Creating a Morphing Shape Animation in Blender!

Oh what's up guys Justin here with dcg essentials comp back with another blender animation tutorial for you so in today's video we're gonna talk about how to animate a transition between a shape and other shapes so something like where a model morphs into another model like for example our gonna animate our default model morphing into a couple different shapes so let's go ahead and just jump into it so in order to do this we're gonna take our shape and we're gonna use what's known as a shape key and so a shape key is it's basically a function contained inside a blender that a that's built to help you transition vertex points in your model into other locations and so what we're gonna do is we're gonna animate between those in order to create a transition animation where our default model changes into a couple different shapes so to start off I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to add a modifier I'm gonna go ahead and subdivide my default model so it's a little bit smoother so maybe I'm gonna subdivide it by something like we'll call it 3 for right now just to make this a smooth err model and we're gonna go ahead and apply this that is one thing is generally speaking when you work with these shape keys you want to make sure that you've applied any modifiers that are in here because you want this to work with the actual geometry of your shape and so now that we've applied this we can go ahead and we can animate the transition and so what we want to do is we want to take this shape and we want to animate it transitioning into maybe a sphere so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to do a shift a in order to add a sphere so we'll add a UV sphere right here and we'll go ahead and we'll move our cursor right here one of our selection to our cursor and we'll maybe scale it down a little bit and so we have as we have a sphere in the same location as our default model and so what I want to do with my default model is I want to add a modifier and in this case I want to use the shrink wrap modifier and so what this does is this allows us to take our model so my default model in this case and it allows us to shrink it into a shape like this one so the way that's gonna work is with our target we're gonna click on this we're gonna click on our sphere you can see how what that does and we can hide the sphere we don't really need that right now you can see how what that does is that takes our model and it basically shrinks it so that the vertices follow the object that we've selected so it shrinks everything down and best as it can it takes your geometry and it matches it up with the object that you select so you can see how now in here our default model has turned into a sphere and so what we need to do is we need to use what's known as a shape key which I talked about a little bit and basically what we want to do is we want to select the second object or the second option right here which is called apply a shape key and so what that's gonna do is that's gonna apply this to our model and so what that's done if we scroll down into our object data properties is now there's an option over here for shrink wrap under our shape keys option so you can see on now you have your basis which is your original model and then your shrink wrap which in this case is going to be our sphere with a value that you can select so notice how when I do this I can transition between my object and my sphere and so now that we have that object or now that we have that shrink wrap modifier and the shape that this is going to turn into we can keyframe the different transformations so in order to do that let's go over into our animation tab and for right now I'm not gonna worry about my camera I'm going to rotate around maybe right here and we're gonna select this option for our viewport shading so we're gonna select material preview mode and so now what we need to do is I to set a keyframe for my shrink wrap modifier so notice how right now there's nothing in my timeline well what I want to do is I want to set a default value by going over to my shrink wrap modifier and clicking on this button right here and what that does is that adds a keyframe for your shrink wrap value of zero so at zero seconds we have our shrink wrap set to zero now at 60 seconds what we want to do is we want to turn this up so I'm going to go over into our value we're gonna drag this over until it's fully it's fully applied and then we're gonna click on this button right here to add a second keyframe and so what that's done you can see as I drag this slider is that transitions are object between not shrink wrapped and shrink wrapped between 0 and 60 seconds so if I hit play you can see how this transitions over those 60 seconds and so what we can do from there is we could either export this animation we'll talk a little bit about the materials in a second because it's not really changing the materials and we want to adjust that so this doesn't look quite as weird but I also want to add another shrink wrap modifier what I want to do is I want to animate a transition of this sphere turning into a cube and so the way that we're gonna do that is we're gonna go back to 0 we're gonna go in here and we're gonna apply another modifier and first we're going to add a cube so I'm gonna do a shift a and add a cube I'm gonna scale it down like this and then we'll just add another modifier so shrink-wrap whoops and we want to make sure we're applying that to our default model not to the cube that we added in here so shrink wrap modifier target cube and you may need to go down and select nearest vertex on this one nearest surface point kind of takes this and it doesn't really transition this quite to the shape that you want and so what you want is you want these vertices to go to the nearest vertex point so nearest vertex will put these vertices on the corner so it'll match up with the vertices of this shape and so now we can turn off this other cube look at this and make sure it looks the way we want and we