The Nuts and Bolts of Blender's animation system
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- Опубликовано: 10 авг 2024
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In this video, I cover some of the most fundamental concepts in Blender's animation system. I made this video to cover some basics that will be necessary for the next video which will be all about the NLA editor.
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In this lesson, you'll gain a basic understanding of
-Transforms
-Keyframes
-Keyframes interpolation
-Actions
And the following editors:
-the Timeline
-Dope Sheet
-Graph Editor
-Action Editor
-NLA
0:00 Intro
1:46 Transforms
2:47 Keyframes
5:15 Keyframe Interpolation
6:13 Actions
12:50 Dope Sheet, and Curves, and Actions, oh my!
17:10 NLA
18:27 Recap
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Кино
![[Blender] Un-confusing the NLA Editor (Nonlinear Animation)](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/tAo7HxxxA08/mqdefault.jpg)
![[Blender] Un-confusing the NLA Editor (Nonlinear Animation)](/img/tr.png)
There is a lot of tutorials where they teach you something and make you only even more confused or opposite, after watching one you feel like you didn't even scratched the surface of presented subject. And you seem to balance it perfectly, after watching your tutorial I feel that I know what actually all those tools really are, how they work together and how to use them
Just after watching this, I'm way less intimidated by animation in Blender. It has a clarity that none of the other videos I've watched on the subject had. You really have a gift for teaching.
Awesome, thank you very much!
This video should be linked in the home page of Blender.org
Glad you liked that much, Fabrizio.
This has to be the best channel out there for Blender tutorials
Haha, thank you, appreciate this :)
reading ma mind brooooo🔥😭❤️
i swear!
could not agree more!
Wasn't there a Beginners playlist on this channel too ?
This is the best tutorial. I can't believe after many months learn blender animation, I dont even know about NLA at all. You enlighten me! Thanks a lot.
I think this is one of the best tutorials I've ever seen on any subject. So many parts in the UI, interconnected in such a complex way, and after watching this I 'get it' enough to start experimenting confidently!
Thnak you, Rick!
Thank you so much for this! I've found it difficult to find tutorials that will answer my noob animation questions but you really cover the basics!
I've been going through your Rigify course, and I have to say you're the best I've encountered when it comes to actually teaching how Blender works. There is so much to learn, but you are able to break it all down in an easy to understand manner. You're amazing!
Hey thanks, man! Always great to hear that the tuts are useful.
straight facts
I really appreciate your use of captions to explain when something is unclear in the narration.
Yeah, while I am editing the videos, I often realize that I missed important info so I add it as annotations. Glad it's helpful.
Yeah, I really need the NLA video lol. I cant wait!
NLA is tough to cover well but I am working on it. Coming soon!
Really looking forward to these, there’s hardly any content about animating full scenes
I also asked on twitter but let me know what you mean by a "full scene" :)
@@CGDive Not sure what the guy meant, but personally I would like more on handling the curve editor and action editor in complex scenes, where you need filters and isolation of separate tracks. Because it is a real pain, especially without knowing the fundamentals. BTW truly appreciate what you do man, acquired your Rigify course and still not done watching it. Amazing job!
@@MelvilleG Did you watch the other two videos in the series?
ruclips.net/video/tAo7HxxxA08/видео.html
ruclips.net/video/UxdPtVAz6Do/видео.html
I finally understood "fake users"... After all this time! Thank you a lot!
That's awesome, it is a very important concept in Blender even if I wish there would be a better solution for it!
ohhhh wow... thats the stuff i don't know. I mention your channel in my channel features... It's a very detailed video...Fan of yours from today
Thanks, man!
I did not animate a lot so this tutorial will surely help me get those basics at last. Keep doing excellent work
Glad to hear that. Basics are super important. More to come!
best explanation of NLA & Actions - everyone else just jumps right in doing things whereas CGDive clearly explains the high level reasoning and bigger picture, thanks a lot!
Glad it was helpful!
amazing explanation of a complex topic. Well done!
Really looking forward to follow up videos about the various editors. Great work!
Coming soon, mate :)
Far the best explanation of Blender animation system. Love it.
Easing myself into the world of animation. You are the perfect channel for this - thank you! 💃
Wow, thank you! Keep learning ~~
@@CGDive I will! 😁
Thanks a lot for making those intros, it saves so much time knowing what the video truly contains!
THANK YOU!
