How to Easily Animate Still Renders in Blender

over the past few months I've basically just been working on tons of different animations and in this video I want to show you some of the easiest ways that you can go from a still render to something that's animated and I'll just show you some of the simplest easiest most effective techniques to get there let's start with the basic stuff though I think the easiest thing you can do to just add motion to a a still render is just just take the camera and move it through space over time and uh sometimes that's all you need like just that only so here's how you do that uh it's very easy you probably know how to do this already but I'll just quickly show you just in case you're brand new to this basically I'll just hide this camera and add a new one just uh just to demonstrate this so I'm going to assume you know how to set this up already a still camera and we'll just have this here so say your still render is like pointing somewhere like this and it's you know some environment or whatever so the easiest thing to do right here is you just set two key frames so just one at the beginning so you basically just tell it hey start here move it forward at the end and then just say hey end here here's exactly how you do that though so I let's just put it right here to start and then I'm just going to with the camera selected press I on the keyboard for insert key frame that brings up this menu and then you can just choose you can choose location rotation there's a whole bunch of stuff in here I think the easiest thing to do for this is just the location and rotation option so if I click that it inserts a key frame for location and rotation all at once and then what I want to do is just go to the end of the animation and I'll just move the camera forward however far forward I want it to go for this so something like that will be fine and then I might actually just move it like rotate it upwards a little bit more too like this and then I'll just uh with the camera still selected hit hit I again and then just do another location and rotation key frame and just with these two things now it's really easy to just dial in the exact range of these that I want so say I want it to start a little bit lower instead of inserting a new key frame you can just grab this and just pull it down and say I want it to end maybe a little bit lower too you can do that or high it doesn't matter something I want to point out too is for almost all of my animations the camera movement will look like this where it's a straight just linear line between the two key frames so I think blender's default interpolation mode is set to bezier which just means that this is the curve that comes on by default when you set two key frames so it's like a really smooth in and then smooth out this for some reason just if unless you like specifically try to do this in a certain way this really often just looks very am and just bad for some reason and uh it just looks a lot more professional and just cinematic and cool if you have this camera movement set to linear the way you do that is just select those two key frames right click interpolation mode and then just set it to linear and uh if you just pay attention to shots in movies and and stuff like that like you'll notice that very often it's it's going to be more like this and less like this where it's like ease in ease out um in like very beginner animations for blender you will see this very often and that's uh one of the first things that like screams beginner for some reason I don't know why but um yeah if you just keep this on on linear I think if you want to change the default you just go to edit preferences animation sorry this was cut off on the screen edit preferences animation scroll down to uh F curves and then you can actually change the default interpolation if it's not on Linear by default I'd recommend changing it to that just because the camera is often something I'll animate first uh and I like to just have it Linear by default I don't like to have it doing ASA curves without me wanting to specifically do that so anyways if you switch it to this it just means that anytime you add two key frames or any key frames it will it will just make it a straight line by default so that's the graph editor definitely get familiar with it if you're not it's very easy to use just look a little scary at first but anyways that's that I guess one more thing I forgot to mention this goes with the camera this is adding uh camera shake this this is very easy to do luckily and it adds just really nice natural movement it just kind of makes it feel like a bit more handheld more recorded like somebody was actually in a physical space rather than CG so the way you do this is with um you could actually animate this by hand and like add a noise modifier to the rotation of the camera luckily Ian Hubert and I think some other people that he was working with have created a free add-on called camera shifi this add-on is extremely handy basically what you do is you just click the plus before I do that just remember that this is very still camera movement it's just going forward if you click the plus here this just adds camera shake straight away and you don't have to do anything except change the amount and the type so if I lower this down you can see it's just now it looks like somebody holding the camera and it just adds like this effect is kind of interesting cuz objectively like on paper it's worse because why would you want the camera shakier right normally you hear about like ways of like reducing camera Shake but here we're adding it but this is something I talk about all the time where in the world of CG it's uh it's very easy for things to feel like very computer generated and very fake and very like that's that's what it is right it is computer generated so of course it's going to feel that way and anything we can do to kind of bring it