Blender Animation Series 1. 2

1. Welcome To The Class: Welcome ladies and gentlemen to the blender animation Series Volume 1.2. This class is for blender users who want to learn a useful hints, tricks and techniques to improve their workflow for creating animations in blender. This class is designed as a direct follow-up to volume 1.1 in the animation series. It is recommended to have basic knowledge of creating animations using key frames in a blender. By the end of this class, students will be able to insert keyframes for single transforms using the dope sheets. Used the record tool to quickly add new key finds. Animates the main camera's location. Animate objects by using empties as the parents would use when the time is by changing your render engine or by using the denoising tall. And render animations the correct way with a specific but effective rent up workflow. Let's now move on to our first lesson in the blender animation series 1.2. 2. Transform Specific Keyframes: To review, blender uses keyframes to create animations, to create a keyframe for the scale of our cube, objects. Come over to the scale value and hit the Enter key on your keyboard. This will create a key frame for our cube. When it comes to manipulating the scaled transforms specifically, you can see this key frame in your timeline. So you see we have this yellow diamond here. We just move this across. You can see the yellow diamond here to indicates a key fine. If we move to fine 60 and then change one of these values. You can see the changed value goes from green to orange. It was gleaned in the first place because we weren't on the first frame. So on the first line, you can see that it's all yellow. But if we move across, it becomes green. We're going to change the y-value and then hits I to create the keyframe. Now if we click on this option here to go back to the start and press the play button. We can play the animation, which in this case is just a variation of scale on the y axis. Now when we create keyframes in this manner, we are creating a keyframe on all three axes. So when it comes to key frames, each of these is a channel. What if you only wanted to create a key frame on a specific channel? In this case it would be the y-axis. Well, what we can do is we can just hit control and C Just to undo this keyframe here, were just guys keep the first one for the moment and then we can change to the dope sheets. So comes at this icon here, left-click to bring up your editor type menu. And then select dope sheets. The dope sheet looks very similar, but there are a couple of key differences. The most notable of which is the lack of any play buttons here. Now, if we hit this option here that you see this little arrow by aside, we can bring up this side panel and this is going to display all of our channels. So I'm going to come over to frame 60 and just open up the summary. So here we have the objects. We have the action associated with the object and what is being manipulated by this action. So you can see this is a bit of a hierarchy here. If we open up the object transforms, you can see that we have a keyframe created for each of these channels, the scale for the x, y, and z axes. If we just press or make a change and then press the icky. You can see that key frames have been made for each of these channels. Well, I'm going to do instead is create a keyframe specifically for the y axis. So what I'm going to do with this y-value sets or wherever I want is I'm going to go key, insert key frames. And this brings up the insert key frames many. You can choose all channels, only selected channels and inactive group. In this case, we want only selected channels. Now, again, it's done all free. But why is it done that when we only made one change? Well, the reason why is because you have to select your channels here. So even if you make the change, it doesn't matter if you don't select individual channels. In which case we're gonna make the change one more time. Then select the y scale. You can see it's now selected. Go key, insert key frames, only selected channels. You will now see that no key frames have been created. On frame 64, either the x or c axes. 3. The Most Common Mistakes: I'm gonna keep this one pretty short and sweet. This is going to highlight one of the most common mistakes that beginners make when creating animations. And it's one that you would have actually seen me bike in the previous video. So imagine this. You go to another frame, frame 120, and you decide you want to increase the x value for the scale on this, fine. So you go to increase the x value. Okay? You decide that you also want to make a change on fine 180. So you want to adjust, say the z axis. You left-click to go to find 180. And then without realizing it's, the x value has been reverted back to one. Why has this happened? Where whenever you make changes on a new frame for any object that already has a key frame somewhere else in the timeline. That is going to revert back to its original value if you do not insert the new key frame on that specific fine. In other words, because we already have keyframes on this object's. Glenda believes that these values should be specific to any key frames that we create. So if we make any changes on a new frame, blender will allow us to make those changes as normal. But the second that we decided to go to another frame without confirming this change as a new key phi. The change that we made becomes completely irrelevant and is effectively deleted by blender. So even if we go back, the sign fine, that x value is still set to one. So any changes that we made no longer exists. Therefore, whenever you make changes like this to your animations, made sure to always apply the new keyframe. So here we've made a change to our scale on the x-axis. So we go key, insert only selected Channel o. But we gotta be careful because we've made a change on the x axis. But if we go back down here, we have the wide-scale selected. And that's another mistake that's very common to do when you are inserting keyframes to individual channels. So make