Making a Minecraft Animation | Part 5: Keyframing (2.8 Tutorial)

Hey everyone i’m i’m back i’m sorry it’s been such a long time since the last tutorial video i’ve seen all your comments asking for more and i finally think i’m confident enough in my knowledge of the subject to actually start the long-awaited character animation tutorials now

This is how this portion of the tutorial series is gonna work there won’t be just one big video but a bunch of different smaller videos teaching about the different principles and tools for animation such as how to use the graph editor principles like overlapping action easing offset anticipation etc etc etc

Now i know i already covered walk cycles before but since then blender 2.8 has came out but i thought i’d go back to the basics and start from the key elements of animating in the new blender now that i got my babbling out of the way let’s begin

So what we’re going to do first is obviously open up blender the first thing that we’re going to see when opening a new scene is a cube a light and a camera we’re going to start off by deleting the camera and the light from our scene use left click to select the light

And then hold shift and left-click the camera so that we’re selecting both objects now to delete them click x on your keyboard and little pop-up will appear asking if you want to delete your selection so we’re going to click delete now we’re just left with the cube

And now we’re going to keyframe this cube so that it moves now the first question you might have is what is a keyframe and why is it so important well a keyframe is a point on the timeline that marks the beginning or end of a motion the in-between frames are then

Interpolated between those points to create the illusion of motion keyframes are the building blocks from which you make an object move in blender so now let’s demonstrate this by adding two keyframes to our cube here first by clicking and dragging the top bar of the timeline down here

Make sure that this blue line is on frame one that blue line shows us what frame we’re currently viewing on the timeline select the cube by left clicking it and then press i on your keyboard now a drop down menu should appear giving you a ton of different keyframing options to choose from

Don’t be overwhelmed though we’ll only be using one today on that drop down selection select the one that says lock rot scale lock rot scale stands for the properties being keyframed location rotation and scale now if you look at the timeline on frame 1 you should see an orange dot has

Appeared that is our keyframe so we know where this cube’s starting point is now but now we have to set the second keyframe telling it where to move next if the keyframes are close together then the motion will be fast if the keyframes are far apart the motion will be slower

So let’s go to frame 10 by clicking and dragging on the timeline and dragging our blue line to frame 10. once it’s there we have to move our cube to its end location to move the cube you can either go over to the top left here

And select the move tool which brings up three arrows you can click and hold to drag in certain directions or you can simply press g on your keyboard and drag your mouse around to move the cube then left click to release it let’s drag this cube to its end position

It can be anywhere you’d like but i’m just going to move it over here by dragging it on the red arrow the x-axis now that our cube is in place let’s keyframe it by pressing i again on the keyboard and selecting lock rot scale you should

See a new orange dot appear on frame 10 of the timeline that means we successfully did That means we subscribed that means we’ve successfully created animation to view our animation i’m recording to view our animation drag the timeline back to frame 1 and press spacebar to play the animation to stop the animation just press spacebar again lastly i’m going to show you some of the timeline tools

To control the start and end frames of your animation just type in the frame you want your animation to start and stop on right here where it says start and end since our animation is only 10 frames long let’s set the end frame to 10 so click on end

And type 10 and it’ll highlight the area that is still active to zoom into our keyframes you can either zoom in with your scroll wheel on the timeline or click and drag this dot on the bottom scroll bar to move the timeline across you can either click and drag with your scroll wheel

Or simply drag the bar at the bottom next i’ll show you the playback tools like i mentioned earlier the space bar stops and plays the animation but there are also buttons right here that let you control playback as well the middle two buttons play your animation backwards or forwards

The button next to the middle ones move the timeline to the nearest keyframe and the very left and right buttons move the timeline to the beginning or the end of your animation well that’s about it for the first episode feel free to visit our tutorial playlist so you can watch the previous

Tutorials don’t forget to subscribe so you can see the rest of the episodes when they come out thanks for watching and i hope you enjoyed the tutorial bye You