How To Create Toon Style Animation In Blender 2.8 (UPDATED)

hey everyone Sergei dragonov ski here from Ukraine mediacom and today I am recreating a tune style animation blended tutorial that I did back in 2016 because let's face it blender went through some changes and it's almost impossible to get the same results in blender 2.8 so a lot of you have been asking me to recreate it and that's exactly what I'm doing here and by the way that tutorial was based on another cinema 4d tutorial that was created by our friends from video smiled that are you if you want to check out that cinema 4d tutorial you should definitely hit the link at the bottom of this video check it out it's super awesome and you should definitely go to you creamy comm slash blender if you want to learn how to create a motion graphics sports bumper like this one alright so we are in blender and this is what blender looks like when you first fire it up you have like a cube you have camera and the light however we do not need to scoop so I'm going to select this press X to get rid of it press Delete and next we do need to bring in a circle now to bring in objects in blender you can do it a number of different ways you can go to add and then you know go to mesh circle that's one way but the one that I like using the most is just a simple shortcut because you can do it anywhere in the screen you don't have to travel all the way over here so you can just go over here and press shift a and then you can go to mesh circle and there you have it and as soon as you click on circle you want to make sure that you don't click anywhere else because once you click on circle you'll see the circle highlighted like this it is also in what I call active mode and because it is in this active mode you can still edit this shape you can go over here you'll see this window right here add curve you can click on it you can see more options and you can go to vertices and you can increase it to 62 you can play with her radius if you want but I'm gonna keep it at 1 so once you're done once you click away as you can see the window goes away and you don't really have those options anymore so now we have vertices in here we're gonna go to the top view either by pressing 7 on a numpad or you can go to view and then viewpoints and then right here top alright so we have this circle we're gonna go into edit mode we're gonna go deep inside of it right now we are in object mode so if you want to go into edit mode you can either click here and go to edit mode or you can press tab on your key as you can see we are in edit mode now even in edit mode we have three options we have vertices edges and then faces we're gonna stay in vertices for right now I'm going to press and select all of them as you can see there they are now we do have a little dilemma as you can see we have vertices right here and right there on the line I don't want for that to do that so I want for it to be like this right like for it to go in between those two points and to be precise I'm gonna undo this I'm gonna do some math just basic math I'm gonna press R for rotation and then click away right away as you can see the window pops up here and in here I'm going to replace it for 360 degrees divided by 62 vertices and when you press ENTER you can see it moved it but it moved it where it used to be but now what I would need to do I'm gonna take this and divide it by 2 and then it's gonna put it through the middle like this too much math but you know I'm OCD and it helps me alright so now that we have it in a proper position next I'm going to go into edges here you can either click on it like this or you can press 2 on your keyboard and now we have edges we can select any of them I'm gonna select this edge and shift select that one so I have two of them selected and I'm gonna continue holding down shift I'm gonna select this one and also that one so altogether I have four edges selected and then I'm going to press X to get rid of it so I'm going to say delete edges and now we have two different shapes right we have if we're gonna we're gonna go back to vertices I'm going to press a to select all of them so you can see better so we have a gap in here and a gap in here and the reason why I did this because I'm going to bridge them together in a way to where this vertices going to connect to that one that one it's going to connect to that one and so on and it's going to give us nice subdivision for bending so to do that we're going to make sure that you highlight or select all of your points by pressing a on your keyboard and then you want to go to edge and click on this bridge edge loops so when you click on it you can see it does exactly what we want so that looks nice next I'm going to go to edge mode click on this edge I'm going to select this edge right here and I'm going to create like a handle for it so I'm going to select this press e for extrusion I like using keyboard shortcuts just ease so much quicker and next right now it's extruding based on our view but you want to kind of lock it in on certain axis so I'm gonna say Y press Y on your keyboard like this and right now it's kind of moving only on the Y and I'm gonna move it right about here so that's good but once you have this extruded you do want to kind of adjust the shape if you know anything about ping pong you know these handles have a little angle right here so I'm gonna select this edge press down s on my keyboard to scale and we're gonna scale slightly like this not too much but enough to where it looks like a ping-pong paddle next what we need to do we need to create some subdivisions and to do that I'm going to press ctrl R then as you can see we can add some subdivisions in here I'm gonna add about let's do 10 like this and once you click away you can see you can keep adjusting it you can create more subdivisions if you want but I'm going to keep it at 10 all right so we kind of have the basic shape of paddle next what we need to do we need to extrude this thing to where we have some thickness and to do that we're gonna go to face mode you can either click on it here or press 3 on your keyboard and I'm gonna press a to select all of my faces and then I'm gonna press e to extrude or you can use this right here you can click on it press on this plus and kind of extrude like this after you