Product Animation in Blender: Bring Your 3D Renders to Life

1. Introduction: There's something really special about animation. When things start to move, things start to come alive. It really opens up the potential to see what's possible in three D software, especially like Blender. Hey everyone, I'm Derek Elliott. I'm a professional three D designer and animator. Animation is something that's particularly exciting to me because it really gives you the option to start telling a story in even more detail, guiding the viewer's eyes. You might be interested in taking this class if you're pretty familiar with blender. Maybe you've created a few different scenes. You're familiar with models and lighting, but you want to bring them to life and create a more immersive experience. Or maybe you're someone like me who's interested in product animation. In this class, we're going to cover a couple different areas of animation. We're going to cover moving the camera through a scene so that you can really feel like you're inside of it. We're also going to make some animations of objects. We'll animate some lighting. We'll also animate a curtain blowing in the wind, bringing that scene to life. Beyond that, we'll also create a looping animation. All you need to get started is a computer with a fresh version of blender installed a keyboard and mouse. Once you become really familiar with animation, you can start to get more freelance work and have a lot more fun with this new area of blender that has a ton of potential. I think you're really going to enjoy what we create. I'm looking forward to seeing your own animations. Let's get started. 2. Work with Keyframes: So I'm very excited to teach you about animation today. It's something that I do all the time and it's one of the most valuable skill sets in my arsenal. I like to use animation to describe things and just in general, to make my otherwise static three D scenes come to life. So the biggest difference from some of my other classes in Blender with animation is that animation, you can think of it as rendering a lot of different frames. So before when we were rendering images, just one image. You know, it might take five or 10 minutes to render a still image depending on what your quality settings are. Now with animation, we'll usually drop the quality a little bit because you're not focused so much on that individual image. But creating an animation, I usually work at 30 frames per second. So that's 30 frames in a single second. So to create 1 second of animation, we're basically rendering 30 images. So that's definitely something to consider when you're approaching animation. Even though it's easy to get started actually animating your scenes, be thinking about how much you're animating, how long your animation is going to be, how important the render is, how much quality you need in there. And you can plan accordingly with how long that might take to render. So in this lesson, I really just want to get you very comfortable and understanding the basics of creating animations by inserting key frames and interpolating between them. And kind of those really base level skills that are going to apply to doing any animation no matter what you're animating. If you're not familiar with the term key frame, what that is is basically telling something where it starts and where it finishes. And then blender will do the work for us deciding what happens between those keyframes. And we have control over that as well. Okay, so the scene I have here is a simple sort of hotel hallway room scene. And that's one that we created in one of my previous classes. So you might already have something just like this. We're going to add animation to a lot of things. But let's just start by adding some key frames to the camera. So again, with key frames, all we need to do is think about where our object is starting and where we want it to finish. Let's start by having a simple animation showing this pool sign over here where we kind of start to come around the corner and see the rest of our scene. So I'm going to press shift D to duplicate this camera. And I want that to be the camera that I'm starting off with. Going to press control in Numpad zero to snap that camera to being my current active one. Then I want to just fly in here and take a look at this shot. To get started, we might start with something like this, where we have a little bit of a reveal, and then we'll come around the corner and see these other objects. Now if you recall to move around the camera when you're in the view, you can just press Shift and Tilda, which is the button above your tab key. And then just use the WAS and D keys to fly around. This is the timeline down here. It's been there the whole time. But you might need to make sure that you see it if you don't just pull up a new window and you can set that to be a time line. So I'm going to bring up my sidebar here, which is the menu. And you can see these are the location information and rotation information for this camera. So I'm just going to get this set up just about how I like the Y in particular, when you're flying around can sometimes get a little bit off. But I want that to be nice and straight. Now in this particular case, I just want to pull out a little bit. I'm going to start with the x location. To get started, I'm going to right click and insert single keyframe. And now we'll see that that field turns yellow. That means that we have a keyframe on that particular frame. If we look down here, we'll also see that we have a yellow marker right here. Now you notice that when I move my playhead around, this turns green. What that means is that there is a key frame for this value, but it's not on the frame we're currently on. Let's think about where we want this to move to next. We'll say maybe over the course of 2 seconds, which if you're rendering at 30 frames per second, would be frame 60. And a quick note on frames per second. By default, Blender is going to be working with 24 frames per second, which is common, but 30 frames per second is a little bit smoother. Keep in mind though, this will be more frames that you have to render. And let's move to 2 seconds on the timeline. That's going to be a frame 60. We'll just have it come around right here and we'll start to reveal that chair, that picture of the table and the lamp. Let's right click and insert a single key frame. What we have now is two keyframes, and blender is automatically interpreting between those. You can see that on a frame one, we're right there. And as we move through, we'll be over here. You can also press Space Bar to allow that to play. You might notice that it starts slow, speeds up in the middle and then slows back down. Now what that is, is interpolation. And that's, like I mentioned, the way that you move between key frames. Now we can illustrate this really easily with just some cubes. And if you're following along without a scene like this, this is a perfect opportunity for you to start to play with some of these concepts. I'm just going to add a couple cubes to my scene and we can leave our rendered view over here just so we can see a little bit easier what's going on. So I'm just going to add a cube here. Then let's do the same thing where we'll insert a couple of keyframes. So I'm going to insert a keyframe on the x value here. And then at frame 60, we'll have it move over here, for example. This is the same interpolation we were getting in our camera view here, where it starts off slow and then it speeds up, and then it slows back down. Now this is the default method of interpolation and blender, this is called Bezier interpolation. Graph editor is something we're going to work with more in the future, but just so you can see what's happening, let's take a look at that right here. If we bring our graph into view there, we'll see that this is exactly what's happening with those key frames. It's starting off slow and then it's speeding up in the middle, and then it's slowing down again at the end, from left to right here. These are our frames. You can think of this as time. Then right over here is our value. Using this