back to things you would see in real life like the camera shaking even just a little bit or film grain or just like using using settings in a way that are realistic stick all that kind of stuff just helps uh sell the the effect that what you made here is a real thing and kind of like is as a place that actually exists and it just makes it feel much more immersive so it's definitely not necessary to do this depends on the look you're going for but it is a really fun way to just make it feel like all those things I was just talking about so even just having this on like 0.1 or 0.2 is enough a lot of the time to just add uh add this camera Shake here and then you can change the effect here like you can change it too I like this one walk to the store and you just have this just kind of yeah just makes it feel a little more more natural so one thing with this technique is that although it this could just be enough to just be done animating uh sometimes you know it's not enough like sometimes you will really notice that the rest of the environment is like 100% still and the only thing moving is the camera and you know that might just look a little bit fake and plasticky and bad so the next thing I want to show you is uh just adding dust particles and like debris and just stuff floating around so I've covered this before I'm not going to go too in depth into the exact settings to use but the basic idea is you just take an emitter particle system I'll do a quick demo of this but I'll just show you what this is first of all let me just isolate these two things so this is the particle system I'm talking about it's uh it's rendering this as bounds so it's like putting a wireframe up all the objects but they're just basically little rocks that I found from quickel I think but uh in the final render they look like this I'll try to remember to put a actual video of the final render up but in the viewport they're just doing this and just having these little things kind of floating around they're not even moving that much but it just kind of adds just nice extra layer of things happening and things moving around subtly and just like it's just kind of nice having the camera fly through all this stuff so you know obviously if you're going for something more realistic you don't want like floating rocks and weird stuff like that but you can do like dust particles you can do snow you can do emissive uh little icos speres and make it just like glowing looking Firefly type things or uh you know you can really do whatever you want just having it doesn't really matter what you put in here as long as there's like just stuff floating around that's small and like has a turbulence which I'll show you in a sec to kind of add Randomness to it it's pretty much always going to look good if you kind of get the right settings here so this is one of this is one of my favorite ways to just add more movement and just make things more interesting versus like having everything completely still so here's how you do it let me just add another uh particle system here to just do a quick demo I'm not going to go like all out and show you every single individual setting there's plenty of videos on how to use particle systems but I'll just show you the basic setup here so you just take a cube regular Cube and just kind of put it over this is basically like the domain of where we want the particles to spawn in so just put it over like just like over the the parts that are going to make sense so like my camera is here that means the main areas I'm really going to see is just kind of in this section right there so that's why I just put it right there uh I don't know I I think my original camera was probably a little bit more forward so it wasn't like sticking out of this area but doesn't really matter that much the way you do this is first of all let's get this out of the way because I don't want to have this big box here so if you just go to this orange Square tab the object tab go down to viewport display and then display as bounds that just makes it like a wireframe of the box and it's out of the way and then we just go to the particles tab here hit the plus regular emitter particle system just change the source over from faces to volume and that just means that it'll spawn kind of like from the volume of the particle system rather than around the outside edges of this box and then we want to turn off gravity because they're falling so just uh field weights gravity just zero and then I want to also turn the normal velocity off this setting is on by default it's it just means that when they spawn in they'll be moving if you just turn it to zero they'll just be still and mine are kind of like behaving a bit weird because I have force fields in the scene that I used for the other system but I'll show you how to set this up in a second um for these settings I'm sure you know how to use this it's all pretty intuitive it's all it just tells you what all these are so lifetime let's go like 400 so just they stay in for 400 frames and then uh let's do start and end I actually want this on like a negative amount because if I start on frame one my animation actually started on frame two because my frame one was looking glitchy but normally if you start like your animation will start on frame one if you start the particles on the same frame that your animation starts sometimes you can kind of see like a ghosting effect where your particles are technically spawning in on the same frame that your animation starts which means like they're kind of half in half out so if you just start it on frame negative 1 that just means by the time it starts on frame one the animation starts on frame one these will already be spawned in fully and you don't have to worry about it being like half visible half invisible okay so now they're kind of just in here still not really moving and then the way you get it to move around is you just add some basic