This is a simple technique to convert your animation from smooth, auto-splined animation, to something similar to traditional frame-by-frame animation, recently popularised in the latest animated Spider-Man film.
Love this video? Then check out my latest short film BLACK CURTAIN: The Fear. Out now! BLACK CURTAIN: The Fear th-cam.com/video/Hl8EpIU3iRI/w-d-xo.html
Actually blender has a modifier called stepped you can add it on top off your animation and it will convert your animation to 2 s and you can keep your original keyframes without baking them. Also you can just change project frame rate to 12fps
I've thought about that myself, but this method is software agnostic, so anyone with maya or Max can do the same thing. Another advantage is that by working in stepped directly, it gives you a more predictable result when shifting key frames to suit a desired outcome.
@@AdamBelis I will say though that using the modifiers is actually awesome as well, and would be perfect for animations such as walk cycles or background characters.
@@Dikko I agree but would be nice to say blender users have this option insm new to blender and was amazed when I found out that you can put modifieres ond curves
I absolutely adore spiderverse's animation style. Its definitely creative and at some points looks really scraggly if that makes sense which is quite unique
This is amazing, as a hand drawn animator, I've been frustrated by the restrictions of having my animations only on ones in Blender, but you've gave me a reason to push forward with perfecting my 3D animation skills. BTW, do you know how I can make the camera not make the poses look flat, because I had a character's arm sticking out towards while the other one was in its default pose, but the hand didn't look bigger than the one in default pose.
last 2 replies are good, if you really want a stylised kind of perspective view, there is *forced perspective* where people actually change the size of a model part and move it towards the camera
This is great for breaking down the fundamental idea of spiderman. However I would like to explain that there is quite a lot of theory involved in posing and breakdowns in the spiderverse style to achieve that comic book style. Animating a shot in spline and just baking on 2s doesn't usually achieve the animation style of spiderverse. The main rules were pose heavy rather than movement heavy all in favour of clarity on motion. It takes some time to wrap your head around haha.
@@PlusHappylab a lot of it is favouring your poses more, even mid action. Super clean silhouettes at all times and very tight spacing. The timing tends to be fairly fast too. So your breakdowns happen fast then your really favour ease ins and outs to the key poses will more isolated overlap and follow through to prevent it from being too stiff. If you frame by frame any action in a spiderverse movie you'll begin to notice this
@@AnimatewithArran wow i was going fr by fr yesterday and i noticed like you said the timing which was fairly fast. do you have any tips for someone doing a straight ahead workflow. thanks for the reply arran
@@PlusHappylab it's tricky doing straight ahead in the style from my personal perspective since it's so key poses centric. There's no really secret sauce with straight ahead but there are tools like tween machine to help with using pose to pose methods
I appreciate you making this tutorial software agnostic! I have a few various softwares aside from blender like autodesk maya, and the way you explained it is definitely going to save me some time :) keep up the good work!
I understand how much work it would be, however if you ever did a course in something like Udemy, I would be the first in line to sign up. You gave a wonderfully skillful way of distilling complex concepts into easily understandable ideas. Love your vids!
22:30 I don't know how I didn't realize that you were doing a super cool perspective trick until the end. It looked so natural but I didn't think she'd be standing on a block far behind to make the big guy look more threatening/make her look smaller.
В книге Animator Survival Kit а так же в одноимённом видео в главе More Timing More Spacing поднимается тема двоек и единичек, было очень информативно посмотреть как это реализовано автором данного ролика в Blender
So I was playing around to see if I could make it more like what they did and I'm stumped... So the differences from your's verse their's, is your's does the jitters nicely it's a great simple effect. But if you look closely their's completely freezes the character on screen. If the camera is moving/rotating the character remains visually unchanged in location and rotation. Simulating a painted cell sitting there for 2 frames you can see this in the bus scene you showed. 1:30 My quest how would you do this... Maybe just render him separately with the camera on 2s as well :/
I'll be making a second video that helps solve the camera issue. But basically you can do it with a plugin made by this guy! th-cam.com/video/PwID61OxAfw/w-d-xo.html
Fantastic video, Dikko! I'm curious, what software are you using to record your keystrokes and your screen? My college is looking to improve its video tutorials by finding a keystroke recorder that doesn't conflict with the screen recorder software, so students can see exactly what keys are being pressed. Once again, brilliant video, looking forward to applying it to my own animation studies! :D
Thanks! It's actually a plugin called screencast keys - so it sits inside blender itself. Wont be much use for other software but here you go! github.com/nutti/Screencast-Keys
Thanks mate, I'm glad you enjoyed it! Be sure to check out part 2. Turns out the camera is just as important!
