Advanced 3D Animation: Create Professional Renders with Blender

1. Introduction: Animation has been a really fun journey for me and blunder. I started just doing very simple things, adding key frames. And I got really excited by just starting to see objects move on the screen. But as I continued to develop, I started to get a better sense for what the feeling was behind the motion. How to create a almost musical feeling to the animation that you're seeing on the screen. Hey everyone, I'm Derek Elliott. I'm a three D designer to an animator with an industrial design background. And what I usually do is create animations for new products that are coming out. You might have seen my work on a really big screen behind someone making a grand presentation, or maybe you just stumbled across my Instagram one day and found a cute little animation. I'm always creating interesting, fun things to pop into my head. So I'm really excited about teaching this class on some more advanced animation. Because I really want to start to open your eyes to how deep blender can go. In this class, we're going to be taking a fake skincare brand and creating a full fledged commercial for it. I'm going to teach you about how to use armatures to fold objects. We'll also take a look at rigid body simulation. Using physics to control the placement of objects. And beyond all that, we'll do a lot of work in the graph editor, creating really smooth animations, moving from one shot to the next, creating fluid motion between them. Stick around to the end of the class where we've got a little bit of a bonus lesson where I'll teach you about how to break into the industry and how to do just what I do for yourself for a living. By the end of this class, I'd really like you to be left with an animation that you're very proud of. Thanks for joining along with me in this class. It's going to be a ton of fun. Let's get started. 2. Plan Your Animation: Now if you're doing more easy or basic animation, you might not need to come with so much of a plan because it's easy to just kind of insert keyframe, see how things are looking, and run with it. But when you're really trying to create professional, polished animation, it's a good idea to take a few steps back and think actually about what you need to be animating. What is the purpose of this animation? Maybe the client said they want you to make our product feel soft and luxurious. Or maybe it's a more technical product and they want to know that they can see all the interior parts and components that make up this amazing product that they've created. Whatever it may be, it's really important to come with a plan. This isn't just for you, but this is also an opportunity to get your client on board as well. So that you both can move together through the project. The project we're working on in this class is a mock up sort of skincare brand. So I'm imagining that the client has given us a few images of the products we're going to be working with. So I'm going to be sketching those products on the page from a few different angles so that we can start to get a better idea of the shape and what the opportunities might be for showing that with lighting or animation. We're also going to move into maybe just writing some of the words that we might have gotten from the client. In this case, I want this to be a nice soft animation that speaks to luxury and premium qualities. So I'll write words like that down on the page as well. And then usually by the time I'm starting to fill out my sketchbook towards the bottom, I'll actually start drawing in some storyboards. Drawing in some actual frames I think will appear in my animation. I'm going to start off by just drawing some of the products we have here. So we're going to have a few different products. One is going to be kind of a jar shaped product, which is going to be a moisturizer in my case. And then we're also going to have another product that's a little bit more of a tube shape that's going to be in this triangular shape. That might be what we have, a face cleanser or something in. I'm just going to draw out these shapes really loosely. And then the last of these three products is just going to be like a little bit of a pump bottle, one that we would use to put in some other skin care product. Then I'm going to usually start thinking about some motion. Then I might start drawing some of these in perspective, thinking a little bit about the actual three D shape of these objects here. I'm just going to draw a simple cylinder shape to indicate what that moisturizer might be. This is where I can really start thinking about how this might be moving in space. I'm just drawing that at a little bit of a different angle. Thinking about the shape of that, actually, what some of these curves might be, as this line I'm drawing here is just to indicate what that curve is. Now I'm particularly excited about this moisturizer product because I think it might be really fun with this jar shape to pop it off the top. I think this is going to be a good opportunity for an animation. As ideas like that are starting to come into my head, I might just draw them out a little bit. Then this would be a time when you can totally start drawing on some little lines to indicate motion that you might want to be happening. I'm just going to draw some flying motion lines to indicate that that jar is popping off and then we might be able to see what's inside there. Now oftentimes I'll be thinking also what are some of the words that the client might have told me. So we're just going to be sort of even just drawing words like, I know soft is one that we want to convey, so I might just draw sort of a word soft that starts to maybe convey a little bit of emotion as well. I also know that we're going to have a box that these products come in and then maybe we want to sort of pull it open. So maybe just inside profile, I'll draw that box and then show it just sort of opening. And then maybe even draw like a little bit of an arrow indicating that that's the direction that the box is going to open. Now I might draw a little bit of a detail of that squirt pump bottle. That's one that I've got in my head I think has a really unique shape. It's going to give a good opportunity for lighting. So maybe we do a simple perspective drawing of that. Thinking about what that shape might look like, what kind of opportunity there might be for animation with that. Now don't worry too much about the quality of the drawing here. As you can see, I'm drawing very loosely and sketchy. And that's the point at this stage in the process is just getting the shapes out there, starting to think about what you might see, maybe even including some of the logos on there. I'll draw a little Dirk logo that I know I'm going to have on there just so that I can be thinking a little bit about typography. Now I'm looking back again at this soft phrase, I really want to incorporate somewhere where we can have a feeling of softness and I think that might work good around this cleanser. Let's just draw that shape out here. Again, draw the little cap and maybe we have this filled with bubbles, or there's something around this shape to indicate that it's like squished in there. It's soft. Maybe speaking a little bit to cleanliness, just really quickly drawing some bubbles around there, thinking what that might look like. That could be an opportunity to create sort of a unique animation experience. Now I'm also trying to think about how maybe I will end this animation. So I know I think I'm going to start with the box opening up and then we'll probably have some type of a reveal. So let's draw what it might look like. When that box opens up, I want those to pop straight out of the box. As soon as it opens, that box lid is going to swing back, and then we're going to have those products pop out of it. Now, I really like this idea of this lid flying off. I also think I want to have that lid maybe fly back down. When that flies back down, maybe that's how we can transition into our final shot. Let's draw just similar image of that lid, but this time thinking about it slamming down, back onto the product. Just another arrow. Thinking about that. Then maybe we do another arrow, and this is going to be where we consider what will be in the next shot. Maybe I'll even draw a frame here. I'm thinking in the end shot here, we want to have all three products. I'm just going to draw some really simple squares to indicate those. Then I want to imagine that we're going to be coming down into that shot. I might just write a few little notes for