How to Animate in Blender - Beginner Tutorial

hey guys it's Steve here from CG geek with a new exciting blender tutorial on how to animate anything in blender so blender is really powerful with its animation tools and you can pretty much animate anything inside of it so I'm going to show you guys how to start animating and how to fine tune your animations and make them even better with some simple tips and tricks there should be a lot of fun I'm gonna be animating some cubes I'm having some shape keys anime materials and then even animating a character at the end of the tutorial so you definitely wanna stick around for that but Before we jump into it I'd like to thank a crowd renderer for sponsoring this video crowd render allows you to render from multiple computers at the same time in blender for free with the ability to connect multiple computers anywhere on your home network at the office or with a friend's computer and even the cloud they're currently running a 30-day campaign to improve this add-on even more some great new features so definitely check out the campaign link in the description below and you can get some great rewards also by contributing like the space visual effects course so go ahead and download the free alpha version of crown render right now and start saving time rendering and if you like it consider supporting the campaign because I think it's a really good thing and I really want to happen also stick around to the end of the tutorial where we use crowd render to render our finished animation [Music] alright so using blender 2.79 be the first thing I want to show you guys is how to do some basic keyframe animation but more than just a basic keep'em animation we'll be using some of the tools in blender to fine tune that animation and show how much control we have over some very simple keyframing so before I jump into it I'm going to switch my tab over to animation because it already has the dope sheet and the graph editor open here and these are two things that we'll be using to fine-tune a very basic colored hard surface animation because we're just gonna be animating the cube here so wait for the cube we actually don't destroy the cube this time we actually use it and to use it I'm going to first start off by just totally control and pulling it upwards so it's sitting on top of our grid floor there and then I'm gonna go shift a and and in a plane I will just scale this up to something like 10 so we have a floor to kind of make this look a little bit nicer and not only quick hit n over here and we're gonna change our display settings to have madcap right here in the shading and then we'll turn on some ambient occlusion too so we can see our animation a little bit nicer so inserting keyframes anywhere in blender is super easy it's just hitting the i key and it brings up all the different keyframes that can be inserted on that object in this case we have quite a few but the main ones we're gonna look at is location rotation and scaling and then you have location rotation and location rotation scaling all together this will add a keyframe in all of those different coordinates for the location rotation and scale of course so I'm going to grab my cube here and I want to put a keyframe on frame 1 here for our first location and rotation I'm not gonna be scaling so just location rotation and I'm gonna first pull it over here in the corner a little bit rotate a little bit and then I'll hit I and choose location rotation so there you go you add your first keyframe you can see it right here it's added in the dope sheet and right here it's added into the graph editor now I don't want this animation to be too long I'm going to change my end frame to be a hundred instead of 250 frames so change it to 100 and then I'm just gonna jump to about frame 80 here and this is gonna the the cube is gonna stop moving so I'm gonna grab it will just pull it over towards the camera and we'll rotate it a bit like it like a maybe was kicked and kind of spun a little bit so I'll hit I and choose location rotation again and you can see we get the keyframe added in the dope sheet up here if I scroll in a little bit to make it larger and in the graph editor down here but you can tell it they're all done on a nice busier curve and this is beneficial for some things but most of the time won't look exactly what you're looking for so if I play this back now just move the side view so you can see it it goes it ramps up and then it ramps down that's because the curve starts off gradual ramps up and then wraps down in the rotation and in the location so that's you know that's fine and dandy but it's not exactly a nice-looking animation in terms of realism so I'm before I do any more I'm gonna change my fps you to be a bit higher I think I'll change it to 60 actually you can see we get a much nicer smoother animation there and just to make this look like it was kicked instead of slowly moving on its own maybe I'm gonna do some work in the graph editor but before you would go to the graph editor you would first tweak your animation in the dope sheet so this is how you would make it a much faster animation if you needed to cut down the amount of time between frames you can grab the keyframes here or you could drag it out making a nice slow animation but if you want to actually tweak the movements of it and not just the length I'm just gonna leave that there around there you would do it in the graph editor