Silky Smooth Rotations - Animation in Blender

hello everyone and welcome I'm Derek Elliott from dirk.com and in this video I wanted to show you a quick rundown of how I create a nice looping animation that doesn't feel boring this type of thing is great to take an otherwise static model and breathe some more life into it than you'd get with your standard turntable style animation now in order to save some time and focus on the animation itself I've already created a little USB device with some cool materials and that's been placed in an environment that I've already lit and added a camera to now I'm not going to show you how to set all this up right now but if you're interested in the lighting materials and perhaps that can be covered in a future video let me know what you think about that in the comments below real quick though I've got a few area lamps with varying power and a little color to some of them as well as a simple plain object here and here that I'm using to reflect some light back onto our object now feel free to copy what you see here or if you do want the full file that we're working with including the animation we create by the end that is currently available on my patreon page there's a link in the description for that now before we get started I am going to take all of the objects that make up this device and parent them to a new empty this way if I want to reuse the animation I can just make any new object a child of the empty and it'll take on that same animation you'll want to make sure your empty is roughly in the visual Center of your object so that when things are spinning around they feel nice and balanced and your object stays in frame now the next thing I usually do with an animation like this is find a nice angle that we'll call our hero angle and that's where we'll start and finish our rotation animation something about like that and with that looking good I'll add in keyframes for the rotation here at frame zero you want to place these frames at zero instead of one so that we avoid having a duplicate frame at the start and the Finish now I can add the keyframe by just hovering over the these rotation fields and just pressing I and you'll see that the field turns yellow which means there is a keyframe on this Frame as I scrub through the animation though you'll see that the values turn green which means that there are keyframes somewhere for that value just not on the frame that you're currently viewing so now we want to add keyframes to the end of the animation but first we need to decide where that is how long we want our animation to be so I like to work in 30 frames per second so I'll go ahead and change that here and then for a simple animation like this six seconds should be plenty now you can do the math yourself or just type in 30 times 6 down here and the end will be set to 180 frames now with your timeline at frame 180 go ahead and insert identical keyframes for the rotation now if we play the animation obviously nothing's going to happen because the keyframes are the same at the start and the finish so there is no motion but what I want to do now is decide what axis I want to do my sort of full rotation spin on and then add in keyframes for that it looks like for this object I'm going to have it spin along this long axis which in our case here is the x-axis so I'll go back down to frame 180 and then in the X rotation field I'm going to type minus 360 since I wanted to do a full complete rotation backwards and then right click and replace single keyframe and that'll add the keyframe for that now if we press spacebar to play you'll see the full rotation happening now before we continue I want to take a minute to tell you about the sponsor of today's video skillshare skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of in-depth classes and members across the world who all come together to find inspiration and level up their creative skills amongst other skills and that's one of the great things about skillshare is that even if you joined to learn about one thing once you're there you'll see just how many other topics and things there are for you to learn about I've been particularly interested in 3D printing lately so I watched some of the lessons in this course called designing for 3D printing with blender by Casa you guys said that right she talks about the different considerations to consider when choosing materials things like that if you're going to be 3D printing Your Design as well as a step-by-step process for producing a pretty simple Design Within blender now what's great is that today you can get access to skillshare for free the first 1000 people to use the link below will get a one month long free trial of skillshare so click that link below and let's continue with the video now I'm going to drag this window up here down and what we have is a graph editor and in the graph editor we can see that our keyframes right now have classic bezier style control with easing happening on each keyframe if your graph isn't in view then you can press a to select all the keyframes then period on your number pad to frame selected now that's a button I use a lot so I actually have it bound to my mouse which you might see that popping up but by by default the curve just barely becomes flat at the end and you know starts off flat at the start so that kind of gives the appearance of it slowing down to a stop but I want it to look like it's always in motion so I'm going to adjust these handles to have a little bit more angle to them now where you see a steep line we have a lot of value changes happening in a short period of time so that's where motion is going to appear fast and in order to keep our Loop looking smooth we need the speed at which the animation starts and stops to be as identical as possible basically the angle of this curve down here should sort of match the angle of the start of the curve you can sort of Imagine them leading into