5 Ways to Make Looping Animations in Blender 3.4 (Blender Tutorial)

Infinite

animations

are also called

looping

animations

. It's a skill set that's extremely important for you to know as an animator, especially if you're going to be doing motion graphics. You know the infinite meaning and you can't actually know when the animation starts or stops. you can duplicate that clip in the future and you'd never know you see it a lot in visual concert ads, those canvas animations on Spotify,

looping

animations are everywhere, but the problem is knowing how to get different components inside a

blender

so that they actually loop, so if we want scrolling or emotion or movement, how do we get that to animate in a loop in those different situations?

That's the challenge, so in today's video I'm going to show you five different

ways

to get things looped and the fifth. It'll save you a lot of time, that's true, but I actually just said that, so you'll watch the full video to improve my algorithm video because social media people were slaves to the algorithm and whatever. asked us to do it, so watch the full video because now you're going to get some of that. That being said, my Christmas sale has just started. Use code D3 Holiday in Blender Market. Click the link in the description. The link is there. the code is there, you can get real-time materials, my animation course, my shading course, all of that right now, with a discount of 25 until the end of December, you can check it out.

Linked in the description. Now, let's get into these tips and tricks. the description um you'll get the project files for these examples so we don't have to waste time setting them up so open up the file that says example one and there will be a couple of nodes under Geometry nodes, but specifically, we're just repeating the texture of noise, so if you're using it in the Shader editor, you have a noise texture, you know, when creating a material, the exact same process works. This is something I did in a recent video, but I wanted to highlight here that all of these effects and all of these tricks have been done before on my channel, so if you've been watching them you already know them, so anyone who's new to the channel , these are some of the things I've been doing. all the time, so watch older videos to dive even deeper into these, so what we're animating here specifically is the W because the W will drive the animation to scale the instances that you don't have.

I really need to understand that the whole concept is just looping the W into a texture. You'll see it quite often in the Shader editor as well, but the problem is that it's just this random seed, it's what you do, it's how we do it. Alright, so what we need to do here is get your noise texture, set it to how you want your texture to look, how you want it to repeat here so we're happy and take your W to zero now if you can hear my neighbors from above. moving your whole house, so what we want to do is take this noise texture, we'll press shift d, don't change any components here and then what we can do now is add a mix shader or a mix node here. it used to be called The Mix RGB, they changed it's now blue, it used to be yellow, so I guess it's beneficial that we go over this now so you can see when you change this factor, nothing changes, you want to

make

sure that's the case and I'm going to follow go ahead here I'll see this little plus icon, I'll show it and let's go ahead and get a timeline which is very important, let's do 120 frames now this part is applicable in all loops. animations, you need to go to your preferences and in the animation tab

make

sure that your default interpolation is set to linear so that the start and stop speed is exactly the same, the default is Bézier and that the start and stop speed is not be the same. so here we go, we need to animate some things, now we al

ways

go back to frame zero, so we're going to type here, we're going to press I for the keyframe on the top noise texture here on the w and right here on the factor, take your factor to zero and then we'll go to the end, bring your factor to one and then bring in the W.

I'm going to try five, that may be too fast, but we'll see now where we are. here at 120. start this next noise texture here at the end at zero, so press Now I remember we used five here, go back to the beginning and then go back to the zero box, type minus five and then press I and what's going to happen is You'll notice that the start and stop are exactly the same, meaning this will loop and animate in a loop or infinity, so notice what happens when we go to frame 120 and go back to zero, there is no start discernible. and stop and that's what we want, so mission accomplished when we're animating the W, you'll notice that this is 4D, so if you want to get another texture, if we want to get another texture here, say like uh, the vornoy texture, you're going to 3D. to 4D now that opens that socket W.

I forgot to mention that so W is now animating and you can animate the W on any texture on any instance here, we're using geometry nodes, the instance here geometry node, but you can also use it for shading , so that's example number one, let's go ahead and open example number two, okay, here we are, we set up these two things right here, this is called, okay, so this is called example two and three because I have two techniques of loops to deal with, so let's say I have all this setup here and I want the camera to go through it like this, so I'm going to hit the tilde key, go to front, shift a, grab my camera and I want to you know, animate the camera through this as well, but I want this tube to look like it goes infinitely, but notice I didn't make this enormously long tube, I just made this little one, so how are we going to make it look like this? the camera also goes through this really cool forever and this is something I came up with a long time ago and I call it box method essentially if you get a plane here I'm going to press S8 so whatever's on my scene.

I want it to be able to fit inside this box in quotes, it's a plane calling it a box because it's square, so when you're setting up your infinite environment, you can say instead of eight, we'll do it again. S2 is now 16 and you can make it cluttered with as many objects, meteors and objects, and set them and keep them here, and what's going to happen is now we know that this was a size of eight because I pressed S8, so that's going to help us . with a little bit of math that we need to do, I'm going to call control and I'm just going to take my camera to the edge of my box here, then I'm going to go to the properties and I'm going to notice that it says negative eight and that's going to help us, so remember that negative 8.