I needed this simple and clear explanation so much!
Ready for the next video thanks for this!
Thanks for watching! Next vid coming next week or so :)
@@CGDive Quick question.. What do you think about the "Animation Layers" add on for additive animation editing? Have you used it? How does it contrast to doing it the vanilla way with NLA?
@@DevGods Haven't used it sorry. I know Luciano did a review on it.
I think that is it ruclips.net/video/tOx_SAG7gl4/видео.html
@@CGDive yea I watched that one just wanted to see if you had any thoughts.. I went ahead and bought the addon after the developer answered a question I had about it’s workflow.. Thanks
Wow! Thank you. That was such a clear introduction to the topic.
That cleared a lot of doubts about the animation in Blender. Thank you.
Great condensation of all of the basic animation tools in one place.
Absolutely fantastic tutorials! Thanks so much for this!!!!
Very clear, thank you for sharing.
On time. Thank you so much. Waiting for next video
You are most welcome.
Great tutotials, many thanks
Great explanation, you break things down nicely and to the point. Subbed
Great breakdown of animation features! I'll be watching the following tutorials also. Thank you so much for making this simpler!
Glad you liked it! :) Happy watching.
Thank you very much! Learned a lot today!!!
great tutorial, thank you 🙏🏻
Great tutorial. Learned some new stuff Thanks!!!!
Thanks, Carlos! Always nice to hear from ya 😊
Excellent tutorials. Thank you.
You're the best!
This year I will study animation and I will learn a lot with your channel.
Thank you!
Thanks and best of luck with your animation study!
Thanks for this. I have had trouble finding a clear summary of how all the animation tools relate to each other.
You are an excellent teacher! I learned so much in this video.
great video, thanks!
Thanks once again like always you help us. I have been using blender for almost a year but still I hope I will learn everything in proper order from this video.
That is my hope too :)
this is gold, man. You are amazing.
Thanks, Nate!
great video! so helpful
Thank you so much!!
Very clear, thank you
Glad to hear that, Calavera! :D
Great tutorial!
this was helpful, thanks
bro , omg ,, I should have watched this the first time I opened blender !! So many things I could have been paying attention to, but just not aware.
Glad you liked the video, man!
Thank you for the effort!
No prob! :D
Thanks for this. A little complicated at the beginning but most effective.
I cant wait for NLA editor.
Working on it. Will be out very soon. :)
Thanks!
Really good explained, thank you ! Keep it up =)
Excellent tutorial. Thanks for sharing.
And thank you for watching!
Very good! Thank you.
Thank you too!
Very helpful!
woooooooooooow you are the best blender teacher imo
Although I knew how to work with dope sheet and others but I didn't know about action storage just like materials and Action editor.
Yeah, that's a good analogy!
this is excellent
잘 보고 갑니다. 좋은 설명 감사합니다.
Thank you, Todor!
Any time!
v good tutorial series!
you are the best teacher, thanks
Thank you~
thank you
Nice one ! THX
No problem 👍
Your tutorials and explanations are the best, thank you so much! Really excited for the upcoming videos. I've been learning so much from your gumroad Rigify courses. I bought the Ogre and Dragon advanced rigging courses and they are FANTASTIC and 100% worth the reasonable price. Will you be mentioning the Pose Library at all? I noticed that it uses actions too!
Glad you like my stuff and thanks for buying the course!
As for Pose Library... yes, it is on my list but the list is long haha But yeah, I am keeping it in mind.
This is the best explanation I've found for this poorly documented system
thank you for demystifying it
the nla actions are integral to the UE import
Nice tutorial..❤️❤️
Plz make full detailed explanation video on NLA,
Working on it. ;D
Here is a very gifted teacher
Thank you, my freind!
Thx mate.
Keep em coming as fast as you possible can churn them out.
I'm just about to start messing with actions and NLA myself.
I have a suggestion for you though.
Please make a video where you explain why most Blender rigs comes with their control bones (AKA control curves in other apps) set to quaternions instead of Euler rotations?
I find Quaternions super hard to work with on rigs.
So if I'm doing something wrong I need to learn how it works fast.
Luckily if the rig is made with Rigify we can use a special tool to switch to Euler even after we have started animating without loosing any work. To bad it only works with Rigify rigs though.
Thanks, mate!
Oh euler vs Quaternions. That's a rabbit hole for sure. :D The general rule I follow is that I keep joints with a lot of freedom of rotation (e.g. the shoulder) to Quaternions, otherwise I use Euler.
