The Complete Beginners Guide to Animation in Blender 2.8

hello everybody I'm grant Abbott and you're watching gabot media and this is the complete beginners guide to animating in blender 2.8 we'll be animating the basic cube going through keyframes rendering and exporting animations and common problems you might come up against when doing animations for the first time this is the first episode of a longer series of animation so look out for other episodes you can also join animation and animation challenge for the month of May for all levels you can find out more about this in the links in the description or go across to my website I've got my screencast keys in the bottom corner here so if I forget to say anything you can look down there or what I'm pressing so this is the basic scene that you'll see when you first open blender now we can go to the animation workspace just to click on the top here and that gives a nice starting set up for animation we've got the camera view of the side here so we're looking through this camera here at our cube if I move around you'll see a sort of similar view and I'm using middle mouse button to move around my scene I use shift middle mouse button to strafe and zoom in and out with the wheel so if I left click on my cube I can move my cube by pressing G to grab and you can see it moving in the camera there the camera is all important because we need to render our scenes once we've done and we need to do it from the view of a camera like we're a filmmaker so we can edit all our scene in here and see exactly what were ending up with over here in the camera what we've got down the bottom is the dope sheet and that will be important when we set up our keyframes and animation shortly you've also got an outliner which tells you everything you've got in your scene and you can select things in the outliner if it makes life easier and you've got a lot of tools down the side here we're not going to go much into those at the moment except for the rendering to just at the top here then I'll go through that shortly so first of all let's animate our cube so I'm going to move it from one side to the other what I will need to do then is set two keyframes one at the beginning and one at the end to tell blender where I want it to start and finish blender we'll work out the bits in between from there so let's go to our starting point so this is our dope sheet down here and we've got frame 1 and we got frame 250 which you can also see in the output setup over here frame start one two-fifty end you can also see the framerate there which is 24 frames per second so every second will be 24 frames and that will give you an indication of how fast your things are going to be moving so let's move our cube into position for the starting point so we're on frame 1 down here I can press it G with my cube selected and I can grab it on the x-axis so G then X and that will constrain it to the x-axis I can move it across out of the camera view just there so this where I wanted to start so I need to insert what's called a keyframe and the shortcut to that is I so I for insert and were animating the location at the moment you can also come down here and go to key insert keyframes in your dopesheet menu but for now I'll use the shortcut up here so I and then click on location and you can see these yellow diamonds here so the dope sheet summary is telling you that there is a keyframe on this point and below that is the details of the keyframe so there's a keyframe under cube and it's saying cube action is the action but I'll go into that in later series and it's telling us that the object transforms are being keyframes to the X location Y location and Z location are all being keyframed let's take it to frame 24 five-ish by right-clicking on the timeline see you right click I'm holding down right click now and moving my playhead as it's called along a timeline and I can just right click in different areas so I'll right click at 25 and then I will move my cube into position where I want it to finish so G then X and then move it across and you can see it going past the camera and it's gonna go off the camera this side left-click to select that position I have to be in my 3d viewport to do this of course I can't do it down here so I can't press G then X down here because it's moving my keyframes so it must be in my viewport up here so G then X and move it into position and now we need to set another keyframe at 25 so I'll do this by going to the dope sheet this time key and then insert keyframes now it's slightly different here it's saying where do I want to put the keyframes and channels are the different things along here so he insert keyframe all channels will insert keyframe on all the channels now you might be thinking well that's a bit pointless isn't it because the Y and the Z aren't used and you'd be right but it was just a quick way of doing it I could have selected the X channel then key then insert keyframes and then only selected channel and they would have made slightly more sense to be honest but generally speaking we'll probably use the y&z a bit later anyway now I want to see my pan emotion so I can use my right mouse button and drag along the timeline and you can see it's working out that needs to move from here to here so that's the basics of keyframes and that's the basics of animation as well that you need to put your keyframes in first then if anything happens in between like you wanted to twist or rotate or something strange or move at a weird angle you can put in your in-between frames