Transcripts
1. Introduction: Animation doesn't
have to be difficult. There's thousands of tutorials and hundreds of
confusing hokeys. It's honestly overwhelming. This class solves that with
the power of motion magic. My name is Smith, and I
love all things animation. You might know me from YouTube, creating silly content like
full commercials in 24 hours. Here I'm your teacher. Showing you how to bring
objects to life effortlessly. In this class, I'll
guide you through animation basics,
setting keyframes, understanding the graph editor, and using the power
of motion to create beautifully simple yet
complex animation. We'll use Blender, a
free, powerful software. But if you prefer Maya
or Minahori, no worries. These principles
work everywhere. For the class
project, we'll create a simple animation using
motion magic and this bottom. Quick disclaimer. This
isn't an introtb lender. You should know the
basics, but don't worry. Even if you don't guide
you through every lesson. By the end of this
class, you'll know how to create stunning animations, make simple objects interesting, and be ready to press render on your first project.
I'll see you in Seth.
2. First Sparks: Starting Your Animation Journey: First Sparks. Before we begin, we'll need to download Blender. You can go toblender.org
slash Download, or below this video in
the class resources, there are links to all
relevant downloads. You'll also notice there
are two blender projects, a base project and
a final project. Please download
both of these right now as we'll use them
throughout this class. While that downloads, let's take a look at what
this class covers. First, we'll explore some
essential universal hot keys. After that, we'll examine a few key animation
principles that can elevate simple animations
from beginner to advanced. Then we'll dive into
the graph editor, understanding its
functionality and why it's crucial for crafting
impressive animations. Finally, we'll put all of
this together in blender, guiding you through
the class project from start to finish.
3. Navigating the Magic: Essential U.I. & Hotkeys: Navigating the magic. Whether you're animating
in the viewpoint or fine tuning in
the graph editor, mastering these
universal hot keys will make everything
ten times easier. Here I've got the Base file
open with three main windows, my three D viewpot, my camera, and my animation timeline. To actually interact with
any of these workspaces, we need to know the basic
universal hot keys, and there's three
categories movement, selection, and transformation. Like I said in the intro, you should know the majority
of these already, but if not, let's do
a super quick recap. Movement. Everything related to movement is done with
the middle mouse button. For example, to
orbit your object, just click the middle
button and drag your mouse. To pan your view,
shift, click drag. And to zoom in, simply
scroll the mouse wheel. Selection. When
animating, we need to select multiple different
objects at any given time. To select one object, all you got to do is left click. It'll outline with
an orange color, and that lets you know it's the currently selected object. To select multiple objects, you can hold down etclick
and box select them. Alternatively, you can hold Shift and left click each one. Transformation. Now that
we know how to move in the three D scene and select our objects, let's transform. To move an object,
simply select it and press G. For rotation, press R. And for scaling, press
S. You probably noticed all these transformations I've done are relative to the
angle of the viewport. If I change my viewport
and rotate again, the outcome is
completely different. This makes it super difficult to transform with precision. So how do we fix that? Well, it's pretty simple. You can actually lock
the movement to the X, Y, or Z axis. To do this, all you
need to do is move, scale or rotate your object, and then press the axis you
want to lock the object to. X is left or right.
Y is front to back, and Z is up and down. So, for example,
select the object, press G to move, and then lock it to the
X axis by pressing X. Now, everything I just
showed you is universal, meaning they work in pretty much all of blended workspaces. So moving in the
three D viewport is the same as moving
in the timeline. Now that we have the
absolute basics down, let's look at why animation
works and the secret to turning simple objects
into stunning animations.
4. The Secret Sauce: Why Motion Magic Works: Secret Zuls. When you look at an animation like
this, what do you see? Now, how about this one? The
difference is huge, right? One feels boring and lifeless, while the other is
full of character and personality.
