Blender Animation: Learn the Basics of Character and Object Animation

1. Introduction: Hello, and welcome to a Blender animation class that's truly out of this world. I'm Harry, a season three D artist with over a decade of professional experience and the privilege of being recognized as a top teacher on Skill Share, specializing in Blender tutorials. In this class, we'll embark on a cosmic journey together, learning all the basics of creating a fun spaceship animation featuring a rigged character. Whether you're brand new to character animation or you followed some of my previous animation classes, there should be something for everyone to learn in this class. My blender classes are well regarded for their clarity and ease, thanks to a step by step approach that's perfect for beginners. In this class, we'll start with a premade starter file as the foundation for our animation. The starter file comes fully modeled, lit, and textured, so you won't have to spend time on those aspects before you start animating the characters. This class will focus entirely on animation, allowing us to dive into the basics and explore some advanced techniques. Please note that Blender version 4.2 or later is required to access the provided files and follow along. You can download the latest version of Blender completely free from the website. By the end of this class, you'll be amazed at how fun and easy it is to create charming character animations in Blender. So if you're ready for an animated and character driven adventure, I invite you to join me in class. Let's jump into our first lesson together. 2. Starter File Exploration: And In this lesson, we'll begin the class with exploring the starter file. If this is your first time taking a blender class, I'd highly recommend you start with my complete beginners guide to blender first. This class was designed for the absolute beginner to blender and three D art in general. We cover every single necessary topic in order to get you up to speed and running and blender. We'll accomplish this with short and focused lessons that cover each topic from a beginner's perspective, utilizing a well organized starter file. We end the class with an easy project where you set up and customize your very own cozy campsite. With that out of the way, let's continue with the lesson. As I mentioned in the class intro, we'll be using a premade starter file for this class. This will allow us to focus entirely on animating the UFO and the cow in this file without having to worry about modeling or texturing them first. With everything nicely lit for us as well, we'll be ready to render our final video as soon as we're done animating the characters. Before we start exploring this file, let's make sure that you have it downloaded and opened in Blender version 4.2 or newer. First, download the starter file, underscore UFO animation, underscore 01, Blender file from the project resources. You also need to download the texture zip folder as well. Now save both of these files in one location, such as a folder in your documents or on the desktop. One additional step we'll need to take is to extract the textures from the zip folder. For example, on a Windows PC, you can simply right click on this zip folder and then choose extract all. This will make a new version of this Textures folder without the little zipper icon on it. You can see an example of that here at the top. With our files downloaded, let's open the starter file in Blender version 4.2 or newer. This file has everything we need to complete the class set up and ready for us. Over here on our left viewport, let's switch our viewport mode to the rendered viewport mode. We can do that by going up here to this top bar with all these tools on it, clicking in our middle mouse button so that we can pan this to the left to reveal these buttons here on the right side. We're going to click the far right button to switch it to the rendered view. It might take a moment as the textures load up for the first time, but after that, it should be relatively fast. This will allow us to see a rendered preview of all the lighting and textures in our scene. You may notice on your computer, however, that there are a lot of bright pink or black textures all over the place. This is because Blender doesn't know where to look for the texture images that we downloaded, even though they were saved in the same folder as the starter file. Luckily, for us, this is a really easy fix. To solve this issue, simply go up to the file button here at the top left, go down to external data, then go down here to the bottom and choose find missing files. Now navigate to wherever you save the Textures folder that we extracted earlier, the one without the zipper icon on it. Double click on this folder to enter it, and then go down here to the bottom right and choose find missing files. You should now notice that all of the missing textures have been relinked and everything looks as it should. With our file prepared, let's talk about what it contains for a little bit. First off, you'll notice that we have a pretty complete looking scene. If you really wanted to, you could just render a steel image of this scene and call it a day. However, our goal is to make it look even better by adding some life to the UFO and the cow with animation. If we rotate around in our right viewport, we'll also notice that the cow has these black lines across its body and on its limbs. These lines are called controllers, and it's what we'll use later on to control how the cow moves. So it looks like it's being lifted off the ground by the UFO. Another thing that we'll notice is that if we zoom out a little bit, and we go down here and hit the play button is that I've already added some background animation, such as shooting stars or this tumbleweed rolling across the background. I added these small background elements like the tumbleweed and shooting stars to breathe a bit of life into the world for us. This makes sure that when we're done with the animation of our characters, we also have a background that isn't static and lifeless. Now we can go down here and hit pause, and then lastly, all of our render settings and output settings are done for us. We can see an example of that by going over here to the render properties and clicking on this tab, and here we can see the settings. We'll be using the updated EV render engine to create our animation, which means we should have a really great looking video that also doesn't take too terribly long to render when it's done. Also have some simple output settings preconfigured for us found here on the tab just below. That way when we're done, all we need to do is pick an output location and then we're ready to render our file. Before we move on to the next lesson, let's make sure we save our blender file so it remembers where those texture files are. We can do that by going up here to file, and then choose Save. With this quick exploration completed, we're ready to move on with the rest of the class. In the next lesson, we'll begin the animation process by animating the UFOs location. I'll see you there. 3. Animating the UFO - Location: In this lesson, we'll begin the animation process by animating the UFO's location. Let's begin. I plan on making each lesson in this class focus on a specific aspect of animating the characters. This will help keep the length of the lessons as short as possible. We're also providing a nice guide that you can reference in the future to see how each aspect of this animation was created. We'll be focusing on the most basic movements of the UFO in this lesson, which is the horizontal and vertical movement. Even with such simple movements, we can breathe a lot of life into the spaceship. So let's begin. We'll start by selecting the UFO and the right viewpoint. This will allow us to start placing location keyframes to control its movements. Now switch to the object properties tab found here on the right side. It's this orange square. We'll be controlling the movements of the UFO and setting keyframes from this tab. First, let's discuss the intention behind the movements. This will help you better understand what we're doing and why we're doing it. You can see from the on screen example that our goal is to have this UFO fly in from off screen on the right side. Stop for a moment over top of the cow, then struggle to lift it up before dropping it back onto the ground, then flying off screen on the left side. We'll be accomplishing this movement through a combination of both location and rotation adjustments to make it look like it's struggling to lift the cow. But the first step is to get the movement handled. Let's start by moving the UFO off screen. To do this, we'll be adjusting the X location found here on the object properties tab. First, let's drag the playhead, this blue icon down here to frame 15 on this slider. We can see it's on frame 15 by the number listed here in the blue square. This is where we'll be placing our first keyframe on the object properties tab over here on the right side, we're going to send our X location to 8 meters. I'll just type in eight and then hit Enter. With 8 meters typed in here for the X value, we'll go over to this white dot, and we're going to click on this white dot to place a keyframe. We can tell our keyframe was successfully placed a few different ways. First, this little white dot turned into a white diamond. The location value here is now highlighted in yellow, and also down here on our timeline, we'll see a little yellow diamond on top of frame 15. All three of these different signs mean the exact same thing to us. It's just letting us know that we have a keyframe placed on frame 15 in this case, and it's set to 8 meters. With our first keyframe placed, we can now begin placing new keyframes to tell the UFO where to move and when to move. Let's drag our playhead here to frame 50 found right about here. We can tell again, we're on exactly frame 50 by looking at the 50 at the top of the playhead. Now we'll go back to the location. This time, we'll type in zero and hit Enter and we'll see that the UFO has popped directly to the center of the frame again. However, we can't forget to actually place our keyframe. Just by changing this value, we haven't actually placed the keyframe. We can get an indication of this by seeing that it's orange here on the number. To place the keyframe, we need to go over here to this now empty diamond and then click it to fill it in making this yellow and also placing the keyframe down here. If you ever notice that the number here that you've just typed in is highlighted in orange, that means that you have yet to place your keyframe, don't forget to do that. Now that we have two keyframes placed, we can move the playhead back to frame zero. Then we can hit Play to see the movement that we just animated. Now, in this case, it's pretty simple. It just goes from off screen and then goes to the center. There's not a whole lot more movement because we haven't added any more keyframes. So we can hit pause here. While we only have two keyframes placed and the movement overall is pretty simple, it's still exciting to see the UFO move all on its own. For the rest of the keyframes, we're going to go a bit faster through the process, as it's largely the same thing over and over again just with different values. I'll explain little nuances as they arrive if there's something worth explaining, however. For our next keyframe, we're going to drag the playhead to frame 57 and then we're going to set our X location to negative 0.5 and then hit Enter. Again, don't forget to place your keyframe. You can do that just by clicking this little diamond here on the right side, making sure that it's filled in and this number turns yellow. Now, this keyframe that we just placed might seem like an odd movement, but the goal here is to create a slingshot effect for the sudden stop the UFO is about to make. The small bit of extra movement helps imply a sense of weight and inertia to the spaceship. Which adds both character and realism to its movements. Now let's move our playhead to frame 74. And again, for our location, this time we'll type in 0.25, not negative this time, 0.25. Hit Enter. And then go over here, click the diamond to place our keyframe. Again, this is another slingshot movement, as I referred to it before, that's just a bit smaller than the last to show that it's losing some of the inertia that it had from stopping. You can also think of this as a rubber band effect. A rubber band wouldn't just stretch out and then snap back exactly to where you left it. It would kind of bounce around and then eventually settle back to where it's supposed to be. That's what we're mimicking here with these small movements and over corrections. Now we'll go to frame 84. Place a zero meter keyframe here, so type in 0 meters and then place a keyframe. Now we'll go to 94 down here on the timeline, go to the location. Type in negative 0.1. It enter, place a keyframe, and then lastly, frame 106, go to our location. Type in zero, hit Enter, and then place a keyframe. We're not quite done yet, but now is a good time to watch the animation play back and see what we've created so far. So let's go down here, drag our animation back to frame zero, and then we can hit the play button found here. We can now see that subtle slingshot effect that I was speaking about as the ship flies into frame from the right side of the screen, then bounces back and forth subtly until it comes to a complete stop. May be wondering how I decided on these specific frames to place our key frames. This starter file is set to 30 frames per second, meaning that it takes 30 frames to equal 1 second of real time movement. With our current animation, we have this whole movement occurring in a little over 3 seconds, which doesn't sound like much. But we want it to have a pretty fast movement, so we don't need to devote much time to it. For really quick movements like the slingshot effect that we added, we need even less than a second. Somewhere around five to ten frames is plenty for a quick movement like this. That's only one third of a second or less. Now we can go down here and we can pause our animation. Let's go back to finishing the X movement for the UFO. We're going to drag our playhead all the way to frame 140 and then we're going to go over here and we'll leave our X location set to zero. All we're going to do is place a keyframe. This keyframe is important as it tells the UFO to remain stationary from frames one oh six, all the way to frame 140, which is a bit longer than 1 second. We can get an indication that these keyframes are identical because there's this long line connecting them. This is letting us know that nothing is changing between these two keyframes. Now we'll go to frame 155, go to our location and type in negative one and then hit Enter and place our keyframe. Now we can go to frame 180. Go up to our location, type in one for 1 meter, not negative this time. At Enter, place our key frame, frame 190 now, place a keyframe at 0 meters. At Enter, place our keyframe. And then lastly, we're going to go all the way to frame 225 found all the way over here. Go up to our location and type in negative eight, hit Enter, and then place our key frame. And that's it for the location animation. You can go ahead now and hit the Play button to see what this entire animation looks like over here in the left view port. The last thing we need to do is animate the Z location, which controls how high the UFO is flying from the ground. The last thing we need to do is animate the Z location, which controls how high the UFO is flying above the ground. There's a bit less key frames for this parameter, so it should go a bit faster. The main thing we want to accomplish with the Z location keyframes is to have it look like the UFO is trying to lift a heavy weight and then dropping it when it becomes too much to hold. This will help tell a small story in our animation of a UFO that just isn't strong enough to carry the cow away and has to drop it and then fly away. Let's go down here and pause our animation. And now we're ready to jump right into the key framing process. We won't stop to play the animation again until we're finished with all of the keyframes. Let's drag our playhead to frame 110. And then this time, we're going to be adjusting the Z location. However, for this first keyframe, we're just going to place an initial keyframe set to 1 meter, which is what it's already at. We'll click this little white dot to place a keyframe here, just locking it into 1 meter. Now go to frame 140 and then for our Z location, we're going to set this to 0.5. Hit Enter, and then place a keyframe. Now frame 145, just a short while afterwards, we're going to set our location for the Z to 1.25, hit Enter, and then place our keyframe. Then lastly, one more keyframe, we'll go to frame 155. Go to our Z location and set it back to 1 meter, place our keyframe. And that's it. The Z location is now animated. Now we can go down here, hit our play button and preview animation one more time before finishing this lesson. The Z animation that we added makes the UFO sink down as it struggles to lift the cow, which we haven't animated yet, so you'll have to use your imagination. Then it springs upward as it finally drops the cow and then flies off screen to the left. While this is overall a relatively simple motion, it's already looking pretty cool. We'll continue building upon this animation in each lesson by adding new keyframes that affect different types of motion for the UFO until it looks perfect. And the next lesson, we'll continue animating the UFO by making it spin. I'll see you there. 4. Animating the UFO - Spin: In this lesson, we'll continue animating the UFO by making it spin. One of the things people think about when they picture UFO is the constant slow spinning of the spaceship. This might seem like a pretty easy thing to accomplish and it is if you only want to spin on one axis. But it becomes a bit more complicated. If you want the ship to spin, while also tilting back and forth. Blender has difficulty maintaining a local rotation, such as spinning on the Z axis, while also tilting on the X or Y axis. You can see on this simple example that the object no longer spins like a spinning top and instead rotates the whole object around a singular point. Luckily for us, there's a relatively simple fix for this issue and it only requires a few tools. To start with, make sure you have the small white collection icon selected next to the UFO collection. Simply click on this white box here next to the word UFO. This will make sure that any new objects are added to this collection by default. Now let's create a new empty object. To do this, hover over your right viewport, hit Shift and A to bring up the ad menu. Now go down here to empty and then choose plain axes. This object will be completely invisible in our render and is simply used as a reference for other objects. In our case, we'll use this empty object to spin our UFO. Before we do anything else, however, let's rename this object over here and the outliner. We'll just double click on this word empty and then type in UFO, spin controller. Now let's move this empty object upward in the Z axis. We just need it to be above the UFO. Roughly 4 meters or so should be fine. You can move it roughly 4 meters, or you can move it a little bit and then just type in 4 meters down here in this move option box. With this empty object created and named, now let's go back to the UFO object just by selecting it here in the Viewport. Then we're going to go to the Constraints tab found down here and it's this little blue icon that looks like two gears with a belt wrapped around it. On this ad Constraints menu, we're going to select this and then we'll choose Copy rotation, which is found here second from the top on the second list. On this new constraint, we're going to choose the target. Just click on this black box and we'll type in UFO. And then we want to choose UFO spin Controller. We'll go down to this axis section, and we're going to uncheck the X and the Y as we want this constraint to only look at the Z axis. With this constraint added, we're ready to begin animating. To animate the spin of our UFO, we'll actually be animating the empty object we added. This is because we've made the empty object the controller of the UFO's Z rotation, which is what this constraint here does. It's telling the UFO to copy the rotation of this empty object, but it's only looking at the Z axis because we've unchecked these two. So whatever we do to the rotation of the Z axis on this empty controller will be reflected on the UFO. So first, we need to select the spin controller from either the list here or you can select it here in your viewpoard. Now we'll go to the object properties tab, this tab here with the orange box on it. Then on our playhead, make sure you're set to frame zero. And for the z rotation, we're just going to place a keyframe here with zero degrees set. So we're not going to change the value, we're just going to place a keyframe. Now we're going to drag the playhead all the way to the very end, which is frame 240, and then we're going to change the z rotation to 90 degrees and then place a keyframe. Now we can play the animation to see the spin that we added. We'll just hit the play button down here and see what it did. Well, notice our UFO is now spinning, which is awesome. However, it also starts spinning really slowly at the beginning, then speeds up in the middle and finally slows down again at the end. This isn't a huge issue, but it would look better if it's spun at the same speed the whole time. Luckily, this is pretty easy to fix. So let's pause our animation down here. Then on the bottom, if they're not already selected in yellow, you can simply drag select over top of both keyframes to highlight both of them again in yellow. And now that we have them both selected, we can adjust the type of keyframe this rotation is using. I'll explain more about the differences between keyframe types in a later lesson. But for now, I'll let you know that we're currently using a Bezier keyframe for this rotation, but we'd rather be using a linear keyframe instead. To switch it to this linear keyframe, we just need to right click down here on the timeline, then go to interpolation mode found here in the middle and then we're going to choose linear. Now if we play our animation again, we'll notice that the UFO continues spinning at the same pace the entire time with no slowdowns or speed ups in the middle. This is a relatively small difference, but we'll use this to a greater effect later in the class. For now, our UFO is spinning and it looks great. In the next lesson, we'll continue animating the UFO by focusing on its tilt. I'll see you there. 