sure to select the appropriate channel. Go key, and select, Insert key frames, then select only selected channels. Now, you might not notice it at first glance, but another common mistake has been made here. So the idea here was to increase the scale on the y-axis between frame Ciro and 60. And then between frame 6120, increase the x scale. But have a look at the animation if I play from frame one. By the way, if you go to edit preferences to the key map menu and make sure your space bar actually set supply. You can use your spacebar to play an animation even without the play options in the timeline. So if I press play, you can see that the cube was actually being scaled on both the X and Y axes. If I go back to any of these frames. So frying 30, you can see that the x value is being increased, not what we want. So why is this happening? While this is happening? Because we don't have a key frame on the x-axis he. So what we need to do is we need to have it so that the x scale does not increase between 060 and starts to increase from frame 60 up to 120. This is where we would go with our selected channels. So the x scale, select it, and then use the value that we want. In this case, one. Go key, insert keyframes only selected channels. You'll notice that we have an orange bar appearing between these two key frames. This isn't the case that there is no difference between this key frame and this keyframe. So if I go to any of these key frames in between, you can see that the x value is set to one. If we go beyond frame 60, that's when the x scale will start to increase. These are some of the most common mistakes that beginners can make when creating animations in Blender. 4. Using The Record Tool: Now there is, gets another method for creating keyframes in blender. This method is going to require the timeline. But before we do that, we're going to delete all of our keyframes. Now what I'm about to show you is another minor mistake that beginners can make, especially if you're not aware of this sort of behavior. Now, I'm on frame Nancy five, so I have these value set. If I change my current frame, it obviously changes certain values depending on whether or not the key frames have been positioned to allow for changes on that value. Now what I can do here is I can click on the delete button on my keyboard and choose to delete key frames. Now because all of the key frames have been selected, they will all be deleted. What, what happens to the scaled values in the 3D view port? As I delete these key frames, you can see that the scale values haven't changed from what they were on frame 98. If I change my carbon frame, even bats one, you can see that these scaled values have been maintained. So this is normal behavior for Blender. When you delete your key frames, then whatever the scale value was on the frame that you own, that becomes the new scale value. Of course, you can always just take those values and revert them back to one. Alternatively, you can go back to frame one in the first place before you delete the keyframes, position your cursor in the dope sheets, hit deletes, and then delete key frames. By the way, if you chose to delete your keyframes with your cursor in the 3D view port. You will delete the keyframes, but you'll also delete the object. So make sure that your cursor is in the dope sheets. Hit delete, and select the leaky frames. Now the scale values have been set back to one on each of these channels. Now we can go back to our timeline. And if we go back to the timeline, you will see this button here. This is the auto keen option. It looks like a record button because that's exactly what it is. So I can left-click to enable this record button. And if I was to say make a change on the z-axis, any change I want and release. You can see at the moment nothing has changed in our timeline. And the reason why this is the case is in order for this record options work, you must, first of all, have a single key frame for your selected object. So what we're going to do is we're just going to click on the icky, but we're going to just set this back to one and then press the lucky to create a keyframe. You can see that we have the objects once again at the action object transforms and then the scale one, all three axes. Now if I go to another frying frame 60 and make a change to the z axis. So click and drag. And you can see as I'm doing it, nothing's happening in the timeline. But if I release the left mouse button at any point, we end up creating a key fine for this specific value. So if you take a look in the dope sheet, we can see that we have created a key frame specifically for the z scale. If we go to find 120, we can reduce this. So let's reduce it to some really low. Release the left mouse button, create a new key frame, go to 180. Increase it. Let's just increase if that's one, release new key phone. So this is a much faster method of creating keyframes in Blender. But it's also very easy to forget that you have this option switched on. So always make sure that when you don't need this to be switched on, make sure you turn it off. Now if we go back and just press play, we can see the animation that we have created by using the auto keen option. 