How to Animate in Blender 2.83 | StreamSchool Tutorial

if you want to make your own graphics and animations for your twitch stream then learning how to animate is pretty important so today i'm going to go over the basics of animation in blender 3d specifically the graph editor because that seems like a sticking point or an area of confusion for a lot of people but it's also extremely important to understand all you have to do is download blender and follow along and i'd also recommend having a basic understanding of the blender interface as well and at the end of this you should have a pretty good looking bouncing ball animation which is sort of a traditional introductory animation exercise and you'll also leave this tutorial with the knowledge of how to actually animate just about anything you want in blender 3d that being said let's get started my name is chris folea i'm your stream scholar welcome to stream school [Music] all right when you first open blender it should look pretty similar to this this is the default screen if we click off that gets rid of the splash screen then for the sake of this tutorial we're going to go up here and click on animation to go to the animation workspace all of these tabs are just different default workspaces for different tasks they're not 100 necessary but it is convenient because the animation workspace gives us the dope sheet right here which allows us to re-time our animation but it also gives us this camera view which for the sake of this tutorial we don't need we're going to replace that with the graph editor by going up here to the left clicking the drop down and changing that to the graph editor and we'll get to that in just a minute when we're actually animating but next i'm going to go ahead and turn on screencast keys you probably don't have that installed but that allows you to see what i'm pressing as we're working just in case i forget to mention any sort of hotkeys or anything finally we want to get the rest of this document set up for the purpose of this tutorial and most of you are streamers and you want to make graphics for your live stream and most live streams are at 60 frames per second the default frames per second that blender uses is 24. to change that we can come over here to the printer icon and change frame rate to 60 frames per second finally i'm just gonna come over here to this 3d view and hit one on my numpad to go to the front view front view you can also do that under view and then viewport and front and that'll do the exact same thing but it just takes a lot longer than hitting one on your numpad so for the sake of this tutorial let's say you want to take this cube and animate it over here animating in blender is actually fairly easy just to move stuff around so to do that first we need a keyframe so if i hit select the object i want and i hit i on my keyboard to bring up the insert keyframe menu you notice we have location rotation scaling and then pretty much any other combination that you could possibly want of that stuff and usually to cover all the bases i'll do a location rotation and scale keyframe all at once but since i know that i just want to move the cube we're only going to insert a location keyframe and immediately you'll notice that we have a bunch of yellow circles over here this tells us that overall there is there are keyframes on this frame then here it tells us that the cube has a keyframe uh furthermore if we dive further down the hierarchy it says that this is in an action called the cube action and further down if we dive even further you can see we actually have an individual keyframe for the x location the y location and the z location on all three separate axes x is left and right y is towards and away from us and z is up and down or blue so we can further see this if we come up here and click this little arrow or hit in on our keyboard when we go to the item tab you'll see that the x y and z locations for object are yellow that means we have told the software that is where we want our cube to be on this frame or at this point in time so let's say we want to animate the cube going over here easy we just move our playhead up here maybe to 60 frames which is one second again 60 frames per second we come up here and we hit t on the keyboard that gives us this menu for our widgets and we can grab the movement widget and we can move the cube over here and immediately you'll notice one thing first of all or a few things first of all this is color coded so green means that from the keyframe none of these values have changed it's been at zero it stayed at zero as we moved now that we move the cube over you'll notice the x-axis is changing and orange means hey you've changed this value but you haven't told the software you want a keyframe there you haven't told the software you want the cube to stay there yet on that frame so to do that we just hit i for insert keyframe and we select location so now if we hit shift and then left on the keyboard that puts us back at frame one and we hit space we can see that play and let's recap here we just told the computer or blender that we want the cube to be at zero zero zero on frame one and at frame 60 or one second later we want it to be over here and the computer just filled in all of the in between frames for us picture this like an original animate the 2d animation studio way back when you have the main animators doing the important frames or the keyframes then they handle off to the in between animators who animate all of these frames in between now in 3d software like blender the computer does that for us furthermore there are a few different ways you can insert keyframes so you can hit i on your