5 ปีที่แล้ว
@@Dikko I will check it out for shure! I wrote my thesis in form of an analysis about the art style and the well done implementation of the 2D animation style in the 3D CGI medium. I like your practical approach in form of a tutorial and made it software independent.
Hey Dikko, Just wanted to say great explanation and video but I have one question, how would you go about on doing this in Maya? Are you familiar on ways to do this in Maya by any chance? Thanks
It's pretty much the same method actually! Only setback is that you would need to purchase a plugin for the keyframe offset dilemma (see part 2), and from what i can tell its a bit pricey.
Yeah, stop torturing yourself! Kidding aside, rendering two passes. 1 with the animated characters rendering every second frame, then one with the background rendered on every frame. Then comp in after effects or something similar.
Smear frames essentially is used on animation that doesn't have motion blur to simulate motion blur but keeping the clearness of everything. Smear = no motion blur No smear = motion blur You can also do neither.
I personally find animating on 2s preety bad. It's meant for animators to get the point across with less work, but obviously 3D doesn't have that problem. In fact, animating on 2s on 3D takes alot more work than a clean fluid well timed and spaced motion. This for me is as silly as recreating real life camera problems like way too much motion blur or a silly vignette effect that only makes the original work more unclear and obscure from the viewer. The thing that made Spiderverse as popular as it is (except that it had Spiderman pasted on the title) is the texture quality and post processing.
It's because we've been spoiled by buttery smooth 3d animation for the past 20 years. Any old Disney or Warner brothers cartoons would have been drawn largely on twos. I understand how it could feel a little jarring at first in 3d
@@Dikko it feels much choppier than 2d animation and feels like a way to cut render time over everything else. Dragon Prince does this to and it hurts to look at
@@PheonixKnght it might be due to the art direction as well. Both that's shows maintain quite a bit of volume even though they are toon shaded, which might be why it's a bit jarring. Compare that to many anime shows which if you would believe are created in 3d more often than you think..! And they are animated on 3s a lot of the time, and they don't have that issue. So there's a lot of factors in play as to why you might find it jarring.
@@Dikko if 3d is used to look 2d I'm ok with it Arc does this better than anyone making you think the games are 2d until the camera moves. To me that style is art. I'm not trying to insult you showing how this is done in Spiderman but some styles are jaw dropping others hurt to watch.
Indeed that's true ;). But for those who don't know shit about animation, I needed to give a more descriptive breakdown. Trying to keep what future videos I make under 20 mins
This helps maybe in a "quick tips" PDF but for those actually learning the technique, it's nice to know why I'm doing it and how to manipulate it. I hate tutorials that just tell you what to do in steps but give no explanation why they're doing it or how to work with it.
A bit tedious but i guess if you want to mix frame rates thats the best way. An easier method is to just render overy other frame then 1/2 the speed of the image sequence. As an added benefit you cut render times and storage space in half instead of rendering 2 identical frames. Thanks for the tutorial.
I know that's another method, and I've used that before a lot. But if you need real time feedback this method is better. Besides you can still render every 2nd frame with this approach if need be, so you don't lose out on doing that. The other advantage with this method is that you can approach the animation more traditionally with certain parts of a single characters animation being animated on one's. If u were to do that in post, you would have to individually time those frames, which is a nightmare.
" '...' being animated on one's. If u were to do that in post, you would have to individually time those frames, which is a nightmare." Nightmare indeed
Stunning video! Do you by any chance have twitter account I could follow? Oh, and are you planning to make tutorials on rigging? Those are some fancy bone controls!
