Transcripts
1. Introduction: As animators, we are artists alongside
being problem solvers, and we also need to
bring that problem solving mindset into
different types of software. Hi, my name is Madison
Erwin. I am an animator. You may have seen
some of my work on the new Spider Verse movie, we've also worked on a
few Marvel projects. I was self taught on
Blender and now being in the industry for a few
years, I also know Maya. In this class, we're going
to be going into Blender, learning some tools
and some tips that are going to
make transferring to other softwares
later in your career a lot easier and a lot
smoother of a transition. I'm really excited to teach
this class because this is going to unlock the next level
in your animation career. These are some tools that I
feel like would have made my transfer into another
software so much easier. One of the first
things we're going to cover in this class is understanding different
softwares that are even available for 3D. We're also going to
go into what are proprietary pipelines
that you're going to end up facing in different studios and
different gigs and I'm going to walk you
through each step of how to change the Blender layout and UI and the hotkeys
to make it more industry standards so
that we'll be able to transfer over to other
softwares in the future. If Blender is the only
software that you know, there's is nothing
wrong with that, you're going to be able to have a successful career
in animation. This class is just designed to give you the
tools that you need to be able to make the transfer
a lot more manageable. The cool thing about this
class is you can take it no matter where you're at in your animation learning journey. All you'll need to
follow along is your computer and Blender 4.0. I'm so excited that you're
here and you're ready to take your career to the next
level. Let's get started.
2. Expand Your 3D Toolset: Welcome to this class. Today,
we're going to be taking your Blender UI and
converting it to be more similar to an
industry standard software. I remember I learned on Blender for about six months before I decided to take
the plunge and try to transfer over to
another software. The software I transferred
over to was Autodesk Maya. That is a beast of
software in itself, and Blender already was such a learning curve,
and I really struggled. This was back when
Blender had right click for your
automatic selection, which just made no sense
and you couldn't change it. There was a lot of
weird things about Blender that did not
translate over to Maya. There's a lot of ways
to change that now, which is what we're going to
be going over in this class, so that way it's not so much of a culture shock when you go from Blender to
another software. I remember that was a really
difficult part for me. We're going to give you some tool sets that
are going to make that a lot more chill of a time going from one software to the other because
you're going to have to do this a lot in your career if you keep going to 3D animation. If you're super early in
your Blender journey, in your 3D animation journey, it's great that you're here
because the earlier you implement these skill sets
and these ways of working, it's going to be so
much easier for you, way easier than it was for me moving from Blender to
another industry software. The beauty of this class
is you do not need to bring a single project
up in Blender. We're going to be
doing this all in Blender's native user interface. I'm going to give
you some tools, some scripts that you can
use to install and fix your Blender up a little bit differently than
you normally would, and the best part is
all of it's undoable. So if you mess up something, there's an easy way to wipe the slate clean and go back
to what you're used to. But we're going to do this so that way you can compare and contrast what is it like using
the industry standard UI? How does it compare
to Blender's? Start easing yourself
very nicely into using a little bit different
of a UI than you are used to with
Blender's normal one. All you're going to
need for this class is your computer with
Blender downloaded, and we're going to walk
through step-by-step all these UI changes, and I'm going to help you
change your workspace to be a little bit more
industry standard. Now, all the things that
we're going to be doing in this class when it comes to Blender UI and changing
everything up in the workspaces, it's going to be a
little bit tedious. This is definitely
a tedious process. Figuring out hot keys, dealing with a new
user interface is a really difficult task. Don't be discouraged,
because in the end, the payoff for this
is incredible. I know I started this when
I was learning Blender. I started it pretty late into my Blender journey
where I changed a lot of hot keys because I knew I was about
to go into Maya. So I was trying to like bridge the gap between
the two software. It was so hard, but it made
jumping into Maya when I actually had to really start animating in it so much easier. Stick with me. I'm going
to hold your hand, we're going to get
through this together and trust me, it's
going to pay off. You're ready to get started. Meet me in the next lesson where we're going
to talk about where does Blender fall within
industry standards.
