How to Create LOOPING ANIMATIONS in Blender!

what's up guys Justin here with the CG essentials.com so in this video we're going to learn how to make animations repeat over and over again inside a blender stick around till the end and we'll talk about how to make a character continue walking with an animation off into the distance let's go ahead and just jump into it all right so the first thing we want to do is we want to create our animation we can do that with key frames right so we're going to select an object and in this case I'm going to key frame the current location values so I'm just going to Mouse over the timeline with the object selected type I in order to insert a key frame or you can come up here you can type I and you can key frame just the rotation of the object if you want so in this case we're going to key frame the rotation here to zero and then at 40 frames we want to key frame this rotation to 360° or in this case negative 360° so we're going to type this in right here and we're just going to type I and we're going to key frame that rotation now if I click on play what this is going to do is this is going to rotate this 360° right perfect but what we want is we want for this to continue um so we don't just want this to do this once we want it to do it multiple times and so in order to do this what you can do is you can jump into the graph editor so we're going to go into the graph editor right here and notice how there's a curve in here representing presenting that movement right so this curve is basically a visual indicator of that movement right here we're going to zoom out a little bit well what I want to do is I want to select that movement right that's our 360° rotation and I want to add a modifier to it I can do that by typing shift and E on my keyboard and notice how there's an option in here for make cylic so when you do that what this is going to do is is this is going to cycle that animation over and over and over again right it's in a cycle it's cyclic so you can use this in order to quickly repeat an animation right here and say that you wanted to slow it down you could do a scale and you could scale it on the x-axis like this and notice how when you do that that animation is going to speed up or slow down depending on how wide um these Loops are in here all right so that is how you can repeat with rotation let's do the same thing with movement so we want to take this object right here we want to start by hitting I and key framing the location and then in 40 frames we want this object to have moved in this direction so we'll just go ahead and move this over here hit I and key frame the location again so now you have an animation where this object moves and by the way this gets more interesting in a second when we talk about doing it with characters but what we want to do is we want to do the same thing as before so we'll jump over into our graph editor right here and we want to select in this case that um that Z location movement or the X location movement so we want to select that movement and we want to add that modifier so we're going to do a shift e and we're going to make it cyclic like this right so now this is doing the same thing as the rot where it's repeating it but the problem is this needs to build on top of itself in order to continue moving right and at the moment we can't do that and so I'm want to click on the X location right here to select it and I want to go find the modifiers tab this modifier tab is going to change the way that the modifier works right so right now for example this has this object repeating the motion when it Cycles well we don't want that we want this to repeat with offset and specifically we want this to repeat with offset in the after mode so when this modifies this after we want it to continue moving and so notice how now this graph of the X location just keeps going up the reason why is that now this object is just going to repeat that offset over and over again like this so it's just going to continue moving until we run out of frames in our animation right this animation is 250 frames so the furthest this will get is wherever this movement continues to at 250 frames now this is something that we can do with characters as well so this is a character that I downloaded from miimo and we'll jump back into the timeline real quick but this character basically has a movement in here that goes until about 120 frames and what we want is we want that movement to continue um just like we did with the uh rotation before so we can go back into the graph editor right here and in this case we don't want to select the character we want to select the Armature that's in here right and we want to find that movement well in this case um all of that movement right here is all kind of like built together into this mixim Mo Armature so we just want to make sure that we select all of it like this and then we want to do a shift e and we want to make it cylic and so notice what that does is that makes every object in here cyclic right and it looks really messy but now it's going to do what we want now this animation is going to continue beyond our 120 frames like this now you do want to make sure that you download an animation that actually kind of like Loops together okay you don't want there to be a giant Gap in here um but you can see how this moves pretty smoothly in here like this and so we've also got this zombie character and with this zombie character what's going to happen is it kind of like walks right um so what it's doing is it's walking over and over again like this or actually it's not it's only running through this one animation well we want this zombie character to continue its movement this is a little bit trickier um with the mixo animation right here but it's not that bad all right and so what you want to do is you want to go find the blue value um in this graph right and so you can actually find it just by opening up the hips and just clicking on the Z location option right here and when you do that notice how this has the modifier associated with it over here well you can just set the after mode to repeat with offset now this character will walk off into the distance for as long as your animation continues so it's just a question of finding the right thing on here with the mixim mo but if I was to jump back into my timeline right and I was to set this to have an end of like 1,000 frames notice how this will just continue that animation looping the zombie walk but it'll move until the very end of this so it'll just go off into the distance for as long as your animation lasts and then when you hit the end of the that animation right you get to 1,000 frames it's going to reset and it'll start over again right here so once you have this kind of set up it's pretty easy to make animated models that not only animate but also move along a path all right so that's foring in this video leave a comment below let me know what you thought was this helpful to you I just love having that conversation with you guys as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this and I'll catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The CG Essentials

Views: 5,454

Keywords: blender, blender 2.82, blender 2.8, blender modifier tutorials, blender tool tutorial, the blender essentials, the cg essentials, thecgessentials.com, justin geis, justin geis blender, blender 2.9, blender 2.91, blender animations, blender looping animation, blender repeat animation

Id: AvKf22KPbZs

Length: 7min 47sec (467 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 25 2023