Yes I do! Currently it's @supergreenanim. Will probably change it to match my TH-cam name, but it won't affect anything on your end. I am definitely planning some rigging tutorials. Those will probably start trickling out once I finish an addendum video for the Spiderverse animation tutorial .
For the balls you were animating I think that's a matcap you're using but would you know how to actually get your render to look like that? Because that material looks pretty cool
In the dope sheet, there's a drop down panel called 'actions'. From there you will see the option to switch between the different actions that are saved in your scene file
Of course! :). Great thing about blender is its consistency in its key map. I have a habit of box selecting because I tend to select groups of key frames rather than while actions.
Thanks while I heard already that they animated on 2s I had no idea how to implement it until now 😮 Animating on 1s then baking it in 2s sounds like a great way of doing it
this is probably the best tutorial i have ever watch he show you a magic trick with only 2 button and then take a lot of example to make sure you can further understand it
Your right in that it won't work with simulations because they sample every frame when baking. Shape keys should work if they are driven by a control joint and the shape key value itself is set to stepped
@Dikko no one cares about software. The people who do are people who are insecure with their skills. I'm a maya animator. So I say maya. You don't like the word I use doesn't matter. Shouldn't affect you.
Yeah if you don't want to actually control the way the animation behaves like an animator would. You know that in some instances the same action can bounce between 8fps, 12 fps and 24 within the same shot to give the action the right kind of character. Switching something to 12fps doesn't automatically add charm to an animation
Love this video? Then check out my latest short film BLACK CURTAIN: The Fear. Out now! BLACK CURTAIN: The Fear
th-cam.com/video/Hl8EpIU3iRI/w-d-xo.html
Actually blender has a modifier called stepped you can add it on top off your animation and it will convert your animation to 2 s and you can keep your original keyframes without baking them. Also you can just change project frame rate to 12fps
docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/editors/graph_editor/fcurves/modifiers.html
I've thought about that myself, but this method is software agnostic, so anyone with maya or Max can do the same thing. Another advantage is that by working in stepped directly, it gives you a more predictable result when shifting key frames to suit a desired outcome.
@@AdamBelis I will say though that using the modifiers is actually awesome as well, and would be perfect for animations such as walk cycles or background characters.
@@Dikko I agree but would be nice to say blender users have this option insm new to blender and was amazed when I found out that you can put modifieres ond curves
@@AdamBelis perhaps another tutorial is needed ;).
I absolutely adore spiderverse's animation style. Its definitely creative and at some points looks really scraggly if that makes sense which is quite unique
it's kinda like art in motion
while other pixar animations are too refined or realistic looking
@@adithyanr7415well said
This is amazing, as a hand drawn animator, I've been frustrated by the restrictions of having my animations only on ones in Blender, but you've gave me a reason to push forward with perfecting my 3D animation skills. BTW, do you know how I can make the camera not make the poses look flat, because I had a character's arm sticking out towards while the other one was in its default pose, but the hand didn't look bigger than the one in default pose.
Not sure if you found your answer, but you're talking about Perspective View vs. Orthographic View. You toggle this with pressing the Num 5 key.
Lower the focal length. 12 is pretty good for what you're describing.
last 2 replies are good, if you really want a stylised kind of perspective view, there is *forced perspective* where people actually change the size of a model part and move it towards the camera
great video bro, it's really gonna help my lego films look like actual stop motion while also maintaining smoothness in actions! subbed!
this is absolutely incredible. I haven't even gotten into animating on blender yet, but I'm a huge fan of spider verse so this si super cool for me
forget it
Hope you're doing well if you started!
This is great for breaking down the fundamental idea of spiderman. However I would like to explain that there is quite a lot of theory involved in posing and breakdowns in the spiderverse style to achieve that comic book style. Animating a shot in spline and just baking on 2s doesn't usually achieve the animation style of spiderverse. The main rules were pose heavy rather than movement heavy all in favour of clarity on motion. It takes some time to wrap your head around haha.
wow how would one learn to get that clarity of motion i noticed in the spiderverse?
