Original subtitles

All right, in this lesson,

we are going to talk about animation.

So we're going to learn how to make some keyframes and be able to start

making some thing's gonna move around on the screen here.

So to get started,

I want to talk about kinda some of the settings to you.

You really need to be sure of before you even get started with anything.

And that is your frame count or frames per second.

This essentially is how many frames will,

how many images will play per second of film,

because that's what film is,

is moving pictures, right?

So it's just several images kind of in a row to create the illusion of movement.

So with that knowledge now, I mean,

I could talk about that stuff all day, but I'm not going to.

So the first thing you wanna do is hit Control or Command D on your screen here.

And whenever you do that,

you'll see that there is this project window right here that pops up.

And on this window you'll see many different settings.

But we're just going to look at FPS,

which is the frames per second.

So depending on what you're creating for,

you might want to change this to something different.

So traditional film uses 24 frames per second.

Television uses 30 frames per second in the United States,

in many other countries in Europe and I think some in Asia.

They use 25 frames per second with their television.

There's, there's some movies that are coming out at 48 frames per second,

which creates a little bit more of a smoother movement.

I personally am not a huge fan of kinda smoother movement,

but it does exist.

And there's also some television shows that we'll use 60 frames per second,

or essentially doubling the frame count that create the kinda smoother movement which

is used more in like sports or kind of action type things.

But alright, so for this case here we're interested a 24.

So hanging 24 and enter.

And there we go.

Just like that.

It changes some things in our timeline and some stuff here.

But really it's important to just make sure that's

set to where you want it to be before you start animating anything.

So then there's no surprises later on.

Because if you start animating at 24 frames per second,

then you decide later on that you want 60.

It's going to look different.

And you're gonna have to redo some stuff, and that's not fun.

So there's actually two places that you need to change the setting.

The first is in the project settings are here where we just changed it.

And then the other one is in the Render Settings.

So up, up top here with our render button and next to

that with the render dialogue and the gear here, I'm going to click that.

And then whenever I look at the output,

you see that frame rate of 30.

So this is essentially what it's going to,

whenever it renders out.

This is how many frames per second it's going to render out.

But, and here is what frames per second you are working in inside of Cinema 4D.

And this is what you output it to,

something like After Effects.

So you've got to always make sure that these are exactly the same.

Kinda weird, but it's something you have to do.

All right.

So let's go ahead and let's talk about some,

some timelines stuff here.

So we kinda talked about it in the initial lesson here,

but I'm gonna go over a little bit more as like a little bit of a refresher maybe.

So down here, we can click and drag,

and this is our,

our timeline or here we currently don't have any sort of animation or anything like that,

so we don't really see anything.

But if we go down a little bit more,

we can see that our start frame is 0 and our end frame is 72.

I can change this to 150.

And then I have to this right here is kind of a waiver.

You just look at a smaller segment at a time.

So do you have like 1000 keyframes?

Sometimes you just want to look at a ten frame gap of it.

And you kind of said,

this isn't necessarily like the project start and end frame.

This is just what you're viewing right here.

So if you want to view all 150 frames,

you just click that little arrow right there and drag it all the way to the end.

Alright? And then let's say sometimes you're in the middle here.

You wanna go right back to the first frame.

You can just click on this little button here that when you hover over,

it says Go to start.

Because the start frame,

coming over to the other side,

this is the end frame.

So all of these buttons are kind of like mirrored.

This button right here, we'll go to the previous keyframe

that you have set and we're in talking about keyframes here in just a second.

This one over here will go to the next keyframe.

This button right here,

we'll go to the previous frame.

This will go to the next frame and back like that.

And then you have play.

And when you play it,

it plays obviously again,

we have no animation, so we'll see how that works in just a second.

Down here, we have this little button here that's grayed out,

which is a way to set keyframes on an object.

Once we have an object,

we'll be able to start making some keyframes.

Next to it.

We have auto keen.

These are basically the two main things are here.

Auto key means that every time you move an object,

whatever frame you're on, it automatically makes the keyframe.

Sometimes that's really beneficial and sometimes you

accidentally leave it on and you start making a bunch of animation without even trying.

So it's good just to be aware of what you're doing.

I'm pretty sure that, yeah.

Whenever auto Kings on you see the whole viewport turns red right here.

And then I'll show you kind of how to use both here.

Alright, so let's go ahead and make a click and hold here.

And let's make a sphere.

Zoom out a little bit.

And let's say I want the sphere to start right

here and then wanted to fly over here and stop.

So what I can do is I can say unframed 0, I want it to start.

And then unframed 40.

I wanted to go over here,

so unframed scrubbed the frame 40 and then I'm just gonna move,

move the sphere wherever I want, r e here.

And let's say that's good right there.

And then I have to click Record active Objects button.

And whenever I do that, you see that it makes a little frame down there.

Now, I forgot to do that on the first frame,

their CSI that nothing else happened.

Suddenly hit undo control Z.

Control Z a couple more times.

There we go. So now I'm going

to hit Record Act of objects on that first frame, on frame 0.

Go back to frame 40.

Move it to the position I wanted it.

And then hit the,

hit the the set keyframe again.

And you see that whenever I did that,

it actually made it a little liner here.

I'm gonna go to start and then hit play.

You see we just created an animation.

Pretty cool, pretty simple.

Now let's say I wanted to go back at frame 80.

So on that frame 80 and then I'd go back like this.

And then I stop.

You'll see that if I just start playing right now,

like if I don't hit the set keyframe button,

it just completely pretend it doesn't exist.