myself. Shot, I'm getting a pretty good idea now. I'm still not quite sure what I want to do with that square bottle. I think it could be fun to do some type of animation where maybe it's leaving like a little bit of a trail of lotion or something coming out of it. Maybe we draw a little trail. Maybe that square bottle is coming down at a little bit of an angle here. So we can draw that here. Just again, very simply, once I've got some general ideas mapped out here, that might be where I actually go and start planning out what some of these frames might actually look like. Maybe we start off with a close up shot of the box. Maybe it's just like barely opening a little bit so we could draw that. Maybe this would be an opportunity to see some of the material textures that we have on the box right there and then it's just barely cracking open. Maybe there could be some light or something on the inside, but maybe that's our first shot where the box lid is just coming open. Then maybe this is where maybe the box spins around. I'll draw myself a little bit of an arrow here so I know which direction I want to move the camera. Maybe the box spins around and becomes fully open like that shot we drew above. And then we see our three products. Then from there, I think we need to transition into maybe some individual views focusing on these individual products. Maybe that's where we introduce that scene with the bubbles. Maybe we start at a little bit of an angle though and we get a spinning effect as we reveal that cleanser product. Maybe the bubbles come in from around it. From that, I think we would maybe go into this line animation. Let's imagine our tube is somewhere right here. And then we have our little spot where the nozzle is. Maybe see that up close before we zoom out. And then see the whole bottle drawing that line. Maybe we see the line start right there. We're starting to pump lotion onto a surface or something like that. And then we would enter our final sequence. Which I think for that sequence it's going to be fun to maybe show the different products just falling into a liquid and disappearing, almost indicating maybe that'd be a good opportunity to put text on the screen that says buy it now or get it before it's gone because the products just disappear into nothingness. I'm not sure how I would show that with a simple sketch, but maybe we can just draw a simple horizon line. This doesn't necessarily need to be what the actual animation would be, but just show that those products now are maybe sinking into the ground there. So now we've got a little bit of an idea of where we're going with this animation. We've got a little bit of a storyboard here. We know what shot we want to start with, where we're going to go from there, and then where we might want to end this animation. It's about this time that I'm ready to jump into blender. Join me in the next lesson where I have a box model with these other skincare products in it. And I want to open that box up. We're going to use an armature to do that to create our first revealing shot. 3. Add Armatures to Open a Box: We're going to be doing a little bit of work with Armatures today. Now, this is something popular with character animators, but there's a lot of ways you can use it with product animation as well. In this case, I'm going to be using armatures to open the lid on a box model that I have prepared. So we're going to see now with a few objects that I have already prepared ahead of time. In this case, we're looking at a box and inside the box we look at wire frame. We actually have a few different skin care models that we're going to be working with. Now the box is a pretty simple object. It's just we have a solidify modifier on it as well as a Bevel modifier, but besides that, we're just working with different plain objects. This is a very simple object that you could build easily with very simple modeling skills. So what I want to do now is open this box up. And the way I want to do that is by using armatures. So if we didn't have armatures, if these were separate objects, we could just animate the rotation, for example. But in this case, I want to use armatures so that the stays as one object and we're deforming the object. So I want to decide where I want this bend to start and in my case, I want it to be right along this back seam here. We're not going to be moving any of the rest of this object, just this lid. So I want to make sure my cursor is selected right there. If yours is not, you can just select that edge, press shift S, and snap your cursor to selected. Then what I want to do is press shift A and add in an armature. And I'll create this large object right here. And this is a bone, there's two parts to this bone. This is the root of the bone and this is the other end of that bone. Now if I go into my side view and tab into edit mode on the bone object, I can just now move this into place where I want that next bone to start. We're going to have two bones here. We're going to have one opening, the main flap of the box. And then we're going to just have another bone controlling that little flap on the edge in wireframe view. I'm just going to move this to right about where that seam is. And it's a little bit difficult to see, but we have our box top coming over right here and then it's tucked in right in this area. I want to get that position around where that next corner is. That's looking good. Now what I'll do back in edit mode is with this selected, I want to press E and Z and just extrude down until we have another bone. Now we have two very simple bones. Now if you want to be sure you can see your bones through things, there's a lot of options with bones in the way that they're displayed in the viewport in this Object Data Properties tab on a bone. We have a few options here. If we can press that bone, we can select this bone to be in front. No matter which way our object is oriented, we'll always be able to see that bone. That's helpful for when we're selecting them and doing a little bit animation here in the future. Now what I need to do is parent this box object to the armature bone object so that we can actually start to create that animation. These are linked together. You can think of armatures like a skeleton. So right now we have a skeleton and we have the body object that we want to parent the skeleton to, but we need to actually attach them together. And the way we're going to do that is with empty vertex groups. If we select this box object first and then select our bone next, we can press control P. And we'll have a few different options here that we might not have had before because we've got bones. In this case, we want to be doing armature to form. If you're working with a simple object and you're not too concerned about exactly how it bends, then this automatic weights option is really good because it'll do a good job of selecting areas it thinks you want a bone to be attached to based on the proximity of the mesh to that bone. But in my case, I want to have very specific control over what each bone is affecting on the object. That's going to be easy for me because this is such a simple object, I can just assign those. Once I have the vertex groups, I'm going to parent this with empty groups. Now if we were to move our bone object, the box object is going to move with it. But if we were to go into pose mode, for example, and try to move this object around, then it's not going to move. Now the way I moved into pose mode really quickly was by pressing control tab. You could also do that up here, but if we now click on our box object, we'll see that we have two bones. So there's a bone and a bone one. So that this is a little bit easier, let's go into edit mode on this bone object and rename this bone. So I'm going to press F two and rename that main flap. And then with this one I'll press F two and rename that small flap. Now if we go back into the vertex groups, we can see that those names have been updated, so it's just a little bit easier to understand. What I need to do now is assign which parts of the mesh need to be assigned to those specific bones. Let's tap into edit mode. Let's select this top face, and then let's also select the side faces that I want to also move up with that main flap. Let's hit a sign. Now if we tab out of edit mode and we go back into our pose mode, we can then rotate this bone. Now this axis is something that's particularly useful for character animators, but I'm going to just change this to our X, Y, and Z oiler that we're used to. Now if we move this, we can see it's working