What'd you think of this Blender adventure? :) How'd I do, for a first time diving into the character animation tools? Give me tips / suggestions for next time if you've got 'em!
The T-key is the hotkey to access the Interpolation menu (Interpolation, Easing, and Dynamic Effects). For the audio: 1. Split the viewport and open the Video Sequencer 2. Under the Add menu - choose "Add Sound" 3. Open the Properties Panel (N) and choose "Display Waveform) 4. Under the Playback menu - choose "Scrubbing"
Had the same issue with the audio scrubbing. Just open up the preferences window and change the audio driver in the audio section. You have different driver wich all work but treat the scrubbing featue differntly. After that you can easily scrub through the timeline while listening to the sound.
Ah yeah, about the waveform... just drag open a new window e.g. under the graph editor in wich you open the video edit panel and make it show the audiotrack. There is an option to show the waveform on audiotracks in the n panel of the vide editing page. Hope that helps. Sry, I know my english sucks 😅
You're doing something very important for Blender community right now. Blender is getting an other perspective from from you that want to learn how Blender works and not changing it to be like an other application. I wish Blender foundation could see this video somehow.
I agree. Someone who may be only used to Blender won’t know what changes may be needed because they don’t know what other software may do better. There is a danger when you are able to do what you want with a software you can get a little excited but not consider there may be a better option. Coming from an industry standard software used at Pixar & Disney like Maya & having years of experience with this software on real projects there is a honest real workflow perspective on what seems to be missing or not working in Blender. For example if someone is so used to after effects they may not be aware of how great Nuke is for compositing way more elements while slowing down less & vector tracks and all these other things that you may assume is a technology limitation when the technology does exist it just isn’t in the software being used
Its not often you see people do in depth animation video like this as well. I wish more people would make these so people can learn how CGI pipelines like this
3 роки тому+2
I think you're not right but you're not really wrong. It's nice to developpe new tires to see how it goes but you never reinvent the wheel... If the design of a fork didn't really change for centuries don't loose your time to try to change that. I'm not saying blender is doing that, but there's definitely still some miss conceptions about techniques and workflow that industry aggred to converge to. I'm still thinking Blender has many problems of user experience (like all softwares) but they create a lot more trying to by more logical in the mapping of shortcuts than more convenient by the position of a hand on a keyboard. If we could have all we like from a software in one... we'll have so many different and unique softwares haha :)
What's very interesting here is that in this video you get to see what someone with prior animation experience come up against when using blender. I find it fascinating that there are solutions to most of his problems in the comments. The question is, why couldn't someone who's experienced in other software find these solutions within a reasonable time frame or at all? That's where I would focus my time if I was working with the UI/UX side regarding the animation workflow in Blender. I find this often myself in Blender. I'm looking for something and I can't find it. I google it and finally learn how it works. Once I know the path it almost seems obvious but the question remains. Why was it so hard to find to begin with? Many things in Blender has gotten better with regards to this exact question so it will be interesting to see how this will develop in the coming months and years.
I've had the same issue when linking two rigs of the same model. A good way to fix it is to change the rig ID. If they have the same rig ID they will copy the action of the other. I'm excited to see you working with blender. It's a great program and I love using it.
Tip: for selecting only the handles of multiple curves, what I do is first select the curves, then using ctrl+box-select to deselct everything apart from the handles you want to edit.
Here's a tip: Whenever there's a slider that goes from 0 to 1 and doesn't appear to go further, it DOES. Just type the value in and it overrides whatever is on the slider (including with negative values so you can go to -1) the Cheek bone was probably constrained, too, so you could go to the constrains tab and edit the constrain to allow you to go backwards. ( it probably had a "limit distance" or "limit location" constraint, so hopping into it and disabling this constraint could solve your problem too).
Hi I am an Illustrator but I really love 3d animation and the process where do you think I can start.. cause I have been practicing by myself using forger on iPad but I suck however am not discouraged I want to learn more and be better to build a portfolio..
@@Phoenix2024-k1g start by finding something you like doing, making art about what you enjoy, so learning the program will become a sidequest, and you will feel more motivated to finish things and learn more
6:44 I'm finding chatgpt is like having a genius friend sitting next to me who knows everything about everything and can explain anything and even seems to understand my cornfused followup questions (i.e. it can actually hold a conversation as it's explaining things to me). It's incredible.
Hey Sir Wade!! Awesome video going along with Blender. Here're some tips that could help. 1. Filtering curves. At the top of the graph editor window is the "View" menu. On that drop-down, check "Only selected curve keyframes". It now makes the selected channel active and the other curves are unselectable with a lower opacity. The opacity can be changed in the preferences under the Animation tab > F-curves. Also to possibly reduce the number of times mousing over to the view menu checking and unchecking, you can right-click on the "Only selected curve keyframe" > add to favourites. "Q" is the shortcut for popping up favourite menu wherever your cursor is and check-uncheck quicker. Also tip, adding favourites. The favourites are contextual to where your cursor is hovering. eg favourites of graph editor will not appear on the 3D viewport, favourites of 3d viewport wont appear on shader editor etc etc 2. Multiple handle select. On the same "view" menu, check "only selected keyframe handles". Can now select multiple handles , no need to select keys then handles. It's direct. Add to favourites as well. Happy Blending!! :)
15:00 actually there's a better method than child of constraint to the finger. You should toggle the invisible layers and find the hand deformation layer. Especially if the character is holding something in his or her palm. The hand deformation layer can be driven by both the ik and fk so it's independent when switching
The audio scrubbing is actually a bug, but you can fix it by going to Edit > Preferences, and in the 'System' tab on the bottom there is a 'Sound' panel... There you can just change your 'Audio Device' to "Open AL - Open AL Soft" and it should solve the issue.
