Using Blender for Motion Graphics

liero · January 29, 2014, 5:51pm

I think there is some ‘shortness of sight’ here from BF or devs or community, motion graphics should be a target and became a Blender’s selling point, it is what kids want to do -and the reason they want to learn that other software-

3pointEdit · January 30, 2014, 12:32am

-IP-:

There are always ways to REPLICATE things, but there are not non-destructive/hierarchycal ways of testing and being CREATIVE. We need ways to PLAY AROUND. With the render baker thing you practically need to have everything thought out already, and pray it works, cause repeating the process everytime you want to see and test things is a great way to kill an artist. The whole point of the hierarchycal / non destructive thing is seeing things on the fly, and changing, for example, an character animation, and see inmediatly how it affects the bigger picture. Playing is important in creativity, and it directly affects the quality of the result, since the more tests you can see the better. A non destructive/hierarchycal modifier workflow is better for the same reason interactive renderers like arnold are better, or why realtime playback of animation is better. The reason is that the more iterations you can see of a render in less time the better tweaking and playing you can do to achieve what you want, and in animation, you obviously gain time by not having to render a video everytime you want to see a change. It’s the power of playing and testing things in a responsive and simple way. Of course you can do things in the end with blender and find your way around, but this doesn’t make blender any better than what blender internal is to Arnold.

I have had exactly this issue with the VSE/compositor combination. I tend to edit and apply effects by testing and tweaking. But devs like you to plan and lock down a story/animation.

These things aren’t terribly compatible with most motion graphics work (especially when experimenting).

IP1 · January 30, 2014, 6:21am

Agreed.
Now, anybody knows what happend to the modifier nodes project by lukas toenne?

Januz · January 30, 2014, 7:13am

Lukas will be in Project Gooseberry, maybe finishing particle nodes?
From this post http://code.blender.org/index.php/2013/06/blender-roadmap-2-7-2-8-and-beyond/, it looks like modifier nodes will be a 2.8x thing.

Januz · February 2, 2014, 2:56pm

Speaking of pushing for features

Here’s the patch and discussion: https://developer.blender.org/T22084

3pointEdit · February 2, 2014, 6:04pm

Wow what a great addition that would be, I really do miss After effects preset keyframe handles. I was just making a bounce the other day and it was so annoying to click twenty times when it should just be twice.

trueog · February 2, 2014, 11:32pm

Yes, I was looking at that yesterday. I´m used to those modes as I work with AE and Flash in a daily basis in the company I work for.
But as I have always sticked to official releases I don’t have f*****g idea how to apply a patch.
Any simple resource to learn how (both in Win and OSX)?

Forget all this. I have search the forums and I see that all this is beyond the scope of what I can assume so far. Sorry for posting it.

Regards

Atom · February 3, 2014, 5:32am

take a look at this vid

I took a look at that video and it certainly could be done in Blender. All the particles have synchronized movement which is the default operation of the Blender particle system.

Have you taken a look at theDynamic Triggering tutorial from United Filmdom? It shows how to manage larger object count scenes using the MeshCache modifier and a few scripts to prepare the media.

The result:

marcotronic · April 13, 2014, 10:43pm

Hi guys,
this topic has been silent for a while. Any news here? I’ve also planned to dedicate myself a while to Motion Graphics in Blender - maybe I can also contribute some tutorial(s)…

thanks
Marco

1pepe · April 16, 2014, 9:55am

Local guru is posting a very good training exercises in his blog

http://www.local-guru.net/blog/
It would be very interesting to make a kind of training document whith them.

Januz · April 18, 2014, 4:06pm

Hey @marcotronic, yeah this thread has been dead for a while. I haven’t received any emails about Blendmo in the last couple months and the site hasn’t been updated, so I guess it’s still on hold.

Local guru is great, I remember learning about Btrace from his tests.

Here’s a little test animation I’ve been working on

(blend file: http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/73489 )

I’ve also wrote a patch to get 4:3 safe limits in camera view (the current ones are widescreen only). Here’s the patch if anyone needs this feature: https://developer.blender.org/D325

1pepe · April 24, 2014, 3:00am

you are good man

GottfriedHofmann · April 27, 2014, 4:09am

Yeah, Blender is lacking behind in that area. A hierarchical modifier stack (or even better: Nodes) would be really cool.

Actually that’s one of the reasons why Frederik developed ARewO - The Animation Replicator with Offset. It’s destructive, but at least you can run it - watch the result, run it again if you don’t like it. At later stages you can use the right selection methods to delete everything and run it again…

iamgabo · June 27, 2014, 11:22am

Hi folks! I guess i’m a little bit late with this thread. Anyway, i want to share two of my mograph animations with a kind of 2D/AE feel. All done in Blender, Inkscape and Gimp.

The first one is for a FLOSS festival in my home town.
The mascot was done by Martin Eschoyez.

Also i’ve uploaded this to BlendSwap (the blend file is really a mess, so forget me)

And this is one for a TV ad, worked in conjunction with Gez.

Let me know what you think and i hope this thread and mograph users start making some noise!
Cheers

Gabriel

DavidGasku · August 22, 2014, 2:15am

Hi, a quick test. In the first half of the video, the animation is driven by the sound.

I love blender, but you quickly realize that there is a lot of room for improvement while doing mograph. I’ve been taking notes of posible impovements, but one easy thing we could do, is gather a library of common actions and primitives.

For example: primitives could include lines over a curve that go from one end point to another, circles that shrink, etc.
Actions could include scaling with a bounce in the end, disappear while blinking.

I also would like to thanks people that post their blends. It is specially useful in mograph, you learn lots of different ways to achieve an effect. I plan to finish this one with some text appearing at the end, and I will upload later. Maybe some tutorial about the audio part, I think I’ve done some curious things there.

feboccini · August 31, 2014, 3:15pm

I am in love with Blender and every time I need to do some work that is conventionally done in another program, I try to carry it to Blender. Follows a motion graphics video I made in Blender recently for the Fire Department of the city where I live below:

theoldghost · September 2, 2014, 6:03pm

Interesting thread here. Less see if I can post a few modest efforts all done in Blender.

theoldghost · September 2, 2014, 6:08pm

And, a few more.

3pointEdit · September 2, 2014, 6:46pm

Pretty cool theoldghost, how did you get the animation of the glass or mirrors so smooth? Non Cycles or a ridiculous amount of render time?

3pointEdit · September 2, 2014, 6:51pm

Feboccini, I really like the use of extruded text for the traditional mographic animation!
How did you get the text elements to reveal themselves without face intersections or flickering? Is it Cycles redering and animated “restrict rendering” value in the Outliner?