3. Get to Know Maya: Welcome back. We're
about to dive into two different animation
softwares and we're going to compare
and contrast them, this is Blender and Maya. You might be very familiar
with Blender already. It's probably the software that you've been learning
on for a while, and Maya, you may be a
bit more unfamiliar with. Maya is usually the one that you're using whenever
you're in the industry. A lot of studios use Maya or their own versions of
Maya that are patched up. Maya is the industry standard
when it comes to animation. Specifically, animators use
Maya within a studio setting. They might use Maya
that looks a bit different because they're using
a lot of their own tools. But Maya is definitely
the industry standard. If you're hoping to get
a job within animation, you need to tailor your Blender to fit more
of the standards of Maya so you're going
to have a easier time shifting from one
application to the other. First things first,
we're going to show you something that you're
probably more familiar with, and this is blender, this is always what you
have in blender. You have your camera here, you have a cube, and then you have a light. We can see that over here in what's called
the scene collection. This is your outliner, which
is showing you everything that exists within this
3D world and your scene. This is very specific to
Blender where you always open the scene and there are
at least three things there. It's never like that in
other animation softwares. If you open Maya or any
other animation software, and you think, where's the cube? Where's my camera?
Where's a light? You have to create
those things yourself. In Blender they're
already there for you, for better or for
worse, some people love it, some people hate it. But just an important thing to note that's different
in case you open another software and
you think where did that thing go, you have
to usually create it. Another thing about
Blender is navigation. This big window is
your 3D viewport, where you're going around,
you can look at your object. The very specific thing about
this is I have to hold down shift and middle mouse drag
to pan around my object. This navigation is
very specific to Blender and it's not
super industry standard. Something to keep in mind
is Blender has its own set of hot keys and
different move keys. If you want to use
different tools, they're going to have a
very different key map, which is what
Blender calls them. Other 3D softwares
called them hot keys. Blender, very different
navigation and user interface, comparatively to Maya
and other 3D softwares. Keeping all that in mind, we're going to switch to Maya now. This is how Maya looks
when you first open it. Relatively similar to Blender, but a little bit different
when it comes to the layout coloring,
where things are. Some key features are
the cube is not there, an interesting thing no cube, no camera, no light. This is an empty scene. This is just me opening up
Maya for the first time. This is what you see.
Another key thing to notice is that the
layout is a bit different. Over here you see it says
channels, edit objects. This is your channel box. In Blender, that's usually
called the Properties window. In Blender, you might
recognize that's usually on the bottom
and you may be thinking, oh my God, where's the
outliner and be confused, because the outliner is
something we use a lot. In Maya and other
industry softwares, usually it's here to the left, so it's hidden and tucked away, so that way you can
tuck it away whenever you don't need it. The outliner, if I
click on it over here, it opens it up and we
see what's in our scene. By default, we
don't have a cube, we don't have a light,
and we don't have a camera like in Blender. However, the top, front, and side views, those are
your orthographic views. You know on Blender when we see the top side, left, right, the views on the camera, on Maya those are
separate cameras that exist as their own entity. That's an important
thing to note. Outliners here,
don't be worried. If you open up another software
and you can't find it, it's usually going to be
over here to the left somewhere and a lot of
times we keep it collapsed. If I click on Outliner,
it stays collapsed. That way we have more space to work within our 3D viewport. I would say the biggest
difference that will trip you up very quickly if
you're going from Blender to Maya is navigation. In Blender, as we know, we hold shift to navigated
around the viewport. Maya, very different. We're going to be
holding Alt and that's middle mouse
clicking to pan. In blender, you would
know that it's shift in middle mouse clicking and
that would pan things around. If I use the Blender controls where I'm trying to hit Shift, hold it down, and I'm
middle mouse dragging, I'm trying to right click. Oh, now all there's
this stuff showing up. If I left click and hit Shift, I just have this bounding
box that comes up. It's very different
and it's hard to break that muscle memory
coming from Blender and going into Maya or
any other software, so to tumble around our object, we are holding down Alt and left mouse button, holding to tumble. Middle mouse button with
Alt is also panning. Then to zoom in and out, still held down with Alt, and we're zooming in and out
with our right mouse button. Just to be super clear, Maya is its own entity and
Blender is its own entity. Blender has something
specifically called blend files. You're very familiar with those
if you've been working in Blender for a little bit
of time or a long time. Maya cannot open up blend files. Blender doesn't really
play well with others when it comes to going
down the pipeline. If you're staying within
Blender, it's incredible. Works really great.