@@PlusHappylab a lot of it is favouring your poses more, even mid action. Super clean silhouettes at all times and very tight spacing. The timing tends to be fairly fast too. So your breakdowns happen fast then your really favour ease ins and outs to the key poses will more isolated overlap and follow through to prevent it from being too stiff. If you frame by frame any action in a spiderverse movie you'll begin to notice this
@@AnimatewithArran wow i was going fr by fr yesterday and i noticed like you said the timing which was fairly fast. do you have any tips for someone doing a straight ahead workflow. thanks for the reply arran
@@PlusHappylab it's tricky doing straight ahead in the style from my personal perspective since it's so key poses centric. There's no really secret sauce with straight ahead but there are tools like tween machine to help with using pose to pose methods
Bro, you should do a course on this more thoroughly, on gumroad or wherever, I would really pay it, greetings from Mexico 😉
I appreciate you making this tutorial software agnostic! I have a few various softwares aside from blender like autodesk maya, and the way you explained it is definitely going to save me some time :) keep up the good work!
I understand how much work it would be, however if you ever did a course in something like Udemy, I would be the first in line to sign up. You gave a wonderfully skillful way of distilling complex concepts into easily understandable ideas. Love your vids!
I'd rather just publish here so everyone can learn!
this is absolutely wicked. I reeeeally enjoyed that movie and you explained the principles of it brilliantly. Thank you. Much appreciated
Glad you enjoyed it!
22:30 I don't know how I didn't realize that you were doing a super cool perspective trick until the end. It looked so natural but I didn't think she'd be standing on a block far behind to make the big guy look more threatening/make her look smaller.
this is actually really helpful as i didnt know HOW to change it to twos on my spiderverse animation
As a human that is animated in 2s I approve
This movie has single handily made most student animation demo reels worked on 2s, 3s, and 4s and I am not mad :D Work smarter not harder kids!
dude when I liked your video, it turned from 12K to 13K (second time it happened) your welcome
В книге Animator Survival Kit а так же в одноимённом видео в главе More Timing More Spacing поднимается тема двоек и единичек, было очень информативно посмотреть как это реализовано автором данного ролика в Blender
Exzellent Tutorial man!
This is just insane, thanks so much dude!
So I was playing around to see if I could make it more like what they did and I'm stumped... So the differences from your's verse their's, is your's does the jitters nicely it's a great simple effect. But if you look closely their's completely freezes the character on screen. If the camera is moving/rotating the character remains visually unchanged in location and rotation. Simulating a painted cell sitting there for 2 frames you can see this in the bus scene you showed. 1:30
My quest how would you do this... Maybe just render him separately with the camera on 2s as well :/
I'll be making a second video that helps solve the camera issue. But basically you can do it with a plugin made by this guy! th-cam.com/video/PwID61OxAfw/w-d-xo.html
Absolutely Brilliant
i simply open after effects and add 30 fps lol
Thats a big amount of knowledge.
Thanks ❤️
My pleasure
Thank you!
great
fantastic video. thx for sharing!
thanks this was great. Good explanation
Cheers! I'm glad you found it useful
This is a very great video.
Hmm...very interesting! Thank you!
My pleasure :)
Fantastic video, Dikko! I'm curious, what software are you using to record your keystrokes and your screen? My college is looking to improve its video tutorials by finding a keystroke recorder that doesn't conflict with the screen recorder software, so students can see exactly what keys are being pressed. Once again, brilliant video, looking forward to applying it to my own animation studies! :D
Thanks! It's actually a plugin called screencast keys - so it sits inside blender itself. Wont be much use for other software but here you go! github.com/nutti/Screencast-Keys
This was so helpful thank you
Awesomely well done tutorial. Thank you man
Thanks mate, I'm glad you enjoyed it! Be sure to check out part 2. Turns out the camera is just as important!
@@Dikko I will check it out for shure! I wrote my thesis in form of an analysis about the art style and the well done implementation of the 2D animation style in the 3D CGI medium. I like your practical approach in form of a tutorial and made it software independent.