5. Animating the UFO - Rotation: In this lesson, we'll continue animating the UFO by focusing on its tilt. Let's begin. Now that we've got our UFO moving and spinning, it's time to add a little bit of tilt to the animation to really sell the story that we're trying to tell. Our main goal with the tilt that we'll be adding is to further reinforce the inertia of our movement. Then have the UFO wobble as it struggles to lift the cow off the ground. As always, let's select the UFO to begin with so that we're ready to place some key frames. We can do that here in the Viewport or over here in the outliner list. Next, make sure that you're in the object properties tab found here, which is this little orange box tab. We can see our timeline below is getting pretty full of keyframes by now. In the next lesson, we'll explore a new view that allows us to get a better view of the things happening to our UFO. For now, though, we'll continue using the smaller timeline to place our keyframes, even though I know it's getting a bit hard to tell what's going on. I promise it'll make more sense in the next lesson. For the rotation of our UFO, which will control its tilt, we'll be animating on both the X and the Y parameters. This is because the axis that we need to rotate on our UFO changes as the UFO spins from the animation we did in the last lesson. As it continues to spin, we'll need to switch to the new axis to make it look like we're still rotating on the same axis. We'll be starting with the Y rotation. So to start with, we'll go to frame zero found here. And then over here in the object properties tab, we're going to go to the Y rotation and set this to negative 15. Hit Enter, and then place our keyframe by clicking this little white dot found here. This will have our UFO start out tilted forward, so it looks like it's flying really fast into the frame. Now let's go to frame 50, and then we'll set the Y rotation back to zero. Hit Enter, and then place our keyframe. Now we'll go to frame 61, go to the Y rotation and set it to five degrees, then place our keyframe. This keyframe begins the slow slingshot effect that I've mentioned in previous lessons. These small over corrections are meant to imply a sense of weight and inertia to the movements, so it doesn't feel quite so robotic. Now we can head to frame 84 and then set our Y rotation to negative 2.5. Hit Enter and then place the keyframe. Now frame 101, go to our Y rotation, set it back to zero, hit Enter, and then place the keyframe. At this point, the UFO has settled in its movements and is ready to begin the process of lifting the cow off the ground. This is where the X rotation is going to be used to make it wobble. However, let's finish the last few Y rotation key frames before we move on. We're going to head to frame 200 near the end and then place a zero degree keyframe here. This is just meant to keep the tilt stationary for this length of time. And then one last Y keyframe, we're going to go to frame 225 and then set the rotation for the Y to negative 25, it enter, and then place the keyframe. This last keyframe makes the UFO again tilt to match the speed in which it flies out of the frame. All right. So before we move on to the exportation, let's play the animation and get a good look at what we just animated. We can do that by hitting the play button and then get an idea of what we did. As we can see, these subtle movements really help sell the speed of the UFO. We're also removing a bit of the robotic nature of the movement that we had before. Now we can go down here and pause our animation. Now we're ready to move on to the X rotation animation. We'll start off by heading to frame 110 and then going to the X rotation and placing a keyframe here, 10. So we won't change the value. We'll just place a keyframe. Now let's head to frame 120, and then we'll go to the X rotation, set it to five degrees, and then place our keyframe. Now frame 130, and then this time we're going to set it to negative five degrees. Place our keyframe. Now we'll go to frame 140, set it to five degrees. This time not negative, so just positive five degrees. Place the keyframe. We can see if we go down here and just drag this playhead back and forth that we've added a little bit of wobble to the UFO as it struggles to pick up the cow. That's what these back and forth, five degree incumbrants were doing on the X axis. Now we're ready to make the wobble more intense as it finally drops the cow and pops back into the air. We'll go to frame 145 and we'll set the X rotation to negative five. And then place our keyframe. While the X rotation is the same as before, you'll notice how much less time we give it to transition from each of these values. This makes this rotational change much more abrupt and adds a lot more energy to it. This is perfect for showing the release of weight from the UFO as it drops the cow. Now let's go to frame 155, set a rotation to zero for the X, place our keyframe, now frame 170. This time we'll set the X rotation to eight degrees, place the keyframe. Now frame 195. We'll set the rotation to negative eight, place our keyframe, and then one final keyframe we'll go to frame 211 and then set the rotation to zero and then place our keyframe. Let's give our animation a play to see our hard work and motion before we end this lesson. We can do that down here with the play button. These last few keyframes that we added make the UFO appear tired or dizzy after lifting such a heavy weight. Just a few key frames can add a lot of character to your UFO and make it feel less like an object and more like something with a motion. We're nearly done with animating the UFO. Just a few more steps to go. And the next lesson, we'll finish up the UFO's motion by adding some modifiers. I'll see you there. 6. Animating the UFO - Adding Modifiers: In this lesson, we'll finish up the UFO's motion by adding some modifiers. Let's begin. With our base animation completed, we're ready to begin adding some variation to the motion using modifiers. If you already have some familiarity with blender, you might recognize the term modifiers. However, this is a little bit different. We won't be adding typical modifiers that alter the UFO geometry or other properties. Instead, we're going to be adding modifiers to our animated keyframes to change aspects of their motion using some randomized values. To see the modifier panel for our animation, we'll actually need to switch to a completely different workspace. This workspace is what I alluded to in the last lesson. The animation workspace will allow us to see a much more detailed view of all the keyframes on our object. Let's switch to the animation workspace now found here at the top. You can find this tab here, and then we can click on it to switch to that workspace. This animation workspace is an entire workspace devoted to making your life easier while animating. I have it preconfigured with a few of the viewports already set up for you. Let's discuss what each of these different viewports is for, so we're a bit more familiar with the layout. First up, we have the top left viewport here showing our three D viewport, and it's currently locked to the camera view. This should be a pretty familiar looking viewport, as we saw in the last workspace. On the top right side here, we have something called the graph editor. This is a really useful window for adjusting the pacing of your animation. We won't be using the full functionality of this window just yet, but it's also where we'll find the modifier panel. More on that in a moment. Lastly, we have arguably the most important window on the bottom of the workspace down here. This large timeline at the bottom is also known as the dope sheet. Here we can see all of the keyframes apply to our object, and they're broken down by parameter if you twirl open the drop downs on the left side. So if we go over here and click this little dropdown arrow, we'll see all the different values and types of things that we've keyframed and where each of these individual keyframes are at. This is super useful if you have multiple types of keyframes all placed on the same frame of the animation. We can tell from this simple example here that we have a keyframe placed for the X location and the Y location at frame 50, but we don't have anything placed for the Z location. This would be really difficult to see without the extra information that the dope sheet provides. Now that we have a better idea of what each of these windows is for, let's start discussing modifiers. The first step is to select a category of keyframes. In this case, we'll start with the location keyframes by selecting the name here on the left side. We'll just select this and it'll highlight only these X keyframes. Now we'll head up to the top right viewport featuring the graph editor. This viewport is where we'll find the modifier panel. By default, this panel is hidden. But if you hit the key while hovering over this viewport, we can see here that this menu disappears, and then if we hit it again, it'll pop it up. You'll see a few different tabs here on this side menu when you pop it open, but the one that we're looking for is in the middle called modifiers. Now let's add our first modifier. Click the add modifier drop down menu found here at the top. We'll be using the noise modifier for our animation. However, all of these modifiers can be super useful for different situations. As a quick example, the cycles modifier allows you to loop a repeated motion such as the flapping of wings, and the limits modifier allows you to put hard limits on an animation to prevent it from going past certain values. You're also able to layer these modifiers, so they work together to create some really interesting effects. For now, however, we're going to add the noise modifier to our animation. So we'll just select noise from this list. The noise modifier is meant to add random variation to the movement of our key frames. This allows us to create a somewhat rigid animation, then add this modifier to create some more natural variation. Will make the flight of the UFO have a bit of floatiness to it and make it feel like it's affected by things like small fluctuations in the wind or the power of its own thrusters. We won't notice a whole lot of change in our animation on frame zero, however, let's head to frame 140 so we can actually see the UFO. We can do that down here just by dragging the playhead to 140. Now let's go through each of the important settings on this new noise modifier and get a better idea of how it works. First, let's zoom into the graph editor on this top right window so we can get a closer look at the red line that represents our location. Can use your mouse wheel to scroll in and out on this window to get a closer or further look at this line. For now, we're just going to zoom in a little bit here so we can see more detail of this red line. We'll explore this graph editor in more detail in a later lesson. Now we can go through the settings found here on the modifier panel, starting with the blend type. Right now it's set to replace. If we click this, we can see different options. This drop down allows you to change how the noise modifier is affecting the motion of your objects. In general, the default replace mode works fine for most animations, but you can try out other modes to see how they affect your animation in the future. For now, we're going to leave our set to replace. Next up, we have scale. This slider changes how spread out the noise effect is across the entire animation. We can get an example of this by just clicking and dragging on this scale here, and we can see the larger the number, the more spread out these waves are, and then the smaller the number, the tighter the waves are and more jagged it looks. You can think of this as the speed of the noise effect or how long it goes between each of its changes. We're going to significantly increase the scale value here for our animation by setting it to 28, so 28, and then hit enter. We can see this really large number makes for a relatively gradual change. As an example, a really small value such as 0.5, will make it really jagged and bounce around a lot. So we can see over here on the left side, if I drag this back and forth, it's starting to jitter back and forth because these values here are so closely tied together by making it much larger, like the example of 28, which is what we're using for ours. When I drag it back and forth, this bouncing back and forth is much more minimized. It's not as jittery as it was before. Our next setting is the strength slider found here. This slider changes how strong the noise effect is across our entire animation. As we raise the strength, we'll notice the waviness of the line increases and the randomized movement of the UFO is significantly amplified. So if we take this slider and we drag it really high, we can see that it's really moving it back and forth a lot because this noise pattern is much larger. We're going to set our strength value down pretty low down to just 0.2, as we don't really need a whole lot of randomized movement for our UFO. Next up, we have the offset value here just below. This slider allows us to shift the noise pattern left and right on the timeline. So we can see an example of that just by sliding this value. Now, we won't notice a whole lot of change on our animation because our animation is using such a small noise value. But if our noise was stronger, this would be a more obvious change. This lets you fine tune the movements if you want to avoid a specific randomization from happening during a crucial moment of your animation. So if we were using stronger values and we wanted to avoid, say, the noise randomizing during the dropping of the cow or when it's flying into frame, we could use this offset value to shift that randomization left or right to avoid it conflicting with anything. In our case, we're just going to leave this at zero as our values are relatively small and this really isn't affecting too much. Next, we have the phase slider found down here. This slider allows us to randomize the noise pattern used for the modifier. We can see an example of this just by sliding it back and forth. We can see that the line is moving and changing the pattern that it's using. If you find that the noise pattern has some weird bumps in it that you're not a fan of, this slider allows you to randomize the pattern to hopefully find a better look. Our noise pattern works fine for our purposes, so we're just going to set this back to one and leave it there. Lastly, we have the depth slider found just below. This slider changes the smoothness of the noise pattern. Higher values will introduce more detail to the noise pattern and make it look a little bit more jagged. See an example here on ours just by turning the value up. Now, it would be a lot more noticeable if we were using more increased values for the strength or a smaller scale. In our case, we're just going to leave this set to zero as it looks fine for our purposes. The rest of the sliders on this modifier have much more specific use cases, so we'll leave those alone for now. With our noise modifier setup, let's hit the play button found here at the very bottom of the screen to see what it looks like on our animation. We'll notice a really subtle waving to the UFO's horizontal movements now. This effect is intentionally subtle as we don't want it to overpower the animation that we crafted in the previous lessons. Let's pause our animation for now, and then we're going to set up one last noise modifier for our UFO. This time, we'll be selecting the Z location found here on the left side. So again, make sure you select the Z location name, and that'll highlight just these keyframes. We'll be going through this process a lot quicker than the last one now that we know what each slider does. So we'll go up here, go to add modifier and choose noise. We're going to leave the blend type set to replace. Go to the scale, set that to 28. We'll set our strength to 0.3. We can leave our offset set to zero, our phase set to one, and our depth set to zero. Again, you'll notice that we chose pretty subtle values for this modifier, so we don't overpower the original animation. We can play our animation now to see what the final result looks like by hitting the play button down here at the bottom. So this subtle Z variation that we added just makes the animation of the UFO bobble around a little bit up and down. So it's now randomizing a little bit to the left and right from the X modifier and from the Z modifier that we just added, it's kind of floating up and down slightly more erratically. Due to these modifiers being editable, feel free to adjust these settings to make them stronger or even more subtle if you'd like to. Don't be afraid to experiment. And the next lesson, we'll move on to animating the UFOs spotlight. I'll see you there. 7. Animating the UFO - Spotlight: In this lesson, we'll move on to animating the UFOs spotlight. Let's begin. The last thing we need to complete our UFO is animating the spotlight used to lift the cow. This spotlight is our representation of a classic tractor beam seen in so many sci fi shows. Right now, our spotlight is on the entire time and has no fluctuations in brightness. Let's animate the brightness to match the motion of the UFO and then add another noise modifier to make it waver in its brightness during flight. First, we'll need to switch back to the animation workspace if you're not there already. You can find the animation workspace here at the top just by clicking on the word animation. Now we need to switch the top left viewport, showing our camera view to the rendered mode. This will allow us to actually see the illumination of the light while we're animating it. To swap this view to the rendered mode, you'll likely need to pan this top option bar by clicking in your middle mouse button while hovering over it and then dragging it to the left so that we reveal these buttons here on the far right. We want to click the far right button here. Next, we need to select the spotlight. We can find that over here on the right side inside this outliner list. So we're just going to hover over this, scroll all the way to the top, and then we're going to look for the object here called UFO. And then you may need to twirl this open if it's not open already, so you'll just click this little arrow next to it, and then you'll scroll down, and you want to select the UFO spotlight right here. This spotlight is located inside the UFO object here in this list because this spotlight is parented to the UFO, meaning wherever this UFO moves, the spotlight will follow. Now with the spot light selected, we can go down here to the object data properties, which is this green light bulb icon here, and this is where we can find all the settings for the light, such as the color or the brightness controlled by the power value. Now let's start getting some basic keyframes placed for our animation. First, let's make this dope sheet a little bit easier to work with by using our mouse wheel to scroll in on it and making it a little larger. This will let us see more increments in the view. We can also click in our middle mouse button, so click in the mouse wheel to pan it to the right, so we can center it a bit better and then zoom in a bit further. Now we can head to frame 40 by dragging our playhead to frame 40. And now on the UFOs power, we're going to set this all the way down to zero watts because we want the light to be turned off. After typing in zero, we'll just click this little white dot next to it to place our keyframe. We're going to start our animation by having the spotlight turned off entirely. This will make it even more impactful when it finally turns on. Now let's head to frame 70 found here, and then we're going to set our power back to 80,000, which is what it was at by default. 80 and then three more zeros, one, two, three, 80,000, and then we're going to place our keyframe. 