Import a CAD model and create an Exploded View animation in Blender 3.0

hello everyone and welcome i'm derek elliott from dirk.com and today i've got a quick video showing how i would import a cad model split it up into pieces and then create an exploded view animation this is a really popular look that a lot of people ask for when it comes to product animation in particular whether or not there's actually a good reason for doing this i'm not so sure about but hey it does look pretty cool it's basically the same thing that we did with the camera animation portion of my cell phone tutorial but with a little more attention given to part separation keeping track of origin points some shape key deformation to make this little clip pop yeah things like that now of course if you want to follow along you'll have to have a model to work with really just anything with multiple parts doesn't have to be a cad model cad models are just usually kind of disgusting with too many parts and great for this type of animation now unfortunately i won't be able to provide the file for this particular one like i normally would on my patreon since it does have some proprietary details but the methods we'll cover should get you pretty well up to speed on the basic process now just really quick the model i'm using is of a mechanical leveling device for a smartphone or action camera called grav grip it was designed by a guy named kevin thomas who reached out to me a long time ago about making a kickstarter ad for its launch and yada yada yada raised over a million dollars and it is a product that you can buy super cool thing and great for this type of animation so definitely check that out if you're into it but let's jump into the video all right so i'm in a pretty default blender 3.0 beta scene here we've got the default cube and everything i'm going to get rid of those and go ahead and import my cad model this is one that i believe was exported from either fusion 360 or maybe solidworks i'll have to follow up on the details there but let's go ahead and import it's going to be an obj um obj i found tends to be the easiest format to work with between cad files and blender people just always seem to be able to export it and yeah it's just a pretty common file format if you're working with something like a step file then that might be something that you need to get an add-on for i do actually have an add-on called stepper which will allow me to import step files and works really well but uh for the most part i've never had too much issue with people exporting obj files for me now for some reason they usually come in you know bigger than they should be or just bigger than the you know it's scaled obviously proportionally but i find that i almost always need to scale things down by like .1 and then sometimes even 0.1 again to get it to a more reasonable size but um i think i'll leave it at the previous scale so that's just to get things working a little bit better with my existing grid i basically want to be able to you know move things and have them snap along the grid but uh of course with most cad projects everything is going to be pretty well to scale so if you need to check the scale that's something you can do but for our purposes we're going to be talking more about the animation here um and of course you can always scale things after the fact now just for the sake of making myself feel a little better the scale on this object right now is 0.1 because we scale that down so i'm going to press ctrl a and apply the scale so now this is like i said a cad file and it came with you know some of these different parts were probably hidden before and so you know they shouldn't have necessarily exported but this is completely common uh when i'm receiving cad files to kind of just have extra stuff in there and and this is all just one piece so you might be thinking you know how are we going to make an exploded view we need to like go in and separate all these pieces and yeah that's basically exactly what we're going to do so what i want to do first is sometimes you can pick different parts by like obj files could sometimes have different materials so already assigned see there you can see we could select those objects that way you know something here was powder coat black select looks like that's a small piece on the gopro and i should say that this um probably covered in the intro but this is the grav grip hydraulic stabilizer it's no no batteries or anything it's kind of just a camera leveler it's a pretty cool project i work on with a guy named kevin for a kickstarter and um yeah it did really well and he's he's selling it so if you want if you want to buy this you can but um yeah it's good good example for this exploded view so what i'm going to do is press tab to go into edit mode and then i'm going to select everything i don't think i really need to do that but i'm going to press p and separate by loose parts and tabbing back out of edit mode now you'll see that it has kind of successfully separated this you can see we've got some issues here where you know the cameras for example weren't separate but that that's okay and to see those separate parts a little easier i'm going to go up here into this top drop down and then blender has this mode called random which will just randomly assign kind of these pastel colors to different parts of the model which is really helpful for differentiating them all and i'm just kind of seeing what those separate parts are so with that done i'll also turn on this cavity option just because it kind of highlights our edges a little bit better and that looks nice i think but yeah what i want to do now is just go through and start deleting all these things so circle selecting is the way i usually like to do that but you'll see that you know i can kind of drag across and it won't always get everything and that's because right now everything has the same origin which is right here at that point so you know if i scroll over that it's going to get everything but what i'll do to make the selection process a little easier just right click and then set origin to geometry and what that's going to do is assign origins you can see all these little dots here are now assigned to kind of the average location of all the the vertices that make up those different parts so now i can just go in here i'm just going to delete the the phone delete the gopro delete that now sometimes when you're doing this you may have yes so there's these little parts sometimes you can avoid having these get separated in different pieces if you remove doubles when you start the file