each other now one way to get them you know pretty close to perfect or exactly perfect is to select the keyframe and then rotate it while holding control which will allow you to snap to a defined angle which when you do that same angle on the other side should you should give you a pretty fluid motion when the animation resets at frame 180. now a lot of times I like to use this normal normalize and auto refresh option to keep my frames in view but the if you're doing the angle rotation you want to disable this Auto refresh so that you know once you rotate one frame it doesn't change your view because if you did that then it wouldn't it wouldn't be even basically um but all in all you can eyeball it as well just get it as close as you can the best way to check it is just to watch it over and over again until you're completely sick of it but in this example the bottom side of my USB stick is not very interesting so what I want to do is have the animation flip quickly past that portion and if you remember we said that a steep curve indicates fashion fast motion so what I'll do is just find a spot where it's sort of rotated on the back add a keyframe right there and then rotate it in the graph editor so that's easy way it can lead to a little bit less than perfect Motion in most cases we want to use as few keyframes as possible so in this case instead of adding the keyframe in the middle I'm just going to adjust these handles to create a similarly shaped curve now sometimes you do need the extra keyframe button in almost all cases again you want to try to create all your motion with as few keyframes as possible to keep it from looking sort of jerky that's one thing I see in a lot of beginner animations now they're hard to see because there's no value change on them they're just flat but we do also have keyframes if you recall for the Y and Z rotation now rather than adding more keyframe to sort of you know give that some motion we can just adjust the handles at the start and the end very slightly just giving them some rotation as well and I'm going to do the same thing with angle and just holding control and snapping those at the end and start to the same angle so with that we've got a little extra Dynamic motion if you do notice it's a little bit too severe on those new axes you just added you can just scale down all the handles you can double click on the channel on the left hand side to select it then press s and Y to scale it down just until it feels about right and you can do the same thing for the other axis here now if if something's not quite where you want it but you want to keep the motion that you just added you can just double click the channel and then just press G and Y and just kind of move it up and down and that will sort of keep your start and end frames identical but allow you to sort of control it so now if we play this all back we have a nice little rotation that feels a lot more organic and interesting than when you get out of a standard linear or default bezier rotation and you know all in all I think it looks pretty nice so that's all I wanted to share today just a short lesson that hopefully gets you thinking about what steps you might be taking to create more interesting animations and how to get started working in the graph editor with any animation project I do the work here inside the graph editor is usually what I think makes an animation Shine the most materials lighting models all that plays into an important role but if you can Master the Curves in the graph editor then you are very sure to be creating high level work that stands out from the rest now if you stick around I just want to tell you a short story about what sort of inspired this animation and uh tell you cool things that my friends are up to so yeah stick around but thanks for watching okay quick Story Time an industrial design friend of mine from Appalachian State named Riley started this company a while back called care recorder that's super cool basically they are creating devices that allow people to type at the speed of thought right now it's not physically possible to type that fast on a traditional keyboard but their technology uses a process called cording which basically allows you to Match multiple keys at once and think in words instead of letters the first device looks like this and is designed for input where your fingers don't even break contact with it and then they release a more traditional keyboard called care quarter Lite which looks like a regular keyboard but has the cording technology built into it now here's where it ties into this video Riley reached out a while back to me and showed me the new device they were working on called carequarter X which is basically just this little USB stick with all the tech packed right into it so now you can type at the speed of thought but on any USB keyboard you already have Riley wanted to create a short animation showing it off and it's a really simple object but served as a perfect exercise in adding value and creating desire for an otherwise pretty basic looking object so anyways long story short I thought it would be cool to make a little video about how I did that animation I hope you enjoyed it like And subscribe and I will also leave some links to care quarter in the description below thanks everyone

Channel: Derek Elliott

Views: 83,876

Keywords: blender tutorial, blender, blender 3d, 3d tutorial, derek elliott, derrk, blender animation, b3d, blender materials, blender principled, 3d animation, product visualization, blender for design, industrial design, blender modeling, best blender tutorials, ducky, blenderguru, polyfjord, blender lighting, full tutorial, blender course, blender furniture, blender product, rendering, 3d rendering, nft, 3d nft, getting started, product design, keyshot, rhino, cad, professional, fusion360

Id: yTHkjNScQK8

Length: 10min 57sec (657 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 02 2022