Animated Tree in Blender

1. Intro: Hello and welcome. My name is Suzana. I'm a 3D artist and in this class, we're learning together how to create one simple animated tree and how to export that animation. Not only you will learn that, but also how to apply materials. How to create environment using Sky texture, how to quickly set camera, how to render images, how to render animation, and how to do some other small settings you may find useful in this or your other future projects. For this class. previous experience in Blender or any other 3D software isn't needed. This is beginner level class, and I will explain everything. What you get after going through this glass is experience in creating simple animations. You can use this for some nature scenes where you need to animate your trees to make that more realistic. And in this case, this simple tree can be used as something in the background or where you set environment and trees are moving. For some closer trees, you will use some more realistic leaves. But in this case, this is perfect for something in the background. A lot more you can do with this is that you can create let's say, situations where in your animation you need your tree to move for certain portion, not just entire animation, like some, something is flying next and tree starts moving. And then is again still. You can create a short animation of that tree. And then furthers that stays still. I will explain that in this class as well. So basically you will learn how to create animation and set number of looping keyframes to either get animated tree all the way through your animation or in just certain portion of your animation. That's a little intro about this glass. Let's begin. 2. Sapling Tree: Let's begin with creating a new project. So we will go here to New File and left-click on general. I will enable here sidebar to turn on Screencast keys. So you can see when I click here and let me hide this again. This will help you follow what I do. And as the first thing, we will delete this cube as we don't need that. So I will right-click here and left-click on Delete. Now we have nothing over here except camera and a light. Ah, the second thing we're going to do is to left-click here and odd mesh plane. So we've got one blank here. And another thing we're going to do, and that is the main thing we will use in this class. We're going to add one sapling tree. And that's done over here. Just left-click odd. And then here in cur, go to right. And all the way down, you will find Sodom tree generator. If you don't see that. You will go here to add it, a left-click. Go to Preferences, I lived with that. And here, go to Add-ons, electrically add-ons, and here in search bar, left-click there and type sapling. And make sure this, this is ticked. That means it is enabled. And we can go back now to add our sapling tree. So we will left the card, go to curve. And here I left-click sapling tree generator. So here it is. The first one on that list. I'm using mouse wheel now to zoom out. And I will move here. I will just left-click this acts to move here. Alittle to center this tree, and left-click this hand holding left-click, I move this a little down and zoom in to see better what I'm doing. So we have three already over here. Don't click anywhere on the side, otherwise this will vanish. So now left-click here this arrow, and this menu will pop out. Over here. You will see geometry. If you see something else, then left-click here and select the geometry to this tree by default. But we can change this. And we can go here to load a preset, for example. And left click this arrow over here. And you will see here right away some presets like YG or say, willow and white birch, for example, and weeping willow and so on and so on. So let's go back to what we had earlier. Vijay. I'm moving this again a little up to see better. The next thing we want to decide about leaves, or let's say branch distribution. Brown drinks random seed. So you can change here how you, how this tree actually looks. Just point here, left-click and hold, left-click. And you can move this left and right, just holding left-click. You move here branch distribution to get tree, you prefer more. You can do that as well by clicking these arrows and change shape. This way. Over here, brown shrinks, which again as well change to desired shape. So I will leave it like this at this point. You can also use this random seed. So you can just click here and it will give you a random tree. You can scale your tree here. Right now it's five. You can go here to smaller like this or to keep the way it was, I would just left-click here and enter five and just slightly here, so it applies here scalar radiation as well. I will leave it on five as it is right now. And here you see you have different shapes here. You can change shape like to spherical. A cylindrical. That's the shape which isn't related to branches and rings and so on and so on. So when you do something, this will affect the shape of these branches over here. I will return to me it was earlier. Now, if you click here, click here. You will see there is option for leaps. And now we don't see any leaves. Why? Because it's not enabled. So who left-click here? We get our lives. Now at this point, we have hexagonal lives. There are other options here. I will keep it on hexagon. And here I decide about number. If you point here, you will see right away it shows maximum number of leaves per branch, so it's 150. And that's kind of too many. At this point. You also have here elif distribution and you can select how those will appear. As you can see, it changes a lot. When a change, the way leaves are distributed all over those branches. I like this way, I don't know why. And I will reduce here a level number of leaves. So just left-click and hold and gloves click and move, left to reduce number. So let's see, I keep it somewhere like here. And then we'll go do something else. And that's animation. 