5. The Duplicate Frames Trick: In this video, I'm going to show you the easiest way to create a rest phase in new animation. A rest phase is effectively a point in the animation where the model is not performing any action. This normally comes in between two separate actions. Now to perform a single action for your animation in blender, you need a starting key frying and an ending keyframe. So let's start with a single action. So we're going to just move our cube along the y axis. We're going to start by hitting I and inserting the key frame for the location on frame one. Then we're going to go to frame 60. And just move our cube on the y axis to a value of about ten. You can see the values here in the properties panel, or you could press the Enter key to bring up the side panel. Next, we're just going to hit and then location again. And now we have a single action starting on frame one and finishing on frame 60. Now if I wanted to bring the cube back to the original position, one thing that I can do is I can go to frame 1-20. Click on the y value for the location and type in 0. Then press IY and insert the location. Here. If we were to go back to frame one and hit the Play button, we perform the first action. And then immediately the second action. There's no rest period in-between. Now you may want this or you may not want this. So I'm going to show you the easiest way to create that rest period. I'm going to hit Control and see a couple of times until we get rid of the keyframe on frame 1-20. Well, I'm then going to do is I'm going to take my value on frame 60, move across the frame 120 so that it keeps the same value. And then I'm just going to hit the icky and insert a location. So that's one way of doing it. So now you see this orange line here. This indicates that nothing changes in-between these two key frames. This is a rest phase. Alternatively, you can also duplicate this keyframe here. So if I press Shift and day and then bring my mouse across, you can see that we have created a duplicate frying. We can bring this to wherever we want, say frame 120, and left-click to confirm the position. Now we have the same thing again between frame 6120, we have to keyframes, but these keyframes represent the exact same values, so nothing happens in between them, and that is indicated by this orange bar. So I am going to show you that one more time. Make sure you have the appropriate key frame selected. Hit shift day, and then move your mouse cursor to the frame that you want. In this case, frame 1-20. And left-click confirm. Now if I go back to frame one and press Play, we performed the first action. And then nothing between the next pair of key finds. What that allows me to do now is go to find 180. Click on the y value, press Ciro and enter, and then insert the key frame. Go back to frame one. Press Apply, performed the first action, rest period, and then the second action. Don't forget, you can move individual key frames along the dope sheet or timeline. So we can take this key frame here and reduce our rest period to say ten frames. Now, if we do this, note that the time it takes to go from this position on the y axis to 0 on the y-axis will increase. And as a result of that, the speed of this animation is going to decrease. So if I press the play button again from frame one, we go with the first action, should rest period, and then come back. But you notice as we come back, the Cube moves a lot slower. So in this case, while you're editing the positioning of keyframes, if you want to maintain a specific speed, you have to make sure that the gap between those keyframes remains constant. So in this case, because I moved this keyframe from shrine 1-20 to frame 70. So 1-20 minus 70 is 50. I had subring the key foam that was located here from 180 back 50 frames to 130. 6. Rendering Test Animations: In this video, I'm going to demonstrate a very important part to your workflow as an animator. What we're going to be doing is we're going to be creating a test animation to preview our work. Now, to do this test animation, there are a few things that need to be set up. First of all, I have my render engine sets that EV. Now, depending on the materials that you're using for your projects, this may or may not be practical, but I have it set to EV because EV is a very fast rendering engine. Then I'm going to go to the Output tab for my Properties panel. You can see I've got my target resolution on the x and y axes, 1920 by 1080. Why want to do for a test render is reduced this percentage value. I want to be able to view the results of my animation, but I want to minimize the render time as much as possible. So you can reduce this to either 50% or 25%, or in fact, any percentage that you're comfortable with. I'm going to reduce this to 25%. This is going to allow blend up, to lend up my animation much faster. You can see that we have an example animation here. The idea is very simple from frame one, all we're doing is when we press play, rotating our objects on the z-axis. And we're doing so in a full circle of 360 degrees. Next, we're going to need to define at the output the location to which we are going to render our animation company, we have it set to a temporary folder. I'm just going to change this to a new folder that's I am going to create on my desktop. So I'm just going to create a new folder. I called it tests animation. Open up the folder and click accepts. So now this animation when I render it, will be outputted to this test animation folder. Now you can change your file format if you wish. I'm going to show you in a future video why choosing an image format is going to be very useful. But for now I'm just gonna have it set to FFmpeg. Open up my encoding and change my container to mpeg four. Keep the video codec H.264, and keep all of these settings as they are. So I'm now ready to render my test animation. To render an animation, go to render, and then select Render Animation or used a hotkey control F 12. So I'm going to left click. And you can see how quickly blender is just moving through each of these frames. So we're just going to give this a minute and then we're going to come back and view our results. Okay, so Glenda has now finished. With our animation, I'm just going to close this up to few your animation. You can go render and few animation or use controlled F11. If we do this, we opened up a small window and you can see your animation in effect. Now the reason why this is useful is because when you create your final animation, you may change certain things. You may adjust your resolution percentage up to a 100%. You may also want to change the render engine that you're using to create a more realistic image. But the big reason why you should use test animations before creating your final animations is because you can preview what your animation will look like. And sports mistakes early. And mistakes are very common when creating animations or renders. The problem