so I'm gonna lift this up a bit so we have a little bit more control and to start we have some different options in what they call keyframe interpretation no interpretation that's a tough word and I'm pretty sure I've messed it up but if you hit n here and you have one of your busier curves here you can see our keyframe interpretation it is set to be easier and that's what we have right here but if we want it to be something that was kicked and then coming to a stop you might want to change it to something like one of these easing options so I'm gonna tries to it maybe cubic and you can see that that's well I put that on the wrong access but it's doing the right thing it's kind of speeding up and then slowing down and I curve like you see here so that's pretty cool and it looks a little bit better in some cases except this is kind of the opposite that we're looking for because this is slow or that fast and I want fast and slow so I would control-z that grab the bottom one here and give it a cubic and you can see now it comes fast and then slows down and so if we do that fit all of these if we grab this one and make it cubic as well and you can see that one's doing the same thing it starts off a little bit faster but it's not perfect yet and that's because there's more keyframes if i zoom out here you can see we have this one that goes all the way down here and this one is an important one so I'm gonna change this to cubic as well and you can see now that it's sped up and then coming to a stop very nice if you drop this down you can see this is a rotation and then these two of the location but maybe something even faster than cubic so maybe we could try this one and see if we like that better or maybe this one and so you can kind of play with these but you can get much more fine-tuned animation by using the different interpretation options without anything adding any extra keyframes someone zoom in here and do the same thing for these okay both these and change them to that and you can see we have a nicer animation where it kind of comes to a stop starting off with some motion and then slowing down so the last kind of fine-tuning I want to show you guys that you can do in the graph editor is you can see that these starting keyframes are still on a Bezier interpretation so it's ramping up a little bit more than it would be if it was kicked for example so to fix this you can just grab a handle and you can rotate it to straighten that out and I'll do the same with this one here and just rotating these handles again we're not adding any extra keyframes but you're getting a totally different animation something that looks like it was thrown and coming to a stop we can do the same thing for the rotation here you just grab a handle and you rotate to the same angle of the curve is already at and you can get sort of a forced throwing effect versus a simple you know ramp up ramp down effect so you can get much better sort of animating effects by just tweaking your your keyframes here a little bit all right so the next thing I want to show you is how you can keyframe pretty much any of these settings you see in blender so I'm gonna step out of the animation tab now back to the default here you can see our cubes still move in there like we animate it earlier I'm just gonna pause that now and we'll jump to a new layer to do some more experiment and I'll hit shift a and add in our cube right back there we can turn on our fancier settings here as well if you want to look a little bit nicer all right so you can pretty much keyframe anything in blender like I just said all these settings here and especially in your say material tab or your physics tab even all these settings are keyframe a ball so what to kind of give an example of this I'm gonna go for a shape key and I'm gonna animate a shape key to show you guys the kind of control you can have over animating any setting in blender so I'm gonna start with my cube and I'm gonna give us some subdivisions so I'm gonna hit W and hit subdivide and we'll subdivide this bad boy about three times maybe four and we can close our tool bar off then hit tab to get out of edit mode and I'm gonna hit the plus key on shape keys and this gives us our basis this is basically a default pose and it needs to be there so I'm gonna add another one now and this one we're gonna call circle so we're gonna have blender animates between a square and a circle using shape keys so this is really cool and I think this is gonna be a tip that you guys will enjoy so to do this with this shape key selected this is gonna be the one that's modified if we go into edit mode now and make some changes to it it's gonna be changing this one but not the basis so I'm going to show you how you can animate this but first we need to make this a circle so to do this I'm just gonna hit space and start typing sphere and there's an option that says transform to sphere if you just choose this and then move your mouse you can see that in the bottom there we have it set to one on the sphere so you just click right there okay and we can choose smooth shading as well over here so it looks a little bit cleaner I might here smooth shading and then if we change this value here you can see our square gets changed into a circle using the shape key and of course like I said because all these values can be animated I can hit I on frame one and then scroll to frame 100 and change it to 1 and hit I again and now if I