3. Animating Tree: Now we will get on animating this. Ah, we want history to start moving. Like there's a wind blowing and this tree, he's moving, carried by the wind, left, right, and so on. And to do that, you will click here. And first you need to go to armature. Over here. I'll have clicked that. Are we built a left-click here to enable use armature. Why we need that? We need that I'm a jeweler because that will lead branches when we apply animation. And that will behave as bonds in that tree, like we have bonds and our body is, our muscles are fixed around and to move, we need to move those bonds. And this tree as well needs balls sat around to be able to move in certain directions. The next thing we will do is we'll go here. Over here, you can change armature levels. Right now it's set to two. And you can set, let's say three. That means the more levels you have actually, it gives more smooth animation, but I will go to do right now to help those with not so well-equipped computer to be able to goes through this gloss easily. You can also increase this to three depending on depending on your computer. Ah, we have here set our armature and we're moving to animation. So I'll just left-click here. And I will add the animation. So we will now go to animating this. Now. If you left-click here, you will enable that are mature animation. Now to be able to see that happening. First of all, you need to enable fast preview. We will disable this later, but this will allow us to see how everything is moving. So we enable fast preview. And here we have the animation speed. So right now it's set to one. We will see how quickly it's moving. Everything, those branches, how quickly moved from one side to side. And if we don't like that, we can reduce the speed or increase here a loop frames so we can set our timeline is right now here. I've tried to show that. I just believed that this timeline pointing here with a left-click, I dropped this time on up. You see our time on is 250. So we can set this loop frames as well to 50. If I left-click here and enter do 50, that means the animation will be that long. This is very sad when strength. So let's see first, what's going wrong here and what we need to do further. So I just left-click play and we see how it's happening. It's kind of Djokovic, right? So let's decrease here. I have a left-click and enter 0.5. And I will put here under so it applies. And let's try again. Now it's better. It looks more natural. And if you'd like more strong wind, you can increase here for wildlife, say unto and left-click so it applies. Let's try again. So it's a little stronger wind right now. So that doesn't matter. Right now when you are practicing Andrew value, you want. But it matters that you understand that I can make when stronger. You can make I mentioned faster or less fast here you decide how long the animation will go. So if you want, let's say you're creating something and you want that to be, let's say 1 thousand frames. But you don't want your tree to keep moving all those frames. You want your tree moving for a moment. Let's say something flying next shoot is three. And that movement is happening in the moment when flies by. And you want your tree, let's say moving for ten seconds or 15 seconds. And the rest of that animation to be still. That's why this is really handy, because you will decide how long that tree will keep on moving. Right now, we are making automation for wind movement. So as it's kind of windy. And we want that to last all the way through their setting to 50 loop frames. I exact amount of frames we have here on our timeline. The next thing you want to do is to animate our leaves as well. So if you lived, speak here to preview. I'll see leaves that are moving. And here you can change leave when settings amplitude, let's say we can go to to foreign example. As you can see, it starts more than differently. Frequency, let's say two. I'm just increasing values so you can see what's happening then the way it affects this tree, randomness, let's say two or six. I reduce this to one. It was better before. And this as well. So this is our tree. And now we want these to be in normal view. We don't want anymore fast preview, so keep in mind before you do anything further, you need to disable this fast preview to be able to see your tree the way it is. Just left-click here before you exit this menu. That's very important here. And now we can exit this. Now if we click somewhere else, we don't need to worry about leaving Fosbury who enabled, if you don't antique this, your tree won't be visible, you will see it just leaves and armature. Now, we move to something very important as well. 4. Plane Editing and Materials: So if you want to hide this armature not to see it here. You can go to here to GR. And left-click decide to not see that armature anymore. You can also disable it for rendering later as well. And now we see all the R3. I'm using middle mouse like brass middle mouse and holding middle mouse. I'm rotating this just by moving mouse 11 and write to S3 from all sides. You can do that as well. Here. Left-click one of these axis and holding left-click, just rotate this tree around. So the next thing is, we want to see our animation now. One we'll left-click. We can see our tree is moving. What you can do now is left-click this plane and then go here to object mode. I'll have to put this arrow and switch to edit mode. Now point here. And right-click