Epic LEGO animation in BLENDER - full beginner friendly tutorial using all free assets and resources

[Music] when you see a ghost in town at night who you're going to call to make it right we need hi guys today we're going to create a Lego animation in blender from start to finish using only free assets this is going to be such a fun project and we're going to learn about cameras drivers constraints and even use the blender video editor hopefully you'll pick up some great tips on the way let's get started the first stop for any Lego related project is mechab bricks.com this is an amazing site where you can construct your own Lego from an unlimited virtual Lego set you can click on a thumbnail to view the model in 3D and use your mouse to spin the model around if you want to edit or download the model you can just click the editor button which takes you to the Lego editor where you can take your model apart or add in your own Lego parts from the huge Library available in the asset browser okay so that's a quick intro to Mecha bricks but how do we get the models out of mecabricks and into blender well if you go to the mechab bricks shop you'll find there's a free add-on called blender light priced at $0 simply add this to your cart and go through the purchase process if you search Mecca bricks for Town you'll see this Lego Town pre-made with lots of shops before we download it into blender we're going to make this model a bit smaller so it loads faster and is a bit less processor intensive for blender inside the Mecha bricks editor first rotate the model by left clicking and holding down so you're viewing the model from above next press the selection tool icon and click on the area select icon click and drag to select this part of the model and press delete do the same to get rid of some of the shots on the right next export the file using the blender add-on format this might take a couple of minutes we're going to choose a car next so from the Mecha bricks home screen search for Ecto and you'll see this model of the famous Ghostbusters car along with the Ghostbusters crew follow the same steps as before in the editor to export the model to blender format next it's back to blender so starting a fresh scen in blender let's start off by pressing a to select everything then X to delete everything uh go to your file menu and import the Mecha bricks then go to the place where you downloaded your Mecha bricks uh click it I think you can deselect logo and just to make it a little bit quicker and then press import Z mbx it's going to take a few minutes so just hold on once it's loaded you'll actually realize that it's very big within the scene that's because the Mecha bricks uses millimeters for scale but blender Imports the millimeters as meters uh so to get around this we're going to press a to select everything press s to scale and then type 01 that makes everything basically 100 times smaller and actually now this is quite close now to real world scale so if we press n on the keyboard we click something you can actually see this is uh 2.56 M wide now we could actually scale this down even further to leg scale but this starts to make it uh make it hard for blender to process the ray tracing uh because it calculates the light kind of in a real world scale so we'll kind of leave it this this is more or less like a human sort of scale so we'll add um a hdri to kind of give us some background and a bit of lighting so if you don't already have blender kit hop over to blender kit.com there's a link in the description below uh get it downloaded it's absolutely fantastic free add-on that's it's got loads of free models and materials and HD eyes um so just once it's uh downloaded and installed just click on the little eyeball and if you click on hdrs um just choose one you like the look of really I'm going to choose this one uh called I think I'm going to choose this one called grass by the grass by the trees okay once that's imported we can click into viewport shading and it's currently set to EV shading but we'll actually change this to Cycles I think for this project uh set it to GPU compute uh make make sure do no is selected 32 samples should be enough for the viewport and 64 for the render I think what we'll do to add a little extra light to the scene we're going to add in a sun lamp so press shift and a go down to where it says light and add in a sunlight you press g g to grab and Zed to move it up on the Z axis just so we can see where it's pointing I'm just going to press R to rotate it just rotate it around 45° um and then to increase the brightness go to the light uh data over here and increase the strength to say let's try let's try um 20 for a start that brightens the scene up quite nicely all right so the scene's already looking pretty pretty nice so let's a good point to save your work so let's do that okay once we've got it to start this stage we can add in our um Ghostbusters car so if you look at the organizer here us seeing collection um we've got the Lego town over here everything's parented to a single empty which you can see actually all these crazy lines over here that just basically means it's parented to this empty over here so we're going to go to file import Mecha bricks and I'm going to import the Ghostbusters car next again it's going to take a few minutes just like before for the models uh sort of imported way too big for the scene so what we'll do with the uh empty selected you can right click on it and click select hierarchy press s to scale and type 01 and everything goes down to appropriate size so with this we've got two parts really so we've got the actual Ghostbusters guys themselves um and what