normalized option will basically just give you values 0-1 A little bit easier to work with, especially if you're working with something like rotation and location. This is the value that's changing, which in this case is the location. And then this is our time again, because of that, where we have a flatter value that is a slower animation. And then where it's steeper, that starts to speed up. Let me illustrate this by adding a few different types of interpolation. So I want to press Shift D to duplicate this cube. And then that'll get the same animation data that the previous one it was duplicated from had. Now let's change the interpolation of this. You can either do this in a graph editor by pressing or you can change it down here. A lot of times when you're doing simple animation, you don't necessarily need the graph editor open. You can just do that down here. And I need to make sure that those key frames are selected. I press A to select them all down here. Then when I press, we'll see that cube moved a little bit. Now this cube, rather than starting off slow and then speeding up in the middle, it just has a constant rate of speed. So anytime you see a straight line like that linear interpolation, it's just going to have a constant motion. Now we have a lot of different interpolations by default and blender that we can work with without actually working in the graph editor itself. So let me show you another one here. This one's really fun. This is the elastic interpolation, so that you can see that this is doing something crazy with a graph editor. Now, before we press play, you can imagine this is a very fast motion at start because it's so steep. And then it steadies out towards the end and we can see exactly what that's doing. It's creating an elastic effect and this is something that's fun to play with. We could also change this to the bounce effect is going to do something like that. Another fun one is the back effect will actually go a little bit past the value you have inserted and then come back to it. If you were animating something like a clock moving or just a steady camera motion, then the linear interpolation is great for that. This interpolation that I have right now, the back interpolation is great if you want to show something like maybe a character's running forward really fast and then they pull back at the end, they **** a little bit. This is most important when you're thinking about combining shots together. You usually want to feel like there's a fluid motion from one shot to the next. If one shot ends with no motion, then you might want to start the next shot with no motion as well. Similarly, if one shot is ending with a linear motion or fast motion, then you'd usually want to have the next shot catch that motion, if you will. So moving back over to our camera object for this scene. I want to start by having the animation just be steady like we just were dropped into the scene and we're moving immediately. There's no real introduction here up here, I can press and change this to a linear interpolation. Now we have a nice cinematic panning shot. So let's take a look at this shot altogether, with our materials and lighting all in place, sort of a nice steady reveal. Now we actually could go into the graph editor if we're feeling like this is a little bit too fast and then maybe just move these key frames. You could adjust the value right here or you could actually just do that in the graph editor and just move that up a little bit if maybe it's a little bit too fast for you. Taking a look at this render, we can see what it looks like. Now in the rendered view, now it's very grainy because we are doing a Viewport render and it's updating every frame. So when we pause it, we can see a little bit higher quality with those more samples having time to render. Now, we did want to animate one other thing in the scene, and that was just a little bit of the lighting. Now this is a similar type of animation where we're going to be adding some key frames in. But instead of adding them onto objects, we're going to actually keyframe some values on our sky texture here. Now this is one thing that might be surprising to you, but in Blender, you can right click and add keyframes to almost anything, even in your materials, and especially in something like the sky texture with the sky. I want to go back into my main camera view just to sort of set up what that's going to look like. So let's get our sky to a good value that we feel like we like. I want to mostly animate the elevation of the sun as well as the rotation of the sun. Just a little bit, almost like we're looking at a time lapse video of the sun setting. In this scene, I'm going to find where I like it to start off, the sunniest this will be. Let's bring the elevation of the sun up a little bit and let's find a nice angle for the rotation. Something like that, I think looks pretty good. We've got some nice shadows being cast on the back wall there. I'm going to insert some key frames, right click, inserting keyframes for the elevation and right clicking, and inserting some key frames for the rotation. Now I want this to be animated over the course of my entire animation. Let's say our whole animation ends up being about 10 seconds long. Let's type ten times 30. We're moving to frame 300, which is the end of our 1030 frames per second animation. We're going to change the values to about where we'd like them to land. I want the sun to be quite a bit further down in the sky so we start to get an evening look. Then we can also change the rotation a little bit. Maybe casting some longer darker shadows. Something like that, I think is looking pretty good. Now if we play this animation, we'll see that over the course of it, our sun is setting in our scene and we have this nice time lapse effect. Now later we can go in and actually add some animation to the lights as well. Now the strength of the sun is still feeling a little bit high towards the end here. I might actually also insert some key frames for that. Let's have it start at the power it currently is, which is 0.1 inserted key frame. And then at the end of the animation, let's have that be just a little bit lower, maybe almost down to zero. Let's type in 0.01 Let's right click and inserted keyframe. Now our lights are starting to shine a little bit more and we have sort of a nice moody scene here. Now for these keyframes, I'd also like to keep things nice and linear. I'm going to press A to make sure everything is selected. Here you can see our values that have been animated. I'm going to press and changes to linear interpolation. In this lesson, we covered inserting basic keyframes and learning a little bit about how to interpolate between them. Whether you want to have a fast motion, a linear motion, or some other cool effect like the elastic one we played with. So we added another camera into our scene and set that as the active camera, and created the first shot for our animation of this little hallway scene. Now the most important thing to think about when you're setting key frames is thinking about the mood you're trying to set. In this case, I want something that feels nice and calm, or relaxing, slowly revealing details of our scene. So that's why I'm using this linear interpolation with not a lot of movement between shots. So meet me in the next lesson where I'm going to show you some more ways to add motion. How we can start bringing life using similar techniques to other objects within our scene. 