80,000 might seem like a huge number, but the watts value on these lights aren't exactly like the watts you see on light bulbs you buy in the store. For this reason, our value needs to be really high in order to achieve the super bright light we want for the animation. Now let's head to frame 110, and we're going to leave the power set to 80,000 and we're just going to place a keyframe. This is meant to hold this brightness value between this keyframe and this keyframe. With this last hold frame placed, we're ready to start fluctuating the light brightness to match the struggle and wobble the UFO is experiencing when lifting the cow. We'll go to frame 120, not too far afterwards. And now we're going to switch the power from 80,000 down to just 20,000. So just replace the eight with a two in the beginning and then place your keyframe. Next, we'll go to frame 130, and then we're going to set it back to 80,000. Again, just delete the two and replace it with an eight, then we'll place our keyframe. And then the last keyframe of the fluctuations, we'll go to frame 140 and then set this back down to 20,000. So again, get rid of the eight, replace it with a two, place your keyframe. Now that we have the light fluctuations done, we're ready to finish up the animation. So we'll go to frame 150, set it back to 80,000. Place our keyframe. Now go to frame 190. And this time, we're just going to place a keyframe, leaving it at 80,000 to make another hold section. And then the very last keyframe, we'll go to frame 220 and set this back down to zero, so that it turns the light off as it flies away and then place our keyframe. With our last keyframe placed, let's give the animation a quick play so we can see how these keyframes affect the overall look. We can do that down here by hitting the play button. We can see now that the light's brightness reflects the struggle the UFO is having and it turns on and off as it flies into and out of the frame. Let's add another modifier to this animation to really make the light look like it's flickering and having a hard time. So first, we'll pause our animation, and then we'll go over here to the left side and make sure that you have the power parameter here selected. It's more than likely already selected for you, but if for some reason you clicked off of it, just make sure that you click on it again to make sure that it's selected. Now we'll go back up here to the graph editor, and then make sure you can see this modifier panel here on the right side. If not, hit the key to bring it up and then make sure you're on the modifiers tab found here. Now click Add modifier and then choose noise. In your graph editor over here, if you hover your mouse over top of it and then hit the home key found above your arrow keys on your keyboard, it'll zoom in so that you can actually see the entire line. This isn't super important that we see it because I'll be giving you the values. But if you're doing this on your own for another project, you would want to see the line here so you can see what these values are actually doing to the values. We're going to go through a few of these first sliders here quickly as we already know what they do, so I'm just going to give you the value that we need. So for the scale, we're going to set this to five. And then for the strength, we're going to make this really strong. So we're going to set this to 50,000. So 50 and then three more zeros, one, two, three, and a head enter. We want a really strong flickering effect for the light, so we need a high strength value to make it do that. The offset phase and depth can all be left at their default values. A new setting that we'll be using is this restrict frame range checkbox down here. Let's check it on for now, and then we can twirl open these option boxes here to see the values that we can adjust. These settings will allow us to limit the influence of the noise modifier to a specific frame range. It will also allow us to blend this transition of the noise pattern. We want to limit this flickering effect to just the main portion of the animation. So we're going to have it start on frame 40 by typing in 40 for the start and then we'll have it end on frame 190. So we can see from our graph here that even though our animation goes all the way to frame 220, this noise effect stops at this last keyframe, and then it goes back to being smooth for this last segment. Our last step is to set up a transition for the noise modifier, so it's not so abrupt when it turns on and off. We can do that here with the blend in and out values. So we're going to type in 20 for both of these, which means that it will give 20 frames of transition before the effect either completely starts or completely ends. It just makes this transition a little less abrupt and smooths it into the rest of the movement. Let's play our animation now to see the final result of this noise modifier we just set up. We'll go down here and hit play. The effect is a little bit hard to see in this low resolution preview render, but it will be a really cool and subtle effect when we finally render out the full animation. It'll make it look like small fluctuations in the UFO's power are making the light below it also change in its brightness, further adding to the struggling feeling that we're trying to give with the movement of our UFO. And that's it. Our UFO is fully animated, and we're ready to move on to the cow character. In the next lesson, we'll start exploring the cow character's rig. So we're familiar with how it works. I'll see you there. 8. Exploring the Cow's Character Rig: In this lesson, we'll start exploring the cow's character rig, so you're familiar with how it works. Let's begin. If you're new to animation, you've likely never worked with a rigged character before. Luckily, the next part of this class will focus on teaching you the basics of working with a rigged character and how to control it. The short lesson will primarily be a discussion and demonstration. So don't feel the need to follow along if you'd prefer to just watch. I'm going back to the layout workspace, so we have a bit larger view for this demonstration. We can do that by going up here and then clicking the word layout. Now I'm going to Zoom in down here so we can get a better look at the cow. The first thing you'll probably notice is that the cow has black lines all over its surface. These black lines are the control rig for the cow. By selecting and moving these lines, we'll adjust individual body parts that each of these lines represent. When we select the control rig, it's going to turn it all orange instead of black. This cow character is what is known as rig. This means this model has bones placed inside of it to control and deform the geometry. In simplistic terms, I've built a skeleton inside of this cow character that allows us to control its movements kind of like a doll or an action figure. Typically, the bones of a character aren't quite so smooth and nice looking, however. I've converted the skeleton into a control rig and gave it a more pleasant and less obstructive shape, which is what we're seeing now. So as an example, if I hit Alt and Z, tensor my Xray mode and then hit tab, you actually see what the character rig looks like. Each of these colorful bones we're seeing here controls an individual part of the body. In this case, this yellow bone here would control its front left leg. You also notice that when I go into Edit mode for this rig, the cow goes back into the neutral position in which I modeled it. So its head goes back up and its tail is now perfectly straight. So now I'm going to hit tab to exit edit mode and then hit Alt and Z to leave my X ray mode. And we can see here the cow goes back to the position that I had it in before. Now that you know a little bit about what I've done to make this cow's movements controllable, let's learn how to actually move them. Again, this lesson is meant only for demonstration purposes, so don't worry about following along with me. Just sit back and watch. So the first step to moving the cow is to select the control rig, which I've already done. However, if it's not selected, you'll see here the lines were black. When I select on one of these lines, it'll turn it orange, letting me know that I've selected it. Now we need to switch from object mode, which is what we're currently in to pose mode. The easiest way to do this is to go up here on this option bar at the top, and you may or may not need to use your middle mouse button to pan it all the way to the left. So we can see this drop down here called object mode. So we're going to select this and then choose pose mode instead. Pose mode is what allows us to control each of these lines, which now all have unique colors to control individual parts of the model. To choose which body part we effect, all we need to do is select one of these colorful controllers. If we select any one of these, we'll see that it switches to controlling that part of the body. For example, if I select this red one around the eyes, it'll allow me to move the head around. You can control all of these parts utilizing the rotate tool, which I currently have on now. We can see that here on the left side. If I use my rotate tool, it'll allow me to move the head around. Now you'll notice if I move too far in one direction, the head behaves a little bit unexpectedly, and that's because this rig has some constraints on it. We'll explain more about that later. In any movement we make, we can also hit Control Z to undo the movement. You'll also be able to keyframe each of these different body parts to make them animate individually. This will be important later in the class when we animate the cow. This same rotation process works on each one of the body parts, such as the legs. So if we select the yellow leg down here and I begin rotating it, we can see here, I can rotate it around, and if I rotate it too far, it'll snap back to the other side. So if I rotate to the side here, so I can get a better profile view of the cow, and then I begin rotating it again. We'll see here that the leg kind of stops once it reaches so far forward. This is because I've placed constraints on many of these bones to prevent you from accidentally rotating it past what a normal movement would be. This means you don't have to worry about spinning the leg the wrong direction or too far in or out. I've basically limited the movements to what would be natural for this character. You can get a glimpse of these limits on the bone constraints tab found down here. It's this little blue bone icon. So we'll select this, and we can see here I have a limit rotation constraint as well as a limit location constraint. In the case of this front leg, you can see that I've allowed the leg to rotate in the X and the Z rotation here and here, but I've prevented it from spinning on the Y direction as that would look pretty unnatural. However, you'll notice that these limits on the X, the Y, and the Z are based on local space, not the global space that we're currently using. This is an important thing to consider when animating bones. You'll almost always want to be animating your bones using the local mode. You can change to the local transform here at the very top by using this drop down that says Global and then instead switching it to local found just below. We'll see after switching this that the orientation of a rotation Gizmo now better aligns with the actual leg. By default, your tools are usually set to global, which means that your tools will follow the world's orientation. You can find the world orientation up here in the top right, which is what the rotation tool was using before we switched it to local. Now that it's on local, it's looking at the actual leg. So in this case, it's looking at the bone inside the leg and then orienting the tool based on that instead. This is significantly more useful for rotating these bones as they now logically follow the direction of the limb. It also makes the limb and rotation found over here make more sense. So you can see here that I'm allowing it to move in the X 30 degrees forward and backwards. I'm also allowing it to move in the Z 20 degrees in and out. But I'm not allowing the leg to rotate around the center, so we can't use this. It won't do anything. You'll see as we move it too far, it's going to snap to either the X or the Z, but it's not actually rotating on the Y. So before I proceed here, I'm going to hit Control Z to get the leg to go back to the original position that I was in. I'll just spin around to double check, make sure it's going straight down. And then we can go back up here and just make sure that it's set to global transform orientation instead of local for now. Now that we understand a little bit about how this character rig works, we're ready to proceed with the rest of the class. In the next lesson, we'll learn more about the two main methods of placing key frames on our objects. I'll see you there. 9. Exploring Keying Methods: In this lesson, we'll learn more about the two main methods of placing keyframes on our objects. Let's begin. Up until this point, it might not have been obvious that there are actually two main ways artists place keyframes for their animations and blender. The way we've placed our keyframes in the previous lessons has been largely manual. For each of our keyframes, we've gone to the desired frame, typed in a specific value for the keyframe, such as the location, then click the keyframe button to manually lock in the value. There's obviously nothing wrong with this method of working. However, it does have a certain rigidity to it. This works great for more mechanical animations, such as the UFO that we animated, but it can lead to a rather tedious workflow for organic animations such as the cow. What's the alternative? The other option we have is a setting called auto keying. The setting will allow us to automatically place a keyframe as soon as we make a change to the model. We do still need to choose which frame we want the keyframe placed on. But beyond that, you just move the model and it adds your keyframe. As with the last lesson, you don't need to follow along with this short demonstration. So just feel free to watch the video for this portion. So the first thing I need to do is make sure I'm not in the pose mode for the character rig here. So I'm going to go back to pose mode and then choose Object mode instead. Now I'm going to zoom out a bit. Then I'll hit Shift and A, and I'm going to make a new object and I'll just make a cube for this demonstration. Then I'll move it out of the way over here to the side so we have a better view of it. Now that I have the cube moved out of the way, our next step is to turn on the auto keying setting. We can find this setting down here next to the play buttons we were using before, it's this one here on the far left, it's this open circle. We can just click this to turn it on. I'll also make sure that I have this object properties tab open here on the right side, so I can get a better idea of what keyframes it's actually placing. Now that we have auto keying turned on, any object that we make changes to, such as the location, the rotation or scale, we have a keyframe placed automatically on the timeline. As a quick example, if I move this cube slightly to the side, you'll see that a keyframe is placed automatically down here on the timeline. We can also see that it's keyframed the locations. Now if we drag our playhead forward to a new time on the timeline, and then again, move our box, we'll see that it's placed more keyframes and then if we drag our playhead back and forth, we can see that it's animating between these keyframes, just like the normal keyframe process would. To make adjustments to either the keyframes that we just placed, all we need to do is to move our playhead over top of one of these keyframes. So in this case, say, the frame 160 keyframe, and then just move our cube to the new location that we would prefer. Now if we drag it back and forth, we can see it animates to the new location rather than the old one because we've updated it. Another thing we can do is to move to a new place on the timeline, say, frame 170, then instead of moving this, if we wanted to keep it exactly in place, we can just hover over this viewport and then hit the Ie key on our keyboard, and I'll manually place keyframes. Well, notice, however, that unlike the last two keyframes that only keyed the location when we moved it, when we hit the I key, it places keyframes on all three of the properties. Now we have keyframes on the location, but we also have them on the rotation and the scale. This isn't necessarily an issue, as it still accomplishes the same goal. However, it does make for a slightly messy timeline, as we have a lot of keyframes that aren't really doing anything. We can limit what kind of keyframes are placed when we use the eye key by using something called keying sets. A keying set is essentially a filter that will prevent you from placing a keyframe on a parameter that isn't part of the keying set. We can see all of the keying sets that we have access to by clicking on the keying button found here on the far left of the timeline. We can click this, and then we can go over here to where it says keying sets, and then we can click on this field and see all of the different options we have. And then it's up to us to just choose the one that best fits our need. For this example, I'll choose the rotation keying set found here at the top. This means when I use the I key to manually force a keyframe, it will only key the rotation and it will leave all the other properties untouched. So I'll select this for rotation, and we can see that reflected here. And now let's move to a new frame. So I'll move to frame 180, and now I'll hit I while hovering over this viewport. We can see here after hitting I, it's only keyframed the rotation instead of the location and scale like before, that's thanks to this keying set that we set over here. This interaction is really useful when you want to use auto keying to make your life a bit easier as you animate, but you also don't want to worry about keying a bunch of unnecessary properties when you place a manual keyframe. There's another setting and Auto key that works with this keying set that we just enabled. If we go over here to the auto keying settings by clicking on this drop down menu, we can see a checkbox here called Only Active keying set. So I'll check this one for now. What this checkbox does is limit the auto key setting from placing any keyframes on properties that aren't part of your active keying set. This means that if I have my keying set on the rotation only setting like it is now, and then I move to a new frame, and all I do is move my cube without rotating at all. Well, notice that it won't actually have placed any keyframes. We can see here that there are no new keyframes placed for this. It did, however, place keyframes only on the rotation. And in this case, all it did was simply lock it in to the consistent zero degree rotation that it's had the entire time. So this means if I moved it up and then rotated it as well. Now if I move my playhead, we'll see here the cube snaps back to where it was because it didn't actually place any keyframes for the location. And instead, all it did was place rotation keyframes, so it just rotates in place. While this can be a somewhat complicated interaction between the keying set and Auto key, it does make a lot of jobs really easy if you know exactly what you want to keyframe and you want to lose any keyframes that don't fall into that active keying set. For now, I'm going to go back over here and turn off my keying set. I'll turn off through rotation just by clicking this X. If you were following along with me, I suggest you do the same thing as well. Again, you didn't have to be, but if you were, you can click this to get rid of that and then we'll go over to our Auto key settings. Twirl this open and then also uncheck only active keying set. Then lastly, we can turn off auto keying by clicking this button here to turn it off. Also make sure I delete this cube by just selecting it and then hitting delete. Hopefully, at this point, you feel a bit more educated about the main differences between these keying styles. This was the last of our discussion based lessons, we're heading back into animating now that we've got the groundwork laid. In the next lesson, we'll begin animating the cow by focusing on its location. I'll see you there. 10. Animating the Cow - Location: In this lesson, we'll begin animating the cow by focusing on its location. Let's begin. The first step to animating our cow is getting the overall position blocked out, so we can build off of that motion in the following lessons. This means we'll simply be animating the cow's position up and down to match where it should be based on what the UFO above is doing. We'll focus on the detailed animation of the cow in following lessons. Animating the location will be a very similar process to how we animated the UFO. We won't be using auto keying just yet as it's not really necessary for this basic part of the animation. First, let's select the cow by clicking on the Control rig surrounding it. So we can just click on any one of these black lines on the surface of the cow. Now let's switch to the animation workspace so we have a more detailed view of what's going on. We can find the animation workspace by just clicking on this button here that says animation at the top. You'll now notice that on the top left viewport, that the animation workspace has automatically switched us into the pose mode for the cow's rig. We can get a clue to this because the cows bones on the control rig are all multi colored rather than being orange like they were before. Normally, this would be a useful little shortcut for us if we were planning on animating the individual limbs of the cow. However, in our case, we actually want to start by animating the entire cow in object mode. So to switch back to object mode, we're going to go back up here to this option bar at the top, click in our middle mouse button, and then move this whole bar here to the right so we can see this drop down where it says pose mode. Then we're going to click on this and switch it back to object mode. This will allow us to animate the entire rig without focusing on any one specific bone. Lastly, make sure that you're in the object properties tab on the right side. So we can go over here and then click on this little orange box for the object properties tab, and this is where we were doing a lot of our animation before. With everything set up, let's begin placing our keyframes. We'll start by locking the cow in place so it doesn't move before we want it to. So we're going to move to frame 50, and then we're going to place a keyframe on the Z location where it's currently set, so we won't change this value. We're just going to click this little dot to place a keyframe. Now we can move to frame 110 and we're going to change the Z location to negative 6.25. Enter, and then place our keyframe. This keyframe determines how high and how fast our cow will lift into the air. We'll come back to this frame in a moment to adjust its pacing. You may have also noticed that both of these values, the initial keyframe and then this keyframe we just placed here are set to negative values. This is simply a cork of this specific scene that I created for us. The UFO in this scene is set to roughly 0 meters, whereas the cow, which is below it is roughly negative 8 meters below this zero point. Of course, these measurements are all relative. So for our animation, it still looks like it's lifting off the ground, even though it's technically a negative value. As our Z value gets closer to zero, it's actually moving up in the air. With that keyframe placed, we can now go to frame 120. And we're going to set the Z location to negative 6.4 at enter, place our keyframe, and then the next few keyframes will be the gentle wobble up and down as the UFO struggles to lift the cow. So we can move to frame 130, set our Z to negative 5.9, place our keyframe, go to frame 140. So we're just doing ten frame increments here, we're going to set that to negative 6.6, place the keyframe. Frame 148, so slightly less this time. And we'll place that at negative 5.25 and then place our keyframe. And now we're ready for the last keyframe of this animation, and we're going to place that on frame 160. For this keyframe, we need to set the cow back to the exact same position that it started at, as we want it to land back on the ground after it's dropped by the UFO. We have two different options we can use to place this keyframe. We can