2D in Blender 2.6 – Tutorial (Part 2) (13 February 2012)
Here’s the second installment of my 2D in Blender tutorial. Please read part one if you haven’t already done so.
Ok, so now we’ve got some images on planes we want to animate them. We can do this already by adjusting the origin/registration point of each plane and keying some rotations like this…
…but arms that don’t bend aren’t very interesting! Setting up an arm out of two planes is an option, and one which might look good for a robot, but we want to deform the mesh and make the arm bend properly. For this we need to subdivide the plane a bit. Rather than use the subdivide button, which will subdivide both the length and width we want to use “Loop Cut and Slide” which is available using the shortcut of CTRL+R.
If you try and move the cut you will move the texture and we don’t want that… so you have to stick them in the middle and if that’s not where you want it you have to add another cut.
On this arm I don’t want the cut in the middle. I want to align it with the little elbow. So, I add an extra two cuts in. Luckily one of the cuts aligns nicely with the elbow. If this doesn’t work out straight away you can always adjust the texture so that it does. In my experience you need more than one cut to make an arm bend nicely.
Now we want to add an armature to control the movement and bend the arm. So, go to Add > Armature > Single Bone.
Arrange this bone so that it starts at the top (shoulder) part of the arm and ends where the elbow is. Then press tab to enter edit mode, select the elbow point and press E to extrude another bone. We want two bones – an Upper Arm bone and a Lower Arm bone.
Now we need to add some vertex groups so the armature knows which vertices to move with which bone. Open the Object Data tab, find Vertex Groups and click the plus (+) button. Assign the vertices by the LwrArm bone with the same name and make sure you click “assign”. Do the same with “UppArm” – So, now we have two bones called UppArm and LwrArm and two Vertex Groups (with the correct vertices assigned) with the same names.
To make this work all we need to do is parent the mesh to the armature. So, select the plane, select the armature and press CTRL+P and choose Armature Deform.
Because we’ve already named the vertex groups this should all work fine. So, hit CTRL and TAB to enter pose mode, select the LwrArm bone and rotate (press R). The mesh should deform nicely like this;
The only trouble is the arm doesn’t look very good unless the plane has a Subdivision Surface modifier. Go ahead and add one. I usually set both view and render to 3. Sometimes you have to watch out that the rounding of the plane doesn’t cut off any of your graphics. This one is a little close to the fingers. To stop that from happening I can add another cut a bit further up.
And here we have a perfectly deforming 2D arm.
Of course, you don’t just have to have two bones in an arm. Sometimes I like to have a character with a bendy arm. For this I usually make an IK chain and control the chain with a single bone, like this;
With these types of arms you have to place them behind the “body” plane. But what if you want to bend them in front? I usually make another copy of the arm which I bring in front of the body and then delete the upper/shoulder part, like this;
This will render well with an orthographic camera but not so well if you’re using a perspective one… unless the distance between the planes is very small.
Another way to bend planes is using curves and lattices. I used a curve on my Deki animation when I needed to make a plant grow. Here’s the plant…
And here’s the full animation;
…and there we go. That’s pretty much how I bend pictures and make animations. Enjoy!
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Thank you! These two tutorials were (and are) amazing.
Monday 13 February 2012(10:40 pm)I love 2D Animation made in Blender. For long time I searched and evaluated different animation tools, some very costly. But only Blender seems to give one the necessary functionality for creating 2D animation with 3D Background. Thanks a lot for sharing this information!!!
Tuesday 14 February 2012(9:02 am)Wow, thanks for these 2 tutorials. I’m definitely gonna work with it. And ofcourse I’m a fan on facebook, so I’ll be up to date for your newest animations. Keep up the great work!
Tuesday 14 February 2012(9:20 am)Hello Albinal, your work is really great! How you make for animate the eyes? You swap planes and play with scale?
Tuesday 14 February 2012(6:13 pm)Thanks for the tutorial!!
Thanks for the positive comments!
@Jota Yes. I swap planes around by keying the layer… though this doesn’t seem as easy in 2.6. I’ve only tried it once and it was a bit buggy. :-/
I wish they’d put back the old way. Press i and key the layer. That was easy.
Wednesday 15 February 2012(12:13 am)I don’t undestood very well the old way:
“I wish they’d put back the old way. Press i and key the layer. That was easy.”
But, i think you can insert some planes e change the preview inserting keys in the “small cam” of scene panel.
Wednesday 15 February 2012(5:35 pm)thank you ! this was great!