3. Add More Motion: Okay, so we left our last lesson off with a steady flowing shot, just kind of moving around this corner here. I think the first thing I want to do is add in another camera and then be able to switch to that camera. So I'm going to press Shift D to duplicate this camera that I have now with the same settings. And let's just move that out of the way just a little bit. Now, before I do anything else with it, I'm going to right click and clear the keyframes on this camera. So that does not pick up the keyframes that this previous camera it was duplicated from head. So in order to move between cameras and blender, we need to add what's called markers to our timeline. I'm going to select this camera right here and add a marker. And then I will bind the camera to a marker. Now we have a new marker that's been created with camera one, which is this camera right here. And that's going to be what Blender interpolates as the camera we're looking through at that frame. So we'll continue to stay looking through that camera until we add another marker with a different camera. So because we ended this animation at frame 60, I want to start the next animation of the camera at 61. So I'm going to select this camera and then press marker. And then bind camera to markers. Like all things in blender, if you're interested in having the hot key, you can press it right there. Control B. Now if we actually go into our view here and we play the animation, we'll see that at frame 61, our camera view switches. And now we can start to add some animation to this second camera, which we've just added. Let's go ahead and go to frame 61. And then using our shift tilda hot key, and our S and D keys, Let's start to add a little bit more detail. I think after we come around the corner, we want to start to just see a little bit more of what's in this scene. Maybe focusing on the statue object moving up to the pots on the shelf. With this camera, I'd like to animate more than just the X location, which is what we animated earlier. I want to actually also insert keyframes for the rotation. I'll just go ahead and press in this area, and that will insert keyframes for all of those rotation values. I'll also press to insert keyframes for all of these location values now, rather than just animating one value by right clicking and inserting the key frames, If we just press in those fields, we'll insert keyframes for all values in that area. You could similarly do that with scale, but we're not going to be animating the scale of the camera. On frame 61 is where this animation starts. And I want it focused right on this statue object, so we can move these around just a little bit until we know we have that framed nicely. I changed this Z value just a little bit. Let's right click and replace that single key frame. Now the y animation, I'll eventually clear out, but for now we'll just leave it still because I'm not going to want to move this area at all. Let's have this shot also be about 2 seconds long. I'm going to move forward to frame 120 and we'll have our animation end right there. I'm just moving my camera around slightly, just getting a little bit better look at this object but starting to reveal a little bit more of the painting in the background. Now that I'm on frame 120, remember that the orange keyframes means that we've changed values on a keyframed value, but we have not inserted keyframes. So let's go and press with our mouse over these fields to insert the keyframes there. Now again, I mentioned that I don't want to animate this y value, it's at a very small value. Now sometimes that happens when you're moving the camera around. It might interpolate just a little bit of a value change. Let my right click and clear these single key frames, which will clear all the key frames. You can see this has gone back to gray for this particular value, and I set that to zero. Let's play our two animations together and see where we're at with these selected. Up here where I have all the key frames in my viewport, I'm going to just press A to make sure they're all selected. And then press and change that to linear. Now one thing I want to also animate in this first sequence is where we're focusing at. First, I want to start focusing on this little pool text object. And then as we start to come around the corner, how our focus fly back into the rest of the room. I'm going to do that by animating and empty. We have an empty leftover here from a previous scene we worked on. We can just use this same one. I'm going to grab this empty and I'm just going to put it around where this pool object is. I'm going to press F two and rename this to Cam One Focus. Then I can select the focus for this in this camera selection, I'm going to go down to my depth of field. And right now that is correctly set to Cam one focus. I want a pretty shallow depth of field so that we're not revealing too much of what's in the background. But I want to have this pool totally in focus while we're in here. We might want a little bit of light on this pool. Let's just add in an area light. I want to keep the focus on the pool text object until right about here. I'm going to press to insert location key frames With a focus object. We don't really care much about the rotation because it wouldn't matter because it's really just focus on the origin of the object. I've got my focus staying right there. And then. Right around that point. I want it to fly back and start looking at the chair. Let's move this over to the chair object, just navigating my viewport and getting that to focus right exactly where I want it. Let's insert another key frame right there. Now you can change the interpretation of this if you want, but I want it to be a slow and steady move towards that new area that we're looking at. Now if we play this back, we'll see that our focus is on the pool object. And then as soon as we come around the corner, we get a little flash reveal of what's to come. That's a nice effect. And then we're moving into looking at this object. This one. I don't need to animate the focus because I want to stay focused on that statue object. Let's just go into the depth of field settings. You can see right now this is focusing on the same focus as before. But I'm just going to press X to delete that. And select this statue object as the focus. We can have a pretty shallow depth of field for this one as well. That statute really stands out. Now you can see we have our two shots nicely flowing into each other. Maybe in this shot, I want this statute to feel like it's coming alive, giving a little bit of a indication of what's to come in this animation. We want to have it start to lift up, let's say at about frame 90, which would be 3 seconds into our animation. That's taking place at 30 frames per second statute to start to come up and maybe rotate just a little bit into the air. Now, similarly with this, I don't want this motion to start slow and then speed up, and then slow down again. I want it to look like it's going to continue moving. I'm going to use a new interpolation technique, and that's going to be one of these ones here. Easing by strength, you can use whichever you want. But I'll start with the quartic one and see how that looks right now. It's going to start off slow, but then start to speed up a lot more. That might be a little bit too fast for me. Let's pull this down to the quadratic one. I want to add the next step to the scene by adding in just a final shot where we're really panning out and we see the whole picture of what's happening. I already have a camera set up in a pretty good position for that final shot. I'm going to use that one right here. We're going to have this camera start at frame 121, which is just over 4 seconds into our animation. Again, I can press control B to bind that camera to a new marker. So now if we play our animation, we've got the first shot, we've got our second shot, and then it should move to our third and final shot. Let's set our end to 240. And then that's what we want to insert keyframes for. I think that it would make sense to be pulling out where we're leaving the scene. I want to imagine that as we're moving through this scene, the sun is setting and the night lights will turn on a little bit. Let's say at frame 150, this light is off, and then maybe also the light we have up here in the ceiling is off. Let's set that to zero and insert keyframes, then by the end of our animation, we want those to slowly start to glow. Let's add back in some power right here, right click, Insert Keyframe. And then similarly on this lamp right here, I'm going to add some more power to that one. And we'll have that land maybe somewhere around 55 watts. But play with values that you think work in your particular