Learning Blender Animation in 1 Week

hi i'm sir wade and i'm an animator i've been using maya for almost 10 years and while i really like it there's a lot of other tools that keep coming out or have been out that i have just wanted to learn for years at this point and honestly it's been a little frustrating because i used to be someone who would spend every single day watching tutorials and trying new things and making little short films and projects and all kinds of stuff but as i've been getting older i just don't have much time to do those kinds of things and at this point i've just become so frustrated with that process and that cycle that i decided screw it let's just dive in and for anyone who's new here i'm not into the hole you must choose one you can only have one 3d software pick the best blah blah blah be like batman have a utility belt with lots of good stuff in there so here's the plan start with the most basic animation assignment that everybody has had to do a billion times the bouncing ball after that we're gonna work our way up the difficulty skill until we get to a full acting shot and i have a bunch of shots and exercises planned along the way but before we jump into the bouncing ball i need to figure out how the heck this software works for animation the hotkeys are all over the place the names are all different and i really have no idea what's going on so let's start with some research and some prep for this whole process a year ago i was fortunate enough to have a zoom call with kelty helmerson he is like the main animation guy at blender as far as i know and super super nice he showed me his workflow explained how he used blender told me all kinds of cool hotkeys and things he had set up and luckily i took good notes so i was able to review those next i checked out luciano's videos the adventures of lollipop man he's got some good videos for getting set up some great tips on setting up your shot and just wrapping your head around with everything that's going on and i went to the blender cloud to download some rigs for my adventures as well as watching a few other tutorials from the people of blender themselves and i know i'm going to get comments of people saying you know you can just change the hotkeys to match maya right i don't want to do that i'm not trying to make my blender session feel like maya i'm trying to learn blender for what it is don't let your attachment to one dictate how you use the other it's just gonna frustrate you and speaking of frustrations i spent the first 20 minutes of this entire process trying to figure out how the heck to link the bouncing ball rig into my file and again people always tell me you should just append it it's easier but that's not how you would do it in a production workflow one of the things i was struggling with was that when i wanted to do two different balls in the same scene i linked both of them and for some reason they were connected but when i'd move one or change one they'd both update and it was super weird i did the whole proxy rig thing and i just i could not find anything online as to how to fix this problem so i just made a copy of the file and referenced the other one so each of them were linked but they were linked to copies of them it doesn't matter i made it work that's all that i care about but as far as ball bounces what i like to do is start with a sentient ball one that sits on the ground and decides to bounce you get to choose how kind of squishy or bouncy it is and this is what that looked like so there i was working focused in the zone not realizing the hours passing me by no what year is it not remembering the last time i'd tasted the sweet nectar of life but i'm motivated i'm animating i'm not gonna lose this momentum i can't be bothered to go grocery shopping and unfortunately not everything is open at 3 00 a.m plus i can't keep eating out it's getting too expensive i declare bankruptcy that's where hellofresh comes in the sponsor of this video because i asked them to sponsor it it's what i actually use to make sure i don't wither away while i work a delicious time-saving and flexible option that i actually think you'll like a lot i've used it for months outside of the sponsorship and i pay for it like everybody else i usually hit the quick and easy menu preference and pick the meals i want to eat in a week a box shows up with all the fresh ingredients properly portioned in recyclable packaging for sustainability along with any meats that go with the dishes you get step-by-step instructions with the pre-measured ingredients so even if you've never cooked before it's pretty much impossible to mess it up crunchy eggshells ruin those muffins it's less expensive than eating out all the time and saves hours on grocery shopping also it ensures that i don't come home with a ton of impulse buys welcome to the cooking show for lazy animators like me let's put on our disney apron and also look at this great oven thing i have i've also been able to learn how to cook my own dishes from the recipes they're all like little cooking tutorials so you can apply the stuff you learn to other meals and the options are super varied so you can have a solid breakfast lunch dinner even sides and desserts are choices you can make and you can always skip a week if you do want to live off pizza for seven days with all the money you saved from your smart choices this is what i ate all week throughout this challenge but i figured a lot of other artists watching may also not have a regular eating schedule because food can be time consuming and expensive so if you want to try hellofresh for yourself there's a link in the notes below and you can use my code surveyed14 to get up to 14 free meals across your first five boxes so just remember what chef gusto said anyone can cook but only the fearless can be great and there we go that is lunch not too bad right [Music] next up it was time for two balls of