play this back you can see that our animation is changing to our sphere and to show you how cool this is I'm gonna jump back to our animation tab where you can see we have our keyframes here and you can control it on a graph just like before I'm gonna choose one of these interpretation of that word I can't say techniques to change this animation a bit more so the one that choose is let's choose bounce and you can see now that it kind of bounces to a circle and I mean how cool is that but it's coming a little bit slower so maybe I grab this keyframe up here pull it in a little bit closer maybe make it all and happen in one second and you can see we have that kind of blobby turning into a circle and that's just super cool I think so a really easy way to get some really nice looking animation effects in blender and you could try something different than balance you could try elastic elastic happens it's quite a bit faster though so maybe you drag the animation out a bit longer and you can see it it's doing its thing and maybe even longer yet we could go 200 frames grab our key frame and just zooming out here I'm just hitting G and dragging it down all the way out to frame 200 you can see you have that effect going elastic happens a little too fast in my opinion though so I would have stuck with I would have stuck with our last one maybe 80 frames and then setting it back to bounce but that's how you do it guys so that's how you animate any setting in blender so with our shape key animation here I want to show you the next segment which is going to be how to animate materials in blender you can animate materials and modes to change colors and do all kinds of cool things as well by using blenders key framing options sort of show you guys how to do this on the go to our node or material nodes here and I'm gonna switch to cycles render and then we'll hit new and this will bring up our material settings I'm just gonna give it a base color of red and we can give it our viewport color of red as well just so we can see what that's looking like I guess it's not going to update unless I change this to material right there so we have our bright red maybe if I change it to well rendered yeah but textured can't get any sort of shading there we go if we change it to texture we get some shading and I'm gonna show you guys how you can animate this color to be a different color so very simple we're just gonna split our window here open up the node editor hit and it closed it off and you can see we have a diffuse going into our surface output I'm just gonna hit shift a add in a shader mix shader' drop it right in there don't connect it up well duplicate our diffuse and we'll drop this into the bottom and I can change this color now to be blue and if I tweak this now as you can see over here in our preview it's not gonna update in the real time here unless I change this to rendered but it's happening a little bit slow now but you can see we get a purple color if I give ourselves a little bit of world color just hit and use nodes and make this brighter so we can see this nicely you can see that we have a purple color now if you animate this you can see it changes from red or blue and then of course purple in the middle and just like everything else this can be animated so I would go I hit a keyframe at frame one jump to the end change the value to one hit return hit I and we have that changing now if I switch back to my animation tab you can see we have our material settings here on the cube as well if I grab that you can see that it's showing up right here now maybe this other keyframe is getting in the way in which case you can drop this one down turn the little eyeball off right there so it's not visible and we could just work on a material and we can give this the same sort of interpretation by giving it a balance or something so the color changes in like a bounce sort of sort of look and that can be pretty cool on itself so you can see we get some nice randomizing colors as it's changing with the shape so that's how you animates materials just as simple as everything else in blender and it gives you a lot of control to come up with a lot of cool animated materials alright so now that you've learned some very basic key framing techniques I wanted to finish the tutorial off with shrinking guys how to do some character animation I mean it won't be a beginner animation tutorial if we didn't cover some characters so I'm gonna use a model here it's not one of my own it's from a gentleman off blend swap I'll put a link in the description where you can download it and follow along but wouldn't do some basic animation now with this character he's already rigged and ready to go and alright so let's do it so before I start animating it is extremely helpful to have a little bit of reference footage so I take a little bit of footage myself just like the fool on my front yard to kind of copy my movements so I can put them to the animation so I'm gonna quick open that up right now so you can kind of start blocking an animation with a reference to follow so I'm gonna just hit n open up my my thing here let me turn that on for you guys so you can see what I'm doing and then I'm going to hit background images and add image I'm gonna open it up it's gonna be a movie clip but we can just leave that image and I'll automatically change when we open it so I'm just gonna open up my reference footage here real quick and it's just me