Ultimate Minecraft Animation Tutorial – Part 1 – Shocking Secrets Revealed!

Well hello there I’m anxious cynic and you want to know how to make Minecraft animations and you’ve come to the right place because we’re gonna start today with a tutorial of minimator version 2.0 so let’s just hop right into it you want to get this software so first you’re

Gonna need to download it we’re going to do a speed run of that process and you might think it’s simple but there’s actually a little bit more to downloading my animator if you want the latest version we’re here at minimator.com you come to the site you scroll down you go download perfect

Seems simple but no these are not what you want unless you want the older version of my animator 1.2.9 right here in this little note that seems a little bit easy to miss is version 2.0 you click learn more and it takes you to the monomator forums where you have the

Anniversary update this is the minimator 2.0 version however you may not want this version either because the developer of this version nimi is retired so what we want to do is actually go to the continuation build the community build so if you want the most up-to-date version of minimator 2.0

This is the place you need to come to the minimator 2.0 continuation build the page of the forums I’ll have a link to this page in the description but you’re going to come down here to the continuation build and you can find and download the latest version so now that

You’ve gotten mine made or downloaded and ready to go you’re gonna get this screen here we’re going to click in new project and you’re just going to do what you might expect you’re gonna name and create your project and so we’ve opened up into mine right here when you first

Start this up you may get a notification that you’re in simple mode if you look over here it says simple mode enabled click on that and what you need to do to get the advanced mode features which you most definitely will want to do is go to monomer.com upgrade and it might prompt

You to donate you don’t have to it’s encourage to do so if you want to keep the side up and the development going and all that stuff but you don’t have to but you’ll do that process you’ll get the code and then you want to just paste

Your code into here and as you can see once you put in that code you now have the ability to switch to advanced mode we’re going to click enable and then now we don’t have that little prompt anymore and we have new render settings if you go into this

We click custom and we’ve got all sorts of things that we can play with in there for now I’m just going to leave that on default so just basic setups it depends on what frame rate you want to export at let’s say generally people want to do 30

Frames per second uh this starts out at 24 by default we’re just going to put the tempo up to 30 and what that means is that every frame in this at 30 Tempo will mean it’s 30 frames per second if you want to do 60 frames per second

Animation which is kind of ridiculous but if you did want to do it you’d put this number to 60 in that way for every frame in the timeline you will have one frame of actual animation in your output I’m also going to up my resolution to a

Full 1080P and that’s pretty good for our project settings so let’s just go ahead and go to the workbench this is how we’re going to spawn in most anything in our scene and we’ll just spawn in a basic character real quick and as soon as it is spawn in you will

See that it does this and I can just click anywhere and make them stop so what you’re going to have here is your timeline and this is the character we just introduced into our scene and once you click on him you’ll see that you get all these options over here so we can

Actually name the object and call them dude and when we do that that object info when we go to our project properties we go to our library you’ll see that we have the Steve character here and dude is only reflected in the timeline just a little detail for

Organization to keep in mind is you can actually have multiple instances of this character object so if I actually go in here right click where we get a number of other options I click duplicate now we have two dudes but only one Steve in our library so you can have multiple

Instances of the things that you create in your scene that are in your library that’s pretty much here nor there if you’re just getting started but just to say if you want to add more characters to your scene and it’s going to be the same character model you don’t have to

Go to the workbench and introduce a new object in your scene you can actually just duplicate an existing one and of course you know rename it we’re going to name this one do two and now we have two dudes and they’re two separate objects Boop just like that but we technically

Only have one instance or one character object of Steve in our scene that’s it’s uh we’re getting into the weeds here so let’s move on all right so back to the interface we click on Steve and you’ll see we get these little gizmos here if I

Turn that off you’ll see that all of our overlays and everything go away in the scene and we can just see it for uh what it is you might want to use that if you’re you know trying to play back an animation and you don’t want all the