properly, but of course that other bone is still stuck to it. What I need to do now is go into the vertex group for that bone and assign those as well. I'm going to select the small flat vertex group. And then let's make sure if we press Select, It's not assigned to anything right now, which it's not. Let's just select that one face and then hit a sign. Now if we go back into this bone object and start going into pose mode again with control tab, now we can rotate this and it's going to move with it. Now it looks like we're actually also moving this object down here. When I rotate that I don't want that bottom part of the mesh to move. I'm going to make sure that this portion of the mesh is not part of that main flat vertex group. Let's select that vertex group and then click Select. It doesn't appear that it is if we hit Select again in vertex mode. But I think what the problem here is is that the order of modifiers matters, including with armatures. The armature actually is a modifier in our stack. And if you remember, modifiers work in order. We need to make sure that our armature is happening first. Because with the solidify and the bevel, we're creating all this extra geometry. But our vertex group was very simple. Once that extra geometry is added, it doesn't really know where to put those new vertices in that group. Let's make sure our armature is first, so I need to get in object mode first. Then control to have deposed mode. And now I should be able to rotate this and it's working properly. Now we have a little bit of flexing here, but that's okay for our purposes now. We just wanted to have control over this primary part of the object. Now you can see that when we open this, we have a little bit of a reveal going on. And we could also independently adjust this one to create a little bit of extra animation on this particular part of the mesh. Let's quickly add a really simple animation where maybe this starts all the way down. Let's right click and insert a single keyframe on that rotation. Then let's move forward. Let's say 60 frames, 2 seconds. Let's go ahead and make sure we're at 30 frames per second over here in our render properties, our output properties. Then let's move this up to something like that. I want to move it up just enough so that our objects can pop out of the box. Something like this, I think is going to work great. Let's also add just a little bit of animation to this bone. So we have just a little bit more happening now. I don't want this to fly out quite right here because then it would intersect with our box just once that clears somewhere right around here. I'm going to insert a keyframe, and then I'll move forward to frame 60, and we can have that fly back a little bit. Let's insert another key frame now, just so we can play this back really quickly. Let's set our total timeline to only be 60 frames. And we can see that box opening animation happening. So what we did today was a really simple use case of using armatures to open a box. Now, armatures are a really powerful tool in animation, particularly if you're doing character animation. But if I'm being honest, I don't use them that much for things besides the simple use case we did here today. But the steps are very similar. You basically create a skeleton for the object you want to add an armature to. Then you assign what parts of the mesh move with which bones. And then you can animate the bones to create whatever effect you're going for. Meet me in the next lesson, We're going to add some bubbles using rigid bodies around our cleanser object. 4. Make Bubbles with Rigid Bodies: In this lesson, we're going to be working with rigid body animation, which is a type of physics animation to create bubbles appearing around our cleanser bottle object. To get started, I'm going to add first a bubble object that we can use to attract to this cleanser bottle object. I'm in the same scene I was before. I just created a new collection called Bubbles. And that's where I'll do this particular animation. So I'm going to press shift S and snap my cursor two selected, just so that it's in around the right place. And I'm going to add an icosphere. Now I'll add in another subdivision to that ecosphere. Just so it's a little bit smoother. I'll just move it a little bit out of the way and shade it smooth. Now I want to attract this object to the bottle object. And the way I'm going to do that again is by using rigid bodies. If I go into the physics properties of this object right here, I can add rigid body. Now if I press space part to play, it's just going to fall into nothingness. That's not exactly what I want. The settings that I want to change here are under the scene tab. I want to go under gravity and just uncheck that option. Now if I press space part of play, it's not going to go anywhere because there's no forces acting on it, not even gravity. It's just going to stay still. But I do want to have some force acting on it, and that's going to be an attracting force to move it towards this object. Previous classes we played with using some of the force fields listed here, but you can also use an object as a force field. I'm going to go ahead in the physics properties of this, change this object to have a force field on it. Now if I press space part of play, we'll see still nothing is happening. That's because we need to change this from the point shape to a surface. Now if we press space part of play, we can see that it's starting to repel away from that surface. Now under the strength here, if I turned that up, it would probably repel faster. Let's take a look at what that would look like. That does seem to be what's happening here. But to have it pull towards the object, I just need to move this to a negative value. If we base bar, we can see that now that is effectively being pulled into our object. Let's give ourselves some more frames to work with so we can see what's going on there. You can see it, we'll fly past it, almost like the moon in orbit or something. And it'll continuously be trying to be pulled towards that object. Now, I don't want to go through the object, I just wanted to sync up next to it. I need to add in a few more physics properties to both these objects, the first of which is going to be adding collision to this object down here. If we now press space bar, let's see if that's working. It looks like that is not working. I think that we also need collision on this object. Let's add collision right here. I think I want to add a rigid body to this object as well. Let's click that and see if we're improved at all. Now it's working properly, but now our bubble is knocking over our object into space. Now, this is a pretty cool animation on its own. Like always, I encourage you to take a pause and maybe you decide this is what you want your animation to be. But I don't want my bottle flying into space like that. What I'm going to do is instead of having this in the rigid body settings be an active object, I'm going to have it be a passive object now. It should not be moving around. Now we can see that that's working properly where it's being attracted to that surface, but it's not going to go through it now. It's not quite as tight up to the surface as I'd like. We have some settings here in both objects where we can for one control the friction, let's bring the friction all the way up to one doesn't slide around quite so much and it sticks to it a little bit more. We do the same thing on this object right here, bringing the friction all the way up. Now it's not moving around quite as much and I'm liking the way that that looks. Let's scale this object down just a little bit and see how it's looking. If we move it even closer to the object, see how tightly it follows that form. Now this is looking pretty good where things are being sucked up to the mesh, but I want them to stay there a little bit better. I'm going to actually also add in a force field with our cursors still right there. Let's push shift and add in a force field, and I'll just make that a force. Now if we press space bar, that's probably throw it way too far into the distance in our physic settings. Let's just pull this down a little bit so that it is a negative value and it's going to hold it next to the mesh. And I think something like that is looking really great. Now what I want to do is create a lot of different bubbles. But before I do that, I wanted to just give this bubble a little bit of waviness so that when we render it with a nice, clear, transparent material, we'll get some more interesting reflections happening. Let's maybe