Everything is compatible. However, if you're trying
to go from Blender to Maya, there's a lot of things that
you have to do that have extra steps in order for Blender files to be
read by other programs. One of the reasons why
Autodesk and Maya is such a leading industry standard is because they have a lot
of different file types. They're integrated with a lot of studios pipelines already. It's very easy to
be able to just plug and play with
the different tools that they need and the
different parts of the pipeline that need to
pick up your work later. Now what I want
you to do is to go on YouTube research online, some different people using Maya for some animation project. See what people's processes
or workflows are. See how it differs from Blender. See how it's similar to blender. Watching someone do something in a software is a lot better of a teacher than you just
jumping into it alone. It's always great to
be able to go in, see how people are
using the software. That way you can be better
equipped when you are making the transfer from Blender
to another software. After you watched a
few Maya tutorials, come back and meet me in the next lesson where
we're going to talk about Blender and Studio
proprietary pipelines.
4. Understand Proprietary Studio Tools and Pipelines: We're going to be
talking about studio specific pipelines and tools. I really just want to
show you that being an animator is not
about the software, the software doesn't
make you an animator, it's about being
adaptable and having the skills that you
need to be adaptable. Because many things are
going to need to be customized to a studio and
not just the software. The first thing that
we're going to talk about is studio pipelines. This can be a new
concept to people, especially if they're first
starting out in 3D animation. Usually a studio
specifically is going to have a set of tools and specific software that that
studio is using for each and every product and projects
that they ever put out. Sometimes this can be industry standard software and tools that you can
easily download, either paid or free online, and sometimes in bigger studios or even smaller studios can have specific proprietary tools and software that they're using that integrate into
their pipeline. That can either be
a base software that a studio has
purchased licensing for and then they have slowly modified to become
something very different, or it can be a software
that they have built from the
ground up or a tool that they have also built from the ground up and now
have to use it within their pipelines that way it fits within the
scope of a project. For instance, I made the switch from Blender to Maya
pretty early on, and I got really good at Maya. I knew
where things are at. I know if something's wrong
where to go to fix it, and hat's another
important thing. Then one of my first jobs working in future
animation, they used Maya, but a very different version
of Maya to the point where I opened up Maya and
I was like, what is this? It had the name Maya, but it did not look
anything like it. It was very customized, heavily modeled to fit
the needs of the studio. Even though it was technically
the same hot keys, the same navigation, there were so many
different tools, so many tools that had been replaced with the
studios own tools, that it was overwhelming. That's something
that happens a lot. I've had that happen also
with a few of my VFX jobs. I've popped in and they say, we don't actually play blast, which is very common to watch your animation,
you play blast it. They're like, no, we
don't play blast, we do this specific thing, here's a tool to use it. The reason that a lot
of these studios end up having their own pipelines
and proprietary tools is because they have either a repetitive action or
something that they do constantly that is a need that can be very
easily automated, or they need it in
a different format, in a different way than
the software gives them. Maybe a studio starts
out with basic Maya. The basic Maya that
we can all download, it looks like the normal thing, but then as slowly
as they're building a project and as the
studio gets bigger, they start adding on
more and more things and duct taping Maya into
this different beast. A lot of times these
bigger studios have their own tech
department that will write tools for the artist, so an artist can say, hey, I'm an animator and I have to do this thing all the
time and it's so annoying because it takes too long and it should be
such a simple process. They might tell that
to the tool department and then the tool
department is going to say, cool, let me write you a script, let me write you a custom tool. They get in, they change it, they script, they make
a beautiful thing. We love the tool department. It's great when it works
really well, but again, it's just a whole new
interface and something that's proprietary
to that studio only, so you're not going
to be able to play with it or learn that kind of software or tool until
you're actually in the studio. It's really important
skill set as an animator to be able to know how to learn new
software on the fly. You may be thinking, well, my end goal isn't to
work for a major studio, I want to work for
myself or I want to freelance and totally
understand that. You won't be having
to deal with a lot of proprietary tools in terms of
you're the one using them, but think about this in
a collaborative way. If we're freelancing,
especially as a 3D animator, usually we're doing a very
small part of the project. We're using our own software, maybe it's Blender or Maya, whatever else we're animating. Then we're sending it
off for it to go down a pipeline or be passed
to another artist. There's going to be a
standard there as well. Even though the
industry standard might look different in
regards to a studio, it still is very much
well and a live when it comes to freelancing
and working for yourself. Because at the end of the
day as a 3D animator, we're doing a very small
part of the puzzle and that's going down
to other departments. What I want you to do
now is go on YouTube, go online, research
some bigger studios. There's a lot of times
of documentaries that these studios will do or show and tells of a few of their tools or
specific pipelines. Even some studios
will have, hey, here's our specific animation
program that we use that nobody can have
except if you work here. Go and research those things and just compare and contrast
what these studios are using so you can get a taste
and get a feel for what these pipelines are and the proprietary tools
that they're using. After you went and
research some of the studio proprietary
softwares and tools, maybe in the next lesson where we're going to talk about how to adapt your Blender UI
to be industry standard.