can apply that as a shape key so now if we were to go back into our object data properties you can see how we have two shrink-wrap modifiers in here so the first thing we want to do is we want to for our shrink-wrap 0 0 1 we want to set that with a value of 0 at the beginning we also want to keyframe it with a value of 0 right here so you can see how this keyframe is set to 0 on both of these well then at 120 seconds what we want to do is we want to set this keyframe to 1 but we also want to set our old shrinkwrap modifier to 0 because otherwise you've got both of these applying at once and it's doing really weird stuff to your vertices so now what we have is we have a keyframe at 0 with our default model we have a keyframe at 60 frames with our sphere we have a keyframe at 120 seconds with our box and so that gives us a pretty good animation if we were to take this mirror to click play you can see how you get a transition between this sphere and between this cube and so you could stop right there if you wanted to one thing I want to talk a little bit about those I also want to transition the material in here so you know in so in blender you can really keyframe most anything there are a few things you can't keyframe but generally speaking can keyframe things like your materials so what I want to do is I want to go in here and I actually want to add a keyframe for my different materials so for my material one what I want to do is I want to mouse over this base color I don't want to tap the I key and so when I mouse over my base color what that does is that gives me a keyframe for my material so now I want to go down here and I want to tap the akeem and we're gonna go ahead and insert keyframes for selected channels and so you don't see anything right here but if you look down inside of this this is added a keyframe for your RGB and a values so what that means is that means we have a keyframe for this being a brown color then if I go over here to sixty seconds I can change this value to all ones no I need to be under RGB that's why so we'll set that all to ones and then we'll do a will tap I right here and we'll insert a keyframe for the selected channels well what that's gonna do is that's gonna transition the RGB values of that color from their defaults right here to the new value right here and notice how we need to do this for our other material as well and we're probably gonna have to do with the third actually because the third isn't a straight white so you can see how right here I have different shades of white on this sphere so what I want to do is for material to I want to add a base keyframe and for material 3 I want to add a base keyframe so I just select or moused over these and tap the I key in order to set these in here and so now we can go ahead and we can add keyframes for all of those different colors at their defaults then I want to do the same thing over here where for this one we want this to go to a 1 1 1 we want to tap the I key to add a keyframe right there so now we don't have this gold color anymore this also transitions to a white and then for the material 2 we want to do the same thing so at this point we want this to be a 1 1 & 1 so I'll do an insert selected channels right here so now this goes from this color to white so now if we play our transition animation we've got our model morphing into our object and we've got our object morphing into another object inside of blender and we could go ahead and set this to end at 120 frames and so then before we export this we want to go ahead and we want to go into our view we want to lock our camera to our view then we want to hit the 0 key in order to get into our camera view then we can use this to adjust our camera so that we have a good camera view of what's happening inside of this animation and then just real quick we can do a shift day and we can just add a son we can go ahead and point it at our object I'm not gonna do too much with the lighting on this one maybe turn the strength of just a little bit all right so now let's go ahead and export this animation so we can just go to our let's see we want to go to the output properties and then under output you want to set this to export an ffmpeg video we'll leave it on RGB m-- we'll leave the rest of this as is for right now this isn't a very heavy scene so we don't need to worry about this too much so we can also set the folder where it's going to place these then once we set our folder we can click on accept' we can go to render and we can click on render animation and so this is gonna go through and this is gonna render out all of these frames and it's gonna stitch them together so we'll go ahead and let this work and then we'll come back and take a look at our final result all right so now if we open the file that's created you can see how this is animating the transition between that object and this object and so from there you can use this to do a lot of different kinds of things you could loop it you could basically work on it from there but that gives you an idea of some of the things you can do with shape keys inside a blender so that's what I'm gonna in this video leave a comment below let me know what you thought was this helpful to you I just love having that conversation with you guys if you like this video please remember to click that like button down below if you're new around here remember to click that subscribe button for new blender content every link as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this I really appreciate it and I will catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The CG Essentials

Views: 35,609

Keywords: blender, blender 2.82, blender 2.8, blender modifier tutorials, blender tool tutorial, the blender essentials, the cg essentials, thecgessentials.com, justin geis, justin geis blender, blender shape morph, blender morph animation, blender shape morph animation, blender animation beginners, blender morph animation tutorial

Id: acZLhnWh2Zc

Length: 12min 3sec (723 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 25 2020