Stuff on your screen but technically you just don’t have to have anything selected and you’ll get the same result and we have our aspect ratio what this does is forces the view whether it’s the 3D view or a camera view which we’ll get to later into what the aspect ratio is

For your final render so that way you can see exactly what your camera is going to be seeing and not uh this whole thing which you know the sides wouldn’t actually be rendering out up here we have our grid overlay this is a good use

For your rule of thirds you know if you want to learn what that is where you’re trying to compose your scenes well you can bring that up you can also customize how many lines you actually see there this here is for your particles we have particles in the scene we can turn them

On or off because they will you know affect the performance of your computer so if you want to have particles in your scene but not see them all the time you can disable them and that way you can kind of animate a little bit more efficiently without the program slowing

Down we have flat mode this means no lighting we have shaded mode and you can see there’s a little bit of a look to them there turn that off he’s the same color turn it on you can see there’s a little bit of shading and then we have

Render mode this is what your final animation will look like rendered Shadows Etc it’s beautiful then finally we have the enable secondary viewport click on that and now we have two of the same screen if we had a camera in our scene you can see here it says active

Camera then that’s what would actually be in here so let’s go ahead and do that we’re going to go into our workbench create camera and now you’ll see that we can move around on this scene and this stays the same because it is showing what our camera showed so how am I

Moving around the scene well if I’m left clicking and dragging my mouse around I am orbiting you’ll kind of orbit whatever the middle of your screen is an object that you’ve clicked on things like that you’ll start to kind of orbit around them very uh very intuitively if I right

Click with my mouse and I move it around then I’m kind of got a first person view I’m looking around from the perspective of my my camera my viewport here if while I’m holding right click I hit the W key I’m moving forward s backwards a left d right if you’ve played Minecraft

Or any other first person shooter then you know how those controls work but you have to be holding right click in the viewport same as with the camera I can actually animate the camera move it around in the scene using those same controls just right click in the

Corresponding viewport if I want to fine tune my uh movement here it feels a bit fast if I was trying to position the camera I can hold the shift key while I do this and it slows it down just a bit and if I hold the space key it uh speeds

It up quite a bit and we can actually change those in our preferences so let’s just take a quick dive into the preferences real quick and we have all of our options this is where you can see that we’re in advanced mode and not simple down here you see copy work

Camera into new camera so if you notice when we spawn the camera in as it was at the exact same angle that our work camera was in well that setting is what does that and this is all pretty much fine so we don’t need to go into those

Settings we’re just going to go on down to interface here so in our interface here we can actually change the theme whoa It’s blinding and that’s dark and then we have darker and you can also change the color of other aspects of the interface here I don’t know what color I

Like what color should I go with here I like that color it’s a little bit me all right so we have compact panels if we click on that then you’ll see that this whole thing kind of shrinks a little bit if you need some more real estate on

Your screen you can do that and kind of make things more compact compact timeline list same thing if you notice the spacing here between our timelines if I click this it makes them a little less spaced out it might kind of make it challenging to select things accurately sometimes you

Know with the time I was being a little closer together but if you need the extra space then you know there you go so rather than go through all these one by one I’m just going to skip to the ones that we need immediately you can

Play with these and figure out what they all do one thing I like to have is z is up that means instead of Y being the up and down motion this is going to be your z-axis that goes up and down then you’re gonna have your X and your y

Uh that’s just a preference I like to have you can leave it however you like but just remember from now on if I say Z then I’m talking about up and down and finally back to uh what got us started on this little Adventure we’re gonna go

To the controls Tab and we get the move speed here this is when you click in here and you and you move around we’re at speed one I can reduce that let’s say 0.5 hit enter and you’ll see I move a little bit slower here so what

I’m actually going to do is leave that at one I think that’s a good speed and the fast modifier this is how fast you go when you hold the space key you’ll see the slow modifier is 0.25 meaning we move a quarter of the speed of the move

Speed there and I actually like to have it just a little slower so I put that on 1.5 and then as you can see I can get a little bit more of a fine tune I can obviously slow that down even more if I wanted to but that’s what I like

