Realizing 3D Animation in Blender: Master the fundamentals of 3D animation in Blender, from keyframing to character movement

Realizing 3D Animation in Blender

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This book is dedicated to my wife, Elina, my parents, Mike and Charlotte, and the many members of the Blender community who have taught me, inspired me, and involved me in their wonderful artistic endeavors over the years.

– Sam Brubaker

Contributors

About the author

Sam Brubaker is an artist, 3D animator, and Blender expert. After stumbling upon Blender by chance in 2004, Sam was determined to be an animator, and in 2006 his short film won the Blender Foundation’s Suzanne Award for best animation. In 2012, Sam graduated from North Carolina State University with a bachelor’s in art and design and immediately started a career as a freelance animator, followed by a stint as a Blender instructor. He has since been a freelancer and educator living on both coasts of the United States. He now resides in the Midwest with his wife, Dr. Elina Thomas.

About the reviewer

Daniele Daldoss is a creative designer who finds his focus in turning classic design into motion graphics and 3D animation. His work ranges from one-off artwork projects to full-scale branding development with the extra mile of including digital technologies in the process. His clients are a mix of small businesses as well as large-scale international corporations.

One year ago, he was hired as a Motion Graphics Team Leader by an international company.

He’s been doing 3D design since 2005, his first year at the Academy of Fine Arts. In 2014, he switched to Blender after a colleague suggested it as software more in line with his way of working. He immediately fell in love with it. Today, he works full-time With Blender and couldn’t be happier.

Jonathan Daniel has been using Blender for over 6 years at this point and is an avid aircraft and tank enthusiast, often modeling these military vehicles in Blender as a hobby.

Table of Contents

Preface

Part 1: Introduction to Blender and the Fundamentals of Animation

1

Basic Keyframes in the Timeline

Technical requirements

Navigating the Timeline

Moving through time

Setting the frame range

Adjusting the Timeline view

Animation playback

Creating simple movement with keyframes

Keying the initial location

The keyed property

Keying the second location

Principles of keying

Keying rotation

Editing keyframes in the Timeline

Basic keyframe editing

Duplicating keyframes

Holding a position

Editing the timing of your animation

Animating nearly any property in Blender

Other keying methods

Keying the material color

Summary

Questions

2

The Graph Editor

Technical requirements

Getting the ball rolling

Navigating the Graph Editor

Bringing up the Graph Editor

The X and Y axes in the Graph Editor

Animation channels

Adjusting the Graph Editor view

Interpolation and easing

Setting the interpolation mode

Setting the easing type

Making the ball bounce

Linear interpolation for objects in mid-air

Adding bouncing keyframes in the Graph Editor

F-curve extrapolation

Linear extrapolation

Cyclic extrapolation

Summary

Questions

3

Bezier Keyframes

Technical requirements

One tired animator

The connected parts of our unicycle

keying the course checkpoints

A novel method for inserting keyframes in the Graph Editor

Bezier handle types

Exposing keyframe handles

Overview of Bezier handle types

Automatic and Auto Clamped Bezier handles

Vector and Aligned handles

Combining Vector and Aligned handles

Editing Bezier handles

Smooth movement with Aligned handles

Bounces with Free handles

Heading, weight, and balance

Motion paths as a visual guide

Tilting while turning

Leaning into it

Copying keyframes to another channel

Copying keyframes

Keying a single property

Pasting keyframes

Scaling keyframe values

Summary

Questions

4

Looking into Object Relationships

Technical requirements

Understanding object origins

The truth about objects and origins

Centering the origin

Grabbing the origin

Parenting objects

The parent/child relationship

Understanding constraints

Adding a constraint

World space versus local space

Copying constraints

Following a path

Editing the animation path

Adding a Follow Path constraint

Animating the path

Drivers

Adding a driver

Editing a driver

Driver F-curves

The final chart of object relationships

Summary

Questions

5

Rendering an Animation

Technical requirements

Setting up the camera

Adding a camera to the scene

Camera view-finding

The animated camera

Rendering basics

What is rendering, really?