we'll do we're going to select those press alt and P and then clear the parent and keep the transformation and what we'll do you can see that all of their parts have been moved in the outliner over here uh press M to to move them to a new collection and we're going to move them to the we'll call it Ghostbusters so what we're left with now is the car itself so if I just grab that empty you can see just the car moves so what we'll do we'll move the car I'm going to press seven to get into top view G to grab and we're just going to move the car over here stick it just there so now the car is kind of basically in front of these shops so what we could do now we can actually get the car moving so the simplest way to do that with the empty SLP selected and on frame one we'll press I and we'll put a a location key frame and then we'll go to frame 120 press G to grab then y to grab on the Y AIS we're just going to move the car all the way over here to about here and we'll press I again and have another location key frame on frame 120 so now the car moves from here to here for a little bit more realism we'll add um a little bit of rotation to these wheels now I'm not going to worry too much about the Acura this is Lego and obviously you can spend a lot more time messing around but for the purpose of this animation we're going to select all three parts of the wheel that we can see press contrl and J and that joins them together as one piece and if you go up to the item menu and try some of these different rotations let's just try some of these so it looks like it's the X rotation so I'm going to put a control a driver in the X rotation box pressing hash and typing frame divided by two so it looks like that and now you'll actually see the car wheel I don't know if you can see very clearly let's just go into a different View mode you can't see but the car wheel is actually rotating now I'm going to do the same thing for this wheel here control J to join hash frame / two and that'll also put a rotation on this wheel okay so now we've kind of got a little animation of the car moving what we could also do just for fun we could have these little Lego heads turning to look at the car as it goes by so I'll show you how to do that so let's uh pick this guy here for a start think he's a little Scout so what I'm going to do I'm going to select his head hold down shift select his hat to press contrl andj to join and if you let's just uh try and rotate this let's uh let's have a look so what we could do you could either animate it by hand and key frame the rotation or we could use a constraint so in this case we're going to use a constraint so with his head selected go down to constraints and we're going to add a damped track constraint the target I'm going to set the target to be this part on the car here the wing mirror and we're going to set the track axis to be Zed so now you'll see the little guy's head actually turns as the car goes by as if he's watching the car so we could do this for some of the other heads as well so select both parts the head press contrl and J add a damp track constraint choose your target select the tracks access to zed so now you could have this for a few characters where they all kind of independently are watching the car as it goes by the next thing to do probably would be to add a camera so let's do that so press shift and a going to add in a camera I basically get my viewport more or less where I want the camera to be let's go back to the start the animation so I'll have my camera here to start so we'll press control alt and zero on the number pad and that basically places our camera where the viewport is and we'll press for a location key frame here and then we're going to move to frame 120 and I'm going to move the move the viewport first to about around here and I'm going to press control Al and zero again to move the camera in the right position and I'm just going to tweak the camera uh Zed rotation a little bit just to get the car in full and I'm going to press I for a Loc location fact let's press I and do a location and rotation key frame there it's probably what I should have done at the beginning okay let's just uh tweak the rotation of the car at the beginning I location and rotation so now the car moves and the camera pans with it as well you could also use a constraint for the camera if you wanted to achieve the same sort of thing here would be a good way to do it so just to tweak the camera a little bit further I'm going to click on where it says camera I'm going to change the focal length to something a little bit wider a wider angle lens so focal length of maybe I think probably I'm going to go for 35 I think maybe I'm just going to tweak the brightness of the sun down a little bit as well or 15 you can also add a little bit of color if you want to the Sun to give you seene a bit of a a look I'm just going to try and be subtle with it just a little bit of orange to it and if you scroll down the camera settings to where it says look you can also change this to medium high contrast or even very high contrast to give it a bit more of a Punchy look I think we'll render this little sequence out and see how it looks so just go to your render settings I'm going to change this 25 frames per second we'll just do a frame 1 to 120 set your file format to ffmpeg video encoding can be EG 4 video code that you can leave at h264 I changed my output quality to perceptually lossless and give it a place to save it when you've done all your settings just go to your render render menu up here and click render animation once the render's finished you can easily view it by going to the render menu and clicking view