How To Animate A Fight Scene In Blender (For Beginners) - Part 1

3D Fight animation is one of the hardest things to learn trying to make a character Punch Kick and fight like those you've seen in your favorite show or game is a little scary the first time you open blender this is going to be a step-by-step tutorial series on how to animate a quick fight scene my name is Cliff and I've made my own F animations here on YouTube and this tutorial series will help you get started the plan is at the end of this series you'll be able to pick up the knowledge and tools necessary to create your own fight animation to start things off I have created other fight scenes to tutorials which are really overall breakdowns on tips on how to create a fight scene but the information I have in those videos I will also be breaking down this series as well I'll be using blender but the principles taught here can be applied to any program this is not a beginner blender series I will go slow and explain everything that I'm doing but I wouldn't consider this a how to learn blender tutorial I also don't want to go into any advanced features just yet I really just wanted to do something simple that anyone can pick up this scene file is part of my combat animator started kit which is a collection of assets that put together that can help you make your fight animations which you can get for free in the link in the description if you don't have the scene file I'm using kin's Sky rig and a free boxing ring environment feel free to use any character you can find and feel comfortable using but if you're new the simpler the character the better okay so let's get started I'm going to go to file open and open My Scene file and these two characters are character rigs a character rig is what you would need in order to move the character in 3D space my native program is Maya so I never really learned the blender UI navigation controlled I changed my keymap to Industry compatible so if you look in here on the key map it is under industry compatible it would probably be set to blender um if you open up for the first time so if you are switching over from Maya this is what I would use in order to go ahead and make sure all the um the hot keys are the same but otherwise I will be putting up the blender UI controls here on the bottom so you can follow along last thing we before we start is we need some form of reference as much knowledge as we may think we know about how the body moves it doesn't hurt to have some form of photo or video so you can see how things work frame by frame I'm going to reference this Quick Clip here but I'll be changing and moving things to make it a bit more simpler than this so from this scene here I'm going to go ahead and click on my show overlays which go ahead and show my character egg I'm going to select my sky rig red here and then go to pose mode now there's a hotkey for this going forward um which for me is the three key so you can see the character here now it's a little bit it's a lot going on here so you have all these overlays you have the character you have the environment so I was able to separate the environment into a different collection so I'm just going to hide it here there so make it a little bit cleaner I'm also going to hide this camera for right now and then lastly I'm going to turn off the X-ray so now it should make it a little bit easier to go ahead and see the the the skyr character I'm also probably going to turn off the blue character as well so I'm really can only focus on the one character here okay so now that we have that I want to go ahead and add something for the bottom here because right now you can completely see another character so I'm going go back to my object mode and going to add mesh a plane and then I'm going to to scale it up from here to about let's see let's check 50 that's more than enough let me just bring it down to 10 that should be fine and even though she's it's still under we're going to go ahead and move the character move the plane so it sits right under the character's foot perfect so from here I'm going to click back on my character go into POS mode and start doing um the first pose for our character here A good rule of thumb is I'm going to also have my auto keying option here as well on so it saves all the frames when I'm moving through the character and the first bit is to really just get that first pose in for the character I'm going to go into a resting boxing pose um my reference here is showing on the opposite end but I'm going to again ready making changes flip it so the character is showing towards the camera which is going to be in my direction all right start with the core first get the character just look my way and this this is your first time using something like this this rig is called is made with something called rigify so if you go on to the item tab here and you see everything selected on this may help it to clean up some of the UI over here so on the bottom here for the the leg I'm going to remove the FK for legs so that way you don't have to worry about that right now just start posing our our character here yeah it doesn't have to be exact like I wouldn't want to go ahead and try to make this the most exact type of pose I want to get it close as possible but we want to get an overall feel for this fighting stance so when it comes to terms of the fingers here something in something fun that's able to curl up the fingers