Controls for rendering

Setting up our scene for rendering

Predicting and managing render performance

Rendering an image sequence

Why output an image sequence and not a video?

Output settings

Pre-render checklist

Rendering the animation

Viewing the rendered frames

Converting an image sequence to a video

The Video Sequence Editor

Output settings for video export

Outputting a video

Summary

Questions

Part 2: Character Animation

6

Linking and Posing a Character

Technical requirements

Linking a character in a new scene

Linked libraries

Making a library override

Understanding Rain’s armature

The art of rigging Rain

The CloudRig interface

Posing an armature

Pose mode

IK bones

FK bones

Fingers, faces, and other accessories

Creating a library of poses

The Asset Browser

Creating a pose asset

Practicing poses

Summary

Questions

7

Basic Character Animation

Technical requirements

Preparing Rain in a new scene

A brief recap on linking Rain into a new project

Using a pose asset

Setting bone relationships for an animation

Hiding bones

Keying pose bones

Blocking or roughing the animation

Reviewing our key poses

The Dope Sheet

Introduction to the Dope Sheet

Organizing the Dope Sheet

Going further into animating this character

Two more in-between poses

In-between operators for posing

Waving

Polishing the animation

Using the Graph Editor on bones

Animating Rain’s accessories

Summary

Questions

8

The Walk Cycle

Technical requirements

Preparing the walk cycle scene

The timeline of a walk cycle

Timeline markers

Getting Rain ready to walk

Moving forward on the Y axis

Establishing the stride length

Looping the animation

Putting Rain on a treadmill

Using a preview playback range

Adding more periodic motion

Torso movement

Swaying from side to side

The Action Editor

More torso animation with sine waves

Advanced footwork

Rolling the foot

Picking up the feet

Correcting the motion of the legs

Copying animation from the left foot to the right foot

Finishing the walk cycle

FK toes

FK arms

Final touches?

Summary

Questions

9

Sound and Lip-Syncing

Technical requirements

Using sound in Blender

Importing audio files into the Video Sequencer

Using sound strips

Timeline settings for working with sound

Acting without speaking

Key facial expressions

Automatic keyframing and keying sets

The science of lip-syncing

Phonetics for animators

Animating the mouth

Summary

Questions

10

Prop Interaction with Dynamic Constraints

Technical requirements

Touching the object

Setting up the shot

Reaching for an object

Setting up an object-to-bone relationship

Dummy bones – a smarter way to rig

The Copy Transforms constraint

Constraints with animated influence

Keying the influence of a constraint

Releasing the ball

Animating a throwing/tossing motion

Animating the ball being thrown

Summary

Questions

Part 3: Advanced Tools and Techniques

11

F-Curve Modifiers

Technical requirements

Where to find F-curve modifiers

Adding our first F-curve modifier

Getting fancy with F-curve modifiers

The Stepped Interpolation modifier

The Built-In Function modifier

Setting the clock with math

Using the Noise modifier

Adding the Noise modifier

Copying modifiers

More fun with Noise modifiers

Using a Noise modifier to simulate an explosion

Restricting the frame range of a modifier

Summary

Questions

12

Rigid Body Physics

Technical requirements

Creating a rigid body world

Our first rigid body simulation

Active and passive rigid bodies

Rigid body collision

The smashing-junk-together algorithm

Collision shapes

Selecting rigid body collision shapes

Destroying a wall

Building a wall

Destroying the wall

Baking the simulation

Summary

Questions

13

Animating with Multiple Cameras

Technical requirements

Ready camera two

Setting up multiple cameras

The active camera

Switching cameras in the Timeline

Camera overrides

Viewing with a local camera

Using multiple cameras in the Video Sequencer

Summary

Questions

14

Nonlinear Animation

Technical requirements

Reusing actions

Appending the walk cycle

Assigning an action in the Action Editor

A hard lesson in forgotten settings

The action strip

Introduction to the Nonlinear Animation editor

Actions in the NLA

Layering actions

Appending the second action

Animated Strip Time

The Strip Time property

Summary

Questions

Index

Other Books You May Enjoy

Preface

When someone takes an interest in learning 3D animation, the first question they usually ask is, What program should I use?

