Select two bones, create a muscle that binds one end to each of them, and then tweak the parameters to your liking. Have you ever seen those fancy animation breakdowns where they show the anatomy of a character or creature and it’s so detailed that you can see muscles moving? For basic stuff you can use corrective shape keys to get a similar effect, but for rigs that need lots of detail and total flexibility in any direction, you can now use muscles thanks to X-Muscle System. Animating your UV’s can help you make lots of awesome effects like flowing lava or switching between 2D facial expressions.ĪnimAll is included in Blender, so all you need to do is check it on and it’ll be there when you need it! 6. You can also animate bevel weights, creases, vertex colors, vertex groups, shape key vertices, and, my personal favorite, UV’s. Just like that, you’ve animated your mesh without using any shapekeys. For instance, vertices! Just select some vertices, insert an AnimAll keyframe, go forward a few frames, move them somewhere else, and insert another keyframe. There are just a couple things that you can’t animate which, if you could, would make creating certain cool effects a lot easier.ĪnimAll is a really old addon by Daniel Salazar that lets you animate some interesting things.

You can animate just about any property in Blender from modifiers to render samples and even node values.

It looks like it’s still in early development, but it has collisions with other bones, which is extremely cool! 7. Another alternative is Spring Bone by Artell. You can also check out Jiggle Bone, which was the original implementation by Simón Flores that now also works with 2.8. You can even chain wiggle bones together! There is some weirdness here and there as Blender’s dependency graph is not an easy thing to mess with, but overall it’s fast, easy, and super unobtrusive when you’re not using it. Wiggle bones is a small addon by Shteve that makes any bone jiggle around based on it’s movement or rotation. Most of the time your objects should respect inertia, but it can get pretty tedious to keyframe all those secondary and tertiary bones if you really only care about one of them and the rest just need to react believably enough. Wiggle Bonesįollow through is a pretty important concept in animation. There’s also an addon called Text Effects, which is an entirely different addon that can’t do those effects but can do intro style transforms really well. You can animate numbers counting up or down, make a timer, a typewriter printout, or that cool matrix style scramble effect. The addon Text FX makes animating text a breeze and adds quick controls for effects that you’re likely to want to use. One of the areas where Blender can be said to be a little bit behind is motion graphics, in particular when working with Text objects. You can also use sprite sheets to randomize a material per object, convert a sprite sheet to mesh objects (it creates a mesh that's in the shape of the sprite, not just a plane), and of course render out any animation as a sprite sheet you can use in Unity, Unreal, or elsewhere.Ĭool, right? It’s a bit niche, so not everyone will need this, but if you do it’ll save you quite a lot of time. If you set the shader to diffuse and the transparency type to Alpha Clip, you can even have your animated sprites interact with lights, shadows, and other objects! Just add it as an object, set the X and Y grid numbers, adjust the timing, and you’re good to go. SpriteHandler makes it extremely easy to import and play any sprite sheet.

There are a few sprite related addons out there, and I’m always attracted by fun names like Get Sheet Done, but the best and most fully featured one I can find is called SpriteHandler. If you’re into making games though, there are definitely times where you’ll need to cross that divide between 3D and 2D. When you think of animating in a 3D software, you probably don’t think of pixel art and sprite sheets. Recently I’ve discovered these Blender 2.8 addons that I think you’ll enjoy, which can help make rigging and animation in Blender a bit easier. Making one or two things move in Blender is pretty easy, but if you’ve ever needed to make more complex effects, things can sometimes get messy or, in some cases, downright impossible.

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