just make this a little bit bigger then when we use a glass shader on this, we're going to want some solidity to it. Let's just give it a little bit of thickness here, something like that. Looks pretty good. Then I'll also add in a displaced modifier. The displaced modifier is basically going to, by default, just push everything outwards. But I don't want it to go just in all directions out. I want to use a texture to control what's happening with that. Also, while I'm right here, I'll move this to be before the solidify modifier. So our displace happens first and then it's solidified in the displaced modifier. We have this option right here, new. And that will add a new texture, which again, I can click right here to jump to the properties of that texture. Now by default that's set to an image or a movie, but I'm going to use a procedural clouds texture here. Now if we take a look at this, we can see what this clouds texture is doing. It's going a little bit crazy. And that's because we don't have a ton of definition on this mesh. Maybe we just add in a subdivision surface modifier and then pull that right above the displacement so that we have that subdivision happening. And then the mesh is being displaced. It's got more mesh to work with during the displacement. I think one level will be just fine there. Now, this is a good time to save your file if you haven't already because sometimes when you're messing with extra levels of subdivision and we start duplicating this object, the scene can get a little heavier press shift control and save this scene. Now that's saved, we can play this and it's still working properly. But we do have that displacement happening now. Now it's a little bit too extreme. I want this to be way less powerful. Let's bring the strength down on it quite a lot then. Rather than displacing on its own local coordinates, I want it to displace on object coordinates that will allow it to change the way it's displaced relative to a different object. We can really set any object here, but I'll just set the cleanser bottle. Now if we look at this very closely, we can see that there's a little bit of motion happening with that as it moves through space. We could probably see that better if we change to a matt cap right here. This is one that I like to use a lot, the normal matt cap, that can be a little bit more useful for seeing the direction of different objects. Now, so that this display is maybe a little bit more pronounced, we can bring the scale of the texture down just a bit until we have something that's just a bit more visible, at least, so that we can see that our changing shape is working properly. It looks like right now it's doing pretty good. We could see also what this might look like if we changed it from object to global coordinates. That's giving us, I believe, a similar effect. Let's try switching between these two. It looks like the object is giving me a little bit more interesting results where the mesh is morphing a little bit as it moves around. We don't want this to be quite as extreme. I'll go ahead and go back into the texture settings and change the scale of the secture to be a little bit bigger. Then back in the displacement settings, I'll make sure that the strength is set. There's something pretty low like maybe even 0.05 We want this to be a very subtle effect, we just don't want these to appear as perfect spheres when we're rendering this scene. Now that I have that all set up with a single bubble, let's add more bubbles to the scene. I'll switch back into my regular studio. What I need to do now is create linked duplicates of this object. Normally, when you're duplicating objects, you might do that with shift D, which will allow you to then make changes to that object separately and they won't be reflected in the original object. But if I go back and start adding different materials to these objects, I want them to all be linked and have the same properties, so I'll press Alt D instead. Now if we were to make a change to this object, it'll happen to both of them. This is really useful because we're going to be creating a lot of duplicates of this object. And we want them all to share similar properties. Now you can see that these are both working independently and having the same physics effects that we set up with that first one. Now what I want to do is just go in and start adding a bunch of these objects around our cleanser tube. I'm going to press Alt D and just start making some duplicates all around the outside here. Now this is going to be looking a little bit regular right now, but we can make some changes to make that look a little bit more irregular after the fact. Let's get all those selected then. I'll just duplicate them again in this plane. And then maybe even duplicate them right here. Maybe we can move these ones back. We wouldn't want these all to be in this array at first, but we could still press Space Bar and see what that looks like. Now we have this nice bubble shape being attracted to all these different ones. But I don't want these all to be exactly the same size, and I don't want them to necessarily be in an exact position. Let's select them all, and then just for the sake of organization, let's move those to their own collection called bubbles. Why do we name it the bubbles collection? I'll leave that to you. Now that we have all these bubbles, it's easy for me to now right click and select the objects in that collection. I don't have to worry about circle selecting them individually like I did before, I'm going to press three and search for the randomized transform option. With that selected, let's make sure we're back on frame zero. Search for it again because we lost it. We can click this scale even button so that we don't have weird stretching on x or y or z axes. We're just going in and out. We can scale them like this. If scale even is on, then they should scale evenly and we'll have different size bubbles that are a little bit more random. This randomized transform is great for doing things like this. You just need a little bit more irregularity in whatever you have set up. Now we do have to be careful about areas where bubbles are intersecting because that might cause errors in our rigid body simulation, where when we press play, they'll start to fly everywhere. We can see that did happen with a few of these. Let's maybe just fix some of those problem areas. It looks like down here we have some bubbles that are a little bit too close to each other. So I'm just going to pull those out a little bit and it looks like we're all clear. Now, I'm going to want to start this shot with the bubbles all coming in together, which is great, which is what's happening with this force field that we have. But then maybe by the end of the shot want them to fly outwards a little bit. If we say this shot is maybe 60 seconds, 60 frames, let's say that they all pull in at first, up to frame 30. They're all in there together, and the strength is what it is. Now let's insert a key frame, but then maybe ramping up over the course of five frames. At frame 35, this strength becomes positive, they start to go the opposite direction. Let's set this to 60, so we can see what our shot might look like for space part of play. And then we can see, then they fly away. That would be a great opportunity to then reveal the details of this model design that we've worked on. In this lesson, we learned about using physics to create a rigid body animation to bring bubbles from outside an object to draw towards it and sort of move around on that object. Consider things like the order of your modifiers. Consider things like the mesh that's being used to draw your object in, whether you're using the actual mesh or one of those other options like a convex hole or even just a bounding box. All these things contribute to making your animation look just the way you like. And I didn't even explore all the sliders. We have options to work with. There's a lot of things to play with. Don't be afraid of troubleshooting them. You will probably run into some issues, but it's nothing that you can't overcome. Meet me in the next lesson where we're going to create the illusion of liquid coming out of one of these bottles using a lot of fun modifiers. 