or you are done extruding you'll see this window pop up and you can adjust this I'm gonna say negative 0.15 that looks good okay so we have like a basic shape in here and by the way I do like to label things so once you've created this you might want to label this in here double click we're gonna call it paddle now right away you notice that our edge right here is pretty rigid it's not not very smooth and for what we're doing honestly you don't even have to correct that because we're gonna use flat colors anyway we're not gonna have any diffuse or anything like shading so but just to show you how to fix it just right click here and go to shade smooth or you can just select this object and you can go to object and in here you'll see shade smooth right there it's the same thing now obviously as you can see we're having a little issue here because our edges are move this well so it's not very sharp now to fix it you can do two different ways you can either go to modifiers while you have this selected and you can add a modifier like edge split and this thing will correct the thing and basically will sharpen everything you know lower than 30 degrees and that's exactly what you want or you can get rid of this option you can again make sure you select this go to this panel right here and in here we have normals you can click on it and check this Auto smooth and again it's the same concept here and as you can see it's fixed it so that's what I'm gonna do actually I'm gonna keep it like this so now we have our shape next let's create a ball so we have our 3d cursor in the center of our scene if you don't you can just press shift C and it will place it in the center and now we're going to bring in our object in the center of this scene and to do that again you can either go to add here or shift a my favorite shortcut and then go to mesh and we're gonna go to UV sphere and obviously it's a bit too big but make sure you don't click away because we need to alter things in here and we're gonna adjust the radius here we're gonna take it down to 0.2 all right it looks pretty small I'm gonna select this move tool and by the way if you're not seeing these controls or these options just press T on your keyboard and it'll pop up or you can just click on this button right here alright so once you are done we're gonna move it out here out of the way you know right click and do shade smooth and yeah it's looking good so we have a ball make sure we label this ball and we have a paddle all right so let's create some materials and I'm gonna split the screen into two and for this one we're gonna go with this image editor because we want to load up our reference image with all the colors so I'm gonna press open navigate to it this one right here that image I'm gonna press open image and by the way if you want to download this image it comes with the project so you want to make sure you download the project for this tutorial the link to it is at the bottom this video so now we have this image it has all the colors we need these four are going to be for the paddle this color is going to be for that ball and these two are gonna be for the background that we'll use later than its oil so let's work with the paddle for so I'm going to select this panel we're going to go to material tab we create a new material and this material is going to be white and we don't want this principal so we're gonna change it to emission because the emission gives us just a one solid color and that's exactly what we want for this so I'm gonna change this color to this off-white so we do have a white material so that's one let's create another one I'm gonna press on this plus sign and let's load up our white material because it gives us a good starting point we're going to duplicate it and let's rename it to orange and obviously we need to change the color of this orange so now we have this orange and this material that's good let's create two more for red and green so I'm going to press on this plus sign let's start with this orange let's duplicate it and let's rename it to red and we're gonna change the color to red this red right here let's do this again plus let's start with the red let's duplicate it and let's change it to green and let's change the color of it to green as well so we have all the materials we need next let's assign it to this object right here so I'm gonna select this object and by the way we do need to see what rendered view looks like so you can do a number of different ways you can either press Z on your keyboard and go to rendered view or you can navigate all the way to the right here and click on this icon in here so this is what the final render looks like right now and as you can see it applied this very first material this off-white so that's what it looks like however we need to apply other materials to it so I'm gonna select this press tab to go into edit mode and I'm gonna press numpad 7 to go into top view and we're going to select some of these faces so watch what happens when I select this select box tool if I select some of these faces like this notice it did selected the faces that I want however it only selected on the visible side of things you didn't select any of these faces or anything on the bottom which is a bit problematic we need to fix this so let's press 7 to go to top view and this time I'm gonna press Z to go into wireframe view like this so now everything we select will select through everything it will go through the whole object so again make sure you select this selection tool and we're going to select some of these faces in here so like that is good so we have let's do this that's probably one too many that's probably good so yeah those are good as you can see this time we have everything selected everything on the bottom as well so that's exactly what I want so let's go back to rendered view Prezi rendered and now that we have our faces selected we want to apply this orange material to those selected faces and to do that just select your orange material and hit a sign and there you have it so let's do the same thing for this I'm going to select this face hold down control my keyboard and we're gonna go to this side press control and select this face so now we have everything selected between these two faces which is exactly what we want and we want to