Character animation for impatient people - Blender Tutorial

there are people who have spent literal decades trying to get better at character animation so you can spend that much time if you want to I don't want that but a lot of the hard work has been done already and now there are tools workflows and resources that will help you achieve your goals much faster [Music] in order to start animating characters fast you're gonna need a rigged character now you can make these yourself but we're in a hurry so the first option is miximo Which is popular so you might have already heard of it it has a lot of free characters to choose from that are already rigged and you can even choose from their library of animations it basically removes all of the work and just does the animation for you you can also upload your own character model and it will automatically rig it for you so that you can use their animations it can work really well but it's very automatic so there is a chance that your model won't deform as you expect it to if you want to animate one of their characters manually you might have a hard time because miximo doesn't make any rig controls for you by default it just gives you the bones that are needed to make it deform if you want to use this rig then you can try using this auto ik option which could help you pose the model more easily just turn it on select a bone press G to move it and then you can use the scroll wheel to change the chain length for different results Auto ik is nice but it's not going to be as good as a rig that actually has luckily there is a free miximo add-on that will take any rigged model from miximo and generate a bunch of controls to make it easier to use so definitely use this if you plan on doing manual animation for a simple rigged character you can download one that I made from gumroad it'll be easier to control than the one from miximo but it doesn't have any face controls so it's only good for body animation for rigs with all of the controls you could ever want check out the free characters from blender Studio these are the same ones they use in their short movies like this one has fine-tuned controls for the face stretch controllers to make things cartoony and even has a pose library and if you use these make sure to check the bone layers in the side panel to see all of the options they give you there are plenty of other free rigged characters but I'd basically just be doing Google searches at this point so let's move on to actually animating again the first method is a little more automatic and that is by getting motion capture animations or by doing motion capture yourself the animations from miximo are motion capture data but a quick search for free mocap animations reveals that you can find this stuff all over the place you can also do your own motion capture for free with Rococo video all you have to do is film a video of yourself doing the performance you want to capture then you upload it to their website and use their application to clean things up and Export them and if you use the Rococo add-on for blender then you can retarget the animations to work with whatever rig you want to use using this free method isn't going to be as clean as having a motion capture suit like you have to be careful about whether your arms and legs can be seen clearly but for a free option this is super valuable I personally haven't done much motion capture but I tried this and it was pretty easy to figure out without looking anything up next we should talk about animating manually so here are some posing and keyframing tips and don't worry I'll talk about more automatic Solutions later on basic posing is very simple go into pose mode by selecting an Armature and changing this to pose mode or by pressing Ctrl tab then you can select a bone and press gr or s to move rotate and scale for trackball rotation you can press r twice you can also transform Bones on specific axes for example you can move a bone on the x-axis by pressing G and then X or you could rotate a bone on the local y-axis by pressing R and then y twice you'll end up using local axes a lot while posing so you can also change the default up here if you like I already mentioned the auto ik option but we can also turn on pose mirroring up here and it should work as long as the bones are named properly which is likely if you downloaded the rig I talk more about this in my rigging video if you're interested in learning more if you want to make long chains of Bones curl try changing the pivot point to individual Origins by pressing period or by using this drop down then select the bones you want and start rotating this is really useful for controlling fingers Tails or any other chain of bones with a bone selected you can press I to insert a keyframe and then you can choose between location rotation and scale or for a combination of the three you should see keyframes on your timeline now move to a different point on your timeline and press I to insert another keyframe press the space bar to play and congratulations now you're an animator now this back to posing you can copy a pose by selecting bones and pressing Ctrl C paste it with Ctrl V and flip the pose with Ctrl shift V and this also works for keyframes on the timeline as long as you have the bones and the keyframes selected we have the breakdowner tool that lets you blend between different poses on the timeline as well as push and relax if you click and hold the tool button last is the motion paths option which can be found under object data properties just select some bones and press calculate and it will show where those bones move over time just know that it won't update in real time as you place keyframes and you'll have to press the update path button to see the changes you can also quickly jump between visible keyframes with the up and down arrow keys your timeline will get messy really fast so you can drag this Arrow to see all of the bones individually but for maximum control you should be using the dope sheet in the graph editor let's make a new window and change this to the dope sheet now you can see we have a few of other menus here this bus button this button makes it so you can see all of the keyframes without having the bone selected and there are a ton of options in the key menu that you should explore but they'll make a lot more sense in the graph editor and we can get there by hovering over the dope sheet or the timeline and pressing Ctrl tab the graph editor can be overwhelming so here are a few tips that will instantly make it easier to use click and drag to box select and you can frame the selected points with period on the number pad or by pressing the back tick key this normalize option will display everything to have a value of negative one to one which can make it easier to look at sometimes you can hide channels by selecting them over here and pressing H or the little eyeball you can isolate them by pressing shift H and you can bring everything back with alt H also if you press n you can add modifiers to the curves like noise to make it more random or cycle for when you want a motion to