How To Make A Lego Animation In Blender (2023 Updated) | Part 1 - Models

so you want to make Lego animation but you're like me and you're too lazy to use real Lego well lucky for you I'm going to show you how to do it on your computer now unfortunately for you it's actually no easier than in real life but I'm going to show you anyways because I still do it how we do it is with this little program called blender blender is an open source 3D modeling animating program that you can download for free from the internet and this is gonna be the first part of a larger tutorial where I will show you step by step the entire process from start to finish inside blender of how I created this oscar-winning animated film yeah this one right here as a clone trooper it's my duty to protect the Republic at all costs this digital age that may that mean communication signals from enemy separatist radios those clankers could never track me now thanks to nordvpn with nordvpn I can encrypt my dinner and hide my location so the separatists can't track me down it's easy to use and compatible with all my devices up to a total of six actually so I could stay protected no matter where I am no matter what com device I'm using but nordvpn isn't just for the clone troopers like me it's for anyone who wants to protect their online information and maintain their privacy so whether you're fighting for the republic or just browsing on the web give nordvpn a try trust me I'm a commander I would know in addition to keeping my communication signal secure nordvpm also lets me access restricted content and bypass online censorship as a cloud trooper I often find myself on remote planets with limited access to information but with nordvpn I could connect to servers around the Galaxy I know my online activity is private and secure and in this day and age that's more important than ever so if you want to protect your online activity and maintain your privacy give an old VPN a try go to nordvpn.com owenator to get an exclusive deal on a two-year plan plus four bonus months free with a 30 day money back guarantee I can't find any reason why you wouldn't I've commanded drag and I approve this message May the force be with you If Only They had a VPN for my brain during Order 66 from importing your models to rigging for animation to actually animating to rendering and we're going to start right now before we start though I just want to say for your own sake if you're looking at the screen here and you're seeing a bunch of these lines here and you're thinking what and you're intimidated by and you look at these menus and you have no idea what any of it means if you don't know blender I would highly recommend that before you start pause this video and do a little YouTube watching from people who show you the basics and then from then if you have that knowledge we can get going so let's get going of course you're going to go to the blender website and you're going to download blender install it like you would with any other program next place you're gonna go where to download the actual add-on that we're going to use mechabricks.com megabricks.com is essentially a community where people can create Lego digitally and they can share the models that they've created with other people and you can download them and yeah it's a cool Community but for our purposes we're going to be downloading them for the sake of using them in blender to do this you're going to go to the shop you and you we need to download the add-on now there are two versions of the add-on there's the light version which is zero dollars and zero cents or there is the advanced version which is 25 either of these will work I have the advanced because it has extra features such as showing more wear and tear on the bricks scratches fingerprints it just makes them look more realistic when we render them but the free version will do just fine starting out so download that clicking on the thing add to cart obviously you gotta log in add to cart download that and install it so I'm going to show you how to do that I'm going to log in so click add to cart you already own this item yes I do and then how you download it is you go to your thing over here your profile you go to purchases and you go to blenderlight and you click download it'll download a zip file but don't extract the zip just leave it like that now we're going to go back to blender we're going to install this add-on we're going to go up to file we're going to go actually it's been moved we're going to go to edit preferences and this is the add-ons panel and we're going to install a new add-on so we're going to install we're going to go to wherever our ZIP file is in our case it's in downloads I'm going to double click it and now it's installed but it hasn't fully installed here it is here but we have to check the check mark to properly install it and then you click refresh if you want but it should be now installed so if you X this off and you go over to file import Mecca bricks I have two because I have the advanced version installed but this is the import window that we will be using to import the models that we that we download from Mecca bricks I'm going to go ahead and uninstall it because I already have it on as of right now I haven't actually animated my oscar-winning animation yet so let's start from the very beginning and I'm going to build the set I'm going to use open the workshop at the top and this is our building space where you can build the models or the characters that you want to import they're different categories and they feature basically close to the full library of bricks that you can think of that exist in the real world obviously not all of them but if you can't find a break that you need you just have to adapt and that's the way it is but there's a lot and you should be all right [Music] now you have your set what do you do with it now well we're gonna download it first We're Gonna Save say that I'm going to call this the control center and I'm going to save it export as change this to blender add-on.zmbx cmbx whatever part of the world you come from click export and it'll download as a zmbx file now we're gonna go back into blender you can move that file to wherever you want of course but I'm going to leave