scene. So let's play this back in the viewpoint, remember we're viewing this in cycles, so it's a little bit slow. You could view this in V if you were really interested in seeing some certain things. But I think that for my purposes, I can see mostly what's going on here using cycles alone. Now besides that, we've covered most of the basics of animation. But I just wanted to sort of complete this story by starting to have some more things. Lift off the ground, like this chair for example. Maybe even the table that the statue is sitting on. And even our picture could start to come off the wall a little bit. And then we could have some small details like these pots lifting up. Now there's one way to really quickly add animation, and that's by using auto keying. So there's this little button down here that looks like a record button that will allow me to automatically insert keyframes for objects, bones and masks. So we're inserting keyframes for objects. So that's going to work great. If we turn on auto keying time, we move an object, it's going to automatically insert keyframes for it. You can see the inserted keyframes for all these values. Now, I don't want to necessarily be animating the scale of these objects. I can have it only for the active keying set. Let's click that right there. And then change our active keying set in this menu to only adjust location and rotation. Now if I was to move this object, it's going to insert key frames only on those active keying sets which excluded scale in this case. Now I need to insert some initial key frames where all these objects are starting. I'm just going to select all of them. All the ones that I want to animate. This is all parented properly. Let's like this object, this object, this object, the painting, and a couple of, maybe all of these pots. I want the motion to be starting right around when that statute, maybe the statue is the first thing to start lifting off. But maybe right before this shot ends that the motion starts to happen on the other objects. Let's press E to insert keyframes for all these at frame 115. And then we can just go to the end of our animation and decide where we want those all to end up on frame 240. I'm just going to slowly lift things, maybe in my camera view here just to create a little bit of interesting animation. And you can see that our key frames are automatically being inserted. I hope this shows you just how exciting animation could be, and this is one of the amazing things about animation. You can take something that might look simple and maybe your scene actually does start off simple. But then once things start to happen, things start to move. The scene gets way more interesting, way more exciting. And that is the power of animation. In the next section, we're going to take a look at another way to animate things, not with just key frames, but using actual physics simulation that's built into Blender. 4. Shape Keys and Cloth Animation: In this lesson, we're going to use a new type of animation, which is physics animation, to create a cloth simulation. This is going to be great for making the look of a curtain blowing in the breeze and just adding a little bit more life into our scene. Okay, so to get started with our cloth simulation, we first need an object that we're going to add that simulation to. So I want to add my curtain right around here using this curtain rod that I created in a previous lesson as our example. And we probably don't want that floating mid there. So let's just pull that over that. That connects in a nice spot now so that I can see what I'm working on a little bit easier. I think I might move this to a separate collection so that I can work on the cloth simulation independently of everything else going in R scene. We'll do that in just a minute. But first let's go and add that cloth object and make sure that it's the right height. First, I want to make sure my origin for this curtain rod is right in the center. So I'm going to right click and set my origin to geometry, which will do exactly that. Then I'll press shift snap, my cursor to selected, press shift A to add a plane. And then let's just get that in the right orientation. I'm going to rotate it on the Y axis by 90 degrees by pressing R Y and then typing in 90. And I'm just going to move this down a little bit, then let's scale this out. Remember to do your scaling in edit mode. This is particularly important when you're doing simulation. So I'm going to scale this on the y axis, and because that was created right in the middle, that should be looking pretty good, just scaling it out to something like that. Now I want to pull this down so that our curtain just kisses the floor right there. So I'm going to go into the physics property tab and I'm going to add cloth. Now if we just press play, we'll see that our cloth falls down. That's how we know that there are physics properties happening on this where gravity is pulling that cloth down, but obviously we don't want it to fall down completely. What I'm going to do is add in some pin groups. I'm going to select these topmost vertices right here and add them to a new vertex group. If I click plus right here, that will create a new vertex group. Now I can assign those vertices to the vertex group. Now in my cloth simulation, I can go down here in the Shape tab. I can change the pin group to that group right there. Which is probably a good idea to go ahead and name Pin. Now if I press Space Bar and play, it's not going to fall down because we basically, those two vertices are holding the cloth simulation in place that it won't just fall down. Now to actually get some more interest happening with the cloth simulation, I'm going to add in a force field. And we'll use a wind force field to simulate a little bit of wind blowing on this curtain. We'll just move that into place over here. And just have that blowing directly at the curtain. It'll move into our scene. Now if we press Space Bar, we can see that the curtain is starting to blow into our scene there. But it just looks like one big sheet of wood or something like that for it to look correct, we're going to want to add in a little bit more geometry to the mesh. I'm going to make sure I save my file right here because sometimes this can get a little bit heavy on your computer when you're doing simulation. Some press A just like everything right click and subdivide this just a couple times till we have some geometry to work with there. Now if I press Space Bar in play, you'll see that for one it's not moving nearly as much. But we do have a little bit more detail happening. It's very hard to see now, though. Now the reason it's not moving quite as much is that because the way these simulations work is that it basically assigns a physical weight to each vertex. Now that we've added so many more vertices into this object, the curtain is much heavier and we need either a stronger wind force, or we can also change the weight of each individual vertex to a lower value. If we bring that way down, you can see now it's moving a little bit too fast, so let's bring the weight of those back up. And now it's behaving just a little bit more naturally. Let's also increase the power of this wind right here. You can do this live where I can keep continuing to add more strength to this. And this can be a little bit of an intensive process on your computer, but a lot of times you can make some of these changes right in the viewport and you can see exactly what's going on. Now it looks to me like the top portion of our curtain is pinned a little bit too much. Let's go back into our vertex group tab into edit mode and then select the vertex group. We could see that pin group Telegraph down because we did the subdivision after we had already set the pin group. Let's just press a to select everything. Remove it all from that group, and then now if we press space, we'd see that it just falls down again. Let's just select this top section right here. Assign the pin group to that. But before I do that, I think I am going to want just a little bit more detail in this simulation. With everything selected, I'm