It just pops right back to where the keyframe was.

So you always have to make sure that you're,

you're making keyframes like that.

Now, the case is different.

If you have auto key on now and turn that on just you can see how that works.

And let's say frame ADM right here.

Let's say frame 96.

I'm gonna go over here and then go down.

So you see I don't have to click on that button every single time.

Every single time I move it on that key for,

on that timeline frame,

it will make a keyframe.

So let's play that.

So pretty cool there.

Now there's a couple of things that we can do inside of these timelines here.

So let's say that we're like this first part right here.

We kinda want that to happen a little bit faster.

But what we can do is we can click on that frame and we can drag it

anywhere along this timeline here you can drag it after you see a changes,

changes the, the line that we're working with here.

But let's say we wanted that 24 frames.

So this first action right here goes from 0 to this position here in 24 frames.

And we can also actually delete keyframes by selecting them open.

We can select it and hit delete.

And you see that whenever he did that,

it just takes that key frame out of the movement at all.

So what, it was supposed to go back up here and then over,

but instead we skip that and just go straight to that keyframe right over here.

The other thing we could do is if we want to select multiple key frames,

is we can click on an empty area and drag,

and it makes this little selection Harry here.

And I can delete.

I can move them all together since they're all selected.

Or I can grab the ends are here.

And I can squeeze these keyframes into a certain area.

So like let's say you have like a five keyframe animation.

And it just happens to slow while you can

grab this whole thing are here and grab one of the edges.

Like little handles on these.

It's kinda weird but and then you can make it go faster or slower as you kind of need.

And it's a pretty useful tool whenever you're animating because it's,

it's not necessarily the easiest thing ever to create.

Perfect timing with your first,

I first kind of pass through animation.

So that's a pretty important tool to have there.

All right, so the next thing would be,

let's go ahead and delete these frames right here.

And let's work on just a single motion.

I'm going to turn off auto keen because again,

if you don't turn that off, any,

anything that you edit that can be animated will train,

will make it automatic keyframe,

including anything with your materials,

lighting, cameras, any any of that kind of stuff.

There's a lot of different settings that can be animated.

So and you find that out whenever you accidentally leave auto qian for too long.

But so let's say that we have actually made this go down 40 here.

It's just so we're only view in 40 frames. There you.

Okay?

So another thing we can do is we can ease,

and we can ease keyframes to make them kind

of go slower into or out of keyframes and into the next keyframe.

Or we can make them linear and make them look more mechanical.

First, let me show the mechanical thing so I can select.

I'm going to go ahead and hit the end, quote.

Pause this real quick,

and then guess it can't do that.

All right, so we'll do one key frame at a time.

Starting with the frame on 40 here.

Whenever I click on that frame, you see that I get a bunch

of options over here on this project panel.

And you'll see that it says interpolation.

Well, whenever says spline,

what it's doing is trying to make it ease into that frame.

So we can change that to linear.

And then I'm gonna go to the first frame,

then also change this one.

See you linear.

And let's see what happens now to really hit play.

A whole bunch of nothing.

Actually, that's weird.

It looks like a lost the animation button lunges at it real quick.

There. There we go.

Okay, now go back to that first frame.

So by default it makes it spline.

So it tries to make your frames pretty smooth.

But sometimes you want it to be,

you know, like I said, the mechanical.

So this one right here.

Because go 60.

Just so we can get a better idea.

Now we should be able to see a little bit easier.

Cc, it doesn't ease into that frame.

It doesn't go slow or fast,

it doesn't accelerate, decelerate with a linear keyframe.

Again, like I said, something looks more robotic or mechanical, less lifelike.

But again, we're gonna go ahead and select both of these and I

can turn it back to spline and maybe you can see the difference here.

So you see it's a lot smoother animation and we can actually go farther into

these settings to make them kinda more smooth if we wanted to.

And we can do that by going into window.

We're gonna timeline or f curve next to it.

And we get this little thing right here.

If we do, we can right-click and go to frame.

All.

We can see that our animation is kind of represented by this curve right here.

It's essentially saying that over time it's moving this amount of distance.

So that's what creates this curve like whenever we make it a linear keyframe,

it's just, it's straight line from one to the other.

It doesn't slow down at all.

It just goes the same speed the entire time.

Well, well, we can do is I'm going to adjust this so we can see a little bit easier.

Now I can kinda have this play and say we

wanted to really ease into that final resting place.

When we click on the frames in the timeline editor here, or in the curve editor,

I can adjust these Beziers here and make it go slower or

faster into that frame right there.

And if I hold Control,

that keeps it straight, that's only good frame.

All again, just I'll just right-click in the middle of nowhere and it frame l.

And then let's see what something like that looks like.

Ccs starts really fast and then it goes really slow out of that position there.

And then clicking on that first one there,

I can kind of adjust this curve to.

So, so now it's going to be really slow on

both ends and really fast in that middle section there.

And sometimes it's a little bit difficult to kind of pick some of these frames are here.

So what you can do is do the drop-down on the shape here.

And then you see that you have all of your,

all the things that you can actually animate on this object are now

kind of in here and you can look at each track individually.

So we see that the thing that we're working with here is position on the x-axis.

So whenever we, again select that,

we can kinda just view that part alone.

And sometimes go to your curve editor and not see your shaping here.

And might look something like this.

And you're like, oh, I don't have anything to adjust.

Well, what you can do is you can click and drag

it into this little panel here if that's the case.

And you see that we have it just like that.

Alright, so that is how we kind of make some pretty simple animations there.

Alright, I'll see you next time.