but that's not always a good thing sometimes with these cad models there can be you know geometry in here like there's these bearings that are perfectly aligned with the housing that they're in and if you remove doubles to remove overlapping geometry then it might accidentally connect pieces that you wanted to be separate so just be careful when you're doing remove double sometimes it's best to just try separating by loose parts first and then and then if you need to you can remove doubles on individual pieces after the fact but this for example is a little logo i know that this is part supposed to be part of the mold here so i'm going to press i'm just going to press ctrl j to join those together but this is kind of the first step to creating an exploded view like this would be to just sort of you know get your model cleaned up to the point you want and and remove any additional pieces and then the next thing we're going to do is just kind of organize just make sure we kind of understand the model so what i'll do is just press i'm actually going to turn on my little gizmo here i can hold ctrl and that's going to be really helpful for putting this back together if i know i'm moving things at defined increments it's going to be easier to align them back up than if i just did that because then that you know to get it back would be you know i wasn't sure exactly where it was so holding ctrl to work with the grid and if you do need to adjust the grid you can you can change it up here and then also for those of you who are concerned about the scale of objects the units are in this tab right here the scene tab scene properties tab but i'm just going to kind of pull all these different things apart and just sort of get a little bit of a feel for the model so this is kind of a pin that holds everything together i believe that is over molded into that part so those are actually they're separate pieces it looks like at least in the cab file they are but i might just go ahead and join them or at least yeah i'll just join them and if i needed to assign different materials which i'll select this one select that one ctrl j to join them if i needed to assign different materials to those then what i can do is just pressing l will select islands and when we did that initial command which was to separate everything into individual parts that's basically what it's doing it's just going in and selecting mesh islands that are not connected to other parts of the mesh and enjoying them together so we've also got a bearing here so i'm going to pull this back and i'm just kind of pulling the model apart getting it to a point where i can sort of understand all the different parts and pieces here you can see we've got this ball that goes in here this is a weight set that's used to adjust the um the balance of the camera on the on the mount here this is actually old version of the grav grip the new versions don't even have that but i'm going to select all these pieces maybe these and i'm going to parent that to that so let's parent those objects now this part yeah it kind of rotates in there i don't think that's really going to be crucial to the exploded view but in case we do want to rotate we want it to rotate about this kind of ball joint there so i'm going to assign a new origin and the way i'm going to do that is just finding some good geometry where i know would be the center of that shift s snap my cursor to selected tapping atom edit mode and then right click set origin to 3d cursor now when i rotate that it's going to rotate as it should kind of along that now there might be a couple other places where we want to do a similar type of thing for example this you know if i wanted to rotate it i would want it to rotate on this axis but right now the origin has been placed over here and when we do that snap origin to geometry that's just going to take you know the average of all these points and kind of put it right in the middle to what it assumes is kind of average but with all this threading down here it's kind of a more dense area so it's kind of pulled our origin there but anyways to get it back to about where i want i want it to kind of be in the middle of this circle so i'm just going to select some you know a logical place and hopefully your cad file is as clean as this sometimes they're not so not so clean this one's not too bad but this is a this is an exported cad model so you know some stuff is a little bit funky but it's it's overall it's really easy to work with not too bad but that's going to be what i assume is the top and bottom of that circle exactly so shift s cursor 2 selected and then set the origin to the 3d cursor now if i was going to rotate this you know it's going to rotate on that axis so that's making me think too that we probably want to parent this object to this so let's parent that keep transform so that's together and then this one let's parent to this as well control p object so now this is all together now this i think actually is part of that maybe another over mold situation but let's just let's just do it as a parent and then so now is this all together okay so the last thing would be to connect this ball control p object keep transform so again i'm just trying to kind of understand my model and the different parts here you don't need to parent everything especially if you're just going to be doing like a linear axis animation but you know in case i want to do some rotation here i want these to be moving sort of logically with it so let's maybe um let's pull that back so i think that bearing is on the back side and then we've got all these parts in here and this is kind of the meat of the device so putting this all together here that caps out there and then we've got this part with a little gear on the end of it and now when i do the animation i'll probably have to figure out a way to maybe move that out of the way so that we can have you know there's no clipping when that passes through there but yeah just trying to understand the model this is kind of the first step you know if you are the one who actually made the model you might not need to do this but for me anytime i'm handed cad data and i'm going to be animating it the first thing i do is just you know massive inspection of the model just trying to understand the different parts and pieces make sure i understand how it works um so that when i'm doing an exploded view like this it all makes sense but with this all out there i think that looks um looks like we've got everything how we want got every part separated you know if you needed to go in and separate things more you could