The QUICKEST WAY to Animate Multiple Objects in Blender!

what's up guys Justin here with dcg essentials.com so in today's video we're going to talk about animations and how you can get multiple objects in your model to move by just changing one thing in blender let's go ahead and just jump into it all right so this is actually an email question I got from one of my subscribers and basically the question was when you've got an object like this one right that's got a bunch of different geometry in it how can you animate that object without having to join all of this stuff together because the question was hey I'm having to join all of this and then I'm losing all of the individual parts and pieces so there's a much easier way to do this than joining this so first off this is the crane model from Theo Rashard or Theo Richard from sketchfab so you can download this and follow along if you want to but the first thing that I want is I want a way that I can easily select all of this stuff that needs to rotate right because this is a tower crane model and basically everything above this point right here needs to rotate and at the moment what I would have to do is I would have to go in here and I would have to do a shift click and select everything in order to get all of that but in order to be able to get to it quickly what I want to do is I just want to create a new collection so we're going to right click and create a new collection then we're going to call this crane right and what I want to do so I'm going to come in here and I'm going to go ahead and click on this drop down right here but I'm going to click and select all of these different objects in here that'll go into the top of this crane and I'm just going to right click on it and click on move to collection I don't want to click the option for Crane top and so basically what I've done is I've taken all of that and I've put it in a separate collection right here well what that means is I can right click on this and I can click on the option for select objects right here and I can select them and move them around and if you forgot anything you can just take that you can just select all of that right click and move that into the crane top collection as well so now I can select everything that's in here and I can do that over and over and over again and so what I don't want to have to do though is I don't want to have to select all of these objects every time that I want to do a rotation of this object plus if I select them all right now right if I do a select objects and rotate them it's not rotating exactly right I mean it's close but notice how the top of my crane is rotating off of the top of this object right here so what I want to do is I want to take all of those objects and I want to parent them to an empty and so what that's going to do is that's going to link their movement data to that empty so to start off I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to turn off my crane top for a second and what I want to do is I want to come in here and I want to tab into edit mode right here and I'm just going to select these top vertices at the moment and then I'm going to do a mesh snap cursor to selected and so what that's going to do is that's going to place my 3D cursor exactly at the center of these top objects that I have selected so it's putting them right in the middle which is what I want because I want to tab back into object mode I want to do a shift a and I want to add a plain axis empty so remember an empty is just kind of a placeholder object inside of your 3D space there's nothing in it it's just basically like dictating a location is what it is so now what I want to do is I want to click on this button right here to unhide everything and I want to take all of this stuff right I want to right click in here and I'm going to click on select objects and then I want to go in here and I want to do a control click I'm going to select my empty so when I select my empty that's going to be the last thing that's selected in here so that means it's the active object in here well now what I can do is I can do a control p and I can do a set parent to object right here so when I do that and one thing that I forgot to do that you want to do before you do this is I'm going to tap a and I'm going to go to object apply rotation and scale you want to make sure that you've applied all of those rotations and scales in here but now what I can do is I can come in here and I can select that empty and I can rotate it like this so if I rotate it on the z-axis like this what's going to happen is everything that I just parented to that empty is going to rotate along with the empty so that transformation data is being applied not only to the empty but also to the objects that are parented to it and so now say that you wanted to create an animation in here you could just turn on auto keying and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to select that empty I'm going to rotate it 45 degrees over here that's going to create a keyframe right here and then I'm going to move this up to 60 then I'm going to rotate this back to negative 45 degrees here so that's going to auto key this well now you've got this animation in here and all you have to do is just adjust this empty to get it to rotate more and so one other trick just because we're working on a crane and this could be fun is sometimes you want this piece right here to actually move outward and inward like this so let's say we were right here for example and we wanted this to move inward to start and then move outward as we go well that's a little bit problematic if this isn't aligned along the green axes right because you can take all these objects you can select them and in this case I'm going to do a control J and just join them into one object um you wouldn't always do that but for the Simplicity I'm going to do this but at the moment right if I do a g x and try to move this on the green axis it's not going to work because this has been rotated where if we waited until here it would work like this and so what we want to do is we want to set the transform orientation of this object to local instead of global and so if I select this object now and I move this it's going to transform this along the local axes so if you go into your view transform and you select the option for Origins what that's going to do is that's going to show you the origin of the object and the direction it's facing well notice how this has a local y value right here and so if you set your transform to the local instead of the uh instead of the global what that's going to do is that's going to move this object along the local it's going to move it along the local axis right here so then what I could do is I could just turn on the auto keying again so I'm going to click on this oh and I need to make sure that I toggle your Origins back off but we're going to go ahead and we're going to move this to right here then verse 16. we're going to set a keyframe to right here so now when you click play in your crane notice how this piece is moving along like this and maybe you would want that keyframe for this particular object to be more like 120 whoops so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to click on this one keyframe it's going to drag it we'll say 110 right here so that's going to move out more slowly so notice how now this is moving even though our crane has stopped moving like this you can use this parenting function to parent multiple different objects to one object so that you only have to rotate that that works in a lot of different situations but leave a comment below let me know if this was helpful to you as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this and I'll catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The CG Essentials

Views: 31,609

Keywords: blender, blender 2.82, blender 2.8, blender modifier tutorials, blender tool tutorial, the blender essentials, the cg essentials, thecgessentials.com, justin geis, justin geis blender, blender 2.9, blender 2.91, blender animations, blender animate, blender animation tutorial, blender parenting, blender parent to empty, blender parent animations

Id: C8C4GntM60o

Length: 7min 30sec (450 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 12 2022