so our animation is a bit boring I'm going to put a plane in so I can see it sliding across a floor so in my viewport shift a to add or you can go to the add menu up here shift a is the shortcut and we're going to add a plane it will add it wherever your 3d cursor is and aren't my 3d cursor with the white and red dashed line around it was right in the center I'm going to scale that up with s and then drag it out words and that's scaling it up ok so the problem is now that our cube if I select our cube it's digging into our floor so I need to bring it up from the floor so I can press G then said and I can actually press 1 and that'll bring it exactly about the floor because I know that's one blender units so G said than 1 and now we've got it above the floor so we'll play our animation again and it's back to where it was now what you have to remember is once you keyframes objects that's where they'll be stuck basically so blender will put them straight back to where their keyframes are so my movement won't have made any difference so what I have to do is go to a keyframe and move it so if i press g said then one and this time i insert a keyframe over the top of my keyframe so i location again and it's inserted the keyframe over that but it's sinking into the floor for the next keyframe now what I can do is the Z location is the same in both well that's what I want anyway I want it to stay the same height so I can copy the first said location and put it on to the second so we select our Zed location keyframe by left-clicking so shift D is to copy things or to duplicate things in blender so press shift D with the Z location keyframe selected that's this diamond and you'll see it selected because it will turn yellow shift D and just drag your mouse across to the other one and release your mouse button and that will insert it over the top now when I drag across my timeline with right-click you can see it stays above the ground now as I've said before we don't actually need the Zed location in this particular case so what you can do is select both of these and press delete and I can delete the keyframes and it's deleted that entire channel but it's still working because there's no actual animation on that channel the same for the Y location so I can select that one shift and select the last one and press Delete and it still got the X location because I didn't select those and it's still working you can also press spacebar to play along your animation at real time however if it turns red up here that means it's calculating and it's not quite at real time so for a moment there it was dropping a few frames so it's telling me the frame rate at the top there but it will try and keep it to real time in terms of the time it takes to get from A to B okay so we want to get a bit more complicated so let's make it rotate so let's go to the beginning keyframe and set a rotation another useful thing you can use is the record button down here so I'll press record now anything I do in here will be recorded so if I press R for rotate and just left click because I don't actually want to rotate it I want that to be the starting point it's now put in all these rotation keyframes and also the scaled keyframes so it's keyframed every channel so the record will keyframe all channels let's go to the end by right-clicking and bring in our playhead to the and I wanted to rotate 360 degrees what will help me if I press n iíve got my transforms up here so I can rotate in the z axis 360 degrees and press Enter and you can see it's placed a keyframe under the Z rotation don't worry too much about the Euler rotation word at the moment it's reasonably complicated to understand so don't worry about that you can see also that when I've keyframed in here it hasn't keyframe the other channels because I had the channel selected in here and it recorded only that channel that I had selected if I had selected my cube and pressed R to rotate let's say and I'm not going to do any more rotation because I've already got at 360 degrees in the Zed and then left click it records everything so anything you do in the viewport here it will record all the channels but you can go up here and change them individually with the record button on and it will record only that channel so we want our animation to look a bit more interesting at the moment it's just doing this and it's only 25 frames long but we've got 250 frames to play with let's do a little more but I'm going to end it at 50 frames so I can come down here and press 50 or type in 50 and let's changed up here as well so I've got a two second roughly animation so let's make it move back into the middle and maybe scale up this time so if I take my playhead to frame 50 grab it in the x-axis so G then X bring it into the middle and this time I'm going to press s and just scale it up a bit now good to drag this dopesheet up so I can see all my keyframes now because I had the record button on this should work okay so it should go and as I go backwards scaled down and across so it's very tating across here then moving into the middle and scaling up which is great I'm going to actually undo that for now and I'm going to show you a common problem that you might come up against so I've got my rotation in and it's moving back into the middle I'm going to turn the record button off and I'm going to select my scale keyframes and I'll do this a different way this time by pressing B to box select and dragging over my scale keyframes which turns them yellow and I can delete them keyframes so I've got my animation