The Ultimate Blender Animation Guide (Beginner to Advanced)

so you want to animate and blender now maybe you're brand new to this or maybe you're an animator who's already used to a tool like Maya and you just want to see what blender has to offer my name is sway I'm an animator I started in Maya 101 years ago and I just gave a 1our presentation on this topic at the first ever blender con la and in this video I'm going to give you the highlights for everything you need to know in terms of animation workflows with a whole bunch of different tips and tricks and things that I wish I had known when I was first exploring blender a few years back we're going to start off with the basic to make sure we're all on the same page as we get to the advanced stuff so stick with it if you are already used to blender there's a lot to cover so fire up blender subscribe if you like animation and let's get started by the way thank you to Razer Nvidia studio for sponsoring this video more on that later also I'm going to go very fast in this video I expect you to pause rewind come back when you need it but I'm going to give you as much information as possible as quickly as I can so here we go when I first started using blender I was always comparing it to Maya which I had been using for like 8 years at that point which is not a very fair comparison because of how little I understood blender I did not do it justice and I'm here to fix that now the first thing some people will tell you to make the blender hotkeys match Maya or whatever industry standard tool you're used to that's a bad idea you can't follow tutorials you miss out on so many features let blender be blender and let it do the things it was designed to help you with and with that out of the way let's get to the good stuff to move any object around in 3D space you will not see manipulators by default get used to using g r and s to grab rotate and scale any object in your scene if you don't want to just move it in camera space you can click the middle Mouse button to snap the movement to whichever axes you're currently closest to and then you can click again to confirm and you can hit X Y and Z on the keyboard to just snap to one of those specific axes and if you tap the same key twice you'll toggle between object space and World space for that axis if you want to move in two directions at a time you can shift tap whatever axis you want to exclude shift Z will exclude Z from the transformation shift Z again will do the same trick as before for moving into object space and this is a reminder that in blender and on real engine Z is the up and down axis not y you can hold and release the shift key to make it more precise when moving around you can hold control to s to increment and if you want to reset any of these Transformations you can hit alt G alt r or alt s to reset those specific channels super handy you need a whole hotkey script for that inside a Maya now if you really want a gizmo visible you can hit this button or you can go to shift space and it'll bring up a menu with all the different options this one's going to give you the universal manipulator to change your pivot orientation this menu lets you swap between World local Gimbal and so on and you can also alter the pivot behavior from this menu here which is extremely helpful when dealing with multip objects so shift d duplicates and then with all of these selected you can see how we can rotate all these objects from the group Center Point or from Individual Origins the active object which is the last one we selected aka the glowing one with the brightest orange or most impressively we can move it from the 3D cursor as our pivot point which we'll come back to in a second also in Maya we use Q to go back to the selection tool to hide the manipulator in blender you're going to want to hit W that'll bring you to selection mode and you can toggle through a bunch of different options tweak mode let you select and activate stuff instantly box selection is what you're probably used to with shift to add stuff and control to subtract from your selection Circle mode is a selection paintbrush and we also have lasso draw mode so you have some choices I'm going to make sure auto key is turned on using this button which is located on the timeline panel we can pull these Out From Any Corner area and swap the window type by the way and you can collapse them just as easily you always want auto key turned on period trust me there's nothing worse than doing a bunch of work on a pose just to scrub away on the timeline and realize that none of it was saved up and down on the arrow keys will jump you from Key frame to key frame left and right will just move you across normal frames and space bar intuitively just plays and pauses that's alt V in Maya for some reason but there you go shift left will jump you to the start of your timeline which I've stolen from blender and put into every other application I use because I like it so much and if you want to frame up on all the data you have in the timeline you can Mouse over the window and hit home this also works in the graph editor by the way to frame up on the selected object in the viewport use the decimal Point period key thing on the number pad this is where most of the camera shortcuts typically live and if you're using a laptop without a numpad go here to change your hotkeys and put it somewhere useful you want this key you're going to use it constantly so make sure you put it where your keyboard hand naturally rests so you can just get to it more easily now the 