sub-divide, left-click on sub-divide. And here, pop out this menu and change number of cuts to, let's say, left-click there and enter three, and left-click on the side. So it applies. There are many cuts. Why I wanted to so many because I will increase this plane. So I will just left-click here and go back to object mode. Now, I will press S on my keyboard and holding gas. I will just move mouse. You see I get this string and arrows. And if I move mouse left or right, I'm decreasing or increasing this plane. And I want to increase some of here. And I will let go S and left-click here. And I want to stretch this LL salvage just go here to transform tool, Left-click there. And I will use this green. This green over here. I will just left-click on that. And holding left-click, I will drag it to the right. Look to stretch this. What I want to do now is I will left-click here again to select this plane. And I will switch here from object mode to sculpt mode. Left-click that. Now, I will go here to inflate, to click that. And this is like a brush. If you use some photo editing softwares or anything such. This is how brushes look. Huge change brush radius. If you left-click here point and left-click and call them left-click and drag this left, right. You can change brush radius, you change strength of that brush. So whatever that brush does, this one inflate, deflate. Here you are just strength of that. What you are doing. Here. You can change radius unit and many other things. You can select even texture of your brush. You can set stroke. Methods, fall off like small solar, linear or whatever. So for any of these sculpt brushes, you can adjust those over here. And you can display cursor or not. And there are many, many options we won't go through. All right, Now I want to show you, but you can do now with this plane. So I will increase this brush. It's kinda small for what I want to do. So I will point here and left-click and drag this to the right. So let's see something like that maybe. And I will not point here, you see it glows kind of on that plane. When I point to this plane, it goes horizontal following that surface I pointed on this dot in the middle. It shows where exactly the center of that brush will go. And now if I left-click, you'll see what I did. I kind of E-flat inflating that area. And making some bump here. And I will make another bump over here and there and there. And I will do that more. Making some hills over here. I don't want this to be flat. And I just keep pointing here. Left clicking. Every time I left-click, I in-flight a little more. I can increase ranks like left-click here and job this holding left-click to the right. So now strength is bigger and what I do is applying more. Now you'll see you have these lines over here and we will get rid of those soon. I will show you how. I just keep pointing here and making some, some heals over here to make this kind of interesting. Not so flat. Okay? So this is enough. Now, I will go back here. I will left-click to swap back to object mode. So I just left-click here, and I will go here. And left-click modifier properties. And then I left-click here and going to generate. And all the way down here is subdivision surface cell actually that, and you'll see it's already a little better. If I zoom in using mouthfeel like this. And I left-click here, I can leave this. I'll hire and see what's happening. Now, levels view is one, I need to increase to two. So I'll left click here and you'll see it's a lot better. Now, if a point here and right-click and select Shade Smooth. Now, all those lines vanished and it's nice and smooth right now. I will go here. To render properties. I will have to click that. And I want this enabled ambient occlusion, bloom and screen space reflections to make materials later better visible. And if I want to use, let's say emission of light somewhere, I need that bloom. I ambient occlusion gives you a nice shadows in some corners. And that's important, especially if you are going to create some interior setting. Some, Let's say in summer room, you want those shadows in corners visible. So this is very important. Right now we are creating just this tree and this down these hills. It's not so important, but I like to show that every time It's really, really handy and gives you a better barrier look of whatever you were making. Now, we will start creating our materials. 5. Camera and Rendering Settings: We have everything set. You can just now light as well. Just left-click this light, zoom out a little. And you can change position of this light. Just left with here to Move tool and satellite the way you want. I'm rather this way or that way you can even pull it back all the way behind. And here you can adjust color of your light. Let's say you want something yellowish like this. And you can change the radius if you point here and left-click, you can change the radius of the satellite to larger or smaller. And this is where you enable or disable shadow. Of course you would like shadow on this tree, but there are some, some points when you design something, Can you want no shadows there to interfere? So you may need to know this as well. You can change this point light to area light as well. In that case, I'm using middle mouse right now to rotate the scene. You see it's pointing. This way. I can left click this dot and drag this to point where I want like that. And I can adjust that even from this angle. Rotate exactly how I want. Or you can do that here. And change angles here of rotation. Point here, and left-click and drag to adjust light the way one there. As you can see. Two ways you can do this. Depending on what suits you better. I like to use both. Sometimes