Graph Editor - Blender 2.80 Fundamentals

the graph editor is the most advanced keyframe manipulator in blender to access the graph editor you have a few options in any workspace you could go to the top left-hand corner of any panel and select graph editor from the drop down alternatively you can go to the animation workspace and go to the dopesheet area from there you can hover over it and press control tab this will toggle between the dope sheet and the graph editor for non hotkey users you can go to view toggle graph editor or toggle graph dope sheet to achieve the same thing compared to the dope sheet the graph editor can do many of the same things but also allows the user to view and edit the motion curves directly let me show you what I mean let's go ahead and make some key frames for our object so we can see what this looks like just like our timeline video let's once again animate a simple bouncing ball to do this simply subdivide your default cube by holding ctrl and pressing 2 on the number row then turn on AutoKey frame we'll set a keyframe for a high pose on the first frame go to frame 10 set a low pose where it's touching the grid set a much lower high pose on frame 15 and do the same thing as frame 10 for frame 20 for our final low pose you may have noticed by now that our keyframes in the graph editor are represented by orange handles along the curves we see displayed now we also want to change the handle type for our extreme low poses on frame 20 and 10 this will once again give us that bouncing ball look however let's figure out how to do that in the graph editor real quick unlike the dopesheet and timeline there is no summary of key frames where we can easily select all of the keyframes on a certain frame so to achieve the same effect let's simply find frame 10 and alt left click any of the keyframes on frame 10 this will select all keyframes vertically on the same frame as the keyframe you selected now we can simply change the handle type by going to key handle type and selecting vector hotkey users can still press V now as you can see the handles have visually changed this time unlike the dope sheet and time line the graph editor directly shows you what changing the handle type looks like in terms of the interpolation curves let's repeat this process for frame 20 alt left click press V select vector we can then play our animation with spacebar again to confirm that we did it right now let's observe our graph editor a little more closely to see how similar and how different it is from the dope sheet before we move on I want to say that in case your graph editor is too zoomed in or you can't see all of your frames simply hover over the graph editor and press home you can also go to view view all the first thing we'll notice that's the same is the left-hand column and just like the dope sheet the keyframes have all been assigned to specific channels you can expand and collapse channels by clicking the arrow or using the plus or minus keys on the number pad while hovering over the channels however you might notice that while the channels are listed there are no distinct rows of keyframes to see which keyframes belong to which channels now we already know that the keyframes are indicated by the orange handles you see spread out along the curves and each curve belongs to a channel simply left-click any of the channels on the left to highlight the corresponding curve in the graph to isolate a curve you can left-click to select it and go to the channel menu and click hide unselected curves for hockey users you can press shift H as in hide this will hide all other curves for you to unhide all other curves simply go back into the same channel menu and select reveal curves for hockey users you can press alt H now let's go ahead and isolate only the location curves and try to manipulate our keyframes and curves using the graph editor as you can see each of the keyframes in each channel exists on their respective curves as these orange handles which we can select and transform using the same selection and transformation options we typically have in blender I'm going to simply shift left click a few of these keyframes and start using G s and R to transform them as you can see moving rotating and scaling keyframes are all possible in the graph editor allowing for very versatile and intuitive transformation of the curves but what if we select a single handle each handle by itself is technically made up of three selectable parts the main body and the two handlebars by default the end points of each handlebar can be transformed as a way to rotate the entire handle and manipulate the length of the handles which affect how the curve interpolates between keyframes you can also select the body and use R or s to rotate or scale both handlebars simultaneously however handle transformation differs depending on what handle type we use for example the vector handle types we have at the extreme low poses of our ball can be edited individually on each side it also cannot be rotated as vector handle types must point to the previous keyframe quick note when you brake an individual handlebar off of its default orientation it will convert the keyframe handle type to free free is when both handles move independently from each other and you can set it to free yourself manually feel free to experiment with other handle types another thing we talked about is the interpolation modes interpolation modes can also be very easily changed in the dopesheet and timeline but we never talked about what they look like in the graph editor since the graph editor is comprised specifically of interpolated curves the interpolation mode greatly affects how the interpolated curves look let's try a few by isolating the Z location curve and selecting all the keyframes by pressing a we can then go into the key menu go to interpolation mode and select constant as you can see the constant interpolation mode removes all curve interpolation and simply repeats the previous keyframes value until it encounters another keyframe if this looks like a familiar pattern to you it might be because you saw it in the interpolation mode menu for con as you can see each of the interpolation modes has an icon that represents what the curves look like one in that mode feel free to test out these modes to better understand them Bezier however is the default and will be changing ours back to Bezier for now now that we've gotten basic curve manipulation out of the way let's talk about more advanced curve manipulation options specifically curve modifiers curve modifiers are similar to mesh modifiers in that they are extremely powerful non-destructive functions that can help you alter and adjust your curves there are a few curved modifiers but to demonstrate this I'm going to show you how to use the noise curve modifier to add curve modifiers simply open the right hand side menu in the graph editor you can do this by clicking the arrow icon on the right or pressing the N key from this right-hand side menu go to the modifiers tab make sure you have the curve you want to modify selected we'll go ahead and select our Z location curve by clicking on the Z location channel on the left hand side then we can go into the add modifier drop down menu and select noise for hockey users you can simply hover over the graph editor and press control shift M and select noise from that menu immediately you can see how the noise modifier affects our curve as the curve now has a noise pattern added all throughout it if we play our animation back we can see that a slight shaking effect has now been added on top of our original animation even if we set new keyframes or move them around the shaking effect adjusts to the curve dynamically just like mesh modifiers we can also adjust the modifier settings to change how the modifier affects our curve each modifier has different settings to play around with so feel free to experiment but these two options at the bottom are available for every single curve modifier this is because they affect the on and off state of the modifier if we expand the restrict frame range option we can see a start and end range that we can set this will allow us to restrict the effect of the modifier to specific frames along our curve additionally the in-and-out frames will allow us to fade the modifier influence in and out a certain number of frames for example if I set the fade in value to 10 the curb modifier will slowly fade in the influence of the effect over the course of 10 frames furthermore you can also manually adjust or keyframe the influence slider just below that under use influence collapsing either of these options will also disable them now some of you may remember that the icon for modifiers for meshes is a wrench icon in the properties tab similarly in the graph editor wrench icons also represent curve modifiers but the only time you see this icon is next to the channel names that's because this wrench icon next to the channels in the graph editor is for toggling on and off curve modifiers for that specific curve for your convenience likewise the checkbox disables the curves values from affecting the object at all and the lock icon prevents changes to be made on that curve as a final note several of the dopesheet and timeline features exist here as well for example you can still add markers in the graph editor and edit them and you can also set your preview range in the same way I hope this video gives you a fundamental understanding of the graph editor in blender

Channel: Blender

Views: 167,919

Keywords: blender, b3d, blender 3d, 2.8, 2.80, blender 2.8, blender foundation

Id: zHlln3AzeMs

Length: 10min 13sec (613 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 30 2019