How to Animate In Blender | Blender Basics Bootcamp Part 9

welcome back for day 9 of the blender basics bootcamp today we're going to add some basic camera animation to our trophies scene and we'll briefly cover the graph editor and dope sheet as well so let's get animated my name is chris folia i'm your stream scholar welcome to stream school animating in blender is actually really easy to do if you just want to do something simple like moving an object or in this case a camera so let's dive in first things first i'm going to go to the animation workspace by going to the top of the screen and clicking on the animation tab here i'm going to go ahead and re-enable my screencast keys because they have a tendency to disappear when i switch tabs and i want you all to be able to see what i'm pressing while i'm working so in the animation workspace we have two 3d viewport panels down here we have a dope sheet panel which lets you scroll forwards and backwards in time then down here at the very bottom we have a squished down timeline panel which has some playback controls and it lets you know where your animation starts and where your animation ends which you can also adjust right here if you really want to so i'm going to go to the left 3d viewport panel i'm going to hit 0 to go to my camera view then i'm going to hold z and go to rendered preview mode just so we can see what our trophy looks like as we animate the camera now to actually animate the camera all we have to do is tell blender that we want our camera to be right here at this point in time or frame if you want to use the right terminology then move forward in time move our camera and tell blender that we want it to be right here at this point in time or frame then blender will automatically take all of that data and fill in everything in between which is awesome so to actually do that i'm going to hit 7 to go to the top orthographic view and to actually tell blender that i want my camera to be right here at this point in time on this frame i have to insert something called a keyframe so to do that i'm going to hit i and that brings up the insert keyframe menu and here we have a whole bunch of different options the only ones you really need to pay attention to are location rotation scale and then the mixtures of the three so i want to animate the location and rotation of my camera so i'm going to add a location and rotation keyframe and here you'll notice down here on the dope sheet we have some yellow dots and that says there's a keyframe here and if we go over to the right our location and our rotation just turned yellow and that's saying these values are now solidified for this point in time and there's a keyframe here so to actually animate this i'm going to grab the playhead by clicking on it scrub all the way to the end of the animation at frame 250 and here you'll notice the location and the rotation turned green that's saying the value hasn't changed since the last keyframe but there's also not a keyframe here so to actually animate our camera i'm going to hit g to grab it i'm going to move it back and here i'm going to rotate it a little bit then i'm going to move it on the x-axis with gx just to center my camera again click to set that and here you'll notice some of the values turned orange and that's a warning it's saying that these values have changed since the last keyframe but there's no keyframe here yet so if you move off of this frame without setting a keyframe your camera is going to snap straight back to where it was on the previous keyframe and to demonstrate that i'm going to click the playhead and you're going to notice that my camera just jumped straight back to where it was on our first keyframe and i just lost all of that work i just did so to actually move it and tell blender we want it over there i'm going to go ahead and hit ctrl z twice to undo and get my work back now i'm just going to hit i to bring up the keyframe menu again hit location and rotation and now you'll notice that we have some dots on the dope sheet and our location and rotation are yellow again which is exactly what we want so now if i hit space you can see that our camera is animating which is perfect and if we want to change the speed of this that's actually what the dope sheet is for so i'm going to hit space to pause my animation then if i click on this keyframe right here i can just click and drag it to move it and now my camera is going to move really fast but i don't want that i want my camera to move throughout the entire shot so i'm going to move that back to frame 250. now you're also going to notice if i scrub through this really quickly that the camera sort of speeds up and or eases in and then towards the end of the animation it slows down or eases out now i don't know about you but when i picture a camera move that's going on throughout the entire shot i want my camera to move a nice consistent speed so to explain why it's speeding up and slowing down and show you how you can change that i'm gonna jump over to the graph editor now don't panic i know my first instinct when i hear the word graph is to panic too but i promise it's not that bad so i'm gonna go ahead and make my dope sheet a little bit bigger i'm going to click the drop down right here and i'm going to change this to a graph editor here we have a bunch of different lines but i'm just going to click the object transform and this is just going to be for demonstration purposes right now but i'm going to click on this eyeball drag down to hide all of them except for the x location so over here i'm going to hit a to select everything then period to zoom in on it just like you would do in the 3d view most of the controls in blender are pretty consistent throughout the software so here you'll notice we have this curved red line and how the graph editor works is this line only represents the x location of our camera the graph editor gives each parameter that you animated its own individual line then up and down on the graph is the value of that parameter and left and right is time so for instance if i go back to frame one you'll notice that the x location of my camera is 5.6114 and if we look at the graph and we look at the numbers on the left yeah that about makes sense it's down here at 5.6114 and if we go to the end of our animation at frame 250 you'll notice that our location on the x-axis is 7.2993 and if we look at the values on the left here yeah that also makes sense and if we scrub through you'll notice that blender filled in all