keyboard to bring up the insert keyframe menu or you can hover over any property in blender it's not limited to location rotation or scale you can animate color you can animate various other properties as well but let's say we hover over a rotation hit i that will insert a keyframe on rotation then if we go all the way to frame 60 grab our rotation widget and we rotate our cube notice how the y turned orange hover over again hit i to insert another keyframe now you'll notice that it rotates as well if we hit space to play then the last way to insert the keyframes or the less convenient way i suppose would be to right click on individual channels let's say we only want to scale this cube on its local x-axis so we could right-click x say insert single keyframe if we if we had right clicked and said insert keyframes it does for all three channels if we right click and say insert single keyframe now we're only affecting the x-axis go all the way over to 60 we can click and drag to scale it up on the x on its x-axis then we can hover over it and hit i or we can right-click and say insert single keyframe so now if we hit space the cube will animate and it will scale now for the purpose of this tutorial in this little section of the tutorial just for explanation i don't want to animate the scale or the rotation so i'm going to right click and say clear keyframes and i'm going to right click and i'm going to say clear keyframes so now the cube only moves and we talked about how the computer fills in all of the in between frames but you'll notice that the cube sort of starts out slow it gets faster and then it slows down again that's because by default the blender uses something called bezier interpretation which is a curved interpretation so this is where we hop over to the graph editor so i'm going to make this a little bit bigger and to navigate the graph editor you can click and hold the middle mouse button and drag around or if you want to change the scale of what you're looking at you can zoom in and out using the middle mouse wheel or you can hold control on your keyboard and press and hold the middle mouse button and that allows you to scale it up and down or left and right so you can sort of frame it how you want then you can click and drag the middle mouse button to move it around and then scale it some more until you get it looking exactly the way you want another option would be to hit a to select everything then hit period on your numpad and blender will automatically frame it to your view i personally want this squished down a little bit so i'm going to do that myself but you'll notice how the graph editor works so from left to right that is the frame number so frame one all over on frame 30 now we're on frame 60 and then up and down is the value of whatever you're animating so for instance this red line only represents the left and right movement of the cube the movement of the cube on the x axis so we have three lines actually and they're all flat we have the y location and the z location and we can turn those off we're not worried about those right now but just to demonstrate this a little bit further if i click on this frame this little black dot and i click and drag it now this starts to make a little more sense right the cube is now 5 over on to the right to the x axis or if we go down now it's 5 over to the left or negative 5 on the x-axis so this red line vertically up and down only controls values of the cube going left and right so if we look at this graph you'll notice that using the curved interpolation of the line moving from frame one to two this line is pretty flat that cube is not moving very much from two to three the line gets a little bit steeper from three to four the line gets even steeper so that's why it starts to speed up if we go all the way to the middle of the animation here you'll notice again i'm using left and right arrow key you'll notice that this is pretty steep now we can see a visible change in this graph you notice the cube is moving much quicker in the middle of the graph that's because from frame 2627 the value changes a decent amount while all the way back here on frame one it's changing almost none from frame one to frame two so because of the way this line is curved that's why the cube is sort of speeding up and then slowing down and the really cool thing about this is as animators we have full control over this and by the way the reason the computer or blender chooses this as the default interpolation is because easing in and out or speeding up and slowing down is a much more natural movement than just abruptly starting an abruptly stopping which feels very mechanical so this is called the bezier interpolation and you can actually change this if you want to we can hit a on our keyboard to select all of the keyframes we can right click and if we go to interpolation mode you'll notice there is constant linear and bezier and if we do constant what that means is it only changes on keyframes so it stays where it is then we hit the next keyframe and it jumps to that position you might be thinking wow that's stupid why would i ever want to do that but it's actually very useful to character animators who are just working on their keyframes and the timing of those keyframes then after they get the keyframe set they'll change it to bezier interpolation so they can work on their inbetweening but then the next interpolation we have is linear and this is if you want it to just be a straight line from start to finish you don't want it to speed up you don't want it to slow down you want it to start abruptly and stop abruptly and that's useful i guess for robots or mechanical animation or it's useful