3D cursor you can shift and right click to put that 3D cursor anywhere in your scene it'll snap onto whatever surface you pointed at and this thing is insanely useful shift s will pull up a menu where you can snap objects to the cursor or the cursor to existing objects or origin or whatever you want it can be used as a new spawn point since any new object you make will show up wherever that cursor currently lives which will save you some time building your scenes and it's also a snapping tool as you saw or a temporary Pivot Point this is something you need anot for inside of Maya want to move a character's hand from the fingertips to show weight without having to spin the wrist and translate it around to fake in action just use the 3D cursor as a temporary pivot and you're done put it in place rotate it change it back when you're done this is where the pivot Behavior menu really comes into play you can also use it as a quick constraint fixer if disabling a constraint causes your object to fly away just snap the cursor to the object first then disable the constraint and then snap the object back to the cursor I have other better tips for constraints by the way but I'm going to make another video for that one cuz it's a whole thing and it's actually really handy you're going to love it like this video And subscribe if you want to see that because that constraints are actually really easy when you know what to do the n key will bring up the properties panel and this is important because if you're animating an object like a full piece of GE ometry Cube sphere whatever the object properties panel will show you your channel box but if you're animating a character rig the rig is the whole object so individual controls won't register here in pose mode opening up the properties panel will show the item properties which is the channel box you're looking for you're welcome hit the slash Key by the right shift for isolation mode it'll hide everything not selected and it'll just zoom in you can just hit it again to undo it great for modeling but you can also hit H to hide objects shift H to hide everything but the object you have selected and to reveal everything once again alt H notice how alt is sort of a reset modifier for your key shortcuts for a lot of the things you're doing it's one of these design consistencies that you'll notice across blender and keep in mind all of these hot keys because they will work in the graph editor very important this is one of the biggest things I was complaining about in blender when I first started messing with it before I understood how all this works in Maya I constantly select curves to filter them in my graph editor but in blender I thought I had to constantly toggle the visibility it's a pain in the butt instead you can just select what you want to see shift H to hide everything else alt H to bring them back amazing super easy you just need to know that there you go also you can create a hotkey out of anything you find in any menu in blender just right click on the action and you're given the option to assign it to a hotkey or put it in your quick favorites which Q will pull up and these are mode specific so you can have different favorites for object mode edit mode pose mode and so on also if you lose them that might be why now here's something that's just plain cool alt B will clip or uncp your 3D view it lets you box select to chop out a section of your viewport only calculating what's in that box which is a good optimization trick for large scenes and slower computers but what's crazy it literally chops out a cross-section of the 3D space I don't know who made this but it's so cool again that is alt B and this was a big hit during my blender presentation you know it's also a hit taking a break to talk about the sponsors of this video Razer and Nvidia Studio I've used Razer Blade laptops for a few of my blender videos because if you're going to animate them blender chances are you'll want to build your scenes and render the worlds you create on a machine that can handle anything that you throw at it this time I've been using the razor blade 14 because I've never owned such a small laptop before and I wanted to see if it was possible to work on these kinds of creative projects while traveling since I just moved to New York I've been exploring the city and working in a variety of different places usually I'm planning videos and doing emails in places like this but I also brought this laptop to LA with me for blender con blender con la is the first official blender event to ever happen outside of Amsterdam and I wanted to make sure that I had a system that would allow me to work on my presentation and to animate when I was back in La now the shot isn't finished yet but I was shooting some reference and blocking out a shot while prepping my talk for the conference obviously the portability was a big bonus for all of this but ultimately it comes down to whether the system has the power I need to actually do the 3D work and video editing the Razer Blade 14 is an Nvidia Studio laptop which in this case means that it's powered by an Nvidia GeForce RTX 47d laptop GPU perfect for the World building I like to do while brainstorming the tone and energy of a shot I'm also able to run some insanely cool GPU accelerated real-time simulations to build into my blend files it's because of reliable systems like this that I'm able to create whatever I need anywhere I happen to be like in this case from New York to LA check out the razor blade line of Nvidia Studio laptops in the notes