apply this red material so we're going to select it press assign that's good now we're going to go to the other side select this face hold down control select this small face right here and it's selected everything in between which is exactly what we want and we're going to select this green material and hit assign so now our panel is textured so that's good I'm gonna press tab to get out of the edit mode and let's create a material for this ball I'm gonna select this ball let's go to material tab and and here we're gonna create a new material but I'm gonna start with one of these I'm gonna go with red and I'm going to create a duplicate and let's rename this to something like ball okay instead of red we're gonna point to this yellowish looking color all right so now we have all of our materials created however we do have a problem and the problem is this as you can see our red our orange they don't really line up to these they look different these look a bit more washed out so something isn't adding up and that's a problem because this is our final render that's what it's going to look like however the problem is this and here's how you fix it the problem is that we have different color space so you can go over here to rendered view and all the way to color management we want to go to view transform and in here instead of filmic we're going to set it to standard and when you do that it will automatically give you exactly what you want now everything looks correct and that's what we're gonna go with now that we have our materials created and apply to our objects the next step would be to create strokes to kind of you know create that depth for a object because let's face it it looks too flat like this handle right here doesn't really have much detail it's kind of difficult to look at so let's do that and to do that we're going to use a feature called a freestyle but before we get to it I want to merge this window into that one like this so we have more space to work with so next I'm gonna go to render tab and we're gonna go all the way down to freestyle and we're going to check this check box to activate freestyle and in the previous versions of blender we would see freestyle in the preview like this but obviously that's not the case in 2.8 that doesn't mean that we don't have strokes around our edges here in fact we do so if you render an image by pressing f12 or if you go to render and then render image you'll see that in a render we do have strokes and as you can see it does create more detail more of that depth detail around here so it's definitely helpful however I also want to create strokes for materials that will separate the materials so how can I make that happen so let's go back I'm going to get rid of this window and by the way in freestyle if you want to increase the thickness of your line so you can easily do so right here line thickness you can increase it I'm going to keep it at 1 but you know you can increase it to whatever I'm gonna go to layer tab and I'm going to uncollapse everything like this and we're gonna go to freestyle line set so in here we have some options to work with and we have this material boundary if you have that one checked watch what happens so now I'm gonna press f12 or if you go to render and then render image you'll see that this time we have lines going through materials and our edges so that's exactly what I want alright so it is time for us to take this paddle and make it Bend so I'm going to select this paddle we're gonna go to modifiers tab right here and we're gonna add a modifier called simple deform and here you want to make sure you are working with Bend because we want to bend it now obviously it's not working properly as you can see it does deforms it around my origin of this object which it's somewhat of a clue but it's not doing exactly what I wanted to do though obviously we do have an option right here that we can create a custom origin like an empty in place of where we want it to place it and it'll work fine it's just one more step we have to do we have to create an MT it's gonna be floating over here so I want to see if I can avoid that now in the previous version of this tutorial we use this but this time we're gonna try to avoid creating any empties so let's do this we're going to tell this origin to be the origin right here like in other words to move from here to the beginning of this paddle and to do that I'm going to set this angle to zero so we can see the actual shape I'm gonna select this object press tab to go into edit mode make sure you are in face select mode I'm gonna select this face right here and I'm going to press shift S and I'm gonna say cursor to selected and right now this cursor drops to the selected face and it puts it right in the center which is exactly what I want so now that I have my cursor located exactly where I want this origin to be next I'm going to press tab to go into object mode and I want to make sure my object is selected I'm going to go to object and then I'm gonna say set origin origin to 3d cursor because we do have our 3d cursor in here so origin to 3d cursor so again object set origin origin to the 3d cursor when you click on it as you can see goes from here to here and let's see what happens now let's go back to modifiers tab and then here as you can see not much has changed but it does kind of Bend around this origin so we're somewhat there but not quiet and what we need to do we need to actually rotate this origin which we can't but here's what we can do we can rotate this object so I'm going to go over here and we're going to rotate it on X about 90 degrees we're gonna say negative 90 okay and obviously if I go back to modifiers tab in here and not much is doing here so it's not really working however if I press ctrl a and if I apply rotation like this notice now it's working so now I just need to correct rotation I'm going to take it to 90 degrees and it's exactly where it used to be and now if I go to modifiers tab you can see that we can alter this angle right here and it's doing exactly what we want it to do so it is working all right so let's do some animation for that we're going to go into an animation tab and the first thing we want to do we want to adjust the output option so click on this output tab and here for X we're going to set this at 