How to Create 2D Animations - Beginner Blender Tutorial

hey everyone it's steve here from CG geek and I have a fun video if you guys today I'm learning how to do 2d animation within blender 2.8 so we're gonna be taking a look at blender 2.8 new 2d animation tools within the grease pencil and actually we'll be looking at how to do three different methods of animation in today's video starting with frame by frame animation using the grease pencil tool then I'll take a look at some of the interpolation tools that you can use to generate keyframes between frames and then I'll finish off by showing you guys how to rig an actual 2d character real quick and do some rigged animation we've actually been doing a lot of 2d animation recently with the release of my new channel Mimi 9 times you guys might have heard about it it's a fun animated storytelling channel they'll be a link to it in the description if you guys want to check it out in this video I will also be using the Wacom Intuos Pro a digital graphics tablet that I will be kind of reviewing in this video giving my thoughts on it as we go throughout the the video I show a few tips and tricks that will speed up your workflow when using a graphics tablet like this one now before we dive headfirst into animation I'd like to first thank Skillshare for sponsoring this video Skillshare is one of the largest online platforms for learning anything you want with over 25,000 courses there's something to be learned for everyone and these courses are taught by talented professionals with the skill and know-how so you can learn anything from drawing amazing looking characters with a pen and pencil to starting your own business they're very affordable with a yearly membership costing just $8 a month and I have a special offer for my subscribers the first 500 viewers to sign up with a link in the description below will get the first two months free to try it out so don't wait be one of those lucky 500 viewers to sign up with the link in the description [Music] starting off we be animating this little scene you see here this is something that I put together in blender that works for a nice little animation sort of a typical cartoon animation where a character runs and then runs right off a cliff realizes the last second and falls so there's some fun animation to be done here some movement obviously some smoky animations and stuff so I put this together as an example on how to show you guys how to do the frame by frame animation within blender I'll include this scene as well as any other scene that I might be using in the video in the description below for you guys to download the starter file and one thing I want to mention before we jump into it what's really sweet about the Wacom Intuos Pro is that you can just unplug the USB C port here and it will work off of bluetooth once you connect it to computer so you can hold it on your lap and use it like a piece of paper just makes it convenient for getting started also I want to mention if you're interested in the Wacom Intuos Pro that I'm using there'll be an amazon link in the description where you can check out the exact tablet that i'm using in this video so you wanna come into his pro does come in around 350 to $380 right now in amazon making it one of the more expensive options for graphics tablet but i will say that it has a very premium feel to it like I've been saying it kind of feels like an Apple product almost we're likely to hate it it has that premium quality to it and this is definitely one of those it feels very premium so I've been really enjoying working with this without further ado let's just go ahead here and get started out so I'm gonna switch to edit mode as you can see up here I'm in edit mode and I'm just gonna select our character here by clicking and dragging selecting all those vs. and we'll get them set up where we want him to be for frame 1 so we want to be running off this cliff we probably want him to be a little bit smaller so I'm just hit an S and scaling and then you can also use alt s to scale the thickness of the curve I'm going to use the circle wheel on the tablet here to zoom in you can just grab your screen over here and if you zoom a little bit here you can see when I hit alt s that is scaling the thickness of the stroke so when you scale it down you might have to also scale down the thickness of the stroke just to get the right sort of thickness that you're going for you also want to make sure that all the layers that you are not working with currently are locked so you won't be accidentally selecting any of those in edit mode if I'm in drama out here and I jump ahead in our timeline to a different frame if I was to start drawing here you would see that our character disappears as this is now the new keyframe that we're creating if I was to grab one of my materials here like our character material you would see that yeah it creates a new frame and deletes the old frame well that that's okay actually for some things because you'll want to be redrawing a character and a feature that will actually make this way easier is if you turn on onion skinning onion skinning is this little option over by the layers here and if you turn that on you'll see when you jump to a keyframe ahead of time and draw something that you have an outline of what that layer looks on the previous keyframe right here so that makes it really easy to see what the previous frame was if you're drawing individual frames for your animation now in this video we have them run off the cliff which means that we can use most of the frame and just be changing certain aspects of the layer so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna tab into edit mode and I'm gonna select my whole character here so jumping