force fields and the way you do that is just shift a force field and then the one just just for like random noise kind of just move them around randomly is this one right here called turbulence you just add add that and then um I usually just set the flow to one and then that's it you can you keep it on zero honestly probably but I like it on one and that just basically makes it more smooth but yeah what this does is I don't know if you'll see it right here cuz I have another one that's kind of doing some other weird stuff but yeah you can kind of see it's just basically just makes these kind of move around a little bit randomly and then when you turn on rotation uh just in here just enable rotation turn on Dynamic here so it gets uh just kind of moves around a bit more randomly and then just kind of randomize the phase of all this stuff here I don't really know which one is which but turn all those up and then you should be good to go just set the render object change it from Halo obviously to whatever object you want so you can do a collection of them if you want to kind of pick randomly but like I said really anything can be here like planes like you just shift a a basic plane and like put a texture on it or just keep if keep it like a regular plane if you want to do like fast moving snow add an ecosphere uh and make it really low poly and like make it kind of translucent and Tiny uh that could be like a dust particle I do that all the time you could do floating rocks like I've done here you could do emission like emissive little spheres that are just glowing really do whatever you want as long as there's like just a bunch of little things floating around that just subtle movement like this is going to be enough to just like make it look more cool and more interesting and just more movement and Randomness and Justa a little bit of chaos introduced you know and then yeah after that you just do some scale Randomness and you're pretty much good to go so like I said you probably already know how to set up a particle system like that I'm just going to showing you the settings I'm using but if you don't just go onto YouTube type in how to set up particle system blender you'll figure it out it's not too hard okay so that's exactly what I did here and then you can see it's just a nice little effect when the camera's moving through that it's just like all this little it doesn't doesn't have to make sense right right like why why are there floating rocks here that doesn't make any sense obviously it's not really it's not really realistic but it doesn't have to be depend what you're going for you know it's just nice to have like little pieces and bits floating around it just makes it look more cool and just nice effect you know it's an easy way to add motion okay so that's that so those two tricks right there are enough to like pretty much add a a good amount of motion to a lot of different types of scenes they're just very simple tricks to just kind of make it feel a bit more alive but you know at some point you're going to have to figure out like how to animate objects moving around and things moving and different parts working together and stuff like that so just uh just kind of play around with animating objects and you'll kind of figure this out over time of like things you can move around it turns out you can actually key frame almost anything in blender so you know anytime you see a little uh dot next to any property that means you can key frame it and you can animate it so just mess around with that as much as you can and you'll figure out like different ways of moving things around but I'll just kind of show you some stuff I've done to give you some ideas of like things you can move so you could set up like intricate Contraptions like this where things are like kind of in a parenting hierarchy if that sounds scary just don't worry about it but objects moving around and kind of interlocking basically you could do just like location key frames and animating the scale of different things and like making things appear and disappear and scale and move around and really just have fun with it um you can't really go wrong with this it's just like do do what is going to be cool just kind of make whatever you want you don't have to do anything that's that complex to make crazy animations I know you'll see people like Ian Hubert just going absolutely crazy you don't have to go like that hard with animating stuff to get something that looks good um a lot of my animations are extremely simple like they're not there's nothing that crazy going on um you could see in this one that's happening here it's literally just those two tricks that I was talking about like the camera's moving forward and there's some dust particles that are barely even moving so that's I think that's it for for these tips but I want to talk about render settings now because maybe I should do this in a separate video actually yeah I'm going to do that in a separate video okay next video I will talk about how to render animations efficiently and samples and resolution and temporal D noising to get rid of uh like grainy D noising crap and like the flickering all that stuff will be in the next video um so stay tuned for that if you want to see that so yeah just go out and just make animations that's really the best way to get good of this is just go try it a bunch of times and you'll figure out like what make sense and like you'll figure out how to do this in a way that's efficient and clean and nice and uh you'll get good you know okay that's it for this one thank you for watching and yeah bye oh and uh if you want to help making still environments I have a course you can go check that out if you want link below okay that's it peace

Channel: Max Hay

Views: 16,996

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Id: Rvw3BPKDILA

Length: 15min 58sec (958 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 15 2023