going to subdivide it just a couple more times until we have a little bit more of a dense mesh. Something like that I think is looking good. Let's Alt and left click this edge. Ring up here, and then let's assign the pin group to that top edge. Now if we play it, we have the whole curtain simulating. And it's just the top part that's connected to that curtain rod that's not simulated. Now I want to bunch this curtain up a little bit. There's a number of ways you could do that, but I'm going to use a tool called Shape Keys. You can think of it as a way to morph your mesh. If you're in edit mode, all your vertices are in one particular place when you're in object mode. They don't really change much. So you can animate objects in object mode, but how do we animate objects in edit mode? Well, we do that with shape keys. Shape keys allows you to make changes to your mesh of your object in edit mode and animate between them. Let's seventh edit mode. And to start by creating a shape key, we'll just hit this plus sign right here. And we need to do this actually in object mode. Somebody hit the plus sign right there, our basis shape key. That's exactly what we see here, that's the shape key that we're starting with. What I going to do is hit this plus sign one more time to add a shape key to the object. What I'm going to do is simply pull in the vertices right here, all the way towards this edge, like we're drawing the curtain across. The way I can pull them all that direction is by just selecting the one on the edge right here. And then pressing shift, snapping my cursor to selected. And then I'm going to change my pivot point by pressing period on my keyboard to the three cursor now, making sure that I'm in key one right here. Which we can just go ahead and name that draw curtain. Now what I can do is just scale this down. So I'm going to scale that in a little bit, just so, something like that. And then now what you can see is when we move this, we can animate that value. And it doesn't look quite right now because it's just changing that one top row of vertices. But if we animate that value over the course of the Closs simulation, it should react to what we're doing. I want to have that starting pretty much right at the beginning of the animation at frame one. I want to have the value be zero where it's fully out. Let's click this little button right here to insert a keyframe. You could also right click to insert the key frame, then let's say by frame 60. I want this to happen somewhat steadily. You don't want things to happen too fast with simulations. Otherwise, there might be some glitches or errors where it's trying to calculate too much, too quickly. So maybe at frame 120, let's bring this value up to one. And we're not seeing that change reflected here because we're actually in a simulation. And when you want to see changes on simulations, you need to see them at frame zero typically. But since we know we want this on frame 120, I'm going to insert the keyframe right there. So if we press Space part to play, we'll see now that our curtain is drawing across that curtain rod that we created because we did add so much more geometry to that. Now we need to either, again, reduce the weight of the vertices or add more strength to our wind force field. I'll bring this vertex mass down a little bit. Let's press Space part to play that again. Now it's looking a little bit glitchy. Probably a little bit too much mass there. Now with cloth simulation, you can also change the quality of the cloth. You could bring the quality up. There's also some presets with the cloth simulation. Maybe we want to see what the silk preset looks like. It'll change some of the values down here. It's a little bit too jumpy, so we might need to add some more quality steps. Let's bring that up to ten and see if we can avoid that. As we can see, now it's looking a lot more steady. Let's right click and shade the smooth to take a little bit of a better look at what this might look like when we're finally done with it. That's looking a little bit better. Now, I am noticing that the curtain is intersecting with itself a bit, and I also wanted to intersect with this wall a bit. We can go down here into the collisions option, and then we can turn on self collisions so that it will collide with itself. Now, we shouldn't have any places where the cloth is actually intersecting itself. This is a really important thing. Mostly working with just one piece of cloth. You don't want the cloth to go through itself now. Similarly, I'd also like to make sure that it does collide with this wall. Let's try just adding a collision setting to this object right here. By clicking Collision, it looks like that's working properly. So now we have our curtain drawing across right there. And let's just get that wind blowing effect in there a little bit more. Maybe the puff needs to happen a little bit longer. Let's drag this out. Maybe we don't want it to look like such a drastic puff. We have a nice breeze now happening right there. Now, just to make this all look a little bit better, we can make sure you save your file anytime you're doing intense effects like what I'm about to do, which is adding a subdivision surface modifier. And it looks like we survived that time, but that's looking good. You could also add in a solidified modifier so that this cloth isn't just a still plane. And we could right collect and shade that auto smooth so we get a nice sharp edge on the side of our curtain. But we also don't want the auto smooth right here. Let's go down into our normal settings and change the auto smooth up to a much higher value, closer to 90, which would mimic the edge that's created with that solidified modifier. Now as long as these modifiers are after the cloth simulation, it should not affect the way the simulation looks at all. Now let's jump back over to the cloth settings and so that we don't have to keep recalculating this every time we want to save what we have with the cloth simulation that's done with a process called baking. If we go into the cache tab down here in our cloth simulation, we can bake the simulation. Let's hit that bake button and it will calculate the whole simulation all the way through. Now when we play it, it's going to be the same every time. Even if we started to adjust values in here, the simulation is saved. And this would be a point at which we don't have to mess with those values anymore. We know that what we have is totally locked in when we go to actually render this animation. This is exactly the simulation we're going to get in this lesson. We created a cloth simulation. We added the cloth simulation to our curtain object. And then we used a shape key to sort of pull it together so we had a nice bunched effect. We also used a wind force field to give it a little bit of blowing motion and add to that mystery that we created in the last lesson. Meet me in the next lesson, where we're going to create a simple looping animation using some of the techniques we've already covered. Very cool, very easy. And an opportunity for you to take an otherwise static model and turn it into something more fun. 5. Create a Looping Animation : So in this lesson, we're going to take a model that I already have built and we're going to add some simple motion to it. We're going to create a looping animation. Looping animations sometimes find themselves as something like a gift animation. They're really great because they're short. They can be a small file size, but they'll play indefinitely, so where you might want to have a longer animation where something keeps happening, but you don't have the file size or the capacity to have a large video file. A looping animation is great for that. In this scene, right now, I have a few things already set up. We've got some basic lighting here where I've got a plane in the background and creating a nice vignette effect with a point lamp behind it. And we've got some lighting on the side. And I have this skin care model right in the middle of our scene. And we've got some interesting materials in here that'll look great for a reflection. Now, I did separate