Easy Blender Tutorial: Animate a 2D Bouncing Ball with Grease Pencil (2020)

hi everyone this is Wayne Dixon from CG cookie here now in this time of corner everyone is trapped in their houses and you're probably really bored so why don't we learn something today I'm going to teach you to do a bouncing ball with grease pencil and blender which is all going to be free now you might be wondering I don't know how to draw anything in 2d don't I need a graphics tablet no we're going to throw that out and we are going to use our mouse so there's no excuses to not do this tutorial it's free as I said and we're gonna have lots of fun so let's get started just pick up that pen I need this all right so the first thing you want to do is go to blender.org slash download and then download the latest version of blender the version I'm using in this is a blender 2.8 2a alright so here I am inside blender 2.8 2a and we're ready to go so here is the splash screen if you wanted to start drawing the easiest thing to do is just to choose the new file 2d animation layer or you could go up here if your splash screen has disappeared and go file new 2d animation and this will give you the layout where you can just start drawing in your screen here but let me just undo that control Z and I'll turn on my screencast keys so you guys can follow along now it's important to note that I'm using a right-click select so if I just bring up my preferences here and under the key map by default it is left click select but I prefer right click select and my spacebar I've got it set to the tools which will be handy for when you're drawing with grease pencil do you able to switch all the tools so you don't actually have to change the same settings as me but these are just the settings that I use but one thing that I would suggest that you change by default is this tab for pie menu because this one I think should be the default setting and when you open up blender but yeah this is the setting that I I choose here as well as the tilde key that's a little squiggle on the top left of your keyboard I changed that one to gizmo so that's going to help us out when we're drawing our grease pencil alright so let me close that and we're ready to start drawing I'm just going to zoom out a little bit with my middle mouse and scroll down and you can see with this layer it's already giving me an object to draw inside and this is called stroke and we've got it's all just set up ready to go so what I'm going to do is jump out into object mode and adding a ground plane I'm actually going to use a cube for that so this is where I hit tab and that's going to bring up my menu and then I'm gonna go to object mode now I'm going to hit shift a and add a mesh and I'm gonna choose a cube and that's going to position it there and then I'm gonna just move it down a little bit so I'm gonna hit G to move to down constrain it to the z-axis by moving it in the downward direction and then now hitting the middle Mouse and then let's just take it to about there and jump into the edit mode and then with all of the vertices selected so hit make sure I hit hey to have them all selected I'm gonna here s and X and then scale so my voice breaks and that way you get it to fill out the whole screen there all right so now we jump back into object mode now this by default is going to look pretty white so I'm gonna give it a material just to make it look a little bit easier on the iron so I'm going to click over here choose the materials panel and hit new now let's change our default base color let's just make this a little bit growl so we can distinguish it from our background alright so these are our two objects this is our ground plane well we'll ground cube really I'm just gonna call this ground and it's always good thing to get into habit of naming your object and the data so I'm just going to click here and then the data as well and while we're in this mode I'm also going to name our stroke this is our grease pencil stroke what we're going to do our ball animation so I'm gonna call this ball and then I'm also going to name the data all because that is going to make it a little bit easier to understand all right so now I'm ready to start drawing our ball here but you'll notice I'm still in edit mode so if I select here I can't actually go to draw mode or start drawing I need to jump back into object mode first and then I can select whatever object that I want in the outline here so if you in edit mode it's going to stick in edit mode all right so here we have our dope sheet for our grease pencil and you can see our layers you can also find them over here in the data tab for degrees pencil layers that's the same thing we can choose our layers down here or up here but let's switch back to the materials for now so I'm going to draw we do that with draw mode so we can change draw mode by having our grease pencil object selected which we did up here and then choosing draw or we can hit tab with that setting that I've changed in my user preferences and then choose draw now I can draw down here on the side you can see all the tools if you want the names of them just hover your mouse a little bit closer to the edge until it changes the cursor there and then you can drag a little bit bigger and that might help you out if you're a new person to grease pencil you don't know what all these tools are so now we have the name so that is good okay so I'm going to draw my first frame of our ball we are on frame 1 and I'm going to draw it on the lines layer so let's make sure that we're doing that but before we even draw I'm going to make sure that I'm changing my pen my brush I'm going to use from a pencil over to pen because we're gonna get this right first time all right so now I'm going to draw with the circle tool over here now you can click over here or because I have the space bar set up to choose the tools here