different weights now back when i went to animation mentor and online animation school this is actually the assignment i did back then two balls of different weights one light one heavy and i put them on these little seesaw block things because i wanted them to interact but in a more creative and indirect way and i was really proud of this little thing right here see that little tiny detail yeah i was stoked on that the goal here the reason i started with these in particular was because i work in the graph editor constantly it's just where i live it's where i love to be and i need to figure out how the heck to use the graph editor in blender but all of this was so much more frustrating than i thought it was going to be because there were little things that i found out through my research that i could do like i knew you could switch the dope sheet and the graph editor really quickly and i literally spent like 20 to 30 minutes trying to find the stupid thing in the hotkey editor and make that hotkey or find online where you can update that or is it an add-in like an add-on what do you do to make that happen i just clicked the hot key with my mouse over the window and it worked and i realized that i'm a complete idiot so pro tip control tab and the dope sheet of graph editor switches between the two and you don't need to do anything it just it just works but there's a bunch of stuff in blender that i did not know how to do i could not figure out how to get things done for example working in the graph editor i wanted to zero out values you just hit alt g and it resets the transformation and it's super easy and it took me forever to find that out i wish i had more friends who animate in blender because this could have been a lot easier if i had someone to talk to about these things the other thing that frustrated me was how hard it is to filter your view in the graph editor in mind you just click on the names of things and it filters them you don't have to really think about it too much in blender i had to go through all the little hide visibility buttons to do it which just took a little bit longer i also for the life of me could not figure out how to grab a bunch of the tangent handles if you grab multiple keys and you want to grab the handles and adjust them all on just one side for example i couldn't find any way to do that this is what it looks like in maya but this is my process in blender and i have no idea what i'm doing wrong here lucky for me i had a helper and she kept my morale up the whole time by the way if you don't know luna now you do you're welcome listen to this for the record we've been living in texas for the last year and our air conditioner broke so it was like 100 degrees at four in the morning and i woke up from the heat and decided to start animating because it only get hotter from there so if i look a little tired now you know why i think the hardest thing during this process even this early on was remembering all the information that goes into the craft of animating as well as trying to learn the technical side of it i was so focused on figuring out the technical that i was forgetting basic animation stuff and i wouldn't catch things until much later than i normally would for example i went on this whole rant about spacing because i realized i had animated this other ball coming down and bouncing and whatever and i realized it was 11 frames of a super linear interpolation for this ball to come from the top to the bottom and then the speed at which it bounced off of the wall was completely wrong and it took me an embarrassingly long time to notice that because i was so focused on the workflow and the process of learning how to do the stuff that i just wasn't really looking at my animation and eventually i finished the ball bounce stuff this is what it looked like it's not perfect but you know what it was done close enough time to move on the next thing i decided to jump to was a walk cycle with a character now this was a bit rocky the lessons i was really trying to pick up from this exercise was copy pasting how to get one curve working repurpose it somewhere else and there's just a ton of stuff i couldn't figure out i didn't know how to manipulate multiple controls i had selected which i eventually figured out you just alt click and drag the different attributes but i didn't know this at the time unfortunately with this rig the elbows were inverted so if you grabbed both elbows and typed a value of 10 one would go forward and one would go back because they were reversed versions of each other i also didn't know that you could paste flipped at the time i will say though the alt g or alt r alt whatever to reset the pose that's great i love that i had to make a hotkey in maya to be able to do that so i like that that's built in anyways i worked on this for a little bit and then decided you know what close enough good enough i got the gist i got what i needed and i'm not trying to make a demoral piece this is gonna do i'm going to bed and that's exactly what i did but i will say i was starting to feel pretty accomplished moving through this as quickly as i was because i was learning the stuff it was frustrating at times it was exciting at other times and ultimately i was doing it moving into the next day i learned a valuable lesson it was time to stop comparing the software i kept thinking oh how i do it this way in maya how will i do it in blender and that's really not a healthy way to do this you need to learn a tool free of the expectations and look at it fresh there are just certain things that aren't the same like the middle mouse button is super useful in maya and i wasn't finding that i was using it for anything hardly in blender and so i'd have all kinds of complaints in my head if i could do this with the middle mouse button in maya i can't do it with blender and it bothered me until i realized that there's just a different way to do it and then