below now let's talk animation workflow and its hotkeys the tum line should always be present which I'll show you why in a second but it's really the dope sheet you're going to be using for animation and instead of adding a graph editor just hit control and tab with your mouse over the window to switch from the dope sheet to the graph editor and back again you'll use this a lot it also works from the timeline to the graph editor too it's also the same hoty to cycle through sidebar pages with control shift tab bringing it back up to set a full key on any object as a 4.1 instead of hitting s like in Maya with your mouse over the viewport hit i instead of pulling up that insert key menu like it used to and now sets a full key on location rotation and scale or lock rout scale this was always possible using keying sets but it's now a default if you want to specify which channels you want to key you can hit k for key and you'll get that menu back but regardless of the version you're in you can set this default behavior from the timeline panel in the bottom left corner under the keying menu this is where you can adjust how big a key you want to get when hitting I and where that key is going to go you can also key any attribute by yes clicking the key frame button or just hover over it and hit I there you can also clear a key frame by hitting alt I while hovering just like you can copy and paste values without having to actually click into the text field just hover over it crl C hover somewhere else crl V this also works on nodes by the way super fast hold Z is the menu for different view modes but shift Z will toggle between wireframe and shaded to help you get to your buried controls quicker and if you have several things selected and you want to use the channel box well by default only the active object will respond unless you hold alt then they'll all listen to you and if you pose a character you can select their controls and pose mode copy the full pose and with control shift V you can paste the mirrored pose directly back onto the rig which is sweet that's just a native feature hold D and click and drag to annotate on the screen this will live in screen space using the grease pencil technology and you can sort of storyboard with it by drawing new annotations on different frames hold D and right click to erase a drawing with an eraser tool or if you want to just clear all the annotations entirely hit end for properties go to the view panel drop down annotation and I recommend right clicking the delete layer button and add this to your favorites so that you can just hit q and remove the annotation layer super easily last animation hotkey there's a tweener built in it's called the break Downer and it shows up in pose mode only pose a to pose B go somewhere in the middle and use shift e to slide between those poses allowing you to quickly favor either pose adjusting your timing with this built-in tweener tool now for advanced shots if you need to bring audio in you're going to use the video sequencer panel you can't use the timeline the graph editor things like that dope sheet so video sequencer panel and in the timeline you're going to enable playback audio scrubbing to hear the sound when you move the playhead and you're going to switch this to sync to audio so that the timeline actually plays in sync with the audio file you might also want to optimize your playback speed with heavier rigs if you're doing a dialog scene with a really complicated character and the render properties under simplify drop this down to globally reduce the viewports complexity that can speed things up for you quite a bit like I mentioned my presentation was an hour long and even in that I didn't get to cover everything I wanted to talk about on the subject so I have a lot more videos to make graph editor constraints bringing in rigs to get them ready for animation dope sheet specific animation workflows and things you need to know for animation acting shots with dialogue so if you like this video if you want more of these blender animation videos make sure to give this video a thumbs up subscribe so you don't miss more of them and leave a comment with what you're most excited to learn so I know where to start and if you want to learn animation from me I just released my animation basics and fundamentals online class which you can do in Maya blender Unreal Engine whatever tool you want they're software agnostic classes there's a onee sale going on for the launch of this class and if you want to pick it up the link is in the notes below for now I hope this video helps you jump into blender with minimal frustration and confusion and thank you again to Razer and Nvidia studio for sponsoring this video check out their Hardware in the notes as well if you're looking for a new system that handles blender like a champ but thanks again for watching I'm Mr Wade and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Sir Wade Neistadt

Views: 10,771

Keywords: blender animation, blender 4.1 animation, animating in blender, animation hotkeys, blender hotkeys animation, blender, b3d animation, blender character animation, blender animation 2025, blender animation shortcuts, blender animation tips, blender animation tutorial, animation tips, blender animation workflow, bcon 2024, blender for beginners, beginner animation blender, animation beginner, blender first time, blender first animation, blender first time animating, anim tips

Id: iVj4H2qYTWA

Length: 12min 34sec (754 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 30 2024