500 Y 500 as well and then we're gonna go to frame start we're gonna set that at 0 and then frame end we're gonna set that to 40 so it's gonna go from 0 to 40 and frame rate we're gonna go with 30 frames per seconds so these are all the settings I'm going to alter for this next I'm gonna go to this window here and press 3 to go to side view and I'm gonna press Z and let's see it rendered just for fun of it I'm gonna expand this area as you can see we're gonna be animating from 0 to 40 so that's a lot of wasteful space we're gonna expand this some alright so that's good let's go to frame 0 and let's select this object and I'm gonna go to modifiers we're gonna be animating the bend deformer so we're gonna go to something like negative 40 you zoom in a bit more and we're gonna set a keyframe at frame number zero so to do that you can either right-click and then insert a keyframe or you can just hover over this value and then press I and when you do that it creates a keyframe which is exactly what we want then we're gonna go to frame number 10 and we're gonna take it up to positive 40 like this and then again make sure you hover over this press I to set a keyframe so we have like a basic animation like this then we're gonna go to frame 20 and we're gonna create the same keys in here so just hover over this value press I and then we're gonna go to frame 30 again go over here and let's take it back down to negative 40 and hover over this value press I to set a keyframe and as you can see we have animation up and then back down so here's what I want to do next so I'm going to select this object I'm going to go to transform options in here and we're going to be animating y-rotation so this right here so I'm going to set it at 0 at frame 10 so it hits and then from here it's gonna be zero set a keyframe and then from 10 to 20 I wanted to spin like this and so it's gonna be negative 180 degrees it's gonna make a full negative 180 turn and then let's set a keyframe so let's see what that looks like so it's gonna hit it then spin around and then hit it again and then from here from 30 to 40 I want to do the same thing so again set a keyframe and then we're gonna go all the way to 40 and then we're gonna type negative 360 and don't forget to set a keyframe all right so it's gonna look something like this hit spin hit spin and you know if you press play you can see it's gonna loop like this so obviously you might need some minor adjustments but overall the foundation is exactly what I want but next what I want to do I want to go into graph editor so go over here graph editor right here and obviously we have all these curves so we can adjust let me press space to kind of pause this we're going to work with let's do the former first so I'm going to select this press well let's do this we're gonna hide this rotation just select this press a to select all the points and then period on a numpad to make it all visible in this window so that's what we're seeing here so at first we have a hit but I won the hid right here to be faster so I want to be fast and then slow down as it you know as it kind of goes up so this one and that one I want them to be smaller in other words I want to press s and scale it down now watch this it's not doing it individually it's doing it as a group right so it's scaling it based on the center of my selection and that's not what I want to do so to change that I'm going to go over here and I'm gonna change it to individual centers when you do that now if I press s and if I scale it notice this time it deals with individual centers so I'm going to scale it down some because I want to speed it up here faster so it's going to be faster but then I want to slow down in here and in here so I'm gonna select both of these and then press s and we're gonna scale it sound like this so let's see what that looks like yeah it looks much better again you can you know obviously you have the time you can play with this and get it to where you like it the best but I'm gonna keep it at that and I think this is good for me so then I'm going to hide this one and let's see the rotation of the paddle so again I'm gonna press a to select all of my points press period on a numpad to make it visible in this window and in here let's see what we can do I'm just going to select all of them right press a and then I'm going to press s and scale them so I'm just going to slow them down on in and out in other words it's gonna slowly gonna speed up and then slow down however in the middle right here I'll be a lot faster so if I preview this let's go to the beginning shift left arrow and then spacebar yeah that's looking good so obviously you can spend more time on this you can make it you know more stylistic but I'm gonna leave it at that and next I'm gonna animate this ball so I'm going to select this ball and let's see where I want it to be hit so right about here I won for the ball to hit the paddle so I'm gonna select this ball shift spacebar and let's select this move tool and I'm gonna move it down let's zoom in so right about here okay so at frame two I went for the ball to touch the paddle all right so let's set a keyframe for that so I'm gonna go to transform properties and for Z position I'm going to either hover over this or click on this keyframe and then it's going to set a keyframe there and then I'm gonna move forward and next time it hits right about here I want to do the same thing again set a keyframe and then in between here we're gonna set another keyframe but this time I want for the ball to be way up so like 3.5 so way up there set a keyframe and again make sure you select all of this press a to select all of it press period on numpad to make it visible in your view here in this window and if I preview this as you can see it's it's not working all that grade right now but I want to kind of loop the animation after this keyframe and before this keyframe and to do that I'm gonna select the Z location I'm going to click on this button right here and we're gonna go to modifiers and we're gonna add cycles as you can see kind of duplicates everything and tiles it which is exactly what I want so if I preview this it's kind of working but we're not quite there so here's what I want to do it's it's doing something really weird doesn't it well so what I want to do when