I need to be very precise cycle here. And then I just click these arrows over here to adjust light. Just the way I want to make it centered for an example like this. And I want this to be, let's say 90. And I want this as well to be minus 90. And to get light exactly the way I want it to fall on some object. The next thing, as I mentioned earlier, is setting your camera. So for those who goes through my classes regularly, they probably know already. And for those who are here for the first time, I like to use simple shortcut to set my camera. So I just press Control key and out and called him dose. I hit 0 numeric pad. Before you start doing that, make sure that you set your scene already and position the way you want to see. What do you want to see in center of your camera. And then press Control Alt and hit 0 numeric pad. And here's your camera. Now, we just need to select the camera over here. Lastly camera here in this this sub objects properties, you will adjust camera how far, how close to your object is. Using these values. Over here, you can see this is x-axis. If I increase this number, if I point here, left-click and increase, it goes more for far from object. Other side, as you can see over here is minus x. So if I go to stat, I make smaller number. I will go back to camera view over here, like I left-click this. Now is the camera view again. If I point here and left-click and make smaller value, I'm going to tolerate minus x. And that means I'm going closer to this object and threw it to the other side. This y axis shows how far I am from this center to two minus r to plus side of y-axis. So as this is 0.09, I'm closer to middle and I'm on positive side now I'm on narrative. Again to positive. This shows position on that axis. So right now they're on two meters. And if I point here, I can lift higher or lower. Now I want to show you something which you may want to do as well here in render properties. If you left-click here. And you don't want anything around except this tree for an example, and this soil. So you don't want to see that sky. You can live to click here and make everything transparent. Now you see you just that. That's a handy to know. You may want sometimes surrender something here at the center and to have everything transparent around. So can I placed that as a layer on some other video? Another thing you would want to do is I'm going back to object properties. And you can hear rotate your camera if you point here. You can go up, down. As you can see. I can lean it to any way I want. And that's how you can adjust the camera view the way you want. Now if you left-click here, you see this camera icon. This is very changed focal length. So right now it's 50 millimeters. But if you left-click here, you can change it to any value you want. You can also, I've obtained for an example here to 30. You see what happens. It shows a larger area. Camera didn't move. It's still the same position where it is. But we changed focal lengths and now we see more of this area. So sometimes you will want to adjust those values to get different view of something you created. Alliance unit for me is set to millimeters. It can be also set to field of view if that's better for you, whichever you prefer, you can sat like that. Type of this camera is perspective. There are more ways to see this. This is not the way you would like for sure when you render some environment. As you can see, it doesn't look so nice. So can change to perspective and use that now when you create something and if it happens that you don't see some object in the distance and you create a let say, some object here. And you don't see it through camera and you wonder what happened at it's there but I don't see it. That's because here you sad how far camera we'll see. So camera by default is set to end its view on bonk 100 meters and beyond that, it doesn't see. So if you have some objects set and let's say 200 meters, and you want that visible behind somewhere in the distance. You need to increase this value. So if you have your object, let's say on 200, you need to enter here some value over 200 to make that object visible as the bow. Here you can set also depth of field, like on professional camera. To see everything better. If you want to focus your camera on certain objects and to make everything a little blurry around. You can left click this eyedropper and select this tree. And camera will focus on that tree rather than things around. So when you move your camera, it will keep focused on this tree always. To render animation. I want move my camera around and animate the camera. In this class. I just wanted to show you how you can optimize your tree and how you can do some simple settings for your camera and your light and environment. Now, we have this stat. And to Render Animation, important is that you go here first and where it says resolution, you have set your resolution first. This is already set for high definition video. If you want for K video, you need to double these values. You will enter three thousand, eight hundred forty and two thousand, one hundred and sixty four K video. Here we have set frame rate to 25 frames per second. Why? This timeline is 250 frames. If we divide that with this number, we get ten seconds animation. I like to take these two are to lead my, ah, laptop finishes rendering faster to not keep rendering guy everything around, but only what's visible here. And important thing is very want your animation to go when you render. So this is where you select, just left-click here and select folder on your computer or create new folder and select that folder so your output, your animation a goes to that folder. This is very select how you want that rendered. If you'll have to click this arrow. These are options for rendering video. I like to render with you as PNG. I'll buy that image, but I like to render so because PNGs are very high-quality images, and then I can import those as a sequence to video editing software that allows me to have higher-quality video later. But if you prefer to render video right away, you can select one of these. Don't forget to go here and save as save your project. And when you're creating something keeps saving through to not lose. If happens that blender crushes. That's important to do before you start rendering. To not happen that you lose everything when you're rendering. And then you are not able to return to that. And to render again. 