but but this all looks pretty good um so what i want to do now is you know i could probably just leave it all apart like that because it kind of looks nice so maybe we'll actually do that so let's let's say on maybe frame 30 we're going to have it look like this well i guess these would be you know maybe these would be a little bit lower and then you know i'm not going to do it that way i'm just going to put i'm going to put it all and put it all back together so let's just uh let's pull that in there pull that in there this builds character putting it back together it's kind of fun too because it's really easy when you you'd when you hold control to snap everything together it's kind of just like a super easy lego kit so this is usually the way i actually like to do is with it all assembled and then i'll insert my first round keyframe so that's what i want to do now i'm going to go to frame one press a to select everything and then down here i can go into my keying set and for the active keying set i'm going to do location select that and now with all those selected i can just press i and that will insert in insert keyframes on the selected keying set which right here is location so if i click on any of these you can see they have um you know location keyframes selected so you know if i moved all this out of the way because there's a keyframe here it's gonna it's gonna snap it back because it's all tied to that keyframe and that's one thing that's really great about keyframes too besides just using them for animation obviously is you can kind of use them as like save states to make sure things stay in place you know i do that sometimes when i'm just doing still renders is i'll actually add animation to the objects just to kind of hold them in different positions but what i'm going to do now is just advance to a known frame you could just go to frame one honestly but i'll go out you know one second or so which is 30 frames if i was in the 30 frames per second setting which uh this is again blender 3.0 beta there's a i'm going to run into something that's confusing but uh so far it looks pretty much like blender 2.9 so we're in good shape but now with all those together i'm going to start doing the yeah the exploded animation so i think for that what i want to do is use this little record button auto key which is going to automatically insert keyframes when i move things now let's see if that works let's drag that down okay so it did but it inserted keyframes for everything and i really just want to do it for location so yeah i can do only active keying set so now when we move this down it's only going to do on the location and that's just to avoid you know i'm not going to be messing with the scale the rotation i might do eventually but i don't want to worry about it now um so just just inserting location keyframes and then maybe we you know we pull this one down too maybe these don't go as high so now as i insert keyframes it's going to it's going to or sorry when i move things it's going to automatically insert keyframes which is really handy for doing this type of an animation so maybe this whole thing you know slides down out of there maybe this slides down a little bit so this basically screws in and it'll tighten on this part and this is what the you know gopro and the phone and stuff connect to um so then maybe this comes all the way out this comes out and now when you're doing this you don't necessarily have to hold ctrl to snap in fact i won't because i'm really going to just kind of eyeball it i want it to visually look nice it doesn't necessarily need to be you know exactly on a certain value that's just handy when you're pulling everything apart so you can get it back together properly but this is kind of a nice you know you want to think a little bit about what your what your camera angle is going to be but really today i just want to focus on the actual animation not so much the setup of everything else so maybe this kind of comes out a little bit this comes out maybe this goes back a little bit bring that there something like that i think is working pretty decent for me so those should have all had keyframes automatically inserted so let's just make the whole thing just 30 frames press spacebar and then bam we got our we got our exploded animation pretty much just like that so working easily if you wanted to have it come back together let's just give ourselves some more frames this is kind of an odd thing happening down there so kind of flashing some c pressing c to circle select and that's just selecting oh it's only i want to make sure i have all my objects selected and then c to select all those shift d and then let's say maybe it only takes 20 frames to get back together so our whole animation is well we'll leave it a 60 so it kind of pauses for a second so that's pretty much it for that that's kind of how i would do an exploded view animation and this is obviously a little bit easier because it's just all linear animation but if you want to add some you know detail to this of course you know these would technically screw in when they go up there's no actual knurling on here so you wouldn't really be able to see that but you can you can add other little details like maybe um you know maybe this starts and ends with this rotation and by the way if you press i like we did earlier out here but up in this field it's going to insert it but it'll just do it for the selected object even if you have multiple selected so let's have that start and finish at that eye and then maybe in the middle this whole thing kind of like rotates a little bit just to give it a little bit of interest now if we undo so let's just say yeah we're doing we're doing rotation now so let's go to keying and do rotation so that didn't insert keyframes when i moved it because uh the active keying set was set to a location but just move that tab and it'll automatically insert rotation keyframes so now that kind of just adding a little bit of interest there now where else could we add some animation we could actually add you know let's just let's say at the beginning here let's just go ahead and insert location keyframes for everything or sorry rotation keyframes so with my keying set set to rotation just press i and it should automatically insert all the keyframes for everything good and let's do it again down here oh i only added three i need to select everything press i okay so now everything has a rotation keyframe so maybe in the middle here we can just let this all kind of go a little crazy this will probably drive a engineer's while but let's just um let's type