I can just hit spacebar and then choose whatever tool that I want so now I'm going to draw my little circle here just by clicking and dragging if you hold down shift it's going to constrain it to be a perfect circle so that's good for me now it's giving me some widgets here we can move it around by hitting G and then positioning it and this top-left widget will change the shape there and this bottom left which it will change the shape and again if you hold down shift when these are active it's not actually going to constrain it anymore so let me just undo that control Z actually I'll just escape it and do pen to it again so let's just draw a little circle that's kind of how big we want our ball I want to kind of position it in the top middle just going to eyeball it for now and and we're good to go okay so I'm ready to confirm this shape so I'm going to hit the Tukey and now we have made that we've committed that it's actually a real stroke now okay so let's use another tool we're going to use the arc tool and give this ball some stripes I'm just going to drag over here and here and if we hold down the shift it's going to constrain it to a perfect line so these these things aren't in line and now we're just going to drag this down just to give it a slight arc not too much but yeah that's what we're going to do and we're not going to worry about going over the edges here because we're going to cut them off with another tool so now that hit confirm and zoom in here so now it kind of looks like an eyeball but I'm going to jump into edit mode and then copy this stroke so I only don't be dead of mode you can see now it looks a little bit different if I wanted to select the whole stroke I can just make sure this one up here is active alright if I want to select the individual points I can just select them here so it's probably easier just to leave it on the stroke and now I have that all selected and I'm going to hit shift D and then drag it down so let's just go to about there that kind of looks right actually I'm going to select both of these then it and shift select them and then just move them both down just a slight slight little bit there so there we go and now I want to cut off these excess areas so I'm going to jump back in to draw mode by hitting tab choosing draw and we have a cool little tool to cut off these and we'll dagi ends it's called the cutter so I'm just going to just choose that and then go chop-chop-chop-chop tada wasn't that easy alright now we're going to fill it in so I'm gonna jump back to actually I was already in the draw mode let's change our tool tunity fill now we drew that with our black material I'm going to choose a different material and use it to fill in our areas here so I'm gonna go down to one of these other preset materials and I'm just going to change this one so at the moment it says red I want this one to be orange and now I can turn on or off the easy strokes so I'm going to turn off the stroke so it's not going to be visible and turn on the fill so here's where we set our color for that fill and I'm just going to drag up color shader here and then just choose a nice orange not to such really but there he goes something like that and now when I click in the top here will actually whoops I don't want to fill it in yet I want to do it on a different layer so let me change the layers here and fill it in on the fields so that way it's going behind the little black line there so I'm gonna fill that and fill that and now let's change let's change our black dots I'm gonna move this up in the stack I'm gonna make this one a blue color so I'm gonna do the same thing turn off our stroke turn on the fill and then change the color drag this up all the way to the top choose a nice light pale blue there we go and now we're still in the fills layer we're going to click in here tada are we I have drawn our first frame of our ball now I can combine these two layers because I'm happy with the way that it looks so the way we do that I'll jump over to the data tab and then with this little arrow here there is the merge down now I want to make sure that its own emerged the top the the layer that I have selected with the one below it so this is in the right order so let's just choose that merge down and now I can real Abel this I'm going to call this character so this is my character I can turn him on and off if I want this one here is my onion skinning which you'll see in a moment okay so that is my character combined into the one layer I'm gonna add a new layer I'm gonna call this one rough because I'm going to do some scribbles to explain some stuff so I'm now drawing on a rough layout and I just want to do a little bit of a timing chart just to show you what I'm going for okay so we've got our draw tool selected actually let's choose my black material whoops black here is our first frame and here is our the frame where we're gonna let on the ground and it's gonna bounce down here alright so here is frame one and I'm gonna say it's gonna hit the ground on frame eight and now we're going to work backwards from there so we're gonna say frame seven he's going to be somewhere in the middle right frame six somewhere in between the middle for that frame five let's go the middle again frame four let's go half way so let's do it roughly in there Frank three halfway and then frame two really really close to the top up there so that's the rough idea that we're going to go for and I'll just I'll just leave this here so we can kind of have a visual guide as we do our animation and now I want to jump back to our character layer now we could draw the same ball on every frame or we can let the computer do a lot of the heavy lifting for us so that's what I'm going to choose so with our layer here I don't you jump into edit mode again I'm going to select all of our points and and and edit them although you can see that