Take Your Character Animations to the Next Level with Blender Drivers

hey guys today I'm going to talk about how I made this little animation I made it with the use of drivers and I set those up and how I rig my character in order to get this final effect let's jump into it so let's take a look at this object this kind of cube I have now if you look over my modifiers I have two modifiers attached to it one is a deform Bend modifier which is kind of bends it that way and the other one's a simple to form twist modifier that modifies it along the z-axis now both of these are super easy to animate I can just key in some key frames and we can have a cool animation come up let's do the same thing for that see what we can come up with super quickly play okay so that's what we get just off the bat so one of the benefits of drivers is that you can create animation or create movement that would have been a lot more difficult without them and this is what I mean so if we go over to an already rigged Cube we have drivers attached you can see that I have the same modifiers applied to this Cube as I did the other one but you can see the angle instead of being grayed out like it is on the subdivision um it's purple purple means that there's a driver attached to it um and the driver that's attached to it is this circle right here so as I move the circle um you're going to see the driver react so going up and down affects a Twist modifier going right to left affects a Bend modifier Now by themselves these wouldn't be super special um you'd essentially just have another way to control the bend and the twist modifier however because both of those drivers are attached to this one object I can animate this object in a way that makes my my driven object a lot more interesting so just watch as I spin this around in a circle you see that my object is twisting and bending simultaneously which makes the animation a lot more organic and dynamic that that would be a lot more difficult to do if you were just to animate these components by themselves so that's a really quick rundown of what drivers are why they're helpful I would definitely recommend taking a look at the YouTube channel Kaizen he kind of goes through this Cube example much better than I have and he gives a really good explanation and primer into drivers and how they're useful okay so the next thing we're going to talk about is how to set up a driver it's very very simple so I have this Cube and it's subdivided and ready to be driven I have my modifiers already added in um so the first thing I need to do is I need to provide an object that is going to power the driving what I like to use is an empty you can use mesh you can use pretty much anything for now I'm just going to use my circle empty I'm going to drag this over here I'm going to make put it at 4 MERS and I'm going to rotate it on the z-axis scale it down cool so in order to add a driver all I'm going to do is I'm going to go click the object that's going to be driven and then you right click on the property you want to be driven so I'm going to drive the bend modifier the angle more specifically I'm going to add a driver and and down here where it says object I'm going to click the ey dropper tool I'm going to click that object now you can see nothing's really happening and that's because we need to do a little bit more work in order to get it rolling so if you go over to driver right click the driver and click edit driver um you see in this dialogue box down here you have some options so we have the objects selected which is our empty uh the reason it's not working though is because it is being driven on the X location so those of you who don't know Green is y blue is z and red is X so right now nothing's happening because we're not really moving it on the X location but we can change that so if we go back to edit driver and click Y location you see Something's Happened now why is it all the way bent the reason is we put our driver at location 4 M so our empty is telling the driver to push the bend modifier 4 M worth so basically what we're going to do in order to get this back to a baseline level is we're going to go over to our driver right click edit driver and because our our circle is 4 MERS to the right um we're going to subtract that 4 M by uh typing in minus 4 and you see now it's it's just like it was before and if we move this driver from right to left um it's the driver is being driven okay now we're going to go to our next um driver and we're going to right click on the angle open drive oops not that one right click add driver and we're going to select our empty and we're going to go to edit driver again and we're going to make sure on the right Axis so our our Bend modifier was driven on the Y AIS so we're going to want to drive this on the z-axis Z location that should be good and so now you see our cube is being driven correctly and now what you could do is you could just you can animate your little empty circle and that will correlate to your Cube so now we're going to go back to my muppet Satan scene and I'm going to talk a little bit about how I use drivers in order to make a system for me to be able to um animate him quicker for social media spots so here I am in the blender scene for my little puppet animation you can see he's he's right here ready to be animated now what I could have done when I made him is I could have um just put in an Armature and animated every part of him the problem with that is I wanted to make his animation a streamlined as humanly possible because I want to create a series with him I want to do some Tik Tok videos where he's doing different gags um and so in order to do that I wanted to simplify the animation or simplify how I accomplish the animation so that I can churn these out so what I did is I created a direct driver system in order to accomplish that now the first thing I did is I created an Armature now this is what it looks like and it's pretty simple I basically have a root bone and then I have a bunch of Bones coming out from under it to represent the spine and and the arms so if you look at my animation you can see how his arms kind of Bobble now what I did in order to create that effect is I use the Wiggle two modifier um so what that does is every time this root bone moves the wiggle to modifier which is right here it simulates physics for the rest of these bones and so if I move this bone to the left or right these bones are going to act as if they're almost like ragd dolls and so that's the first thing I did in order to turn this into a system the second thing I did like I've I've said a couple of times is I created drivers now I only have three drivers here and in order to animate this clip um I I only touched these three drivers the first one is location and you can see as I move it from left to right um the puppet moves the second one was the mouth and so he's a muppet so his mouth is only going to move up and down and so you can see how that corresponds and then I have the head turn which is basically the rotation um of the puppet so he can look left right down and up and so how I had him walking in is I just had the head turn uh like this and I basically created a bobbing animation for his location and I animated him on screen as I play the animation for that clip if we don't look at the actual animation but we come over here and look at the um location mouth and head turn drivers take a look at what they look like and other than the camera movements all of the animation came from these three drivers and to make it even more simple you see for instance the location um so I I created that the location animation with three key frames I put a key frame for the left from him moving from right to left and then I created one animation of him bobbing up and down then all I did was I created a cycle modifier in the graph editor and I had that animation repeat over and over again um until the end of the animation just so that I'd have that Bob and the arm is moving accordingly um and then the mouth I animated up and down one time and the head turn you can see I I animated with two key frames so Al together um as far as the puppet was concerned this animation took 11 key frame and beyond that it was just modifiers in the the graph editor and um camera effects so I hope you guys enjoyed taking a look at this I had a lot of fun making it um if you have any questions I'd love to hear from you in the comment section I'd love to know how you guys use drivers in your own projects to make animation simpler and more straightforward but um please reach out please like And subscribe if you can that helps me out a lot thanks have a good one bye

Channel: Ghost Studios

Views: 7,745

Keywords: aescripts joysticks and sliders, joysticks n sliders, motion graphics, blender, blender tutorial, blender drivers, joysticks and sliders, character rigging, joysticks 'n sliders, animation, motion design, motiondesign, intro to rigging an amature to a character in blender 3.0, how to rig in blender, blender driver, blender 3d, blender driver tutorial, blender drivers editor, blender drivers expressions, blender drivers tutorial, blender drivers explained, using blender drivers

Id: C99bU4ewSaU

Length: 11min 20sec (680 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 22 2023