Here's the secret. The only difference between these two animations
comes down to rules, specifically the 12
principles of animation. These are all encompassing guidelines that pretty
much every studio, artist, and student relies on, and it can take a
lifetime to master. Luckily, this book teaches you everything you need
to know about them. It's the closest thing to achiet code for
animeors honestly, and I want to show you a
few of these principles so we can understand them and apply them in our class project, starting with principle one, timing Timing is
exactly how it sounds. It's the amount of time
it takes for animation to go from keyframe
one to keyframe two. For example, this
Frank Green cup, it's animated here popping
up over 24 frames, which is 1 second of animation. The first keyframe is here
with the initial pop, and the last keyframe
is here where it lands. A good sense of timing is key to creating
excellent animation. But this one still looks boring, which is why we need
principle to spacing. Spacing is the polar
opposite of timing, but they work so well together. Notice how the cup is linear. There's no change
in how it moves. That's because we
haven't distributed or spaced any of the 24
frames. They're all. Let's say I want the cup
to jump up super fast, linger for a little bit before
falling down and landing. To do that, we need to
change the spacing of these frames between the
two main key frames. This is literally called
in betweens or breakdowns. So for this example,
I'll add some in betweens here where the
cup is at its peak. This will slow it down,
giving the illusion that it's floating and it'll
look something like this. If this principle
doesn't click with you just yet, you can
think of it like this. The closer the frames are, the slower the object will be. And the further away the frames
are, the faster it'll be. Remember, this isn't timing. The animation will still
take one whole second, but the movement
within that second depends entirely on
how we space it. Now, this animation looks okay, but I can feel
something's missing. There's one more
principle that I want to show you that'll elevate
this till the next level. Follow through
overlapping action. This principle adds
believability to your object. In real life, nothing comes
to a standstill immediately. There's always some type of
overlap or follow through. For example, this cup. There's no way it would look
like this in real life. There needs to be
some form of follow through or overlapping action. Here it is with the
principle applied, and here it is without. You can see the difference
this makes immediately because now this cup feels
real. There's weight to it. The momentum makes sense, and overall, it's believable. These are just a few of the
core principles of animation, but it means nothing if we don't know how to
apply them to objects, which is why you'll
want to watch the next lesson where I show you exactly how to do
that with one of the most powerful
tools in blender.
5. Curve Control: Mastering the Graph Editor: Curve control. Now that we understand the
fundamentals of animation, let's actually put
it to practice. Here I'm in blender, and
I've got the base file open. Let's start out with creating
a simple animation and then apply the principles we just
learned using the graph end. So first, I'm going to
select this box object. This is called an
empty or a controller, and all the cup objects
here are parented to this. So whatever transformation I do, the cup is going to follow. Let's now set three key frames. With the box selected,
I'm going to press K to open the keyframe menu. You can see there's a
ton of options here, but we just want to play
with the location for now. So click that and
then let's make the exact same
keyframe on frame 23. For the third and
final keyframe, I'm going to put this in
the middle on frame 12, and all I'm going to do
is move the cup upwards. So remembering the hot keys, G to move Z to lock
it on the Z axis, and I'll move it about here. Now, if I hit Play, you'll see it kind of
sucks. It's boring. But we can make it so much
more interesting using the principles we just
learned and the graph editor. First, we want to change the timeline workspace
to the graph editor. You can do that by
clicking this button and selecting Animation
Graph Editor. Now, we're met with a
pretty wild screen, and this thing can get immensely confusing on larger projects, especially if you don't know
what you're looking at. So let's break it down. On the left, we
have our channels. You can think of this
like a mini outliner. This shows us the object and then all the axes
that we animated. Next is the graph editor itself. This is like an
expanded timeline with way more control
and clear visuals. You can see the three key
frames we set on the Z axis, the timing or frames at the top, and the value of each frame
on the left hand side. These lines indicate the
interpolation of the animation, which right now
is set to linear, which I mean, that's linear. It's a straight line. Since
we only animated the Z axis, there's a bunch of
keyframes here on the X and Y axis that we
don't really need. A quick way to hide
them is to click the eyeball icon
for each channel, or even better way is to solo out a specific
channel by selecting it and pressing Shift
If at any time, I want to bring the
other channels back, I can just press Alt H
or click the eyeballs. Now, this view is okay, but I like using the
normalized view. It makes everything have a value from negative one
to positive one. And I just find it
way easier to read. Now that we know what
the graph editor is, let's actually play with it and use the principles of animation. We want to implement timing, spacing, and overlapping motion. We've already got
the timing down. It's 1 second animation. Let's now add spacing. To do this, I'm going
to select all three of these keyframes
by pressing eight, and I want to change the
interpolation of these. So let's press T
and select Bezier. You can see now we get these
super smooth looking curves. And if we hit play, it's a
totally different animation. But now we can select any
of these keyframes and change the entire animation
with just a few moves. For example, let's
make this jump. I'm going to select
the first keyframe and rotate it to
make a steep slope. I'll do this on the
other keyframe, as well. And just like that, we've got a jumping cup. If we want it to be
even more extreme, we can scale each keyframe up
a bit to really exaggerate the curve and stretch
the spacing to almost entirely on
the in between frame. That's I mean, that's a
pretty snappy animation. Now, if we wanted to, we could also do the
opposite and just reverse the curves
to look like this. Although, I mean, it's
pretty unrealistic. Another thing you can do
is change the handle type. Right now, these
handles are free, meaning you can transform
them in any way you want. If you press V, it
gives you a list of different handle types and each does something
slightly different. Now, what about that
last principle? Follow through and
overlapping action. This one, again, is actually
really simple to make. Since our cup is floating, it doesn't really make
sense for it to be jumping. There should be some kind of overlapping action
at the bottom of the screen where the momentum pushes it down before
it comes back up. So instead of actually showing you exactly
how to do this, I want to see if you've
been paying attention. Here are three different graphs. I'm going to give you
30 seconds to choose which one you think will work to create overlapping action. And whichever one you choose, I want you to replicate
it in blender. Starting now. If you chose B, congrats, that was the correct one. The curve quite literally
overlaps into a negative value, which creates the overlapping
action or follow through. Now, this is a super
simple animation, and it's still unpolished. The curve could
definitely be tweaked a bit to create a
smoother motion. But at the end of the day, it's up to you when you want to throw in the towel and
call your animation done. Takes some time to get
used to this workspace. For many of you, it's probably
your first time animating, and it's a lot to wrap
your head around. In the next lesson, we're
going to put all of this together and create a
stunning animation, utilizing all the techniques
I've just shown you.