The folks at Blender have plans for revamping the animation part of the software as far as I know. It was supposed to be "Animation 2020", but according to Ton, it was delayed to be "Animation 2022"
I’ve been a 2D animator for the past 12 years. Similarly, I’ve found myself too busy to adopt a new tool, until of course I too said: screw it, just dive in, lol. So yeah, just starting on Blender, so how fitting to start with this video. Great video my dude. Looking forward to deep diving into your playlists. Cheers!
I'd really love to see you keep doing more with blender! For those of us who'd love to get into animation but don't have the money to sink into programs like Maya, it's such a great resource and so helpful to watch someone learn the process with me. Please don't give up on blender, I know there's a ton of incredibly talented people who'll help you with it, and please don't stop sharing your learning process too! Congrats to Alice on her new job! I really liked the final animation 👍
For the Audio Scrubbing, I know its confusing and I hate it too, but you need to switch the playback to "scrubbing" and "sync to audio." I love Blender, but even I know that is just inconvenient and should be changed.
21:15 For those of you wondering how to fix this, there's an option in the timeline where you can have your animation play synced to the audio at the cost of dropped fps. Click on 'Playback' next to the clock icon on the far left of the timeline, go to Sync, then select Sync to Audio!
you can see waveforms easily by just opening a video editor timeline/sequencer and throwing video there and press "N" while hovering on that area and enable waveforms
That chip eating animation was awesome, Wade. I know you were going to keep telling yourself that it's not perfect and it's not polished. It really came out awesome, though. Be proud of what you made and move on to the next thing. Iteration is far more valuable than perfection. Excellent work.
Sirwade is perfectionist I do agree that it honestly turned really good and promising but if you have seen animations he made with Maya it's really outstanding stuff
Tip for dropped frames: In the Timeline Editor Click Playback and at the top of the menu you will see all the sync options for playback as well as some other helpful parameters like syncing Audio on while scrubbing
I remember the when I first started animating in blender. AND IT WAS HELL FRUSTRATING. I had no guidance for a long time, until I found some UA-cam channels (which UA-cam would never show me when I searched for some help) After a lot of sucking and failing, I finally got the hang of it. Now when I try to remember those times, I think I would NEVER like to go back to those times but TBH, It was really exciting.
20:57 go to the playback button in that editor you have and there's and option for audio scrubbing it's useful I hate its not active by default also there's av sync. It's not perfect and can be displaced/ off a little but it's the best blender can do
Also there are a few things I would say to help you but typing on a phone is a nightmare and there's a small chance you'd even read it in the flood of other comments
Tip here fo real time playback. Turn on simplify in the properties and turn down the max subdivision to 0. I set a hotkey to toggle on/off simplify to switch between hi-res and low-res displaying. Also viewport shade over evee shade for animating.
I've been wanting to learn animation in blender but didn't know how to start. Thanks to this video as I now have a better idea of where I should begin. Great video
In case no one has told you - in your graph editor quandry at about 7:15, you wanted to select just one side of a bezier control. The way to do that is to change the type of control point to non-continuous. That's what's happening in your maya clip - by pulling on just one side you are creating a sharp point in the curve, and you need to change the point type in blender and then you will be able to do the same thing, the same way.
Great video! Speaking as a blender animator if you want to listen to the audio you should import the audio or video in the video sequence editor. The sound should work then and you can display waveform for audio
@@SirWade oh ok! Interesting I thought maybe you had imported the footage into the image editor since I’ve ran into that same issue when importing it that way. That is quite odd. I’ll admit though I usually just import the audio and am not using corresponding footage so maybe try importing the audio and footage as a separate files and line them up in the video sequence editor that might help
This is the most genuine video on learning new software/s. Very relatable. I guess my takeaway is to be patient with the process and that it'll turn out okay if we just keep at it. Thanks for this.
This is fantastic. It's exactly what I want to do. I'm a long time Maya user and will be continueing to use it for work, however I'm seeing cool things pop up all the time and would like to expand my knowlege and pick up some new tools outside of my bubble of a workflow. Thanks for the inspiration.
For a none animator, I thought it turned out great! I have been trying to learn how to animate for years… but I never get past the learning the toolset part. I think you did a great job of it and also pointing out the positives and the negatives in the different steps of the process.
This video is amazing!! 🙌🏼 I'm used to animating in Maya and quickly had to do some animations in Blender a few months ago without having the time to actually dive in and learn the software and it was a nightmare. I had sooo many problems with the graph editor etc. and was so traumatized that I couldn't get myself to open Blender ever since, haha xD But your journey really makes me wanna try again and see how far I can get! Thank you so much for your hard work, it's greatly appreciated! 🙏🏼
No idea if that were possible but I'd really love for Blender Bob and you to talk at some point because he and his studio seem far further in this same transition and he says basically the only part of Blender that is a no-go for him is the state of UV mapping. (That said he also makes sure to point out, that he did modify his own Blender a lot to fit his own needs, so in terms of specific shortcuts he'd not really be that great a resource for you. Also, his works seems to mostly be SFX-ish, replacing parts of live action shots with 3D assets, and not a full CG route as you seem to aim at. I'd imagine there are gonna be different needs between those two)
To filter view in graph editor, go to view -> 'Only Selected Curve Keyframes' and 'Only Selected Keyframes Handles' , and voila :) No need to hide and unhide all the time!
looking really good for 1 week.! been trying some blender/unreal engine back and fourth. it is kinda blowing my mind how much work it takes to go from creating a an engine, making a mesh. rigg the mesh. animate. then you need file knowledge on how to convert into other file types and stuff. after importing files, a world of programing opens up. if you are a single person and try to find free files. like characters and sound files etc. your are in a world or legal trouble if you are not carefull. after all the imports are in there is the coding. and for games you need to know which assets should be rendered by the cpu and gpu. how big the textures are. to uptimize fps and game performance. if your game is going to be online you just made it 10 times harder. then there is the marketing and i proberly missed like 80 steps on my way... just mind blowing how complicated making games is. i did consider if a rocket scientist would be easier.. properly is. not to mention you really need to be a good story teller. have great knowledge of math equations for calculation all the stuff like drop chance, damamge vs metigation. and overall..