either just go over here and then type in the exact value negative 8.06 in keyframe that is normal, or we could copy the original keyframe and place it at the end. For the sake of example, let's use the copy method to show you how it works. First, we're going to go to this first keyframe we placed here on the Z location, and we're just going to click on this to highlight it. Now we're going to hit Shift and D at the same time to begin duplicating this keyframe, and we're going to drag it all the way over here to frame 160. And then left click to place it. And that's it. Now we have an exact copy of the keyframe placed at the end, and the cow returns exactly to where it started from. Before we play our animation, let's go over here to the left ePort, click and drag on this option bar with our middle mouse button. To the left. That way we reveal our rendered button. We're going to click on this so we can actually see the lighting within our scene. Now we can go down here and hit the play button to see what we've animated. Our cow starts to slowly rise up into the air as the UFOs spotlight turns on, then it wavers up and down as the UFO struggles to hold it up. Then it drops to the ground as the UFO gives up and flies off. While the basic animation looks pretty good so far, there are some simple changes we can make to have the motion look even better. To make these changes, we'll need to start using the graph editor on the top right viewport. Let's start by pausing in the animation. Before I explain what the graph editor is useful for, let's zoom in on it to make it much more visible. The easiest way to do this is to first make sure that you have the Z location keyframe category selected over here on the left side. So we're going to twirl this open so we can see Z location and then select it. Now we can hover our mouse over the graph editor here on the right and then hit the home key to zoom into this line. You can find the home key above your arrow keys on the right side of your keyboard. After hitting the home key, Blender will zoom into this graph line and make it as large as possible to fill the screen. With our Z location graph line visible, let's discuss what we're actually looking at. The Z location is a perfect example of how to read this graph as it reflects what our cow is actually doing. If we look at this line, we'll notice black dots along the line and then subtle curves that attach each of them. The black dots represent the keyframes that we've placed, and the blue line represents the speed at which the cow transitions between these keyframes. The steeper the line, the quicker the cow is moving to get to the next keyframe location. You can see here at the beginning of the animation that this line is not that steep. However, we get to the end and the cow drops from the air down to the ground, this line is a lot more steep, which means it makes this change much more quickly. Another way to interpret this is that the cow slowly lifts into the air over time, but then quickly drops from the air back down to the ground. So if we imagined our cow traveling along this line as if it was a roller coaster, what could we do to make this animation look even better? The best candidates would be to focus on the very beginning of the animation as well as the very end of the animation. Let's start by making the cow lift into the air really slowly to start and then speed up as it reaches the top of the movement. To do this, we'll need to adjust the handles on the first keyframe. First, we'll select this first keyframe just by drag selecting over top of it in the graph editor. Now that we have it selected, we have a few different things we can do to any of these keyframes. Now that we have it selected, we have a few different things that we can do to any one of these keyframes that we select. Now, you don't need to follow along with this just yet, but as an example, we could hit G to move the placement of this keyframe. We could hit R to rotate the handles on this keyframe. And lastly, we could hit S to scale it, scaling up these handles, changing the curvature of the line it's attached to. Now I can hit Control Z to undo these changes and set it back to where it was. For our animation, we'll be using the last option, scaling. Let's drag the playhead either down here or up in the graph editor closer to the beginning of the animation. Right around here is probably fine. Around frame 70. And with the first keyframe still selected, we can hit S on our keyboard to begin scaling this, which will start increasing the size of these handles, changing the curvature of the line that are attached to it. Now let's begin scaling these handles up to make the graph much more gradual to start with, but steeper and faster at the end. After hitting S, we're just going to scale this up, pulling it towards the right side. Until this little handle here on the right side, you'll see that there's three dots. We want the right most dot. To go all the way to this darker black line, right about here. Then once we're happy with the scale, we can just click to place it. We were visually just scaling it up until this orange line met this black line. But we also have an option down here to twirl up in this resize and then we can change the scale here manually if we'd like to. You don't have to worry about having this exact value, but anywhere around 2.5 roughly would work fine. For now, I'm going to twirl this back down so we can get a better view. Now let's drag the playhead back to zero. And then hit the play button to see the animation that we just adjusted. With this subtle change made, we've slowed the initial lift off of the cow, but made it speed up quickly as it eventually leaves the ground. This gives the animation a bit more life as the pacing isn't so consistent. It makes it seem like the UFO spotlight needs a moment to reach full power, so it lifts the cow slowly as it charges up. It's also important to note that this change we made didn't change how long it takes for the cow to reach the first keyframe. It takes the exact same amount of time, in this case, 60 frames or 2 seconds, but we've redistributed the speed of the animation during those 2 seconds. So even though it starts moving slowly to begin with, it speeds up to compensate for the slowdown in the beginning, meaning that the overall time spent lifting into the air still remains the same, 2 seconds. Now let's pause our animation, and now we're ready to work on the last key frame of the animation. Our goal for the last keyframe of this animation is to make the end of the movement as abrupt as possible. Right now, if we look at this line here, we'll notice that there's a subtle curve right before it reaches the end. It goes down and then slowly curves and then flattens out. This means the cow is slowing down slightly right before it hits the ground. This would make sense if the cow is a different type of animal like a bird or a winged insect, as they can use their wings to slow the fall, but cows don't have wings, and our cow wouldn't be able to slow its fall just before the end as it hits the ground. We'll make the change for this keyframe using a different method than the beginning of the animation. This time we're going to change the type of keyframe used at the end. To do this, we'll again need to drag select over the keyframe, so we're just going to drag select over the last keyframe in this case, just found here at the bottom right. And now with our mouse still hovering over top of this graph editor, we're going to hit V on our keyboard to bring up the handle type menu. This menu allows us to change how the handles on these keyframes behave. By default, all of our keyframes are using the aligned setting, which is what they default to when you create a keyframe. This aligned setting is great for making subtle curves between each of the motions to make the movement start out slowly and end slowly. Generally, this is a good place to start as it works great for most situations. But in our unique case, we need to use a different handle type. You can see here next to the option vector, that there's a symbol that looks like a line with no curve at all. It's just two straight lines running into a keyframe. This is perfect for our purposes as we want to eliminate the curve in our line as well. This is true of all these other options here. We can look at the symbol next to them to get an idea of what they're useful for. However, as I mentioned, vector is the one we'll be using, so let's click on that now. The handle type switch to vector, we can see the handles have turned green, and the line now has a sharp corner at the bottom of it with no curve at all. So this line goes straight down, hits the keyframe, and then goes horizontal. There's no subtle curve like we had before. Let's drag our playhead back to zero and then hit the play button to see the new animation. We can see now that the cow quickly falls from the air and doesn't slow down at all until it finally stops on the ground. This has removed that slight slowdown and floatiness that we had before, making the animation have a lot more weight and realism. These last two changes that we made using the graph editor might have seemed pretty subtle, but it's these little changes that can have big effects on your animation and really improve the polish of the overall look. In the next lesson, we'll add some modifiers to the cow's location to give it some variation in its movements. I'll see you there. 11. Animating the Cow - Adding Modifiers: And In this lesson, we'll add some modifiers to the cow's location to give it some variation in its movements. Let's begin. Up to this point, we've only added animation modifiers to movements that we've already keyframed. Obviously, this is the most common way to use these modifiers, but it's not the only way. What if we want our cow to slowly waver left and right as it floats using a noise modifier? But we don't want to hand animate this basic movement first. We can't apply a modifier to an animation or a keyframe that doesn't exist. As you might have guessed already, I have a simple fix for this problem. All we need to do is add a single keyframe on the parameter that we want to apply the modifier to, and that'll solve our issue. This method works because a single keyframe on a parameter that already had no animation won't cause any issues for us as it simply locks in a parameter that already wasn't animated. All this does for us is give us a place to attach our modifier to. We have three different parameters that we want to do this placeholder keyframe process on. So let's set that up now. First, make sure that you're in the animation workspace found here. We can switch to it just by clicking on the word animation. Next, make sure that you have the control rig for the cow selected, and you're in object mode. So if you're not selected already, you can just hover over any one of these black lines and select it, and then to double check that you're in object mode, you can either look here and see if the rig is shown in orange or you can go up to the top option bar, click in your middle mouse button to pan it all the way to the left. Make sure it says object mode. If not, it'll more than likely be on Pos mode. You'll want to switch it back to object. With everything set up, let's begin placing our keyframes. We're going to go down here and move our playhead to frame 50. We'll be placing our keyframes at the beginning of the cows animation. It really doesn't matter where we place these single keyframes. Frame 50 is as good as any other place. Now we can go over here on the right side and make sure you're in the object properties tab, which is this little orange box and then we're going to go through and place three different keyframes. Our first keyframe is going to be the location, so we'll just click this little dot to place a keyframe. Now we'll go down to the rotation and place an X rotation keyframe, and then lastly, a Y rotation keyframe. And that's it. We don't need to change any of these parameters. We simply need the keyframe. With all of our keyframes placed, all we need to do is add our modifiers. Let's start with the X location. We're going to go over here and select X location from this list on the left side. If you don't see all these different parameters here, you might need to twirl open this option menu here. If that's the case, just click this little arrow and then I'll twirl it open and you want to have just the X location selected. Now we'll go to the modifier panel, and if you don't see this, just hit N to bring up the modifier panel and then make sure you're in the modifiers tab here on the right, and now we'll go up to add modifier and choose noise. This process will be largely identical to previous noise modifiers. Going to go pretty quick through this. So to start with, we're going to go to our scale, type in 40 for the scale. For the strength, we'll set this to 0.6. We're going to leave these three parameters as they are. So offset phase and depth will remain at third default. Now we'll go down to restrict frame range, check this on, twirl it open, and then for the start, we're going to start this on frame 50. For the end, we'll type in frame 155, and then for both the in and the out value here for the blend, we'll type in 30 for both of these. With these settings, we've added a slow movement left and right that starts when the cow lifts off the ground. And then ends just before it falls back to Earth. You can either give your animation a quick play to see what we did, or you can simply go down here to the playhead and drag it back and forth to see the slight waiver that we added. You can see our cow here just kind of floats back and forth left and right, a little bit thanks to the noise modifier. Now it's time to add a modifier to the X rotation. So again, we'll go down here and we're going to select the X Euler rotation found just below. As a quick note, there are a few different types of rotation methods, but the most common one is called Euler, which is named after Leonhard Euler, a Swiss mathematician from the 1700s, just in case you were curious. Now again, we'll go up here to our add modifier and then again, choose noise. For our scale, we'll set this to eight. Our strength will set to point to four. We're going to skip the next three just like last time and then check on restrict frame range, twirl this open, and then for the start, we're going to start this at frame 100. We'll end it at frame 155, and then the same thing as before, we're going to type in 30 for both the in and the out. If you're curious to see what the X rotation line looks like in the graph editor, we can just mouse over this and then hit the home key on our keyboard. And here we can see it at the very top. Well, notice that if we drag our playhead, that this randomized wobble that we added on the X rotation begins right around the same time that the UFO begins to struggle. The rotation on the cow that we just added helps connect the movements of these two characters and sell the story. Feel free to give the animation a play or just drag that playhead back and forth to see the rotation that we added. And then lastly, let's add our modifier to the Y rotation. Again, just like before, we'll go down here to the bottom left, choose the Y rotation, go to add modifier, choose noise. Now we'll set our scale to 16, set the strength to 0.4. We'll skip these next three, go down to restrict frame range, turn this on, twirl it open, and then we'll set the start to 110. We'll set the end to 155. And then again, set the blend in and out to 30. Just like the rotation modifier that we added, we've limited the influence of this noise modifier to only the time when the UFO is wobbling. So let's drag our playhead back and forth here to see what we've done. So we can see now that it's rotating on two different axes, as well as hovering back and forth left and right thanks to the location modifier that we added. We can also drag our playhead back here to the beginning and then hit the play button to see what it looks like in real time. Well, notice that the movements of our cow are a lot more varied and lifelike thanks to these simple modifiers. The movements of the cow also better reflect the story that we're trying to tell with the UFOs struggle. This is the last time that we'll use modifiers in this class. However, if you wanted to learn more about them, I'd recommend my animate a cartoon bumblebee class where we use the cycles modifier to make wings flap. In the next lesson, we'll begin animating the bones of our cow rig, starting with its spine. I'll see you there. 12. Animating the Cow - Spine: Hi. In this lesson, we'll begin animating the bones of our cow rig, starting with the spine. Let's begin. This is it. We're ready to begin the animation of the cow. This is where we really make the cow come to life with expressive movements and subtle secondary motion. We're also ready to begin using the auto keying setting that we discussed in a previous lesson. This will allow us to keep our animation process a bit more organic and fluid and less focused on exact movements. Without further ado, let's begin animating. As with the previous lessons, we'll be working in the animation workspace found here. You can get to that just by clicking on the word animation. Next, make sure you have the cow rig selected here in the left view port. If it's not selected already, just hover over one of these black lines and then select it until it turns orange. Now it's time to switch from the object mode that we're currently in to the pose mode instead. To switch to pose mode, we're going to go up here to this top option bar, and you may or may not need to click in your middle mouse button to pan this bar. So we're going to pan it all the way to the right so that we can see the furthest left and then we're going to click on this drop down here which says Object mode and then instead switch it to pose mode. Then lastly, to make our lives a little bit easier, we'll be switching this top rate viewport from the graph editor which it's currently on to the three D viewport as well. This might seem like an odd change because we already have our camera view port here on the left side, but it's really difficult to actually rotate the parts from this view. It'll be much easier to work from a regular three D viewport and simply look at the left side to get an idea of what it looks like from the camera view. To swap this graph editor to a three D viewport, we'll go up here to the very top left and then click on this drop down and now we'll select this top left option three D viewport. We'll likely switch back to the graph editor in later lessons. But for now, three D viewport is going to be a lot more useful to us. Now we can reposition this view over here by zooming in and out. Then we can also rotate this view, so we have a better view of the cow. If you'd like to hide this side menu, assuming it's up on yours, you can just hit N to hide that side menu so you have a better view. Before we begin animating, we'll also need to switch our transformation orientation from Global to Local. We can find that here at the top center of the right view poort. So we're going to click on Global and then switch it to local instead. This will swap the orientation of our tools, such as the rotation tool that we'll be using to orient themselves with the bone rather than the overall world. This will make our lives significantly easier when posing the cow and placing our key frames. Our last step is to enable auto keying. This process will allow us to be a bit looser with our animation process to achieve a more organic movement without the need to worry about exact values that we're using. We've got two different settings that we need to turn on, so let's handle that now. First, we'll go down here to the bottom and toggle on auto keying. We can do that simply by just clicking on this button here with the empty circle, then it'll turn blue to let us know it's on. Now let's enable a keying set to make sure that we only key the rotation of our bones. This will prevent us from making unnecessary keyframes on parameters we have no interest in effecting. To add the keying set, we're going to go over here to where it says keying, and then click on this drop down menu. Next, we'll click on this field here where it says keying set and then we're going to choose rotation, which is found here at the top. This rotation keying set means when we use the eye key to manually place a keyframe, it will only keyframe the rotation and not the location or the scale. With all of that set up out of the way, we're ready to begin animating our cow's rig, and each of the following lessons will be focusing on a different part of the cow's body. This will allow us to keep each of these lessons as short as possible, while also providing you a good reference point if you wanted to rewatch a specific section. This lesson we'll be focusing on the spine of our cow to start getting a baseline for the cow's overall movement. That's because the spine of our cow is the foundation for the rest of the body parts. All of the other parts, such as the head or the legs are connected to the spine in some fashion. That makes this a really great place to start. We'll start by animating the lower spine. This is this green ring that we can see here on the back side of the cow. We can select this bone by simply clicking on this green ring to highlight. We won't be animating this bone until frame 50. So let's drag our play head here to frame 50, and then we're going to place a manual keyframe. Now we can hover our mouse over this right viewport to where we see our cow on the top right, and then we'll hit the I key to place a manual keyframe on this bone. If we go down here on the dope sheet, we can twirl this open to see that we've keyframed all three rotation values by placing this manual keyframe. Now we want our cow to extend its back slowly as it's lifted into the air. This will help the cow look more weightless as it floats, and it'll give the cow a bit more life as it reacts to the environment. It takes the cow until frame one, ten to fully lift in the air. So we'll have the cow extend its back fully over that amount of time as well. So let's drag our playhead all the way to frame one, ten. Then we'll need to reposition our view so we can see the cow still, and then the place our key frame will be simply rotating the cow's bone in the viewport. The only parameter that we'll be animating is the X