5. Adapt Blender Workflows to Maya: Welcome back. We are about to jump into the
nitty gritty of how to customize your Blender UI
for Intratutandard software. This is Blender 4.0. As you can see, this is
the very default setting, this is Factory
Settings Blender. First thing that we're
going to do is theme. We're going to go to edit, we're going to go to preferences, and here we're going to have several
different preferences that we can use to make this a little bit more
into standard that's already built into
blender as an option. A lot of people just don't
know that it even exists. We're going to go to themes, it's the second one
here, click on that. Now the beauty of this
is we have presets now. This did not used
to be a thing with blender and you used to have to go in and do this
all yourself and script it, but now we have a preset. We're going to click down,
open this drop menu, and now we have Blender dark, Blender light gray, minimal dark, all
this different stuff. Our favorite is Maya. I'm going to load this preset, and as you can see, things
changed a little bit. What changed? We're going
to flip back and forth. Blender dark, this
is what Blender usually has, looks like this. Maya, a little bit different. This is really just
changing colors and the different ways
that things are outlined or highlighted
or selected. This one is a little bit
more industry standard, it's a little bit
more like Maya, Cinema 4D, a couple
other softwares, Rumba, even if you've used that. This just makes it a bit
more cohesive when it comes to jumping back and
forth between softwares. Next thing that
we're going to do, this is the fun one that's going to help a lot of things in your blender career and your animation career
going forward, and this is hot keys. Hot keys are the
things that you're pressing all the
time to quickly get to a new tool or a new resource on the 3D animation software. With Blender, we
have all of these. It's going to be under key map. All of these things can
be changed manually. You can go in as we see
all of these options. Hot keys are something that
are completely customizable. Some people have their
entire own hot key set up, which is insane, but it's really good
to be able to have your hot keys translate
between softwares. Let's say you're animating,
you grab a control, you want to set a key,
what are you pressing? On Blender, a lot of times
the standard preset for that hot key is I. I is all
the way over on my other side of my keyboard for me. I'm using my left hand on the keyboard, my
right hand on the mouse. For me, that's inconvenient to constantly go over and press I. Now what I like to do is make my hot key something
that's very simple. It's easily translatable
between different softwares, so let's go here and we're
going to hit Import. I have made you a nice little industry hot keys
Python script that is going to automatically put some
of the Maya hot keys in your Blender so that way you can go seamlessly back and
forth and navigate. Amanda is very simple. It's not changing every single
hot key and blender, because you need to be
able to follow along, especially if you're
first learning Blender, you need to be able
to follow along tutorials and know, hey, if they say to press
these buttons, those are actually going
to be the hot keys that are doing the action
that you want to do. These are really just fixing your navigation hot keys because
that's the biggest thing that trips a lot of people
up when they're going from student in Blender to Maya. We're going to select these
industry hot keys and we're going to say Import
Key configuration. Now you can see this drop down change to Industry hot keys. If you click that drop down, the beauty of this is you
can switch back and forth. But I'd encourage you to use industry hot keys as much as you can for your key map set. Now that we have that,
let's close this off. Now, I can move around,
I know where I'm at. This is going to work
very much like Maya. In order to tumble, you're going to hold down
Alt and you're going to hold left mouse button and that's going
to tumble around. This is very standard, this is with any other 3D
animation software. This is going to be
how you're navigating around your 3D viewport. Next thing is Alt
middle mouse hold. This is going to pan. Then two different ways
you can zoom in and out. This is middle
mouse just scroll, I use that mostly or you can use right mouse click and
then also holding down all. That way you can go in and out. You can see this is a very
easy way to flip around. Now here's one of my
favorite hot keys that I included in this keyset
that is so useful. Let's say I'm way out here, I can barely see
my scene anymore. Maybe instead of going
to the scene collection, instead of going
