Blender Tutorial - Lego Building Animation

hello everyone and welcome to another blender made easy tutorial today we're going to be revisiting our childhood and playing with some legos i created a poll two weeks ago asking which tutorial you would like to see the most and the lego building animation just barely won that vote the glowing particle smoke animation was just writing its tail so you can expect that tutorial very soon make sure to click subscribe to stay notified whenever i upload that to actually get a lego set into blender we need another program called studio this is a free program and i'll link it in the description if you want to play around with it you can import a pre-built set that other people have made or you can go ahead and create your own on the left side you have a ton of bricks to choose from and you can just click and drag and place them in the scene for this tutorial i've created a blender logo lego set as you can see on screen and if you don't want to download this program but you still want to follow along i will link this file in the description so go ahead and grab that keep in mind if you use one of the pre-built sets you don't want to have it too complex or it's not going to really import into blender properly i've had multiple crashes and files just take forever to import so make sure that the lego set is not too complex or it just might not work once you have made your lego set all you have to do is go over to file down to export as and then click on colada that will export it as the file format that we can import into blender now let's go ahead and jump into blender and import that in so over here in blender i'm going to press a to select everything and delete all the objects from the scene then we're going to go over to file and then down to import and then click on colada.dae navigate to where that file is and it's over in this folder we're going to click on the blender logo we don't have to change any of the settings then click on import now depending on how complex the lego set is it might take a long time to import we can see this was pretty quick now before we do anything else we have a couple of extra objects in our scene as you can see a camera and two lights we're not going to need those so go ahead and delete those next i'm going to select this model and everything is currently parented to that if we were to try to animate all these objects it's not going to really work properly so we're going to unparent every single one of these pieces from the middle so we can animate them separately i'm going to select the model and then press x and then delete it you might notice though that everything becomes quite large so i'm going to press a and scale everything down until it's the appropriate size another thing you're going to notice is that everything is now parented to another object as you can see over here now that's not going to really work either so we're going to delete those parents as well so we just have the basic models without them being parented to anything so to do that i'm going to select one of these objects in the outliner over here then we're going to go over to select down to select by type and then click on where is it at empty we want to click empty right here and that will select all of these objects then we can delete them so press x and then delete them then you can see everything became a really large and once again so we're going to scale everything down and then place it in the middle of our scene so you might have to do this a couple of times until everything is quite small and there you go you can still see it's quite large we're going to scale that whole thing down go into top view and then place it in the middle of our scene go into front view and drag it up so it's in the middle of the grid floor then we can rotate this along the x so it's flat just like that and then you might notice that it's currently backwards so we're going to flip this by hitting control m then click on x and that will flip it along the x-axis then we can rotate it around and place it in the middle of our scene just like that and there we go now we can see that all these objects are no longer parented to each other and that is exactly what we want next up if we go into wireframe you're going to notice that we have all of these lego logos right on each of the top of the bricks now these are going to be animated separately which isn't really going to work for our scene so just to make everything a little bit more organized we're going to select that one press shift l and then click on select object data and that will select all of them we're going to delete them by pressing x and delete them just to make everything a little bit more organized so they're not going to be animated separately or that's going to look a little bit strange and there we go we've now added our model and blender and everything is ready to be animated so let's go ahead and do that right now to animate this very easily we're going to be using a add-on called commotion i've used this add-on a couple of times in other tutorials and i highly recommend downloading it because it's so easy to use and very very good so i'll leave a link in the description if you want to grab that to install the add-on you can go over to edit down to preferences and then underneath the add-ons just click install right there and then once you've installed it type in the word commotion and you should see that out on there make sure that is checked and you'll be good to go so to use this add-on we're going to go into front view and press a to select everything and drag all these objects up a little bit right about that height then on frame 1 i'm going to hit i and then add in a location keyframe we're then going to skip 10 frames later drag all of these objects back down to the grid floor then press i and add in another location keyframe then what we're going to do is press n and go over to the commotion tab right here and we can see here we have an offset animation button if we then restart the timeline we can come over here and change the offset amount and this is how many frames it's going to skip so for example if you set this to 2 for every object there's going to be 2 frames offset between them in this case i want it to be 1 then we can click on offset animation down on the bottom you can see all the keyframes are now offset and it's going to automatically offset every single object for us now if we press the space bar we can see exactly what this looks like currently it's being offseted by the cursor so wherever the cursor is that is where it's going to offset all of those objects you can for example change it over to random we'll restart the timeline and then click on offset animation now it's going to randomly choose these objects as you can see here and then place them in that exact spot this one might look a little bit weird because you're going to get some floating objects so i'm just going to stick with the cursor you can also use name if you wanted to but i think the cursor one looks the best one other thing that we need to fix in our scene is the material because currently if we go over to the material tab everything is using a base color of white if we click on the drop down menu though you'll see that we have two other materials here so for some reason whenever you import the colada it changes the material to just a base color but it also imports the material that was created in the studio program so to fix that we need to select one of the objects press shift l and then click on material and that will select all the objects using the solid orange color then all we have to do is change it to the solid orange001 press control l and then click on link materials now everything is going to be using that new orange color as you can see here we need to do that exact same thing for the middle part as well i'm going to press shift l select material change it over to the blue and then press ctrl l and link materials and there we go we've now fixed the materials and now we are ready to set up the camera the lighting and everything else in the scene for the rest of the scene i just added a plane and then i changed up the lighting a little bit with an hdr and then in the eevee settings i set ambient occlusion on in the color management i set the look to high contrast to give it a more dynamic look i also animated the camera and so it goes across the scene as the lego set builds and then for the lighting i also added a sun lamp with a little bit of an orange color from there i created a wood material for the ground floor and then added all of the maps that we need like the specular and the normal map and then change the scale so the wood grains are a little bit smaller you also want to enable motion blur this will really sell the scene and make it look a lot better you can also add in a little bit of depth of field to give that really shallow look and then from there i think you'll be good to render it out but there it is that is how you create a lego building animation in blender thank you very much for watching if you created your own animation i would love to see it so make sure to send it to me on instagram at blendermadeeasy thanks again for watching and i will see you in the next one

Channel: Blender Made Easy

Views: 52,164

Keywords: blender, lego, blender 2.8, animation, blender tutorial, how to, blendermadeeasy, blender made easy, blender animation, for beginners, easy, learn, new, 3.0, studio, legos, b3d, eevee, cycles, commotion, offset

Id: V1sBtP-mOa0

Length: 8min 59sec (539 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 28 2021