back to frame 1 you can just use the button here to click a keyframe back I'm gonna select the whole character and make sure that he's where you want him and then you can jump I'm gonna go about 5 frames here so I'm gonna jump right to about I will go to frame 6 so then in edit mode here you can just grab a character with G and you can pull them ahead and you can see now that at frame 6 we have a new keyframe where he is moved of course everything is still the same but he is now in a new position at that keyframe but if he moved who we obviously need a new pose so what I'm gonna do here is I'm going to tap into edit mode and I'm gonna unselect everything and then using the box select mode here I'm just going to select his foot and his leg they're just part of it and if I hit L it will select the rest of that stroke and I can just delete these points now because wouldn't be redrawing the legs and the feet so just selecting a bit of each of those strokes by holding shift and selecting it once you have part of every stroke selected you can just hit L it'll select them all and then you can hit X and delete those points okay so at this point get it point we need to have a new frame for our care so I'm gonna grab the black material here in my material tab and what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna draw you can see what his previous frame was here I'm just gonna draw a new frame of his arm kind of coming down here all right and now his back arms should be kind of just barely visible as he's pulling it forward and now his feet should kind of be in the in-between stage that should work fine for this and we can just go ahead and quick fill in those feet with our other material here our filled material you can do a simple shape for each foot something like that as all we really need to do we don't have to be too picky on this okay and now what I can do is also kind of distort the body a little bit here so I'm gonna grab sculpt mode and because he's kind of picking his feet up it doesn't really make sense that his but it's kind of sticking out here so I'm just gonna go to sculpt mode and with grab selected I can pull those vertices in a bit to kind of make it fit this frame a little bit better you can switch to smoothies real quick and smooth that out a little bit as well and there's a nice in-between frame we can also change the position of his head a little bit I could go back to edit mode and select a chunk of those vertices hit L to select them and maybe he can be kind of throwing his head back a little bit here and the whole shape of his body could also be rotated a little bit if you want to select some of those strokes there hit L and kind of just rotate the whole shape of his body a little bit for that frame and you can see have a nice in-between frame here now as you can see his pose changes and all we need is one more post now I'm only doing three frames for this animation to keep it simple for the video you can always add more in-between frames of course so what I'm gonna do here is at this point we want to copy our original keyframe so I'm just going to click the keyframe right there shift D and pull it ahead so instead of going into edit mode this time I'm just copying the keyframe these are two different ways of adding new keyframes obviously and on the last keyframe here that I just added I'm gonna select our whole character and pull them ahead of that previous keyframe as you can see the onion skinning feature is really helpful to kind of line up your keyframes in the different positions of course here we need new arms and legs again so I'm just gonna select a piece of every one of those strokes at L and X to delete those points he can kind of be stretched out again in this frame that's fine because he's again extended out switching to remote and grabbing our black stroke this leg needs to be kicked back now now something that can be helpful when you're using the Intuos Pro here is there's a lot of options on the side all these buttons are programmable so out of all the graphics tablets I've used now I think Wacom really has the highest quality drivers it seems like they really put a lot of attention to their drivers and they're really good I haven't had any crashes or anything with the drivers and they have all kinds of programmability buttons that could be programed options that can be changed and even have some features like this one if you're working on a stroke here and you want to get a smoother motion you could just hit this button here and it gives you precision mode which basically means the whole radius of your tablet now is just gonna be narrowed down to that small view which allows you to get much more precise movements if I'm working on something like the foot here so here I'm going to turn off the stabilizer settings and use precision mode so precision mode is just one of those awesome driver options that they give you to kind of give better results when you're working and you don't feel like changing your view or whatever you can just get a nice smooth stroke using precision mode okay so onto the next keyframe now I can turn off precision mode there I'm going to go ahead and cycle through these now as you can see we have our two frames of our character running my Scala phone is head back in the middle there you can make these even more exaggerated if you wanted to but it looks pretty good here as you can see sitting on frame one we have the before and after frames and what you can do at this point is just cycle between these frames now so I'm just going to grab that key frame here and go shift D duplicate it and pull it again about six frames ahead and if I go to that frame now I can just grab all those vertices in edit mode and move them approximately to