these two objects because I think in this animation, I want to have the cap pop off a little bit. Let's first make sure that this object is parented to the other objects. So let's press control and keep it transform. Now when I move this object around, the cap will move with it. Now the first step with a looping animation is to decide how long you want this animation to be. So I'm going to maybe make this one be about 6 seconds long. So let's go six times 30, and let's make sure we're set to 30 frames per second in our frame rate. Now this animation is one I'm rendering in V just to give you a little bit of taste of what that might look like. It's great for something like this that's quick and you don't want to take all the time to render the animation like you would in cycles. So the way I want to first start is by rotating this whole thing, I'm going to want it to spin around this Z axis, but I also want it to be at a little bit of an angle. And if we set it at an angle first and then try to spin it, it sort of spins in a weird way. So I want to actually parent this object to an empty. Empty will be what controls that main rotation. Let's first shift and add an empty. We can just have that be a cube. Let's adjust the size of that empty. And then let's parent our bottle object to the empty by pressing control and keep transform, just like we did before. Now let's rotate this to an interesting angle. Maybe something like this, something like that. Looks pretty good. We've got a nice low focal length, 50 millimeters, so we've got some good perspective happening, which is going to look really cool when the bottom of this bottle spins towards us. I'm going to first start by animating the rotation of this object. Now, the most important thing to note when you're doing looping animations is that instead of inserting keyframes at frame one, you want to insert them at frame zero, and I'll explain that in just a minute. Let's actually insert it at frame one, so you can see what I'm talking about. We're going to have that do a full rotation starting at frame at negative 40 degrees on the Z axis. Let's right click, Insert a single key frame, and then at frame 180, we're going to insert another key frame, but we want to add 360 degrees at full rotation to that. Let's replace that key frame. Now if we play this for one, it's starting up and slowing down with the easing the default Bezier interpolation there. Let's first of all change that to linear. Now if we play it back, it's very hard to notice. There's a subtle pause at the very end of the animation. And that's because when we added 360 frames, we basically made it the exact same rotation as it was before. Right now, frame one and frame 180 are exactly the same. We have a little one frame stutter. The way to fix that is just to pull either the 180 to 181, which is after the animation, or pull the frame one back to frame zero. Frame zero doesn't actually get rendered. Now when we move this through, we have a nice, steady animation that's looking great. Now as I mentioned, I also want to rotate this around this axis a little bit. The reason that we use the empty is now that when I rotate this on the Z axis, it's easy to do. So let's do the same thing. We'll start at frame zero, insert keyframe for zero degrees, and then a Frame 180. We'll insert it for 360 degrees, depending on which direction you want to rotate it. Let's also set this to linear. It's spinning. While it's spinning, we've got a really dynamic motion here. Let's add another little bit of detail, which is to have this cap pop off. Now maybe it doesn't start off off, but maybe somewhere around here where we're not seeing so much interest in the shape of the object, we've just got all this text on the back. Let's have it pop off right around frame 60 and we're going to have that move in the Z direction to pop off. Let's insert a single keyframe there. Then we want to make sure that comes back down on to the bottle at let's say Frame 150. Let's insert a single keyframe there. Now we have two key frames that are identical. And now I can add the position I want it to be popped off at. Let's say it pops off over the course of these frames, and then rest a little bit, and then go right back down. Maybe at about Frame 90, we have this come up a little bit, something like that, just to reveal the rest of the bottle a little bit. Let's insert a single key frame, and take a look at what that looks like. Snow comes off and goes back down. I'd like it to stay up there a little bit longer, though. I'm going to, with this keyframe selected, scale this out a little bit just so that there's a little more hang time with that animation. Then it comes back down nicely. Now I don't want it to come down so steadily. I want it to have that snap effect. Let's grab this handle on the bezier curve and just pull that up a little bit. Now it pops off and goes back down. We can have it pop off with the same energy that it went down. Let's do the same thing there. It's a really fast pop off, comes back down, and the animation still is looping perfectly. That's great. Now just to build off the last lesson a little bit, let's add just a real quick shape key to this object so that maybe we can have the pump moving a little bit while the cap is off. The cap is off, starting right around there. Maybe we have a pump right there. And then it'll return to its position. Let's insert a Shape key by clicking this plus button right here. Let's add another key frame for it in the down position. Now I'm tapving into edit mode here. I'm just going to select the parts that I want to depress down, which is really just this top section right here. I'm going to go into my wireframe view and make sure that I have everything selected and I'm just doing L to grab those pieces. We'll have this whole part moved down a little bit and it looks like we're missing one more piece here. I'm just going to do a new selection technique. I'm going to use to circle select and just make sure I get at least one of those vertices. And then I'll hold control and hit plus on my number pad and that will grow my selection. And I'll just do that a few times until I'm sure that I've got all the parts of that mesh and it looks like we've got them all right there. I've got my shape key set up. Now I just need to move this whole section down. I'm going to press and Z now. Instead of moving directly down on the Z axis, I'm going to press twice. I'm going to press Z, Z. So that it's moving down on its local axis. Just down a little bit. And that's our depressing animation. It's not depressing, it's very exciting. But the cap depresses if you get what I mean, right around here. We have this at zero. It's not depressed, it's feeling very nice. Let's add a keyframe there, and then let's have it pop down right here in sort of key frame. And then have it pop back up right there. And then we could just duplicate these key frames if we want that same animation to happen again, we'll circle select them down here on the timeline using C. And then just duplicate them over. And then we should have two presses and then the cap comes back on in our animation loops. Now the last thing we might want to do is if we don't want our object to fully leave the frame when it pops off, we could have the camera zoom back as well. Just other little tips to make your looping animation a little bit fun. We want to be animating on the y axis, so let's insert a single keyframe here, then when the cap comes back on, we want to be back down. That's right, about frame 150. Let's actually try to make sure that lines up exactly. Frame 60 is right where it starts to pop off. And that is exactly what we did here, 60 to 150. Just making sure that those keyframes are line frame 60 were right there. And then just like the cap animation, let's pull out this one reached its peak at about frame 90. Let's do the same thing here. Let's pull out right around here, so that we can see the whole object insert a single key frame. Then we can actually copy the same curve we had before from this object so that it matches exactly. Let's press A to select at all control C to