6. Motion Magic: The Class Project: Motion magic. Now that we have all these tools and
principles under our belt, let's put it to use and
make something awesome. For the class project,
we'll recreate this looping animation
from start to finish. I'll guide you
through my workflow, showing you how I created
it and sharing tips and tricks for each
stage of the animation. To keep it simple,
we'll split this into three lessons locking,
splining and polish. As a bonus, if you want to see the entire unedited workflow, I've created two bonus lessons. These show you literally
everything I did to create this exact result for the
full 1 hour recording. You can also open the
final project file to study this animation, understand how it all works, and get some ideas
for your own project.
7. Animation: Blocking: Locking. Here I've got
the base file open, and we're going to start
this animation with locking. Locking is essentially placing the main keyframes for
the entire animation. So to start, I want this
to be a looping animation, meaning the first and last
keyframes are identical, which creates a really
fun looping illusion. I'm going to set my
timeline to have 60 frames and start blocking
each piece of the cup. All I'm doing here is
setting keyframes for the location and rotation
of all the cup pieces. This won't be set in stone. We just want a rough
idea to then build upon. Now, since this cup
is on a weird angle, I want to transform
it so that it follows the local axes of the object, not the usual world axis.
It's currently doing that. To fix this, I can lock it to the local Z axis by
pressing Z two times. Now it ignores the world Z axis and puts it on the cups Z axis, which just makes it
way easier to animate. This works for anything, by the way, moving,
rotating, scaling. You can make it
follow the local axis by pressing the relative X, Y, or Z twice. This is going to be an
exploded view animation. So I'll place each
piece of the cup to look like this on
the middle keyframe. It's important to note
that all the pieces of this cup are parented to
this empty controller, which we're going to use to
create the snappy rotation. So let's now block
that out. I'll place a few rotation and location
keyframes around these areas, and all I'm really
doing here is rotating the bottle 360 degrees
on the x axis. Again, I want to use
the local X axis here. So I'll press R to rotate, then X twice to
lock it in place, and then I'll just drag my mouse until I see 360 show up here. Or I can literally type
on my keyboard 360. You'll see now if I hit play, it looks all wrong. That's because the
last keyframe has the initial rotation data still. So I'm just going to
duplicate this keyframe from the middle and place
it at the end. If we hit play now, it's still looking pretty bad. But this is just
the rough blockout. We still need to figure
out the timing, spacing, and overlapping action, which is all done in the next lesson.
8. Animation: Splining: Spining. Now that we have the rough blocked
out animation, we want to move into spining. This is just a fancy
way of saying, use the graph editor. Let's open the graph
editor by clicking this button and selecting
animation Graph Editor. Now I'm going to select
all the objects, then select all their
keyframes and press T. This opens the
interpolation menu, and now I'll change them
from linear to Bezier. You can see we now have
super smooth curves, and the animation itself
is totally different. Animating with the
rotation active, though, is kind of distracting. I want to solo out just
the cup's animation. So I'll select the empty object
and click this checkbox. This visually hides the
animation for the empty object, so I can just focus on the cup. Let's now apply some spacing to the cup by changing
these curves. I want this to open and close quickly but slowly
float in the air. So just like we practiced, I'll make all the curves
have a steep slope at this first and final
keyframe and put pretty much all the spacing on the middle keyframe
here by scaling it up. Now it looks way better. Let's see how it looks
with the rotation as well. Not bad, but I can tell the
timing and spacing is wrong. I'm going to try timing
it differently by pushing this keyframe to frame
40 when the cup closes. Now for the spacing, I want it to rotate
slowly before snapping into that huge
360 degree rotation. So I'll scale the
first keyframe like this to give it a long buildup. Now I'm just going to rotate this keyframe to
create a steep slope, which will give it
that snappy rotation. This is already looking really quite similar to
the final animation, which is pretty crazy
because all we did was change the timing and
spacing of a few curves. This is at a pretty good spot, but I think the timing for some of these objects is still wrong. If you haven't noticed yet, this is probably a
good time to tell you that animation isn't linear. It's not a straight line
from start to finish. It's actually more like this. You're gonna have
multiple moments where you'll change your timing, try different ideas,
or even delete some sections from
your entire animation. It's all part of the process, and it's actually why I love it. With this in mind, let's
play with the timing and spacing a bit
because currently, all the cup pieces
are opening and closing at the exact same time. All I'm doing here is
offsetting the objects. I want the lid to pop
off the body first, followed by the plastic inside, and then the button
on top of the lid. That looks much better. Everything we've done
so far is pretty basic. The animation looks okay, but I want to add weight
and believability to this. Let's now do that and push
it even further by adding some overlapping action and really fine tuning
some of these curves.
