Lesson video

Hi, I'm Rebecca, your computing teacher for this Blender unit.

For this lesson, you're going to need the software called Blender, which you should have downloaded in lesson one with your parent or carers permission.

You're also going to need a pen and paper to make any notes that you might need to and to remove as many distractions as possible so that you can really focus in this lesson.

Once you've done all of that, we can begin.

In this lesson, you will add, move and delete keyframes to make basic animations.

You'll play, pause, and move through the animation using the timeline.

You'll create useful names for objects and you'll join multiple objects together using parenting.

Let's look at the two different types of animation.

Firstly, we've got stop motion, and this means that you have to manually animate every frame of the animation.

So for example, if you've ever seen the Shaun the Sheep movie, they've used clay and plasticine to create the models and they very slowly move each character by bit by bit taking a photograph at each point.

And that's a frame by frame or stop motion animation.

We've then got keyframe animation.

And this only requires you to pick the important locations or the keyframes and the computer works out the rest, and this is called tweening and they use this in films like those Pixar Films that you might've seen, those automation movies.

So keyframe animation is something we're going to be looking at in this lesson.

And in this example, you only need to tell the computer where the car is at one, two and three, positions one, two, and three, given these keyframes, the computer works out the other positions.

So if you can see those where you bold red ones, where it's labelled one, two, and three, and then those paler ones between it, the computer worked out where the positions are of that car should be based on where those three keyframes are.

So why might a modern film use keyframe animation rather than stop motion, what do you think? Pause the video while you have a think about that.

Let's take a look then.

So in general, it's faster to make animations in that way.

It's easier to edit them too.

It's smooth, creates smoother animations, and it's repeatable.

You can use the same walk animation in a different shot.

So we're going to look at using keyframing now in Blender.

You should have already downloaded the file called Snow Scene from the website.

If you're unable to do that, or if it's not working, you could use your Snowman from lesson one and add some trees in the background to start your Snow Scene, if you wish to.

So I've already downloaded the Snow Scene file.

So I'm going to go to file, open and I've saved it in my documents area.

So I've got it there, Snow Scene, and then I'm going to press open.

And then the Snow Scene is going to open and there it is.

Now when you first open up your Blender Programme, you'll see that it looks all greyed out like this.

And that's because we haven't selected the render option up here.

So if I go over to here, I can click the render one, takes a little while, and then you can see all of the colours and textures and materials that have been applied to those objects.

So remember to press that when you do it.

Now, what we've got here is we've got a snowball, we've got a snowman and down the bottom, you'll see the frames that we can use for this animation.

Now you get different timelines here for whichever object you've got selected.

So if I click on the snowball, then I'll get this one.

It doesn't look like much has changed, but it will when we start doing this in a minute, and then I can click on the head of the snowman, which is the thing I'm going to animate as well.

And it is, even though it doesn't look like it, it is a different time for using for different objects.

So I'm going to start with the snowball because what I want the snowball to do is I want it to travel towards the snowman's head.

And then the animation will show there, the head falling off and going onto the ground.

So we've got to do our first bit.

So we, first of all, we need to say what the keyframe is for this snowball in order to get our keyframes selected, we have to type our I on our keyboard, and then you'll see this menu comes up and it says the insert keyframe menu.

And the option that we want is this one, the loc rot scale one there.

So I click on that and you'll notice a tiny little yellow diamond appears on that first keyframe.

So now I've said that at this frame, I want this snowball to be in this position.

Now I want to say where I want it to be at the end of the animation.

So I want it to now move towards that head.

So I have to say, it's roughly frame 20.

You can change this on yours if you want to, if I click on the number 20 there, then it now jumps to frame 20, and now I can move the ball, the snowball over to where I think it should hit the snowman.

So around there I'm going to go for, and at the moment I haven't set the keyframe yet.

Can you remember what I need to depress? What button do I need to press in order to set the key frame? Can you remember? It is the I button on the keyboard.

So I'm going to press I, and this is the insert keyframe menu again, can you remember which one I had to click? So it's this one here, visual loc rot scale.

There we go, so I can click on that.

And then you can see now that the diamond, the yellow diamond has appeared.

Now, if I just press back on this, you can actually watch and you can see that, that first part of the movie, I should go back again, press play.

You can see that the snowball is now moved towards the snowman.

So I'm going to carry on now, now that is all to do.

That is a timeline that is attached to the snowball.

Now I need to look at the timeline that's attached to the head.

So there's the head object.

And you'll see now that, that keyframe has disappeared because I'm not on the snowball one anymore.

If I go back to the snowball one, you can see that those two keyframes appear.

But if I go to their head, those keyframes have disappeared because we want a different timelines.

So this is a timeline for this object.

So I'm starting there.

So I've got to set a keyframe.