copy those keyframes, and then let's paste them onto the camera. Set this at frame 60 and then press control V to duplicate that animation that copied the key frames. But it did move our camera a little bit. Let's just select all these and then move this down until our camera is back in the right place. I'm just pressing with those keyframes selected and moving them back. Now it looks like it's actually popping in. Let's press and Y and scale that on the y axis by negative one. Now it's properly popping out. We just need to have it come out a little further and we just need to play with the values a little bit. This is ready to render now in V, V is super fast and this is an animation that you render pretty quickly, since we don't have a lot happening here. In this lesson, we created a simple looping animation. Looping animations are a really great way to practice your animation skills and create something that's really fun with a lot of action happening in a really short period of time. Meet me the next lesson where we're going to tie this all together. Take the animation that we've created here and actually render it out to a video file that's ready to share wherever you'd like to share it. 6. Two Ways to Render: In this lesson, I'm going to teach you about two ways that we can render our animation in Blender. And that's a little bit different than rendering still images because with animations we're rendering hundreds, sometimes thousands, of different frames. Now the simple animation that we just made with the bottle is rendered an EV, and that's going to go very quickly. We can render that straight to a video, rendering a more complex animation like one that's made in cycles. The room scene we worked on is something that's going to take longer and follows a little bit different process. So let's get started with the simpler process. Rendering our V animation, the bottle one, the looping animation straight to a video file. Okay, so I've got my animation set up looking just the way I like it. I've changed the background color a little bit and just did a little bit more polishing with the motion here. So this is an EV render like I mentioned. So V renders very fast. You can see we're moving in real time. We don't have any of that graininess that we experience with the cycles render. So we'll first go over into our render settings here and let's make sure we have our frame right set to 30 frames per second, which is what we were animating in the whole time. And then consider choosing an aspect ratio. So for me, I think a 1,200 by 1,200 pixels square image is going to work just fine. So let's go into our render Properties tab here and we can change a few settings. For one, we're going to make sure we're in the EV render option. And then our Viewport is rendering up to a maximum of 16 samples, but the render is going to go at 64 samples. This works similar to what we are doing in cycles, but with EV of course it's much faster. 64 should be a pretty high quality render. Let's do a quick test real quick. Maybe at an important frame within our animation. More. Right about there. And press F 12 and just take a look at what that looks like. So you can see everything is pretty smooth here and it render extremely fast. It took 0.1 seconds to render that single frame, whereas with cycles rendering one frame was taking close to 20 seconds to do. We could change those settings up even higher if we wanted to, but I think they look pretty good right now. There's a few other settings you can do in Eve. You can turn on the Bloom effect, which will give you a little bit of a glow to your images. That's something that's really fun to use in V. We can leave that on. You can also work with depth of field. I'm less interested in that. In this case we'll ignore that. But we also have options around screen space reflections, which will give us a little bit more realistic reflections. And we can even turn on motion blur if we wanted. Let's take a look at what that might look like. We'll find area where a lot of things are happening quickly. Press 12 and render it. You can see we just have a little bit of blurriness with how fast that object is moving. We could bring the shutter speed up a little bit to increase that effect even more. So let's press F 12, render this image, and then we have a really nice emotion blur effect. Again, this is rendering very fast. We doubled our render time, but we're still way under a second, so this is incredibly fast. So have a look at some of the other EV settings, but we've covered the most important ones here. So now I want to move back into my little output properties tab. This little printer icon and control some variables about what exactly we're rendering. Again, when we're rendering our cycles animation, we'll probably want to be rendering it to still frames, PNGs or Jpex for example. But in this case, render it straight to a video file because it's going to go so fast. Let's select FFmpeg video here, and then we have a lot of options under the encoding tab here. I'm going to change that to something more familiar like Quick Time or Mpeg four. Now after you've got those set up, we can render to another popular format, 264. And that should give us a pretty good video file that's nice and small, but works on a lot of different devices and can be uploaded in a lot of different places. The next thing to do would just be to select your output folder here. I'm just going to navigate to where I want that to be saved to. I'll make a new folder called animations. And then you can name your animation right here so that when it outputs you'll know exactly what it is. I'm going to name this bottle Pop. I want to press except to make sure that that's ready to go. Let's make one more small change to make this a little bit more contrasted by adding a high contrast look to it. Let's now have a really poppy render that looks like something you might see on social media to be used for an ad or anything like that. Let's go ahead and press Render. Be sure you save your file. Before you do that, I want to press control as to save it. I'm going to hit Render. And then instead of Render Image, we're gonna hit Render animation again. Evie? Incredibly fast. It's going to be moving very quickly through this render, not taking nearly as long as cycles. So all 180 frames here. We're already about halfway through that. And we'll just wait for that to finish. So once that's done, we can close this window and we can open up wherever we have that file save. We can see now that we have our finished animation 1,200 pixels square. And it looks really pretty good. And as we can see, it loops perfectly. We don't have any stutter between there. So now let's talk about a slightly more complicated way of rendering, which is what I typically do when I'm rendering in cycles. So with cycles animations, I render things out to frames because they take so much longer to render each individual frame, rather than rendering straight to a video file that could potentially be corrupted. I want to render each frame individually and then string those together after the fact. That way if we have any problem with our render, we've sort of been saving along the way and we can pick up our render wherever we might have had an issue and continue it without having to re, render the previous frames. I'm pretty happy with where this scene is. I want to go ahead and start the rendering process here with animations. You can probably drop your samples down a little bit lower, just so that things render a little bit faster. I'm going to try something as low as 250 samples, for example, because using noise is going to help us a lot with making sure that we still get smooth images. At the end of this, just watching through one more time, making sure that there's nothing major that I'd like to change. And everything's looking pretty good. I think we're pretty much ready to render now. The process here is about the same as working with some of the other projects we've done, but just checking your samples, checking your output resolution, and maybe we even render this as a test render first, just 50% size. This