If you use shift h it wil hide all thats not selected. H on it own hide the one you have selected. Alt H brings everything back depending if your in edit or obj mode it will be all the scene or the bit you have hidded from you mesh.
Really glad I found your video. Back in the late 80s and 90s, I was a 3d animator using Softimage on Silicon Graphics workstations and later 3d Studio Max. ( I remember having to work for a few days on Alias, which I believe became Maya, and being as baffled as you were here). Then I pursued other interests. I've been toying with Blender recently, and your experience confirmed to me that the way it's put together is just too fundamentally different from the way I want to work. I don't have the years left in my life to rewire my brain to understand and accept the language and logic of Blender. I mean, somewhere in the comments someone helpfully explains (I think) how the easy way to constrain something is with "Library Overrides." I mean, seriously? "Library overrides?" Every tutorial I've watched so far includes very specific and very esoteric instructions about how to set up this, that or the other before something very basic will work as expected. I'm too old for this. I just want to get back to animating a little bit, to add some spice to my videos. Not learn to fix a combustion engine so I can take the car for a spin. Blender seems to be an incredibly powerful software, and there are obviously artists doing great things with it. I really wish I could utilize grease pencil at least, but I remember the state of being a perpetual alpha tester. Of course, back then, we paid $100k for the privilege of banging our heads against these systems that rarely worked as advertised, while trying to meet a deadline and wow a client with the new feature/effect. I appreciate that I can now have that experience for free, but I think I might pass on it and just animate frame by frame in Krita. Sigh, I feel old.
7:07 If you disable _View_ > _Only Selected Keyframes Handles,_ you can box select multiple handles. You could also box select the points you want (including both handles), then hold *Ctrl* and box select what you _don't want_ (the points themselves & the handles on the other side) to subtract it from the selection. I guess the first method might get cluttered, the latter is a hacky workaround... I'm not as familiar with animation as I am with other areas of Blender, so I might be missing something, though.
I'm quite enjoying this blender journey of you Sir great job on tackling it. All I gotta say is I miss hanging out on the streams. I myself have been learning to use Unreal Engine 5 lately the past two weeks, so far I'm quite enjoying it but blender will always be my main love. Also huge congrats Alice on the future journey.
Try blender 3.0 because there is a tool that you hope to be available on blender it is a shortcut for moving from the object rotation to scale or moving or vice versa, you should just go to preferences and activate active tools in the keymap preferences.
It's awesome, I wish I could do that much, I'm still in 3d animation kindergarten. But I know how you feel, I'm a carpenter and I'm never satisfied with the outcome, I always believe I could do a lot better even though everyone else is loving it
I'm a little late, but a note on why you couldn't get Proxy rigs working at the start - proxies are an old, deprecated workflow that's been replaced with a far better system called "Library Overrides". If you're using a recent blender version you can just link in the collection, and instead of using the "Make Proxy" operator, simply use the "Make Library Override" operator instead. For just animating a rig this is all you need, but LO's have a ton of extra functionality which lets you link things into scenes while still being able to modify them at the same time, rather than being locked out like you are with Proxies, for example with LO's you can hide individual objects, add/remove modifiers, and tweak properties of linked objects while still being able to make changes in the linked file and have them update in your scene. It also lets you have multiple copies of rigs linked from the same file, which solves your main problem there :)
I appreciate you calling out the shader and lighting workflows in Blender - having done those in a few other applications I feel like that's an area where Blender actually stands up pretty well.
So with Blender's shape keys and drivers, you're able to have multiple shape keys driven by the same bone but just doing different things. With my rigs, I made it so if I move the eyebrow bones in different directions, they can drive different emotion shape keys
from someone who went to school using Maya and had to also learn 3D Max for an internship, blender is a whole different ball game and really frustrating one cuz of mainly the hot keys and where everything is at, so this video helped out a lot!
I'm finally deciding to take a look at blender for animation, just for side fun stuff and memey things. Xenoblade got me wanting to figure out how to do simple retargeting, and the FIRST thing I'm doing is ... Spending a week on rigging information, mocap information, armatures, etc. Eventually I'm gonna have to figure out the actual animating process, so these kinds of videos give me some hope I won't be as lost as I have been for all past attempts at trying to learn Blender!
New to blender. After watching this, I think I'm just going to download a face mocap app for facial and lipsync stuff and keyframe like 2 poses for my animation lol. On another note, this was a good animation Wade, given the limitations.
Question in Maya, how to properly “reference” a character in? Unfortunately I don’t think we learned this in school or did they explain the difference between importing and referencing.
Animation is something you've got to love, there will be some frustrating moments doing it (sometimes just because of software bugs), but the end result will be worth it!
Wow, seeing the final animation I was pretty impressed! I'm still just learning modeling/sculpting but the intention is to eventually use blender to animate.
OK, I haven't touched 3D modeling/animation in decades, but I miss it every time I watch a video like this. Thank you for posting! Blender is installed now and time to look at some tutorials. Thank you!
Man, I don't think I could write a comment long enough to answer all the questions and help you with the problems you ran into. I'd love to be able to help you while you're animating some time. I'm not an expert animator but I am an expert blender user
Despite the fact that I spent my first 3 years animating strictly with a graph editior, in Blender I animate mostly in the dope sheet or action editor to block out the animation, and then usually go to the graph editor once I have the animation blocked out and timing is mostly set. Dive into the Dope sheet more. It's far more useful in Blender than it is in Maya.