where the next frame should be as he's running across our little Mountain Ridge here and then same thing at this point we would want the extended upwards leg motion just grab our original key frame here shift d it and pull it ahead and you can see at this point we have a cycled animation now where our character comes running and is moving at a good clip across our our mountain we have to put that last keyframe in the right spot of course so here's some basic character animation of our character running between frames you can see how the onion skinning option allows it to allows you to get much better looking results and of course at this point if you ever want to to tweak something like oh hey you know his his feet looks like they're too strong in the stroke there you can always just go to sculpt mode grab the thickness option here and using this holding ctrl you can kind of turn down the amount of thickness I'll want to turn down the strength you real quick and then just holding ctrl you can go ahead and skinny up those legs a little bit and there we go this one too might need a little bit of that just a little bit of skinning up to make it match the other keyframe and maybe a little bit at this frame as well because we didn't do that and there we go we clean that up quite a bit you will want to be careful when you're using the sculpt mode here that you're always on a keyframe when your skin iing something up otherwise you would be adding a new keyframe so I'll quick finish this animation up so we have our character all the way to the edge of the mountain here and once we have him at the edge of the cliff I'm going to show you guys how we can change his expression and then animate him falling off the cliff in a very cartoon-like fashion okay so here is the animation running him off the cliff if I play this through here you can see we have them making it all the way to the edge of the cliff here we need to go ahead and add some new keyframes now for him to change the expression for a moment and then fall so this is where we get to draw a completely new frame from scratch so I'm just gonna grab a frame right around here about 72 let me zoom in here a little bit using the scroll wheel on the graphics tablet and then I'm just gonna kind of position our camera right over our character here and here we draw a frame from scratch so I'm just gonna grab the drop mode here I want to give him a bit of a different face expression here and also a little bit of a different shape of head as this time around he's looking at the camera so grabbing our material here and increase the radius of my brush just a bit to kind of match the thickness of our stroke there something like that looks like it will work and here I can just start drawing the face so here is where I really like drawing with the Intuos Pro it has a very paper-like feel so I've used a handful of tablets like I mentioned and this one has one of the best feels to it and because it's Bluetooth so you can just sit on your couch and draw away it really feels like you're drawing on a piece of paper or a notebook or something so I really like the feel of the Wacom Intuos Pro and something else that's really cool is it has a touch mode so on the side here if you flip the switch you can enable touch mode you can now move the mouse with the finger grab things and scroll and whatnot it basically behaves like a trackpad that's fully customizable and makes it really handy to operate so the touch mode is a very nice little feature there so yeah let's go ahead and draw the face to our character here starting with the head here I'm just gonna kind of give him a little bit of that flung over hair okay so I'm going to turn on a little bit of stabilization not too much and we can have a little bit of active smooth here as well so here I'm just giving him a very simple sort of expression where he looks at the camera and kind of realizes his mistake I'm not gonna be going into detail on character drawing as I have a tutorial on that already for creating a cute little zombie if you guys want to check out that tutorial for drawing in a blender two-point-eight go ahead there'll be a link in the description or on the screen right now but for this I'm just gonna do a simple sort of character face here he's gonna have a little bit of an expression this will work I might just want to scale that stroke up a little bit to face it right there just doing a very simple character pose here where his feet are just kind of dangling here and he's like oh boy so just very simple I'm just gonna become I'm just gonna be kind of out of sight a little bit and yeah he just realized that he made a big mistake here so that's all we really need for that a quick expression here this one's gonna be one of realization here I'm gonna use that precision mode again and I'm just gonna hit the button on my tablet here and give him some of those thin lines right around the eyes that you can use to make them look a little bit nervous something like that it's about all we need okay so there's our pose if we kind of scrub along here you can see right at that point he changes to realization and what we want to do here is we want to hold that frame for seconds and then right around frame 75 or so what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna go to sculpt mode and again bringing up our tool bar here with T I'm gonna grab the grab brush grab the grab brush and here I'm going to take our character and just really cartoon aliy stretch him out a ton so give them a really stretched out face expression and then really pole is behind down a bunch and now you might be thinking that like whoa this is gonna be a bad looking frame but it happens so quickly that it really doesn't matter so you just want to