5. Create the Illusion of Liquid: In this lesson, we're going to be creating the illusion of fluid pumping out of one of these bottles. Now I say illusion because this isn't a proper fluid simulation. Fluid simulations while possible in blender and they're a lot of fun, can take a really long time and are very headache conducing. I've got a technique to share with you. In this lesson, we're going to use a lot of modifiers to create a fluid looking effect that's a lot easier and much less headache conducing. I've created a duplicate of my product that has the pump on it. And for this shot, I think I'm going to remove the cap. So this is all one object, but I'll tap into edit mode. Press Ldslect that cap and press X to delete it so that it's out of there. Now we just have our nice pump bottle product that I modeled. Okay, So what I want to do now is create a illusion of liquid coming out of this pump bottle. And the way I'm going to do that is by first creating a curve that that liquid can appear on. So I'm going to press Shift and add in a curve, and I'll use a Bezier curve. Now let's go into our top view and just stretch this curve out a little bit till it's a nice size. We'll scale this out just so we have a nice fluid curve shape. To make that more smooth, we can change the resolution up here to the maximum 64. So this is nice and smooth. Now the first thing I want to do is animate this object moving through this curve. I'll do that with a follow path constraint. Now the first thing I want to do is make sure that this object is set right at the start of this curve. The start of that curve should be right there. Let's tap into edit mode and select the end of the curve. Shift as and snap my cursor to selected. Now what I'll do is snap this bottle to the cursor selection to cursor. We're going to do is add in the follow path constraint. Now if I select this Bezier curve and press space bar, it's not going to move along it. And that's because we need to animate this path. It also looks like, based on the offset that I'm getting here, that maybe the start of the curve was actually over here. Let's snap our cursor selected. And snap our selection to cursor right here. Now if we click animate this path, now that we have the follow path constraint on, it's not actually following that path. And that's because this path needs to be animated. Let's click that button right there and make sure that our path is animated. Now it's properly moving along the path, but it's not moving exactly along it. We need to actually get this object right to be in line with the end of that path. Let's press Tab to go in edit mode. Snap our cursor to selected, and then snap this selection to our cursor. Now if we press space part of play, we'll see that it successfully moves along that path. Now this path is actually animated, Is something we can have some control over. If we select that path right here and we move down into the path animation, we can see that over the course of 100 frames is how long it's taking to move from the start to the finish of this curve. That's why it doesn't quite complete it. I want this to actually take place over the, the course of 60 frames. Let's set that to 60 right there then. Rather than using the default linear extrapolation that's on this evaluation time, I'm just going to right click and clear these keyframes because I want to have some manual control over that at evaluation time. One is where I want to start off. At frame one, I'm matching up in my playhead. I'm at frame one down here, and I want the evaluation time to also be one. Let's right click and insert a keyframe then. I want it to be at the end the full duration at frame 60. Let's move our playhead 60 down here and set this also to 60. And then we can right click and insert a key frame. Now if we press Space Bar, we can see that it's moving through that path at the time we've defined. I want to actually add some dimension to this path. I can do that a few different ways, the first of which is going to be adding a bevel object. Now we can add a Bevel object, and that just needs to be a curve object. I'm just going to add in a circle object. Then let's just move that to wherever, and then we can select this as the bevel object. Then you'll see that the bevel object here matches the size that we have. Moving along our curve, let's scale that down to something that may be a little bit more reasonable. Something like that looks pretty good. The next thing I want to take note of is that these caps are unfilled and they're just blunt ends. But really what I'd like to do is have it taper at each end. I can add an actual taper object on this curve, that's going to be right here. This also needs to be a curve object. Let's add in another curve object, we'll just make that a bezier. Now if I select the taper object, we'll have that changing over the course of the animation. Now our bevel object just seems to have been made this much smaller. So let's just scale up this bevel object until it's about the right size. And don't worry about it being too big. We can move it off frame after the fact. Just get this to a nice size. You can think of this as a small little x and y axis, where this is zero thickness on this side and this is zero thickness over here. Just like working in our graph editor, what I want to do is actually change this by rotating it a little bit so that we have thickness in the middle of our curve also, but the ends are still tapered off. Now you could also even add, you could write, click and subdivide this if you want it to be more consistent depth throughout the middle of the curve. This is looking pretty good. Let's select our huge circle here and bring this down until we have just a little bit of a better size. I think that something like that is working pretty good, matching the size of our nozzle. This is looking great. The next thing I want to do is maybe we could tilt this up a little bit. Let's try doing that. That's looking a little bit more like the angle we'd actually want to see this happening at. Now, another option we have in the curve constraint for this object is to have it follow the curve. Now if we click that, we'll see that it actually follows that curve. Now we might need to make some adjustments to the rotation after we do that. That's looking great. Now, curves can be really confusing because there's a lot of options for which axis is up, which axis is the forward axis. Then this object obviously also has its own axes that we can mess with. If you get frustrated or you get stuck working with curves, just pay attention to where things are oriented, what direction the curve object is, And I'm sure you'll get it fixed in no time. Now, the last thing I want to do is actually have this animate as we move along it. Let's do that by controlling the start and end mapping right here at the beginning of this animation. I want it to be just barely coming out. Let's insert a keyframe right there and then by the end of the animation, we'll have it go all the way to the end. And we'll insert a keyframe here, because these are both being Bezier interpolated. We're going to get a nice effect where this is moving at the same pace that this is moving along the curve. You just need to make sure this end mapping value matches the speed at which you're moving along the curve. The way I have it here is looking pretty good. Now the last thing I can do just to smooth this all out a little bit is you could add in a remesh modifier on this curve object Just to give it a little bit more fluid like look and smooth it out of tad, we use the voxal remeasure and set this to a very low size, like 0.05 Now you can see by animating the path end mapping, we've got a nice animation of fluid sort of being dragged out of this object. And we'll want to tweak our camera angle a little bit so that we don't actually see where it's coming out of the nozzle, but viewed from the right angle. This is going to work great for what we're trying to show in this particular part of our animation. So fluid simulation can be very complex and curves are complex as well. But I think this is a little bit of an easier method for creating the specific look I was going for in this case. And that's sort of the fun with animation, is figuring out ways to create the look you want, not necessarily doing the first thing that would come to mind. Meet me in the next lesson where we're going to start to add camera animation to all the shots we have here to tie them together and create a rough cut that's ready to share. 