when creating an animation is that it can take a very long time to render your final result. And if you spend like several hours rendering an animation to last for several minutes, and then notice a law or an error in your animation, then you have to make changes to collect that ever and then render your entire animation from scratch. By creating a test animation, you dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to render. And you can preview your results ahead of time. So then you can make changes that need to be made before creating the final animation in this example. And it's probably difficult to spot because the resolution is so low. I can notice two things that I would like to change. The most glaring of which is the positioning of the camera. So when my object rotates, it's positioning is in the top half of the cameras view. I want it to be in the center, so the camera is in the incorrect position. I also think that my Suzanne object is moving too slowly. I want it to move twice as fast on its c-axis. So I'm going to make that change as well. So I'm going to close this and make those changes. So if I left-click on this first keyframe here on frame 240, it selects everything associated with this key frame. So all of these gets selected. I can then just click and drag and move this down to frame 120. Now what this is going to do is it's going to double the speed of the rotation because it needs to perform that rotation in half the number of frames. If we press play, you can see it rotates much faster. While we're at it. Let's have it do a second rotation form here. So I'm going to go to find 240. And all I need to do is click on the z value here and type in 720 and press enter. Then I'm going to press the icky to insert the key frame. Now, if we go back to the stance and press play, we will do to foster rotations instead of a single rotation in the same amount of time. Now the second issue that we pointed out was the positioning of the camera. So if we press 0 on our number part, we can preview our scene through our camera. We can also go to the View menu Cameras and select Active camera from here. Or click on this button here to toggle the camera view. Then go to View and lock the camera to view. I'm then going to hold down the Shift key and metal middle mouse button and just pan my view up as that's going to move my camera. So now we have our Suzanne object in the center of our cameras view. Those are the two changes that we wanted to make. So now we can once again render our animation. Secco render, Render Animation. And then give your animation minute to complete the vendor. And if we come back, we will see that the animation is finished once it reaches the final frying, which in this case is 250. We can just close this go render view animation. And you will be able to see that the positioning of the camera is correct. And the pacing of our rotation has been successfully adjusted. 7. Render As Images: Another important aspect to the rendering workflow in Blender when creating animations is to create your animations as a series of images before converting them to a video formats. Now in the previous video, we simply skips ahead and just rendered and animation as an MP4 video. If we go to our output folder, you can see the rendered result here. So it's name is given depending on the frames used. And then it has the file extension mp4, which is a direct result of the container that we assigned to it here. Now, when you create your final renders, its going to obviously be taking a substantial amount of time to complete those renders. And you don't always see every single error that you make. Or you may decide while looking at your animation as it renders, that you might want to change something. So let's look at a hypothetical example. Say if I wanted to change my animation so that from frame 120 to find to 40, Maya objects would rotate in the opposite direction. Currently, it just rotates in the same direction two times, one time for each period of 120 frames. If I'm making this decision as I am watching my animation being rendered, I would have to cancel the animation and lose all time spent rendering. However, one way to I can get around that is by switching to a picture format instead of a video formats. With a picture formats blender will render each frame of the animation as an individual image. You will then be able to cancel at a specific point and keep all the frames that will render it before. I'm going to show you what that looks like now in practice. So I'm just going to increase my resolution percentage to 100%. Just to indicate that this might be my final results, I'm going to change my file formats from FFmpeg to JPEG. You can do any of these, but you shouldn't go with either JPG or PNG for your result depending on whether or not you have an alpha channel. If you have an alpha channel in your video, you want to use PNG. Not JPEG is a smaller, easier to use bio formats. So I'm going to use JPEG. I'm going to keep the quality at 90%, the colour with RGB. And then I'm going to go back to frame one, go render, render animation. You can see this time the window that has appeared is much bigger than last time. And that's because we have a much higher resolution image that needs to be rendered. I'm gonna come back in just a moment when it hits frame 120. Okay, so for our hypothetical example, we're hitting the halfway point, where just about the past the halfway point. And suddenly I decide that I want to rotate my Suzanne objects in the other direction. I can first full stop this animation by clicking on this button down here. So it is stops the render of the animation, but it hasn't deleted the animation that has been rendered. If we go back to our output folder, you can see the list of all of the JPEG images that have been created, one per frame. And if we go down to the bottom, you can see that we ended up all the way to a 142. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to select number one for e2. Then shifts selects all the way up to 121 and press the Delete key, then delete the selected files. One, I'm at it. I'm also going to delete my MP4 video. So deletes selected files and then I'm left with my image file was going from frame one all the way down to frame 120. I'm just going to come out of this by clicking cancel. And let's see what happens if we try to preview this animation. You can see that despite the fact that we are using JPEG files, we are still able to view it as an animation because of the way that the frames have been numbered. What this is going to allow us to do is it's going to allow us to make changes from phi 120 trying to 40, and then render these in the same folder. There's a few things we need to do to make sure that it works in that manner. But first of all, let's make a change to the animation itself. The easiest way to do it is to select the frames on frame 240. Go to item for our selected objects. And you can see at the moment the z value is set to free 60. And that's because we're actually on frame 120 here. We need to move to trying 240. We're going to left-click on the Z value and tie peanut Sierra. Then click on the icky to insert the keyframe. Now if we preview this animation in our fruity reports, the first 120 frames behave as normal. And then the rotation is reversed for the second set of 120 frames. Okay? So we've made that change, but we now want it. Soda blender only renders from frame 121 to find 250. We don't want it to re-render the frames that have already been rendered, which are frames one to 120. To do this, go back to your timeline. Then change this starts option. So we're going to change it for one to 121 and press Enter. You can see the change that has been made in our timeline. Now from frame 121 with the sine outputs selected and the same option selected, go render and render animation. It will start from frame 121 and it will render all the way to the finish. So now the animation has finished rendering. It's time to see if what we have done has worked for our needs. Were going to close this window. I'm just going to restore the star frightened back to one. And then we're going to go render view animation. You can see we do the initial rotation. And as we reach 1-20, the rotation reverses and goes the other way. Perfect. So that's how we use our JPEG or PNG file formats to render our individual frames first and then make changes where needed. In the next video, we're going to demonstrate how to convert this series of images to a movie file. 8. Converting To A Movie File: If you want to convert a series of images into a movie file, then you will need to open up a new workspace. Come up to the top of the blender interface and click on this plus button. Then goes where it says video editing and select video editing. Left-click to add the video editing workspace. Next, we're going to need to add our strip of images to this sequence here. To do that, go to add, then go to image sequence. Then locate your image sequence. So for me, I'm just going to locate it in my desktop test animation. And here I have my sequence of images. Now if you take a look over here, we have a staff Feynman and frame. So here I'm going to just set this to one and set this to 250. I'm going to make sure that I select the first image. Scroll down. And it may take you a little bit a time. Hold Shift select, so that we select all of the images and then click on Add Image strip. This is going to add every single image that we created. So we actually have the full animation here. If we click play than here for our timeline. You can see the animation being played. Now what this is going to allow us to do is it, is, it is going to allow us to go back to our properties panel and set up our output settings so that we can render a movie file instead of a series of images. So from here, I'm just going to scroll down to my outputs settings. And you can see we have the same output destination, which is fine for now. But this time we're going to change the file format from JPEG to FFmpeg. Then we're going to open up the encoding, change the container to mpeg four, just as personal preference. And with all of the settings ready to go, or you have to do is go render and click Render Animation. Now, because we have a strip here in our video sequencer, these settings are going to be applied to this strip and not the keyframes created before in our layouts workspace. So now blend is poverty is converting this strip of images into a movie file. So go render and select Render Animation. You will notice that the animation renders very quickly when you are converting an image sequence into a movie file. So I'm just going to give that a minute and then we'll come back when it's done. Okay, so the vendor has been complete, order is left is to check to see if it has been successfully saved to our output destination. So we're going to close the render window. Open up this folder here, and you can see we have the appropriate video file that has been created form our render four reasons stated in the previous video with regards to being able to make last minute changes, this is the preferred workflow for creating animations in Blender. Creates an image sequence first so that you can make last minute changes if needed. And then convert that image sequence in to the appropriate movie file. 9. Eevee Vs Cycles: Ev versus cycles. What's the difference when it comes to rendering? Well, you will know by this point that there are multiple render engines in Blender. At the moment we have EV is the active render engine, but there are a couple of other options. The second option, workbench, we're going to ignore entirely. It's not really used for final renders, more previews. The ones we're going to focus on, our EV in cycles. So EV is the real-time render engine that would allow you to render images for your animation very quickly. Cost of realism. Cycles works the other way round the cycles render engine is all about creating realistic lighting and materials to create as good looking as soon as possible. The downside of that is that cycles renders will always take longer than EV vendors. Let's compare the