Hi the things you did in this video are excellent and actually helped me a bit, but for the bounce ball you can do it faster by making the balls follow curves and running a soft body simulation
Hey there, I've been using Blender (my first 3d software) for about 4 years now and I always tried avoiding things like rigging and character animation, and relied on websites such as 'mixamo' in order to carry that burden. But I've recently started to really notice the importance that this area of 3d has and watching you "relearn" character animation with Blender and the amount of detailed information you share along the way has really helped me as I begin my journey toward learning this new skill. Thank you for sharing your experiences for so many others like me to get started in the industry!
7:19 I think you need to select the whole thing and then paint out the wrong handles using c. It's a bit weird/hard to find but the c mode is pretty awesome
Check the descriptions of the first few videos in Blender Guru's donut tutorial. Somewhere in there he has a link to a hotkey cheat sheet. It's not everything, but it helps.
This video give my a lot of advice :D. My dream is making animation and I try to work with Blender. However, it's not really work because I don't know where to start :)) so this is help me a lot.
@sir wad niestadt you can turn on audio video sync to get perfect voice and you can use other similar options, some will reduce frames but they will show the blocked out frames hope's that work
That's insane, Not gonna lie. Didn't expect this from you. Just a lil randomness will probably lift it to the next stage. I'd def watch a series of this.
I sure hope Blender devs take a look at this video. We have been struggling on the animation side for Blender and it def work!!! They keep catering to modeling, texturing, etc. We need some animation support ASAP
I'm brand new to Blender. The only 3D software (limited) experience I have was using Bryce 3D about 20 years ago. I am starting at ZERO and trying to learn allllllll of this. It's extremely overwhelming. You can see what the software is capable of, you can watch how others do it, but it feels a LONG, LONG, LONG ways away when you are just beginning to use it for the first time and from no knowledge of 3D at all. I've been watching loads of videos and am even working through a few Udemy courses to grab a general knowledge about this software and all things 3D, including physics (which I never took). It still seems like these classes are a step ahead of beginners, and are expecting users to know things. I have to stop the video and research what they're talking about and that's not how I love learning. WOW, is all I can say... it's a huge ocean to navigate when you don't even know where the shore is! LOL It's a lot to learn and I take my hat off to those who have mastered this skill. I am envious and want to learn to be just like them! I would love any further guidance on what resources would best serve me to learn this from the ground up. Recommendations would be incredible. Thanks for your video... it's nice to see I'm not the only one... the struggle is real man! LOL
Hi Sir. Great video. It was like a hands-on experience for someone like me thinking about learning Blender. I started with 3D Max a bunch of years ago and got a degree with Maya, which I've been using religiously, for better or for worse, for several years now. To answer the question you posed- yes, you were successful in learning to animate Blender in your given challenge time. You just needed more time to finish and polish, get more experience with some of the tools, but the principles are the same and you've clearly learned enough to complete the job, given more time. Thanks for sharing this.
that was fuckin' epic while i do physic based animations with gravity and rigid body linking and ragdolls fluid n' stuff but that was an awesome journey of blendering
To get clean audio, you'll need to export the audio from the video, and import it to blender as a video sequence, that will make it smooth, you can also load reference like this, also, its best to stick to image sequences, this is 100% a pain.
What'd you think of this Blender adventure? :) How'd I do, for a first time diving into the character animation tools? Give me tips / suggestions for next time if you've got 'em!
take the alive course by pierrick
I know this is not about animation, but do pls character making tutorials
The T-key is the hotkey to access the Interpolation menu (Interpolation, Easing, and Dynamic Effects).
For the audio:
1. Split the viewport and open the Video Sequencer
2. Under the Add menu - choose "Add Sound"
3. Open the Properties Panel (N) and choose "Display Waveform)
4. Under the Playback menu - choose "Scrubbing"
Had the same issue with the audio scrubbing. Just open up the preferences window and change the audio driver in the audio section. You have different driver wich all work but treat the scrubbing featue differntly. After that you can easily scrub through the timeline while listening to the sound.
Ah yeah, about the waveform... just drag open a new window e.g. under the graph editor in wich you open the video edit panel and make it show the audiotrack. There is an option to show the waveform on audiotracks in the n panel of the vide editing page. Hope that helps. Sry, I know my english sucks 😅
TIP:
For better audio scrubbing in the timeline: go to TIMELINE, on the top left corner select "playback" and set the sync to "SYNC TO AUDIO" :)
This should work out of the box.
@@Twixt-ng there's different modes for different uses
Thanks for the tip!
I was thinking about this
In addition, if you going frame by frame, it is better to use back and forth arrows on the keyboard. The sound is more clear that way.
You're doing something very important for Blender community right now. Blender is getting an other perspective from from you that want to learn how Blender works and not changing it to be like an other application. I wish Blender foundation could see this video somehow.
I agree. Someone who may be only used to Blender won’t know what changes may be needed because they don’t know what other software may do better. There is a danger when you are able to do what you want with a software you can get a little excited but not consider there may be a better option. Coming from an industry standard software used at Pixar & Disney like Maya & having years of experience with this software on real projects there is a honest real workflow perspective on what seems to be missing or not working in Blender. For example if someone is so used to after effects they may not be aware of how great Nuke is for compositing way more elements while slowing down less & vector tracks and all these other things that you may assume is a technology limitation when the technology does exist it just isn’t in the software being used
@@soundbreaker2485 well said 👍
Its not often you see people do in depth animation video like this as well. I wish more people would make these so people can learn how CGI pipelines like this
I think you're not right but you're not really wrong. It's nice to developpe new tires to see how it goes but you never reinvent the wheel... If the design of a fork didn't really change for centuries don't loose your time to try to change that. I'm not saying blender is doing that, but there's definitely still some miss conceptions about techniques and workflow that industry aggred to converge to. I'm still thinking Blender has many problems of user experience (like all softwares) but they create a lot more trying to by more logical in the mapping of shortcuts than more convenient by the position of a hand on a keyboard.