it was fine i just if i hadn't have been thinking of how maya does it wouldn't have been so mad at blender and so to this point i started really trying to take a step back and just learn the stuff as its own software this is where my original plan completely went out the window because originally i had planned on a seven day production schedule to do a bunch of the basic exercises the ball with the tail the pendulum i was going to do all these different mechanics exercises with the lifting of a box and changing expressions all this stuff and then i realized i'm not trying to relearn animation i'm just trying to learn a new tool and the workflow associated with it the other thing that was really difficult is that i still have stuff to do i'm not just animating like i still have a lot of things going on in life right now and so this whole one week challenge was getting very difficult and it was literally like the first or second day so i decided to step it up a notch let's just go bring in a full character rig and see what happens your soul is forfeit [Music] the first priority was to test drive a full character rig figure out which controls i want to use for blocking and for posing and just get a sense of how it works and i thought maybe i'll just do a practice exercise that could be an option something instead of what people usually consider a demo reel shot i could just do a blink i just the dialogue and by dialogue i don't mean a whole acting shot just the lips just the mouth maybe a head turn maybe something with the hands a yawn just a smile doesn't matter something small manageable but that would have been too easy that would have been too straightforward and that is not in my nature apparently so instead i went looking for reference found something on tik-tok and began to set up my shot i also noticed that rain has the weirdest butt of any rig i've ever seen i don't think this is supposed to look like this why does it look like this i i hate it i don't want it take it back fix it if you've been watching this channel for a long time you might remember some of the interviews we've had for example simon otto the head of character animation on all three how to train your dragon movies when i interviewed him he gave a really great piece of advice you have to give yourself goals by this time i will have achieved this i will have blocked to frame 240 and you really hit that you try and really hit that i think the biggest enemy in getting stuff done is perfection do that at the end fix it at the end you told me you have some workflow videos stick with the workflow like you have to have a workflow think about my shot shoot reference do some drawings once i have that i block through my shots on eights or something or i just do the body blocking or whatever whether you're layered or pose to pose or define the moments when you say now i'm going to edit what i did you have to separate editing and improving what you have and going through and doing something those are two separate processes and when you start mixing those things up you you meander and you start spending a lot of time one of the best traits is to just start working start blocking your shot and just keep going until you're done don't get distracted by anything it's something everybody struggles with but you've got to learn to overcome that and so for me it was time to just start blocking out the shot so while i was blocking there were a bunch of things that came up things that i made notes of that i wanted to share for example you don't want to take the shot too far or all the way to completion without getting some feedback or you risk redoing a lot of work animation's a team sport and getting feedback is what really helps bring your work to the next level or at least to make sure the intentions that you have for the shot are actually clear and that the viewer will receive them without any other explanation so my goal at this point was really just to block out the shot and not get bogged down by all the technical details like props and constraints those things can slow you down and halt your progress entirely if you focus too much on them i figured out how to use constraints and that was all fine it took me a while some googling and all that but one thing that i can share and if you haven't seen my other videos on prop animation or ikfk they're great videos they work for any tool and it's how i actually knew how to do this when you are setting up a prop to use with the hands in most cases if it's something small like a pen or a cup or whatever you should constrain stuff not to the wrist not to the arm not to the hand itself but to a finger because most people don't animate just an ik or just an fk they will switch back and forth and i do that in this shot i knew i was going to have to switch from ik to fk for the different parts of the shot if you stick to a finger it doesn't matter which skeleton you're using the fingers or the fingers and the hands are the things that switch the hands and the arm so just stick it to a finger be done with it but it was going fairly well it was actually working i was animating i was making progress things stopped going quite so well there's an add-on i put in blender which gives me this ease thing in the graph editor it's kind of like a tween machine and it was nice at times but it needs some work anytime i used a ton of controls with the slider it would hang up the whole software would would just freeze up whether i use the slider or the little buttons it didn't matter that's not great it was just faster to crash it and pose it myself so i'd love to see some work done there now there is a built-in thing called the breakdowner and that's only a partial solution i don't love how the ui element isn't by the mouse when you hit the button it's like over on the corner and also it worked with everything that was selected you couldn't isolate just selected graph editor curves or