lender times of each. So I'm going to render with EB first keeping my settings at the faults. So we have this sampling section here, render value set to 64. We're going to keep that as is. Then we're going to go render. And I'm just going to render an image. We don't need to enter a hold animation here, we just need to render the image. And you can see that the image renders in about 2.5th, which is extremely fast and very good for animations, especially if realism is not your goal for those animations. Let's compare this with a went up four cycles. Now there are different options that you can change. You can see that the lender value is different here it's 128. So I'm just going to change this to 64 to match the EV render engine. Then I'm going to go render and render image. You can see this time it's taking a lot longer. We see these little squares that are being used to render different parts of the image. And these represent the different cause and Fred's of our CPU. We're going to wait a few more seconds for that to complete. But you already get the idea that the amount of time it takes to render an image in cycles is substantially longer, 23 seconds longer than when doing the exact same image in evi. However, you may also notice the results of the image itself look better, the shadows look better. It just looks like a cleaner image because the lighting is more realistic as are the materials. That's basically what the Cycles Render engine is. It's the render engine of choice for realism. Of course, you need to set up the corrects lighting and materials to achieve that. But cycles has the toolkit to achieve realism in Blender, whereas EV is more for faster renders or stylized results. Now, beyond that, there are a lot of settings that you can change with both render engines. We're not kinds go through all of them, but we are just going to highlight some of the key ones. So for the EV render engine, you can choose to add things like ambient occlusion, bloom effects, depth of field, subsurface scattering, screen space reflections, motion blur, et cetera. Now if I just turn many of these on, maybe turn up the subsurface scattering and then go to render my image again in EV. You can see it takes a little bit longer to render up the same scene as it did before. So when we first went it in EV, it took 2.5th. Now it takes 1.5 seconds. But the result is actually a little bit better because we actually have some of these additional effects added on top of the base render. Now, cycles, on the other hand, has some different options to work with. We don't have those additional effects that we can position on top of our render. Instead, it's all about performance. So for example, we can go to this performance tab and we can adjust things like the tile size. Now you can also change what the fonts you're using. So we can go from CPU to GPU if you have a GPU installed. So make sure that this works. Go to Edit Preferences, then system, and made sure to select your compute the vice for the Cycles Render engine. So here I've selected cuda and then my graphics card at G-force GTX 1070. So make sure you choose the correct option here to find your graphics card. If you go none, it is just going to use the CPU to render. I have it sets a cuda, and then I have my graphics card selected. Now if I was to render this image again, this time in cycles, you'll remember that last time. It was set to about 23 seconds. So if I render it again, you can see now that it seems to be rendering faster, but there's just that one square, but it's working a lot faster than with the CPU. And if we take a look at the final time, each just under ten seconds. So just by changing from my CPU to my GPU, I have decreased the amount of time it takes to render by more than half. These are just a couple of the key things that you need to note when deciding what render engine you want to use. 10. Denoising: When rendering in cycles, a really good method of reducing your width times is to enable denoising. Now one issue with the Cycles Render engine is when you set the render value too low, you end up with noise in your scene, which just ruins the image. I'm going to show you an advantage of using denoising with low render samples. So I'm going to just start by putting in a really low value for the vendor setting here. I'm going to type in two and then press enter. Now what you'll find is the number of samples is directly proportionate to the amount of time that it takes to render your image. So if I go to Render and render the image, you can see that it takes a second to render about assign as EV with some of the additional settings applied. However, you can see that the result is not what you would expect. It is extremely noisy. To improve on this result and say get less noise, you need to increase the number of Wender samples. So we increase the ten render samples and then go render render image. The result looks better. But you can still see a significant amount of noise, especially in areas where there are shadows. So how can you get the shorts heart render times, but also not have this noise where you can do this to an extent with denoising. Didn't denoising option is found here and is only used with the Cycles Render engine. It's not even required with EV. So I'm going to open up this denoising option. And you can actually set the noising for both the lender and your 3D viewport. We're focused on the vendor for now. So we're going to click this checkbox and we have several options. Now you have the NLM denoise or which can run on any computer mice. You have optics which runs on GPUs, more specifically the newer GPU's. And open image de-noise, which focuses on CPU viewport de-noising or vendor denoising. Now, optics is enabled for one fires and series NVIDIA GPUs is just not as good. But I'm going to select this anyway, since it's normally the quickest one for me, even though I have an older GPU. Now if I go to wind up this image with the lender settings set to ten, render, render image. You're going to find that it's going to take longer to render to the