Key Frame Animation of Low Poly Character in Blender 2.9x

in this video we're going to use blender to keyframe an idle animation a run animation and tweak the animation for a little bit more of an expressive run cycle as well if you haven't seen the two previous videos in this series check out the first video where i model this character and in the second video we create an armature and rig and weight paint [Music] all right so now we're going to switch from this uv editing tab and i'm going to be working in the animation tab and everything looks a bit gray and dull here so i'm going to set the settings right i'm going to go to this drop down switch the texture and i usually like to keep shadow on and also this cavity look with both and then slide these up then we get a little crisper low poly look and the armature is showing through here which is fine also on this left side we can do the same operation drop down texture and then we go shadow cavity both slide these up so now we're all set to start keyframing and the first thing we're going to do is create an idle animation and there's many ways you can do those it's quite funny how different idle animations look usually they're very exaggerated for some reason but we're going to make a quite a basic one make sure that you're in post mode and you do that by selecting this armature and pressing ctrl tab and when it goes light blue like this that means you're in post mode i'm also we're going to change in the animation here down in the dope sheet we're going to switch to action editor and we're going to click on this little plus here to create a new action and i'm gonna mark this and rename it to first actually i'm gonna do a t-pose pose and i usually prefix this nowadays with zero first because with a zero here it means that it alphabetically sorts it at the top and whatever animation is alphabetically at the top when you import it into unity will be the default pose of the character and it's quite nice to have them come in in a t pose because you might be in the middle of a death animation or something and it's a bit tricky to get out of that doable but it's uh this is easier we also need to lock this animation into place now i want to click this little fake user and that means that this is data is going to be saved even if it has no user it's called and that's if we accidentally clear stuff away in the nla editor or something that won't get deleted it's got a fake user now so we protect it with this little shield icon for this t-pose now there's no keyframe here so i'll click a to select all of the bones here and then while i'm up here i'm going to press i to insert a location and rotation keyframe and that's all we need to do to lock this t post now into this action that can be accessed now through unity or a game engine so we can have it in t-pose if necessary that's pretty good if you need to set up an avatar or some body mapping in unity so a little tip keep the t pose now we're going to do the idle animation i'll click on this little icon to do a new action and that creates a new action it copies it pretty much what i just had but we can rename this one now to idle connect this to a fake user so we don't accidentally delete it in any other editor there so now when we're going to start keyframe animating i click on this little record button here for auto keying it makes it a little bit easier otherwise you tend to forget to manually insert the keyframes so i usually enable auto keying here and then i select this arm now and press r to rotate when we just fold the arms down maybe like this or to rotate that one down select the torso g to move it and we've got inverse kinematics enabled so he'll he won't sink through the floor with his feet now so i'll lower him down to there maybe we can bring the knees out maybe a little bit g to move these i should enable screencast keys so you can see what i'm doing here and i click on this foot here shift space and g which gets this little move icon rotate to the side here so i'm just going to have them squat a little bit like this maybe we'll bring this foot back r to rotate and z to rotate it on the z axis rotate again manually g and this one rotate z to rotate on the z axis and then i just tweak it a little bit like this i use the middle mouse button to rotate an r to rotate the foot here maybe slide this foot forward to there and we can change the body pose as well drop it down a little bit further rotate the torso forward click the spine bone rotate it backward and everything that i do now in terms of rotating and moving these bones will save that into keyframes and if i click a here you can see all the ones that are stored here now and that's basically all the bones but some of them are tweaked now we also want to bend the arms a little bit it looks a bit unnatural to have them hanging so r to rotate that one or to rotate the lower arm like this maybe side view here rotate just use the mouse wheel to click on it to rotate and press r to rotate it in whatever direction that you're currently viewing hard to rotate this one forward hanging down to there so now he's standing here nice and simple but if we press play now nothing's really happening because we've only got one set of keyframes here on number one so we need to animate to another state and if you can't see the keyframes here sometimes a little bit hidden and i hold the shift key now in the middle mouse button to slide up because they're hiding up here out of view now we skip forward to frame 20 let's say and for this one we have to figure out what's he going to do with his body while he's just standing here maybe he sways a little bit maybe he moves his shoulders like he's breathing or something so make sure that auto keying is still enabled down here and we go to frame 20 here and we figure out something new to do let's do g to move the torso up a little bit or the pelvis maybe we'll raise his shoulders a little bit hard to rotate the shoulder similar to like the lungs breathing or something and as we raise the shoulders i'll rotate the arms down a little bit r to rotate r to rotate now every time i do something now it inserts keyframes automatically down here now we can press play but first i should we can scrub here holding the mouse wheel that looks a little bit like he's breathing we could do a few more little tweaks here just pick any bone rotate it ever so slightly rotate just tiny tiny movements hands maybe slightly slightly that's it and then now we try to scrub it again yeah that's all i'm gonna do for now and now i can click on a to select all the bones here make sure the mouse cursor is up over here over the armature when you do it and then you can press ctrl c slide to frame 40 here and then ctrl v and that pastes back the post you could also copy the keys down here another way to do it if i do ctrl z double click a while the mouse is down over the dope sheet here or the in the action editor click on b to box select select