Create a PRO CAR ANIMATION in Blender in just 25 minutes! Complete Blender tutorial - see every step

hi guys i'm leo from mediaway and today we're going to create a fantastic animation with some of these beautiful cars using only free assets and free software i know you love car animation tutorials so i'm going to go all out this time to make my best tutorial ever [Music] we're going to cover using drivers hdris where to get free models using empties to control the camera and adding some secret source in the compositor to turn your renders from this to this here's the default blender scene uh i've got my shortcut keys down in the left hand corner over here so you can see what i'm pressing so just press a to select everything x to delete everything and just click delete okay the next thing i'm going to do is press n and this will pull out your side panel and from here you can see we've got the blender kit add-on installed if you don't have it installed hop on over to the blender kit website and get it installed just quickly click on import settings make sure this is set to append and not link must be set to append um you can actually search pretty easily so if we just click on search filters we'll click free first and then we'll click on the categories for transport and then click on car and then click on supercar you can see here everything that's listed here is free anything with a little lock icon you have to pay for but it's fantastic value and definitely worth doing i'll put a link in the description below so we'll start off by dragging in this porsche cayman so this is the porsche 718 cayman you can also search using the search field here so we're going to add in a couple of more cars so let's get the aston martin in okay so it's aston martin victor and we'll also search for a ferrari eight one two just drag that in for some reason this ferrari is coming a little bit small compared to the other cars so just click on the empty that's this sort of this sort of shape with um lines along every axis um and if you just press g to grab you can actually see this moves the whole car press escape to cancel that so make sure with this axis selected press s to scale and just scale it up you can just eyeball it so it looks about right that looks okay to me okay so we've got all three cars imported now we can add in a road so back in blender kit you can just type in road into the search bar and this one here procedural two lanes road is the one we want so just drag that in just drop it into some space over here just roughly near the cars okay so what we're going to do we're going to use this as a basis for the road it's procedural if you look over here in the scene collection and just toggle this little arrow down you can actually see we've got all the different parts of this road here and if you click on the one that says road shape you can see it's actually a path now if you press tab to go into edit mode let's press seven on the number cad and press a to select all you can actually see this road's made up of three points so what you can do you can actually press g to grab the points r to rotate the points you can actually make this road any shape you want really so what we're going to do just for the purposes of this tutorial i'm just going to grab them and we're just going to have the road fairly straight so i'm kind of eyeballing this and using the center grid line here as kind of a reference to get all these points in the right place so g to grab r to rotate that looks okay so um we've got a nice road here the other thing we want to do perhaps make the road a little bit wider because i want to fit all three cars along the side of the road so what we'll do press tab to come out to object mode click on this here which is called the road profile press tab again press a to select all and you can see actually see underneath it's easier um you can see basically this is the profile that makes up the road [Music] so we'll press this button here this is x-ray button press seven on your number pad to see it from the top view and what we're going to do is just go in edit mode we're just going to select and drag these points here press g to grab x to constrain to the x axis we're just going to make it a little bit wider just about like that press tab out of edit mode okay from here we can see the road markings you can just click on those you can see the road painting is selected if you actually click on this little empty here that what the crosshairs it's called road base point just press g to grab that x to move on the x axis and that more or less will give us three lanes okay final thing we need to do is just move these um street lights so select the street lights first press tab to go into edit mode make sure you're still in x-ray mode select all of this um street lamp on the right to press g to grab x to move on the x-axis and again just eyeball it so it's in the right place so now we've kind of got all our streets set up ready for the cars to race this is a good time to save your work so let's do that nexus file save as okay from here we're just going to move our three cards into rough position so the cars usually have an empty for each car so you can kind of see the empty by just clicking on the cross hair sort of underneath the car so select the the empty first seven for top view g to grab just move it into the right lane quickly do that for all three cars okay you can see all three cars just punch through the road a little bit which means the road probably just needs to be a little bit lower so if you click on the the base object for the the road profile and just press g to grab we'll do this while it's up underneath actually g to grab said to move on the z axis and just drag it down until those tires just all disappear perfect okay next we'll add in the camera so move to kind of somewhere behind the cars press shift