it goes up I want for the ball to hang up much longer than what it does now so I'm gonna select at this point and I'm going to press s we're gonna scale this so it's gonna really hang up there even more all right that's good but then I'm going to speed up right here and also shifts like this one right here so I'm gonna make both of these a lot smaller so again make sure that you have or is it this array or make sure you it's set to individual centers that's important and then press s to scale it so we're gonna make it a lot smaller let's see what that looks like yeah that's good so as you can see it hits it pops it up it lives there much longer in fact this animation looks good to me so I'm gonna leave it as this we are almost done with this tutorial we just have to do few more things and for that we're going to go into main layout and I'm gonna press Z to see you rendered view and we're gonna go into that camera by pressing 0 on the numpad and that's what that camera sees now watch what happens when I move around as you can see it snaps me out of that camera and if you come from like a cinema 4d background it's definitely a bit annoying I want to be able to move around like this and for my camera to move with me now I know in blender you have the fly mode and you can use your keys but that's not something I enjoy I don't really care for it but we do have an option in blender if you press 0 on the numpad again to go into camera if you go over here and click on this icon under view we have this right here locked camera to view so when you have that one checked and if you move you can see the camera moves with you so that's super useful especially if you come from Simo 4 D so I'm going to position this probably I want to look at it from up high like that maybe zoom in some and again this thing is so subjective you want to position it however you to position it so that's what I'm gonna go with something like this maybe let's preview this that's not bad that's good yeah and again you can pull out some now one thing I want to point out is that once you're done with positioning your camera you want to make sure that you uncheck this because if you don't I've done this many times you accidentally will move away thinking that it will snap out out of your camera view but what it does it grabs your camera with you and that can be annoying so that's good press zero again to go into camera view numpad zero and it's looking great so if I preview this that's exactly what I want and again I can preview this frame by pressing f12 on my keyboard as you can see The Strokes everything is looking nice that's exactly what I want so what I want to do next I want to change the background so each time the ball hits the paddle like right about here I one for the background to change colors to do that we're gonna go into this world tab and we're gonna play with this collar right here so at two we're gonna change this to another color but we need to bring our color image so again I'm gonna split this window into two we're gonna go to image editor and we're going to bring in our image again so this one right here so we're gonna be dealing with these two colors so let me kind of take it back so all right so something like this is good so at frame 0 I want it to be purple so right here click and make sure we pick this purple so frame 0 it's purple make sure you set a keyframe for that so hover over this press I and then we're gonna go to frame 2 I think that's where it hits and then here it's gonna be this light blue color okay again make sure you set a keyframe for that so hover over this press I let's keep going so then we're gonna go to another frame so right here where it hits so right at frame 22 I wanted to go back to purple so I'm gonna click here and we're gonna pick purple all right make sure you set a keyframe for this so hover over this press I and let's see what happens so as you can see purple hits it blue and purple again and then obviously it's gonna repeat itself but I'm going to go back to animation layout right here and we have more options in here so obvious we have something weird going on here so I'm gonna select everything press 8 and then period on the numpad to kind of make it all visible in your window so if I preview this you can see it's doing a lot of fading and that's not what I wanted to do as you can see it kind of fades from one color to another I want for them to be constant and to do that and here's what you need to do select all your points by pressing a on your keyboard and then right click and go to interpolation mode and we're gonna click on this constant and when you do that notice when I preview this everything is working well and the reason why because this key right here is gonna stay the same all the way to the next key so it's gonna stay flat all the way to the next key and then the next key is gonna stay all the way flat to the next one and that's what constant does so if I preview this it's working well now that we are done with everything our next step is to render our animation and for that I'm gonna pause this video we're gonna go to output settings and in here in the output panel we're going to determine where we want the animation to end up so click on this folder and navigate to your renders folder I'm going to say something like renders that's good you want to make sure that you name your file I'm going to name it toon style animation and then press accept after that you want to go and adjust your file format I'm gonna go with something like ffmpeg video so it's going to be an actual video usually out of 3d you render image sequences well for this case because it's such a small file and it doesn't take very long to render I'm just gonna go with video so once you have everything set up here next just go to render and click on a render animation as you can see you'll be done in seconds all right well this is the end of this tutorial thank you so much for watching it I hope you found it useful and if you have make sure you hit like subscribe to our YouTube channel follow us on social media and don't forget to check out our course on how to create a motion graphic sports bumper in blender two-point-eight the link to that is at the bottom this video but in the meantime my name is Sergei Pratt Nevsky and this is Ukraine Mediacom [Music]

