Product Animation in 15 min [Solidworks/Blender/Keyshot]

what's up guys this video is going to show you how to make the product animation you just saw by using solidworks blender and keyshot i break down my workflow into 10 steps and i will go through each of them in the next 10 minutes my goal is to give a quick instruction for an industrial designer who has to use animation to present how the design is assembled or how the component moves or rotates you should already know solidworks and keyshot after watching this you will be able to come up with some basic product animations so let's get into it these are the earbuds i build in solidworks you can see i made every part that needs different material into an individual part i didn't do a lot about the case but i made sure the hinge has a nice detail that i can use concentric mate to assemble them you can see if i suppress this i can kind of open and close the cap so let's save this as sto format click options and make sure save all components of an assembly in a single file is unchecked it will export every part as an individual file that's what we need so we are in blender i will be using a lot of hot keys but you can see what i'm doing on the bottom left of the screen the first thing i will do is shift select everything and press x to delete them then i will import the stl files that we save from solidworks let's drag select everything and hit import the orientation is strange so let's click r to rotate and x to lock to the x axis and hold ctrl to snap to 90 degree now we can see the assembly is not in the center of the scene let's deal with it first this orange dot is the origin of the part it's also the pivot point when you want to rotate the part so far every part has the same origin location on the corner which doesn't make a lot of sense to set the origin click a to select all parts right click set origin origin to geometry and now the dot is in the center of each part but actually i want the origin of every part to be the same as the origin of the case i will explain why but now just select the case shift s click 3d cursor to the selected so the 3d cursor just moved from the world center to the origin of the selected click a to select all parts right click set origin origin to 3d cursor now all the parts has the same origin which locates in the center of the case lastly shift s cursor back to world origin a to select all parts shift s selection to cursor now our assembly is finally in the center of the scene press n to check the location it should be zero in all axis but because we rotate everything at first it's not zero in the rotation to solve that click object apply rotation or just all transforms you can see it's zero now this part would be a little confusing for beginners but by doing this you can make sure later when you are moving things around and adding keyframes when something goes wrong you can always type 0 to get the part back to its default position the first thing i want to animate is the top case because we just set the pivot point at the center of the case it doesn't rotate the way we want it but you can see i have a cylinder shape which implies where the pivot point should be to mark that out click tab to go to the edit mode this is where you can drag vertices to change the geometry but we are not going to address that today so shift select these vertices shift s cursor to select it the 3d cursor is moved to the center of the vertices we selected i'll hide the top case right click set origin origin to 3d cursor click r to rotate y to lock to y axis now the top case should rotate in the proper way let's set the rotation at 90 degrees for now next i want to move the left earbud let me hide the case first select the part click g to move z to lock to z axis you can see there are some parts we should move along with this part in this case we need to set a sub assembly in blender it's called parent to do that shift select the subordinate parts first and select the dominant part in the last place notice that the last part selected is highlighted differently ctrl p to parent parent to object now the sub assembly is created when the dominant part is moving the subordinate parts will follow it now i want to animate this silicon tip make it look like it's press fit into the place let's enable gimbal tool at this point because the moving direction will not fit into any of the world xyz axis we have to create a new gimbal tool which specifically oriented for this part to do that click tab to go to the edit mode click 3 to select face select the faces that implies the normal direction we want if you switch to normal you can see the gimbal tool is facing the right direction with the faces still selected click the add button here to create a new gimbal tool click tab to go back to the object mode now i can move the part with this gimbal tool i think we have done with all the preparation so let's start to add keyframes and see how the animation look in the timeline first let's move the earbud higher let me drag the timeline so it's more visible as frame 1 the mouse hover over the location and press i to add keyframe move to frame 80 set the zip back to 0 and press i to add keyframe when the object is selected you can see the keyframes as yellow dots in the timeline it's very flexible to adjust you will see me move the keyframes a lot in this process i feel it is too slow so i move the last keyframe closer to the first one the last thing is the top case we set it at 90 degrees earlier and now i will keyframe it set it back to 0 and press i to add another keyframe okay so now when the earbud goes in the case closes press shift a to add a camera the camera is there but now it's blocked by our model click g to move s to scale now let's readjust the rotation to see through this camera click the button here to go to the camera view and under view tab make sure lock camera to view is checked in this way when you are navigating in camera view the camera will be moving accordingly you can fine tune the position and rotation while looking for the best angle i will animate the camera by adding some keyframes here click the same button to leave the camera view to see how the camera moves in the scene when you are satisfied with all the keyframes it's time to export the file to keyshot first find the last frame of the animation in this case it's 90. set the end frame at 90 so we don't export any unnecessary part set the frame rate as 30 fps go to file export alembic find the folder and click export in keyshot go to file import choose the alembic file we just exported under environment and camera make sure import camera is checked under animation choose keyframe transforms then hit import open animation window and you can check if the animation is imported successfully go to camera panel and you will see the camera we create in blender we can still adjust the camera parameters in keyshot such as focal length or perspective value there is one last thing before we start to apply materials as you can see the model looks faceted to solve the problem select the part right click edit normals click calculate vertex normals and hit apply now it looks better if there are still some defects go to edit normals again readjust the edge angle and recalculate you may have to do the same thing to all the visible parts it's kind of tedious but it's the most reliable and effective way i found so far after doing this you can start your keyshot stuff apply materials and set a good lighting for it so i have done with the materials and lighting let's click render output animation i will make sure that both video output and frames output are checked it will be very helpful to have the frames as still in mages for later post-processing and i will hit render and let keyshot do the work so that's pretty much everything thanks for taking time to watch this i hope you get some knowledge from it good luck with the project you

Channel: Shane Chen

Views: 79,569

Keywords: tutorial, animation, product animation, industrial design, design, product design, blender, keyshot, solidworks, 3D animation, blender beginner, animation beginner

Id: rdILHNZoxOM

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 14 2020