Animating a Blink, Part I: Blocking - BLENDER ANIMATION WORKFLOWS [Blender 2.8]

Hi, I'm Luciano and welcome to the adventures of Lollipopman. Welcome to the Blender animation workflow. This is where I sit down and try to animate a shot and show you my approach in Blender. So yeah, I think that's it. Remember to like and subscribe and let's get on it. Okay, so I'm gonna try to keep everything as simple as possible and not take 70 hours and to do a blank. And so first of all, we have our character and our scene. And as you can see, I've deleted all the workspaces that I don't need. I've only kept this layout one and the animation one. I'm gonna get my timeline up a little bit higher and then have this thing here. And most of the video is based on default Blender hotkeys, default Blender tools, besides one set of hotkeys that I've changed, which I talk about in the effective keyframing. I think I'm gonna make a few adjustments. This is on by default, which when working in animation is great because if you get to post-mode in your rig, then this will not allow you to get out easily. And what you want to do is just stay in post-mode all the time. And then we'll go to preferences here. And then in the key map, we're going to change tab for pie menu, which makes life much easier. Something quick. If you want to change your navigation smooth view to zero, which will make that when you change from one view to the other one, you don't get that little rotation. And under system, you want to put auto save in one. So it saves every minute, save versions in zero. So you don't get that annoying blend one file. And under system, you want to go all in with your undoes because I don't know, I use that a lot. You can probably use an emulate numpad as well. I use it just because I really like this hotkey and I tend to press one by mistake. And when I press one, it changes the, the layer visibility and yeah, not cool. And the rest should be fine. The rest should be completely fine. So let's select the rig and you can select it here as well. And I'm going to hit tab and then post-mode. Post-mode is a mode to generate animation. The great things are that you're locked in in this mode. And if you're in object mode, the rig behaves as a one object and then when you enter post-mode, you can access the different parts of it, making it really easy to, for instance, select the entire rig and you can then hit key frames. And that's it. You don't need to make sure that you're not selecting something by mistake. You're selecting the entire rig. That's it. Same. If you have two rigs, if you press a, you select both rigs together and you have some specific tools for animation, like the breakdowner, copy and pasting poses, inverted flip. You can have one character and be isolated from everything else or several characters and have them in post-mode if you want to work on them at the same time. There's a whole tool set that leaves just for post-mode that it's not available in object mode. Other things about post-mode, which are great, is that you cannot duplicate a controller by mistake in post-mode that doesn't exist. You cannot delete a controller by mistake. And finally, post-mode is your living space where you should be comfortable. And so as an animator, you open up your shot, select your rig, go into post-mode, you're ready to go. Great stuff. So yeah, if this video is proving useful for you, remember to like and subscribe and let's get back on it. And I'm going to hit tab and then post-mode. And now with the, with the tilde key, I'm just going to go to my camera and I'm going to select all the controllers that I want. You can see I'm using here the select box for selection. I'm going to select all the controllers that I want to keep around and then shift H and hide the other ones. Then to select these two that are the ones that move the entire eyes and also I'm going to press H and I'm going to select the eyes and I'm going to hide them as well with the H because I really don't need them at this point and these guys neither. Maybe the nose controllers I don't want to see yet as well because the nose doesn't get really affected by the, by the blink, but maybe these ones will serve a little bit if you want to push it. No, actually I don't think so. Goodbye. So Blender, because of the way it's built, you can always have your controls with H and you can always get them back by pressing Alt H, which is great. And when they come back, they're all selected. So you can actually press H again and hide them again. We are missing a button to unhide the last one selected, but it's fine. Anyways. So we have our scene set up. We can just turn it on and off, but because we're just going to focus on some face, I'm just going to keep around the face one and the tweaks for the face, which it's, it's great because it's great because now, because I have these two on, but then I hit all the rest by hand. I still have access to these two when I turn those layers and, and I, I can focus on them very easily and they'll never be lost or anything. So I'm going to start by making it asymmetrical a little bit. I'm going to try to be as less idiotic as possible when doing this. I just recorded this video like three times and the first one was without audio and the second one got cut at minute 40 and I don't want this one to be two hours. I want it to be at the most half an hour. So I'm not going to tell you exactly what I'm doing or why am I doing it? I'm just going to try to do it as best as possible. I'm just keeping it, keeping it nice and then explain to you the part of the workflow I'm using, which is the point of the video more than teaching you how to animate because I reckon most of you already do animate way better than I do. So, so I'm just like trying to give it a little bit more appeal and asymmetry so it's not completely flat. I'm using the low poly version of the character with the simplify because that's going to run really fast and also I kind of like this model in a kind of a low poly feeling. I think it's cool. So yeah, there we go. There's a shading issue there that I don't really agree with but it's not a big deal. As long as it looks nice rendered, okay, it doesn't look that nice. Okay, that's not too bad. Like, we can live with that. I think, yeah, we can figure something out. Cool. Let's go back to, uh, yeah. Yeah, you see? The issue's gone. Like, low poly kind of style looks cool. Fair enough. Let's go. So I'm setting up this one post and if you haven't seen the effective keyframing video, go and see it because there's some tips on how I set up my hotkeys for keyframing. So I'm gonna press I. You'll probably get the menu if you haven't seen that video but what I'm doing is pressing I and setting keyframes on location, rotation, and scale and then we'll move on forward to the closed post. So we're gonna do like four frames or three frames should be fine. We're gonna push this down a lot and then push this one up