All right so now that we’re done with that slog let’s go ahead and actually uh close this little window once again if we lose it we can always bring it back right there we can also just click this button on and off can’t make up my mind okay we’re gonna

Leave it off so we’ve got these here and what you can see is we’ve got several different uh gizmos here to play with we have these they’re up and down remember like I said the Z you’ll see that these are the values the numerical values so

If I actually wanted to zero this out I can reset all values Boop and that puts Steve at zero this is basically you know the origin of our scene here all zeros so you can move the character like this no y x and the Z and uh we can rotate them using this

Just like so and then these little gizmos actually allow you to kind of move around more in a three-dimensional way on that particular axis so this is a yeah this kind of don’t match up this is this is our our x-axis but it’s the color of the Y but maybe they did that

Too why is it that way but as you can see here I can click on that and I can actually move Steve up and down and back and forth on that axis so that just gives you a little bit more freedom with the movements of the character once

Again I can reset those values by clicking on that and reset that value by clicking on that and there we go now he’s back to normal so uh these are the gizmos you have as you can see over here these are all highlighted in yellow if I

Click on the scale tool then you’ll see that all those go away and we now have a different set of tools there and look at that if I click on that one it does that click on this one it just scales on Z this one scales on our y-axis this one

Scales on X but again just like the other move tools if I click on this you can kind of scale across a couple of different axes at the same time Steve looks like he’s underwater conversely if I go to these I can actually just select one at a time so

There’s our bin tool but right now we don’t have anything that we can bend let’s click on his arm right there and you’ll see that we now have a little bendy you do and that’s all that it shows though so if I click on rotation now we also have this rotation

If I click rid of Bend then we just have the rotation if I click on the Move tool now we have move and rotation but if I click off the rotation now we just have move but generally I don’t think you really need that level of specificity so

I’m just going to go ahead and turn those all back on so that we have the ability to do whatever we want when we want and we can bend we can rotate and we can move all in one go as you can see it gets a little bit cluttered there so

That’s why you might would want to select these on and off but now you know okay so we’ve got our camera we’ve got our character we know how to move things around let’s go ahead and Venture into the next part of the interface which is the environment so

With the environment tab we can actually adjust what our scene is going to look like just kind of the default parameters so I’m going to go ahead and turn on render mode so that we can see our shadows and we’ve got the time here and

We can adjust the time of day you can see that the sun and the moon are generated by default within my animator and as we change the time it changes everything for us and it looks pretty good we can click on rotate here and that’s going to change the direction of

The Sun in our scene so if I put it like this and then I take it down you’ll see that the sun is now over there I can rotate it and you’ll see we’re rotating the sun’s position around so that’s pretty cool Okay so we’ve got the time

Of day we’ve got our angle set up Steve’s looking pretty beautiful but let’s actually adjust this a bit we can now go to the sun strength and the sun angle as you can see here the angular diameter of the sun changes the size of sun and shadows so first I want to give

My strength I feel like this is kind of a weak Sun I like my son to be a little brighter maybe 200 percent maybe a bit much let’s try 150 percent I feel like that looks a little better actually looks like Steve’s got some real sunlight on his face and let’s change

The angle here if we go down lower to zero then I think we’re gonna have the sharpest Shadows you can have so if I go up and you can see we get softer shadows and you can see like when I click and move around that changes the

Rendering so it’s only once you stop and let the program do its thing you see we’ve got some actually uh good looking Shadows there they started out sharp and then they get softer as they go up Advanced rendering this is why you want to use monomator 2.0 over the previous

Versions now let’s go to our Sky background we have Minecraft or we can do custom where you can actually bring in an image and a Sky Box you know we’re not gonna do that right now but you can see that it kind of changed things if I

Go back to Minecraft gives us back our Minecraft uh default options here we got a moon texture we have Sun texture we got a moon phase so we can actually change the shape of the moon so I can click on we’re on Full Moon I can go to new moon first quarter