The answer, according to the smartest and most experienced animators, is that it’s a waste of time to argue about this. An app is merely a tool, not what makes you an animator. What matters are an animator’s ideas, patience, and willingness to learn. Every minute spent mulling over which app is best is a distraction from actually animating, so just pick one and get started!

I like that answer, don’t you? Anyway, the correct answer is Blender.

It’s not Blender’s excellent features and competitive price ($0) that make it the best. This quirky free program has changed dramatically since the version I downloaded as a teenager in 2004. Its suitability as an industry tool for animators is no longer disputed like it once was. But the thing that makes it the best 3D program hasn’t changed a bit – Blender is licensed under the GNU General Public License as free software. Not just free as in $0, but really free. The program – along with its source code – is free to download, modify, and share by anyone, and is legally stipulated to remain so in perpetuity. It cannot be acquired by another company. It will never charge you a subscription fee. If you expect to spend hours and hours of your time and creativity in a single program, that feature should matter to you most of all.

Another thing that hasn’t changed about Blender is how much fun it is to teach. Blender has always been full of features that users find accidentally. The community shares these secrets with one another like scholars sharing esoteric knowledge. With this book, I hope to share a little of that magic with you.

Who this book is for

If you’re new to 3D animation and would like to get started with the best 3D animation program out there, this book is for you. With my experience training 3D animators of all ages and skill levels, I’ll transform you from a novice tinkerer into a real animator from as early as Chapter 1

. Only the most basic starting familiarity with Blender is required.

Perhaps you’re already a competent Blender user who has yet to really break into animation, an experienced animator who’s looking to switch to an open source pipeline, or someone who just finished Part 1 of this book. If that sounds like you, you’ll find helpful exercises, tips, and commentary in the character animation chapters and chapters on advanced topics.

What you need to get started

This book does not come with a computer! To follow the exercises and make your own 3D animations, you’ll need Blender, a suitable computer on which to run it, and an internet connection.

Let’s look at this in a bit more detail.

Your animation workstation

The minimum and recommended system requirements to run Blender can be found on the official Blender website:

https://www.blender.org/download/requirements/

Nearly all new laptops and desktop computers will meet these criteria. Even if your machine is no longer the latest model, there’s a good chance it can run Blender perfectly fine as well.

Hardware

If you’re shopping for a new computer or an upgrade specifically geared toward 3D animation, I recommend putting your money toward a dedicated NVIDIA or AMD graphics card. A high-performance GPU is the most crucial computer part to help ensure your animations play back smoothly in Blender.

You will also need a mouse and keyboard. Blender makes use of practically every key on your keyboard as a hotkey, so a full-size keyboard with all the functions and number pad keys will be the most helpful. As for the mouse, that’s non-negotiable. You need a mouse with a left button, a right button, and a clickable scroll wheel in the middle. A touchpad will not do!

Operating system

Blender runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. If you have a choice and you’re curious about Linux, that happens to be the best operating system for Blender. Now would be an excellent time to try it out!

Put simply, Blender has all the technical requirements of a 3D video game. If you’ve got a computer that can play the latest games, an internet connection that can download them, and a mouse that’s fast enough to beat them, you’ve probably got all the hardware you need to make 3D animations.

Prerequisite knowledge

Though this book is written with the novice reader in mind, we’re going to skip the most elementary essentials and get straight to animating in Chapter 1

. That means you’ll need some starting familiarity with Blender and computers.

Computer literacy

You must know what a file is, because we will be saving files to folders. Later, we will need to click on those folders and find the files we saved there earlier.

Basic controls in Blender

You can be a Blender novice, just not a Blender never-seen-it-before. Do you know how to navigate 3D space in Blender and look at the default cube from all sides? How about selecting that cube and moving it to a different location on a particular axis? Can you delete the cube and replace it with a sphere? If these tasks don’t sound too hard, you already have what it takes to tackle this book.

Finally, you must be able to download and install Blender on your own.