pretty quickly here and Blender at least is I can go ahead and select all of my fingers here kick the scale key change just to local and then it will go ahead and curve into a little bit of mini Fest but from then after a skill I'm going to hit to rotate and then from rotate I should be able to turn into here I probably can do away with the thumb here it's a nice quick way to get a punch pulse all right I'm going to do the same on the other side now I mentioned this before but blender is not my native program so if you guys have any cool tips on how to utilize blender a little bit more easy little more easier than I'm doing feel free to let me know but after that we have our first sort of pose maybe I'll bring this in to guard her face a little bit better something like this that's probably a little bit more but we have our guard we got our guard hands and then we have our action hand and anytime you kind of want to see how it looks I just click off the overlays kind of give it a little bit of a of a overview in 3D space and character is nice and balanced and it's good enough to go ahead and start this pulse right so just in case when I go on my key frame um auto key here it may not have every key selected um I believe it's set to probably I'm not sure actually what the the default is but I I I like to bring it down all the way to a whole character so therefore once I move something and then the whole character actually um gets key but if that doesn't work I'll just go into the hot key to to to do the same and that should bring all the keys into all the poses now so if I do move anything we have our home po here on frame zero the first move we're going to have is a jab right so from here I'm going to start on frame five and then we're going to see how the timing is for that for our jab pose going to move the character up just a little bit bring the character's foot forward a little bit just to give them a little bit of a of a jab step we're going to have our Arm come out we're going to twist the shoulders and just really getting into our jab here I think this is pretty good all right a good Ru of measure and this might just be my own personal OCD but I go ahead and make sure I add all in the keys here just in case so now when I come back to my original point my original key it should now kind of move a little bit into our posst so we have our pose here and what I want to do is be able to have the character start from this pose here to the punch pose and to bring it right back and how I can do that is adding in another window here called The Dope sheet the dope sheet is our animation key editor and it makes it a lot easier to manipulate the keys from from duplicating adding and anything you really want to do on the timeline as far as making sure the anim looks exactly the way you want to it's much more easier with the dope sheet this is just the timeline of the animation itself I'm able to go ahead and play Reverse go to each frame the dope sheet is the animation editor so from here I'm going to bring my cursor to the bottom right now so I can see the crosshairs and I'm going to add it another window it just makes a duplicate of whatever is there already on top of here cuz I still want to have access to this playback menu but on here I'm going to change this the editor type to the dope sheet and let's bring out our character just for me I like to see exactly you know once you have multiple characters you really want to see exactly which character selected and I'm going to uncheck this only show selected so actually has all my keys because when I do have it selected and I open it's only the Torso that select it right it's only the foot and the foot so if I want to duplicate the pose I'm not going to be able to do so with the whole pose it's only going to duplicate what's selected but if I uncheck this it shows the whole thing so from here on frame zero there's two ways to do this both are exactly the same for my opinion but the way one is you go ahead and old school copy oh no frames cuz I did not select anything old school copy go to frame 10 right click paste and it goes from punch one back to the original post the second way to do this so I'm going to delete it here is go in here right click select the key it should be the same go into duplicate and then it's going to drag into the second pose punch one punch two exactly the same thing in a different um parts of the animation sometimes one little beit easier than the other but for right now both of these work exactly the same so from here what I want to do next is something called offsetting the keys so offsetting the keys is going to let me make this animation just a little bit more realistic right now if we play it I change back to frame 12 from my animation if I play the animation it is very robotic right the character is moving from one pose directly to the other this is when you see an animation and it feels robotic this is one of the reasons why all everything is moving at the same time the foot body arm head everything is moving exactly at once so if I remove the overlays so you can see that action right it's just everything's moving at the same time so that's why it feels almost like a uh like an action toy so what I want to do is start overlaying my our actions which the best way to go ahead and know exactly what to Overlay is to examine reference but I'll go ahead and give you a little bit of some tips here the first thing is I'm