If we could have all we like from a software in one... we'll have so many different and unique softwares haha :)
@The design of the fork has changes though lol
What's very interesting here is that in this video you get to see what someone with prior animation experience come up against when using blender. I find it fascinating that there are solutions to most of his problems in the comments. The question is, why couldn't someone who's experienced in other software find these solutions within a reasonable time frame or at all?
That's where I would focus my time if I was working with the UI/UX side regarding the animation workflow in Blender.
I find this often myself in Blender. I'm looking for something and I can't find it. I google it and finally learn how it works. Once I know the path it almost seems obvious but the question remains. Why was it so hard to find to begin with?
Many things in Blender has gotten better with regards to this exact question so it will be interesting to see how this will develop in the coming months and years.
I've had the same issue when linking two rigs of the same model. A good way to fix it is to change the rig ID. If they have the same rig ID they will copy the action of the other. I'm excited to see you working with blender. It's a great program and I love using it.
its a free industry standard program
Tip:
for selecting only the handles of multiple curves, what I do is first select the curves, then using ctrl+box-select to deselct everything apart from the handles you want to edit.
Use b to box select the handles as far as I am concern this works... at least for me!
Here's a tip: Whenever there's a slider that goes from 0 to 1 and doesn't appear to go further, it DOES. Just type the value in and it overrides whatever is on the slider (including with negative values so you can go to -1) the Cheek bone was probably constrained, too, so you could go to the constrains tab and edit the constrain to allow you to go backwards. ( it probably had a "limit distance" or "limit location" constraint, so hopping into it and disabling this constraint could solve your problem too).
This.
Hi I am an Illustrator but I really love 3d animation and the process where do you think I can start.. cause I have been practicing by myself using forger on iPad but I suck however am not discouraged I want to learn more and be better to build a portfolio..
@@Phoenix2024-k1g start by finding something you like doing, making art about what you enjoy, so learning the program will become a sidequest, and you will feel more motivated to finish things and learn more
6:24 the Ctrl + Tab is actually a life changer! I use it all the time hahah
6:44 I'm finding chatgpt is like having a genius friend sitting next to me who knows everything about everything and can explain anything and even seems to understand my cornfused followup questions (i.e. it can actually hold a conversation as it's explaining things to me). It's incredible.
thanks for the shout out!
Thanks for the videos!!
Hey Sir Wade!! Awesome video going along with Blender. Here're some tips that could help.
1. Filtering curves. At the top of the graph editor window is the "View" menu. On that drop-down, check "Only selected curve keyframes". It now makes the selected channel active and the other curves are unselectable with a lower opacity. The opacity can be changed in the preferences under the Animation tab > F-curves. Also to possibly reduce the number of times mousing over to the view menu checking and unchecking, you can right-click on the "Only selected curve keyframe" > add to favourites. "Q" is the shortcut for popping up favourite menu wherever your cursor is and check-uncheck quicker. Also tip, adding favourites. The favourites are contextual to where your cursor is hovering. eg favourites of graph editor will not appear on the 3D viewport, favourites of 3d viewport wont appear on shader editor etc etc
2. Multiple handle select. On the same "view" menu, check "only selected keyframe handles". Can now select multiple handles , no need to select keys then handles. It's direct. Add to favourites as well.
Happy Blending!! :)
Don't use proxys for rigs use library overrides to use multiple, is made to circumvent that problem
Yeah proxies are kinda a legacy thing. I'd also reccomend assigning the Make Library Override action to a hotkey
Oooh thank you! I need to go read up on this
From 3.0 they're removing proxies and library overrides will be the only option.
@@SirWade you definitely exceeded my expectations
15:00 actually there's a better method than child of constraint to the finger. You should toggle the invisible layers and find the hand deformation layer. Especially if the character is holding something in his or her palm. The hand deformation layer can be driven by both the ik and fk so it's independent when switching
This.
The audio scrubbing is actually a bug, but you can fix it by going to Edit > Preferences, and in the 'System' tab on the bottom there is a 'Sound' panel... There you can just change your 'Audio Device' to "Open AL - Open AL Soft" and it should solve the issue.
The folks at Blender have plans for revamping the animation part of the software as far as I know. It was supposed to be "Animation 2020", but according to Ton, it was delayed to be "Animation 2022"
Yeah it was the grant/donation Facebook made that is funding 3 years of Animation development.
@@jadu6409 We all know what it is for.
I’ve been a 2D animator for the past 12 years. Similarly, I’ve found myself too busy to adopt a new tool, until of course I too said: screw it, just dive in, lol. So yeah, just starting on Blender, so how fitting to start with this video. Great video my dude. Looking forward to deep diving into your playlists. Cheers!
Check out spitfire storyboards! Especially if you’re a traditional 2d animator. 🔥
Do you think 2d animation is dying?
@@unknownclint1740 not a chance. maybe just in the US
@@gideonwise7711 hehehe lol.
@Dwi grease pencil
I'd really love to see you keep doing more with blender! For those of us who'd love to get into animation but don't have the money to sink into programs like Maya, it's such a great resource and so helpful to watch someone learn the process with me. Please don't give up on blender, I know there's a ton of incredibly talented people who'll help you with it, and please don't stop sharing your learning process too! Congrats to Alice on her new job! I really liked the final animation 👍
For the Audio Scrubbing, I know its confusing and I hate it too, but you need to switch the playback to "scrubbing" and "sync to audio." I love Blender, but even I know that is just inconvenient and should be changed.