like I said being a fool in my front yard jumping around alright we want to change that to movie clip now and not camera clip I guess I do have to open it there mm-hmm that'd work there we go and now it's moving with me and so I'm just jumping around it's this guy sitting here kind of having a thought tapping his toe and then boom an idea comes to him and then he goes kind of wait a minute and nope that won't work and goes back to tapping his toe and sitting there thinking so this is about approximately 340 frames long so I already have the timeline set up to that here and I'm just gonna quick kind of position my goofy video over my characters so it's again a in perspective and scale so I'm going to slide it over here by moving this value and then if you hold shift you can kind of move it a little bit slower and smoother and then I want to take the scale of its down a little bit if I can here let's see size right there scale it down quite a bit and then pull it over there let me zoom in a little bit here pull it down and it's a little too small in scale so just kind of fit it fit to your character real quick something like that will be close enough and so let's start by blocking out our animation so blocking basically means jumping to every large movement so you don't want a lot of basically movement between frames that makes things look very fake and very Hammer cherish you want your characters to kind of hold a pose then hold another pose and then hold it on the pose with just small movements in between those sort of major movements as the major movements are gonna make things look a lot more cartoony and animated that way you want so blocking is kind of just setting up those major movements and then we come back and kind of fine-tune the animation so to start we're just gonna grab our major controller keyframes so all the other bones are already hidden so we just kind of have our controller bones and I'm going to turn on automatic keyframe insertion right here so this is basically just going to insert a keyframe every time I move an object in blender so instead of hitting I and inserting a keyframe like we normally do it will do it for us so I'm going to start by just grabbing his waist here and kind of make him a little bit more slouched by pulling him down then I'll grab this bone here on his toe and I'm going to let me zoom down here this foot here kind of pull him over and sometimes it's helpful to split your window I can hit T to close off the toolbars and have one of them in view so you can see if it's lined up and then another one when you're moving around to move the the bones so for example I can see here when it's kind of lined up over there just by tweaking this so I'm gonna pull him over here a little bit and I'm gonna rotate his foot along with that access so he's kind of holding the same pose this foot can be over here a little bit whoops make sure it's the right foot thank you and I'm just gonna pull this one over bits as well and now we have to grab his hand grab his hand here I'm gonna rotate it around grab it rotate some more and put his hand over his mouth like so and then we have to grab the elbow bone and kind of pull that down so it's fitting with with the animation somewhere around there would be good and of course this hand is on his hip so when I grab that hand kind of pull it down rotate it some people in prefer using the orbital kind of rotation here for rotating bones so maybe you'd prefer choosing this option right here and kind of rotating your bones around to get some it might help a little bit and if you're doing a lot of rotating to have that kind of control so I'm just kind of placing his hand on his hip here and I prefer this one but depending on what you like you can go back and forth I do prefer the this one so I'm just gonna rotate it kind of pull them in here and like I said these are just the basic poses so nothing too fancy right now and then his head's gonna be kind of down and now we can kind of fine-tune a few of the finger just to get the right pose I want these to be kind of bent more than the one finger here I'm gonna grab both these and scale a little bit and this will kind of curve them in a little bit so he's kind of in a thinking pose right here I'm gonna pull that hand down just a little bit maybe tilt the head down just a little bit more like he's deep in thought and then these fingers as well kind of wrapping around his waist a little bit I'm just gonna grab all three of them by holding shift right clicking we could scale those in a little bit let's go in like it's just kind of sitting here on his hip pull his hand back there a little bit more and uh yeah that looks pretty good good enough for me and that will be our first block blocked out pose so now if I bring up our dope sheet you can see that we have all these key frames on key frame 1 and because he doesn't make much movements on key frame 1 I can pull this elbow bone out a little bit here if I grab it kind of match the goofball in the background there and so I'm gonna grab all these key frames and I'm gonna shift diem and pull him over until I make a major movement so right now it's just small movements tapped my foot and then starting right around here right around frame 85 or so I start to move more exaggeratedly exaggerated so um and why did I come with come up with my own words sometimes exaggerated is what I'm looking for and I'm just gonna grab all these key frames and drop