Judothesurviver – Minecraft Animation Tutorial for Blender 2.9 Episode 3- Keyframing and Character Animation

Hey everybody how’s it going judo survivor here welcome back to another tutorial this is episode 3 in the 2.9 tutorial series where we cover character animation in blender well not only just character animation mainly just any animation i guess really quickly i’m going to take this opportunity to plug my disc

Judo’s dojo it’s a nice large friendly community about 280 people uh a time of recording it’s a nice animation focused discord so if you’re finding these tutorials interesting and helpful and you want to join a community full of like many people go ahead we’ve got dedicated home and

Support agents to help fix any issues you may run into and it’s just generally a fun place like in the description join if you can right so i’m going to go over basically animation preferences that you’re going to want to keep in mind i’m going to go over what they do and

How to enable them go navigate over to this little playback drop down and change no sync to av sync essentially what avsync does is keeps the viewport playback running at 30 frames per second this often does mean it drops frames especially if you have a larger scene and not a powerful computer

But it gives you a much more realistic uh playback of your animation speed wise as opposed to if you had no sync where it might slow down you judge your animation off that and adjust for it only to realize after you’ve rendered that animation is too slow so definitely check avsync

For keying um essentially if i create a cube right now and i press i to set a keyframe you get this whole list of options you can set keyframes for location rotation scale location and rotation locate rotation and scale and like a bunch of other ones and essentially you just have all these

Options of different keyframes to set we don’t want to have to go through this every time we set a keyframe we just want to set a frame of where the object is and be done with it so if we go into keying set the default active keying set

To location notation and scale it will set keyframes for the location rotation in the scale and we don’t have to worry about um we’d have to worry about it anymore what we’re going to also want to do is come to this little button right here next to all these

Playback controls and click it this is auto keyframe essentially this way you don’t have to press i every time you set a keyframe it can be kind of an issue if you leave it on and like forget about it then you’ll set a key from the wrong place by accident

And think oh no what the hell happened watch my character moving all the way over there but generally it’s a nice thing to have on because you don’t need to constantly press i every time you change the character’s movement all right so what is a keyframe keyframe is essentially a

Marker telling the computer where an object is or a bone or whatever it tells the computer what the objects or whatever you have keyframes current state is at the time what its location is rotation is and its scale if you have keyframes set for location rotation scale which is what we do

If you have set a location for example it would only tell the computer the cube’s location all right so let’s set some keyframes just uh so i can demonstrate what i mean if i go to frame 0 and i click i to set our first keyframe you

Auto keyframe doesn’t know when you want to set the first keyframe so you have to set it and then after that you can just let it take over um start first keyframe at frame 0 with i then go to frame 20 or so drag the cube over here

With the gimbals remember press t and click this up and drag it over it will set a key from right there and now if you go to frame 0 and press space bar to play the cube moves since you have location rotation scale as our active king set we can rotate if

We want or scale it it will automatically set the keyframe if it if you don’t want our keyframe just press i and then now the cube rotates and scales as well as moves which is great you can set a um set another keyframe maybe have a frame 50. Oh let me explain what i just did with this thing well essentially you don’t have to use the gimbals to move things or rotate things or scale things there are hotkeys in blender that you can use to do that for you for example g if you hit g and just move something around

It’s uh you can effect you can grab the object and adjust its location if you press r and just move your select the cube press r and rotate the mouse it uh rotates and if you press s scales easy but when you press these it just scales rotates and moves

According to where the camera is we want it to we want to move it on axes which is where you can press g and then press x to move on x y from the y or z to move on to z if i hit alt r to reset the rotation

And i press like g x x y to my y and z to m z and it’s a bit clear you can also do the same for rotation rotate on the x by hitting rx r x it doesn’t show in screencast keys for some reason r y or r z and then

S x s y s z perfect you don’t need to touch the gimbals i just like having them because they’re a bit more convenient in some cases all right so that’s keyframing or very basic keyframing you can like move your cube around hit g hit shift z

To move it everywhere on this axis but the z one g shift x any axis except the x and g or g shift y and the x’s except the y and you can do that for rotation scale as well all right that’s keyframing and some blender controls

Let’s get back into the character all right so what i’ve done is i’ve changed since the last tutorial changed my character’s look a little bit to properly like show what is going to go on the scene because in the scene it’s a harrowing life scene harebrained and a sheep are going to be