to the outliner, maybe I just want to grab something and look
at it real quick. What I'm going to do
is I'm going to hit a light or something
in my scene, and I'm going to press
F on my keyboard. That automatically takes
my perspective camera to wherever that thing
is that I just grabbed. Also when I tumble now, it is going to be tumbling
around the selection. That is a very useful
and very standard set of hot keys and functionality that's in a lot
of 3D animation software, but a Blender that
is not a default. I call this quality
of life upgrades. This is just going to upgrade the quality of your
life when it comes to just navigating around repetitive actions
that are a lot easier. Another thing that
is going to be a hot key in this is move tools. QWERTY, Q-W-R-T-Y on your keyboard is going to be kind of where your
hands resting. This again, very
standard for pretty much any software that
you've ever used for 3D, this is what it's going to be, a little bit different
from blenders. Q is just going to select whatever object you want.
This is your selection tool. If I want to use my mouse, left click to select anything. W is going to be or move tool. This is how we're moving things. We have panhandles, we have different axis that
we can go off of. E is going to be our rotate key, and also R to finish it off. This is scaling
just very generic, being able to jump
back and forth in between different
softwares and have this hot key muscle memory
is really important and it's going to make it so
much easier to dive into other 3D softwares when
you need to learn them. Now that we have our hot keys, we're going to change our
layout just a little bit. I want this class
specifically not to be, I'm going to overhaul
your entire Blender and you're going to not know
where a single thing is, not the goal of this class. We're just making some
simple changes that I wish I would have
whenever I'm going back and forth between
Blender and Maya just to make my mind not have
to work as hard. That's the goal
here. In Blender, the outliner is
here on the right, Maya is to the left. Now Blender has a
very strange way of making a workspace comparatively
to other softwares. With Maya, for
instance, you just drag and drop a window
wherever you want it. It's super easy.
Blender is a little bit more confusing if you're not
familiar with how to do it. Just to show you in Maya, this is what we're
going to be emulating. Your properties panel, AKA
the channel box in Maya, that's going to be mainly what's over here on your right, your outliner is going
to be on your left. For Blender, how we're
going to do this? It's a little bit complicated, stick with me and we're
going to do this together. I like to start in the
animation workspace. First things first, I like to change the
dope sheet down here. We're going to change that
to your graph editor. Now if you use the dope sheet, don't change that, keep
using the dope sheet. But a lot of times animators are using the graph editor
way more than the dope sheet, so I always have my graph
editor open down here. The next thing that I'm going to do is make sure that I can see my timeline because I don't like that that's hidden by default. We're setting this
all up so that way we can save this as a
workspace later, that way we can always
come back to it. Right now we have our 3D
viewport on the right hand side, and then over here
on the left hand side we have our camera. This is a great way
for animators to work. I think it's a great
starting point for any shot that
you're opening. This is your properties panel, and then this is going
to be your outliner. We're going to right
click and then we're going to say join areas. When we say join
areas like this, it's going to come up
with this little arrow and it's going to
show down or up. This is controlling what window is going to
merge with what. In this case, we
want our properties window, this bottom one, to merge with the
top, so we want the outliner gone because we're going to move
where that's at. We're going to say up, great. Now this is just our property. Just to compare, this is next
to Maya, getting similar. Now where's our outliner? We got to find that. This is where it gets a little tricky. What we're going to
do is we need to open another window in here, and we're going to
make it this long window right on the left
hand side of our workspace. To do that, we're
going to go all the way up here to the
left hand corner of our screen and see how
your mouse turns into like a little cursor right
there, a little crosshairs. We're going to take that,
we're going to left button click on it and there
we go, now we have two. We don't really want two
of the same shot cam, so what we're going to do is do a little fun thing now
where we're going to right hand click on