This should be the default opinion imo. I knew bout this feature but forgot wht it was called or where it was so it some time for me to find it.
I’ve seen people also layer the waveform window under the graph editor to add the visual
@@TammyJerkChicken that's also useful but it's not nearly as useful as actually being able to scrub and hear the audio
21:15 For those of you wondering how to fix this, there's an option in the timeline where you can have your animation play synced to the audio at the cost of dropped fps. Click on 'Playback' next to the clock icon on the far left of the timeline, go to Sync, then select Sync to Audio!
you can see waveforms easily by just opening a video editor timeline/sequencer and throwing video there and press "N" while hovering on that area and enable waveforms
The graph editor is life!
I’ve been wanting to dive into blender, as a person who learned Maya animation in school so this is perfect timing.
That chip eating animation was awesome, Wade. I know you were going to keep telling yourself that it's not perfect and it's not polished. It really came out awesome, though. Be proud of what you made and move on to the next thing. Iteration is far more valuable than perfection. Excellent work.
Sirwade is perfectionist I do agree that it honestly turned really good and promising but if you have seen animations he made with Maya it's really outstanding stuff
Tip for dropped frames:
In the Timeline Editor Click Playback and at the top of the menu you will see all the sync options for playback as well as some other helpful parameters like syncing Audio on while scrubbing
Glad to have you back Sir
I remember the when I first started animating in blender. AND IT WAS HELL FRUSTRATING. I had no guidance for a long time, until I found some UA-cam channels (which UA-cam would never show me when I searched for some help) After a lot of sucking and failing, I finally got the hang of it.
Now when I try to remember those times, I think I would NEVER like to go back to those times but TBH, It was really exciting.
What were the channels that really helped you, if you don't mind my asking?
@@SnowPheasant yeah, I need it too
I just started blender, can you give us the channel's name?
20:57 go to the playback button in that editor you have and there's and option for audio scrubbing it's useful I hate its not active by default also there's av sync. It's not perfect and can be displaced/ off a little but it's the best blender can do
Also there are a few things I would say to help you but typing on a phone is a nightmare and there's a small chance you'd even read it in the flood of other comments
Love these blender videos!
Quick tip, you can use the VSE to preview the audio waveform, also make sure to enable “sync to audio” in the timeline panel.
yeah. I make another split window below the graph editor to see the wave form.
Seriously Amazing so So Amazing hats off sir 👋
Tip here fo real time playback. Turn on simplify in the properties and turn down the max subdivision to 0. I set a hotkey to toggle on/off simplify to switch between hi-res and low-res displaying. Also viewport shade over evee shade for animating.
I've been wanting to learn animation in blender but didn't know how to start. Thanks to this video as I now have a better idea of where I should begin. Great video
In case no one has told you - in your graph editor quandry at about 7:15, you wanted to select just one side of a bezier control. The way to do that is to change the type of control point to non-continuous. That's what's happening in your maya clip - by pulling on just one side you are creating a sharp point in the curve, and you need to change the point type in blender and then you will be able to do the same thing, the same way.
Great video! Speaking as a blender animator if you want to listen to the audio you should import the audio or video in the video sequence editor. The sound should work then and you can display waveform for audio
I think that is where I imported the audio 😬 Someone mentioned it may just be the blender version?
@@SirWade oh ok! Interesting I thought maybe you had imported the footage into the image editor since I’ve ran into that same issue when importing it that way. That is quite odd. I’ll admit though I usually just import the audio and am not using corresponding footage so maybe try importing the audio and footage as a separate files and line them up in the video sequence editor that might help
P.S. love your content man! Always have it on in the background while I animate! Keep it up!
@@SirWade change the audio driver in the audio settings under preferences and the scrubbing works, had the same issue
@@SirWade press "N" hovering curser on sequence editor and you will see enable waveform toggle there
This is the most genuine video on learning new software/s. Very relatable. I guess my takeaway is to be patient with the process and that it'll turn out okay if we just keep at it. Thanks for this.
You always give me so much strenght and determination! Thanks Sir Wade!
This is fantastic. It's exactly what I want to do. I'm a long time Maya user and will be continueing to use it for work, however I'm seeing cool things pop up all the time and would like to expand my knowlege and pick up some new tools outside of my bubble of a workflow. Thanks for the inspiration.
1:40 I've been scouring the internet trying to find animation rigs like this for so long and now they're in this video THANK YOU!
For a none animator, I thought it turned out great! I have been trying to learn how to animate for years… but I never get past the learning the toolset part. I think you did a great job of it and also pointing out the positives and the negatives in the different steps of the process.
This video is amazing!! 🙌🏼
I'm used to animating in Maya and quickly had to do some animations in Blender a few months ago without having the time to actually dive in and learn the software and it was a nightmare. I had sooo many problems with the graph editor etc. and was so traumatized that I couldn't get myself to open Blender ever since, haha xD
But your journey really makes me wanna try again and see how far I can get! Thank you so much for your hard work, it's greatly appreciated! 🙏🏼
I had the audio scrubbing issue before, and I remember there being an option for AV sync you had to check for it to work properly
Luna is a beauty and thanks so much bro just starting my animating in blender journey
To see the waveforms, you can open an instance of the video editor, click on the sound file, and toggle show waveform in the options.
No idea if that were possible but I'd really love for Blender Bob and you to talk at some point because he and his studio seem far further in this same transition and he says basically the only part of Blender that is a no-go for him is the state of UV mapping.