rotation, which is the red circle on this rotation tool. We can see that here if we rotate around. The only one we'll be animating here is the red one. So to begin moving it, we just need to click on this red handle and then pull it back and forth. One thing that we'll notice while rotating this bone is that it doesn't rotate very far and stops after a small amount. This is an intentional choice I made for this rig, as I wanted to prevent movements that would otherwise break or make the rig appear incorrect, such as bones rotating in unnatural directions. While the movement of the spine is locked at the angles that I specified, we're still technically able to key frame values higher than the limit I determined. This means we'll still only want to keyframe rotation values within the limited range that I determined. The reason for this is that if we rotate this all the way back well past where it locks, we can see at the top left, we're still changing this rotation value. It'll actually make the movements faster than they should be, and that's because it's trying to rapidly move to a value outside its range and then being stopped at the value that I located at. The cow won't move any further than it's allowed to, but it'll move faster than you're expecting. For that reason, we'll be using these limits that I am put in place as guides for where we should be placing our values. Can make the process of rotating these bones to their locked values easier by holding down the control key while we rotate. So if we begin rotating this bone and then hold down our left control key, we'll see these little white lines pop up. This is showing five degree increments. So we can see as we move it snaps to each one of these little white lines, moving it just five degrees each time. So while rotating this bone on the X axis and holding down the control key, let's move it until it just stops moving. So once we notice that the cow is no longer moving backwards, that's the last place we're going to rotate it to. So right about here. Then we're going to let go to solidify the keyframe. This ensures that our keyframe isn't trying to move the cows back much further past where the limit is thus increasing the speed at which it moves. The process of using angle snaps and moving your bone to the limit of its rotation will get a little bit more second nature as you do it more times. It might seem a little fiddly right now, but it's really not too bad. So now that we have this keyframe done, we're going to move to frame 160. And then we're just going to hit the eye key while hovering over top of this view port at the top right to place manual keyframes. These keyframes here that we just placed are just meant to keep the rotations locked as it's flying around in the air. Now let's move to frame 164, so just four frames after the last. And then in our view port here, we can go down a little bit so we can see the cow a little bit better. And then frame 164 is the frame where we're going to return the spine to its original position. This is the moment that the cow comes crashing down to the ground. So this movement also needs to be rather abrupt as the feet make contact. So we're going to simply just grab this red controller here again, hold down control to enable snaps and then rotate it until the feet make contact. We still have the upper spine to animate, but before we move on, let's clean up these excess keyframes that we created using the I key down here. So we can see by the dope sheet that both the Y and the Z rotation aren't really doing anything, even though they have keyframes. So the first keyframe and the last key for AM are identical, meaning they're not really actually contributing to this animation. So let's just delete them so that they're not there. To delete them, we're just going to drag select over these bottom two lines and then hit the delete key to remove them. This cleans up this view down here, and it doesn't affect our animation at all as those keyframes weren't doing anything. Now that we know a little bit more about this process we'll be using, let's move a bit quicker through the upper spine animation. The upper spine will feature a bit more movement. So we'll be key framing more than just the X rotation this time. So our first step is to select the upper spine, which is this blue ring here right around the shoulders. With that selected, we're going to move back to frame 50 like before, and then we'll hover our mouse over the top rate view port and then hit the I key to place manual keyframes. After placing the keyframe, we'll go down here, twirl this open so that we can see all the keyframes we're placing. Now we can move to frame one, ten. Adjust our viewport so we can see a little bit better. And now we're going to rotate this bone on the X axis backwards to its limit while holding the control key down. Sold down control while rotating, and then we're going to rotate it until it stops moving, and then just back it off one so we know we moved it just until the limit. If you're the type of person who strongly prefers knowing the exact values that we're rotating each of these bones, I understand. If you'd like to see the values that we're rotating here, we can both hit RN key to bring up this menu here on the right side, then switch to the item tab found here at the very top. And then you can see the X rotation we did here is 20 degrees. I'll try to make sure I have this side menu up for anybody that like to see the values we're using, but I won't really be calling out these values as the goal of this is to be a little bit more free form. But if you'd like to try to match my values a little bit better, you can look at this menu here to see roughly where the bone is placed. Now we can move to frame 126, and this will be our first keyframe that targets more than just the X rotation. This time we'll be rotating on the Z. So let's rotate around so we can see the top of our cow to get a better view of it. And then we're going to rotate on the Z so that the cow's body moves to the left roughly 20 degrees. So right around here. Again, you don't have to worry about the exact rotations that we're doing here. You just want it to visually look like mine. If you do have your side menu up over here, you'll notice that this doesn't actually make the Z rotation 20 degrees, and it also affected the Y rotation due to the interaction between the diagonal movement and all of the other axes that it's turning on, but it's relatively close. Just try to remember that in this portion of the animation, we're focused less on the exact degree values and more on what the actual movement looks like. It's also worth noting that down here on our dope sheet, we didn't keyframe the Y or the Z rotation at frame 110 along with the X rotation. So the Z and the Y rotation takes place over a longer period of time and overlap the movements of the X rotation. This is actually completely fine. It helps the animation by overlapping movements and not having everything happen at the exact same time. Now let's move to frame 144, and this time, we're going to again rotate on the Z rotation, and we're going to rotate the cow the exact opposite direction. Mirror the movement that it had before except to have the body rotate to the right instead of the left. This will help give the cow some life as it appears to look around confused as it's shaken by the UFO mid air. Now let's move to frame 160. We can reposition our view so we can see the cow a little bit better. In this frame, we're going to lock the X rotation of the spine just before it makes contact with the ground. It's important that we only keyframe the X rotation here as we want the other values free to move for the next round of keyframes. The easiest way to do this is to use the I key to manually place three rotation keyframes and then delete the Y and the Z keyframes, leaving only the X behind. So make sure you're on frame 160. Then we'll hover our mouse over our top right viewport, hit I to place our three key frames. Then we can go down here, we're going to click off any of these keyframes just in this empty area down at the bottom. Now we can drag select over the bottom two, which are the Y and the Z, and then we're going to hit Delete to remove these keyframes. This allows us to keep the X rotation locked to where it's at, but freeze up the Y and the Z to continue animating to the next frame. And then for our last keyframe, we're going to again go to frame 164. This is the last frame of the movement, and it's where we need to set everything back to its original position from the beginning of the animation. You'll remember from a previous lesson that we can duplicate key frames. So that'll help us easily set the cow back to its correct spot. To do this, we're just going to go back to frame 50, drag select over the bottom three here. So we're selecting M X, the Y, and the Z rotation of this bone from frame 50, then we can hit Shift and D to begin duplicating these frames. And we're just going to place them over here on frame 164. After left clicking to place these keyframes, we can see our cow snaps back to its original position. And that's the last of our key frames. Before we play our animation, let's go over here to the left side, and then we're going to click on this button here that has these two overlapping circles. When we click this, it's going to hide the viewport overlays, so we can hide the view of the bones on top of the cow. That way we get a little bit better view of it. With those bones hidden visually, we can go down here and hit Play to see our animation. So after playing your animation, you may notice that your cow has a little bit of a pop at the end where it's resetting back to the beginning. This ideally shouldn't occur. We can see an example of that here on my animation. This has happened because the first and the last frames of this cow's animation aren't identical. So if this has also happened to you, we're going to go ahead and pause our animation, bring it back to frame 50, and then I believe the problem lies here on the backbone. So we're going to select the lower spine, and then we're going to drag our playhead from 50 all the way to the end where it says 164. And we can see over here the rotation for this X should be zero, however, it says 1.5, which means that the beginning of our animation, and the end of our animation are not identical, which is why we noticed that quick pop at the end. To fix this, we have a few different options. So we can just go over here, type in zero if we'd like, and that'll fix that rotation. Or alternatively, you can use that duplicate method that we had before. So we can just simply drag select over this keyframe, hit Shift and D. Duplicate it over here, and then just click and place it directly on top of the other keyframe to replace it with an identical copy of the first keyframe. Now that we fix this issue, we can go down here and hit the play button. Well, now notice that as the animation starts over, the cow doesn't have that quick pop showing us where the beginning and the end of the animation are. This is exactly what we want, as we want a seamless transition from the beginning to the end. We don't want to really know where the animation is starting over. And with that small problem fixed, that's it. The spine for the cow has been animated, and it's already looking a lot more alive. One important detail of the way we animated the cow landing is we waited for the feet to make contact with the ground before letting the back reset to its original position. This subtle timing really makes it feel like the cow is rapidly falling from the sky. Then it hits the ground with its feet first before the rest of the body snaps back down to the surface. Small timing differences can make or break the realism and weight of your animations. So be sure to keep them in mind when animating your own projects. Always consider how these motions would affect your own body if you were in their situation. Now that we have a basic understanding of how to animate using auto keying, we'll proceed a bit quicker through each of the other body parts, slowing down only to call out the important details or tips. In the next lesson, we'll continue animating the bones of our cow rig. This time focusing on the head movements. I'll see you there. 13. Animating the Cow - Head: In this lesson, we'll continue animating the bones of our cow rig, this time focusing on the head movements. We'll be continuing the animation of our cow in this lesson. Let's make sure that you're ready to follow along. Here's a quick checklist to make sure that you're ready. First, make sure you're in the animation workspace. Next, make sure you have your cow rig selected. Then switch from the object mode to the pose mode instead. Your top right viewport should be set to the three D viewport rather than the graph editor. Your transform orientation should be set to local rather than global. You auto keying should be turned on, and lastly, your keying set found over here should be set to rotation. This checklist is going to be pretty much the same for all of the following lessons. I'm not going to mention it each time. I will, however, include a little on screen reminder of all of these items at the beginning of later lessons just so you don't forget. With that out of the way, let's jump right in. We're animating the head this lesson. Let's select the red head controller found here around the eyes of our cow. While the controller for this bone is wrapped around the eyes at the front of the head, you'll notice that the pivot is actually placed at the base of the head near the back. This means the head will pivot and rotate from a natural place regardless of where this controller is located on the cow. Let's begin our animation process now. A lot of the emotion for our cow is going to be coming from the head movement. While the face isn't animable on this rig, we can still show a lot of emotion just with the head movements. Let's start out by moving to frame 20 down here on the timeline. We'll be starting the animation of the head a bit sooner than the other body parts. As we want it to look like the cow begins to notice the OFO prior to being lifted into the air. We're going to start by just placing some placeholder keyframes by hovering our mouse over the top right view port and then hitting I to place the keyframes. We can go down here to the bottom left and then twirl open this menu here so we can see all three key frames that we placed. Now let's move the playhead to frame 80 and our next goal is to have the cow turn its head upwards to look at the UFO with the added benefit of looking towards the camera. This will let us get a good look at the cow's face from the camera angle, while also having the cow react to suddenly being lifted off the ground. In our top right viewport, let's position the cow so we can see it a bit better. We're going to first start by turning the head backwards so it looks up on the X axis all the way to its limit. So we'll grab the red handle on this rotation tool. And then hold down Control as we rotate it, and we're going to rotate it until it stops moving, and we'll move it back just before it stops. So right about there. Now let's spin our view around so we can see the head from the top. And now we're going to rotate it on the Z axis. So let's begin rotating it to the left on the Z axis while holding down control, and we're going to rotate it until it just starts clipping into itself. We don't want to move it so far that the head starts turning downward like this. Want to move it to right about here. So the base of the neck contacts this blue line on this controller. Don't worry about getting the angle perfect. Just get it to look somewhat like mine. Now we can see over here on the left side, the cow is now looking upward and it's facing towards the camera. Now let's move to frame 126 on the timeline. Then again, we're going to reposition our view so we can see the backside of the head and the now let's begin turning the cow's head in the opposite direction to make it feel as if it's leading the movement of the shoulders. By having the head move prior to the upper body, it gives the movements an almost snake like appearance to add to the organic and interconnected nature of the body. So our first movement here is going to be rotating the head downward a little bit. Let's turn our camera a little bit to the right here, and then we're going to grab this red handle and then move it downward, so it's not looking quite so high into the air. Right about here is fine. Again, don't worry about getting an exact, just something similar. And now we can rotate around again to the back. This time, we'll grab the blue handle here to rotate it on the Z, and we're going to rotate it towards the right right about here. So now the overall head position is a little less extreme. It's not looking quite so far into the air, and it's turned its head over to the right side. Now let's move to frame 145. At this position, the cow is nearly at the peak of its movement upward as the UFO prepares to drop them. We're only going to be animating the X rotation this time, as we want to prepare it for a quick snap upward as it falls from the air. Up in our right viewport, we're going to rotate around to the side so we can get a better look. And now we're going to rotate it just on the X axis. Grab the red handle, hold down control, and we're going to rotate it down as far as it goes right up to the limit. So right about here. This movement downward helps illustrate that the cow is moving upward so quickly that it's having a hard time keeping its head up due to the G forces that it's experiencing. Heavy body parts such as the head, tend to move in the opposite direction of the overall body movement because the inertia wants to keep them in place rather than rapidly moving them back and forth. So they sort of lag behind in their movements that make them appear to move in the opposite directions of the predominant movement of the body. You can notice this effect in real life if you put your arm straight out in front of you and then quickly raise your arm straight up into the air. You'll feel your hand angle itself downward and lag behind the movements of your arm, just like the cow's head has. Now let's move to frame 154 on our timeline. This frame starts making the transition from flying upward to now falling downward. This is when the UFO finally drops the cow from the air. We'll be using the same principle as the last keyframe to animate this one, meaning that if our cow is traveling downward quickly, that means our head should snap upward quickly as it doesn't want to move as fast as the rest of the body. This will really sell how quickly the cow went from rising to falling. This head position will look largely similar to the first head position, looking upward and to the left at the camera. First, let's rotate it on the X axis, and we're going to make it look upward. We'll grab this red handle, hold down Control, and rotate it up to the limit. So right about here. Next, let's swing our view around so we can see the backside of the head, this time we'll grab the blue handle to rotate it on the Z, and we're going to rotate it to the left. We're going to stop just before it starts clipping into the body, right about here. Basically, once the backside of the head makes contact with this blue ring. Now we can move to frame 160 and then reposition our view. And just like the last lesson, when we placed a keyframe on the spine, just as the cow made contact with the ground, we'll be doing the same thing with the head. So we can see down here, our feet have now reached the ground, and we're ready to make that locked keyframe. To do this, just simply mouse over the top viewpoard here and then hit I to place our manual keyframes. We'll also be going down here to the dope sheet, clicking into this empty space here to unhighlight the keyframes, and then we're going to drag select over these bottom two, the Y and the Z, and we'll be deleting them just like the last time. That's because we really only want to lock in the X movements. And the reason we only want the X keyframe in this case is because that's the one that will control the quick snap downward as the cow's front feet finally make contact and the head goes back to its original position. Now we can head to frame 164 when the feet finally make contact, and now we're ready to set the head back to its original position. And just like the last lesson, we'll be duplicating the first keyframes to make our life a bit easier. So we're just going to go over here to frame 20, drag select over these three keyframes, the X, the Y, and the Z, hit Shift and D to begin duplicating them. Then we can drag them over to 164 and then left click to place them. And now we can see here, our head is snapped back to its original position. With this key frame placed, let's give our animation a quick play to see what we've animated. So we'll go down here and just hit the play button. Now, over here on the left side, we can see the heads, turns up, notices the UFO, looks around a little bit, and then falls and snaps back down to the ground. This helps give the cow some emotion, as well as give it a sense of weight and inertia as it's flying around and falling at great speeds. If we wanted to, we could stop here and have a pretty cool looking animation. But there are a few more things we can do to make this animation look even better. The first thing we could do is add a little extra head movement after the cow lands on the ground to give it some extra character rather than just remaining completely stationary. We're going to have the cow shake its head quickly back and forth in confusion and general disapproval of being tossed around by this UFO. So first, let's pause our animation, and then we're going to go to frame 200. Now let's rotate a review up here so we can see the back side of the head. These movements that we're adding will primarily focus on shaking the head side to side on the Z axis and tilting it slightly on the y axis, which is the green one. So let's start by rotating it just on the Z axis. So we're going to move it on the blue, hold down control, and we're just going to move it about five degrees to the left. So about one or two snap points to the left. Right around here is fine. So five to ten is good. Now we can select this green ring here, and we're going to rotate it to the left, as well. We're going to rotate this one somewhere 8-10 degrees. If you'd like to, you can