6. Add Camera Motion: In this lesson, we're going to go through and add in all the cameras to our different scenes. Creating sort of a rough flow going from one shot to the next. Adding in some markers and finishing out just little bits in the scenes and the shots that we haven't done yet. So that by the end of this lesson, we have a rough cut that's ready to share, just to share around with people and make sure we're all on the same page about what's being covered and we're not missing anything. Okay, so the important thing for me to do now is start sort of organizing my scene a little bit more. So I'm first going to be focusing on this box scene which I have in a scene in a collection that I've labeled box open now. Right now I also have open a new scene that we'll be working in. And I also have my bubbles seen. But I'll hide that for now. Just so we can focus on the box opening. The way that this camera is set up. We're going to be duplicating this several times using this in the different collections, but I basically have an empty set up right here that's allowing me to control my camera so that we can spin it around in different areas and focus on different points. Now with this camera, we also have an empty set up, that's our focus object, so that we can control the depth of field on that camera. So first I want to create that revealing shot where we just sort of see our box just start to come up. As this box opens, I want to be focused right in on that first bottle object. We'll place our focus right around there. And then let's just make sure we're going to make this shot last about 60 frames total, but we might jump between two cameras in that situation. Let's go ahead and insert a keyframe for the way that this camera is oriented. Now, maybe starting with something like this, let's insert a key frame and then maybe we're just a little bit lower on the box, maybe we're a little bit more further zoomed in's zoom in just a little bit more on our y axis. Something like this is looking pretty good. Then over the course of about 30 frames, I want to just pull to the side just a little bit. We're going to add some rotation there. Maybe we'll also actually come up a little bit. Let's make sure that we have a keyframe there on the x rotation. I'm going to insert a single key frame for that that's come up looking into it just a tad, something like that. I'm going to play with my curves a little bit more later, but just to get a general idea of what we're going to be doing, I want to come into this animation with a little bit of motion. And I want to finish with it still in motion, close to linear. But we'll just adjust those handles manually. That's a good place to start our animation. Then I want to zoom out to a different angle where we can spin the box around really quickly. We can actually leave the focus object because we can animate that focus moving from one place to another, and it's not going to be too far of a gap. Let's select our camera object, as well as our empty object controlling the camera. And let's press shift to duplicate it. Then let's select that other controller, which I have labeled Cam one controller. We'll just move this over here. We're going to want to just be focusing in the middle of our box, maybe from a little bit of a different angle. Let's clear the key frames for this so that it's not getting the ones from before. Let's add in a marker so that at frame 30, we move to this camera. I'm going to press marker and then bind camera to markers. Remember the hockey, there is control when you're going to be repeating an action a lot. It's a good idea to remember what the hot key is. This scene is getting a little bit jumbled here. We've got a lot of different empties, but as long as we are making sure we're selecting the right ones, we should be totally fine. Let's also make sure that our first camera has a marker at frame one. I'm going to press the hot key control B, and we should have this effectively switching between them now. Now as that comes up, like it's revealed and our bottles become more visible, let's get that camera set up for the second shot. Let's just maybe zoom out a little bit. We want to see a little bit more context here. Insert a keyframe right there at frame 30, and that's where this shot will start and then we'll have it finish, maybe zoomed out just a little bit more. Insert a keyframe there and we'll have a little bit of rotation happening as well. We want to continue the rotation from the previous shot. What I'm going to do is add in a rotation key frame right here. Let's right click and insert a single key frame. And then frame 60. Let's decide how much we want to rotate. Maybe something like that will look pretty good. Now if I select both of these empties, I can see the motion from each of them. I'm going to hit this normalized button and then I'm going to frame selected. Remember that's period on your number pad. I believe I have that bound to a mouse button though. We need to have a little bit more steady motion moving into this shot. We want to match the curve we had previously here with the x rotation and the z rotation. I want this curve to look like it's leading into this curve so that we have a nice steady motion between those shots. Something like that I think is looking really good now if the render view is a little too slow for you, then you can definitely check these things out in a more solid shade of view. A lot of times when you're working with animation, you're really just focused on the silhouettes of your objects. I like to use the Random Viewport tab, which we'll just assign random colors to different objects so you can really focus on their silhouettes in particular. Now the next other little thing I wanted to have in this part of the animation was that right around here, these would pop out of the box. So let's go ahead and insert some key frames for that. I'm going to right click and insert single keyframe for each of these at frame 40, they're totally stationary. And then by frame 60, we want them to be popped up a little bit, okay? So first we need to make sure we have key frames in the rest of the location right there. And then we need to move forward to where we want them to pop up. And then right here is where we'll bring each of them up. Let's bring all these up. And Z, Okay, because these were actually modeled in a vertical orientation. The Z axis is actually not the axis I want to be animating on. It's instead the Y axis. Let's actually clear out the keyframes for all the Z. And I can just do that right here by deleting all the key frames. I should have checked this first, but it's actually the Y location that we want to be animating. I had assumed that up would be the Z as it normally is. But because I modeled these up and they are parented to an object that was rotated down, the orientations got a little bit confusing. It's a good thing to keep in mind to check what orientation things are at. Again, at frame 40, we want to insert keyframes for the location, so that these are right where we want. Okay, now we can move forward to frame 60, and then select each of them. Move them up a little bit so that they can pop out. And then insert keyframes for each of them until we have that animation working properly where the boxes pop out. Now, maybe we don't want them to pop out all at the same time. An easy way to do that would just be in the graph. Let, let's select each one of these and then we'll just offset their animation a little bit. I'll just grab, let's say we want the close one to pop out first. Maybe we pull back a couple of key frames. Let's just pull that back, two key frames. And I'm doing this all in the graph letter, this one can pop out at frame 40. Then maybe this one pops out two frames later, we'll see what that looks like. Maybe not quite as extreme of an effect as we'd like. We can just move these even further apart until we have the effect we're going for now. Another thing is I would like these to pop out with a little bit more energy. Let's just do a little bit of editing on our curves. I'm going to change the rotation, pivot point to individual centers, Then we'll just press R to rotate them. Let's just make sure we have them all right here. Then I'll scale this out just so that we have a more extreme motion. Remember, steeper lines are more extreme motion. That's a good place to end this shot. Now let's go ahead and move onto our next shot, which is going to be going into our bubble world. Let's click the checkbox here to go into our bubble collection. Now I need to add a camera to this area as well. I'm just going to duplicate some of the things I already have set up here, duplicating the camera. The empty. Let's also duplicate this empty object, which is our focus. Let's press Shift D, and let's move that over to this new area where we're going to do our bubble animation. Now I'll go ahead and move these objects to a new collection. I'll press M and then move into