(That said he also makes sure to point out, that he did modify his own Blender a lot to fit his own needs, so in terms of specific shortcuts he'd not really be that great a resource for you. Also, his works seems to mostly be SFX-ish, replacing parts of live action shots with 3D assets, and not a full CG route as you seem to aim at. I'd imagine there are gonna be different needs between those two)
10/10 for the ad segway
To filter view in graph editor, go to view -> 'Only Selected Curve Keyframes' and 'Only Selected Keyframes Handles' , and voila :)
No need to hide and unhide all the time!
looking really good for 1 week.!
been trying some blender/unreal engine back and fourth.
it is kinda blowing my mind how much work it takes to go from
creating a an engine, making a mesh. rigg the mesh. animate. then you need file knowledge on how to convert into other file types and stuff.
after importing files, a world of programing opens up.
if you are a single person and try to find free files. like characters and sound files etc. your are in a world or legal trouble if you are not carefull. after all the imports are in there is the coding. and for games you need to know which assets should be rendered by the cpu and gpu. how big the textures are. to uptimize fps and game performance.
if your game is going to be online you just made it 10 times harder.
then there is the marketing and i proberly missed like 80 steps on my way...
just mind blowing how complicated making games is.
i did consider if a rocket scientist would be easier.. properly is.
not to mention you really need to be a good story teller. have great knowledge of math equations for calculation all the stuff like drop chance, damamge vs metigation. and overall..
If you use shift h it wil hide all thats not selected. H on it own hide the one you have selected. Alt H brings everything back depending if your in edit or obj mode it will be all the scene or the bit you have hidded from you mesh.
Really glad I found your video. Back in the late 80s and 90s, I was a 3d animator using Softimage on Silicon Graphics workstations and later 3d Studio Max. ( I remember having to work for a few days on Alias, which I believe became Maya, and being as baffled as you were here). Then I pursued other interests. I've been toying with Blender recently, and your experience confirmed to me that the way it's put together is just too fundamentally different from the way I want to work. I don't have the years left in my life to rewire my brain to understand and accept the language and logic of Blender. I mean, somewhere in the comments someone helpfully explains (I think) how the easy way to constrain something is with "Library Overrides." I mean, seriously? "Library overrides?" Every tutorial I've watched so far includes very specific and very esoteric instructions about how to set up this, that or the other before something very basic will work as expected. I'm too old for this. I just want to get back to animating a little bit, to add some spice to my videos. Not learn to fix a combustion engine so I can take the car for a spin. Blender seems to be an incredibly powerful software, and there are obviously artists doing great things with it. I really wish I could utilize grease pencil at least, but I remember the state of being a perpetual alpha tester. Of course, back then, we paid $100k for the privilege of banging our heads against these systems that rarely worked as advertised, while trying to meet a deadline and wow a client with the new feature/effect. I appreciate that I can now have that experience for free, but I think I might pass on it and just animate frame by frame in Krita. Sigh, I feel old.
7:07 If you disable _View_ > _Only Selected Keyframes Handles,_ you can box select multiple handles.
You could also box select the points you want (including both handles), then hold *Ctrl* and box select what you _don't want_ (the points themselves & the handles on the other side) to subtract it from the selection.
I guess the first method might get cluttered, the latter is a hacky workaround... I'm not as familiar with animation as I am with other areas of Blender, so I might be missing something, though.
leave Rains Butt alone XD you're just too funny my dude
In your timeline click view then choose frame dropping and audio scrubbing from the top of the drop down menu. It will help in lip sync
I'm quite enjoying this blender journey of you Sir great job on tackling it. All I gotta say is I miss hanging out on the streams. I myself have been learning to use Unreal Engine 5 lately the past two weeks, so far I'm quite enjoying it but blender will always be my main love. Also huge congrats Alice on the future journey.
Try blender 3.0 because there is a tool that you hope to be available on blender it is a shortcut for moving from the object rotation to scale or moving or vice versa, you should just go to preferences and activate active tools in the keymap preferences.
Ther is also an update in the pose breakdowner that called in maya tween machine
I'd LOVE to see an updated version of this!
There is olso an update in the pose breakdowner that called in maya tween machine
It's awesome, I wish I could do that much,
I'm still in 3d animation kindergarten.
But I know how you feel, I'm a carpenter and I'm never satisfied with the outcome,
I always believe I could do a lot better even though everyone else is loving it
Where is the rest of these tutorials like day 1 day 2 et cetera I'd like to take this but I'd like them all great video by the way though
I took courses at the Santa Monica Center for media and design using Maya and I only want to know if blender can do the same work
I'm a little late, but a note on why you couldn't get Proxy rigs working at the start - proxies are an old, deprecated workflow that's been replaced with a far better system called "Library Overrides".
If you're using a recent blender version you can just link in the collection, and instead of using the "Make Proxy" operator, simply use the "Make Library Override" operator instead.
For just animating a rig this is all you need, but LO's have a ton of extra functionality which lets you link things into scenes while still being able to modify them at the same time, rather than being locked out like you are with Proxies, for example with LO's you can hide individual objects, add/remove modifiers, and tweak properties of linked objects while still being able to make changes in the linked file and have them update in your scene. It also lets you have multiple copies of rigs linked from the same file, which solves your main problem there :)
I appreciate you calling out the shader and lighting workflows in Blender - having done those in a few other applications I feel like that's an area where Blender actually stands up pretty well.
I miss sir wade's videos so much!
So with Blender's shape keys and drivers, you're able to have multiple shape keys driven by the same bone but just doing different things. With my rigs, I made it so if I move the eyebrow bones in different directions, they can drive different emotion shape keys
Ya ALLAH har insan kamyab ho har insan ko sehat izat Dolat or jo jo hum apnay parents kay liay karna chahtay hain zaroor karain
from someone who went to school using Maya and had to also learn 3D Max for an internship, blender is a whole different ball game and really frustrating one cuz of mainly the hot keys and where everything is at, so this video helped out a lot!