just go a full ten, that's fine. So now the whole head is turned to the left, and it's also tilted towards the left. Now let's move to frame two oh three. So only a few frames afterwards. And now we're going to swing the head in the opposite direction to begin the head shake. We've also left very little room between these key frames to make the movement really fast. Three frames is only a tenth of a second. So we'll start by rotating it on the blue axis, the Z. We're going to rotate it holding down control, and we're going to move it about 20 degrees from where it started. So we're going to move it 20 degrees to the right, so about here. And this time, we're not going to touch the Y. We're just going to leave it rotated as it is. Now we can move to frame two oh six. So again, another three frames. And this time, we're going to swing the head back to the left. But this time we'll also tilt the head as well. So we'll start by moving it on the Z again. So grab the blue handle, hold down control, and then rotate it towards the left 20 degrees roughly. And then this time we are going to use the green handle to move it on the Y as well. So we'll grab the green, hold down control, and this time we're going to move it about 20 as well, towards the right. Now the head overall is looking towards the left, but it's tilted towards the right, which is the opposite of the first movement. This will help make this head shake feel like it's throwing the head back and forth. It's a little bit of a more wild movement. It's a little less controlled. The head is just shaking back and forth and tilting as it's doing so. Now we can move our playhead to frame two, ten, so a bit further apart than the last one. And this frame is going to use an identical head position to frame two oh three. This means we can just use the duplicate method that we've used before to copy the keyframes here. We can find frame two oh three keyframes here in the middle. So we'll just click down here to deselect, then drag select just over these middle ones here. So these keyframes, hit Shift and D, drag them to frame 210, and then left click. The main difference here is that we've slightly increased the amount of time between this head movement and the last head movement. This means that the head begins to move a little bit slower here as the head shake comes to an end. If you've ever seen a dog shake after getting wet, you'll know that when they start to shake, it's really quick and then it slows down as it comes to an end. That's what we're mimicking here. Now let's move to frame 216. So again, even slower than the last one. You can tell that it's getting slower because these keyframes are going to be further apart. And this will again use an exact keyframe position from a previous one. This time we'll be copying frame two oh six. So first we need to just click off the timeline here, then we'll highlight these keyframes. So the ones to the right of this grouping of three, hit Shift and D, drag them here, and then place them. Then the very last frame of this headshake, we're going to go to frame 222. And this is the last frame of the headshake before the animation loops back to the beginning. So we need the head to go back to its default position. To do that, we're just going to copy the frames from frame 20. So we'll drag select over these keyframes here, shift D to duplicate them, drag them to the right, and then click to place them on frame 222. And then before we move on with our last adjustment, let's just drag our playhead back a little bit, right around frame 180. Then we can go down here and hit play to get an idea of what this headshake looks like. So we'll just hit Play to see this so we can see if we drag it back here. And watch the headshake. I just shakes its head back and forth a little bit to show it's disapproval and also possibly being confused about what just happened to it. Now let's go down here and pause our animation. With the headshake finalized, we have one last thing to adjust. This next change will require us to switch this top rate viewport back to the graph editor for a moment. So to do this, go up to your top rate viewpoint, go to this dropdown menu found here in the top left corner, and then we're going to choose Graph Editor. Now we can go down here to the bottom left of the dope sheet. We're going to select our X Euler rotation category. Then we'll hover over this top right window. Then we can hit the home key to focus this line here in the graph editor. So we'll just hit home found above your arrow keys so we can see the entire line. Our goal now is to adjust the pace at which the cow initially lifts its head as the UFO flies over top of it. So it's this movement here in the beginning when the cow lifts its head as the UFO flies above. This is the movement that we'd like to effect. Right now it's a slow and gradual lift of the head, which looks okay, but it would be a bit more expressive if the head movement starts out really slow and then quickly snaps upward as the cow is startled by the UFO lifting it off the ground. And you'll remember from a previous lesson that based on the steepness of this line, that's what controls the pace of the movement. So right now it's a relatively smooth and gradual line. We want it to be a bit more steep here at the top. That way, it snaps quickly, and it'll start out flatter and more smooth here at the bottom. We'll start out with the beginning of the movement first. So we're going to drag select here over top of this keyframe. And then make sure you have your playhead here set to frame 80 to use this as a guiding line. Now we can hit S on our keyboard to begin scaling this keyframe. And we're going to scale it until this orange dot here on the right side crosses over just over top of the blue, this blue line here of the playhead. So right about here. This has made the beginning of this movement slower and more gradual as we made this curve smoothed out a good bit. It starts out relatively flat and then starts to get more steep further in, which means the movement will start out slower and then speed up as it goes. Now we're ready to effect the top of the movement found here. But this time we're only going to select this left handle. So we only want to select on this dot here to the far left. We don't want to drag select over the entire keyframe. Again, just collect on this, just the left handle, and we're going to hit S to begin scaling this, and we're going to scale just the left side of this curve, leaving the right side of the curve untouched. We're going to scale it until this dot passes over top of this 50 line. So just pass the 50 line right around here. By doing this, we've made the beginning of the animation slow. We've made the middle really fast. You can see the line is almost vertical, and then we again slowed it down here at the top by widening this curve and making it a bit smoother, which means it'll slow down quickly before it reaches the top of the movement. Now let's go back to frame zero and play our animation to see the changes that we made. We can now see that the movement starts out slowly, but once the cow notices the UFO, it quickly snaps its head upward in surprise as it's lifted off the ground. This is a relatively subtle change, but it does add a little bit more expression to the cow's movements. Before we finish here, we can pause our animation, and then we're going to switch this top right viewport back to the three D viewport. So we'll click on this drop down here at the left and then choose three D viewport. Hopefully, you're enjoying watching this little cow come to life one step at a time. It's really exciting to watch all of these seemingly disconnected movements blend together into a lifelike reaction to the environment. In the next lesson, we'll continue animating the bones of our cow rig, this time focusing on subtle ear movements. I'll see you there. 14. Animating the Cow - Ears: And In this lesson, we'll continue animating the bones of our cow rig. This time focusing on subtle ear movements. Let's begin. Now that we have some of the more important parts of our cow animated, let's add some more subtle motion to the elements, such as the ears. Before we begin, take a moment to look at the One screen checklist to make sure that you have your file ready to animate. Once you're all set up, let's begin. This process will be largely the same as the previous body parts. Both ears will have basically the same animation, but we'll start by selecting the controller on the left ear to animate the first one. We're going to select this ear here on the left side of their head, which is this pink ear. We'll save the green for the next. Now we can move our playhead to frame 50, and then we're going to hover our mouse over top of this view port at the top right and hit I to place our manual keyframes. Now we can go down here to roll it open so we can see all of the key frames. As always, this is simply to lock the rotation in place prior to its next movement. Now we can head to frame one, ten found here, and then we can reposition our view so we can see the head a bit better. Now's the time to lift the ears upward to make it look like the UFOs beam is pulling it up along with the rest of the head. We're going to use the X axis to rotate it basically up to its limit. So we're going to grab the X axis, hold down control, and then rotate it until basically it stops moving, right about here. The ears are a relatively small and subtle part of the movement, so we don't really need to animate more than just the X axis to sell the effect that we're after. Now let's move to frame 160, basically near the end of the movement. We can fix our view up at the top so we can see the cow a bit better. And then we can just hit the eye key over top of this three D view port to place our keyframes. This is meant just to keep the ears locked upward during the entirety of this animation. Now we can move to frame 164, right as the head snaps downward, and we're going to be resetting the ears back through their original position. As always, we can go down here, drag select over the first set of keyframes and then hit Shift and D to duplicate them, and then place them here by left clicking at frame 164. That's it. The simple animation for the left ear is complete. Now let's quickly animate the right ear to match the movements of the left ear so we can rotate around select the green ear on the other side of the head, and now we're ready to begin animating. We'll go back to frame 50, and then we'll hit I to place our keyframe while hovering over this top rate viewport, twirl open the keyframes down here just so we can see everything. Go to frame 110, reposition our view so we can see the ear. And again, we'll rotate it just on the X axis. All the way up to the limit, we're holding Control down. So right around here. Now we can head to frame 160. And again, we'll just place a manual keyframe using the eye key to lock it in place. And then one last keyframe, when frame 164, we're going to drag select over the initial three keyframes, hit Shift and D, duplicate them, and place them here at the end. Now we can swing our view down just to make sure that the ears look correct and that they're both roughly in the same position. Everything looks good. With the final keyframe placed, we're ready to hit the play button and get a preview of the animation. We can see the ear movements are relatively subtle, but they definitely help reinforce that floating feeling that we're trying to capture with our animation. In the next lesson, we'll continue animating the bones of our cow rig. This time moving on to the back leg movements. I'll see you there. 15. Animating the Cow - Back Legs: Hi. In this lesson, we'll continue animating the bones of our cow rig. This time moving on to the back leg movements. Let's begin. We're nearing the end of the body movements for our little cow. We're going to start moving the back legs around now. While the legs don't make a huge difference in the overall position of the body while it's in the air, they do have a large visual impact on the movement of the cow. The legs will help us show that the cow is obviously not too familiar with the feeling of floating, so it's not sure what to do with its legs. As always, before we begin, take a look at the onscreen checklist to make sure that you have your file ready to animate. Once you're all set up, let's begin. We'll start by selecting the back left leg, which is this red controller here. Again, both of the animations for each of these legs are going to be pretty similar, but we've got to start somewhere. So let's begin with the back left. We'll start by going to frame 50, hovering our mouse over here on the top right viewport, and then hitting I to place our typical lock in keyframe. Now we can go down here to the bottom left and then twirl this open so we can see all of our keyframes. Now it's head to frame 100. This frame is our first opportunity to get the leg into a new extended position. Let's go up here to our top right and get a better view of our leg. Let's start by rotating the leg outward on the horizontal using the Z axis. So we'll click and drag on the Z axis, hold control. We're going to spin it outward to its limit. It's not very far, but we'll move it to the furthest it can go. Now let's rotate our view to the side so we can get a better view of the X axis, and we're going to extend our leg back about half the distance of the limit. So we'll drag it back holding control. Let's get an idea of where the limit is. So it's all the way out here. We're going to move it back some about half the distance. We want to save these really extreme movements, moving it all the way to the limit from when we actually need them. Now let's move to frame 130, then again, we can fix our view so we get a better look at the leg. Then this time we'll be having the legs wiggle back and forth during the floating portion of the animation to help illustrate the confusion of the cow. For this specific movement, we'll be moving the leg forward to make it seem like the cow is trying to walk, even though it's off the ground because it's so confused as to what's happening to it. So the only thing we need to move here is just the X axis. So we're going to rotate the X axis until the leg is basically back to where it started. So it's basically in line with this other foot. It can be a little forward or a little back, but we want it mostly up and down like this. We can leave the Z rotation where it's at for now as it looks fine being rotated outward a little bit. Now let's move to frame 148. Then again, we can go up here and fix our view. And now the up and down movement of the cow is getting more erratic due to the UFO struggling to keep it afloat. So we want to make the leg positions a bit more extreme as well. Let's start by moving it backwards on the X axis. So we'll rotate to the side so we can see a bit better, and we're going to rotate it backwards until it's just about at the limit. So not quite at the limit. We can go backwards just a little bit, but much closer to the limit than before. Around here should be fine. Now let's go back down to the dope sheet. We're going to click off the keyframe so we don't have anything selected. And we're going to drag select over this keyframe here one frame 100. So we want specifically the Z rotation. Now we can hit Shift and D to duplicate this rotation all the way over here to frame 148. This will prevent the leg from rotating back towards the body before we're ready for it to move. So it'll keep it locked being kicked outward a little bit. Now we can go to frame 160 and then reposition our view. Is the last frame for the back leg, as it needs to be ready to make contact with the ground as the cow falls back to Earth. This is the same process as the other body parts. So we're going to go back to frame 50 over here, drag select over all three of these keyframes, Shift plus D, duplicate them over here to frame 160. This ensures that by the time the cow makes contact with the ground, the legs are ready to catch it. At this point, we're done with the left leg animation. So let's move over to the right leg. So we can just select the green controller here on the back right leg and then rotator view so we can see a bit better. Let's head back to frame 50 on our animation. And as always, we're going to go up here to our top right view port and then hit I to place our keyframe. Go down here to the bottom left, twirl this open so we can see all the key frames. Now let's go to frame one, ten. So a little bit after the first keyframe for the other leg, can go up here to fix our view, and now we'll be altering both the rotation as well as the timing for this leg. So it doesn't feel too similar to the other leg. They're generally reacting to the same forces, but we want the legs to act independently of each other. That way, they don't feel like they're attached to each other. So our first movement will be on the Z axis. And we're going to rotate this one outward a little bit, but not quite as far as the last one. So the last one we moved out to the limit, this one will just pull back a little bit. That way, it's just slightly different than the left side. Now we can rotate to the side. And again, we're going to move the leg in a similar direction but not quite as far. So we're going to move the leg backwards on the X axis. And instead of moving it basically half the distance like we did before, we're going to pull it back slightly, so it's only slightly backward. Right around here should work. Our goal here is to give the leg some movement without having it mirror the other leg completely. Now let's move to frame 130. And for the same reasons as the last leg animation, we'll be moving this leg forward again to make it feel like it's trying to walk. So we'll be moving it just on the X axis, and we can rotate down a little bit so we can see the other leg. Now we'll rotate it forward on the X axis basically in line with the other. We don't have to worry about them being too different here, as we want them both to move forward. Now let's move to frame 148. Then we can adjust our view, moving it up so we can see the leg better. And now we're going to rotate the leg backward to display the same extreme movement as the other leg, paying special attention to vary its rotation a little bit from the opposite leg, just so they look a little different. So we'll start by moving it backwards on the X axis, rotating it here, we can hold in control. And instead of moving it to the complete extreme, we're going to move it a little bit less than the other leg. Right around here should be fine. So we can see they're both move backwards, but not quite as far as the other leg. And then for the z rotation, we're going to move it inward a little bit. So instead of being kicked outward, this time we're actually going to move it in just to help vary them. And then lastly, we can go to frame 160, the very end of the animation, at least for the legs, fix our view so we can see it a bit better. And then we're again going to copy the key frames from frame 50. We'll drag select over these keyframes here, shifty and then place them here at frame 160. That way, the legs are back in position when it hits the ground. With both of the back legs fully animated, let's play the animation to get a better look at what we've done. We can do that down here just by hitting the play button. While the front legs still aren't animated, we can see just how much more life the cow has thanks to the back leg movement. It really feels like the cow has lost its bearings and is confused as it's lifted into the air by the UFO. It also further contributes to that feeling of floatiness that we wanted. In the next lesson, we'll continue animating the bones of our cow rig, finishing all the leg movements by animating the front legs. I'll see you there. 