so let's go ahead and get started the first thing that we will do is delete the default cube so press x and delete it next up we could go ahead and model the puzzle piece ourselves but that would just take way too long so instead we're going to be using this script that this guy created which automatically generates a puzzle which we can download as an svg so go ahead click the link in the description and go to this page once you're here you can either decide to build a hexagon circle puzzle or a rectangle one i'm going to be creating a rectangle one so go ahead and select this and it'll bring you over to this page here we have a couple of different settings the seed value is up top and this will just give you a random variation the tab size is the little pieces on the end of the puzzle you can control the size of it i'm gonna be setting this to twenty percent the jitter amount controls the randomness of the puzzle so if i drag this up you can see they're a lot more crazy and uh curvy i'm gonna be setting this down to one percent so they're pretty straight and then here we have the corner radius so you can control how round the corners are the tiles the number of pieces going across and up and down i'm going to leave it at 15 but i'm going to set the y to 11 so we have one more in the middle and then finally you can control the size so if you want a square one we can set this to 200 but you're gonna want to set the tiles to 11 just like that so we have a square piece i'm going to be leaving it at 15 and 300 for the size and once you're happy with your puzzle go ahead and click on download svg now jumping back over to blender let's go ahead and import that file that we just created if we go over to file down to import and then click on svg which is a vector format i'm going to click on this and then navigate to that folder once you have found it go ahead and select the jigsaw.svg and import into blender we should see it down here but it's currently really small so let's go ahead and box select the entire thing and scale it up probably around this size now when you import an svg they are converted into curves as you can see here we have all the curve settings so let's go ahead and select them all and press ctrl j to join them into one object then over in the collections i'm just going to drag it into the original collection and delete the one that was created next up i'm going to select it right click click on set origin and origin to geometry then i'm going to press alt g to snap it to the center of the world from there let's go ahead and add in a plane we'll scale it up to be a little bit bigger than the jigsaw puzzle now let's select our curve once again and what we're going to want to do is change the resolution because if we zoom in here you can see there is a lot of geometry and we're going to be using a knife project on the plane to cut out the pieces with this set to 12 it's going to be a lot of geometry and it's going to be a little bit too much so i'm going to set the resolution of the curve a little bit lower you can probably get away with a resolution of 7 but i'm going to go with 8 just so we have a little bit more smooth pieces once we have done that we can go ahead and shift d it move it to its own layer just in case we want to go back to it and then i'm going to just hide that go ahead and select the curve once again and we're going to convert it to a mesh to do this go ahead and right click select convert to and select the mesh now if we go into edit mode we can see we have a lot of geometry the next step is to hold shift and select the plane then go into edit mode if we press a to select everything and press f3 we can type in the word knife and you should see the knife project what this will do is it will take the objects that are selected and then cut them out into the plane so if we click on knife project it might take a couple seconds for it to generate but once we do that we can see it has worked correctly we have all the pieces on the plane so now we can go out of edit mode select the curve and go ahead and delete that we're not going to need it anymore then we will select the plane once again and go back into edit mode and we're going to delete the outside edge i'm going to go into vertices select mode and select all the corners then press x and delete the vertices now that we have all of the pieces in place let's inset them so i'm going to press a to select everything and i'm going to zoom in here and then i'm going to double tap i this will inset each individual face you only want to go a little bit because if you go too far you're going to get these weird artifacts so only go right about there just go in a little bit and then left click next before you do anything else press ctrl or command i to invert your selection and then delete all of those vertices now what we have is individual pieces that we can select and move anywhere we want i'm going to press a to select everything and go p and then click on buy loose parts now we have individual objects that we can select and manipulate how we want i'm going to select everything and then right click and click on set origin and origin to geometry so now every single piece has the origin in the middle of it before we get on to the animation of our puzzle pieces building itself let's create the material i'm going to go over to the material tab and create a new one from there we can split this view and then open up the shader editor i'm going to press n to close off that panel and add in a new texture so i'm going to press shift a and add in an image texture we'll plug the color into the base color then i'm going to click open and navigate to a texture i'm going to be using this one right here and open image from there you can go ahead and play around with the principled shader if you want to i'm probably just going to go with a roughness of like point a to metallica 0.2 then if we press z and go into rendered view we should be able to see it right here but it's not applied to any of the other puzzle pieces so to fix that i'm going to press ctrl l and click on link materials and once we've done that we can see it's located on the puzzle pieces if we come to this menu and go over to the uv image editor we can play around with the uv map so i'm going to go into edit mode select everything come over here on this window select everything as well and then scale it along the x so it's actually proportionate if for some reason you have a weird uv map what you can do is press u and click on project from view and this will automatically generate the correct bounding box as you can see then you can scale it up and place it in the middle of your texture and now that we've done that let's go ahead and give it some thickness i'm going to go into edit mode and extrude it downwards just slightly like this and i'm also going to add in a bevel modifier doing this gives it a lot more detail and it looks a lot better in the final animation so just with one of them selected let's go over to the modifier tab click add modifier and select bevel i'm going to press ctrl a and apply the scale to it so it actually applies the bevel correctly then let's turn the segments up to a value of three to apply this to everything else we're going to do the exact same thing press control l and click on copy modifiers and there we go now every single one of these has that bevel modifier now let's create the animation of the puzzle pieces building themselves to do this it's actually very simple we're going to select all of them press i and add in a location rotation keyframe on frame one then we're going to select that keyframe and just move it over to frame 40. then on frame one we're going to drag all of them upwards just right about there or so depending on how high you want the puzzle pieces to fall from probably around there and then i'm going to hit i and add in another location rotation keyframe next up i'm going to select a bunch of random pieces just like