Tuesday 06 March 2012(3:17 pm)Thank you so much for sharing these tips!
Wednesday 07 March 2012(12:55 pm)Hello Albinal,
I love your 2D animation style a lot. And nice techniques.
To answer your layer animating problems, I suggest Aligorith’s blog (the coder that did most animation part)
http://aligorith.blogspot.com/2011/04/enough-of-layer-animation-bugz-already.html
The way you animate layers in 2.5+ has changed. It gives more power in certain cases, but makes us re-learn a bit
Thursday 08 March 2012(7:25 am)@oenvoyage – Thanks for that link. I’ve read it but it’s still quite confusing. I used to swap objects across layers by pressing i and keying the layer. This was easy. Now it seems I have to toggle the visibility and renderability in the outliner, which doubles the effort.
I’ve heard that I need to use keying sets… but this is another massive page of reading: http://aligorith.blogspot.com/2010/12/animating-in-25-getting-to-grips-with.html – A lot of which goes over my head! I’m still trying to work it out.
Thursday 08 March 2012(10:45 am)Thanks for these awesome tutorials. As for animating eyes, you can use the amazing Animall plugin for eyes and mouths, just put all your eyes (open, closed etc) on one big image and animate the UV of the plane. Obviously you have to use Constant keyframes (T key in the dopesheet) for instant transitions. You could also do it like ‘the old way’ by animating the object’s visibility icon in the outline. It works incredibly well.
Saturday 10 March 2012(8:42 pm)whoops, I meant in the outliner
Saturday 10 March 2012(8:43 pm)Albinal, I think I can boil down Algorith’s link to a simple usable technique:
You can continue to use layer animation to toggle visiblity, but you must set the layer membership keyframes in the Object data pane of the Resources area on the right of the screen instead of the header of the 3d view.
The layer selections in the header of the 3d view toggle visibility in the 3d view window only and can be disconnected from the scene itself.
Layer membership for an object is controlled by it’s object data which is set in the Object pane of the Resources area. To find this, make your object the active object then in the middle header of the Resources area (just below the outliner) click the cube icon. Then scroll down to the Relations section of that pane- inside it is the layer selector you should use to keyframe the layer visibility of that object.
Tuesday 13 March 2012(3:13 pm)@kev – Sorry I’ve slept on your comment! This sounds interesting. Thanks for posting it.
@r0ger – I haven’t got time to look at it right now but I’ll be sure to give it a try. Thanks again for posting!
Tuesday 13 March 2012(5:03 pm)Hi, thanks for share this great way to animate 2d in Blender, but please, can you explain how to animate facial expressions.
Thursday 15 March 2012(7:29 pm)Gracias!
Thanks Meliza. I rig the eyebrows and swap planes around to change the eyes/mouths. If I have to do a lot of lip-syncing then I’ll do it separately in flash and export an image sequence. Hope that helps?!?
Friday 16 March 2012(3:10 pm)Thanks Albinal for your super tutorials! Iam trying to find alternative for flash, and blender seems a good choice. I am a biginner in blender and if it is possible could you or kev expplains in details how to use AnimAll plugin for eyes, ets animation Thank you once again.
Tuesday 20 March 2012(7:09 pm)@manussa – Thanks! I do find that Blender’s animation tools are much better than those of Flash… but Flash is still useful for many things. Unfortunately, I cannot help with the AnimAll plugin as I have not yet used it. Maybe Kev can help with that one?!?
Thursday 22 March 2012(9:44 am)Thank you, Albinal, but could you explain a little bit ( or maybe wider and deeper
) how to swap eyes and mouth and etc. You mentioned that in previous posts but I didn’t understand it clearly, or could you know any good explanation in the net concerning that things. Thank you once again Generally I am looking for a long time some altenate for comercial 2d animation soft and i feel I ‘ve just found it in blender. 
Thursday 22 March 2012(1:05 pm)I wish I could. My usual way of swapping eyes was to key the planes on different layers… but this doesn’t work properly in 2.6. I haven’t yet done a project where I’ve tried the new things suggested in some of these comments. I need to learn this as much as you do. :-/
Thursday 22 March 2012(1:18 pm)Hi againg! look I found a short tut about UV animation using Animall
Its not about swaping but i think its a good starting point
Thursday 22 March 2012(2:04 pm)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSTp8EXSYnk
maybe it help you in new projects
Cool. Thanks! I’ll check it out.
Thursday 22 March 2012(2:07 pm)