point where it tops out at 24 seconds, which is what it was originally when we had it set the 64 render samples. Now though result looks extremely similar to that, so it doesn't appears the, if there is any difference. However, this is because we are using very low tile sizing. Now normally with your GPU, you would want much larger tile sizes. So here I'm just going to take the tile values of the x and y axes. And I'm going to increase them to 256. So 256 pixels on the eggs and 256 pixels on the wine. Then we're going to render our image once again. So go and click render image. The base render is a lot faster as is the denoising process. So this time, it only took us 6.5 seconds to create a successful looking render with only ten render samples. Let's go even lower. Let's go to psi two. And let's see if this is any better than what it was before. If you remember, when we rendered wishes to samples, it was extremely noisy. So let's go render, render image denoising work. And in about 5.5 seconds, we get a pretty decent result. Now it looks a little bit blurry and that's because the noising can only do so much. It works with the data that is available. So if you'll render samples are too low, then the denoising tall is going to struggle to create that clear image. And that's what we see here. So we've got a little bit of an issue around the eyes and that small issue with regards to the coloring on the underside of our object. The best thing here is to find the appropriate number of render samples and combined with the noising depending on what image you are rendering. I recommend never going as low as two. But in a lot of cases, you can render at 25 samples with denoising and get really good results. And this can really benefit when using these cycles will render engine to create your animations. 11. Keyframing Your Camera Properties: In Blender, if a property can be altered, then it can also be animated. That's the case for most of the different properties in blender form, object transforms to the color of materials, to the depth of field of your camera. Speaking of the camera, there are a lot of things that we can animate with the camera is self let alone the scene that it views. So I'm just going to demonstrate a quick animation by manipulating one of the cameras many properties. So making sure that the camera object is selected. Go to the camera data tab, which is located here in the properties panel. You'll see you have a variety of options here, such as the depth of field, as well as the shift on the x and y at focal length, clip star, etcetera. Will, you will find is that if there is a white dots next to a property, it means it can be animated. If we open up this camera option here, you can animate the size of the camera and the sensor. You can also animate the distance of the depth of field. So let's try this. With regards to the depth of field. Let's reduce this value. And we'll just kind of go into our rendered viewport shading so that we can get a good idea of what's going on. Let's reduce that to 0. All of a sudden, we can see absolutely nothing. Let's begin increasing the distance value. Seeing gets lighter and eventually something of b appears in view. At the moment, it's still blurry. If we continue to increase this distance value. Eventually, we start to get an idea of exactly what it is. Get the distance value high enough, and you can sell it, Suzanne. So what we can do here is we can animate this. I'm going to set the value to say points to. And then click on this button here to animate the property. So now we've created a key frame for our camera. More specifically the focus distance of our depth of field. Next, let's go to frame 60 and increase the distance to five. Press Enter. And then click on the animates property button again, which this time looks like an empty diamonds. Now if we go back to the starts, our Animation and press play, you can see the depth of field just about because obviously we're using cycles here is reduced and comes into view. So we'll show you that again, that for field eventually reduced until we can see objects. This is just one example of how you can emanate the many different properties in blender. 12. Using Empties To Control Animations: In this video, I'm going to be demonstrating how you can animate your properties by using an empty object as the parents. So here I have an example scene of a star, planets and moon. What I want is for the planets object to be able to orbit around its own axis and have an animation for that. But also to be able to orbit around the star and have an animation for that as well. You can do this by assigning one of those properties to an empty object. Now you could parent your planet objects to your star objects and then orbits using that method. The only issue with that is that the star objects will be rotating and controlling the rth object or the planet object. So the rotation here is going to be the same as it is here. But that presents the problem of not being as it is in the real world. So the solution is to use an empty objects to add an empty object, go shift, and I. Then come dance where it says Empty and choose any of these options. Apart from image, it really doesn't matter which of these options you choose. I'm just going to go with plain access. I'm going to just rename this and probably should we name the others as well. But I'm going to rename this as planets empty. Now, I'm going to select my planet objects, which is sphere dot COC everyone. Let's just rename that. Then hold control and select the planet empty objects, which is easier in the outliner panel because at the moment it's inside of our star objects then hit control and pay and set parents to objects. Now the planet has been parented to the empty. What this means is if we have the empty objects selected and begin rotating on the z axis, you can see we are beginning to orbits around our star. At the same time, we can select the planets object itself and begin orbiting on its own axis. So what we're now able to do is we're able to open up our timeline and then just