Did Blender Just Change Animation Forever?

it's no secret that animation is hard with thousands of tutorials to choose from an ungodly amount of learning and to top it off this it's pretty obvious why animation is difficult but what if it wasn't exactly one year ago blender announced a massive upgrade project called animation 2025 they showed us how they're going to fundamentally change animation with one goal in mind and that was to empower animators to keep animating for the next decade fast forward to today and there is so much to talk about like groundbreaking new features quality of life changes and a new animation system that's going to change the way we animate forever so let's break these down one at a time creating an entirely new animation system isn't easy and coming off a year of development there's already been huge progress with a bunch of new features and they call these the shinies everything I'm about to show you is available right now in blender 4.0 like for example the graph editor is now a Powerhouse there's a whole new suite of tools available to us that let us do some really cool things with animation like push and pulling key frames scaling by average and even time offsetting your animation all of this was actually implemented by the developer of an add-on called animade it's an amazing add-on with a bunch of cool stuff but just having these tools in blender's vanilla build it's amazing there's also two completely new smoothing functions we've got the Gan filter and the Butterworth filter but they're a little complex to explain so I called in a professional break this down yo going on mate how are you um can you explain the Butterworth filter oh the Butterworth filter um yeah I think sometimes while you're turning stuff down you get a certain area that gets really loud this filter like rolls off frequencies without boosting anything at the same time it's pretty exciting stuff mate get smooth with the bottle Earth filter long story short it Smooths all of this was basically impossible to do before and now you can easily do it with just a few clicks but it gets even better look at all these keys I'm working with right now not that many right well when you start working with keys like this one of two things will happen either blender will explode or you will it becomes so frustrating to work on an animation when your system is running at like 4 frames a second so with this latest update the graph editor is literally 12 times faster but probably my favorite update is what they've done with modifiers look at this all of these are called fcurve modifiers and they let you add a bunch of cool effects to your animation I'm talking like stop motion subtle movements even looping full sections of your animation only problem is it's really annoying to do to get these effects you need to go to the individual layer add the modifier edit the details and then repeat this for every single layer but now you can literally do all of that with one click and edit every single layer at the same same time it's awesome now you might be saying SM there's no way it can get better than that it it can I don't know why I don't know why it P like bones are like the number one thing that makes animation even possible without them you can only really animate super simple objects so it's kind of funny that bones are one of the most valuable assets for animation while also being one of the most neglected I'm pretty sure there has hasn't been an update to bones in like 4 years previously if you wanted to animate a character you'd have to sift through potentially hundreds of controls all while keeping a mental note of which control does what it's a nightmare so to fix that you can use these layer functions which basically show or hide pieces of your Armature that sounds great Until you realize you can't name these so not only do you have to sip through all these controls you also have to sip through different layers to find what you need do you see the problem this workflow sucks or I should say it did because we just got a massive update with bone collections essentially everything I just described has now been fixed and it's neatly tucked away into this bone collection system you can easily name any bone layer now plus bone colors are now way better so every bone can have their own color like before but now you can add them in edit mode and pose mode it's also just way more readable in the animation workspaces I mean look at the difference here if that wasn't enough on top of all this there's even more updates like nla improvements new animation snapping options and a massive upgrade to the POS Library this is amazing but I want talk about the huge announcement they made which is literally going to change the way you and I animate forever but all of this is kind of pointless if you don't really know how to animate and going back to the start of this video animation is hard you have to learn blender's user interface how to interact with multiple different work how Ed that's a lot and it can be super overwhelming if you're just starting with animation that's why I want to show you something my friend Derek created recently this guy is a freelance Pro working on 3D animation for huge Brands which is why he just released five original classes on skillshare and this is my favorite one it's called Advanced 3D animation it's 1 hour long and it's so good everything you need to know about animation Derek walks you through it in such a short period of time plus since it's on skillshare if you want to learn other stuff like blender in general or even some of my classes you can because skillshare has hundreds of career focused classes like photography and animation it's awesome this video is sponsored by skillshare by the way but honestly if you're part of the 33% of people watching this right now you can check out all of this for free because skill show has hooked me up with an amazing offer for you the first 500 people to use the link below will will get a 1-month free trial of skill sh it's limited to 500 people so first come first served but genuinely clicking that link not only helps support the channel but it lets me make these videos for you for free click that link and thank you so much to skillshare for sponsoring this video with the release of blender 4.0 we already have so many amazing new features like node tools and light linking but blender announced one of their biggest updates yet and it kind of went under the radar this is literally going to change how we animate forever it's a complete reinvention of the animation system as we know it this is massive if I wanted to animate something now it is stupidly complex stick with me here you've got your main character and once you start animating your character gets strips and these strips hold actions and these actions hold your animation that's fine until you realize strips live in an entirely different section of blender called the nonlinear animation editor it's all over the place and it gets worse because you never really just animating your character you're also animating the amature the object and materials which by the way also have their own actions tldr this is like cooking for Gordon Ramsey except you're on a zoom call there's no ingredients and your house is on fire kill yourself so what's the solution one of the main goals with this new system is to speed up animators and make it simple so what if instead of all that there was a single animation block and it holds everything no nla editor no actions just one block and layers this is what they're actively developing right now and the potential this opens up is insane I don't think you quite understand we can now have layered animation so layer one could be your rough blockout Layer Two could be your spline and once you're happy with it you can collapse the children layers underneath the main character layer this is not only way cleaner but it's going to allow us to do things like create rules so maybe you want the layers to happen in a certain order like have the Run Cycle and then vomit and since this is done with layers this is going to be huge for the layout stage because you can go backwards and forwards to different takes of Animation if you're having trouble breathing don't worry that's a common symptom of shock because this gets even better we can have mix layers so maybe you want to add in some rotation without touching the main animation layer well all you need to do is add another layer above it make some rotations and set the type to mix combine or mix replace this is going to be massive and like me you're probably saying okay but where how do I animate like where do I put the keys now well that's kind of the beauty of it each layer is essentially an infinitely long strip and it holds all your key frames so you don't need to worry about actions or strips or anything you can just solely focus on animation now if you're like me you're probably a little bit confused on what this would even look like or feel like so they managed to make a super simple demo and you can see here just how powerful this is going to be once it is fully implemented now let's be real here this is all super early in development and potentially 2 years away but seeing projects like this getting pushed and actually developed is so exciting and I cannot wait to get my hands on this so while we wait there's one massive problem I see a lot of beginners make when starting in animation and I break down exactly how to fix that in this video right here

Channel: Smeaf

Views: 462,059

Keywords: blender, blender 3d, blender animation, blender 3d animation, blender animation future, blendercon, blender animation 2023

Id: Ca0zQvAuhDI

Length: 11min 16sec (676 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 30 2023