But I'll put this topic on my list.
Oh, and by the way, the tool that comes with Rigify for converting between Euler and Quaternions is not only for Rigify. As far as I know, it was a separate addon, it was then added to Rigify for some strange reason... and now the devs want to separate it again :P
Thank you for the summary. What things are possible in the dopesheet editor that aren’t available in the action editor? I’ve been using the action editor solely and never needed the dope sheet yet
Yeah, in recent versions they are quite similar. Even the Timeline has a lit of the features. I'll try to point out difference when/if I make a video about the dope sheet.
Is there a video where you explain how to combine Mixamo animations in a sequence, eliminating the "origin jump back"? Is this possible with the NLA?
And I agree with another comment, these videos should be on blender's website. Logical, concise and to the point.
I don't have such a video yet. There are some on RUclips tho.
ur awesome man ..
You too man! :D
Wow, awesome animations on your channel! Congrats!
@@CGDive thanks alot man .. it really means alot to me .. i will keep uploading better ones .. and u keep making wonders with these perfect tutorials .. i will tell everybody i know about ur channel .. ur the best .. cheers
@@bilosofie Keep rocking, mate!
respect..
the respect is mutual :)
I NEED this! Having so many issues getting my animations into Unreal, I don’t know/understand the NLA stack/editor at all so I’m just exporting my actions but in UE4 I have to go in and manually remove empty frames because it imports from blender with too many frames and won’t seamlessly cycle like in blender 😔
I'll cover this in the next videos but if you can't wait, try this. Push your action to NLA, go to the strip options and under Action Clip reduce the End frame by 1. So if End is 73 by default set it to 72.
See this image because there are two Start/End settings. You want the lower one. More info in the next videos. :)
imgur.com/a/n4vOZ9i
@@CGDive Wow! Thank you!!! You’re a life saver, I’ve been pulling my hair out on this one for days! I really appreciate this!
@@CosmicComputer CGDive - it's good for your hair! :P
do you think we can do procedural animation in blender like we can in godot? i just want to control my rig like a video game
Not sure what your mean by procedural animation. Can you give an example from Godot? Blender has animation curve modifies which can create certain type of procedural anims.
Your videos are awesome. I am searching for a feature in blender for weeks, Found no answer. Can you help me a bit. I want to save a material change animation as action for later use in blender. e.g. I want to change the color of default cube from green to red. And I want to save this animation as action. How can I do this? what are the steps?
Ah, good question. The animation of a material property is part of the material itself. I guess you could create a custom property on a mesh object or rig and make it drive e.g. the color of the material. That way it will be part of the object or armature action...
@@CGDive Can you you make a video tutorial on this topic please?
@@rimonmath hmmm, probably not. There is a huge list of problems that people ask me about over and over and these have higher priority.
@@CGDive Is my problem not a high priority topic? There is no video tutorial on RUclips about saving material animation as action for later use. Actually I was looking to 2d face speak animation in 3d characters. There are lots of tutorials with image sequences. But I don’t find any work around for saving that animation as an action for later use. It would be a great tutorial.
This feels illegal watching. Soo much of my confusion was resolved by simply watching this video. That being said, I can't be the only one who thinks Blender's Animation system needs to be simplified, I mean 4 different panels are needed to be open in order to animate anything...
Anyways great tutorial!
Haha thanks!
As for the editors, I get it but at the end each one is needed. I tried to show this in the video but what you'll use depend on your needs. For very simple stuff you can just use the timeline. For more complex stuff add dope sheet and graph editor. Then NLA if needed. I hope the video didn't make you think that all have to be used and open at the same time. Only use what is necessary at the time.
Is there an easier way to animate a rigged character than Keyframing the individual controls on the rig?
The only thing that comes to mind is to use motion capture. Other than that I can't think of alternatives to keyframes.
Hello again. So I've finished a rig up and began animating it. I set keys using the gizmo inside the viewport.. Say I set a key for a Z location moving the selected bone up and down on the global axis. The key gets set properly, However when I got to tweak that key in the graph editor moving it up and down translates the bone on the local z axis which is killing my workflow.. I basically cant use the graph editor with this happening. Does anyone know what that is and how to fix it using a rigify rig?