a add in the camera if you press control alt and 0 on your number pad it will automatically put your camera to the viewpoint i will just quickly tweak some camera settings so click on the camera click on the camera icon here to change the settings we're going to have a wide angle camera so something like 20 28 mil 27 mil is fine uh we'll also add in depth of field um if you click on the viewport display and show the limits you can actually see that crosshair there represents where the um the focus distances of your camera so we'll set up the view first and we'll adjust that so press zero to get back into your camera view if you press shift and tilde on your keyboard you can actually control the camera with the mouse and move forward with the w a s and d keys move forward and backwards left and right and you can also move up and down with the q and e keys so just for now i'm going to position the camera roughly around there um we can also add a bit of a tilt on the camera if you just tweak the y rotation this is called a dutch angle gives a bit more drama to the scene right we're going to add in a bridge i think at the end of the road so again hop into blender kit search for a bridge and if we select this one that's called suspension arch bridge pop it in about the right position click on the suspension arch bridge sort of the base object in the scene organizer press 7 for top view s to scale we're just going to scale the bridge up so it's the same width roughly as the road g to grab and we'll move it scale it just to touch more we'll pop at the end of the road just there let's just zoom in we might tidy this up a bit a bit later we also need to move it down so it's level with the road so press g to grab z to move it down and just eyeball it so it kind of lines up with the road about like that to light the seam we're going to use a hdri so again blender kit has got all the hdris built into it you just have to search for them so i already picked one for this scene but there's millions to choose from um so this one is called shanghai so if you just type that in you'll see we've got this great night scene so drag that in here it asks you what resolution you want to import it in um obviously the higher resolutions will take longer and use more memory on your computer 2048 i think we'll be fine for the purpose of this demo so obviously we can't see anything yet because we're still in viewport shading mode so if you hop over to your camera settings we'll change the render engine to cycles make sure the device is set to gpu compute noise threshold is basically how many times blender will sample before the noise is deemed acceptable um 0.01 is quite a high setting so if we just change it now to 0.5 and really same for the viewport that'll be 0.5 will be fine and we'll denoise the new viewport as well now if you click back into viewport shading press naught to get into your camera view and already you can see the scene is looking pretty good okay from here if we click on the car let's click on the porsche and push your period key and that will zoom into the porsche just rotate round to the front of the car we can see the porsche headlights aren't on so we'll just need to fix that let's do that quickly now so with the headlight selected pop into the shading tab click on here to get the rendered view and press your period key on your number pad if you want to zoom into the headlight if you see headlight is selected all we need to do is turn up the emission strength let's set it to 250. we can do the same with the tail lights just click on the tail light turn that one up to 250 as well okay to do the same on the ferrari is slightly different process click on the rear headlights drop down until you can find lighting machine texture just turn up the emission strength on that 250. okay for the headlights we're just going to do a slightly different process um if you just search for the one that says headlight 02 i'm going to add in a new material it can be an emission material strength of 250 and then we'll just delete the other materials that basically will assign the emission material to those parts of the car finally for the aston martin zoom out click on the aston martin press the period key on your number pad with the car body selected if you hover over your scene key and press the period key it'll actually find the aston martin for you straight away just scroll down tc headlight l uh pump up the emission here to 250 scroll down to find tail light l and again pop the emission up to 250. there we go headlights on all the cars let's hop out back into layout view press naught on the number pad to get your camera let's hit f12 and do a render okay if you get any out of memory errors here just close your render view switch this back into wireframe view and hit f12 to render again um i think the hdri is a little bit bright so we'll turn that down as well let's sort that out first so click on your world settings we're going to turn the strength of the hdri down to 0.5 for the road make sure you've got procedural two lanes road selected press g to grab z to move up and just tweak it up just a little bit right we're gonna do some work in the compositor to kind of improve this image a bit more as well so let's do that next so go into compositing tab click on use nodes so we'll just move these apart so we've got a bit of space press shift a and we're going to add a viewer node we'll pop that down there and you also want this to be linked from here a nice little shortcut if you've got node wrangler enabled is to hold down the shift key and right click and draw a line across those two makes a nice little junction there neatens it all up a bit right so we're going to add in some glare tab so shift in a search for a glare node and drop that in there we'll change this one to fog glow and we'll change the mix down just to maybe 0.9 with