animation that looks pretty cool we could extend the scene by rendering the same scene but from a different camera view angle so we'll start by adding a new camera by pressing shift and a and then clicking camera we're going to set the new camera to the active camera by clicking on the camera icon and what we can do also is just move the viewport let's focus on this these people's faces and then press control out and zero and that moves this new camera to this new position so you can just tweak your camera maybe we'll go a bit more zoomed in and perhaps we'll turn the camera around a bit a great way to control the camera is go to the view menu navigation and then walk navigation and then you can move the camera with the mouse and by pressing the W and Keys you can actually move around the sea as if it was a computer game you can also move up and down with the q& E keys so let's kind of choose an angle maybe around something like this and what we'll do we'll add some depth the field and we'll click and focus on this guy in the middle we'll also increase the focal length a little tiny bit perhaps we'll also just add a bit of pan to the camera so I don't want to render out the whole scene I just want to render maybe from frames maybe from frame 80 so we'll start at frame 80 and finish at frame 110 and we just render this short section here perhaps we'll also just add a little bit of movement to the camera so we'll start the camera frame 8 and press I for location and rotation and then we'll just move the camera at the end perhaps just across just a little bit maybe also rotate on the Zed press I for location and rotation key frame so we just get a tiny bit of movement from the camera you can also change the interpolation of the camera by pressing T and instead of having a bezier interpolation we'll change to a linear which will mean we'll lose that kind of SL soft ramp up and soft ramp down at the beginning and the end right let's save this one and render it out so we finished the render and we can view the animation and we're getting some little weird flashes on this guy's hat this is basically due to Cycles not quite getting it right um to reduce this kind of flashing we can actually do something called um clamping so if you go to your render settings and scroll down to where it says clamping I'm going to set this one to 10 where it says direct light and that should fix the flashings on those frames I'm just going to render out the animation again just to check that's worked okay that's great so by adjusting the clamping of the direct light we've managed to fix most of that flickering problem let's just save that and what we'll do next I'm going to show you how to use the blender video editor to edit your Clips together so file new video editing so here we have kind of the main window you need to set your frame rate to the same as you've rendered out in and what you can do you can literally just drag and drop your video clips into this sequencer so I'm going to do that now so you can see here we've got our two video clips here I'm just going to drag them one by one into this video window and now you can see them playing up here so what you can actually do is rearrange your Clips just by dragging them around and you can also split your Clips by finding the place you want to do the cut and the timeline right clicking and then clicking split so what we'll do we kind of jump cut here let's just move these around a little bit so now you can see when we press play it plays the initial pan we cut the people's head swinging around then we cut the car driving off and when you finished you can just render out using the same settings as we did before in the render window okay that gives you everything you need to know to get started with making your very first Lego animation okay so I've just spent a little bit longer on this animation I've just added in one last scene where the Ghostbusters are waiting in line and all the heads turned just to meet the car as the car comes up I've also made some changes the environment so actually after animating I thought it would work better at night so I've swapped the hdri for a night hdri it was called Garden KN uh is this one over here okay so I've also taken the sun I've turned the strength of the sun down so it's now at 5 and I also change the color of the sun to Blue to kind of make it more like a Moonlight um I've added a couple of Lights in either end uh you can see the on here is blue just to give a nice blue tone to this end of the the uh animation and at the other end let me show you I've just added a red light just to kind of give it a bit of Interest as we start the animation and the last thing I did uh was added a volume Cube so basically let me show you what it looks like I added a cube and just resized it to kind of fill this area and then for the material I actually created a new material I removed the surface so it actually said disconnected so there was nothing here and then under the volume I just set this to a volume scatter which is just here and just change the density to 0.02 just to give a little bit of fog to the scene adds a bit of extra atmosphere and gives a bit of nice glow around the light areas and then I've rendered it out I hope you enjoy it and I'll see you in the next one when you see a ghost in town at night feel a shiver through your spine creepy Shadows give a fright who you going to call to make it right we need the Ghost Chasers G Chasers we need the Ghost Chasers [Applause] [Music]

Channel: MediaWay

Views: 1,647

Keywords: blender tutorial, blender animation, blender lego

Id: Zb8z_JCkcx8

Length: 21min 2sec (1262 seconds)

Published: Thu May 23 2024