pull them out a whole ton give them a nice big stretch and then you can grab a smooth brush and kind of smooth those joints out a little bit so he still looks good in that stretched out pose and we'll just jump about two frames further this time to tap into edit mode grab a whole body and pull him down along these that access so right around there and then two frames further and he can be out of the frame so if we play this back now we'll see that our character comes running and disappears out of the frame pretty cool so you can see how easy this sort of animation is in blender and it's honestly a lot of fun now I might jump to these keyframes by hitting that button there and make these shapes just a little bit smaller as he ended up a little bit large even though stretched out frames so now disappears off the frame pretty funny now if you want to let a little bit more time go by so you can see his expression all you have to do is grab those keyframes pull them out a little bit so Realization sits there for a second longer before he falls and yeah there you have it so the last thing I wanted to quick show you guys before we jump in to our next example of animation in blender is what you can do here is add some smoke effects that add a lot to our scene what I'm gonna do is on the first frame when he starts to fall here so I'm gonna hit the plus key to add a new layer and on this layer I'm going to add some smoke effects so with our material selected it's the bottom material here I'm just going to do some puffs of smoke here you definitely want to turn on the stabilizer settings as there's no reason not to yeah and yeah we're just gonna kind of make a smoke cloud so I'm just going along and adding some strokes of smoke here add a few in the middle here as well so if a quick poof of smoke and then I'm gonna drop to the next keyframe when he's falling even further and what we can do here is add more puffs of smoke except this time it's gonna be broken up a little bit so we'll make a few individual Hatch's of the smoke now you really don't have to be picky at all with this sort of cartooning as the smoke clouds are only there for a split second and they just add a lot to the shot so here I'm just adding a puffy little cloud sort of following the motion of him with him and this will just kind of give you the motion line of where your character is moving alright so then in the next frame here we have the character out of the screen and we want our smoke cloud to be kind of broken up so here I'm just gonna do a few real quick small little smoke poof's around where our smoke was before so these are fun just super simple things you really can't draw them wrong however you want a drum is perfectly fine and they will look good something like that if i zoom out here so you can see them all and then we go to frames and we don't need any of them so what I can do for this is just I'm in edit mode grab them all hit G once and you can see that that adds a new keyframe and then all you need to do is I don't want to erase my character down here so I'm just gonna unselect him holding shift and box selecting and then you can just hit X and delete those points and as long as there's a keyframe there it will know that at that keyframe all the points are disappeared and basically we need to add a keyframe to tell blender that at that point we don't want any clouds so at this point right here I'm just gonna tap into edit mode grab the chunk of clouds there and again I'm gonna hit G so I automatically add a keyframe and then I can just hit X and delete those points now you can see that the cloud appears as soon as he starts to move and no sooner so if i zoom out here now guys and you want to see the animation played all the way through with the smoke added you can see if I give her a run through we have that nice cartoon like sort of Looney Tunes animated smoke cloud that appears as he falls so there it is that kind of adds a lot of effect to your scene giving it that motion trail and sort of that cartoony feel it's not you know how to do these sort of motion cloud effects you could do the same thing like behind his legs as he's running it's similar to what I did in my example and it just adds a little bit of motion to the scene it makes him seem like he's moving a little bit faster so I'm really excited to show you guys the next example I have here and this is scene interpretation so we're gonna be taking two frames and interpretating automatically the key frames between those frames so it should be a lot of fun and I'm gonna go ahead and open up that project now okay so in this example scene again link in the description we have a car moving across our scene here so I have a cute little car here I'm just going to lock off all the other objects so I don't mess up anything but the car so I'm just gonna tap into edit mode and select an entire vehicle here and I'm gonna jump ahead to about frame 60 and with the whole car selected in edit mode I can just hit G and we'll move that car to the end of our scene here rotate a little bit and there you have it we have a car that appears there and appears there now if you wanted in between frames without having to manually add every key frame you could also obviously do this with object mode dealing with different layers and animating objects as a lot of you guys probably know and if you're not familiar with that you might want to check out my video on animation in blender there'll be a link up there or down there any ways you could do it with objects but instead wouldn't be doing it all within grease pencil using keyframes interpretated with blender with both those keyframes selected I'm just going to select our vehicle here again and I'm going to go up to interpretate right here you