@ thanks! I checked out your animation reel. Good stuff! I noticed u were a student at CG Spectrum. I had a scholarship there a few years back.
Hey Dikko, Just wanted to say great explanation and video but I have one question, how would you go about on doing this in Maya? Are you familiar on ways to do this in Maya by any chance? Thanks
It's pretty much the same method actually! Only setback is that you would need to purchase a plugin for the keyframe offset dilemma (see part 2), and from what i can tell its a bit pricey.
hmm i used shift+alt+o, then deleted every second keyframe, then set the interpolation type to the constant. Thanks for guide
Any guides to help us dorks still using Source Filmmaker/SFM please?
Yeah, stop torturing yourself! Kidding aside, rendering two passes. 1 with the animated characters rendering every second frame, then one with the background rendered on every frame. Then comp in after effects or something similar.
how do you do this in maya 3d? is it bake simulation? cause it yitters alot
Thanks, It is mind blowing...
Glad you liked it!
Fantastic and so simple. Thanks :-)
Glad you liked it!
cool
Very useful information, thanks! Looking forward to more vids (animations or tutorials)
Thank you! More coming soon :)
thx a lot
Nice! Yo TH MAN!!!
In walks Spider Punk moving on 3s and 4s 😂
Yeah the amount of offset groups for the bloody character must have been a right pain in the ass!
@@Dikko But it worked so well! It literally embodied his personality of not following the rules.
What program do you use to animate?
Blender :)
Do we add motion blur when animating on 2s? Because on the hold frame, it would lose it's motion blur?
Generally you don't work with motion blur, because the blue will still calculate at 24 fps even if the animation is on 2s, so it looks quite odd
Smear frames essentially is used on animation that doesn't have motion blur to simulate motion blur but keeping the clearness of everything.
Smear = no motion blur
No smear = motion blur
You can also do neither.
😍😍😍😍 useful
I tend to call animating on twos or on threes "stuttering" because it looks like the animation is stuttering.
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When an amateur tells you how he thinks things are done…
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I personally find animating on 2s preety bad. It's meant for animators to get the point across with less work, but obviously 3D doesn't have that problem. In fact, animating on 2s on 3D takes alot more work than a clean fluid well timed and spaced motion. This for me is as silly as recreating real life camera problems like way too much motion blur or a silly vignette effect that only makes the original work more unclear and obscure from the viewer.
The thing that made Spiderverse as popular as it is (except that it had Spiderman pasted on the title) is the texture quality and post processing.
I can't state how much I HATE this choppy style it looks like my PC is losing frames
It's because we've been spoiled by buttery smooth 3d animation for the past 20 years. Any old Disney or Warner brothers cartoons would have been drawn largely on twos. I understand how it could feel a little jarring at first in 3d
@@Dikko it feels much choppier than 2d animation and feels like a way to cut render time over everything else. Dragon Prince does this to and it hurts to look at
@@PheonixKnght it might be due to the art direction as well. Both that's shows maintain quite a bit of volume even though they are toon shaded, which might be why it's a bit jarring. Compare that to many anime shows which if you would believe are created in 3d more often than you think..! And they are animated on 3s a lot of the time, and they don't have that issue. So there's a lot of factors in play as to why you might find it jarring.
@@Dikko if 3d is used to look 2d I'm ok with it Arc does this better than anyone making you think the games are 2d until the camera moves. To me that style is art.
I'm not trying to insult you showing how this is done in Spiderman but some styles are jaw dropping others hurt to watch.
@@PheonixKnght all good good man we're just discussing stuff so no need to be concerned about insulting me :)
For those whose who don't have 20 minutes: Select animation, Space > Bake Animation > Frame Step: 2. In graph editor, T > Constant.
Indeed that's true ;). But for those who don't know shit about animation, I needed to give a more descriptive breakdown. Trying to keep what future videos I make under 20 mins
This helps maybe in a "quick tips" PDF but for those actually learning the technique, it's nice to know why I'm doing it and how to manipulate it. I hate tutorials that just tell you what to do in steps but give no explanation why they're doing it or how to work with it.