Channel: ukramedia

Views: 124,435

Keywords: ukramedia.com, Sergei Prokhnevskiy, motion graphics, Blender, Blender 3D, Toon Shading, Freestyle, videosmile.ru, Mikhail Bychkov, Ping Pong, Table Tennis, Cartoon Style, Cartoon Shading, Blender Motion Graphics, tutorial, lesson, 3d, motion design, animated gif, mograph, blender mograph, b3d, blender 3d motion graphics, blender motion design, Cartoon style animation, video tutorial, video lesson

Id: 71WnmX1UrEk

Length: 31min 3sec (1863 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 15 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/r_lighter]

Modifiers affect the object based on its applied location /rotation /scale, so if you rotate an object but don't apply, the modifier will affect the state you had initially

[u/alaslipknot]

alright, i'll do my best to give you an ELI5 explanation

 

You don't always have to Apply transformation (scale, rotation, location) but it is a good rule of thumb to always apply it, for example there is no reason at all for an object to have negative scale, unless you know exactly why.

 

as for the video, you just think of it like this, if the intended visual result is to stretch the door handle to make it "longer and thinner" (dark blue background), and your modifier is doing it through the X axis, then the light blue background will give you the "wrong" result, so instead you have to rotate your object to make it work with the X axis modifier, but since most of the modifiers will take into consideration the object "non-natural rotation"

Natural rotation = x:0, y:0, z:0

the modifier will look at the object and be like "oh this is rotated 90 degrees, let's calculate that into the transformation" and end up giving you the wrong visual results

(keep in mind there is nothing truly wrong)

but if you rotate the object 90 degrees and apply it to make the rotated state be the new "natural rotation", the the modifier will just do what it was doing earlier, but since you rotated your object into the right directions, and didn't have any "non-natural" values for the modifiers to take into calculation, you'll end up with the "right" visual results.

 

for more in depth explanation, read this