if you want to make something that's like an endless loop like a conveyor belt or a wheel or something you wouldn't want that to speed up or slow down but in general most of the time you want to use the bezier interpolation so understanding how the graph editor works uh now we can manipulate this so if we select this handle right here and we hit or if you select this frame then this handle and you hit s on your keyboard you can scale that and you'll notice now it's going to start much slower speed up and then slow down much faster so if we play that you'll see what the cube does and how that reacts and we can do the exact inverse so if i hit ctrl z a bunch of times to undo that and i select this frame and i hit s for scale then zero for zero and hit enter then we select this handle and then select this handle hit s to scale it let's make this start out really fast and then slow down so now if we hit space to play you'll notice the cube starts fast and then it slows down again we've only set two keyframes we told the computer or blender that we want the cube to be here and we've totally want it to be here then we just manipulated the line in between and that gives us so much control so knowing that let's make a ball bounce which will again show off the power of the graph editor so i'm going to go ahead and have the cube selected and i'm going to hit delete on my keyboard then i'm going to come up here where it says add i'm going to go to mesh and i'm going to select uv sphere then you'll notice that if we zoom in on that it looks kind of like a disco ball and we can get rid of that by going to object and shade smooth so finally i'm going to grab the movement widget and i'm going to move the cube up so it's sitting on the red line this doesn't have to be exact just get it close this isn't an actual floor for us then i'm going to scale my graph editor down a little bit it's a little bit in the way but let's say we want the ball to start up top fall down and bounce a few times let's think about how we want to approach that we already have the ball on the floor so we'll go ahead and insert that keyframe let's say around frame 30 we come up here we hit i on our keyboard and a location to set the location keyframe then we go to frame one we drag the ball up here we want it to fall from we hit i again location now if we hit space to play you'll see the ball falls however if you're paying attention you'll notice that it starts slow speeds up and then slows down now if you drop something in real life it's gonna it's gonna speed up and it's gonna smack into the ground unless it's like a feather or something so for that we want to adjust the graph and we want to take this handle and we want to adjust it so that this is sort of a curve so it starts slow and then speeds up but you'll notice if i grab this handle and move it the handle to the right moves as well it's hard to see because of the coloring but you'll notice that both of the handles are moving and we need to fix that that's going to be problematic for one reason we want this ball to bounce multiple times so let's say i come over here and insert another keyframe and i move and i move just this handle now you'll notice that the ball is gonna the ball is gonna dunk under the floor and that's not very natural for a ball to do unless it's on water so to fix this we can select this keyframe or all of them by hitting a on the keyboard we can right click and we can go to handle type and we can set that to free rather than aligned we set this to free and we select just this handle now only this handle will move and i'm gonna sort of squish around again using control plus middle mouse button to get this a little bit more ideal for me it's whatever you're comfortable with and we can manipulate this handle to make this graph a really nice shape so now if we play this the ball starts out slow like it's at the peak of going up and then it just smacks into the ground which is exactly what we want so now let's say we want to animate this ball bouncing the next natural move for most people would be say i want to add a keyframe of the ball up here but think about this for a second you don't need to do that we can insert keyframes of the ball just on the ground and then we can use the graph editor to manipulate where it is in between those keyframes we can use the graph editor to make those arcs so let's say we go forward to about frame 60 now because normally each bounce is going to take less time but this is only half of a bounce and this is a full bounce so these keyframes are going to be the same amount of time so go to frame 60 hit i to insert a keyframe location we're going to select this frame right here right click set the handle type to free then you'll notice the ball's not moving in between here but if i set this cursor to in between then we start manipulating these handles so we select this frame select this handle click and drag this handle now you notice the ball is moving and we don't have to set any additional frames this is this is making our life so easy here we can just move both of these handles to make a nice arc so now if we zoom out and we play this you'll see the ball bounces we probably want this ball to bounce a few more times before it settles but you can make this ball bounce as much as you want by manipulating these handles or as little as you want by manipulating these handles this i'll tell you right now is going to look really unnatural but just know that that is an option so let's move forward but less frames let's go forward maybe 20 frames instead of 30 this time hit i to insert a location keyframe select it right click handle type free or you can just hit v to bring