a new collection, and we'll say LCA, underscore bubbles. Now when I say LCA, that's just the term I created on my own that I used to keep track of my collections. I make that stand for lights, camera action. That's usually the collection that I just want to put cameras, lights and other things like empties that I'm using to focus with mostly lights and camera, the action just seem to make sense now. Anytime I'm in the scene when I see LCA, I know that's where I'm placing those things. Let's extend our animation a little bit. I think we wanted this shot to also be about 60 frames. Let's pull out to frame 120, and then at frame 61, let's have it on this camera. Let's press control B with our mouse down here to add a new marker. So now we have that first shot bottles pop out and then we see the bubble animation. Let's go ahead and get this position into the right area and we can clear the key frames from when it was duplicated. Let's make sure we're looking on frame 61 so we can actually see what that looks like. I want to press all R to reset my rotation, and then let's just pull this in a little bit, just so we have a nice frame shot. I'll mention that I'm rendering this at 1080 by 13 50, which is a popular size for social media. It's a good balance between quality and being too extreme of a render that doesn't take too long when the camera moves. We've already completed that bubble action. We just need to adjust the key frames here. Again, those key frames were on this force field value. Let's see if we can select that somewhere around here. Let's find our force field in the bubbles collection. It's not in there, it's right here. Okay, now that we have the force field selected, we have a couple key frames that we inserted right at frame 30. Let's just slide these over to where we need them now, which is going to be now at about Frame 90, because I think we're going to start this sequence, and then it's going to last 2 seconds. So about halfway through, we might need to go back to frame zero and re bake this. Now when we come into the scene, the bubbles are moving around and then they pop out. Now we might also just want a little bit of rotation in the scene. We'll probably add a little bit of an extreme rotation with the box. Let's just go ahead and try to mimic that here, where when we come into this scene, we're already moving quickly and then we find a steady position to land on. Maybe we come in somewhere right here. Let's insert a single key frame and then move to frame 120. Then by frame 120, we're starting to spin out. Let's insert a single keyframe there. Now if we play this animation, you can see we're moving around. Let's actually, just like we've done with Closs simulations in the pack past, let's bake this rigid body simulation so that it's not going to move around in the rigid body world settings. We can go down to the cache and then right now our simulation is taking place over the course of 250 frames. Which is totally fine. That's a little past what we need, but we'll leave it at that. I'm going to delete, I'm going to make sure all bakes are deleted, and then I'm going to press Bake All Dynamics. Now we'll just go through and basically create a save state of our animation so that we don't have to keep calculating it each time just so that we can work a little bit faster. So I think that's looking good now. Just while we're in here, we could do a real quick check on our lighting. So let's press control S to make sure we're saved. Let's go into rendered view. And we could just add in a few really simple lights just to kind of kick things off here. That's looking great. And while we're in here, we could just add a real quick material to these bubble objects. Let's just make that transmissive by turning this all the way up. And we'll turn the roughness all the way down and we'll make sure that this is a nice bright white color. Now that's looking pretty good, but back in our solid view here, I think that the camera is looking like it's got a nice motion. We could turn back on our box collection if we wanted to see this altogether. Back at frame zero, we're opening up. They pop out, we have a nice view. And then we're ready to move on to the next one. 7. Finalize the Animation: Final slam is what I want to use to enter my last sequence. Again, make sure you're saving your file. I'm going to add a new version of this animation, Cams three D. This is where I'll create our last sequence where we see those bottles just disappearing into some cream liquid. For that sequence move, we have that one be closer to 4 seconds long plus 120. So now we have another 4 seconds there. Let's add in our last animation. I have this already in a collection called Sinker. Let's check that on right now, the sinker is just a plain object. Then we also have our sinker bottles. These are some bottles that I've already animated a little bit. I do need to slide them over on the x axis a little bit. I'm just going to type X L O, that should filter out only the x location. Now I can just, I should be able to slide all these, Let's uncheck normalize, and then just pull them over like this. Using the graph editor is a great way to make large changes like we just did right there. Okay, right now this animation is happening 0-60 I'm going to make sure I have everything selective here. These are all going 0-60 I'm just going to move them over to start at frame 241 is where that motion is going to start. Maybe since we've already animated these to be only 2 seconds long, let's take away those extra 60 frames we added. This should be 300 is where that ends. What I have is the bottles here going down into this mesh object. Now that looks okay on its own, but it would be cool if we had a little bit of a wavy effect there. I'm going to duplicate again our camera object and our empty and everything. And move it over here, just so let's in the center of the scene. And let's press M and move that to a new collection, which we'll call LCA. Okay, then we'll put this into the Sinker collection, and the bottles that are in the Sinker collection can also be right there in that same collection. Let's add in one last marker to control this last piece of animation. That's going to be switching to this camera right at frame 241. So let's press control B. Now we're looking through this camera. Let's just get our shot framed up a little bit differently, just till we like it. Maybe we pull out a little bit, maybe we need to move over just to tad out a little more. Right now we have a subdivided plane with no physics properties on it. And these objects are already animated, but they also don't have any physical properties currently on them. I want to add dynamic paint to them. With each one of these, I'm going to add dynamic paint and set this to be a brush. And we'll click Add Brush. And then we'll do that on each of these. Dynamic paint brush, add brush. And then this one dynamic paint brush, add brush for this object. We'll set that as a canvas object. Dynamic paint, add canvas. The type of canvas we use in this case is going to be the waves. Now if we press space part to play at frame 240, we should see that the dynamic paint starts to create a really fast and easy liquid effect. That's going to be great for sinking these bottles and closing out the scene. Now it's going a little bit too fast. There's a lot of options we can control here. One is going to be the speed. You can bring that down a little bit so that it doesn't go so fast. Something like that is looking pretty cool and you can make sure that this is shaded smooth, of course. Then you can also control the damping. If you do a lot of damping, it's going to look like a little bit more of a viscous fluid that they're going into something like that. Looks pretty cool. Now we'll play with those settings more, but at this point we have our total animation set up. And what we could do is turn all these collections on and then render this all out to a video file that we can use to analyze share with other people and see if we've got all the shots we want in this one sequence. So right now in one big fat scene, we've got all our different things happening. You can see as we press play to move through it, we have all the shots working together. If I wanted to render this all out so that it's something that I could share, I could do a quick viewport render, rather than actually rendering the animation with its full quality. I could just do a viewport render in my render settings. I could go from the cycles render engine to the work ***** render engine which is going to render exactly