6. Rendering: Now to start rendering, if you want to render image, you can select which frame you want. You can either a left-click and drag this keyframe. Or you can play animation and stop where you want to render. Or you can even move here by clicking up to certain frame you want to render than a left-click here and left click Render Image. And then you will simply select very one that really want that image to go. The next thing you can do is to increase here resolution. To hire if you are rendering the image, you would like that a lot higher than this, if that is for, let's say printing or something. You want to create to be enlarged format. This is very small. You can use this for, let's say, thumbnails or for just posting somewhere on your socials and something like that. But if you want, let say if you want to render image for stock platforms where you can, let say cell dose than that has to be a lot bigger, let's say 8 thousand resolution on the x-axis. And let's say 5 thousand on y axis to have something large enough or let's say six thousand, four thousand to have something large enough. And useful. Everything smaller isn't really of use to someone who wants to create something with that. Further. If you want to render animation, you will click here and simply click Render Animation. And that will go to folder you selected earlier. 7. Disabling Tree: Before you start rendering, very important thing is that you disable these first three from the view because you won't see it now. It's not visible here and in this view part, but it is visible in render. And you will see how and why. If I left-click here and I tried to render image, you see I have here another white tree. And I need to disable that. So I will click here and click here. And now it's disabled in a render as well. Now if I left-click here to random image, it's not here anymore. You see it vanished and it's not visible. That's right area anymore. You have just this main tree right now, not that white anymore. That's important that you don't forget where it says three, you need to disable that camera to not see that. I will show run smart. If it's enabled. And you try to render, you will get this white tree inside as well. So that's important. Left-click here to disable. And now we have nice tree without that, right. 8. Closing Words: I hope you enjoyed this class and I hope to see you again Post your projects. As your projects, you will see in description, you can either post your rendered video or you can render images of certain frames so we can see how you went through that and how your trees moving from this frame to frame. What's also important is that you practice this. Keep in mind not to click around, to not lose that menu for settings. And that you disable that first tree before you start rendering. That's very important. Leve a review so other students can see how these class is and when they want to join, they can see what they can learn here as well. I would also like to say that Blender is very, very big software. And even if you think at the beginning, it's a little scary and there's so many things. Don't let that frighten you because every day you have opportunity to learn something new. And the more you learn, the more you will see and it's never ending learning, you will always have something new and it's all the time evolving. That software is changing. You will keep finding something new and interesting to learn. And not everyone knows everything in Blender. We all select certain portions where we are super, super good and some other portions we know. But everyone will find his place in that huge software where he feels the most comfortable and where he learns and constantly evolving and applying some other things, but centers creations around that specific portions in Blender. And you will find for an example, I'm mostly focused on animations, some motion graphics and things like that. Or you will find other artists more focused on creating certain environment or just some objects which you can place in games. Some items you can use. Some are focused only on creation of materials. And there are many, many, many, many ways you can use Blender and learning as much as you can from every of those portions of Blender actually helps you decide what exactly you want to do. But you want to learn where you want to move, in which direction. Keep learning those other areas as well. To know how everything works and what you can combine and how you can use everything to create something better, something more interesting, something new, something that perhaps no one created yet. And that's what makes learning Blender so interesting. And it's never boring. And I'm trying to keep my clauses interesting, not boring. And not in a way where I will just come out and tell you what you need to do and that's it. I'm also trying to learn along with you and to explore and to teach you while I'm exploring as well. That's it for this class.