it in my downloads we're going to go to file actually first we're going to delete everything that's currently in the scene delete I click X to do that if you don't already know that shortcut we're going to go file import uh why isn't it there all right so I've just found out that you can't have blender light and advanced installed at the same time good to know so make sure you uninstall one if you're going to install the other and remove it so I'm going to now I'm going to go file import and it's there Mecha bricks and we're gonna go downloads and I've got a million because I have no idea oh I did name this one so if you don't name it it goes Untitled but I got control center right here double click that to import now we've got our model imported into blender and it's pretty cool you can kind of look around see what it looks like but first thing we're going to do is delete this little empty actually you don't really have to but it's just a habit of mine I always delete it next thing we're going to do is if I if you notice if your set's very big if you zoom out it'll clip and it'll disappear this is because these models are actually ridiculously big in the sense of blender scale so we have to scale everything else up to match that I'm going to view and the clip start and end I'm just going to throw a bunch of zeros on the end of that clipping so that when I zoom out I can zoom out forever and you can still see it which is very frustrating if you don't know why your model is all of a sudden disappearing when you zoom out it's not noticeable on this one because it's pretty small but if you have a bigger model you will notice it immediately and next thing we're going to do is add a camera this will be the perspective from which we look through at the scene I'm going to add a new collection because I like to be organized in this one cameras because you may have multiple cameras and when we animate I will use multiple cameras and I will show you how and we're going to go to shift a to add camera and your camera is very tiny but that's okay if you click zero on your numpad or if you go to view cameras active camera this is the perspective of the camera and we're going to go back to uh view here and I'm going to click this this lock this check mark which locks our view to the camera view which means if we start moving around the camera moves around if we have that unchecked and we start moving around we now lose the perspective of the camera as you can see there he is Click zero again to go back in our thing check the camera to move around and I'm just going to look for a nice shot I like the way these kind of lines all lead down towards the chair you can also turn on um composition guide so if you like using the rule of thirds there you can see the rule of thirds there let's put this chair directly in the middle we're going to zoom in a little bit more and voila that's one camera let's say we want to add another camera at a different angle I'm going to go shift a new camera and it'll be camera one put that into that collection and we're going to make this the active camera which you can do by either doing control B or going to object or sorry view cameras set active object as camera this is our new camera and we're gonna if you click on something and you click um the numpad period it'll align your your view to this object or you can also do this by going View local uh sorry view frame selected that one right there and it'll also make that the center of your rotating rotation whatever you want to call it let's say I want to have a side view of this chair but I can't because the wall is in the way if I go past the wall it's a little bit too close there's a way we can trick this in a real life scenario you would just take the wall down obviously you could just delete the wall but we want the wall for the other shot what we can do is make it see through the wall by increasing the clipping on the camera just the same way we did with the with the world view but we can do this to the camera view I'm gonna throw those zeros onto this in case we want to do a wide shot but the clip start is what it sees first so if I increase this ever so slowly eventually the wall will start to disappear and then I can see the chair we're going to go back to our original view view camera set active object as camera and we're gonna we're gonna render this out but first we're gonna have to add lights if you're an outside scene you could throw on an hdri image or HDR image to simulate a sky for example which will give you decent lighting but for this case it's indoors we're gonna have to be a little more customized so what I just did there was I did shift s selection or cursor to selected which puts our cursor in the light bulb I'm going to make a new collection for lights and I'm just going to add a Point light I want to move it down a bit because it's not quite just in case if you go into up here on the top right of your 3D view there's different viewing modes if you click the viewport shading mode that'll put us into look Dev and we can kind of see what the lighting might look like before we render give this time to load and we're going to change it so it uses the scene lights and the world lights all right this is future me realizing I forgot to mention something if you downloaded the light version of the add-on you probably will not be seeing this probably it'll probably just be pink if you just see pink it's because the light actually doesn't allow you to see in this mode so to see or to see what you're doing you can either just use the normal object if you're portraying you could change it to texture one of these two one of these things random single material object texture for example or if you want to see what it looks like when it's rendered some of the spectrum material you can use the viewport shading option which is a lot more stressful on your computer there's no lighting Source at all which is why it's so dark there is but it's not powerful enough for us to actually see it and because these models are so big we have to use massive numbers in our power of the light to actually see it so I'm going to change this to 1 million Watts which is extremely bright don't necessarily need it to be that bright so I'll drop this