repeat so under the key menu we have interpolation mode which you can also get to by pressing t and this has some useful curve shapes you can play with everything uses bezier curves by default but you should look at all of the other ones like this one called back that overshoots the endpoint by just a little and if you want to and if you want to if you want to flip the interpolation Direction you can change the easing type with control E I like setting it to ease in and out and using these interpolation shapes in the middle and for when you want very specific curve shapes use a bezier interpolation and you can change the handle types with v then move rotate or scale the handles back in the dope sheet we also have the action editor which will let you save animations you can rename them and click the shield icon to save them and you can create a new one by clicking this which will duplicate what you have currently or press the X and click new for an empty action this is nice for when you want to save animations to reuse them like walk cycles and gestures this is also really useful for when you start using the nla editor which will let you add these actions together and layer them on top of each other but that's a topic for a longer video the next option is auto keying which is the most fun method in my opinion all you have to do is press this button and now whenever you move rotate or scale a keyframe will automatically be placed and this means that you can press the space bar and move your Armature to record the movement in real time you might be watching this thinking that this feature is just a gimmick well it kind of is and I love it because it feels like playing with toys and the results are always hilarious there are some quirks to mention though like if you try to use this on top of other keyframes it will look pretty glitchy so I try to avoid that but there are a few ways around it one way is with keying sets on the timeline there's this keying drop down which lets you choose what channels you want to keyframe and then you can use this Arrow to make Auto keying only place keyframes on those channels this should let you record things like location and rotation separately this also means that when you press I to insert a keyframe it will automatically insert it to whatever you had selected as your keying set to do layered Auto keying you can also mute Channels with these check boxes and you can lock Channels with the lock icon and to smooth out rough motion you can go to the graph editor select some points and press alt o and that will smooth those curves out if you look closely you'll notice I actually used auto keying in a lot of my videos and I'm pretty sure other popular animations on YouTube use similar methods if you want to save poses to reuse later you can use the pose Library first make sure you're in pose mode and select the bones that are part of the pose then you can press F3 and search for create pose asset if you open up the N side panel and go to the animation tab you should see the pose it created for you and if you have two or more poses you can click and drag them to blend between them you can also add poses from the assat browser under the asset menu and rename them in the N side panel over here poses are saved as actions so if you want to edit a pose you can do that from the action editor next is about a free add-on that I love called Wiggle Bones 2 and it uses physics to add some secondary motion to your movements it's very easy to use and the link is down below after installing it go into pose mode and select the bone that you want to wiggle press n to open the side panel go to animation and you can turn it on there adding it to the Bone head will make it move from the base of the bone and tail will move the tip of the bone and make it rotate a little more you can preview the motion by pressing the space bar and moving the Armature around and if you really wanted to you could keyframe all of this motion manually but this just makes it so much easier it has quite a few options like if you turn the stiffness down things will move a lot more and you can also add collision by selecting an object or a collection if you like what it adds to your animation and you want to render it out you have to bake it first and you can do that with the bake action button at the very bottom this will turn all of the motion you see into keyframes another way that I like to do it is by going to the action editor and saving the current action and then and duplicating it then press F3 and search for bake action select visual keying overwrite current action and press ok now since you duplicated the action you'll have one with the wiggle baked in and one that is unaltered in case you want to change it later the next tips are more about workflow and should help you tackle animating pretty much anything first is to look into animation principles which will help you understand what makes motion look natural like squash and stretch anticipation and secondary action next is video reference if you watch behind the scenes content from an animated movie you're likely to see animators recording themselves and referencing that as they animate the way I like to bring references into blender is literally just by dragging them in like this now you should be able to scrub through the timeline and see the video move as you animate if you want to change the frame range or edit the start Point select the image and go to object data properties and you'll see all of those options right here if you're ever struggling to animate something definitely try recording some video reference an animation workflow that is very common is called pose to pose this means focusing on the big recognizable key poses first and then later you can go back and fill in the space between them this can help you figure out the timing of your animation before making it really complex and this style isn't for everyone so if you don't like it you can check out other approaches like focusing on individual sections of the body and layering them up one by one I put a video about that in the description one thing that has helped me a lot is by watching videos that aren't about blender whether it's about Maya Cinema 4D or even 2D animation a lot of the concepts and principles will still be useful so don't limit Yourself by only searching for blender resources and if you're serious about getting better then the best thing you can do is practice I know this video is meant to be for impatient people which is why I talked about automatic approaches first but you have to understand that progress takes time and if you practice smarter not harder then it won't take you decades to become proficient and knowing about all of the concepts from this video will help you level up faster if you have any other character animation tips to share make sure to leave a comment and one more tip if you're really impatient you can also just get someone to animate for you

Channel: Joey Carlino

Views: 85,431

Keywords: blender

Id: GAIZkIfXXjQ

Length: 12min 49sec (769 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 25 2023