So what do I need to do in order to set a keyframe? I press I on my keyboard and then which one do I go to? This one here.

Okay, and they need to put that little diamond shape.

And now I moved to the frame in the timeline where the head would fall on the floor.

So I want it to happen quite quickly.

So I'm going to do this at frame 30 this time.

So I'm going to move over to frame 30, and then I'm going to decide on the position for the head once it's on the floor.

So I'm just going to maybe put it there.

I don't, it's not on the floor at the moment, is it? Wonder if I can just drag it down a little bit so it's on the floor, it's not really realistic, is it? This is going to fall at a very funny angle, but anyway, so we've got that frame 30.

That's where it's going to fall.

Okay and now we've got that keyframe there and if I press play, let's just see what happens.

Go back to the start, press play.

Here we go, it's not very realistic at all is it? I think you'll do a much better job than me.

Okay, so I've got one keyframe on the go and I've got another keyframe on the go.

Now, if you're not happy with your keyframes and you want to move them around, then what you can do is you can select the object that you want to change the keyframe for.

So let's say you want to make the snowball go a little bit faster for example, then what you can do is you can move this keyframe.

So I've selected the snowball and currently it hits at frame 20.

But if I wanted it to go a little bit faster then what I can do is I can just drag it to an earlier frame.

So maybe even at frame 10, like, so, but now if you look, when I press play, there's a delay isn't there? So what I've got to do now is I've got to move the one that's on their head too, back to 10, and then I can move this one back as well.

So now it's all going to happen.

I might even move that even closer.

Now it's going to happen super fast.

Let's see what happens now.

That's super fast now.

The other thing that I can play around with is the length of the animation.

Cause at the moment it's going all the way to 250 frames.

And obviously my animation is quite short at the moment.

It doesn't need to be that long.

So I might shorten it to perhaps 60 frames or maybe 50 frames actually.

And now it'd be much shorter.

And when I press play, now, it should just loop like so.

So that is how you set keyframes for those objects and what you're going to do.

I do want to do the same animation, but then what I want you to also do is get the carrot nose and the hat from the snowman as well to fly off too.

So it's not just the head, okay? That's what you're going to be asked to do.

So now you can work on your own animation where you make the head fall off and the hat and the carrot, and just make sure that you practising those skills, so moving the timeline, adding keyframes, playing your animation and editing those keyframes, pause the video while you have a go at that.

So we're now going to look at names and parenting and using parenting to attach objects to each other.

Let's take a look.

So this is where my animation is so far.

If I just press the play button, you can see what it's doing.

So it's hit by the snowball and then the head and the hat and the carrot nose disappear off into different directions when it's hit.

So it's not very realistic at all at the moment, but it's a start.

I've practised doing the tweening and moving it with different keyframes, so made some progress.

That should be about where you are as well.

Now, what I want to do now is I want to teach you about naming these objects carefully and also joining those objects together, using parenting.

And what we can do with that then is we can join all those objects together and we can actually make it so that the whole body falls over when it's hit by the snowball, not just all these separate bits that move, that move in their own directions.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to just go back to frame one before I do this so that the snowman looks like this.

So you will need to make sure you do that before you start to.

What I want to do is I'm going to name all these parts sensibly cause at the moment they haven't got sensible names.

So I'm going to go to the sphere and I'm going to call it the snowman's body.

Now to give it names, I go over here, which the object properties section.

So I'm going to click on that and I'm going to give it a sensible name.

So I'm going to call it snowman's body.

And then I've got the snowman's head.

I've got the snowman's hat, it's my dog having a little nightmare in the background if you had that, snowman's hat and the snow one's cone or snowman's nose.

That'd be a better name, snowman's nose.

So I've got there now, I've named all of those parts.

Now I want to focus on this bit up here, because these are all these objects that I've got in my scene that are on the screen right now.

So I've got cone, cone, cone, cone, cone, all these different things, and they're actually all part of the trees.

If I go all the way down, you'll see, I've now got my more sensibly named snowman.

So the hat, the body, the head and the nose, and what I'm going to do is first of all, I want to join the head together.

So I want to have the head, I want to have the nose and the hat attached to it.

So this is the snowman's head.

And I want to make the snowman's head, the parent and then the hat and the nose, the child.

And in order to do that, if I hold down shift on my keyboard and I drag that then you can see it changes.

You can see it hovers over.

It says dropped to set parent.

So the parent of snowman's hat is going to be snowman's head.

So I'm going to do that and then I'm going to let go.

And you can see now that the snowman's head now has the snowman's hat underneath it.

So that's the parent and that's the child.

And I can do the same thing with the nose.

So what do I hold down on my keyboard? I hold down the shift key.

So I'm going to hold down the shift key and I'm going to drag it onto the snowman's head and let go.

And then you can see we've got snowman's head as the parent.