In it that’s it so i made herbin a sheep um another story i can get rid of by clicking it just x delete however doesn’t have another right sword in the chest i’m going to click the bones and the chest x delete we don’t need them so i can

Probably get rid of the assets my collection anyway back to animating click the character’s armature in object mode it will already be in object mode but if you click it and then hit ctrl tab you can move these in these little bones individually in the same way that we can

Move the cube before so if i take like the head and hit double tap r or so or something you can free rotate it or i can use rx to rotate on the x y bar z and the same if i go control tab and then click the sheet control tab

I can do the same thing with these bones uh rr g gz gx or you can use the gimbals you know so what i’m going to do is i’m going to animate the sheep i’m going to turn off the character really quickly actually now i think about it i need to animate

The camera first let’s get our opening shot essentially in the scene the camera pans down from the sky shows the sheep the sheep hear some ruffling it was bad and then um maybe the camera comes towards the sheep like heroin is running at the sheep and then you hear a neck snapping sound

As the sheep gets killed it’s really bloody gory it’s awesome all right so first shot is going to be the sky so i’m going to point it at the sky and maybe move the camera with shift f just a bit up here then it’s going to automatically set keyframe because i moved it

If you don’t move it then you have to press i and then what i’m going to do i’m going to go to frame maybe how about 60 rx and then pull it down actually we’re too near the edge of the world aren’t we we need to find a better

Place in the world so i’m going to delete these keyframes go to frame 0 and just find a better place all right this seems like a better place some uh water here so i’m going to go rx point at the sky and then make sure there’s no trees in the way and then

Frame 60 or x bring it down to right here i’m quickly going to go grab the sheep or did you go sheepy sheepy here you are click the root and i’m just going to go back to the camera view and then put the sheep right here i think So right about there and really i’m going to pose the sheep in its first pose so i’m going to take this feet and kind of just drag it out drag this out down maybe forward a bit and then down like that down like that head down and that still doesn’t reach these

Minecraft models are really stubby i’m going to put this foot like it’s bracing itself it could fall on at any time wow anyway sheep kind of dipping its head into the water maybe like that perfect all right so the camera comes down we keyframed it that’s a bit too fast

So i’m going to do i’m going to take this keyframe and drag it to frame 90. this might be a good time to introduce the concept of the graph editor i have a whole video on the graph editor which you can check out i’ll link in the description but it’s

I’m not going to go too into it in this tutorial it’s a really complicated piece of uh this really complicated tool but it’s mighty helpful so i’m going to go into animation i’m going to go up here and i’m going to change this window to a graph editor

Essentially you can edit the keyframe curves with a graph normalize because i want it normalized so you see how when the camera is here it eases in eases down and eases slowly to a stop if i take this shift d x then just g y to ease the curve even more the camera

Stays up there and then it comes down and then it kind of slows down i think i’m going to take this shifty and just ease it a bit more maybe take this up here there we go material view so we got the camera the first camera animation Might be too much cam cups down there we go um now i’m going to go forward a frame after that last cut i’m going to set keyframe to make sure everything’s keyed then jump forward a frame and just move the camera over here essentially that will just jump the camera to another position

Like a like a cut or something so maybe i want the camera right here the sheep can just stay there for now oh and i’m also going to extend the scene time to frame 1000 to give us more time to work all right camera comes down then sheep

Sheep will come up let’s uh let’s animate the sheet so if i click the sheep go into pose mode and select every bone and maybe around when do i want the sheep to come maybe around frame 180 so the sheep is drinking and then maybe 175 actually set a keyframe for everything

Then press spacebar maybe i’ll have 25 frames pass to where the sheet comes up so maybe r maybe move it out enable the gimbals maybe move it back a bit and then i’m going to go forward a frame to give or two frames to get some offset

Set this rotation to zero so all r and then two for two more frames forward and alt r so now sheep comes up nice and smoothly very nice the sheep hears the sheep is drinking uh comes up perfect and i can’t really teach you how to animate well

I can teach you how to animate things but animation is something that i’m not even going to attempt to teach properly because even i don’t know a lot about animation my work mostly comes through years of trial and error getting feedback finding out what works what doesn’t different principles of animation

I’m currently attending animation mentor which is an online animation school so i don’t know like that much i’m not a great teacher when it comes to like actual animation principles and how to animate but i can teach you how to like set keyframes and then maybe you can