it right at that point so we have still movements until here and then the next block top pose is going to be boom he's got an idea so now at this point we can make some adjustments because we have two key frames holding the the first pose this one we're gonna start with the hips again he he gets really excited so he can maybe be leaning back a little bit and at full extension and his head is gonna be kind of tilted upwards triumphantly when I grab his hand and his hand is gonna be pointing upwards like bum bum he's got an idea so I'm gonna pull his hand up all the way here just rotate these fingers down a little bit more and scale them down a little bit more as well to rotate him as much as we can like so a little bit of rotating and hold that pose right there this hand has to be kind of shooting out behind him like he's like he's a holding a pose and I working to extend these fingers out and Alison was hit scale to kind of extend him out wrote his hand back a little bit like so and maybe maybe some of these would be in a little bit like he's a little bit pointing down here as well something like that looks kind of kid and his feet have to if you see here as we scale through his feet have to kind of jump out a little bit so I'm gonna grab some of these feet and move them out so I'm gonna pull this foot over here and as you can see we have to pull the waist down just a little bit I'm gonna pull this foot over there so this is enough to work with now this is the basic animation I'm not going to go through the whole thing as it would take a little too long but you can see he's sitting here not doing anything and then he's boom he's got an idea so I'm gonna work with these two or three keyframes to kind of fine-tune it now so first of all in this area here what we'll come back to this we'll start at the beginning why not so now that we have the basic keyframe he's holding a pose let's start with that foot that foot should be tapping so in keyframe one well rotate it's just up a little bit so we rotated up just a little bit and again I must put my window here so I can see what it looks like right here then I can also work in 3d space so this foots rotated up and we'll just kind of scrub down along here a little bit and it comes up even more what about to that point so I'm gonna rotate it up some more and then go along some more kind of holds that pose a little bit so I'll rotate a little bit more and then boom comes down so we wrote it down and then it's go through a little bit more and this foot slowly comes back up so what I can do now is I have these four keyframes I can grab them all and shift DM and we can kind of pull these to line up right with the the animation now so I'm just doing the same thing again except this time it's a little bit faster of a toe tap so I'm just gonna move my cursor here scale a little bit and this is gonna scale all my keyframes down to my cursor which just can essentially make it happen faster so I need to do that a little bit more let me just pull it back a little bit and so it's coming down to the right time and then it's going back up already so I'm gonna do that again shifty pull these out and as you can see he's following it up and then down again it needs to be scaled a little bit so I'm just gonna secure these key frames down it goes up and comes down and then again again again you guys get the idea he's just tapping his foot down it doesn't have to be perfect something like this can be a little bit different but this one it comes up and down and then boom he has this idea so that's all the toe tapping we really need and now if you play this through you can see that we have a nice toe tapping animation all right so that's good for the toe tapping but what about the finger scratching he's gonna be kind of scratching his chin thinking about this a little bit so frame one here if I hit Z you can see my character in the background - a little bit more and he needs to be kind of scratching his his maybe is upper lip so I'm gonna scale his finger out a little bit for frame one and then we'll move along and you can't really see what what I'm doing so I'm gonna make this viewport up here wireframe so I can see through it and then I'll do the animating down here and so he's kind of going mm-hmm-hmm you know what actually he's not really scratching I should have been scratching right in my upper lip that would've been good but I'm not so instead I'll just make it animated here and I'll kind of animate his scratching to his toe so I'm going to just pull this down here so I can see what its toes doing and when its toes up this will kind of be scratched in a little bit something like that and maybe a little bit of hand movement as well and then when his toe comes down boom he'll be kind of scratching out so just kind of going in rhythm with his toe tapping toes up he's scratching and toes down his fingers outs so you guys kind of get the idea we're just gonna finish this out real quick scrubbing through our timeline I'm just using my arrow keys to move nice and fast and up fingers in and down fingers out and this is where he gets his idea it's now you can see we have a little bit of finger movement going on and maybe just a little bit of head movement along this time so these are very subtle movements nothing nothing too major but maybe he's kind of bobbing his head just a little bit as he's as he is thinking here I want to actually move keep him on a little bit more