our rough layer here has also been selected so a way to disable this is just to go over here and choose Auto lock in active layers so that means that it's not going to be able to select anything other than the layer that you're working on see how this little lock layer there the the padlock comes on and off that's really handy when you're doing stuff like this okay so this is the position on frame 1 this is where I want the ball to be and then on frame 8 so let's just scrub down here to frame 8 I can use the arrow keys left and right or I can just scrub with the left mouse click I'm going to position it on the ground so I'm gonna hit G in our viewport or we could bring up our gizmos so let's just bring up the tilde key and choose our move gizmo and then you can see we've got some handles so I'm going to just drag it down to the ground actually close to the ground because I'm going to do some more editing and this is automatically you can see it's added a keyframe on that character so if I scrub now you'll see that it is jumping back and forth but I haven't finished I haven't quite finished with this some frame here I'm gonna add some squash and stretch and to try and maintain the volume here so let's change this to a scale tool and then we're just going to scale it on the x-axis all the z-axis sorry and then shrink it down on the x-axis just to maintain that volume and you can see I'm poking through the ground so let's just go back to our move tool and drag it up a little bit so it's just touching the ground so there we go so that is our two frames here Bom Bom and now we're gonna let the computer do the interpolation between these two frames right but our spacing isn't going to be correct but we're going to fix that later so up here in interpolate we have this little sequence button so I'm going to click that and you know oh sorry I got a little bit of an error there because we need to be in between two keyframes so any frame in between there will do and then we choose interpolate sequence and you'll see that we've filled in some frames here and there a blue color so it's not the right spacing but what it's done is it's interpolated the position as well as that squash and stretch that I that I wanted and now I'm just going to fix our spacing but we want to be able to see what we're what we're working on there so we you notice that we've got the onion skinning from our start frame to an end frame but it's not including any of these new frames so over here in our data tab still we've actually got our filter by type in on the onion skinning and we're gonna choose all types and now you can see it's gonna show us all the frames then we're just going to ramp up how many frames it's going to show us before we run in 87 so we get all the frames and then afterwards you choose well I chose eight but said seven will do that's going to show us all the frames there so it's only gonna show us when we're when we're not scrubbing it's gonna hide it when we scrub and then when we're still it's going to show us all the frames there okay so now we're gonna fix each one of these spacings so we're gonna go to frame two I'm gonna zoom in here and remember we wanted to get it really tight at the top so you know select all our frames and then just drag it up and we're using our onion skinning I want it to be super super close but not not right over the top so that's what I want that'll do we're really really close but not just moving down slightly then we go to frame three let's select them all with the a key and then drag it up again we want it to be super close but not I'll it a little bit of a bigger gap that's good let's go to the next frame select all of our points with the a key slightly bigger so remember we're on frame four so it should be the middle of our ball should be about there so I was staying true to our timing chart selecting everything there dragging it back up we're on frame five so we should be getting slightly bigger that's it's probably a little too much it's got frame six select everything drag it up should be around here getting bigger now it's probably a little bit too much of a gap here we go now frame seven we want this one to be about half way and drag it up there we go alright so now you'll see that if we play our animation for you it might just be spacebar but because I've changed that to the tools it is shift spacebar for me and you can see our ball falls so let's just copy these frames and make it go back up so I'm going to select everything with the box select so just hit B select all of our key frames here on a character layer I'm gonna duplicate them with shifty just drag them over here that will be anyways fine like because we're gonna move them back into the right position so these are still selected I'm gonna scale them around my playhead so I'm putting the playhead on the last frame here so I'm gonna hit s X negative one and then hit enter and what I've done is I've flipped the order of those frames and now I'm going to drag them back and I don't want to drag them over the top of this one I'm gonna leave one frame of a gap and then we're gonna paste these ones on frame ten so let's just grab them with the G key move them back and you can see now we're going to go down we're gonna hold a couple frames on the stretch and then we're going to go back up and now I want to end my animation on frame 18 so I can type in end here I said 18 but I'm in 17 so typing 17 or I can just hit control end you know timeline here and that's going to end our animation there okay so now this frame here I'm going to give it a squash and push it down on the ground so you'll notice that there's a gap here if I edit our strokes here it's actually going to automatically create a keyframe for us which is which is what we want so I'm going to select all of our points here and then I'm going to make sure that I mean actually I'll do this