Figure it out from there which is what i’m betting on so don’t expect this to be a full how to animate well tutorial but one thing i can teach you is that you don’t want to let the computer do all the work this is not good enough this is garbage

Because it’s just a sheet moving up sheep doesn’t just linearly move up maybe uh well this when this starts to move up in a few frames this can come down a bit and then a few times later the head can come down a bit more

Like it’s zoom and that mic looks a lot better it’s like he’s pulling his head up rather than just going up yes like kind of grab on to it so voom there we go i think that looks pretty solid maybe i’ll take this and move it back like at frame 215 maybe

Lg and then pull it down a bit so now it comes like that that looks kind of weird though and this is where the graph editor comes in and you can just play with these curves so this is the movement on the y curve it looks like

Yes so if i take this down it so currently it eases a little bit and then boom if i even out the curve a little bit by just moving it down like this now he’s pulling back the whole time which is nice i’m also going to want

This foot to move backwards so maybe around here around 195 pull the foot back to here g y oh do you have the wrong thing selected yeah i do frame 195 i think it was then pull this back so oops looks like this now perfect i think we’re not perfect not

Even close but i think i want the sheep to come up a bit and that’s usually on the z so i can take this keyframe you see how the z stays flat and then moves up you can see the sheet kind of there it moves up to get back to the original position

And take this i’m just going to curve it up a little bit so now the sheep is constantly moving up maybe i’ll put it over here maybe i’ll have him come up a bit more and then fall like that hmm what else can i do maybe to play these curves a bit

Maybe i’ll have this foot actually come in and stop moving a bit before the end so like that and maybe halfway through i’ll pull it up with g and z and there we go or with the gimbals i feel like he waits too long to pull

This foot so i’m going to just take these box selected b move him over here like that i feel like he actually might go a bit too far back maybe i actually want him or maybe because he’s not up enough maybe i’ll pull him up a bit

And then take this up like that nah what is it i think i think it’s because he continues moving back so i’m going to actually i think it’s the y x no is the y location i think yes i’m gonna pull this one down a bit so now he goes back

And then falls maybe not that much this way down like that move down a bit more and maybe i’ll have finally have the on the x rotation have the body kind of just rotate back like that and maybe z come down a bit more so like sheep isn’t just

I stiff that might be too much there we go and maybe a few frames later i can have the sheep actually come down a bit like that so boom a few more frames i should really have screencast keys on for this so you can see what i do

There we go all right so basically you can see me like just move it with g click g that’s basically a shift d a duplicate graphender is pretty easy once you get the hang of it but it can be hard and i respect that i respect

The fact that it is difficult thing to learn this like stops moving so maybe i can have it come up a bit like too far back and then as this the back falls it can fall as well so that’s too much what the heck oh it’s this it’s there i can just get

Rid of that then i think there we go that’s looking pretty nice i think and maybe lastly the head can kind of droop down a bit too just give our characters life you don’t want them to ever be completely stiff you want them to be like

Real things as close as you can as a self-taught animator or like as close as you can get so there we go that’s our sheet points head out of the water so very nice i think this is looking pretty okay um so yeah hopefully this taught you the basics of character animation

I didn’t go over the apex right too much because now i think about it i might not actually need it for this scene but uh you can apply what i applied to the sheet rig to any any rig the controls just might be a bit different for example

If i go to the apex rig oh i disabled it that’s right if i enable the apex rig and go to it it is where is it where is it where is it there it is make sure i am in object mode and then click it pose mode like these

Are just the same as the sheet bones you just move it like this uh like move it with r you can move this like that um pelvis like that you can come into this little eye king this is the eye control so however under snap eyes

We can hit like the eyebrow and you can like pull it down up rotate it or scale it to get the bend you can pull this thing down to like get the eye bend or you can move this around to get that kind of eye like if you want them angry you can

Just like scale it in and then down maybe that out a bit and then pull these up and he’s angry like it’s it’s all pretty simple once you get the hang of initially animating things so don’t be too intimidated by the more complex rigs they’re actually pretty easy to get the

Hang of if you like this video please don’t forget to like and subscribe you know all that good stuff really does help out video channel commenting something you can do as well tell me if i suck tell me i should have gone over the character rig more or just say

Nice thank you i always appreciate it even though i don’t respond to many comments i get them all and they’re awesome so thank you very much see you in the next video bye Here