something things that animbot can do so it's better than nothing but it is only a partial solution but here is probably one of the biggest things this was awful the rain rig ik fk hand switching it's a nightmare i don't know if this is the rain rig or if it's the cloud rig like add-on thing whatever this is but oh man this thing needs some work first of all the snap doesn't work 100 now that's not that big of a deal it's not a it's not a deal breaker but i would like to see the snap actually be accurate because it would change locations more importantly though the visibility thing sucks if i went from ik to fk or vice versa it doesn't matter if i'm in one arm layout setup whatever and i switch to the other one it disappears now usually that's normal because you switch to the other one you don't need to see the one you're not using but then you scroll back into your timeline before you keyed that into where you were using the other one you don't see it it doesn't show it you can't show both you switch the ik fk switches do whatever you want and they just they don't it just i should be able to turn it on and turn it off with the ikfk buttons regardless of which skeleton i'm actively in it was so frustrating and i hated it also there were all kinds of weird generated graph editor curves that were super buggy i know that that's definitely not supposed to happen and while we're talking about the rain rig there are some things missing for example the cheek puff it doesn't have a control to go in you can only puff out and only a certain amount you can't really push it further which is unfortunate but it's not that big of a deal but the fact that it doesn't suck in was a bummer because especially for this chewing shot i wanted it to feel fleshy and organic and then super fun and so i decided to take it upon myself to learn how to add a custom control in a separate blender window i opened the original rain file and figured out how to add a shape key re-sculpt the face into what i wanted and put a driver to push it through the reference now i could not figure out how to actually create like a bone or like a control to do this and it didn't put a lot of time into it to be honest but i just made a cube and locked its rotation to that shape key that i turned on but this is ultimately why you want to link or reference your rigs versus importing them i now have a rain file that i could load back into my shot i then had that control i could add it to my shot but i am able to share this if i were working on a bigger project with other artists and we could all use it non-destructively without affecting our work or having any issues i was super proud of myself for this one and it's important to remember that blocking is really just to communicate the intentions of the shot for posing for acting and especially timing and when you're doing these little projects for exercise and learning it's also nice if you can scale it back if you pick something that you are able to cut in half if you really need to which is what i decided to do i only animated about half of the audio that i originally wanted to from like 800 frames down to 300 because it's about as far as i got and i really didn't have the time to keep going it was at this point that i realized i should get some eyes on this so i got some feedback from a good friend of mine beau pratt bo and cameron pratt run the pratt bro stream over on twitch i'll link to that down below if you guys want to check it out it's fantastic great learning resource they are amazing teachers and they really know their stuff super helpful for learning animation i got a ton of good notes on my work there were a few ideas that i hadn't considered that got brought up that i should do one note in particular was that this moment with the eye direction wasn't really reading he couldn't really tell like what the character was thinking it's right in between her being childish where like let's say a parent says don't eat that and the kid goes ah and she also feels genuinely curious whereas like oh don't eat that but i want to it's not really clear where she's kind of looking all fair all good points because if it's not clear it's not working doesn't matter what i want it to be your but i intend if it's not clear it's not working so i knew i had some work to do by the way if you want any one-on-one feedback time with me we have patreon studio dailies it's a community feedback area to learn from other people's shots like you would in a studio and get direct critiques on your own work we do them twice a week over on zoom and i'll put a link to that in the description so if you want to come check out the patreon there's all kinds of fun stuff all kinds of good stuff to help support these videos which by the way if you're enjoying this please hit the thumbs up really helps with the whole youtube thing i appreciate it and subscribe if you haven't already it's free you can always change your mind so thanks now as i was addressing the notes from feedback i decided to jump into lip sync i wanted to get a little bit deeper in there and this is where i really just hated my life i hated everything about this process it's not playing enough of the audio for me to get an understanding of the dialogue there is a chance that i just didn't know what i was doing in blender that is entirely possible that maybe there's a better way to do it i just hadn't found it if it's not a default behavior and it's not easy to just stumble across the right way to do it and you end up in my situation where i'm just doing something and being frustrated that's not ideal and also if there's just not a better way to do it well then no no no no no the audio scrubbing experience was awful there were so many dropped frames that i couldn't scrub through my timeline and hear what they were saying reliably on each frame i had no idea where the lip shapes needed to be because i couldn't find out where the sounds were