can see this option on top I'm going to grab it you can see we have two different options for interpolate and you can do interpolate just a single frame or a sequence and you can also choose these selected strokes which said what I want to do here so go ahead and choose selected strokes for now we're just gonna leave it on a linear type and I can choose interpretate a single frame and you can see that on frame four here I can determine where I want to add a new keyframe so if I chose right there you would see we have a new keyframe they're automatically added and it's automatically added between the two frames now this option works really great for things like this but if you're dealing with a completely redrawn character blender is gonna have a really hard time determining what in in-between frame would be so it really only works best when you're grabbing an object and moving it so it can move those strokes to match the exact location of the new strokes instead of drawing a new object from scratch and trying to interpret it between those two frames it's pretty much impossible but you can do some really cool things with it now so I'm gonna show you how you can go interpolate and choose sequence and this will automatically add keyframes between those two keyframes on a linear curve so if I play this back now you can see that we have a nice smooth animation of our car driving from left to right so this is pretty cool and what's even cooler now is like I said you can use the linear curve so if I command Z this and go back to interpolate you can choose something like the dynamic effect bounce and this will have our vehicle zoom over here kind of bounce off the wall and then keep driving all the way up to the edge using that curve so if I jump into the middle here go back to interpolate and choose interpolate sequence you can see we have all the frames sequenced but if I play it back now you can see it's going on that bounce curve and we have a very different animation so interpolate can work really well for certain aspects of animating in too deep you can even create your own custom curve here if you go to interpolation and choose custom you can create a curve however you would like to change the way the car is going to be animated so with something like that if I went ahead and did it you would see now you have it kind of pulled forward kind of back up and then drive forward again so pretty cool and it's nice option to have if you come to a case where you need something like that all right and for this last and final animation technique and blender 2.8 I'm gonna show you guys how to rig a simple character and animated using bones so really cool stuff here I'm just gonna use the zombie character that I created in my how to draw 2d characters course already published on YouTube if you guys want to check that out so I'm gonna go shift a and add in an armature you can see that gives us a bone right there if I rotate around here we'll want to go ahead and go to top view with seven grab that bone and just line it up to be right in front of our character and here I'm just going to set that bone to be right at his waist and scale it up so we have a nice sized bone fitting his whole body there now I'm going to tap into edit mode grab the tip of that bone and hit X e to extrude that bone up along these z-axis just to be for the whole length of his head there now I'm just going to grab that bone there and hit shift D to duplicate it for one of the arms here I'm gonna rotate it and scale it down and we're just gonna position it sort fits the length of his arm here we're only going to do two bones for the arm that we can assume in here real quick grab the tip of the bone there as well and extrude that up for the hand now we're just do the same thing on the other side here as well very nice and same thing with the legs except this time we're just gonna use one leg actually so I'm just to grab that top bone there duplicate it for the leg here we're gonna scale it down a bit rotate it we're hitting our and asked to scale it and rotate it down just so it fits over his leg they're approximately it doesn't have to be perfect so I'm not doing any sort of fancy armature eggs or anything I'm just setting up the bare basic armature for our character here and what we're gonna do now is we're gonna tap into object mode so what you can do is even a selected character then you're gonna select the armature and you can go ctrl P when go ahead and when the set the parent to empty groups I usually do automatic weights but in this case I'm just going to go ahead and automatically a tell blender what I want to be assigned to what so I'm just going to do with empty groups so with that assigned now what I can do is I can grab our character our 2d character member and we're gonna jump into draw mode here and if I go into camera view here zoom out just a little bit you can see over on the right side here if I scroll down to our layers tab our pencil right here if I scroll down further we have vertex groups and if I drop that down now you can see we have all those bones assigned as vertex groups I'm gonna make that just a little bit bigger so we can see what we're doing and if I switch to weight paint now what's really helpful too is to see what bone is what because we didn't name anything because we're lazy is that what we can do though is jump in to our armature settings here by selecting our bone in object mode and go to our viewport display and just check names and now if I grab our character again and go back into draw mode or a weight paint I should say now you can see what bone is what and it'll make it really easy to assign the right portion of mesh to the bone so scrolling down here to our vertex groups I want bone one to be his