is a good tool to check and make sure everything looks good before you really commit to doing a full render. Other things to make sure you're checking is your frame rate. So in this case, 30 frames per second is what I was animating at. So that looks great. Make sure your frame range is set correctly. We have all 240 frames there, which I wanted to include. The last thing would just be to check your file format. If you're just doing a test render, you can probably render to a Jpeg file, which isn't going to have as much data in it, but it's going to create a much smaller file that doesn't take up quite so much space on your computer. The next thing to do would be to select your output folder. I'm going to press open right here, and I'm going to create a new folder, my animations folder that I'll call frames. And I'll double click right here and maybe even make a new folder, because I'll also put my final frames in here. We're going to call this frames preview. Then let's press into this folder, then I'll name these frames RA for frames preview one. Then I'll hit Accept. Now once we feel like everything's set up properly, let's save our file one last time and then we can start rendering our animation. Now usually when I'm rendering, I don't want my GPU to be using any extra energy that it has to. I'm going to set this to a solid view and then just get that out of the way so we're not taking up any extra memory there. Then when it's time to do is go into your render options and click Render Animation. And once we click that, it's going to start rendering away, putting those frames into the folder we have selected So you can kind of watch those frames start to appear by pulling up the folder. And when we enter that folder, we'll see that our frames are starting to appear and they're being numbered properly. Once these are all done, we'll string these together into a video file to create something like we do with the EV animation, but with our full cycles rendered animation. If everything looks good there, we'll bring up our sample count. And we can also increase the resolution to our full size so we have our total ready to go rendering. Even though it takes a long time, it's sort of a good thing because it gives you an opportunity to step away from your computer, take a break and let the rendering happen, do its thing. And we'll come back to it when it's done, to see all those nice juicy frames. So my animations just finished rendering, and now I want to take all those separate frames that I've created and pull them together to create an actual video file. So what I'm going to do is press File, and then I'm going to open a new project. And we have a default layout here for video editing, so let's click on that. And now we have our, sort of, we're still inside Blender. It's looking a little bit different, but this is just a Viewport that's set up with a little bit more control for video editing. So what I'm going to do first is make sure my aspect ratio is correct, so 1920 by 1080 is the default. But remember this was 1080 by 1920, because this was a vertical animation. We also had this at 50% But rather than changing that to 50% here, I'm just going to divide these values by two. This should be exactly what we've output. Now what we can do is start adding those images into our sequence. I'm going to go to the Ad menu here, and then I'm going to add in an image sequence. And then I'll navigate to where I have that saved in this frames folder. Here I have all the separate frames. I'm going to make sure they're sorted by name. Press A to select them all, and then add the image strip. Now if we press Spacebar here, we can see that our animation is all together. And we have the actual fully rendered frames all moving together, creating our final animation. One thing I did not set was the frame, right? So let's make sure that's set to 30 frames per second. And then we can also make sure that the length of the animation is exactly what we had it set out, the default and Blender is 250, but we need that to be 240. So let's set that right there. Press space part of play. This is the fully rendered Cycles version. Remember when we were in the viewport, we saw all that graininess. But now we have all the frames rendered, individually strung together into a more finalized looking animation. Now, there's still a little bit of glitching here because we use a low sample count and because we rendered it at half resolution. But really this is looking pretty good and this is a great place for you to analyze. Things are looking right, or if you might need to make more adjustments. But I'm liking the way this looks. So I'm going to exit out of that full screen view with this altogether. Now I'm going to do a similar process to what I did with the EV animation. I'm going to first select an output folder. So let's navigate to where we want that. And then set a name for the file room view. Preview is what, I'll name that one. Let's press Accept, then same settings like we did before. Let's go into the encoding options. Mpeg four is great, H 264 is great. You could change the quality setting, but medium quality does just fine for something like this. Let's double check that our output folder is correct. Double check that our resolution and our frame rate is correct, and that we have this rendering frame frame one to 120. Now remember these aren't actually rendering the frames, it's just pulling those individual images together. Once that's all ready, we can just click Render and render animation. And of course, that will fly through very quickly because it's just putting pre rendered frames together. So now if we navigate into our folder where we have that, we can double click on the animation and say that we have a finished video file that's ready to share. So in this lesson, we covered two types of rendering. One in V, which I like to use a lot, which is rendering straight to a video file. But in cycles, we render those to frames. Then what we did was strung all those frames together into an animation within blender and exported that as its own video file, so that that's also ready to share. Even though rendering can take a lot of time, there are things we can do to speed that up, whether that's reducing the number of samples or by reducing the resolution of the render. But it's all worth it at the end to see that final, polished result. Now if you just hate rendering on your computer, or maybe your computer isn't very powerful, or you're working on a laptop traveling and you need to render something quickly. There are a lot of ways that you can render projects online using different cloud services. Sometimes with a little bit of money, you can render things very fast. This is really important when you're hitting deadlines or clients are asking for things very quickly and your computer just can't quite keep up. Stick with it. Be patient. It will all be worth it in the end, I promise. 7. Final Thoughts: So I hope you've enjoyed this class on animation. This truly is my favorite part of blender animating objects, bringing otherwise static things to life. In this particular class, we looked at inserting key frames. We made multiple cameras moving throughout our scene. And we really started to add a mysterious mystical element by starting to bring objects to life, lifting them into the sky. We did a nice sunsetting animation. You just add a little extra mood to our objects. We added some depth of field variation to control where the viewer was looking, what came in and out of focus. And beyond that, we did a very practical animation. This is something I get paid for often with freelance work. We created a looping bottle animation of a little cosmetics bottle. This is something that people are looking for all the time and you can get started with today. Potentially even start getting some clients of your own. With just the skills that we learned in this class, please share your work in the project gallery. I would really love to see what you came up with. I'm very proud of you for making it to the end of this class. Thank you and good luck on the rest of your blender journey.