Blender

Blender is free to download and easy to install. The latest version can be downloaded from the official site blender.org

, but every previous version is available as well.

For this book, I recommend downloading and installing version 4.0.2 here:

https://download.blender.org/release/Blender4.0/

Download the package that matches your operating system and install it. Using this version will ensure that what you see on your screen will be consistent with the instructions and screenshots of Blender in this book.

Blender is well maintained by developers at the Blender Foundation and in the worldwide community. Though updates to the software are frequent, the foundation keeps every previous version available online. Blender’s backward/forward compatibility is quite good, so later versions of Blender, such as 4.1, 4.2, and so on, may also work with the exercises in this book. This will gradually change as time goes on.

What this book covers

Chapter 1

, Basic Keyframes in the Timeline, to ease ourselves into the subject of keyframes, will cover how to create a rudimentary animation in Blender using the default cube and Blender’s most basic animation editor, the Timeline.

Chapter 2

, The Graph Editor, discusses Blender’s graph editor, which is indispensable for creating more complex motion. To realize the usefulness and importance of this tool, we will use it to animate a bouncing ball.

Chapter 3

, Bezier Keyframes, discusses Bezier keyframes. These versatile keyframes offer direct control over the shape of the F-Curve, allowing the animator to directly draw the animation. This will be useful for our third exercise: animating a unicycle!

Chapter 4

, Looking into Object Relationships, by examining the ways objects can be parented, constrained, and driven by other objects, teaches us how objects can be made to move in precise ways without being directly animated.

Chapter 5

, Rendering an Animation, discusses rendering. Your animation can’t just live inside a .blend file forever. You’ll want to render it as a sequence of still frames and export those frames to a video file that can be shared with others.

Chapter 6

, Linking and Posing a Character, looks at linking and posing a character. An aspiring animator should become familiar with character animation using a professional-quality rig. In this chapter, you’ll be introduced to Rain, an excellent rig provided for free by the Blender Foundation.

Chapter 7

, Basic Character Animation, discusses character animation, which requires managing hundreds or sometimes thousands of keyframes for a single scene. Two new areas in Blender are needed to do so effectively: the Dope Sheet and the Action Editor.

Chapter 8

, The Walk Cycle, explores making a character walk, which is essential but tricky! We’ll have to use the tools and techniques from previous chapters with even greater care and precision. Along the way, we’ll learn some additional techniques for ensuring symmetrical animation and smooth footwork.

Chapter 9

, Sound and Lip-Syncing, will guide you through the process of importing a voiceover audio file and animating Rain’s mouth to match the spoken words.

Chapter 10

, Prop Interaction with Dynamic Constraints, covers proper interaction. Picking up an object and throwing it is one of many acts that are simple to do in real life but not so simple to animate. We’ll need to add our own constraints, apply their effect at precise times, and even animate their influence.

Chapter 11

, F-Curve Modifiers, returns to the Graph Editor. There’s still more to the Graph Editor than meets the eye! F-Curve modifiers allow an animator to generate endless motion without endless keying! Animating a clock will be our exercise for applying this useful feature.

Chapter 12

, Rigid Body Physics, explores the physics of rigid bodies. Why animate lots of objects by hand when the computer can do the work? In this chapter, we’ll animate a wrecking ball destroying a wall – a perfect opportunity to use Blender’s rigid-body simulation features.

Chapter 13

, Animating with Multiple Cameras, covers various methods for using multiple camera objects in one animation. Most films and television shows are shot with more than one camera. There’s no reason 3D animation can’t be the same way.

Chapter 14

, Nonlinear Animation, explores what is possibly Blender’s most mysterious and esoteric feature, the Nonlinear Animation Editor, which allows you to animate your animation.

Getting the most out of this book

Each chapter in this book consists of an animation exercise with guided instructions. I recommend you read it while seated at your computer and follow along in Blender! That’s the idea, anyway – maybe you’ll decide to read the chapters out of order or disobey the instructions at your own peril. It’s a book, not a schoolmaster.