@@button9 indeed, "context is king"
@@Dikkofacts
A bit tedious but i guess if you want to mix frame rates thats the best way. An easier method is to just render overy other frame then 1/2 the speed of the image sequence. As an added benefit you cut render times and storage space in half instead of rendering 2 identical frames. Thanks for the tutorial.
I know that's another method, and I've used that before a lot. But if you need real time feedback this method is better. Besides you can still render every 2nd frame with this approach if need be, so you don't lose out on doing that. The other advantage with this method is that you can approach the animation more traditionally with certain parts of a single characters animation being animated on one's. If u were to do that in post, you would have to individually time those frames, which is a nightmare.
" '...' being animated on one's. If u were to do that in post, you would have to individually time those frames, which is a nightmare."
Nightmare indeed
that last quote was beautiful! “no spiderverse just copied the last 100 years of animation” lol tsssssssss
So in summary animated characters (or other moving things such as Birds) on 2s and everything else like background on 1s r
Yes but it's more complicated than that. Check out the follow up video for the reasons why
Stunning video! Do you by any chance have twitter account I could follow? Oh, and are you planning to make tutorials on rigging? Those are some fancy bone controls!
Yes I do! Currently it's @supergreenanim. Will probably change it to match my TH-cam name, but it won't affect anything on your end. I am definitely planning some rigging tutorials. Those will probably start trickling out once I finish an addendum video for the Spiderverse animation tutorial .
We're using technology to make things look as if they're older technology...
@dikko do you mind sharing how you made the first two balls look very 2d? What type of shader or rendering did you use?
Eevee and a custom toon shader (you can get it off my gumroad)
OOOH ahh yeah, that's the stuff. Love me some clean, stepped animation
For the balls you were animating I think that's a matcap you're using but would you know how to actually get your render to look like that? Because that material looks pretty cool
Custom toon shader :). You can find many on blendermarket.com
Heh dik 0:03
Absolutely brilliant. Thank you for sharing :-)
Hello. How do you switch back to the original animation after baking the keyframes (assuming "Overwrite Current Action" was unchecked")?
In the dope sheet, there's a drop down panel called 'actions'. From there you will see the option to switch between the different actions that are saved in your scene file
before i selected a keyframe for my character to go along the path but after i bake my animation it doesnt follow the path anymore what do i do?
first ever person that i found to talk about animations in blender.
u la la
Thank you so much dude, i've been all night searching how to do this and you are a hero to me
6:09 You can also select all your keyframes by pressing the 'A' key
Of course! :). Great thing about blender is its consistency in its key map. I have a habit of box selecting because I tend to select groups of key frames rather than while actions.
Thanks while I heard already that they animated on 2s I had no idea how to implement it until now 😮
Animating on 1s then baking it in 2s sounds like a great way of doing it
this is probably the best tutorial i have ever watch
he show you a magic trick with only 2 button
and then take a lot of example to make sure you can further understand it
I’ve tríed it and works well with armatures, but I haven’t been able to make it work with shape keys or cloth & hair simulations. Any idea?
Your right in that it won't work with simulations because they sample every frame when baking. Shape keys should work if they are driven by a control joint and the shape key value itself is set to stepped
I smashed the subscribe button instantly.
Thanks for smashing that sh*t! Much appreciated.
XD!
thanks bro
Wow!
For us maya animators this is just hilarious. This is just the step before polish and spline 😆
You mean for us Animators, regardless of which software you animate in ;). You may know this, but not everyone does
@Dikko no one cares about software. The people who do are people who are insecure with their skills.
I'm a maya animator. So I say maya. You don't like the word I use doesn't matter. Shouldn't affect you.
Why do he kinda sound like elon musk
you can just set the fps to 12 instead of all this sh!t
Yeah if you don't want to actually control the way the animation behaves like an animator would. You know that in some instances the same action can bounce between 8fps, 12 fps and 24 within the same shot to give the action the right kind of character. Switching something to 12fps doesn't automatically add charm to an animation