create a key frame for the rotation of frame one. Then we could go possibly to frame 120. Actually, let's go to frame 60. Turn us up to free 60, and then create a key frame. Frame 1-20. Double this value again, 720 at a keyframe, continued through that and then go over to our planet empty objects. And then do the same thing for the planet empty. But this time it's going to be used for orbiting. So the last animation that we just did was for creating the rotation of the planet itself. And now this one for the planets MC is going to be body orbiting of the planets around the star. So we can insert our rotation keyframe. And this time let's go all the way up to two for a set that to free 60, and then create a keyframe. Now if we go back to the start and press play, you can see that we are both orbiting our star, but also rotating on the planet's own access. This is just one example of being able to use MTS to create more complicated animations in Blender. 13. Animate A Moving Vehicle: In this example, we are going to demonstrate how to create an animation by using objects constraints. So here I have a scene where we have a vehicle object, this car, and a path for it to follow. So it's going to start if I can just get a hold of the object itself from this point. And then it's going to work its way to the other end of the path, also following the curve. Now the question is, how do we get the car to follow the exact path that we want? Well, one solution is to just use keyframes for transforms. Inserting keyframes for both our location and our rotation where necessary. However, an alternative way of doing things is to use an object's constraint, especially if we're trying to get from 1 to another in a specific way. So to do this, we need to create what is known as a path objects. You can create a powerful object by coming up to the add menu, which by the way is shift. And I. Then go to the curve option select path. You will get this line that appears in the center of arsine. And if we hit the Tab key to go into edit mode, this line, this path has a series of handles and you can left-click and then grab each of these handles to create the shape that you want for your path. You can also do things like subdivides your handles to create more. So select to hit the light mouse button and then click subdivided to create a nother handle. The path. Not to save time. I have actually already created a path that follows our rope. So I'm just going to bring it from view. And you can see this line here just about follows the actual path of the load. It's a little bit off here, but we won't worry about that for now. So what we need to do is we need to get our vehicle to follow this path objects. We can do that by selecting our vehicle and then go to add objects constraints in the objects Constraints tab in the Properties panel. So former top, go down to this icon here, which is labeled as objects constraints and left click. Then open up this menu. And the option that we want is the follow Path option. So left-click. And then we need to define a target's. Now before we do this, it's important that the selected object, in this case the vehicle, has its location values set to 0. I'm actually going to leave it as is right now so that you can see what I mean by this. So I'm going to set the target to the car PAF, so it's looking for any powerful curb objects. It's found one hour car path objects. Left-click. And you can see that the location of the object has changed. In our 3D viewport, the value has remained the same minus 9.7. But now it's much further back than it needs to be. We actually want it to be around here. To fix this, just fix the location on the appropriate axes. So I'm gonna type in 0 and then press enter. The car is now in the correct position, right at the start of the path. Now, if we were to press the Play button, as is, you can see the car follows the path. There's a significant issue here. So if I take a look at my scene from a top orthographic view, go back to the start and press play. You can see we are following the path that the car isn't rotating with the path. So how do we fix this? Well, there are two things that we need to do. First of all, we need to select this follow curved option. This is going to have the rotation followed a curve, but you can see this creates a new problem. The entire vehicle has been rotated when we don't want it too. If we press play, you can see the car is now rotating with the curve. But in the long axis. To fix this, we just have to change the forward axis. In this case, changing it from y to x because the vehicle is moving in the x direction will solve the issue. So now if we hit ply, the cart will follow the path and rotate as well. There is a lot more that you can do with this and other object constraints to get even better results. But this is just an example of how you can create an animation by using objects constraints. And you will have noticed that no keyframes needed to be inserted to create this animation. 14. End Of Class Challenge: Congratulations on completing this class. It is now time to finish with our end of class challenge. For this challenge, you must create the following animation. Create a scene where an object is animated using an empty object as the parents use the following to help prevent the mesh to the MC objects. Used to record tall for fast key frames or insert individual key frames from the dope sheets menu. Used the duplicates or frames trick to create a rest phase in between each animation or each set of keyframes. Animate the camera to change location. Drawing your animation sets up your scene with the render engine of your choice. Remember, EV is for fast rendering cycles is for a more high quality render. If using cycles enabled denoising, sexual renders destination and then sexual file type to image. For example, dot PNG. Render your animation and then converts you'll rendered animation to a movie file to finish. Complete this challenge. Congratulations on completing the second volume of the blender animation series, and we hope to see you next time.