head so what I can do is I can tap into edit mode you want to make sure your layers are unlocked so you can select all of these portions and then I'm just gonna go ahead and select all of his face everything that I can anyways then I'll to select all the loose portions and now down in our vertex groups here I'm just gonna assign this to bone one so if I hit the assign button now and I jumped over to weight paint you would see that that portion of our character is now in red and that is because actually I missed a stroke there so I'll just paint that in red there that is because it is assigned to that vertex group so with everything red it means that'll work well when we rotate that bone that all the mesh will follow so let's go ahead and do the same for the body then I'm just going to tab into edit mode we're going to select as much of the body here as possible I'll hit L on my keyboard to select the loose portions of the mesh and then I'm gonna sign this all to bone one assign and we're good to move on so same thing now for like the arm I'm just gonna grab C to select most of that mesh then I'll hit L to select all the loose portions and now I just want to hold ctrl and unselect everything past that joint there so we don't have that portion of the mesh assigned to that bone so now I can just assign all this to bone to still grab onto and hit a sign and then you would do the same thing for bone three go ahead and slide bone three and you're gonna select all this portion of the mesh down to there I'll to select all the loose portions and then hit C and hold shift to unselect the portion that was already assigned to that other bone so just doing that and then assign that right there boom okay so with the bones all assigned to different portions of our 2d character all I have to do now is go back to object mode and you can select your armature here jump into pose mode and if we go ahead and grab like our head bone here for example you can see we can rotate our character around and animate them just like we would a digital character so all I have to do is go and start rotation and then jump - I'm gonna quick change this actually to the actual dope sheet there yep then jump to a different frame here and you could go ahead and rotate his head a bit maybe forward and insert rotation right there or if you want to just leave this on will automatically insert the keyframes for you a little bit easier and you can do things like grab his arm here jump the front and mode you can rotate it down you can even move the position of it a little bit I wrote you this hand down then a bit as well and you can see that there's a few areas where when you rotate you might have a little bit of stretching and this is where you might want to go through and the weight paint mode and kind of paint just a little bit extra kind of give that nice sort of smooth transition so I'll show you what I mean if I grab our character here and if we go to white paint on bone three let me go ahead and drop down here to our vertex groups I'm bone three you might want to grab your way print tool I'm bone three you might want to go ahead and paint just a little bit extra there and then I'm bone - you would want to maybe paint a little bit extra there as well okay so now back in pose mode if I was to grab this bone and we'll go ahead and move to a new keyframe here maybe we'll make him wave now when you rotate the bones you can see that we have a smoother transition it could still be feathered even more but that just kind of helps give some better results there so yeah you can go ahead now and animate your character sort of waving here by having his hand go back and forth here pull it in a bit pull it out of beds and you could also be having his head move at the same time so basically any character motion that you would normally do in blender you can go ahead and do now right with a rig so if I just turned off overlays there you can see now that our character is animated using bones but that's gonna do it for this video guys I hope you had fun learning some of the different styles of animation you can do within blenders to degrease pencil tools really cool I've had a lot of fun playing around a thumb and like I said I'm being using a lot of the new animation techniques in our new channel me me 9 times so go check that out get subscribed I really appreciate any of you guys's support and feedback so yes after using the Wacom Intuos Pro now for a few weeks I am really impressed with it it's the closest you're ever gonna get to drawing on a pen and pencil I think with the feel that you get and then also all of the extra buttons and functionality is really handy the touch mode the customizable buttons again like I said before I really like Wacom drivers they haven't had any issues they're super customizable and it looks like they put a lot of work into making them very user friendly so I really like the drivers and I like the tablet it's a little bit more of an expensive one but if you can afford it and you want something that feels is close to pen and paper as possible the Wacom Intuos Pro is a great option so they'll be a link in the description but if you wanna check that out but that's gonna do it I hope you guys enjoyed this animation technique video using blenders grease pencil tools I'd like to again thank Skillshare for sponsoring this video do you guys want to get that free two months use the link in the description below quick and I'll see you guys in my next video bye bye

Channel: CG Geek

Views: 1,100,686

Keywords: Animation, Rigging, 2d, charactor, animate, how to, tutorial, blender, 2.8, eevee, free, easy, beginner, learn, tablet, rig

Id: Or1HtAG9M-s

Length: 31min 49sec (1909 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2019