here it moves across spinning and comes back into the middle and I want it to scale upwards as it reaches the middle so I'll go to my end frame and I'll scale it up to about there and I'll set a keyframe for scaling now let's scrub across our timeline and it's kept it all big that's because I have no previous keyframes so it's made it all big and it's just got that one keyframe so in fact there's no animation happening here it's just sticking to this one keyframe which is when it's all big so if I go back to the beginning and change my scale back to one which I can do in here I can actually click and drag over these it selects them all and I can press one now enter and I'll bring them all back to one but do remember without record on it won't keyframe them so good plan is to come into here key insert keyframe all channels and now my scale will be keyframed as well as everything else but everything else is the same so that's fine now at the moment it's scaling up all the way through my animation I actually want it to move across and keep the same scale to this point and then only scale up as it gets to the end here so I can therefore select my first keyframes for scale all those three shift D to duplicate and move them into the middle that means they won't actually be any animation between those two keyframes for the scale as you can see it's staying the same size then when it comes back to the middle it scales up so that's the very basics of key framing in blender 2.8 I can press spacebar now to see my whole animation now what would be nice if my camera saw a bit more of the scale so I can press N over this toolbar scroll down a touch to where it says lock camera to view and press n to get rid of that and now when i zoom out a bit I can move the camera in the same way as I move viewports I'll just stop the animation for a moment so you can see the shortcut keys it's a wheel to move out and middle mouse button to move around let's get it to a nice position somewhere around there and there we go the one last problem I am having is that it cuts through the floor at this point so have a think about how you can solve that the way I can solve that at the moment is I can actually move it up in the z-axis from here to here so at this point it's got a keyframe for the said location and it's perfectly above the floor at the moment as you can see there but as it goes along here it cuts into the floor so we need to keyframe this last bit here and I can press my record to record whatever I do grab it in the z-axis move it up above somewhere around there and now we should be able to see as it scales it moves upwards as well so it always stays above the floor and because I had record on it recorded everything I did one thing to watch out for let's say I'm playing back my animation like this and then I think actually what I'd like it to do is move over here remember you've got the record on it we'll set keyframes for all that channel so suddenly it's moving or weirdly but this can be very useful because you can move it all over the place whilst records on and it'll do all sorts of interesting things the other thing to bear in mind it if you have keyframes very close to each other it can create quite a jumpy effect I can select all these keyframes down here by selecting the dopesheet summary keyframe and that selects everything underneath and I can then G to grab and move them very close to each other and you'll see how this jumps so watch out for keyframes that are very close to each other I'll undo that lastly to render your animations you have the render tabs over here so you've got all easy settings here which can be quite fun to play with but the render output just underneath it is the important bit so at the moment the resolution is HD and it's rendering at a hundred percent of that you can bring this down to 50 or 25% to check your animations but Eevee will render this very quickly anyway remember to set your start and end frame so it doesn't go on pointlessly and it captures your entire animation and lastly but still very important is where are your files going you click in this little folder here and you can set exactly where they're going so mine are gonna go on to the desktop and I'll create a new folder test animation and then click inside that folder and name it as well now generally speaking it's good practice to output them all as single frames so pngs are good and that's how I would tend to output however other people like to go for ffmpeg and you can check your encoding methods here h.264 is the most widely used and you can change your quality here once you're happy with those settings then you can go to render render animation and a new screen will pop up and it will render your animation pretty quickly if you've got a decent graphics card and you're using Eevee I can then close down this screen find my file and play it back and there we have the basics of animation do remember the animation challenge for the month of May if you want to get involved with that have a look at my website links to that and other courses are in the description thanks for watching and I hope this helps

Channel: Grant Abbitt

Views: 546,741

Rating: 4.9424014 out of 5

Keywords: understand, texture, paint, how, to, learn, blender, tutorials, 3d, art, graphics, game, material, guide, easy, sculpting, sculptor, sculpt, painting, 2.8, 2019, animation, animate, keyframes, output, file, mpeg, h.264, rendering, video, movement

Id: zp6kCe5Kmf4

Length: 16min 41sec (1001 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 09 2019