Part I: Get ready! - Animating a Shot in Blender 2.9

In today's video, we're going to start a new series of animating a shot from start to finish. Hi, I'm Luciano and welcome to the Adventures of the Little Man. We'll set up the shot, we'll bring in the audio, bring in your references, put the stuff in place so we can get started, set up the constraints and get on with blocking. Then we'll polish the shot and then we'll finish it up. Today's video is mostly technical about bringing the characters together, linking them all in. And yeah, we're going to take it slow so we can go step by step. Check out my Gumroad for some rigs, some characters like the one that we're going to use today. Remember to like and subscribe and let's get started. We're going to start by organizing our project folders and our structure of the scene so we can get into animating. The first thing is to know that Blender doesn't have a project management system built in, kind of like what you'd have in Maya where it creates its own folders. So that's something that you need to build by hand, but it's good that you keep a proper structure because it's going to be easy to move a project around and do stuff like that. So I went and created basically the main folders that I use most of the time. One for sound, one for the scenes where I'll be animating, one for the images that I'm going to output like play blast or renders, and then one for the assets, which is where I'm going to throw my rigs and characters and stuff like that. And then maybe if I have textures separately, I will create a textures folder or they could go inside the assets if you make them go with the rig because you can save them in the rig file. And for personal projects or smaller projects, I think that's a good idea to keep everything as tight as possible so you don't get to lose much stuff. So this is my project setup basically. So I got those four folders. I'm going to actually put them in a bigger folder, which is called Rocket Girl Project. So I'm going to put all of them inside of that one. And now we have everything. And so now we can jump into Blender and start putting things together. So first of all, I'm going to delete this stuff. Second, I realized that the interface was a little bit bigger before. So I'm just going to do that so you can see better. You can see that's much better for your eyes and mine getting old. And now we're going to start by getting rid of the crap we don't need. So first of all, I'm going to delete all of the spaces that I don't want because they stay in the scene. And so wherever you go with this, they'll just stay. And I don't want them all. I really think that they should be separate, like the spaces should be not on the file, but on your Blender. So you choose what types of spaces do you have. So we got layout, animation, and video editing. You're going to see why the video editing one is going to come in handy. And so layout. And we're going to get our scene together and get started on that. So I'm going to link the files. To link, there's several ways that we can do this. We can go file, link, which is one way. And we can also just like drag the character and link it in. And now we can just go click link. And we're into the file. And the file is a library, which we probably talked about before. So we're going to go into the collections. And I made it very obvious which one you need to link because by looking at it by name, if you kind of not look at the fact this one says link collection, we have a character one, a rig one, a local one, a model one, which all to some extent sound like they could be the one that you want to link. And so because this linking system is still like not super friendly in the way of like what you need to pick and how to recognize it and just like make it work. I just decided to make it obvious by naming it obvious. Also Blender is really good at naming. So no matter if you have like caps lock and spaces and like whatever, like capitals, I'm sorry. Whatever you can put in your name, Blender will not have a problem like Maya has. And so yeah, I was like, why not? So link that in. And then we got a character. And now we're going to go to object and relations and make proxy. And then again, you get this one is the one that you want to link in. Proxy. Boom. So we have a character and it's rigged, which is awesome. And so first of all, I'm going to select both of them. And then I'm going to put them in a collection. Sadly, the collection button doesn't do that for you, but you could do that with M. You press M, then it will allow you to do that. So this collection, I'm going to call it Rocket Girl. I'm just going to hide it, turn it off for now. I'm going to make my famous collection cinematography with the object selected and M. It will move it to a new collection in this case. All that it has to do with the camera, with the lights and everything is going to go into that collection. And then I'm going to bring in the rocket. So this one, I'm going to do normal. Just go here, import link. And then as you can see, it's going to be harder to find the object. So I can just drag and drop it from the Explorer to Blender. And then it puts me in that folder, which is really cool. So if you have always your windows open with your files, it's very easy to go and navigate this way as well. So rocket rig and this, we're going to hit a problem here because I don't remember which one is here. So rocket collection. Interesting. Okay. Yeah, that's probably the one we want. And then if I go here and make a proxy armature. So this file, I didn't prepare much clearly and now we got the rig. But we got in the collection, in the regional collection, where the geometry is, there is also a copy of the rig and we don't want that. So we're going to move these two guys here. We're going to put them in a new collection called rocket, right? And we're going to move this down. I don't know how to do that. Maybe just drag it down. Cool. Right. And this one we're going to get rid of. We can select it and press X just like everything in Blender. And we are going to save this file. And again, I'm going to want to save it in my project folder in scenes. I'll drag this here. So now we're in scenes. We're going to call this. I usually like to have twice, like 001, 001. Because that way, this is the version of the file. So say I made a different choice, then the first three numbers will be those choices. And then the one with four digits usually just goes up every single time I save. So yeah, it's not a good idea to override your files. Always save incremental. It will keep you safe. So we've got this first version, which is our setup. We don't want this double controller thing that we're looking at right now. Because that gets in the way mostly when you go into post-mode. And as you can see, I'm trying to go into post-mode. That's giving me a headache. Because tab by default in like