Top 10 Rigging & Animation Addons for Blender 2.8 - #1 is FREE

making one or two things move in blender is pretty easy but as soon as you start adding a lot of objects or making some really complex animations things can start to get pretty messy pretty quickly or in some cases downright impossible recently though I've found some new add-ons for blender 2.8 which make the process a whole lot easier I'm Jonathan lamb fell with CG cookie comm and today let's take a look at a few of my favorites when you think of animating in a 3d software you're probably not imagining sprite sheets and pixel art but if you're into making games there's definitely some times where you're going to have to cross that 3d to 2d divide there are a couple sprite related add-ons out there the favorite name of which is get sheet done but the best and most fully featured one that I can find is called sprite handler right annular makes it super easy to import and play any sprite sheet just add it as an object set the X and y grid numbers adjust the timing and you're good to go if you set the shader to diffuse and the transparency type to alpha clip you can even have your animated sprites interact with lights shadows and other objects in evey or cycles you can also use sprite sheets to animate particles randomize a material per object convert a sprite sheet to mesh objects which is a pretty cool feature and of course render out any animation as a sprite sheet it's kind of a niche set of features so not everybody's going to find it helpful but if you do it's going to save you a lot of time let's be real one of the areas where blender is a little bit behind is motion graphics specifically in the area of text objects and animating them well the add on text effects makes the process a little bit easier by giving you some preset effects that are really fun to use you can animate numbers counting up and down create a timer a typewriter or that cool matrix scramble style effect there's also an add-on called text effects rather than text FX and that one can do a couple different effects so instead of the ones that I just showed you above they can do some intro motion graphics style like YouTube logo type things and that one's pretty fun too so I'll link to both in the description below number eight is wiggle bones follow-through is a really important concept in animation and it's just the idea that objects should respect an inertia as you animate them so if you animate a tail of course you have to move the main tail bone but you also have to move this Andheri and tertiary bones to react accordingly and it can get pretty tedious to animate all those other bones when really you only care about the main most important one and everything else just kind of has to act believably enough well wiggle bones is a small add-on by Steve that helps any bone wiggle around based on its movement or rotation basically adding this secondary movement or follow-through almost for free you can even chain will bones together there is some weirdness here or there as blenders dependency graph is not an easy thing to mess with but overall it's fast easy and super unobtrusive when you're not using it it's free so I'll link to the blender artist thread in the description below where you can download it and try it for yourself you can also check out jiggle bones which is the original implementation by Simon florist for 2.79 but now it's been updated for 2.8 plus so you can compare the two and see whichever one you like better another alternative is spring bones by artell that one you can find on github and it's pretty early on in development still but it has collision with other bones which is super cool for the time being I prefer wiggle over jiggle but whatever wobbles your boat number seven is animal you can animate pretty much any property and blender already but there's a few that you can't wear if you could it would make creating some cool effects a lot easier animal is a pretty old add-on by Daniel Salazar that lets you animate some pretty interesting things for example vertices just select some vertices insert an animal keyframe go forward a few frames move them somewhere else and insert another keyframe just like that you've animated your mesh without meeting any shape keys at all you can also animate bevel weights creases vertex colors vertex groups shape key vertices and my personal favorite UVs animating your UVs can give you some really cool effects like flowing lava or animating 2d facial expressions by switching your Ubese between different eyes or different mouths animal is already included in blender so all you need to do is check it on and it'll be there when you need it number 6 is X muscle system have you ever seen those really cool VFX or animation breakdowns for you see a character or creature like walking along and the anatomy is so detailed that you can see the muscles moving well for basic stuff you can use shaped keys to kind of get that effect but if you need a really complex rig that's very flexible and needs to move in all different sorts of directions really you can only use muscles and you can now do that in blender thanks to ex muscle system the way it works is pretty simple you select two bones create a muscle that binds one end to each of them and then tweak the parameters to your liking there's a lot you can do here from customizing the shape of the muscle in edit mode to pinning it to different parts of your armature you can make any muscle you can think of and then you apply those muscles to the skin of the character and it deforms properly as the muscles slide squash and stretch underneath so you can apply physics if you want to make things jiggly from what I've tested so far it works surprisingly well though I know my example is a little bit rough so it's kind of a weird flex but ok number 5 is animating there are so many tools and tons of cool techniques for moving around vertices in blender but there's surprisingly few tools for moving around our other favorite points in space keyframes well the add-on Anna made by RA de veau brings about some of these clever concepts to the graph editor after installing the add-on you can use these sliders to easier keyframes between 2 points in 14 different incredibly helpful weights there are also hotkeys and pie menus if you want to get really serious and fast with it there's also a second panel called an M transform which lets you move your object in the 3d view and all of the curves will shift over accordingly so you can play the same animation in a different place that is magic you can tell it's an add-on made by animators for animators because there's no extra gimmicks no fluff just a handful of well-thought-through features that work every time number 4 is dynamic parent there are very few things that I found more frustrating when starting to learn animation in blender then switching parents you'd think that a character picking up an object giving it to another character that character putting it down it seems like it should be simple enough and setting up the constraints isn't too hard it just takes a little bit of time but also if you happen to click set inverse or clear inverse at the wrong points in the process you can get hopelessly lost in trying to get that object back to its original location and orientation it's worth doing by yourself at least a couple times