the glare node still selected press shift d and drop it in again just we'll change it from fog low to streaks and we'll have two streaks to kind of get that slightly anamorphic look that you can see across there again reduce the threshold we don't need to go mad with this maybe even reduce the mix a bit more minus 0.95 so just a bit more subtle the final thing i'm going to do to add to the image to really make it pop is to add a color balance node so press shift and a search for a color balance node drop that in there and basically this splits into shadows mid-tones and highlights so we're going to make the shadows bluer and we're going to make the highlights more orange that really gives a much more dramatic look to the scene if you want to make the shadows a little bit lighter you can just tweak this up very very slightly but you know don't go too mad with that okay this is looking really cool now okay for the animation hop back into the layout tab so we're gonna have all the cars driving along this road and we're gonna use a couple of different cameras to take some different angles of the cars so the first step is to get the wheels moving now normally for this you'd use a proper rigged car i've already done a tutorial on car rigging and i'll link to it at the top right here to save time we're not going to rig the cars properly we're actually just going to make the wheels rotate so it gives the impression that they are rigged so basically click on the inside of the rim and the outside of the tire press ctrl j to join them together now if you press r and x you can see the car will actually rotate the wheel on its x-axis so if you hop up back into the item view here we know that the x axis controls the rotation of the wheel so instead of using keyframes we're going to use drivers so click on here where the x rotation is type in hash frame times 2 and what this basically does it'll take the frame number times it by 2 and apply the result to the degrees of rotation so now if we scrub through the timeline you can see that the wheel is rotating it actually looks like it's rotating backwards so let's just finish that so right click delete drivers press hash frame times -2 and now the car wheel should rotate in the correct direction which it does basically now all you need to do is repeat this process for all of the wheels all 12 wheels on all the different cars which i'll do now and get back to you in a second the porsche already has empty setup for the wheel so just click on the empty and repeat the same process okay at this point you should have all the wheels on all the cars moving when you scrub the timeline to get the cars moving we're going to move them all from the start to the finish of this road so we click on the first one make sure you click on the empty of the car so the whole car moves when you press g press escape to undo that move to frame zero press g to grab the car press y to constrain to the y axis move it to the start of the road there press i to add a keyframe and click location a location keyframe move to the end of your timeline 250 frames press g to grab y to move all the way to the end of the keyframe press i and press location so now we can see the car moves all the way from start to end um at the minute these keyframes are kind of bezier keyframes so that means the animation starts off slowly and speeds up and then slows down again at the end but what we're going to do we're going to actually have this as a constant speed so while you're hovering over your timeline press t change the interpolation so it's set to bezier by default but click on linear and now you'll see that the car moves at the same speed right through the animation okay we're gonna do that for all three cars so go to frame zero zoom into your car click on the empty seven top view g to grab y to move on the y axis i to insert a keyframe location keyframe move to the end of your timeline g to grab y to move on the y axis move to the end of your timeline i to insert a location keyframe and t to set it to linear interpolation so now you can see we have all three cars moving pretty much simultaneously and if you want one car to speed up or go faster or come from behind what you can do is click on the crosshair of the car you can actually just move this keyframe the last keyframe a bit further back so now you'll see that the porsche starts to slow down or if you want the porsche to win you can move the keyframe forward and the porsche will start to lead through the timeline so that's basically the animation set up so if we zoom in to the porsche you can actually see the wheels are moving all the cars are moving so now actually let's let's stick the camera in and render a frame find a nice view to render from control of zero to move the camera oops make sure the camera is selected give it a bit of a white tilt um we can actually increase the depth of field by changing the f-stop number so if you want it more blurry let's just go into render view and you can see this you can actually see the distance with the limits here let's focus it on the back of the porsche and we'll actually by decreasing the f-stop number it increases the amount of blur you get in your shot so let's leave it about 1.2 and the other thing we can switch on is motion blur that's in the render properties setting let's do another quick render and actually you can see from this that all the cars are blurred and i guess really that's kind of obvious because the camera is actually stationary while the cars are moving so what we want to do is actually have the camera moving at the same speed as the cars and then basically everything else will be blurry and the cars will be nice and sharp so let's set that up now so if you click on the porsche then do a shift and right click on your mouse it'll actually put on put the 3d cursor on top of the porsche press shift a and