Etc so if you don’t want to just have that default very beautiful big succulent moving there then we can actually change that next up clouds let’s go to our clouds we got normal as you can see they’re normal clouds go to faded oh a little bit like what story

Mode clouds or something or we can do flat this is for all the uh pled PCS out there that can’t handle the 3D clouds I guess in Minecraft I don’t know that’s a look though if you want it we can change the speed of the clouds as

100 we can bring it down to 25 percent that means they’ll move slower bring it up to 300 percent that means they’ll move faster right now they’re not really moving much at all but throughout your animation they may be moving to be honest that kind of throws me off in the

Previous versions the clouds are moving the whole time so I’m not exactly sure what the deal is with that haven’t used 2.0 enough here I am making a tutorial about it in any case we can change the offset so we can you know move the clouds manually if we want to we can

Change the height bring them way down let’s actually make that a little more noticeable so if we bring our clouds back ugh we’ll bring it down it’s got some fog or something you know little hanging clouds whatever change the size you can bring these way in make little small

Clouds or we can make them enormous and have really spaced out you know kind of Midwestern Plains kind of clouds let’s go ahead and reset that you reset these values by right clicking click reset and now we’re back to our default we can change the thickness we’re gonna have a

Big thick you know maybe thunderous clouds and we can bring down make them maybe not flat clouds but a little thinner something like that you know let’s go ahead and make them thick clouds and we go down here to our Cloud color and we can actually

Do this and oh man we got some storm clouds isn’t that Nifty let’s go ahead and reset that that’s not too Nifty actually next up the ground so as you can see by default we just have some ground here and uh it’s grass but if we

Don’t want to be grass we can come down here to our ground tab change ground and then we get this list of all sorts of Minecraft block textures and the other textures now of course we could import a scene but sometimes you’re going to have this ground visible

In the distance so if you want it to be a grass plane or maybe you want it to be an island or something let’s see if we can find the water and then we put a little piece of scenery in here and we would have kind

Of uh an ocean of sorts then we have fog so we’ll go to fog here we got Sky fog as you can see it kind of has that foggy look back there if I turn that off uh which one is it this one there we go oh exactly so the coolest features here

For me when I like to play with is distance and fade size and what that does is this is 10 000 blocks away or whatever uh unit is using and we can bring that in and that brings our fog in real close like and then we can do Fade

Size so if we go smaller that means the actual distance between the thickest fog and the thinnest fog is gonna shrink and if we bring it up and then it goes further so like if we bring the distance further out let’s say 10 000 and we bring the fade

Up and you’ll see that we get more of a gradual fade in and if we bring it down it’s less of a gradual phase yeah who would have thought it well what’s this we have a tree in our scene okay so for the next one which is wind we needed to

Have something in here that would be affected by wind so click on wind and this is going to adjust how much these leaves here are affected by our wind so we can turn up speed let’s say 50 percent let’s play the animation and you’ll see that it’s being affected by wind quite a

Bit so if we go back to 10 and I’m playing the animation by hitting the space bar by the way you also have these controls here see not quite as effective but we can also turn the strength way up and it’s uh going a little crazy there I’m actually

Kind of liking this look though directional speed directional strength all these things we probably need more full scene to kind of you know see what that’s all doing but that should give you a good enough idea of what’s happening in your scene here and how these settings affect things so I’ve

Reset that but that is also something uh to note if you turn the wind off then you’re not going to have any movement so if you kind of want to have a non-shader look you know where Minecraft is just kind of looking like Minecraft in your animation then you can actually just

Have the wind off and not have any of those effects applied all right so that’s it for the interface for this tutorial we’ll be getting into other aspects of it as we progress through this tutorial series but that should be enough to get you started and familiar

With it just go through and play with things see what things do don’t be afraid of it you can always reset to default that’s going to do it for me thanks for watching part one of this series tune in for part two we’re gonna go into importing your worlds and all

The little details that go into that so thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one