so that you can get comfortable with the process and also just learn what's going on behind the scenes but after that learning period just give all the trouble and go install the dynamic parent add-on by Roman Ville Odin that way you can just click when you want an object to switch parents it's super simple and it works well the one quirk in two point eight is that it appears under the toolbar and not the sidebar but if you scroll down one post down and the blender artist thread that I'll link you to in the description below I'll show you the couple lines of Python the after you just copy and paste in order to fix that and then you'll be golden it's free so go check it on and it'll save you a lot of headache number three is auto rig pro to make a complete character or creature rig is not easy and it takes a lot of time Auto rate Pro promises to make that task a whole lot easier you see it has this smart rig feature which allows you to place these circular points on the neck shoulders wrists etc and rig based on that it's pretty intuitive and you can just do it in front orthographic view since it calculates the right volume depth for you it also auto detects fingers and rigs those perfectly even my Baker rig with three fingers so all you need to do is place the circle on the wrist of course no auto rigging system is perfect so you'll likely need to do some manual weight paint adjustments but for any normal character it's pretty minimal one cool bonus feature is that it can generate this bone picker map so you can select the right bone if things are getting crazy in the 3d view one thing I really appreciate about Auto rig Pro is that the developer art l has made sure that it works with other animation and rigging add-ons and even goes out of his way to encourage his users to support those other developers for example it works hand in hand with X muscle system it works with voxel heat if you use skinning which by the way it's not on my list but it probably should be and I mean if the name voxel heat a few skinning doesn't get your blendy senses tingling I don't know what will it also works with expose picker and a lot more and constantly throughout his documentation he's linking to these other add-ons and saying hey if this works better than mine ghost support that one and I just think that's super cool so you could be wondering if this is worth purchasing if rigify which is another auto rigger slash Auto Skinner is both free and included in blender but despite having that free alternative auto rig Pro has consistently been the number one seller for scripts on the blender market with that number of users still maintains a five-star review so there's definitely a need out there for a more advanced solution and auto rig Pro seems to hit the nail on the head for most users so if you do a lot of creature or character rigging definitely check this one out number two is bone layer manager do you remember how layers in blender used to be this little grid with the different colored dots inside and then once we switch to collections in 2.8 organizing things suddenly became so much more intuitive well as far as I know rigs and rigid bodies are the only two things that still use that old system and that means if you're rigging something unless you rig it completely from scratch by yourself and let's be honest sometimes even then you can easily forget which bones are on which layers it's a total crapshoot to find what you're looking for bone layer manager comes in to save the day here because now you can assign names to those bone layers it also gives you a super intuitive sidebar UI for adjusting rig properties and messing with constraints now you can put all your face bones on a face layer I K arm control bones on an arms I kale air helper bones on a helpers layer and so on and so forth and you'll never have to guess what's where there are quite a few animation and rigging add-ons out there so it was hard to narrow it down to a list of just ten of my favorites but as far as I know the number one in this category wins by a landslide and that's animation notes by Jacques Luc [Music] [Music] receipt of the stuff is the future and you can just check out on November video that we did with Simon Tom's to show what cool stuff can happen when you let people plug things into other things and do some math in between but instead of shaders and colors and textures though animation nodes does the same procedural stuff but with objects vertices text and even times some effects that were just not possible to do in blender before at all are now relatively quick to create with animation nodes if you're more into modeling than the motion graphic side of things then you can also check out the sort of related add-ons for chalk nodes that's made more for like parametric procedural modeling you're more into rigging and you want to do like node based rigging check out the development of this add-on called ghost I K and that looks super cool so far out on motion tool should also get a shout-out here because sometimes it can be a little bit easier to use than animation nodes but with less complexity also comes less freedom so whether or not you'd want to use it definitely depends on the project now to just add to the node hype for a second the blender foundation has already announced the everything knows project and that's led by none other than Jacques Luke himself so while I highly recommend getting animation nodes and trying it out it's just a taste of what's to come and I'm even more excited for what's going to be added to blender official later on down the line now we don't know how long that's going to take though so in the meantime just grab yourself a free copy of animation nodes and let me know you make okay obviously I love add-ons but recently made an animation for my upcoming fundamentals of mesh modeling course that looks like this and I got a few questions on that wondering what add-on I use to create the building everything falling into place type effect and actually didn't use any add-on whatsoever I really wanted to fine-tune control over everything and while I love add-ons because they often make our lives easier there's no shortcut to just mastering the fundamentals of keyframes and choosing the right interpolation types and things like that so I'll put links to all of the add-ons that I listed in this video in the description below but if you're brand new to animation I'd actually recommend not installing any of them just yet instead check out the animation courses on CG cookie by Wayne Dixon he's been a professional animator for years in and so he'll walk you through the basics and explain some of the difficult concepts in a way that's easy to understand if you go through his lessons and exercises creating something like this will be super easy thanks for watching if you found this video helpful go ahead and click Subscribe and that way I'll see you soon effects effects text effects I'm pretty sure my autofocus just doesn't work whatever wobbles your boat alright I've said that sentence more than I will probably ever want to say again in my lifetime

Channel: CG Cookie

Views: 282,810

Rating: 4.948853 out of 5

Keywords: blender, tutorial, blender tutorial, cg cookie, blender 2.8, blender how to

Id: j6lct_lVUco

Length: 13min 27sec (807 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 26 2020