16. Animating the Cow - Front Legs: In this lesson, we'll continue animating the bones of our cow rig, finalizing the leg movements with the front legs. Let's begin. We're ready to finish the leg movements of our cow by getting both of the front legs animated. I won't mislead you and claim that this process will be all that different from the last lesson. But nonetheless, it's still an important step. Obviously, make sure you've double checked the on screen checklist to make sure that you're ready to animate. Then let's begin. We'll start by selecting the front left leg with the yellow controller on it. Now let's move to frame 50. And then on the top right V port, we'll hit I to place our manual keyframe as always. Now we can go down here to the bottom left. Twirl open so we can see all of the keyframes. Now we can head to frame 110, fixer view so we can see the cow better. And then for our front legs, in general, they're going to be rotated towards the body, they'll be rotated on the x axis inward towards the body to make it feel like the cow is floating and its legs are dangling. Before we rotate the legs downward, first let's rotate around to the front. And then we're going to kick them out a little bit on the Z axis. So we'll grab this blue handle here, Hold down control while we rotate, and then just rotate them out about ten to 15 degrees somewhere in here, just to kick them out away from the body a little bit. Now we can rotate around to the side, and then on the X axis, we're going to move this basically down to the limit. So this red handle hold control, and you can move it basically down until it stops or just before if you'd like. Now let's head to frame 130. And this time, let's rotate the legs upward to make it seem as if the cow is reaching for a solid surface to hold onto, even though there's none to be found high off the ground. This further reinforces that sort of confused look and movement that we're trying to give the cow. So we can start by just rotating it on the X axis. So we'll just grab this red handle, hold down control, and we want to rotate it a little bit further out, not quite to the limit, but a bit further than it started at the animation. So it may be about here, about 15 degrees or so. And then let's spin our camera around, and we're going to rotate it on the blue axis, the Z, all the way out to its limit, which isn't much further than what I had it, but yours might be a little bit further. So I'm just going to rotate it to about here and then let it go. Now we can head to frame 148. And then this will be the last frame before we reset the position of the leg so that it's ready to make contact with the ground. So we'll start by just rotating it backwards towards the body, all the way to its limit on the X axis. So we can just rotate it as far as it possibly can go. And now we can spin around to the front, and we can move this backwards, so back into the body on the Z axis until it's about here. I just needs to be a little bit different. That way, there's some movement on the Z axis as it's moving on the X as well. And then lastly, we'll move to frame 160, which is where the cow finally makes contact. And as always, we're just going to go down here to frame 50. Drag select over the X, the Y, and the Z, hit Shift and D to duplicate, and then we'll place them here at frame 160 to get the legs back in the position. And rather than playing or animation right now, let's just handle the other leg while we're at it. So we're just going to select the other front leg, which is this purple controller. Now we can head to frame 50 over our mouse over this top view port and hit I to make our keyframes. Now go down here to the bottom left to roll it open so we can see all the key frames. And then this time, we're going to go to frame 100 instead. And then we can adjust our view so the cow is back in sight. Just like the last lesson with the back legs, we'll be altering this leg's rotation and timing slightly to help differentiate it from the other front leg. So we can start by rotating in outward when the Z axis, the blue handle. We'll just rotate it out a couple of ticks here. So maybe about five or ten degrees, and then we can spin around to the X axis, and we can rotate it back towards the body a little bit less than the other leg. So we'll leave it a little bit further forward than the other leg is. So maybe only about five or ten degrees in this case. Now let's move to frame 130. And this time, we're going to swing the leg upward and outward for this quick upward movement. So we can start by rotating it on the Z axis, outward, all the way to its limit. So not too much further, but can rotate it until it stops, and then we can rotate around until we see the X axis a bit better. Then we're going to rotate it up on the X axis, basically, just one or two ticks before it hits the end. So you can rotate it all the way to the limit if you'd like, or you can stop it just shy. We just want it to be a little higher in the air than the other front leg. Now we can head to frame 148. And let's get this leg more in line with the other. So we'll start by rotating it inward on the Z axis. We can rotate it in just a few degrees. Then let's spin around. And again, we're going to rotate it down to match the other leg, but we'll have it just a bit forward. So we'll move it down, and then we'll stop until it's just in front of the other leg. It's right about here. And then lastly, we'll go to frame 160. And then we can copy the first keyframes here, hit Shift and D, drag them to 160, and then click to place them. And that's the last of them. All the legs are now animated on our little cow. Let's play the animation to see how all these legs now work together with the movements of the body. The flailing and somewhat disorganized movements of all these legs help give the cow a confused and slightly worried feeling. Of course, we know that the cow will safely be brought back down to earth in just a moment, but they don't. So it's important to show that in our animation. In the next lesson, we'll finish animating the bones of our cow's rig by animating the tail. I'll see you there. 17. Animating the Cow - Tail: I miss lesson, we'll finish animating the bones of our cow's rig by animating the tail. Let's begin. This is it. The last bone that we need to animate for our cow. This won't be a particularly complicated lesson, so let's just jump right in and finish it. As always, before we begin, take a look at the onscreen checklist to make sure you have your file ready to animate. Once you're all set up, let's begin. Let's start by going up to our top right viewport, rotating around so we can see most of the tail here. Now let's select the base of the tail here, which is this yellow controller. This controller will have the bulk of the movement applied to it. Still animate the other parts of the tail, but the movement of the base of the tail will be more complex as it dictates more of the movement for the rest of the tail. So we'll spend more time here. So let's start by going to frame 50 as always. Then again, we'll hover over our top view port, hit I to place our key frames. Then we can go down here, twirl it open so we can see all of them. Now let's move to frame 100, adjust our view. Now this is where we're going to begin animating the X rotation to cause the tail to raise and lower. We'll start by lifting the tail on the X axis, about half the distance to its limit. So if it's limits all the way up here, we're going to rotate it about here. So it's about halfway. I'll actually need to move mine up just a little bit more, so it's pretty much perpendicular with this angle for the back. So I think somewhere around here it looks good. Now let's move over to frame 130. And this time, we're going to rotate it down, so it's pretty much in line with the flat part of the back. So we'll just rotate it down. So it's a nice straight line with the rest of the back here. Now we can go to frame 140. And then we can again rotate it upward to make it match the falling that the overall body of the cow is doing. We're going to rotate it basically back to the position it was at before, maybe a little bit higher. Next, we'll go to frame 150, adjust our view, and then we're going to rotate the tail downward. So again, it's pretty much in line with the back. This time, it'll be a little bit further down because the back is more curved. So somewhere around here is probably good. Now we can add to frame 160. Adjust our view and then this time, we're going to rotate it all the way up to the maximum because the cow just finished falling out of the sky, so its tail would have flew up into the air with it. We're going to move it up to the maximum rotation for the tail. Then once you have that positioned, we can go to frame 164, and now we're going to have to drop it back down to where it was before. As always, we can just go back to the beginning of the animation over here on the left, drag select over just these three key frames at the bottom, Shift D, and then click them over here to place them. We'll see that if we drag the animation back and forth here, that the tail waits for a second to flip back down, similar to the upper body. Because once the feet make contact, the tail is still in the air, so it needs a moment to fall back down to its original position, just like the front half of the body does. And that's it. The bulk of the tail's movement is handled, but it still looks odd because the tail is currently bent over the entire time. Let's fix that now using the other bones. Now let's select the middle bone here, this light blue one in the center of the tail. We'll go to frame 50, hover our mouse over the viewport and hit I. Now we can go down here, twirl this open. Let's move to frame 100. Then we're going to rotate it on the X axis upward to its limit. W until it stops, right about there. Now you can see we're getting more of an upward curve on the tail. We can head all the way to frame 160, and then this time, we're just going to hit I to lock in the position for the keyframes. So we just want it to remain upward this entire time, and then we can go to frame 164, drag select over these first three keyframes here, hit Shift and D, and then place them here to reset it back to its original position. Now let's finish the last part of the tail by selecting the red controller here at the end, going back to frame 50, hitting I in the top right, twirling this open to see our keyframes. Now we can go to frame 100, adjust our view, rotate this tail upward on the X axis, all the way up to its limit. Now we'll go to frame 160, just like the last time. Hover our mouse in the top right, hit to place our lock in keyframe, and then we'll go to frame 164, drag select for the beginning keyframes, shift in D, and then place them at the end to reset the position. With that last keyframe placed, let's give our animation a play so we can see the result of our tail animation. The tail movements are another subtle but important detail that makes our cow not only feel alive, but also like it's being affected by the overall environment. Hopefully, you feel a bit more confident in your ability to animate a simple rigged character after animating every single little bone in this fella's body and breathing new life into the render. In the next lesson, we'll finish the cow's animation by adjusting its scale. I'll see you there. 18. Animating the Cow - Scale: In this lesson, we'll finish the cow's animation by animating its scale. Let's begin. Adjusting the scale of our cow might seem like an odd thing to animate, but we'll be using it in a creative way to mimic a principle of animation known as squash and stretch. If you've ever paused a cartoon during a particularly movement filled scene, you've likely noticed that the character could look distorted during these quick movements. They might look like they've been elongated or stretched out as they move quickly in one direction. Or they might appear squashed and flattened if they've come to an abrupt stop. These distortions you're seeing are meant to exaggerate the movements of the character, provide a sort of elastic or bouncy nature to the character. The squash and stretch might seem a bit extreme, but in motion, they simply blend together with the rest of the movement and make it a bit more expressive. Since the vast majority of our cows animation occurs on the Z axis, meaning it's predominantly moving up and down, we'll really only need to adjust the Z scale to get the most results for minimal effort. So before we begin animating, first, make sure that you're in the animation workspace. You might already be there already, but if not, go ahead and switch there now. Now make sure your top rate viewport is set to the object mode rather than pose mode. So in this top bar here on this left dropdown, we're going to switch it back to object mode. We want to be object mode to make sure that we're scaling the entire cow's body rather than just individual bones one at a time. Then lastly, make sure you're on the object properties tab found here using this orange box. Okay, so let's get this scale animated now. We'll start by dragging our playhead to frame 130, then we can adjust our view up here so we can see the cow a bit better. This is the first frame that we're going to need a keyframe on, and we simply want to lock it in place for now. To do this, we're just going to go over here to the right side where we see Z scale, and we're just going to place our first keyframe. Now let's move to frame 140. And now as the cow begins to drop quickly, we're going to increase its Z scale to stretch it out vertically slightly. This will help display a bit of extra speed in its movements. So we'll just go over here to our Z scale, and we're going to type in 1.1 it enter, and then don't forget to click the keyframe button here to the right. So now if we drag it back and forth, we can see that the cow just barely elongates as it begins to drop. Now let's go to frame 148. And now is the time for the first squash. The cow comes to a pretty abrupt stop as it flies upward and then begins to fall. This is a perfect time for us at a squash to accentuate this change in direction and speed. So we'll do this by going over here towards the E scale, and this time, we're going to type in 0.9. So we're squishing it slightly, and then we're going to go over here and place our key frame. So again, if we drag this back and forth, we can see as the cow begins to drop at elongates and then it flies upward, and it squashes slightly as it begins to stop here and then fall. Now we can move over a two frame 160, and this is where it's pretty much made contact with the ground at this point. So now is the time for the most extreme stretch because the cow is falling at its fastest speed. This will really help sell the speed at which the cow is plummeting back to Earth. So over in Z scale, we're going to type in 1.3 at enter, and then place our keyframe. So as you can see, this is a pretty extreme stretch here. The cow is pretty obviously increased in size, and it's mostly in the vertical direction. So as we drag it back and forth here, we can see that the cow kind of squashes and stretches based on its movements. And then it really stretches out here because it's moving the quickest. Now let's move to frame 164 when everything comes to rest, and it kind of resets back to its original position. Just like the last frame, now it's time for the most extreme squash. Our cow just came to a very abrupt stop when it hit the ground. So let's accentuate that with a really big squish. So we can go over here to our Z scale. We're going to type in 0.8 for the Z and then place our key frame. And now our cow has gone from its largest size to its smallest size here just in a matter of few frames. Before we end our scale animation, let's add a little bit of a bounce as it comes back to its original scale. Now we can go to frame 169, just a few frames after, and we're going to return it to scale just a little bit larger than the original to spring back into shape. This will add a pleasant bountiness to the end of the movement when it makes contact with the ground. So we can go over here towards scale. We're going to type in 1.075. I enter and then place our key frame. So you can see here it's not very much larger than the original, which was 1.0, but it is a noticeable difference. And lastly, we're going to go to frame 172 here, and then we'll type in one for our Z scale and then place our very last keyframe. And now our cow is back to its original position, pose and scale ready for the animation to loop. And with that last keyframe placed, our animation is 100% complete, which means that the entire animation of this class is complete. Let's give the animation a play to see the culmination of all of our hard work. We can do that down here with the play button. Scale animation is honestly one of my favorite parts of the movement. It adds so much bounciness and just general cuteness to an already pretty adorable little fella. We're just about done with the class, but we do have a few more things to take care of before we say our goodbyes. And the next lesson we'll render our final animation. I'll see you there. 19. Rendering the Animation: In this lesson, we'll render our final animation. Let's begin. Most importantly, we need to render our final animation so we can actually share it with our friends and family. Luckily, this will be a relatively easy process, as I've already set up the starter file for rendering. First, let's head over to the rendering workspace found here at the top of the screen. We'll just click on here where it says rendering. I've customized this use slightly for us to give us a look at our camera here on the left side. This isn't 100% necessary, but it does allow us to scrub the timeline at the bottom and get an idea of the exact frame that we're about to render. So let's drag our playhead down here at the bottom to frame 130, so we're right about in the middle of the animation. Now let's render a single frame of our animation. We can do this by going up here to where it says render and then choosing render image, or you can just hit F 12 on your keyboard. So let's do that now. Should notice that the image renders pretty quickly. In my case, it only took about 2.5 seconds. This is thanks to the EV render engine that we're using for this project. This is a good sign for our full animation. The faster each frame of our animation renders, the quicker the entire video will render. This is because an animation is really just a series of still images played together in sequence to create the illusion of movement. So if our individual images render pretty quickly, that means the entire video will render also pretty quickly. Before we render our final animation, however, I did want to point out a few things. First, let's head over here to the compositing workspace. So we can get to that by clicking on the word compositing here at the top. And now on the right side, we can see our render that we just did. And then if we zoom out on the left side using our mouse wheel, we can see a few notes that sort of look like the material editor. I won't be explaining all of the details of this workspace, but as a brief overview, this is where you can add additional effects to your image, such as glowing around the lights or distortion around the edges of the frame. After zooming out on the left port here, we can see that we have a glare node, as well as a lens distortion node. This glare node is what's adding this bright bloom around all of these bright lights. So as a quick example, if I bypass this glare node and plug it in here, we can see our image still looks pretty much the same. However, it's lost all of that nice glow that we had before. And then if we add our glare node back in, but we leave this lens distortion unhook, now we can zoom in down here to the bottom left of the frame. And then when we plug in this lens distortion, we'll notice that we now have this blurry chromatic aberration effect on the edges. The image is being broken into different channels of color, separating it and giving it a rainbowy effect. However, if we zoom out, we'll notice that the center of the frame doesn't have this effect because the lens distortion primarily only affects the edges of our frame. So around the edges here, we'll see it in the center we won't. Now that we know a little bit about the effects that I added, let's go back to the rendering tab. We can get to that by going to the rendering word here and then clicking on it. The last thing that we need to take care of is the output location for our video file. So to do this, we're going to go over here to the right side and switch to the output tab if you're not there already. It's the third tab from the top here that kind of looks like a printer printing on a photo. Now in this menu on the right, we're going to scroll down until we see the option for output here. It might not be twirled open like mine is, so if that's the case, just click on this little arrow to twirl it open so you can see the options. Now let's tell our animation where to save once it's done rendering. To do this, we can go over here and click on this white folder icon to choose a location. I recommend saving this video in the same place as the blender file that we're currently working on, just so everything is in one place. After you've found the location that you'd like to save your video, we can go down here to the bottom bar, and this is where we can give the name. So just as an example for the name, I'm going to use UFO animation. Underscore final, underscore 01. I like to name my files with a number at the end here just to make sure that I can go back and change the version number if I'd like to. As a final step for videos, I also recommend putting another underscore at the end beyond your file number. This is because Blender will add the frames of your animation at the very end. If you don't add an underscore at the very end of your file name, you're just going to have a bunch of numbers run directly into your file number. You need this here as a space. With your name set, you can go over here and just click the accept button. And that's it. We're ready to render our animation. I've already taken care of all the output settings for you, aside from the location where you're going to save the file. But if you're curious, I've set this file up to render as an MP four video, as it's a pretty universal video type, and we'll work on most platforms. Now we can go back up here to where it says render. And then choose Render Animation and it'll begin rendering the animation from frame zero all the way until the end. So we can just click this button here. This will more than likely take a few minutes for your computer to complete rendering. But hopefully you won't be waiting for more than five to 10 minutes for it to finish. I'd recommend that you pause the video for now as you wait for your animation to finish. Then start it back up when you're all done. I'll see you in a few moments when my render completes. I'm back and my animation has finished rendering. It only took my computer about 5 minutes to finish. So hopefully yours wasn't too much longer than that. Now we can navigate to where we saved the file and then double click on it to play the animation. Everything in the animation looks pretty good. However, if you're on the Windows player, we can go down here and click on this repeat button. And now when we play the animation, it'll continue looping without stopping after each play. So now we can see that it loops seamlessly as it goes from the beginning of the animation to the end of the animation. This video file is ready to share with all of your friends and family on pretty much any platform that you can think of. While this animation is finished, we're not quite done yet. In the next lesson, we'll discuss different ways that you can participate in the class project. I'll see you there. 