Blender's animation tool you should always use

over the last decade I've made hundreds of Animation in blender and there is one tool I used all the time it allows you to track your arcs and spacing directly in the 3D viewport I'm Perry from P2 design and by popular demand this is everything you need to know about the motion path in blender let's get started in my humble opinion when it comes to creating good animations once you nail the idea and build nice poses the most important points to address are arcs and spacing spacing is often covered in animation classes we talk about easing in and out about acceleration impact stops basically about speed and you often see this kind of shots drawn on the screen explaining the evolution of a character or an object over time or in our case on each frame with the experience you configure the spacing using the graph editor but there are times where the graffiti top becomes hard to read and it's mostly used as a tool to build and tweak the spacing not to read it fortunately we can use blender's motion path to read the spacing directly on screen to display the motion path of an object you need to add the object selected and then go to the object properties in their motion path and click and click calculate don't worry we'll go over all the option A little later on when I confirm we can see the motion path appearing along the origin point of our object the motion path shows the position of the origin point of an object on each frame this is shown as white dots the orange dots with a number represent the keyframe of the animated object before we go any further I'd like to give a shout out to shipit a free collaborative render farm for blender this video is not sponsored by ship it I'm just helping alikin one of our community member spreading the word for more information you can find tutorials from ideal money hovenin for Creative shrimp that will guide you on how to use it Link in the description getting a good animation definitely relies on spacing but also on arcs drawn by your character's features or any object spot you're trying to animate if you're an animator or you want to be one you probably saw the bouncing ball example a thousand times a bowl draws nice arcs on the screen but this is true for anything in animation when a movement is not interrupted by an impact it bounds a hit it will most certainly draw a knock that's why you'll need to be able to track them check this animation I did with the Crimson running character you can learn to create this character and rig it with my courses on p2designacademy.com see how the motion path draws nice curve and I can also read the spacing between each frames let's have a closer look to how the motion path works first of all and that's a common mistake from my student when you want to track the arcs of a character rig get to go into the Armature properties not in the object properties if you calculate the motion path from the object properties of the Armature it will calculate the position of the origin point of geometry and it won't be moving basically but if you switch to pose mode and you go into the Armature properties you will be able to calculate the motion path of the selected bone so let's do that together by the way you can get the Crimson running rig for free on p2designacademy.com in pose mode I will select the hand bow you can do that with enable I press shift H to hide all the other bones I now go to the amateur property and expand the motion path panel by default the path type is set to in range and by default the calculation range is the scene range so in this specific case from frame 0 to frame 320 when hitting the calculate button a context gel menu pops up with the same option we just covered but there is an additional one called the bake location which is specific to boats it allows you to choose whether you will be tracking the head or the tip or tail of the bone if I enter edit mode on the amateur you can see the OCTA here or shape of the bones this part is The Tail Of tip of the bone and this one is the head of the bow you're just telling blender to draw the motion path from one or the other of those two points while the bone here is displayed as a custom shape is structure still feature a head and a tip let's hit the calculate between and confirm the motion path find on your appear in our 3D viewport each right dots represent the position of the head of our handpone on each frame and by default a blue line is connecting those point in the timeline order the point from frame 1 is connecting to the point from Frame 2 Etc within the motion path panel there is another panel called display here you can access some handy additional options if you choose to display the keyframes some of the motion path point will turn to Orange and since the keyframe numbers option is enabled I can see the keyframe number next to its position on my timeline we can see that for this specific Boon I have a keyframe on frame 210. this keyframe is identified on the motion path I also have a keyframe for frame 211 but I don't have any keyframe for frame 212. I can see a white dot tracking the position of the bone on this specific frame but there's no frame number next to it if I enable the option frame numbers now all the frame have a number to identify them let's zoom in a bit now you can see that each dot on the motion path as a number but when this Frame is not a keyframe it will be displayed in white instead of orange the current frame that is being played is shown in blue one of my favorite options allows us to change the thickness of the motion path and give it a custom color by itself you may think that's not a big deal but when you're tracking multiple bone at the same time let me calculate the motion path of this pound bone I will select it