rotated like that so now he's just kind of mmm bobbing his head back and forth these can be a little bit more up to your imagination as my characters not moving too much here so I'm just gonna do a little bit of back and forth rotating here like so and if I play that back you can see we have a little bit of mmm sink in and then he's got this idea not too bad you can make a little bit of waist movement as well to kind of fill out your keyframe even better if you look at me I'm kind of going up and down a little bit in my breathing almost so your waist can kind of control your breathing like maybe here he should be up just a little bit and then down just a little bit these are very subtle keyframes so too much goes a long way so I'm just doing very subtle and then down a bit and then up a little bit down a little bit and so forth and that looks pretty good and then right before he jumps he might want to go down a little bit so he's kind of preparing for that hop and if we play this back it should look like he's thinking and then boom his idea so it's looking pretty nice we got some nice sort of keyframe movement going on here um you could give a little bit of movement to this other hand here if you want to not look so stagnant maybe just at least following the hip animation here a little bit so this might be going up and down with the hip so you could do that if you want it but I'm gonna move on to the next sort of fine-tuning here so we can keep this not looking too repetitive if you did yeah alright so there's just a little bit of hand movement so you can see how you do that so the next thing is going to be kind of fine-tuning a jump here so as you can see with the two blocking poses he doesn't really jump in here and I think a jump would be really good because he's kind of jumping to his to his thoughts so right at the peak of his jump here I'm gonna take his waist and I'm gonna pull him up in the sky and I think we'll grab his hands as well his hands should probably follow along with this so right at the peak of his his enthusiasm he's jumping up in the air here and we can change the Z out of you know so that's solid I'm gonna pull him up in the sky a bit and maybe a little bit over to the right so you can see he kind of goes mmm bum bum idea now this keyframe if we wanted maybe move it a little bit further I feel like it's a little too soon I would just go up to my dope sheet here I'll select everything and then select all the keyframes underneath my cursor we can pull him a little bit tighter so if I play that through in real time he goes but um like he's got an idea it still is a little bit slow so I might grab the keyframes the blocking pose right before it here and pull it out a little bit so it happens a little bit faster so now he's bump up boom and that looks a little bit better maybe being a little too fast so we have a pretty nice-looking pose here as he proudly jumps to his position here but there's something that could still be improved and for example first of all let's bring his knees up a little bit when he jumps so we're just going to go to where all the other keyframes are here and we'll pull these up a little bit by hitting G and whoops those are the toes the toes should actually be kind of down a little bit but that doesn't really matter we just grab our heels pull him up a little bit maybe rotate him down a little bit like he's jumping in midair so you can see we have that boom and it's looking looking pretty good whoops accidentally added extra keyframe make sure you're over the cursor there before you put another keyframe in all right so I'm just tweaking a little bit so we have a nice little hop now this is where you could also use your graph editor to save on keyframes and make this a little bit more fine-tuned so must put this up we were quick go to our graph editor and what I want to do is I want to animate his hip bone and his feet like I said maybe I said I don't know to to kind of bounce when he hits the ground so we can do this with the interpretation options like we were using earlier in the tutorial on bones so I'm going to turn off the ones that we don't need here I'm only going to be changing whatever makes it go up and down and I believe it's actually the Y location here yes it is it might be the Zed location if you're using a different rig but with the rotation of these bones it's the Y here and so I'm going to grab this bone and as you can see it's a curve where he's landing and if we take our interpretation by hitting N and changing it to say bounce you could get that same sort of cartoony animation where he kind of bounces him to the ground and that just makes things look even better in my opinion if you're going for that kind of cartoon animation so I'm gonna do the same thing with the feet here I'm grab his foot grab the Y location and you can see that actually this is bone is going along the y axis this time and it is the Z bone for this one I think let me just make sure if I move this actually that's not really going up and down either maybe it's the X location we want to animate or the Y let me see which one is moving at the right direction can't really see from this view switch over here grab the Y bone here no okay it's moving that side-to-side I want whatever's gonna move it up and down not that one let's try this one all right it is that location this time alright so we're gonna grab these dead location I'm gonna change it to be balanced as