9. Animation: Polish: Polish. With our animation
pretty much complete, we're now ready to polish it. I want to add some weight
and overlapping action, and we'll start by using
the empty controller. Since the cup is popping
the components out, there needs to be
some kind of force behind it to motivate
that action. Here I'm adding some
location keyframes and in betweens on the Z
axis for the controller. I'm pulling the whole
cup down before pulling it back up
a few frames later. This gives the effect
of the cup popping or bouncing back from the
initial downward force. After removing some unnecessary
location keyframes, you can see the overlapping
action coming into play. This looks okay, but it
can definitely be better. Let's now polish the curve and make it look even
more appealing. All I'm doing here is
scaling and rotating the handles to find what
I think looks good. A super heavy trick
to help with scaling is to change the pivot
point of your key frames. You can do that by
clicking this button, and I like to use
individual centers. This lets you scale
multiple keyframes without changing
their initial value. This looks great, but now I want to continue adding
overlapping action. The next crucial spot is
the rotation right here. All the pieces come
slamming down, so there should be some kind of force pushing the entire
cut down, as well. Oh. Again, I'm just adding simple location keyframes here and tuning
the curve handles. For this particular motion, changing the handle
type to vector for this keyframe is
actually really handy. You can see it automatically
makes the curve steep and perfectly spaces the frame
to make that jump motion. Now, the last major animation I need to polish is
this end frame, where it loops back
to the beginning. I'm going to duplicate
the first keyframes and place them on frame 60. With a few quick tweaks
to the last keyframe, the loop is now looking amazing. The final thing we
need to polish is the 360 rotation of the cup. As right now there is way
too much overlapping action. The whole motion of
this just looks wrong. All I'm doing here is finding the correct amount of
rotation to place in the breakdown frame
and then using overlapping motion to ease
into the final frame. This now looks pretty amazing, but there's one major issue. The animation loop isn't
working because frame one and frame 60 are
the exact same frame. It's creating a duplicate frame which breaks this
illusion for the loop. The easiest way
to fix that is to just remove a frame
from the timeline. So in the timeline editor, I'll change my
frame range 60-59. And now we have a seamless
looping animation. Like I said, this
whole process of animation is a lot
of back and forth, trying new ideas until
something sticks. This is the stage of animation
that can take as long or as short of a time
frame as you would like. There's a famous quote. Art is never finished,
only abandoned. So take as long as you need on this lesson to fine
tune your animation. Once you're happy with
it, the final thing to do is press render. The next lesson, I'll show
you exactly how to do that, and we'll also build this
color swap transition effect.
10. Animation: Rendering: Rendering. With your
final animation complete, it's time to render. All the lighting and camera
settings are locked in. So all you need to do is choose where you want
to save your render. In the properties
panel, click this icon. This is the output
tab and it lets you choose the output location. Clicking this button
lets you navigate to a folder where you want
to save these renders. Once you've found a location, give it a file name and
use this formatting. Animation Underscore color. We'll be rendering this as a
video file for convenience, but usually we would use an image sequence in
case of a blender crash. Now, all that's left
to do is press Render. In the top left, you can click
Render, Render Animation. Or you can simply use
the hotkey Control F 12. Now, what about that
color transition? To achieve this effect, all you have to do is render out as many colored cups as you want and splice them together
in any editing software. Blender has a video editor. DaVinci Resolve is free. Even Capcut can
be used for this. Once done, you'll have a
fully fledged animation. And now it's time
to finally press publish on your first project.
11. Final Thoughts: Final thoughts. If
you've made it this far, I want to thank you
for taking this class. You now know the absolute
fundamentals of animation. We covered some core
animation principles, learnt one of the most
powerful tools in Blender, and made an amazing
looping animation. I'd love to see how your
animation turned out. So please send me what you made, either in the class
projects Bow or directly on Instagram with the
handle at Smefabo. I hope you had fun
and I can't wait to see what you've made.
Thanks for watching.
Smeaf, 3D Generalist and Tutorials