I'm finally deciding to take a look at blender for animation, just for side fun stuff and memey things. Xenoblade got me wanting to figure out how to do simple retargeting, and the FIRST thing I'm doing is ...
Spending a week on rigging information, mocap information, armatures, etc.
Eventually I'm gonna have to figure out the actual animating process, so these kinds of videos give me some hope I won't be as lost as I have been for all past attempts at trying to learn Blender!
dude I love your personality!! 🤣
New to blender. After watching this, I think I'm just going to download a face mocap app for facial and lipsync stuff and keyframe like 2 poses for my animation lol. On another note, this was a good animation Wade, given the limitations.
Question in Maya, how to properly “reference” a character in? Unfortunately I don’t think we learned this in school or did they explain the difference between importing and referencing.
Animation is something you've got to love, there will be some frustrating moments doing it (sometimes just because of software bugs), but the end result will be worth it!
*you're so very talanted!*
Wow, seeing the final animation I was pretty impressed! I'm still just learning modeling/sculpting but the intention is to eventually use blender to animate.
OK, I haven't touched 3D modeling/animation in decades, but I miss it every time I watch a video like this. Thank you for posting! Blender is installed now and time to look at some tutorials. Thank you!
Can you please make a video on the process of becoming an animator, which course is best for animation and is degree important to become an animator?
Man, I don't think I could write a comment long enough to answer all the questions and help you with the problems you ran into. I'd love to be able to help you while you're animating some time. I'm not an expert animator but I am an expert blender user
Maybe some of these videos could help me out, if I start using Blender soon!
Despite the fact that I spent my first 3 years animating strictly with a graph editior, in Blender I animate mostly in the dope sheet or action editor to block out the animation, and then usually go to the graph editor once I have the animation blocked out and timing is mostly set. Dive into the Dope sheet more. It's far more useful in Blender than it is in Maya.
the food commercial man you are a freakin genius you killed it
Hi the things you did in this video are excellent and actually helped me a bit, but for the bounce ball you can do it faster by making the balls follow curves and running a soft body simulation
I think if you select the channel you want to edit the curve on and press shift+h it will hide all the others except the one you’re on.
Hey there, I've been using Blender (my first 3d software) for about 4 years now and I always tried avoiding things like rigging and character animation, and relied on websites such as 'mixamo' in order to carry that burden. But I've recently started to really notice the importance that this area of 3d has and watching you "relearn" character animation with Blender and the amount of detailed information you share along the way has really helped me as I begin my journey toward learning this new skill.
Thank you for sharing your experiences for so many others like me to get started in the industry!
7:19 I think you need to select the whole thing and then paint out the wrong handles using c. It's a bit weird/hard to find but the c mode is pretty awesome
Check the descriptions of the first few videos in Blender Guru's donut tutorial. Somewhere in there he has a link to a hotkey cheat sheet. It's not everything, but it helps.
Thanks for your videos! I stumbled upon Blender just after AM and I've never looked back!
I liked this video at the beginning.
This video give my a lot of advice :D. My dream is making animation and I try to work with Blender. However, it's not really work because I don't know where to start :)) so this is help me a lot.
@sir wad niestadt you can turn on audio video sync to get perfect voice and you can use other similar options, some will reduce frames but they will show the blocked out frames hope's that work
You are an amazing person, Sir. Thank you for your great videos.
That's insane, Not gonna lie. Didn't expect this from you. Just a lil randomness will probably lift it to the next stage. I'd def watch a series of this.
Came for the tutorial, stayed for the great editing. Even the ad is good 😂
I sure hope Blender devs take a look at this video. We have been struggling on the animation side for Blender and it def work!!! They keep catering to modeling, texturing, etc. We need some animation support ASAP
23:35 so beaitiful lights :D wow
I'm brand new to Blender. The only 3D software (limited) experience I have was using Bryce 3D about 20 years ago. I am starting at ZERO and trying to learn allllllll of this. It's extremely overwhelming. You can see what the software is capable of, you can watch how others do it, but it feels a LONG, LONG, LONG ways away when you are just beginning to use it for the first time and from no knowledge of 3D at all. I've been watching loads of videos and am even working through a few Udemy courses to grab a general knowledge about this software and all things 3D, including physics (which I never took). It still seems like these classes are a step ahead of beginners, and are expecting users to know things. I have to stop the video and research what they're talking about and that's not how I love learning. WOW, is all I can say... it's a huge ocean to navigate when you don't even know where the shore is! LOL It's a lot to learn and I take my hat off to those who have mastered this skill. I am envious and want to learn to be just like them! I would love any further guidance on what resources would best serve me to learn this from the ground up. Recommendations would be incredible. Thanks for your video... it's nice to see I'm not the only one... the struggle is real man! LOL
Great work Wade, really enjoyed this video.
You can enable the waveform at Blender video editing page, then use it on timeline
DUDE that was impressive
Hi Sir. Great video. It was like a hands-on experience for someone like me thinking about learning Blender. I started with 3D Max a bunch of years ago and got a degree with Maya, which I've been using religiously, for better or for worse, for several years now. To answer the question you posed- yes, you were successful in learning to animate Blender in your given challenge time. You just needed more time to finish and polish, get more experience with some of the tools, but the principles are the same and you've clearly learned enough to complete the job, given more time. Thanks for sharing this.
NGL I AM HERE for a whole ass series called "Sir wade's Animators Kitchen" Ep1: the spline and the spaghettis
that was fuckin' epic while i do physic based animations with gravity and rigid body linking and ragdolls fluid n' stuff but that was an awesome journey of blendering
To get clean audio, you'll need to export the audio from the video, and import it to blender as a video sequence, that will make it smooth, you can also load reference like this, also, its best to stick to image sequences, this is 100% a pain.