all of these keys and if you go down far enough here out of view it's going to know that you want to select all the ones that even if i hold the shift and mouse wheel now you can see that all of these turned yellow so it selected all of these keys and then while i'm down here with a mouse i can press shift d to duplicate these and slide them to frame 40. that's another way you can do it you can copy them up here like we did first or we can copy the keyframes down here and duplicate them with shift d right now when we press play we can see that it's got a lot of key frames here that it's not using and we wanted to loop on so we're going from frame one here that's our start frame but this end frame here is 250 so we want to lower that but we don't want to lower it to 40 because this frame is duplicated then he'll do a little twitch so we're going to go one frame ahead here 39 we'll go to edit this one press 3 9 and then now it's going to loop here if we press play he's got his little breathing post now a little idle animation you might not notice it now but we should make this animation into a cyclic animation so some animations this idle one you can't really tell so much because it's such a subtle movement but for our run animation that we're going to do we want to make the animations into cyclic movements as well because then it's going to predict on the motion curves so it knows what frame is going to come after this 39 frame again to fix that press a to select all the keyframes down here in the action editor dope sheet and do shift e and then set keyframe extrapolation to make cyclic and you won't see any difference now but we would see difference here in the graph editor but it's so shallow the graphs that we can't really see them now but for the run animation it'll make more sense so we'll repeat this again for the run animation switch it back into the dope sheet and now the idle animation is done if you want to preview it without the armature you could either look on the left side here you can also hide the armature it'll still animate so simple as that that's going to be our first animation that we're going to have the second animation we're gonna do in this video is a run animation they're a little bit more fun to do for any animations like running and walking i usually google up a reference image so let's do that just go to google and type run cycle and hit enter and go to image search and here you can scroll through any animation that you like let's just pick this one here and then we're going to have a look at this so we're going to replicate the straight leg the down the passing pose here the push and the up and then we're back to the straight leg pose here as well and we they've this one actually names the keyframe one three five eight and then we loop on 12 again and then we can start animating using that image as a reference so i'm gonna go to uh here let's create another one click on this little icon new action rename it to run and click the little shield icon here again to protect it from accidental removal with the fake user connection i select this bone select a to select everything and we want to clear some data out here make sure you're in the run animation here i'll double click a to deselect while the mouse is down here in the dope sheet or the keyframe b to box select all of these and make sure you go past the bottom here press delete and then delete these keyframes now we've cleared all of them so we're back to this and here we can even clear these so while all the bones are selected here a do alt g to reset the movement and alt r to reset the rotations of everything we're back into t pose and now we're going to keyframe the animation so using that reference image or whatever reference image that you picked go into side view of your character and i'm going to do control 3 on the numpad so i get the same view as my reference image and then we're going to do the first frame here make sure that auto keying is enabled down here and make sure you're in the run animation i'll click on the torso and we see that we're going to lower the torso down a little bit like this then we're going to take his right leg and that's going to be going back so g to move it and r to rotate the foot to make sure that you pick the target ik bone now and if you have a character set up like this one like i did in the previous video then this one is already set up for this foot animation and the leg inverse kinematics so again r to rotate and try to replicate the look of that movement of the leg and then for his other leg that's going to be the straight leg here his left leg g to move it r to rotate it so we get this heel contact we can leave the arms for later on but we can lower the torso a little bit so we got good connection with the ground archer rotate it forward and then r to rotate his head up but we'll keep the arms out for now we'll just focus on the legs first so now we've set the first keyframe and according to the reference image it should actually be a little bit higher still so we'll move it back to there because we need to have some space to move them on the next frame downwards so we'll go to frame number three now according to the reference and here it should drop down a little bit or to rotate the foot g to move it in under the body and this right leg now we're going to put press g to move it forward so it's about to pass here we can look on the left side here everything it looks a bit funny bone but that's okay okay again the arms we leave and any more head movements we'll just keep it simple for now then we skip forward to frame number five and here we're going to do the push pose so the pelvis or the root bone goes up his right leg goes back and r to rotate we have to bring him down a little bit so we see that the ik bone is connected good still to the heel there this right leg g to move it forward and r to rotate and g to move it we're gonna have it to here and then the final frame now we're gonna skip forward to frame number eight and he's gonna go up again higher and his left leg is now gonna detach from the ground r to rotate g to move fold it r to rotate the foot back take the right leg here r to rotate the foot and g to move it forward archer rotate g to move it forward and that's going to be the last keyframe that we need for the leg movements here if we scrub this we can see that he's moving his legs up to here so far so good now we need to mirror this to the other side as well if you checked out the two videos before this where we did the mirror and did the roll angle and everything set up but then we can copy and paste mirror poses now that's going to be really handy if i select a to select all the bones and expand this a little bit so we can see some more keyframes double click a that deselects everything down while the mouse is down here over the dope sheet or in the action editor click a again to select all of these now we press ctrl c to copy all of these so that