what we're seeing here with the settings that are defined in this area. We could set that to random. Now when we actually enter rendered view, we're going to see the same thing we saw in the Viewport. This would be as simple as this would be. Just like rendering an animation in V, which you could also render your preview render in V. But in the output here, I'm just going to change to FFmpeg video. Then I can make sure my encoding is said to something like Mpeg four. Then we could select our output folder. Let's make a new folder called preview, anim, double click here, and we'll call that preview one to save the file. And then what you could do is maybe just at 50% save it and then you could render animation that's actually okay, so our height was not divisible by two, so let's just leave that at 100% save it. And then we click render animation. And what that's just going to do is go through and render our animation just using the viewport. Now this is a really great thing to share with clients because again, they're not thinking that this is finalized given that we've got all these kind of crazy cotton candy colors. But it's an opportunity to just share kind of where your head's at with the animation and what you want to be doing moving from one shot to the next. And this is a great launching off point to moving into more finalized, polished animation in the graph editor. So it's important to go through the steps we did in this lesson to make sure that everything is lining up the way you want. You're thinking about the placement of your camera and your objects, and you have something that you're ready to use moving forward into that final polishing stage where you can really start to spend some time on the lighting, making sure that the highlights are in the right places, making sure that your focus objects are in the right spot. And that just in general, there's a nice fluid motion moving from one shot to the next and you're telling the story that you want to tell. So meet me in the next lesson where we'll take a look at breaking into the industry. Using the skills that you've acquired with blender and using it to start making living, getting some freelance work, and getting paid for all those blender skills you've been spending so long developing. 8. Break into the Industry: So what I want to do now in this lesson is give you a little bit of practical advice of how you can move from just having a bunch of blender skills to turning them into an actual business. Maybe doing some freelance work of your own. One of the biggest and most important things in getting better at blender is practice. It's going to take, it's going to take a lot of practice, but you'll get there. So it probably took me about five years to really start feeling comfortable with blender, but nowadays, it really doesn't need to take that long. If you've got enough persistence and dedication and you set some time aside to practice blender, then you could be in the same area in less than a year. Personal projects are obviously a very good way to start practicing your skills and blender. But at a certain point, it's going to be a good idea to start working with people. Now, maybe you can find some freelance clients that are interested in your work, but be very selective about who you work with. In my opinion, one of the best parts of working with people is that you have a little bit of accountability. You've maybe got a deadline and you've got some constraints to work in. This is really good when you're working on Blender projects, knowing that you have some defined variables to work within. So when you're deciding whether or not to take on a project, there is more that you need to look at than just the money. There's other situations where you might want to take on a project, for example, if it's someone that you think maybe is well connected. But if you can tell that this is someone that genuinely might have more work for you in the future, then that could be a project you're considering taking on. A lot of my greatest clients that I have nowadays, I met through someone else who I maybe did a free project for. People will remember if you help them out and they'll want to pay that forward. So even though maybe you're doing a project for free and maybe it's taking a little time on your weekend to get it done, you never know what might pay off in dividends in the future. So when you're deciding whether or not to work on a project, consider what it's doing for you. Maybe it's profitable, maybe the work isn't super glamorous. But you know you're going to make enough money to keep a roof over your head, that's very important. Another area to be considering is whether or not this is going to be something that looks good in your portfolio. Maybe the project isn't super glamorous, maybe you're not getting paid a ton. But it's something that's really going to help round out your portfolio and get you access to jobs you might not have had access to without a good portfolio like you get from that one particular project. Another area to consider is passion. Maybe this is project that's just going to bring you joy. It's going to allow you to express yourself creatively. It's going to be an opportunity to really let your true colors show. Creating something that you're proud of that maybe doesn't have the budget or the use case in your portfolio, but puts you in a place where you have something that you can be really proud of. Something that energizes you, drives your creativity and pushes you to go further, whether it's for profit or for passion, or for something in your portfolio. One of those three P's, they're really all important. They're all bringing you to a more well rounded portfolio, giving you more experience, potentially growing your network. All these things work together to move you forward to that next step, wherever that is that you want to be. So one parting thought to leave you with would be that you really need to think practically about where you want to go with your career. What are you trying to do with Blender? It's one thing to just start picking up these skills, but be a little bit aimless with what you're doing or why you're doing it. So it's a good idea to even write down who would be your dream clients, who would be a great company to work for. Whether that's making an amazing advertisement on TV, or maybe you want to help launch huge campaigns or help people get investment on their own ideas. Think about what you want to do. Look at the type of work that falls into those categories. Look at who those companies are hiring. Take a look at their work. Take a look at your work. See what those gaps might be. Focus on those areas to improve. And then in no time, through personal projects, professional projects, you'll be in a place where you can close that gap and start working with those dream clients. So if Blender is something you want to pursue professionally, it's something you want to make a living with it, then congratulations, that's awesome. I really am happy that you feel that way. Keep nurturing that passion. Don't focus too much on just making money immediately. Stay passionate about blender. Keep learning. Move your skills into the next level so that you can get there. Learning blender is difficult, A lucrative career. Using blender isn't just going to be handed to you, But with enough time and persistence, you'll get there. Anyone can do it. I feel so lucky to have taken this free piece of software and turn it into a full blown career. Getting paid to make animations and renders that inspire and delight. 9. Final Thoughts: Holy cow. Wow. Congratulations to you for making it to the end of this class. And double, triple, quadruple. Congratulations if you made it through all five classes in this class we covered a lot. We did a ton more camera animation, really polishing the motion between shots. We also did some more advanced animation. So now that you've made it to the end of this class, you really have all the tools you need to start making really high level animations. With extra practice, you can start creating advertisements for television or for social media. You could start launching Kickstarter campaigns of your own, or maybe you just have a personal project. One of the things that excites me the most is seeing what other students are creating. Whatever it is you're creating animations of your own or stories you're telling. Please share them in the gallery below. I'm really excited to see what you've come up with. I really hope you've enjoyed following along on this journey with me. I'll see you around.