going to start from the bottom up so the first thing is when we are starting a punch for the most part our foot is going to start immediately but not necessarily the first thing the first thing is going to be our center of gravity our center of gravity is going to lean in first and then our foot's going to make action so because of that going ahead and select here our foot is going to move just a tad slower so instead of it having starting in zero frame I'm starting on frame one and you can see already that the body is starting to move before the foot so then then then the foot reacts and comes back and even just then even though you don't necessarily see it it gives it a little bit extra realism if you really want to push it you can go to frame two and you can start seeing now it's starting to overlap the things are not happening exactly at the same time cuz it's waiting until frame two to move before it hits to frame five so now we'll try frame two for right now that way to see exactly if it works but as you can see the foot stays the foot gets there and it immediately starts to come back so the next thing we're going to do is we're going to copy and paste our animation so it can show that the foot is staying there a little bit while the punch is happening right it gets there the punch happens and it kind of Waits a little bit before it settles back into the original pulse so now you can really feel that it's not just moving it's staying there for a little bit of a beat and then coming back but it's still coming back at the same time from here that last pole I'd probably just delay it a bit to get the frame 12 and now you really see oh okay it's coming in it's doing the punch and then it's coming back afterwards so you really feel like this feels a little bit more realistic and over the did was move the first frame to frame two move the last frame to frame 12 and we held these for two frames all right it's a good rule of thumb to just start so from here because this is the center of gravity I'm actually not going to change this at all I'm going to leave it exactly the same because this is where we're going ahead and basing our animation off of right so or overlapping an actions off of this center of gravity I'm actually going to move right up into the arm right to keep this very very simple so the next thing from here is that you see the arms already coming in for the punch right punches are supposed to be Snappy right you can see and it's you don't really feel the power coming into this really whatsoever so what I want to do is from frame two and even though we could probably do the same thing right where we kind of push it in a little bit more I am going to move it from frame two but I'm also going to add another key so I'm going to copy bring this back to the original or bring it back to frame two it's the same idea so it looks the same but I'm going to bring this in a little bit more almost like we're Gathering the momentum for it so even though it's similar it's now creating a little bit of a movement there right so we bring it back out and try to look at it you can feel it it feels a little bit more Snappy and what this is called is building anticipation so we're bringing this in a little bit so you now you can feel the anticipation of this happening and then it coming back right so now it feels a lot more it feels a lot more Snappy right so the same idea is going to happen when we want to go ahead and bring it back I will probably bring this up Just a Touch not necessarily the same notar the same um beat as the foot but what I want to do is make sure that at least for the elbow we're bringing it we're snapping in as well so even though she drops it just a bit I going to go ahead and raise it up so it feels a little bit more Snappy so if we're punching here she's coming back up into that resting pose so now it's a punch and it's a lot more Snappy than before so the last thing I want to do with that arm is just kind of raise this a bit while it's moving so on frame I would say frame one let's just go ahead and do a touch up this punch is happening on frame five let's just move it a touch up so it feels a little more Snappy and let's keep it just a touch up when it's coming back down and in this i' probably delay all the way back down to 12 so it adds a little bit it adds in a I'm bringing in my shoulder to give power to the punch so if we see it from different Ang angles she's kind of doing the same thing right getting ready for that punch so now you can see just from adjusting the foot and the arm we already have a lot more of a realistic looking type of punch than what we had before and that's it and that's your first punch your first punch in blender in the next video we're going to start blocking out the rest of the combos for this quick fight animation and I'll see you guys over there on the next one

Channel: Round Table Animation

Views: 77,209

Keywords: fight animation, how to animate a fight scene, round table studios, fight animation tutorial, animation, how to start animation, fight scene, animate, how to animate, how to animate a 3d fight, how to animate for beginners, the blender essentials, blender, blender modifier tutorials, how to animate a fight scene in blender, blender fight scene, blender fight animation tutorial, blender fight animation, blender tutorial

Id: K0N4bBfyzoQ

Length: 24min 39sec (1479 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 12 2023