f3 and search randomize transform which will now open up this menu which will allow me to randomize the rotation of everything just a little bit let me do that just kind of cool and just of these selected pieces i don't want there to be any clipping or anything but now let's do um now with those selected let's press i right there and i should add all those keyframes and since we had them on the front and the back they should come right back together yeah so just kind of a cool cool thing now one last little detail that you know you might want to do with uh you know with this particular part there's this little clip that goes in and out so let's uh let's see if we can add maybe a shape key to simulate that clip depressing so to add a shape key what we're going to do is just hit this little plus sign right there and now we'll add basically you know it'll remember the shape you know that shape as the basis so then we do one more shape key and then we can just bring this little part down so let's uh pressing alt z by the way to go into my x-ray view and then so i just selected one of these and then i want to um well for one let's um we want to rotate this about sort of that curve right there so i just selected two vertices shift s cursor to selected um because that's about the axis where i want to rotate this whole part and i'm just going to select like the top right here and then control plus will grow my selection i'm just going to keep pressing that until it grows to you know maybe right about there as good and then there's a couple spots it didn't quite get so let's circle select add those and yeah looks like i got a good amount there and then what i'm gonna do is just press uh let's actually turn on some proportional editing up here and select connected only so now i can press r to rotate this and then let's rotate it about the 3d cursor so pressing period on my number pad or sorry period on my keyboard and then now i can kind of rotate that so you can see there's this little clip that kind of fits into that slot there and this is one thing that helps you know whenever you're working with somebody on this you obviously need to talk about the talk about the model so now pull that down and that's you know on my key one here so now if i tab out of edit mode we've got this little control that will adjust that so maybe this whole animation let's um let's actually pull out a graph editor so up here i'm going to go into my graph editor and those are all the keyframes for one i'll normalize them okay so that's everything a little bit confusing but those are all our keyframes so 1 to 50 so maybe we have for one thing if you want to make this all you know a little bit longer for example maybe you want this to happen over 120 frames you can just press a to select everything up here and then g and you know you don't you wouldn't want to move it like that that's pretty cool but just g and x to slide along the time frame and now it's just going to create some space on either side and then i can press s and x to scale those out and that's just going to make our animation happen a little bit slower which is nice and that will give us an opportunity to add in some frames for the shape key here so that animation doesn't start right now until frame 25 so maybe at frame 25 we have this fully depressed insert keyframe and then we'll pull it back a little bit and we'll have that back to zero and with my auto keying on it's automatically adding a keyframe for me i wish that worked a little bit weird be careful using that auto keying sometimes you can accidentally insert keyframes when you don't want to so then let's have that um so it clips down then maybe when it goes out pops back up keyframe automatically inserted pops out and then maybe right there we'll have it still up but then go forward a few frames we'll have it go down insert keyframe and then we'll have it kind of snap back up boom so now we've got this cool open up click just kind of a simple uh simple thing hopefully i showed you a few different tools you could use there you know since we animated the uh or since we changed the origin here maybe we want to add a little bit animation to that you know just so maybe right here it's got a little uh what would that be the x oh which means we would need to parent this control p object key transform and we didn't parent everything inside so that might actually be a bad idea but you could you could parent everything and then of course if you wanted to move your whole object i would recommend adding an empty so shift a add an empty you can add whatever you want and then you just want to parent all the other parents to the empty and then you can move the empty around but i'll leave that for you to figure out definitely if you have any questions let me know in the comments but really the magic happens up here in the graph editor if you really want to smooth things out change some things you can add in some dynamic effects here this is probably going to look absolutely bonkers okay so you uh probably don't want to do that but let's see if we could i'm pressing t by the way to bring these up that's kind of cool the bounce effect um but yeah i'll do another tutorial sometime going more in depth into the graph editor but uh yeah for the most part maybe just leave it on bezier looks pretty good but yeah there's your basic cad file to exploded view animation i won't talk much about the actual rendering of this because it's going to be highly dependent on your own model but yeah that's kind of how i would go about taking a cad model splitting it up adjusting origins as needed and then adding animation to the different parts to kind of show it off this is something that people ask for a lot in the freelance projects i do but yeah hope you all enjoyed it thanks for watching definitely check out grav grip very cool product there is a new version available this is the old one and yeah thanks for watching i'll see you next time [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Derek Elliott

Views: 221,987

Keywords: blender tutorial, blender, b3d tutorial, blender 3d, 3d tutorial, derek elliott, derrk, blender animation, easy animation, blender 3.0, b3d, blender 3.0 tutorial, blender tutorials, 3d animation, how to 3d, cad, 3d cad exploded, exploded view, cad model in blender, import cad to blender, step to blender, obj to blender, stl to blender, import to blender, industrial design blender, blender for designers, exploded, keyshot, keyshot animation, solidworks animation

Id: KFb4r8UVO0A

Length: 25min 31sec (1531 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2021