a brand new Blender will only try to go to edit mode. And so when you're in a link character, Blender can't go into edit mode. So it will give you an error message instead of like doing whatever you want it to do. And so I prefer personally going to preferences, emap, and then setting tab for pie menu. Because that will make it that every time that you press tab, you get a pie menu. And so you get the option to go to post-mode instead of like getting hit with an error message, right? So that's much, much better for us. I'm going to go to the rocket file. So we're going to go here, assets, rocket rig. And then we're going to open this file and make sure you see how everything changed because of the file. I'm not super happy about that in any case. So we have this collection right here, which contains the armature. It contains this thing. So we're going to make sure that we can see those little guys there. And so if you hide them with that, then it stays hidden in the other file. So I'm just going to hide it here like, so I'm going to call this, I shouldn't change the name now because the link is going to be lost, but I'm going to do it just because I haven't started in the other file. So I don't mind that it gets lost and that I have to do it again. So I'm going to do this rocket rig and then here hidden. Yeah, we don't need any of that. Probably this circle should go there too, actually. And then under the rig, we got, this is the name of the rocket. You see, I'm super organized all the time. A rocket model. And yeah, this is what we want. Should be good. So now I'm going to save and I'm going to go to my file again. We are going to allow execution. This comes up because of the Rigify rig, which has the rig UI Python that executes itself to create the interface. So we'll allow it and we permanently allow it. So I'm going to go again file. It's missing something. So the rocket girl is there. It's hidden, but it's there. And then the rocket itself. It's also here. And the collection, it has the collection and the collection works. Okay. Something doesn't work because of the naming change that we did. Probably. So I'm just going to delete these guys here. Way to go again, link. I did not rename that collection. Did I? Rocket rig collection probably didn't rename it. And then relations make proxy rocket rig. At least we have that now it should be working. And then, yeah, that and that. And as you can see, it's problematic. This is something I spoke about earlier and how the coloring, it's not letting me understand whether things are selected or not. And so if I go to their girl rig in her case, it's very clear what is selected and what isn't. And in this case, it's very hard to figure out if something is selected or not, which I can probably fix. So we're going to do that right now. I'm going to just let all of this inside of this video, because I think you're going to bump into a lot of these similar issues and you'll probably want to fix them. Mostly if you're doing a shot on your own and there's not a pipeline or, or something fixing this stuff for you. Right? So I'm going to put these guys here. Actually, I'm going to move them into the rocket collection. I'm going to hide this guy for now. I'm going to save this file again. I'm going to go and open again, my rocket rig. Luckily the changes are starting to propagate there. And so now I should actually rename this rocket. And what did I say? I need to do, oh, change the colors. And so the colors, the colors of the rig. So I need to show it. And so here comes an issue, which will, which is part of this new way of linking. So for me to not need to, to not be able to see the rig in the other file where it's linked to, I need to turn off the little TV here. The problem is, is that this doesn't allow me to see it in my own scene where I'm working with it. And so the way around this is to create something like a new collection, which we're going to call local, right? And now we have the rocket rig in this collection and we can have it as well in this collection. So I'm going to also select the rocket rig because we need it to be in the collection that it's going to be linked, but turned off. And so at this moment, we only have it now in the local one and it disappeared from the rocket rig one. So what we want to do is keep it shared between the two collections, which is an interesting concept. And so I'm going to go to collections and add it to the rocket rig one. And so in the rocket rig one, if I turn it off, you can see that it also turns off here. And so in this one, we are going to put it inside a secondary collection called rig. But this rig collection, you see, it took it out of the other collections and now we need to make a mess basically. So we need to move this collection inside the rocket rig. Now it's sitting inside. We can turn it off from there. So it's not visible and we can take the model. And as you can see now, the model is separately inside that same collection, but it's on, that's why we can see it. Even if the rig doesn't have it. And then in the local one, we want the rig itself also be in the local one. And so now we can see it because visually this guy shouldn't be here. Let's hide it. So visually the local one is showing it. And then the one that's inside the rocket rig, it's not showing it. So as long as there's all this one collection that's showing the rig, it will be visible. But this means that because this is the collection that's going to get linked, then it's not going to be visible in that case. And so the local collection is the one that doesn't move over. It's an interesting concept. Again, let's go back to the rig. So I'm going to go to bone groups and you see we have these three ones here. For some reason, this is not being taken into consideration, which is interesting. So select the red ones. Yeah. And then custom color set. Now it works. And then the yellow ones, custom color set. And then the green ones, custom color set. Now it will work. So I have done it at some point for some reason it wasn't working, but now it works. Bam. So now we can again save our file. I'm going to replace it because I'm a mess. And I'm going to go to my scene one. The rocket, it's obviously not working again because I screwed with the names. So let's just delete all of that. File link, rocket rig link this one. That's kind of obvious. And now file, as you can see, the, the controls are not there. And then relations make proxy rocket rig. Now we got that. And then they have the colors that I want. Cool. Finally. We only got to cover the linking part at this point, because it's important that, you know, the entire process and how to set up the characters when they're not ready. In the next video, we're going to bring in the sound. We're going to bring in some reference and we're going to move forward to the next step. So remember to like, if you like subscribe and see me next time.