20. Class Project Ideas: In this lesson, we'll discuss different ways that you can participate in the class project. Let's begin. While we finish the main animation for this class, there are still plenty of opportunities to learn. The best way to continue learning is by making your own class project. By customizing this animation with your own ideas or coming up with something completely new, you'll reinforce the skills you've learned over the class and possibly discover new things along the way. Customizing the animation doesn't have to be super involved. It can be as simple or as complex as you'd like to make it. Even small adjustments to this basic animation will still reinforce your knowledge and allow you to express yourself. For this lesson, I'm going to give you a few quick tips on different ways that you could create your own unique version of this project. We won't be going too in depth into any of these methods, as this lesson is really only meant to give you some quick tips and get your imagination going. Before we begin making any changes to this file, however, first, make sure that you've saved this animation as it is right now. This will ensure we don't make any changes to the class example that can't be easily undone. So again, to save your file, we can just go up here, to file, and then choose Save. Now let's make a new version of this file that we have some freedom to change the parameters in without having to worry about messing up the original animation. To do this, we can go up here to file again. And then this time, we're going to choose Save as. Now down at the bottom, I'm going to change the name of this file so it's not the same as the original. I'm just going to add the word test in all caps and then an underscore at the beginning to make sure I differentiate the name of this file, so it saves us two different versions. We have the new name set, we can go down here and hit Save As. And now that we've saved it, we're actually working in the test version of this file. We don't have to reopen it, it'll automatically switch to the Save As version, which in this case, is the test. This will allow us to play around in this test file without messing anything else up. Okay, so now that we have our file ready to play around in, what kind of things can we do to our animation to customize it? Well, to be completely honest, the possibilities are endless. You can do really anything you want. But let's focus on just a few obvious changes that we can make. The most obvious change is to simply adjust the camera angle. This doesn't require us to change the animation at all, but it still gives us a different perspective on the motion of both the cow and the UFO. The environment for this animation is relatively limited, but we can still find a new interesting view for our animation. So first, let's switch over to the layout workspace found here at the top. Now over here in the left view port, we're going to click on this little lock icon. So it looks like a padlock, and currently it's open. So when we click on it, it'll now be a locked icon. This will enable the camera to viewport setting. This allows us to reposition the camera just by orbiting around inside this view. It's now using just the normal viewport navigation controls, we can move around, and it will actually adjust the camera for us. Let's find a new view. Let's go back to frame zero. So we can see what the cow looks like when it starts that we make sure it's in the frame. We're going to zoom in here, maybe try to get these grass and rocks here at the bottom left. Something around here is fine. Again, you can adjust your view as you'd like, but this is just an example. I think of you somewhere around here looks good for mine. One of the main things to consider when picking a new camera angle for this scene is to avoid showing the edges of the world or the end of the animation, such as the shooting stars in the sky. We can just drag our playhead here and see where the shooting stars so we can see there. Just make sure that it starts and end outside of the frame. Same thing with the tumbleweed and also just not showing the edges of the world that we can see here in the right viewport. In my case, this view avoids both of those issues, so I think it works fine. So one of the most important steps here is once you've found the camera angle that you like, don't forget to uncheck this lock icon because we don't want to accidentally move our camera once we found the position that we enjoy. With a new camera angle come some new issues, however. The first issue is that the depth of field for our camera isn't configured for this view. So if we zoom into our cow, Notice that the cow is really blurry. Luckily, this is relatively easy to fix. So our first step is to select our camera, which we can find in the lights and camera collection down here at the bottom. So we'll twirl this open, scroll down until we find our camera here, and then we can just select it from the list. Now let's go down to the object data properties, this green camera logo right here, and then we'll go down to the depth of field settings found here. You might need to twirl this open if it's not open already, so you can see the settings. We need to adjust this focus distance here to make sure our cow isn't blurry. So first in your left view port, zoom into your cow. You want to be relatively close. That way we can see this blurred edge between the nose and the white fur. Now we can adjust this focus distance. So for my specific camera angle, I'm going to need to lower this focus distance because I've moved my camera closer to the cow, so I needed to focus a little bit sooner rather than later. Know from my view, a value around 12.5 should get us pretty close. And then once I have 12.5 typed in here, I can move it back and forth and see if I need to further adjust it. So in my specific case, moving it to about 11.15 is actually a better view. Now, again, this completely determines on what your camera angle is. So if your camera is a completely different position or it's just closer or further away than mine, you'll need to find a number here that matches better to your view. It might be smaller or it might be larger. Also, when adjusting this focus distance, you'll either need to be in the rendered view, which I'm currently in now by selecting this far right button, or if you're in the solid view, you need to twirl down this option here on the right side, and then make sure you have depth of field checked on. If you don't have this turned on, you won't actually see any depth of field in this. So we can see if I turn it back on, now I can actually see the blur in this gray view. Can either work in this gray view or you can be in the rendered view here. Now let's zoom out a bit so I can see my full camera frame. And with our depth of field fixed now, maybe I'd like to change the position of the moon or make it a bit larger. That way, it fits the frame better. To do this, first, you're going to definitely want to switch to your rendered view for this as this moon really only looks like a moon and not a square when you're actually in the rendered view. I can just click on this moon to select it and then hit S to scale it. I'm just going to make my moon a good bit larger. I really want to have it prominent inside this frame. Maybe I'll scale it to about here. Once the moon's size is correct, I can hit G to begin moving it. I'm just going to move it up a little bit so it's not contacting the top of the cactus and I'll move it about here. Feel free to place your moon wherever you like and make it as big as you like. I think this looks better for my camera, so I'm going to leave it here. With our view adjusted and our moon resized, another easy step we can take is to adjust some materials. By adjusting some of the colors, we can really change the look of the animation. Let's make this environment feel a bit more alien by changing the colors of the sky and the moon. We'll start with the moon first. So we'll first go over here to the shading workspace found here at the top. And now we need to switch our top viewport back to the rendered mode found here on the far right. Now I won't be explaining exactly how the shading system works in this lesson. However, if you'd like to know more about it, I'd recommend my magic of materials class, where we discuss everything you need to know about how to create your own materials. So to change the color of our moon to something a bit more alien, first, let's make sure you have it selected in the viewport above. We can go over here and just simply select it in the viewport by clicking on it. You can tell that it's selected because the material name here in the center of the screen should say moon. Down in the bottom viewport, here we have our shader editor. We can zoom in and out of it with our mouse wheel and we can click in the Muswheel to pan it back and forth so we can slide the view. Now we need to add a new node to adjust the color of our moon. I'll hover over the bottom viewport down here and then hit Shift and A at the same time to bring up our ad menu. Now we can go up here to the search bar. Click on this and then type in color and then hit R afterwards to see color ramp. So we're going to choose color ramp, and then we'll move this new node that's attached to our mouse right now over top of this top yellow line. So the yellow line that's going from color to base color. So we'll hover it over top of it until it turns white, and then when we click to place it, it'll automatically connect it for us. Now if we can click and move this, we can see that this line now runs through this new node. Now that we have our new node attached to the system, we do need to connect one more line. So we're going to zoom in a little bit, and then we're going to click from this color node here. We're going to click on this little yellow dot and then drag this wire down here to the color inside the emission. This will allow this new color ramp node to color both the color for the base color as well as the color for the emission. This emission color is what's controlling the glow of the moon, which is why it looks like it's self illuminated. Now with this color ramp node setup, we can zoom in here. And now we're ready to begin changing the color of the moon. Now let's select this far right slider, the white one by clicking on the top triangle above this white box. We'll know that we have it successfully selected because the bar at the bottom will turn white. Now we can select this white bar to bring up the color picker, and then we can just move this dot anywhere we want on this big circle to change the color of the moon. In my case, I'm going to choose a bright orange color. Maybe somewhere around here. Feel free to choose whatever color that now that we have the color of our moon changed, let's also change the color of our sky to something a bit more colorful as well. This material is a bit different, however, as we can't select the sky in the viewport. When we select the sky here, nothing happens. We'll need to go down to this object tab here on the left side and then switch it to world instead to see the sky texture. In this bottom viewport, we can scroll out to see the entire material for the sky. We can see here that this material is a bit more complicated than the moon was. Luckily, we don't need to change too many things on this material to actually change the color of the sky. If we zoom into this blue and pink color node here in the middle, We'll see the main node that's controlling the colors for the sky. Let's adjust both the pink and the blue slider on this node to make our sky a new color. First let's change the left slider, which is currently pink. It should already be selected, but if not, just click on the little triangle above the pink box to change the color. Now we can go down here and click on this pink bar and then pick any color we'd like. I'm going to make mine a sort of reddish orange color. And now if we move our mouse to the side, we can see that my horizon here is a bright red color. Let's change the main night sky color as well by going over here, clicking this triangle above the blue slider, clicking the bar at the bottom. And then I'm going to make mine into maybe a green color, sort of a bluish green color. Again, feel free to use whatever colors you like. This is just the color that I think kind of works well with this orange color. Also adjust the position of these sliders to change how much of each color is present in the sky. So if we go down here and grab the green slider and move it to the right, we're going to allow more of this orange into the sky. So if we move it really far right, now it's mostly orange, and if you move it really close to the orange, we're going to get rid of pretty much all of it because we're allowing less of this orange to bleed into the green. So for my case, I'm going to move it to somewhere around here. That way, the orange just starts touching the bottom of the moon. You could also adjust this orange slider, left or right to change the intensity of the color along the horizon. So if you wanted a really intense orange or whatever color you chose, you would move it closer to the right. Or if you wanted to make it more subtle, you can move it to the left. Now that we have our sky color changed, let's not forget to switch back from the world tab here on the left, back to the object tab instead. This will allow us to change the color on most of the objects in the scene. Really, only the sky is handled with the world tab. The color changing process is pretty easy on most materials in the scene. You'll either be changing the colors present on the color ramp node like we just did, or you'll simply be changing the base color directly on the principled BSDF node. So as a quick example, in this top view port, I can rotate the view so I can see the UFO instead. And then we can select the UFO, and we can see here that the UFO metal material is really simple. So all I would need to change is just this base color, this bar here. So if I wanted to make it red, I could just move it down to red, and now we can see that the metal on our UFO is red instead of blue. If an object like the UFO has more than one material applied to it, we can switch through the different materials applied to it through the slot menu here. So we click on this drop down. We can see all the different materials applied to this, such as the bright glow strip underneath the UFO. And here I can switch the base color to maybe a bright green, and then also the color and the emission because it's a glowing object, also to bright green. Now all these little lines, as well as this ring here, are green instead of orange. To easily get back into our camera view, we can go over here and click this button that will show the on screen controls, and then we can click the camera button here to jump back into our camera view. As a final note on the materials, in order to change the cow model, you'll need to select it over here in the outliner. You won't be able to select the actual model inside the viewport as you'll be selecting through it. That's because I have it locked from selection here in the outliner. The only way to select it would actually be from this list. So to select the cow first makes you have the cow collection twirled open. Then you'll also need to twirl open this armature cow. So we'll click on the arrow to twirl that open, and now you can select cow body. After selecting it here in the list, we can go over here to the slot and we can switch between any of the materials that are currently applied to the cow. I have the cow locked from selection in the viewport to prevent you from accidentally selecting it instead of the control rig when we were animating. Now that we're done with the materials, we can head back to the layout view found up here. If you make significant changes to the colors of your scene, you might also want to adjust the colors of your lighting as well. I won't be going through that process right now, but you can find all the lights in the scene inside the lights and camera collection over here in the outliner. And then to change the light, you would just simply select the light from the list that you want to change. And then down here in the object data properties, this green light bull icon, you can change the color or the brightness if you'd like to. The last change that we'll discuss in this lesson is altering the animation of either the UFO or the cow. This will likely be the most impactful change that you can make to your project, but it will also be the most involved. As a simple example of what you could do for your own project, we'll add some extra time to the end of the timeline so you can fit in a little bit more UFO animation. So to add more time to the animation, we can go down here to where we see start and end. And we're going to change the end time 240-360 instead. Now, let's zoom out in the right Then we can select our UFO so we're ready to begin animating. For the sake of simplicity, let's also turn on auto keying so it can be a bit more loose with the keyframe process. We can do that by just clicking on Auto keying down here. Then lastly, to make sure we can see the entire timeline down here at the bottom, on this scroll bar, you'll see a little black dot here on the right. If you click and hold on that black dot and drag it to the right, we'll scale our timeline so we can see the entire thing. Now let's drag our playhead to frame 225. And then we'll switch to the object properties tab here on the right by clicking on this orange square. We're going to place a keyframe here on the Y location. That way, it doesn't affect anything else aside from the positions going forward on the timeline. I'll leave everything back here locked as it is. With that setup complete, let's go to frame 250, and then in our right viewport, we're going to zoom out a bit so we can see most of the scene. And now let's switch from the local transform, which we're currently using using this drop down here at the top, and we're going to switch it back to Global as that works better for our UFO. Now let's move our UFO backwards on the Y to about half the distance. So right around here. Well notice that at least in my view, the UFO is still visible in the camera, so we're going to need to move it outside of the view so that it's not visible. So we're just going to move it on the X axis here so we can do it in the camera, which is probably the easiest place to do this. We're just going to move it to the left until it's outside the view. Then lastly, we'll go over here to the right side, and we're going to place a keyframe here on the Y rotation to lock that in place as well. So if I go down to my timeline, if I drag it back and forth, we can see our UFO flies off the screen just like it normally does. And then once it flies out of the screen, it quickly flies back to this new position ready for the new animation. But it's doing that all out of frame, so we can actually see it move to this new position, which is what we want. Now let's head to frame 300, and then in our right viewport, we're going to move it just on the X axis over here to the right side. This will allow it to fly from the left side of the screen, all the way over to the right side of the screen. And again, we're going to move it all the way until it's just off frame on the right side, so we can't see it here on the other side. This will make it look like the UFO is circling back to try to pick up the cow again. We can also go over here to the Y rotation, and we'll set this to five degrees to make it look like the UFO is spinning as it's moving through this direction. So now if we drag our playhead back and forth, the UFO flies off screen. Quickly moves back there to loop around again, and then flies across the screen as it turns slightly, getting ready to pick up the cow again once it reaches the beginning of the animation again. The last change we make could be to swap these last two keyframes that we placed to vector handles so the movement doesn't have any slowdowns in it. To do this, simply click on your timeline off to the sides, you deselect all of your keyframes, then drag select over just these last two keyframes that we placed. Now right click on the timeline, go over here to where it says handle type and then choose vector instead. Now let's go over here and play our animation to see the change that we made. We can now see in our left view port that the animation plays as normal with the OFO flying in from the right and then flying off to the left. However, now it looks like it flies back in space and then loops around getting ready for another round of picking up the cow. With this last change made, we've reached the end of our lesson. When you're ready to render your own unique animation, I recommend that you convert the final video into an animated GIF using a free online converter, such as easygif.com slash MCR. In Lesson 16 of my cartoon bumblebee animation class, I explain the entire process to converting your video file into an animated gif using this free online converter. Animated gifts are much easier to share on some platforms, such as Skill share or other social media websites. So it's a valuable thing to know. The tips and tricks I shown you in this video are by no means the only ways you could customize this animation. But hopefully, it gives you an idea of where you could start. Don't feel pressured to make massive changes to your animation. Even small adjustments can give your render a unique look and help you practice what we've learned. I can't wait to see what you all come up with. As a quick example of what taking this scene a little bit further might look like, this is my class project for the UFO animation. I simply continued making changes similar to the ones that we discussed in this video until I had this really colorful and alien look for the cow in the desert. And the last lesson, we'll end the class with some conclusions and farewells. I'll see you there. 21. Conclusion: Congratulations on reaching the end of our class. I wanted to take a moment to express my heartfelt gratitude to each and every one of you for being part of this journey. Your participation and excitement for learning is incredibly rewarding for me as a teacher, and I can't thank you enough. I hope you had fun learning the basics of character animation and blender. It's been a pleasure guiding you through the basics, and I hope you found this experience both fun and valuable. Now that you've got some awesome new skills under your belt, I can't wait to see where your creativity takes you. I wish you the best of luck in creating your own charming character animations and Blender. If you like this class, let other students know by leaving a review. Your feedback really helps me understand what you found most valuable in the class. You can leave a review easily by going to the Reviews tab just below this video and clicking the Leave a Review button. I really appreciate the support. After leaving a review, you might want to follow me here on Skill Share, as well. You can follow me at any time by clicking the follow button above this video or by going to my teacher profile and clicking the follow button there. Following me is the best way to get notified when I release a new class or make an important announcement. Don't forget to check out my teacher profile for more classes just like this. You might find something else that interests you. Lastly, I want to thank you all again so much for taking my class and supporting me by participating in the class project. I can't wait to see what you all come up with. Farewell for now, and I hope to see you in another class soon.