this and we're going to rotate them randomly so they have a little bit of rotation so over in the proportional editing i'm going to turn this on and set the fall off over to random now if we double tap r we should get a random rotation but you can see it's rotating everything like this that's not going to really work so let's switch this over to individual origins now if we double tap r we can see that we're getting this effect so go ahead do this a couple times select a bunch of random ones double tap r select one and just kind of do this sort of effect just like that and once you're happy with it select everything go i and click on location rotation now what happens is if we play our animation you can see they all go into that position on the bottom which is pretty cool but one problem that we have is that they're all moving at the exact same time this doesn't really look good for the animation and i want only one of them to be moving at a time to do this we're going to be using an add-on called commotion this will offset every single one of the keyframes for us automatically and it's very customizable and very very good so go ahead click the link in the description and download the version 2.21 and then make sure you have the latest version of blender installed 2.9 or above to actually install the add-on you can go over to edit down to your preferences underneath the add-ons click install and then navigate to that blend file and then import that in once you have it go ahead and type in commotion and you should see the animation commotion click that box on the side to enable it and you're good to go so how this works is if we press the n key we can go underneath the commotion tab and here we have a lot of settings over here that we can change let's just go ahead and test this out by clicking offset animation and what this will do is it will take every single one of the objects that we have selected and then offset the animation by the number that we have put in right here so since it's set to one it's gonna offset by one frame for every single object now what happens is if we play our animation we can see we get this effect and there you go with just a simple click it offsets everything completely with normal blender you can't do this and i don't know why it's not in blender automatically this is such a useful thing anyways over in the commotion add-on we can see here we have a sort by currently it's set to the cursor so what this will do is it will sort the offset by the cursor if i move the cursor over to the right side i'll restart the animation and then click offset animation what it will do is it will actually start over on this side now as you can see so wherever you place your cursor and the if the mode is set over to cursor it'll start at that point one thing to note is with the offset animation button wherever your cursor is on the timeline that is where it will be placed for example if i have it on frame 71 and i click offset animation it's going to move it over to this spot so make sure you restart the timeline and then click offset before you do anything else the other sword by that we have here is the name what this will do is it will take the name of every single object and then offset it by that way for example you can see here we have plane one which is located in the bottom left plane zero zero one is located here plane two and it'll just go down the line so with it set by name and then we click offset animation and then we play it we can see this is the effect that we're getting it's going by the name of the objects and then offsetting them that way we also have random which will randomly select the object and offset it that way so if we restart our animation and click offset it'll take random pieces and then bring them down finally if you want a little bit more control you can click on multi-offset this will allow you to use objects in a collection to offset it to test this out i'm going to go ahead and collapse this right-click and create a new collection we'll go to collection at 3 and then i'll press shift c to snap my cursor i'm going to press shift a and add in an empty object i'll just place it over here and i'm going to turn off proportional editing i'll press shift d and move it over to this spot and then to add in a couple of keyframes i'm going to go to frame 1 select them both i location rotation we'll skip to frame 50 move this down move this one up and then select them both hit i and add in another keyframe so now if we go back over to our first collection we'll select all of the pieces once again we're going to animate the collection one which has all the pieces in it then for the effector it's going to be collection 3 the one that we just created we'll restart the timeline and click on offset animation now what happens is it's going to use those empties that we just created you can see the bottom right and the top left it's going to offset them that way up on the top we have two different values here the offset and the threshold the offset is how many frames it will offset per object for example if i bring this up to a value of 2 instead of every single frame it's going to offset every single object by 2 frames so if i click on this it's going to double the amount of frames that we have and it's going to look something like this the threshold amount controls how many objects are going to be offset so if i bring this up to a value of five there's going to be five objects moving at the same time then it's going to take another five move those at the same time and offset them that way so if i set this down to one and then i'll click animate offset we have a lot of objects moving at the same time as you can see for this animation i'm going to select the cursor and i'm going to leave the cursor at the center of the world then we'll restart the animation and click offset as you can see this is looking really really cool one final thing that i'll do in this tutorial is i'll take the middle piece and then move that to the end of the animation so that one is actually the last one that gets placed to do this select the middle piece and grab those keyframes and then move them all the way to the end of the animation frame 205 now what happens is if we restart and then we play this you can see the middle piece is there once it's completed the last piece is that middle and it looks a lot more satisfying another really cool feature that you can do with this animation is you can change the interpolation mode of these keyframes you can do this very easily by box selecting every single one of them and pressing t and then selecting the one that you want for example the bounce interpolation has a really cool effect if we select that one i'll restart our animation and play it we can see this is the effect that we're getting the pieces are bouncing as they land on the ground the constant one will give a cool effect as well it's almost like a time lapse of the pieces being built the one that we'll be using in this tutorial is the bezier interpolation because i think it looks really nice with the smooth transitions and then finally the last step is just to create a scene around this you can add some lighting add in a plane with a texture and then render this out into an animation but there you go thank you very much for watching this tutorial if you learned something new or created your own animation make sure to send it to me on instagram at blendermadeeasy if you're new here consider clicking that subscribe button because i create blender tutorials all the time thanks again for watching and i will see you in the next one you

Channel: Blender Made Easy

Views: 13,025

Keywords: blender, tutorial, blender 2.8, blender animation, puzzle, jigsaw, blendermadeeasy, beginner, animation, 3d, cycles, eevee, how to, create, build, blender tutorial for beginners, b3d, learn, fun, puzzles

Id: msD6lt043Sg

Length: 15min 1sec (901 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 28 2021