And then you can, you can look at the arrows and the lines here to see that the hat and the nose have now been attached to the head.

And now what I want to do is attach the head to the body.

So I want to make all of this, the child of the body.

So I'm going to click on the head as that's the parent of this section, what am I going to hold on my keyboard? I'm going to hold the shift key.

So I'm going to hold down shift and I'm going to drag it onto the body like that.

And then it all closes, but you can see that it's all still there because you've got a parent symbol there with a little 300, but also I can click on this little arrow here and just scroll down and I can see now I've got the snowman's body, which is the parent of the snowman's head, which is the parent of the hat and the nose.

So now that object there, is all joined together.

If I press play now and some strange things are going to happen.

So if you look, you can see that those objects have split up a little bit.

They've now gone in a very strange locations, very different to what I was doing before.

And you can see that they are still attached because they are attached by that dotted line.

But what I want to do, is to complete the new animation.

So I'm just going to pause it.

I'm going to go back to the beginning because I want to make sure that my object stays together when I do this.

And I'm going to get rid of the keyframes that have already been attached to these objects.

So I'm going to go to, here delete keyframes.

So I just right clicked there and did delete keyframes.

And I go straight to the hat as well.

Delete keyframes to the cones, to the current nose, right click, delete keyframes.

And I don't need to, let me just check, I've done the head, done the heart and I've done the nose.

I don't need to change the snowball because the snowball's fine.

So if I press play now, I'm just back to where we were before, when we had just on the snowball bit.

So now should be able to move the whole body all in one, go.

So if I just grab this, the bottom, the body, you can see now I can move that snowman all in one go because it's all been attached together using parenting.

Now I want to make sure I put that back in the right place.

I'm going to go to edit, undo, and just make sure it's in the right place so that when that snowball hits, it's going to work.

I also need to remember which keyframe it hits it.

So it's a keyframe 10.

So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to select the body.

And now I am looking at the timeline for the body so I can put the keyframes in.

And then at 10 is where I want it to fall over.

So I'm going to go to slot to keyframe 10.

Now you, there we go.

I'm at keyframe 10, and now I'm going to add a keyframe in, so I'm going to press I, and I'm going to go to a third one from the top, okay.

So I've selected my keyframing and now I need to decide where it's going to fall over.

So I'm going to do that at 15.

So there we go.

Now I've selected 15 and now I need to get into the position for where it would fall over.

So what I want to do is I want to pull it all the way over here.

And can you remember when we learned about rotate in lesson 1, what I can actually do is I can rotate the whole thing now using that all button on my keyboard and I can rotate it so that it looks like the snowman has fallen on the floor.

So I'm going to click there and this is where the frame should end, so now the snowman has fallen on the floor.

So now when I press play, you can see.

Yeah, there we go.

What was going on? Did I not press keyframe? What did I do? I didn't press keyframe.

I don't think let's just go back and have a look.

No, I didn't, you see, that's a common mistake that can happen.

So let me just set this back again.

This will probably happen to you, so it's a good job I've made this mistake too.

so I'm going to try it again.

I've got my first keyframe.

I'm happy with where it is at the beginning.

And then I want to make sure that I've got it for frame 15.

So now I'm going to move it over to there and I'm going to use the rotate to make it fall on the floor.

It's not quite on the floor though, is it? Cause you can see the shadow.

So there we go, it's fallen behind the trees.

Now this point might just move it over a tiny bit so I can see the head, there we go.

So I'm happy with it now.

Now I'm going to remember to put that keyframe in this time.

And that's why I didn't work before is I'm going to press the I this time and I've got to put the keyframe in and now fingers crossed it's going to work.

So let's just go back and press play, well, there we go.

So now we've got an animation where the whole snowman has fallen over when it's been hit.

So it's up to you to have a go doing that yourself now.

So what I want you to do is pause this video while you have a go at doing that yourself and make sure that you're practising those skills, renaming the objects, parenting objects together, and animating a parented object.

And you'll also need to remember how to delete those key frames and put new keyframes in too.

Now once you've done that, don't feel like you have to stop because you could then animate it further if you wish, but pause the video now while you have a go at that.

Excellent, well done.

So we've come to the end of the lesson.

So that was some key skills that you learned there all about animation and using keyframes to tween those frames together.

And you may or may not have extended your animation further too.

There's lots of different things that you could do.

You could maybe be adding another snowman and make it look like two snowmen are having a snowball fight together.

You could make the trees move.

The trees could fall over based on a snowball hitting it.

There's lots of light, you can take this any way you want really, be really interesting to see what you come up with.

And if you'd like to, please ask your parent or carer to share your work on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, tagging @OakNational and #LearnWithOak.

Cause I'd love to see where you've got to this lesson and I'll see you again soon for lesson three.