in edit mode so let's get our scale gizmo back here so let's hit tilde and in scale I'm gonna squash it down a little bit flatter than that then then the round but then preserve the volume by going a little bit wider not too wide and now let's just move it down to the ground again so let's go move position is down here right on the ground and now let's just scrub our animation to see how we've gone I think I've actually squashed it vertically too much so let's just go back to whoops tilde choose our scale let's just remove that a little bit let's uh just shrink it down and now let's just choose all of all of our keys most there and I think that's more like what we want okay so jump back to object mode and actually draw mode will be easier to view this and let's play our animation just to give it a once-over yep that's not that's about right that that squash I'm happy with that squash so now we can actually add as a bonus little thing here we're going to add a shadow under this so I'm going to jump to the top view with numpad 7 if you don't have a numpad just click the Z up here and that'll take you to the top view and now I'm in the top view and I'm going to create a new layer so I'm going to do that over here in our data tab I'm going to create a layer hit plus let's call it shadow shadow and it doesn't matter if it's if it's above or below 4 for this example but because we usually want our shadow to be below I'm gonna move it down so it is below then I'm going to draw a shadow shape on our ground here but I don't want it to stick at the origin point I'm going to stick it to the surface point here and then we get a little bit of an offset so I'm going to type in point zero zero one so that means when I draw my stroke here it's going to sit slightly above the surface of our ground plane and it's going to be visible in in the viewport all right so now let's get our circle active and we're drawing with our pen tool that's what we want we're drawing on our shadow layer and let's draw this circle here I'm just going to get rid of my gizmo because it's going to be in the way so let's just click that one there and it's disabled them and now let's just draw a circle actually before I draw my shadow let's go create a material for it so we've already got one down here called I'm gonna change this one to be cool shadow and let's turn off the stroke and make our fill we're gonna make it pure black but let's lower the opacity to say 0.6 or 60% all right now we're ready to draw our circle it's going to draw on our surface here and let's just go about the width of our character there and getting hit G and position it roughly about where I want it so that is our stroke there now I'm going to confirm with the enter key and then jump to the camera view with the numpad 0 and you can see okay we're a little bit big but let's fix that so let's jump into edit mode I'm gonna select our stroke here and then I'm going to scale it so let's go scale and just shrink it down a little bit and it's a little bit skewed to the screen right so I'm gonna hit G to move it and then constrain it to the x-axis just to position it under here and I still think that's a little bit big so it's just scale it down talk about that okay so that is looking good let's go to one frame before and let's shrink it down again so it's his scale this kind of down to the right width and let's go one frame before that were even going to scale it down a little bit to our shadow is starting to appear as the as the as it gets closer to the ground so there we go so that's what it's doing so that's pretty good now I'm gonna do it our little trick again I'm gonna select these key frames drag them over here and flip the order so with these three selected I'm going to here s X negative one that has flipped the order now I want to drag them back and I do want them to be over the same frame here so that's that's okay because now that's the right order and just as a final little touch I'm going to animate our opacity so in two frames before here I wanted to be invisible and then we want it to appear so I'm gonna keyframe our opacity that is what this figure here is so hovering over here I'm gonna hit the fire key now we've added a keyframe to our opacity let's go to frames before let's drag it down to zero and keyframe that as well now I think there's a little bit of a bug because everything has disappeared I'm just going to make sure I turn on the onion skinning and that's going to fix that so I'll make sure that I report that bug anyway so that is our shadow appearing and then I'm going to do the same thing in Reverse so on the last frame here we want it to keyframe at a pasady 100% so let's hit I and let's go to frames later and drag it down to zero and then here I like to make sure that we keyframe that all right so I think we animation is done I am ready to get rid of our rough layer I'm just going to select that keyframe here and hit X to delete it now that is all gone and let's turn off our onion skinning and play our animation so that will probably be spacebar for you or shift spacebar for me so there we have it a bouncing ball done with grease pencil and that wasn't too hard was it hopefully you guys learned something and had a lot of fun my name is Wayne Dixon this has been a tutorial free tutorial for you for CG cookie comm if you want to learn more please head on over to CG cookie and learn more about blender and other stuff like 3d modeling animation everything over there but other than that thanks for watching and please stay safe see ya

Channel: CG Cookie

Views: 18,791

Keywords: blender animation tutorial, blender tutorial, blender 2.8, blender animation, blender grease pencil, grease pencil, grease pencil animation, blender how to, cg cookie, cgcookie, bouncing ball

Id: yKcRGoOv7Go

Length: 23min 19sec (1399 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 09 2020