actually hitting blender's timeline is basically useless for animators so you really do all your work in the dope sheet or the graph editor and i'd love to be able to see the waveform in either or both of those places but i'm sure there's a way to show the waveform i just didn't know the real problem was the real time playback and all the dropped frames the fact that i could never hear the audio while i was animating that was a pain i hated it lip sync was such a struggle because of that some of this was definitely just the learning curve of me having to get used to things but other parts of the process i feel it's worth a critique and i can't wait to see what the devs are doing for blender 3.0 because this definitely needs some work and honestly at this point i was done i was fried and finished and i got enough of it working that i felt like i had a handle on things and it would have just kind of been more of the same and i really just didn't have any more time we were out of time on this challenge so i called it you know part way through blocking or blocking plus or wherever you would say this is where you definitely know what's going on and i feel like i kind of messed a few things up that i wanted to fix but you know what a little bit of the acting needed some context and so i decided to do some set dressing since the video was sponsored by hellofresh i wanted to just put the box in there to make it seem like maybe she was eating hellofresh and this is just entirely my call i just wanted to put that in there for fun so i figured out how to do some uv stuff stick a logo on a box i needed to put a little plate of chips and i could not figure out how to do that easily so i just decided to create an emitter and simulate some chips onto a plate i also made a procedural watermelon just to test my shader abilities i really like the shader workflow in blender that's one of my favorite parts to do actually and while this was not needed at all i really wanted to do lighting because i also really like that part of blender too so i used the skylight world node to get most of the way there some windows to catch some interesting shadows and because i'm not a masochist i didn't want to model a whole background so instead i just grabbed a background image with matching light direction to save some time blur it color correct it and do some light compositing i really should have created a shot camera first but i made it work fine i did need to switch the test eyes back to the normal eyes that she's supposed to have because that's not what i want at all and figure out how to render on alpha which is this thing here after some light compositing this is the shot it's really hot what do you mean don't put it down if you put that on my plate don't eat that it's really hot it's not that hard it's not that obviously it's not done but you get the gist i think this kind of gets it across and you know what i am proud of myself i did not think that i was going to be able to get this far in this amount of time to answer the question of can you learn blender's animation tools in log all week the answer is yes especially if you have some background in other software because i am very familiar with maya and other 3d tools it definitely helped but regardless i really just didn't expect it to go as well as it did i feel like this shot actually has a lot of potential it has promise it actually isn't a bad animated shot i feel like if if someone were to watch this if i were job hunting you know it's definitely not finished it's not polished like it's it's not ready for a demo reel but i feel like it's actually in a good direction unlike the walk cycle which i think is actually really stiff and bland and it's kind of weird to look at i'm not a huge fan of how that turned out but that was again really trying to figure out the workflow of the graph editor but once i get into the more advanced stuff and really spent some time doing a bunch of different things i feel like it all kind of came together but i'm interested to know what you think when you clicked on this video and you saw the challenge did you think it was actually going to work out to this point did i exceed your expectations or did i fall short please let me know in the comments let me know if you found anything in here useful that you didn't know before or if you've got any tips for me because i had a lot of problems and uh i'd like to fix them if possible anyways if you've enjoyed this video please hit the thumbs up and subscribe if you haven't already it makes a huge difference and a huge thank you as well to hello fresh for sponsoring this video because since i do have hellofresh and i've used it for months i really like it i think it's a really good thing for artists who don't have a lot of time if you want to eat well eat healthy and feel good as you sit and wither away on the computer you should definitely check it out with that link in the description thanks again for watching i'm suede and i'll see you in the next video alice who you might know from the blender videos my editor is no longer my editor she's starting a new animation job we're excited for her we're also sad so leave some nice comments down below for her congratulating her on the new gig and uh i gotta find a new editor so yeah that's gonna be fun

Channel: Sir Wade Neistadt

Views: 198,159

Keywords: learn blender animation, blender animation, b3d animation, character animation, blender character animation, learn blender, 1 week, learn in 1 week, learn blender in 1 week, blender for beginners, blender free animation, maya vs blender, maya vs blender animation, maya animator, blender animator, how to animate in blender, blender acting animation, blender lip sync, blender dialogue animation, blender walk cycle, ball bounce, bouncing ball, blender, blender 3d, b3d, animate

Id: 6xr_9Ce2Ylc

Length: 26min 1sec (1561 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021