add an empty we'll do a different shape just so we don't get confused we'll do a cube empty that's the scale okay and if we actually call that camera empty we won't get confused so then what you want to do is select the camera hold down shift click on the camera empty press p to parent the camera to the empty and keep transform so now this basically means wherever the empty goes the camera will follow and we want the camera to follow the car so we need to parent this empty to the car so if we click on the empty that we've just created then click on the car empty and press ctrl p pair comparing that now you'll see that as the car moves the camera follows the empty and the empty follows the car so now the camera is moving at the same speed as the car so if we render this again now we should see something slightly different so now we're getting a nice motion blur on the road and although you can't see it very well you can actually see that the wheels are spinning round so essentially from here we've kind of got the animation set up with the car sort of chasing on the porsche and the other thing we could do to add a bit of interest is to have the camera kind of jiggling about as though the chase car is struggling to keep up with the camera so we can do this by swiveling open the camera empty and clicking on the camera you can actually see by adjusting the z mount on the camera we can actually move the camera up and down we can actually add noise to the z parameter to make it jiggle up and down automatically so if we go to the start of the animation right click on this and insert a single keyframe just on the zed location then if we go to animation tab we change this mode to the graph editor if you press period on your number pad you can see we've got just that single key for the z location it's a tiny little arrow here just click on that you can actually see we can add something called a modifier so if we add a noise modifier you can see here now on the graph editor let's go back to camera view over here that the camera basically wiggles up and down now as we play through the animation now this is probably a little bit too much so we can actually decrease the scale this kind of makes it happen a little bit slower and decrease the strength to just be a bit more subtle so now we kind of just get let's decrease the strength a bit more so now we just kind of get a subtle movement as the the camera chases the cars a couple of other little call tricks so we can actually use this empty on the porsche that controls the camera to control the camera view so by selecting the empty pressing s to scale we can zoom in and zoom out and by pressing r to rotate and then z to rotate on the z axis we can actually rotate the camera around the car so you could start off the animation at frame zero with the cube empty selected to press i and then set to location rotation and scale keyframe and then at the end of the animation we could actually scale the cube so we could get zoom in a bit we could rotate the cube on the z-axis or really anywhere you want and then we press i again to set another location rotation scale keyframe and you can see through the animation the camera is actually animated around the car so really the last thing to do is to render out a few of these sequences with different camera angles and then stitch them all together in an editing package to make a video so i'll just quickly go over your render settings if you go to the render tab you can set your resolution here now if your computer's very slow or a bit older you can actually change the percentage size so 50 will basically render at half 1920 by 1080 so it'll render basically twice as fast or maybe even more the other thing you can do is change the output settings down here so change the file format to ffmpeg video the encoding needs to be set to mpeg4 you could change the output quality to perceptually lossless and choose somewhere to save the video file if your computer's really struggling with that you're getting crashes you can actually change the file format to jpeg and then basically render out a series of frames and then stitch them together back in your editing package so if your animation stops working at frame 57 you can just render from frame 58 to 250 and it'll render out the frames that you haven't got [Applause] okay i'm going to work on this some more and i'm going to show you the finished thing in a few seconds so what i've done here we've got a few different camera angles and i've rendered the animation several times so i'll just show you the different angles so the first one you've seen already is kind of panning behind the camera using the empty to control the camera the second one is a fixed camera so it's literally just a short animation just with the cars going by from a fixed camera the third one is the camera fixed to a car so basically we're just using the car as a parent for the camera and just following the animation through like this the next one is the side camera so again we're just using an empty on the car and just panning the camera around the car as we move along it's just a short one it's just a camera passing over the cars as they whiz by so basically we've got five different cameras uh by the way i'm using this um handy ad on here called render set pro it lets you set up different cameras in the same scene and then render them all in one go i'll put a link in the description below um so what i did i left this rendering overnight if you don't want to use render set you can achieve the same result by just saving out your blender file five different times with different camera angles okay let's show you the final result [Music] [Music] you

Channel: MediaWay

Views: 50,909

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Id: a78qElaliLI

Length: 28min 5sec (1685 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 28 2022