down to point two which should be good probably a little bit bright still but we're going to duplicate this by doing shift d g x so he's around in the center shift d g x again that one shift dgx for this one so there we have a basic um lighting setup not very good but that's okay for this this is not what it'll look like in the end this does not look very realistic and that's okay this is the early preview essentially it's a different render engine than what we will use in the end I'm going to adjust some settings in my camera one thing that you can do to make your renders look a little bit more realistic is to mimic what happens in real life with depth of field open up depth of field I checked that on I don't have the power to use depth of field if you know what depth of field is you know what I'm talking about I'm going to make the focus you can make the focus any of these objects here by just clicking but what I like to do for more um freedom and especially when I'm animating is to make an empty move that empty to wherever you want to be in Focus Shift s selection to cursor so it moves the empty to that spot I'll name this Focus object and now I'll go back to the camera and make the uh Focus object our Focus object and now it is focusing on wherever that empty is and I can move the empty and the focus will change but you don't really notice anything right now because again the models are so massive the values in blender have to be as massive as well in this case they actually have to be small so if I change this to 0.01 for example which is probably the lowest I would ever go that's very shallow and maybe a little too shallow I'm gonna draw the bump this up to 0.03 and because Lego in real life is so small depth of field would be a little bit higher than what it might be for a movie with real humans or photography real life size this is It's almost like macro photography because of how small Lego is and that's good for our case you can see a preview if I click on viewport shading and this is a lot more takes a lot more computing power on the computer's behalf because it is the more advanced render engine I'm going to turn that off that actually looks pretty good another tip of mine that you can do in real life Lego bricks are never perfectly connected to each other I can make it so that there are small gaps in between the bricks and they're not perfectly placed like they would be in real life to do this it's actually part of the add-on if you open the add-on on this side of the screen you can click randomize But first you have to select which objects you want to randomize but I don't want to select the camera because I don't want to move the camera so I'm going to use it I'm going to open this restriction toggles I'm going to turn on the selectable option now I have the option to click this I'll do it for the lights too which restricts me from being able to select the camera so now if I click a to select everything it selects everything except for the things that I don't want it to select which is perfect now I will click back to our camera view and I'm going to turn off the overlays just so I can see it better if I click randomize everything shifts a little bit and I can change the strength here I can go to show you what I mean I can go all the way 100 that's a little extreme but if that's the effect you want to go for that's great and you can even do it again and you go 100 again to make it even stronger so I'm going to leave it around 8 percent seems good now that's everything I will render out this image first let's change some render settings over in the render properties I'm going to change the sampling I'm going to turn off threshold actually I'm gonna leave that on change the sampling not to 4000. I'll do like 200 performance I'm going to use tiling turn that on it was already on but I'm going to change the tile size to 256 output properties and let's say you wanted to do a 2.35 for one aspect ratio I could change this to like 800. makes it narrower but I'm gonna leave that at 180 because that's normal 16 by nine you can change the output of your image the FPS if you're doing an animation you can select your FPS next thing we're going to do is we're going to open the compositor tab to set up denoising now you could do denoising down here although I feel like sometimes it doesn't work as well I find if you go to the compositor use nodes we're going to make it so that you don't have to use quite as many samples for it to not look grainy or noisy and if you're from any if you've rendered you know what I'm talking about we're going to go to the layer properties and we're going to turn on denoising data which turns on these three things we're going to go shift a search up denoise plop in the denoise node drag in the normal drag in the Albedo Albedo whatever and now this will denoise us our image for us we're going to render out our image I'm going to drop the samples to like 100 just so this goes a little quicker to render your image to see what it looks like go to render image and give it anywhere between 30 seconds to an hour depending on how good your computer is if you want to do really large scale animations you will need a strong computer that's just unfortunately how it works this is our beautiful scene rendered it was pretty low sample so it doesn't look quite as good as it could but as you can see we have a lot of detail in here got some fingerprints on there if you wanted to let's say Turn down the amount of fingerprints that you see you can just go to the micro bricks Tab and turn it down you can turn it all the way to zero you can turn all the way to 100 and that's going to conclude it for the first part of this series in the next episodes we are going to be importing an actual character into the scene and I'll show you the full process of how to animate a character I'll show you how to make custom decals how I make Animations My workflow will be different than a lot of other people's hopefully this helps you [Music]

Channel: Owenator Productions

Views: 108,930

Keywords: blender, owenator productions, mecabricks, lego, 313th, 313th: a star wars story, animation, 3d, modeling

Id: 2gzv2HKAyS4

Length: 20min 14sec (1214 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 06 2023