that little bar, again between the two windows and we're going to
say vertical split. Now this is going to
give us a cursor, is going to turn into a line. Now we can place this vertical
split wherever we want. Either or it doesn't matter
which one you do this on, but I'll do it on the top
one, just right here. The next thing that
we're going to do is we're going to right click on this and we're
going to say join eras, and now we're going to
make this one big window. We're going to turn
this down here, and now we've got
two right here. We're moving around. It's a little bit of a puzzle, but stick with me, we're going to get
to it until the end. Now just to make things cleaner, we're going to click left
hand on this editor type. This is changing,
what is your window? What information is in here? We're going to shift
this to Outliner. Now we've got an outliner here and we can
also collapse it, so it's really tiny
or we can make it really big so we can find
what we're looking for. Now, same thing. We're
going to rinse and repeat. Right click on this little area, this little line right
between the two windows. We're going to say
Join areas and either one since this
is the same shot cam, we're going to join it and
now we have this beauty. This now is a lot easier to
go back and forth and we see both of these interfaces
are emulating each other. But it's a little bit of less of mental gymnastics
whenever you're switching back and forth
between these softwares, and if you're getting used
to blender like this, it's going to be a
lot easier to hop into any sort of three software. The one thing that's important is if I close blender right now, this all goes away,
it disappears. How are we going to make sure
that that does not happen? What we're going to do is
we're going to go to file, we're going to go
down to defaults, and we're going to say
save start up file. It is going to save
this blend file, this workspace for your start up file every time
you open Blender. When you're importing something, when you're wanting
to bring in a rig, you're wanting to do something, it's always going
to have this kind of work space set up for you, which is really nice because you don't want to
have to do what we just did every single
time you open blender. This is going to
save your hot keys, your preferences, the theming, everything that you need,
it's going to look like this. Let's save start up file. It's telling me start up file saved, so we should
be good to go. Now I want you to go and do
this with your Blenders. Walk through all the same steps, change your Blender UI to
be more of this work space, the hot keys that I gave you. The hot keys will be linked
in the class resources, so you can just
import them right away, you don't have
to do them yourself. I want you to take a picture, maybe a screenshot, of
your Blender and UI, how it looks now versus
how it looked before, and I want you to share it to
the class project gallery. That way you can talk
with other students. Say what you like about the
change, say what you hate. Play around the hot
keys for a while. See how it feels to
try to animate or just navigate around a scene in Blender now that you
have this new set up. Hopefully now you feel
a lot more prepared to face alternative
animation softwares.
6. Final Thoughts: Congratulations on
finishing this class. Hopefully this is giving
you the tool set that you need to feel
confident and to feel like animation is you and it's not your software that you're
using. That's just a tool. As you navigate the vast
world of 3D animation, do not lose your spark. I know the learning curve
can be so difficult. There were times through
my animation journey where I wanted to
quit many times over. But keep going and persist. Always come back to
your why of animation. Why did you get into this
from the first place? It's so rewarding
when you get to do something every day
that you love so much, and it's such a rewarding career in terms of we're
problem solving, and at the same time
we're being artistic. Remember with all this
animation software stuff, the more you know, the
more softwares you know, the more industry compatible
hot keys you know, the more opportunities
that are going to open up in the 3D animation
industry for you. Now I want you to
share some words of encouragement in the
Project Gallery. Talk to your fellow students. Talk about your journey,
where you're at, what your next steps
are on your career, and your animation journey, and what you're most
excited about going forward jumping into this vast
world of 3D animation. I really hope you've
enjoyed this class and get to check out all my
other classes on Skillshare. Good luck on the rest of
your animation journey and landing your dream
job in the industry, and I hope to see you around.
Madison Erwin, Animator