and instead of going into the panel I will press the q key this gives me access to my quick favorites where I've stored the option calculate motion path I'll show it to you in a few seconds when a bone is selected you can give its motion path any color you want and it's way easier that way than having all the motion path with the same color to add any operator or tool to the quick fabric simply right click on the button and choose add to Quick fabric from there when pressing the q key depending on the context here in pause mode the quick fabric menu will pop up and you'll find any operation you stored in my case I stored calculate a little path and clear bone path and if I click the last one guess what it will get rid of all the motion path that I've calculated just a little side note the quick favorite menu is contextual if I'm editing the mesh of the character and I press Q you can see that I have other option these are operation I use a lot in edit mode so yeah domestic favorites let's have a look to the path type options and the calculation range I will work on the control torso of my character and I will switch the calculation range to selected keys I will now box select some keyframe on my timeline and I will calculate the motion path whether using my quick favorites or for the motion path panel the motion path will appear with its default color and we can see that the cached range corresponds to the Keys I've selected if I switch to manual range I can choose the starting and ending frame of the motion path calculation so I will type in 1 to 200 and click update path you get the ID the cast range and the displayed motion path show the bone motion from frame 100 to frame 200. now let's switch the path type from in range to a round frame we now have two new inputs frame range B4 and after basically it's the number of frame display blade based on your current position it's using the cache range we calculated before but we just display a jungle fit another time I will switch back to scene range and recalculate the motion path so that it covers the whole animation now I will switch back my path type to around frame I will pick a better character post to see the result on this Frame the bone position is here and I'm only showing on the motion path one frame after and then frame before the current position so basically this is my favorite way to display the motion path not with that range for sure I prefer to use five to five before and after or 10 to 10 but it's definitely more readable than using the whole animation range especially when you are using multiple motion path at the same time it's a bit of a mess compared to the around frame option as soon as you move a controller the motion path will automatically update but if I edit my animation through the graph editor or the action editor you can see that it doesn't update I need to go to the motion path panel and click update path that's why again I advise you to use a quick favorites now if I edit my motion with the graph editor and then move any other bone it will also update the motion path computation wise the motion path can be pretty heavy especially if you're working on Long animations you can reduce the motion path range to prevent any lag I hope my contents helps you and if so please consider subscribing hit the like button and leave a nice comment you already know this is the best way to help me growing this YouTube channel now the question I'd like to address is when to use the motion path I generally don't use it on the very first pose I'm creating but I definitely use it during the blocking stage basically I will track the center of gravity of my character pretty early on during the animation process and then when I switch to spline and work with the graph editor I will use it like almost all the time when you're animating to the camera for a short animation or a feature film you should always check your motion path from the camera point of view if I take this animation I did for my animation course alive when I'm tracking the tip of the sword to create a nice Arc I do it from the camera point of view because whatever the solution you need it to look right from the camera point of view if you're on Twitter you probably saw this post that perfectly illustrate what I'm saying share animating for games on the other hand you need to make sure that your aux and motion path looks good from the main game point of view but you should also check it from all angles depending on the camera Freedom the player will be able to turn around the character and it will be a bummer that your animation doesn't look good from this angle brendoza image twos are being developed and improved by the animation module team anybody can join the animation module so if you think that you can help just join blender sure needs developers but we also need animators rigors or whatever blender user you are to test the different builds and the different new features one of the features we'd like to be developed is some kind of interactive motion path where we could maybe edit it as a curve for example there's an existing add-on that does that I never really tested it but I think it's pretty limited for the time being but interactive motion path to me is really one of the future tool of blender this is the end of this video I hope you enjoyed it and I will see you in the next one [Music] foreign

Channel: Pierrick Picaut

Views: 340,803

Keywords: blender3D, modeling, shading, rigging, B3D, p2design, sculpting, digital, animation, cartooning, rendering, CYCLES, tutorial, Pierrick, Picaut, Pieriko, 3D, Computer, Graphic, blender, eevee, VIDEO GAME, rig, animate, stylised, best, Blender, art, digital art

Id: 5QAdQwCRbBM

Length: 13min 1sec (781 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 05 2023