a little bit. Same thing with the other side. I'm gonna lower this other one. See if we can make it look like it's a closed die. Something like that, right? Yeah, something like this. And then I'm gonna select them all, Ctrl C, Ctrl Shift V, and then we get a paste one of that one. And because I'm using auto key, we get keyframes on both sides. It's all fine. It's all nice. And I push the eyebrows a little bit lower as well. So they push with the entire thing. So basically, we can do eyebrows, push eyelids, eyelids go down, and then eyelids end up down, they push back up, and then they push the eyebrows. I think that's gonna be pretty. So we're going to do that. Right now we're working on Bezier curves by default. If you like step mode, I'm gonna show you that in a minute. So as you can see, because of the way this rig is built, it's not that great. Because if I select these three controllers, then the middle one gets double transforms. So if you want to move the three of them, you probably want to just move the two other ones. But I reckon it should be backwards. You should have one main one that moves the three of them. And then if you select each one of them, then you use that to offset and shape the thing. But yeah, this clearly wasn't, nevermind. Oh, well. So I'm just pushing this a little bit further down, further down. Make sure, actually, this one, this one should be, yeah, there we go. And then this one, just a little bit. Actually, this one I don't want to move. This one I don't want to move. So, see? Blink. So I want to work in dead mode. For that, I'm just going to hover on the timeline and press T and change interpolation type to constant, which will make them in constant interpolation. Kabam! And then we're going to copy this first line of keyframes and paste it back in frame 20. Actually, frame 22, I think. Something like 12 frames for blink should be about right. And then we're going to copy this keyframe here. We're going to duplicate it with Shift D and we're going to push it a tiny bit more. So we're going to move it a little bit more down, a little bit more down, a little bit more down, more down. Yeah, something like that. And then, yeah, that helps. And then around frame 18, we're going to make sure that these guys are almost open. With Shift E, you get the breakdowner, which is basically a twinner or like the twin machine and stuff like that. Really handy. And it works like this. You press Shift E and then your mouse cursor has a zero in the one side and 100% in the other side. It's great that it's embedded here and it's so easy to use, like, and it just drives everything and you're like, oh, you're just hovering around and you're like looking for the perfect breakdown. And also you get to see the number here up there. It's very cool. 95%. So because of the way it's designed, it's a very precise tool. Bam! Good. And then in the same frame, I'm going to do this one, but I'm going to do it slightly less open. So we get that feeling of a offset blink, don't do it by offsetting one frame. That doesn't work. It looks terrible. Just do offset in between so that they go like slightly faster one than the other one. Yeah. Because your eyes actually close at the same time and end up opening at the same time and they start more or less at the same time. It's not a frame of a difference. That's too long. And so same thing here, I'm going to around frame 12, I'm just going to start and then I'm going to go file select, flip active, which will flip my selection again. Flip active, right? Flip active. There's the video coming on Tuesday. Flip active. So now I'm just going to go back to this guy and then make sure that he's starting with a little bit of a head start. Yeah. I think that's not too bad of a blocking. We need to add some little things before we go to polishing. I'm just going to grab this and move the eyes somewhere that they're looking a little bit more kind of like towards us. So I think that could be okay. By the way, shift alt Z hides my overlays, which means basically hides my controllers and everything that I don't want to do. Yeah, I think that position is better. And so we should probably also do some eye darts while we're at it, at least one. So we want to make like this main controller of the eyes, press eye and then two frames and move it a little bit to the side. Basically when you look at a person in the face, you look eye, eye, mouth, eye, eye, I'm going to do eye, I'm going to do eye, eye, and then hold that one, mouth, and then hold that one and then copy this one here. So eye, eye, mouth. Actually, we probably want to do this. We want mouth to hold for longer. Yeah, and let's keep this guy here. Eye, eye, mouth, eye, eye, mouth. Yeah, I think that works. And I'm using two frames for changing, which is correct. We just need a breakdown. And so we don't really need to polish the eye darts, but the breakdown, we're going to do it at least at something around 80 or 90%. So I'm just going to, so he goes like that and we're going to just go like so, 90% something, because you want to favor always where the eye is landing to. So with this, we do it quite easily. And I like that these eyes have that fleshiness that drags a little bit the eyelid. So it already looks a little bit more fleshy. I reckon this animation should be a tad longer. Let's make it a tad longer. So the eye blinks are not so compressed one with the other one. In time, we can do the mouth one. Now it feels like it's looking at the boobs. That's funny. You get the idea. Actually, I'm going to still make it shorter again. I think we're going to do that. Cool. So that's it for today. In the next video, we're going to dive into the graph editor and into the dope sheet in Blender, which is uncommon for Maya animators to use the dope sheet. I think I might know maybe one animator that uses the dope sheet in Maya. Well, in Blender, it's a really important part of the workflow. It just makes everything much easier. It's really similar to the timeline that we saw today. It's just like more expanded, has other tools and whatever. Hope you like this video and that you can get something out of it. And remember to show it to your friends. I'm also trying to make the jump to the Blender side of the force because it's actually quite fun. After all the caveats, Blender feels like a really fun software to play with. To be honest, it's been a really hard video to make. It's really hard to see oneself animating, mostly because animation is part of my heart. So seeing myself doing mistakes or doing stupid things and then trying to fix them halfway through so nobody notices it is really, really tough. So I'm really open to feedback. If you want to comment on how I'm doing things, if you have better tips on animation, please, please give them to me because I'm longing for learning all that stuff. That's the end of part one of Blender Animation Workflows. Remember to like and subscribe and see me next time.