well you can see we got the interpretation going on there we'll do the same thing here grab the Zed location bone and give it the bounce so now if you play our animation back you can see when he jumps he's got sort of that a cartoon animation look now I made a little bit of mistake here on the left foot here I have to not put the interpretation on the first keyframe here if I bring up my properties tab we want this one to still be keyframed somebody's gonna change the interpretation here to be busier and I want to grab the one at the peak here and change that to be bounce so it happens after his jump and now we can see we have a bounce in a jump and it actually looks son looks pretty decent and it goes up and kind of bounces to a stop now again I still think that maybe this could be moved a little bit and that's why you want to use the dope sheet for moving key frames because it's super easy and so this way as we get the best looking results and just to kind of work that animation you want to make sure he's bouncing at the right time so it's a little bit of a hop and then he's good bum so and then the one other thing that we might want to do is right before the jump so I'm gonna pull this over a little bit just for find tweaking his make his hips go down right before they go up because he's kind of crouched here for a little bit so I'm gonna do the same thing with his hips and his feet and the grab his hips and his feet at the same time I would just pull him down a little bit so he's kind of crouching I'm gonna pull hips down a little bit more so he's kind of crouching a little bit right before his jump so I was like ooh there's the idea and then he jumps so that just gives a little better looking results I think maybe pull the hips up even more to exaggerate it and the feet can't be moving until he goes so we want to actually grab his feet here his feet can just stay the same these two and we can just grab these and if you just overlay them onto the key frame it'll automatically over right so now we just couches down and then bounces up and you have that little bit of bounce effect to make it look kind of cartoony and I think it looks pretty good so let's close our background image now and see what we've come up with if I switch to just a window here shift space hit Z and let's play this through with alt a so he's sitting there and thinking and then bounce he's got an idea and that's looking pretty good you can see that we're playing back actually a little faster than we should be um I think I said 260 but it's playing a little faster for whatever reason but if the animation is a little too fast you can always stick Gale all the keyframes at once just slow it down but I mean let me collapse this down a little bit so we can have nice a nice big view of it there is our animation so that's about it guys that's going to be the basics you could continue this on if you want a little bit of a project and finish it out to the rest of the video but that's going to be it because um I've showed you all the techniques and tips to how you do it so I hope you've enjoyed this video so far and it's time for the last part of this tutorial which is gonna be how to render it and we're gonna render it like I said at the beginning of the tutorial with crowd render so I have a finished animation already here and I'm gonna quick show you guys how to set it up in render your animation using crowd render with two different pcs at the same time maybe you have an extra laptop or something you can pull over you can render it on both of them to essentially get twice the speed rendering on two different computers okay so I have the the finished animation here ready to be rendered and I'm gonna show you just how quick and easy it is to do with crowd render so first off you don't want to head over to crowd one or render comm and you can see the website right here and you're just gonna want to switch over to downloads here create a free account and then you'll be able to download crowd render I already have it downloaded so I'm just gonna close it off now and once you have it downloaded you can go into your user preferences here you're gonna go into add-ons up on top and then you'll choose install add-on from file and then grab your crowd render and download that right there again I already have it installed so I'm just gonna show you now how you go into your user preferences one more time and then switch to your add-ons and you're just going to look under a render so you could go right here and pull out render you'll see crowd render right here you know wanna check that box let it let it open once it's open like that you can close it off and you want to save your blend file and as soon as to enable it you'll see over here if I scroll down that we have crowd render if I drop that down you see we have a start button and that's basically going to start the crowd render network and allow it to be found by other computers or find other computers as well and you don't want to hit start so I'm going to first change it to CPU rendering because I'm just gonna render with CPU it does work on GPU though and I'm going to click start so you can see that you have a few settings here and it says up here that the render server starting and I connected to the node render server and it's ready so that's all you have to do now you're gonna want to jump over to your other PC real quick you're going to want to open up the same version of