Hey there. This is normal. All animations are recorded on the local axis only. Global axis when moving a bone or an object are there just for convinience. One of the many technicalities of 3d animation that you have to get used to, I am afraid. 😟
@@CGDive is there a way to get the controllers to follow global space so things are more predictable in the graph? I feel like this should be an important feature to have. Or will I just have to get used to moving things in local space in the view port? which is pretty awful imo. Can I gain more control by having better bone rolls? Or does this not have anything to do with the bone set up?
@@CGDive this means I basically have to adjust 2 keys to move on one axis.. that can’t be right there gotta be better way lol
@@CGDive I found the answer! Since I only want the transforms you follow global space the solution was to create a bone on the control rig that is lined up with world space and constrain the transforms of the IK control to that bone.. that way in the graph editor all the transforms will line up correctly
Good to hear you figured it out. And yeah, good rigs would have the controls aligned with the world or something else that makes sense.
you have a workspace for animation ?
I am not sure if you're asking a question or suggesting I use the Animation workspace.
The Animation workspace is nice but it wasn't exactly what I wanted for this video.
@@CGDive oh mean, I mean the custom workspace that you've made
@@kloa4219 Ah.. no :) I tend to reorganize my main interface as I go. This is probably not the best approach so do create your own workspaces :)
have you tried making shorts out of your videos ?
I have a couple of shorts already... and yes, I have an idea to take some time and just turn some of my existing videos into shorts. :)
So the Timeline isn't like a master Timeline like other programs where all your data sits after all? Cause my keyframes keep disappearing
Yeah, I think so but I have to say that I have all but forgotten how it works in other apps I had some experience with (e.g. MAX).
@@CGDive Haha I thought after doing everything the final key frames will end up on the timeline like most video/audio editing softwares but they kept disappearing after I switched to a new animation. SO I'm using NLA instead of the timeline keyframes since a lot of bones are present and it's not just a simple location keyframe. Thanks for the quick reply 🙏🏼
I find that default behavior of actions weird compared to other parts in blender. Every else in blender if you do something on a material or object, it automatically gets a user. I dont understand when creating these keyframes, why the action does not get a user. I really messed up my beginning days of Blender. because in most placed when something doesnt have a user it is still stored. Except here in the action editor, i find that very strange and very inconcistent. Wonder what the idea behind that is.
Hmmm... not sure what you mean. The way actions are handled is consistent with materials etc. When you create a new action it's automatically linked to the object you're animating. When you unlink it (X button), then it no longer has a user and it can be lost. This is exactly what happens with materials and other data that is linked to objects, isn't it?
@@CGDive i dont always see material gets cleaned automatically by Blender. But perhaps im mixing things up then.
@@RomboutVersluijs Yeah, there is like 84% chance that a piece of unlinked data will be deleted after reloading. So random :D I hope things will become easier to manage with the asset manager.
Sigh.. thanks. None of this except the Action Editor and maybe Graph Editor matters if you're exporting for games does it?
I came here because the NLA was interfering with my actions - and I thought action animations were separate from the general dopesheet (world animation).
Although, I still don't really understand why creating an action alone creates a strip on the NLA automatically - perhaps for preview purposes? Regardless, thank you for the rundown. I was about to pull my hair out - I understand Blender is an animation tool first, but for a simple game character loop this was very confusing.
Всегда создаю фейкового юзера для своих анимаций, так как был болезненный опыт потери данных. Спасибо за видео. С нетерпением жду туториала по NLA 👍
Thanks Dima. Yeah... always save your Action with Fake User. Blende really needs to improve the User experience in this area.
please help my dumbass, I have already created all my actions, that part is done completely, I have deleted the action instances from the nla window, now I want to start recalling and arranging my saved action clips back into nla and arrange them- how do I get the action clips back into the nla without using pushdown(which just creates new action instances I don't need)?
Hey hahaha
I am not sure how you got them in the NLA in the first place but one way is to set them as active action, then push them down.
Another one - a more professional approach - press shift+a in the NLA. That brings up a menu and you can choose your actions from there.
Please make videos on video editing in blender
Oh.. like the VSE or another editor? It's a bit outside of the scope of the channel at the moment but I'll think about it.
nla's that new crypto thing right
Not sure if you're joking, trolling or actually asking a question haha
Don't get me wrong, it's just hard to say on the internet.
So I'll assume it's an actual question. NLA is the Nonlinear Animation Editor in Blender. It has nothing to do with Crypto.
Thanks!