of these values automatically and that's what the red line is now by default blender uses something called a bezier interpolation and that's a really fancy way to say this is a curved line now the the reason the camera is slowing up or speeding up and slowing down at the end of the animation is because this line is curved and that makes sense if you think about it if we go to the start of the animation and we scrub forward a few frames you'll notice that this line is a really flat if we look up and down this value hasn't changed very much at all but if we go to the center of the animation and we scrub a few frames you'll notice this line is a whole lot more diagonal which means the camera is jumping in space a little bit more than it was at the start of the animation every single frame which means it's moving faster so then if we go to the end of the animation you'll notice it flattens out again which means every single frame this value is changing almost not at all so to manipulate this line you can do it the same way you would change a bezier curve when you're modeling you can drag these handles and you can move them around and now our camera is just going to sort of snap into place on the x-axis here like that or it's just it's just not going to ease in or we can move this around and work it however we want we can make it super easy just by scaling these handles these controls are exactly the same as controlling the bezier curves when you're modeling but if we want to make our camera go one consistent speed we don't want the default bezier interpolation so to change that i'm going to go ahead and turn all of these channels back on i'm going to hit a to select everything period to zoom out and here i'm going to go ahead and right click go to interpolation mode and i'm going to change these to linear interpolation so now if i hide everything and zoom in on my x-axis you'll notice it's a completely straight diagonal line which means this camera is now moving the exact same amount every single frame which means it's gonna be a really consistent speed throughout the entire animation which is exactly what i want for my camera move and those are pretty much the bare minimum basics of animation and blender other than that you can also move the keyframes and stuff in the graph editor using the same controls as always but yeah those are the bare minimum basics of animation in blender and you're not just limited to animating the location rotation and scale either you can animate just about anything you want in blender if the parameter has a dot next to it you can animate it so for instance we could animate the color of our trophy we could animate the roughness of our trophy we could animate the brightness of this light we could animate the rotation of our world image and the the there are no limits the possibilities are endless so to demonstrate that let's go ahead and animate the color of the trophy logo i'm going to click once that'll select the glass click again that'll select the trophy cup so i'm going to go down to the materials panel and here i'm going to make sure i'm on the base metal cup i'm going to click the arrow next to base color and here we have the two colors that we're mixing i have my silver which is most of the cup and the pink which is just the logo so for instance if i hit shift left arrow to go back to the beginning of the animation you'll notice we have a dot next to this color that means this property can be animated so if i click the dot that'll turn into a diamond and it's a filled diamond which means there's now a keyframe here there's also a yellow outline around the box now now another way you can do this is hovering over any parameter you want to animate and hitting i on the keyboard to insert a keyframe if you really want to be rebellious but i feel like clicking the dots a little bit more intuitive so here i'm going to scroll forward to 125. you'll notice the outline is now green and the diamond is empty so here if i change this the outline will become orange although it's a little bit hard to see i'm going to make my logo something like a nice orangey red then i'm going to click the diamond and that'll set another keyframe here finally i'll go to the end of the animation and now i'm gonna change this to like a nice green or something click the keyframe and now if i hit space you'll notice that the logo is gonna animate from pink to red and then it's going to animate all the way to green at the end of the animation and just think about how cool and how easy that is to do in blender just for really simple animation like this it's awesome now if you want a more in-depth look at animating in blender i have an entire introduction to animation and blender video on this channel where i take you through a traditional animation exercise and teach you how to animate a bouncing ball using the graph editor and i'll link that in the description down below but otherwise i think this scene is really shaping up i think it's looking pretty cool i'm actually going to go ahead and go back to my first frame right click on the color block and say clear keyframes because i don't want my logo color to animate but otherwise i think we are about ready to move on to the next and final video in this tutorial series so i'll see you all in the next video at this point you should have a nice camera motion in your trophy scene but i'd also like to encourage you to mess around with animating your trophy as well maybe you could have it rotate or even fall over have fun with it if you found this video useful and want to stay tuned for day 10 make sure you hit that like and subscribe button and ring the bell i'll be releasing these basics videos on a daily basis for the duration of the course and if you want to come hang out with me live i'm live at least every friday over at youtube.com oraclefish also if you want to download my example files or just support what i do here on the channel make sure you check out my brand new patreon link in the description until next time my name is chris folia i'm your stream scholar and the class is out you

Channel: Stream Scholar

Views: 363

Keywords: blender, blender animation, how to animate in blender, blender animation tutorial, stream scholar, streamscholar, stream school, how to animate, blender beginner tutorial, blender beginner animation tutorial, beginner animation tutorial, blender 2.9 tutorial, beginner tutorial

Id: OsI4GnayPyE

Length: 12min 18sec (738 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 28 2021