blender install the same version in the add-on and do the exact same steps by going into your user preferences and enabling that add-on as well also don't forget to click start in the crowd under tab as this will make the second pc available to render on the network so to add your second pc to the render nodes you just want to click add I'm going to type out the name of the PC if you're not sure what the name of your PC is you just go to your control panel and right there in the system information and will tell you exactly what your PC name is so just type out desktop line and for me it's the unique numbers gonna be different for everyone I'm just gonna type out the number of my second PC here alright once that's typed out whoops I type that right wrong there we go test top and then all you have to do is click that sync button right there and it will connect to the server so once that's clicked you'll see connecting to notes now and after giving in a moment it should say synced depending on the size your project as it has to upload it basically to the other PC real quick but it usually is pretty fast and usually your blend file isn't that large especially in this case it's only a few megabytes so once it's synced you're ready to render so you want to double check your render settings real quick make sure you're happy with your resolution maybe if you do a test render real quick by just hitting f12 and seeing what you're getting and you can see whoops not get what I want and that's just because then you turn on both layers here so I can have my background layer and then you can see that okay I'm getting the kind of render I want I'm ready for it so I'm gonna hit escape now so if at any point the project becomes unsynched you'll just want to click resync and it will automatically to re-upload the project and sync it right up so once you're satisfied with your settings and you've done a few test renders you're ready to click the render animation button and sit back and watch crowd render do the work on both your computers at the same time so it kind of goes through an algorithm and determines which computer is more powerful and will distribute the project between the computers evenly giving you up tomorrow under times so it's super cool and it's a really a great project and I really hope that it gets funded more so we get this add-on growing to be even something bigger and it's a great resource so definitely go check out the campaign that's going right now smash that contribute button and let's make this project happen okay and our animation finished here and to give a little example of how much faster it was with crowd render my second PC that I'm using is a intel 8 core 16 thread and of course i'm rendering on thread ripper here with a 16 core 32 thread cpu so another computer cut down the the render time about six seconds I was getting about 22 seconds with both of them and this is one around adjust with this PC and it's about 28 so you're cutting out about 6 seconds with just one extra PC and if you add more and more pcs of course your render time is gonna be cut down even more it is still an alpha though so you will run into some bugs but it's quickly getting better and more stable so if I show you right here you can see all of our finished frames and I put them together an animation here right now but if you guys want to see how to do this yourself it's quite simple you have all your frames now all saved onto your desktop or wherever you chose to put them and if I just create a new file here we load the start up file you just want to quick punch in your settings that the footage was rendered at so it's gonna be 1080p 60fps and then you just jump over to your video editor and you're gonna change the timeline to be the right length which is 340 frames of course just go shift a at an image then you go to that folder where you have your animation frames I'm gonna hit a to select all of them import image strip or add image strip as it says there and you can see right now you have all your frames put together in your animation if I play this back you can see we have it playing through about 20 FPS right here and we can save this out as a movie now so I'm just gonna go defaults we're gonna go to our output we're going to change it from P&G to ffmpeg video will change the encoding to be h.264 mp4 and that's basically all you have to do you choose your outputs I'm just going to choose the animation folder again here accept and then you can render animation and we'll fly through and just stitch all those frames together in a nice animation so this is the proper way to render animations as it is gonna save time in case there's a render error when you're rendering individual frames versus all of them together so it's definitely the right way to render an animation thanks for watching and definitely check out the crowd render campaign that's running right now for the next 30 days and I'll see you guys in my next blender tutorial so bye hey you later alligator

Channel: CG Geek

Views: 1,067,638

Keywords: Blender, animate, animation, tutorial, learn, beginner, rig, cartoon, 3d, 3d animation, physics, render

Id: HyVvi-TjHlM

Length: 41min 3sec (2463 seconds)

Published: Fri May 18 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Lirammel]

have to say it: he did not destroy the first cube!!!.

finished my very first animation this week (.08)seconds so I enjoyed watching and learning some more thanks!