up that menu and that's a little bit easier we can select that handle and we can make this bounce a little bit less you might want to squish the graph up using ctrl plus middle mouse button just to give us more room to work now you'll notice the ball bounces twice go forward maybe a little bit less i insert location set this to handle type free and then drag this up and this is all starting to come together as you can see we're making a beautiful bouncing ball animation so hit play the ball bounces and it settles and you might want to do one more bounce maybe not i'm not going to worry about it but let's say we're not satisfied with the ball just staying in place and bouncing let's say we want this ball to bounce from left to right so to do that we're gonna want to manipulate the different channel so this blue line only affects the up and down movement of this sphere so if we hit the down arrow right here we have a y location and an x location we want to manipulate the x location next so if we turn these two off you'll notice there are a bunch of black dots here and those are all keyframes inserted on the x location however we only want a point a and a point b for the x location so we don't need all of these frames and what's really cool in the dope sheet is we can hit this down arrow we have access to the access to the x y and z locations so if i select all the in-betweens on just the x-axis and hit delete and then delete keyframes nothing is going to change it's not going to negatively affect anything but now we only have to work with two keyframes for the x location so let's say we want the ball to start here drag all the way over here to where we end select this frame hit g for grab y for y axis and move it up and let's say you want the ball to rest about right here i'm going to pan up a little bit just so i can see more let's say we want this to rest about here so now if we go back to the start and we play that now the ball moves as it bounces and this doesn't look horribly natural and i'm fully aware of that that's because the ball is slowly easing to a stop if we look at the graph it starts a little bit slow speeds up significantly and slows down significantly at the end but it's stopping right when it stops bouncing and that's super unnatural for a ball to do a ball is going to stop bouncing then it's going to roll some and we're not going to worry about rotating the ball because ours is a perfect sphere and you won't be able to tell if it's rotating or not but we do want it to slide a little bit past finishing bouncing so just because these are all location keyframes doesn't mean they have to end at the same time if we select just this x location keyframe click it and drag it we can move this much further and have it roll for several frames so now if we play this it's going to bounce and move then roll a bit just because we have the x location moving past where it stops bouncing then we can tweak this further if we want to we can select this frame right here hit s 0 to scale it down to 0 enter to apply we can select this keyframe select this handle hit s to scale it out now it'll start faster and it'll ease and that looks ugly as heck but you want to tweak it you want to make it look good and look how you want it to look i think for a bouncing ball animation that looks pretty cool so hopefully at this point you have a decent idea of how the graph editor works and again i know i mentioned this earlier but you can animate just about any parameter you want in blender and you can manipulate any of those parameters you animate in the graph editor as well just as one last tiny example let's say we wanted to animate the color of this sphere so i'm going to go ahead and select the light and the camera and delete both of those but let's say i want to animate the color of this sphere i'm going to go to rendered preview gonna go to the materials panel add a new material we're gonna make this an emission material just know you have full control here so i could say i want this ball to turn from white to red by the end of the animation so you can hit i on the color box even drag all the way over here to the end and set this to red then hit i to insert a keyframe again notice how it's outlined in yellow now it's outlined in green because there's no keyframe and bam now the ball slowly animates to red and you'll notice that over here in the graph editor we have the material pop up and now we can animate these values as well so if i just turn off the transforms then look at the colors let's say we want this to start fast and slow down into red we can scale that down then we can set this to individual centers and scale these up and now it turns red and we manipulated how fast it turns red using the graph editor so just know you have complete freedom to animate just about anything you want in blender the the sky is the limit at this point you should have a pretty cool bouncing ball animation and a decent understanding of how to animate things in blender the next step is just try things do not be scared to experiment it's literally the best way to learn if you have any questions or just want to come hang out i'm live every tuesday friday and saturday at twitch.tv oracle fish live and if you found this video helpful make sure you hit that like and subscribe button below the video for new content every single week let me know in the comments or on discord what you want to learn next and until next time my name is chris folea i'm your stream scholar class is out you

Channel: Stream Scholar

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Id: yxtEzIWDdgI

Length: 24min 45sec (1485 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 02 2020