The Technical requirements section in each chapter will tell you what additional things you need to follow along. Some chapters require that you download a specific file prepared specifically for this book by yours truly. Other chapters may require using an asset you created earlier, so always remember to save your work at the end of the exercise!

Finally, there is a Questions section at the end of every chapter that will challenge you on what you’ve learned. These are not ordinary quizzes! Some questions are straightforward and have answers given in the preceding pages. Other questions are intended to make you think critically or do your own exploration in Blender. A few are jokes or trick questions, but the hardest questions of all are the ones that only sound like tricks... if you can answer any of those, you get an A+.

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Part 1: Introduction to Blender and the Fundamentals of Animation

Math is all about numbers, modeling is all about vertices, gravel is all about very small rocks, and animation is all about keyframes. These are all boring but essential facts, which is why we begin this book with three whole chapters that – though they have different names to hold your attention – are solely about keyframes. First, we’ll learn how to create them and move them left and right. Then, in the second chapter, we’ll move them up and down, and, in the third chapter, we’ll learn what makes them move by themselves when no one is looking.

By the time we get to the fourth chapter, we will have grown so sick of keyframes we’ll want to learn how to animate using as few of them as possible. Finally, the fifth chapter is about frames, of which keyframes are not a type. What is a keyframe, you ask? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

If you’ve never animated anything in Blender before, this is the place to start.

This part contains the following chapters:

Chapter 1

, Basic Keyframes in the Timeline

Chapter 2

, The Graph Editor

Chapter 3

, Bezier Keyframes

Chapter 4

, Looking into Object Relationships

Chapter 5

, Rendering an Animation

1

Basic Keyframes in the Timeline

For our first animation in Blender, we will animate the default cube. It has to be good for something! This may seem painfully boring, but we must keep things simple at first, and even simple objects can tell a story. Ours will be a 5-second epic about a young cube that ventures eastward into the unknown, then turns around, returns home, and rests in the end, wizened by many frames of traveling.

This exercise will serve as an introduction to Blender’s Timeline, as well as keyframes, the building blocks of any animation. We’ll use keyframes to determine the location, rotation, and color of the cube at various points in time.

Whereas this chapter is intended for readers with zero knowledge of Blender’s animation system, you will need to have a little experience in Blender’s basic functionality. This includes navigating the 3D Viewport, editing numeric values, and selecting and moving objects in 3D space.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

Navigating the Timeline

Creating simple movement with keyframes

Editing keyframes in the Timeline

Animating nearly any property in Blender

Technical requirements

To follow along, all you will need is Blender 4.0 running on a computer that meets the minimum system requirements. Later versions of Blender will probably be suitable for this book as well, with only minor changes, though this can’t be guaranteed.

Figure 1.1: The default scene in Blender 4.0, shown here in the Print Friendly theme

If you have already made significant changes to your user preferences or startup file, go to File | Defaults | Load Factory Settings to restore the same environment as the one shown in Figure 1.1.

Tip

For the time being, there’s no need to click on the Animation tab at the top of the screen or to switch to any other workspace. Everything in this chapter can be done in the default Layout workspace. Remember that workspaces are just preset window configurations for your convenience. They are not essential to each task for which they are labeled. Since Blender’s interface is so flexible, I usually ignore them or make my own.

Navigating the Timeline

Open a new file in Blender and take a look at the numbered area at the bottom of the screen just below the 3D Viewport. This area is called the Timeline, the most basic editor for animation work:

Figure 1.2: The Timeline

The Timeline displays your keyframes and contains controls for playback and basic keyframe editing. Much of the work of animating will involve this window and/or one of Blender’s several other animation editors.

Moving through time

The first thing you probably learned in Blender was how to navigate the 3D Viewport, moving your viewing angle around in 3D space using the middle mouse button and various keyboard shortcuts. For the same reason that you needed to learn this before actually modeling anything, you must learn how to navigate in time before animating anything.

In the header (the part with menus) of the Timeline, you’ll see some menus, playback controls, and finally some integer properties:

Figure 1.3: From left to right – the Current Frame, Start Frame, and End Frame properties

These are the Current Frame, Start Frame, and End Frame properties of your scene. The most crucial of these properties is the Current Frame.