copies all of these little yellow keyframe dots here slide it forward to frame number 12 according to the reference image and now comes the magic control shift v that pastes everything that we just did but mirrored so now we should have an animation where he runs and then it follows through with the other leg and since we copied the idle animation this is in cyclic mode so this animation already works and if that doesn't work for you it's probably because you're not in cyclic mode i'll click a to select everything shift e and usually it's clear cyclic this is the default behavior that you'd have so basically just stands he stops here so if you're modeling without doing the idle animation first and you're wondering why yours is stopping here this is why and this is the normal behavior as well and we should actually copy this frame just to make sure so double click a to deselect everything and then i'll b to box select drag it down past here and just the first keyframe and you can scroll down here with the middle mouse button to make sure that everything is selected shift d to duplicate it and then we need to see how many frames we're going to skip one two three here so we're going to skip one two three and then there is going to be our original pose again and now if we loop with this we can't loop it on 23 because 23 is the same frame as one here so we have to loop it on number 22 and then press play and now we have a pretty good it's just the leg so far no movement to the head or anything like that so it's looping now but we should really keep that cycling thing on because if we go now select all the keyframes i'll go to view and do toggle graph editor if i hold the ctrl key i can slide this up so i see these graphs a little bit better and now you can see that we've got some movement here for example these represents the different rotations that we did to end movements of the leg joints and see that they just flat line here after this so sometimes you'll get a little jitter when when it loops if you do it this way and what i usually do to get rid of that is i do make sure that everything is selected here you can do this both in the graph view and in the dope sheet that we were in before do shift e and make cyclic and see now that it repeats this over and over again and that's probably the best way to ensure that you get perfect motions between the different synchronizes now we can go to view and switch back to the dope sheet okay so that's uh the legs done now we can fix the arms a little bit after here so i'll go to frame number one again select this arm and then i press one on the keypad or the numpad to see from the front we do r to rotate this down to here now if i i can do this up here as well ctrl c to copy it and ctrl shift v to copy the pasted mirror mode here again if this doesn't work for you the way it did is because the roll angle is probably incorrect so check out the previous video on the rigging to get the roll angle correct when you do the armature so for the arms we need to see here how should they move control three so as the right leg goes back the right arm should go forward so i'll rotate that one forward and rotate this one up rotate down tweak it a little bit make sure auto keying is on and that you're on keyframe number one here for the other arm on the other side the left leg is going forward so this arm is going to go back i'll rotate it from the shoulder to there and rotate the lower arm down to there and the arms aren't so picky you can get away with a quite simple animation so for here we can select shift select these arms only the ones that we've changed now press ctrl c skip forward to the 12 animation frame which is the reverse exact reverse one up here now ctrl shift v and that pastes the mirror mode so that runs he's got his arms running out a little bit so we can fix that and on the final frame here 23 we need to copy back this frame again the first one so ctrl c skip forward to 23 control v just the normal one no shift we don't want to mirror this one now when we press play he's actually moving his arms and it looks a bit stale still and they're pointing inwards so let's fix that go back to frame number one we can use the middle mouse button to rotate this one maybe we'll just rotate that arm in rotate that one in further as well that could be better in many ways shift select both of these ctrl c go to this frame ctrl shift v and go to the last frame control v again and now he'll start swinging his arm forward a little bit like this all right so let's uh tweak this animation a little bit further and uh i'll go to the first keyframe here and select the spine bone press one to go to front view maybe we'll have him tilt over a little bit to his uh right side when the left leg goes forward maybe we'll do r to rotate and z to twist it a little bit like this as well just a little little tiny bit and then with this bone selected now ctrl c go to frame number 12 ctrl shift v go to frame number 23 and ctrl v again so we have this cycle thing so now he's swaying a little bit more and then i'll do side view control three on the keypad we can also make him tilt forward a little bit more and on frame number one it's gonna be the same but we'll go to frame five and rotate it forward ctrl c and then we have to skip if i zoom in with the zoom wheel here a little bit i can see how many should i skip one two three i should skip so from this frame one two three and then here ctrl shift v and now we've implemented a little forward sway as well so this is how you can keep tweaking your animations if you want even further swaying movement or if you want him to arch his back maybe do even more cartoony movements and just build on this set of animations uh maybe a walk cycle use the same type of a reference and do that or you can keyframe any other sort of animation and when you're done just untick this auto keyframing so you don't start editing and moving loads of other objects around so it stores those locations it's a bit easy to forget you can make the animation a little bit more expressive as well if you want for example here i tweak the animation a little bit so the second keyframe or the down post there is lowered the torso down and then the highest pose i'm actually moving up the torso quite a lot to exaggerate that movement as well and if you're making a platformer it could be fun to exaggerate the movements a little bit the principle of animation is to exaggerate movement one of those principles so that might create a little bit more of a cartoony cycle for you you can download the blend files that i've done in many of my tutorials in the tutorial tier on patreon.com infensia until next time have a great one and i'll see you then bye for now [Music] you

Channel: Imphenzia

Views: 87,929

Rating: 4.9857559 out of 5

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Id: yjjLD3h3yRc

Length: 21min 6sec (1266 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 06 2021