Animating the Blender initial cube

[acs]

The blender initial cube could be animated with:

• Location
• Scaling
• Rotating
• Apply the above to parts of the cube (faces, vertexes ...)
• Deforming: with 8 vertexes and 6 faces the mesh is a bit limited. But we can evolve the cube to deform/morph it also
• Coloring

The initial approach could be just to use the Animation Player and modify the cube properties (location, scale, rotation ..). Deforming could be more complex because it involves moving the vertexes. Let's see.

Blender doc about possible animations: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/animation/index.html

[acs]

As we can see in the video, animating the cube changing the location is pretty easy, We just need to define the keyframes (value for a key in a frame) in the different time position (the frame) in the timeline. Blender will automatically interpolate the values of the different keys (properties) for the rest of the timeline.

Screencast from 10-10-22 23:17:37.webm

For the location animation we can use also the follow path animation. You select the object you want to move first, and second the curve you want it to follow. And with Ctrl-P (Follow path) to define the location animation. Real sample to come.

[acs]

Ok, the difficult task is ... howto move just a part of the cube? One of its faces? Is it possible with keyframes or do we need a shader? I thinkt it is the shape keys (key mesh?) animation what I was looking for. Interesting post about this topic

And this is exactly the video I want to create. Deforming the cube using shape keys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKZKhS7pOww

The steps are easy:

• Object Data Properties -> Shape Keys -> Add -> Basis: Basic shape from which to start
• Modify the shape of the object in which ever way you want (for example moving a vertex in edit view)
• Animate the shape transition adding a key frame for Value of the new key shapes

The geometry is shared between all shape keys. So if you modify the geometry in the reshaping, it will be modified also in the basis shape key.

Screencast from 11-10-22 06:29:13.webm

[acs]

This video is pretty useful as a quick demo on using follow path constraints: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90iWyuXQgS4

Here goes the result of applying this tutorial:

Screencast from 12-10-22 00:04:38.webm

The key things:

• Create the path: Object Mode->Add curve->Path and then extrude (select point and e key) the last point of the path to build the curve
• Add the object, a cube in our case, position it at the start of the path, select the cube and after it select also the path (shift-click).
• With the cube and the path selected, press CTRL+P (Select parent) and select the Follow Path option
• Just press play in the animation player and that's all

This kind of animation using constraints is useful in different use cases like camera scrolling. But we won't go any further now.

A simplified version pretty easy to follow:

Screencast from 12-10-22 00:17:11.webm

[acs]

And it is time to use bones to animate the cube. It is not the best option for a cube, but it is a nice exercise to understand howto add bones to a mes, merge them and use the bones to animate the cube deforming it. It is the same concept we will use for animating characters.

[acs]

Really cool video showing howto use bones to animate for a simple model created from scratch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAiTYaiZmY0

Adding some bones to the cube so we can deform it using them it is pretty direct.

In Object mode:

• Add cube
• Add armature
• Select the cube and after select also the armature
• CTRL+P and select with automatic weights

Change to Pose mode:

• If you move the bone, the cube will also be moved. And the same for the rest of transformations

If you add more than one bond to the armature (Edit mode, key E) you can transform the cube in different ways moving the bones.

Ok, as the last thing to cover, howto animate using the bones?

In pose mode, you can create keyframes for the bones, so you can track the changes in the bones, which are the changes in the mesh. For doing it, just press the i key (insert keyframe) and select the Location, Rotation and Scale, which will track these properties for all the bones selected. Then when you animate the scene, the mesh will be animated from the bones animation. Cool!

This is the basic for animation using armatures (bones), a kind of rig pretty used with characters.

[acs]

Ok, enough for this one!