Current Frame is a very special property that determines the frame, or point in time, in which the scene is displayed. Just as you must view a 3D model from many different angles, as an animator, you must move through time, viewing your animated scene at many different frames as you work.

Changing the Current Frame value moves backward and forward through time in your animation. There are a variety of ways to do this:

Directly editing the Current Frame value in the header of the Timeline

Clicking anywhere along the Timeline’s row of frame numbers

Tapping the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard

Holding Alt while scrolling with the mouse wheel

Tip

The vertical blue line in the Timeline which marks the current frame is called the playhead. Dragging the playhead left and right is a technique called scrubbing, which is indispensable for reviewing and inspecting your animation.

Give these methods a try. As you adjust the Current Frame value, the horizontal position of the playhead in the Timeline will move with it. Keep in mind that, because we have not yet animated anything, nothing else in Blender will move.

Setting the frame range

The default scene in Blender has a Start Frame value of 1 and an End Frame value of 250. This means that the animation will begin at frame 1 and end at frame 250, for a total duration of 250 frames. At the default frame rate of 24 frames per second (FPS), this will yield an animation just over 10 seconds long.

Tip

The Frame Rate setting of your animation can be found in the Dimension panel of the Output Properties in the Properties Editor. For the remainder of this book, however, we’ll stick with 24 frames per second, a nice divisible number and a rate commonly associated with a film-like or cinematic look.

250 frames is an awful lot for our first animation, so let’s shorten the range we have to work with. Dial down the End Frame property from 250 to 120:

Figure 1.4: End Frame set to 120

This shortens the duration of the animation to 120 frames, exactly 5 seconds. Just enough time for our epic 3-part adventure!

Adjusting the Timeline view

Although we’ve set our animation to end at frame 120 and not at frame 250, the Timeline is still displaying a range of frame numbers from 0 to 250. We’re no longer interested in any frames past 120, so let’s adjust our view to use the horizontal span of this area more effectively:

Middle-click and drag rightward in the Timeline to move the frame range 0 to 120 into roughly the center of the area.

Use your scroll wheel or Ctrl and middle-click to zoom in so that the Timeline displays only the desired range of interest, 0to 120.

As you can see, the controls for changing the Timeline view are pretty much the same as any other area in Blender:

Figure 1.5: The Timeline, adjusted to show only frames 0 to 120

Tip

If you lose your way in the Timeline (or almost any other editor, for that matter), press the Home key or go to View | Frame All. This has the same result as what we just did, restoring the editor’s view so that all visible content is nicely centered.

In later chapters, it will be necessary to scroll around, zooming in and out at different keyframes as our animations become more complex. For the rest of this chapter, however, we can leave the Timeline view where it is.

Animation playback

Controls for playback and for jumping to specific frames are in the center of the Timeline header:

Figure 1.6: Timeline playback buttons

Hitting the spacebar or clicking the Play button will play your (presently very boring) animation, rapidly incrementing the Current Frame value at the established frame rate. Hitting Ctrl + Shift + Spacebar or clicking the backward Play button plays your animation backward. Until stopped, the animation will play on repeat, looping back to the Start Frame after the End Frame has been reached.

You can stop the animation immediately at the current frame by hitting the spacebar again or by pressing the Pause button in the Timeline. Hitting Esc will stop the animation and also return to the original frame at which playback began. Remember to stop the animation before attempting to edit anything.

Tip

Playing and stopping animations is such a frequent action that I almost always use keyboard shortcuts instead of clicking on these buttons. The hotkeys for playback work in every editor, so you won’t always have to have the Timeline open.

We’ve gone long enough without animating anything – let’s now make the cube move!

Creating simple movement with keyframes

In the first act, our hero Cube will stride fearlessly from west to east. We’ll achieve this using keyframes, a technique inherited from the traditional hand-drawn animation process.

In hand-drawn animation, a lead animator draws the most important frames in a shot, or keyframes, which determine the positions and expressions of characters and objects in the shot