I'm going to highlight this hit M new collection and I'm going to call it Loop and then what we can do is press change a collection instance Loop and then you can hold control so it snaps and I just tap those boxes right there and I press alt D to create an instance , so it's easier on an alt D computer and you can take them as far as you want and make them far enough to where it's not very discernible until the end and now we have this big long situation and whatever changes you change here changes there, which is great, so here's our camera, let me press the period key so that the center here now remembers that our camera was set. to minus eight so I'm going to press the back arrow and you can hear my cat jingling in the background but it's Christmas so I guess it's appropriate we're going to press the keyframe and then I'm going to press this arrow to go to the end remember eight negative because this is eight by eight, if we go to positive eight, we're on the exact edge, so if I press play and notice when this timeline ends, the only discernible end of the animation is this very end when you can see that the instances regenerate because we go back to the beginning, but there are a lot of ways to hide that we're not going to get into that today by watching my other looping

tutorial

s and you'll see that, but notice that it's a perfect looped Corridor animation because we start at that negative eight a positive eight or you can even do the other positive eight to negative eight thing if you keep all your models inside that and just instantiate it in the future.

You will never see the end and this just animates forever now let's do something else this is a very very simple technique but you know sometimes you can get lost in the mess this is a very simple thing to animate and it's rotating things 360 degrees , so what can we do? Is this this object right here on the outside? We're going to rotate it 360 degrees, so we're going to take it to zero and I'm going to click on the keyframe and I'm going to go to the bottom and I'm going to type 360. and now it's very fast, I wouldn't, it's a little dizzying to watch, but it rotates infinitely, but The reason I wanted to show you that it seems obvious is because there's a really cool trick here.

I'm going to delete the keyframes. you want it to spin much faster, so you'll need to do more than one 360 ​​rotation. What you can do is press keyframe, go all the way and type 360 ​​asterisk 5 360 times five, which would be five. rotations that are now 1080 and now I mean that's just crazy, but you get the idea that you can actually speed up the rotations and that's a really fun way to add variety if you have multiple things rotating your scene, one can go faster and the other creates this level of randomness. Alright, we're done with example two and three, let's move on to example four, so let's open that project file.

Well, this is the old one. Let's loop it with a little bit of scrolling and that's going to be in your modifiers. So what am I going to do? es, I'm going to give you the project file with no empty spaces, just this guy scrolled a lot and this is my modifier stack here to create this, but the only thing we want to worry about is just one scroll modifier, like this that you could take an object and move it too if you hear some strange noises, I think my neighbors are rearranging their whole apartment so there will be a little bump, I can't do anything about it okay so we have our move here with a force and you We can play with the force here, but we need to go ahead and animate this and we need to animate in the loop because doing this is boring and then going into the texture, you can't really do the loop, you can only change the scale, which is It's annoying that you want to keep just one scale, so we're going to go ahead and use some voids, we're going to set up a little thing, so we're going to go ahead and form a curved circle and we're going to Go ahead and get an empty flat shaft.

Make sure empty is selected. Go here to your restrictions. Here we're going to add constraints, follow the path and we're going to select the circle and then this circle, we're just going to expand it and we're going to use this void to animate this, here's a really cool trick if you've never done this before. There's another thing I've been doing forever. I have to admit it because sometimes people yell at me for teaching things from above before. but there are always new viewers on the channel, so let's go here and we'll click on this object, we'll go back to your modifiers and we'll do this first scroll, whether we have two, but that's just to change the shape.

The first offset in your coordinates goes to the object and that will allow you to select an object that when that object moves, your offset will move the empty object and so what happens if I click on this? I'm going to press R twice. handling the animation very simply, that 360 degree concept, we're going to take that and I'm just going to go ahead here in the transform settings. I'm going to click and drag, go to the end, click and drag here and type. in 360 on both axes and that's going to animate that there, but then we can add another level of detail which is rotate this guy, so let's go ahead, click and drag here, make sure we're at frame zero, go to the end. type 360. and now there is no discernible beginning to this strange scrolling animation, but it is an endless loop that we can use, so using those gaps and animating them helps you create randomness in your movement and visual randomness in the scrolling that you can. use all these different examples here for different projects okay the last one I mentioned is a time saver so let's go ahead and open up example number five so here you have a timeline with 80 frames and let's imagine you have in a scene there are several different things looping, you don't just have three objects, you have many objects, so let's imagine and then say you're working with a client or you decide, hey, I want to add more frames because I want this. the animation to slow down is too fast the way to do it adds more frames but the problem is it's already animated we already have these ones that rotate 360 ​​degrees we say we want to add over a thousand frames right this is crazy but trust on me when you do it.

We're doing client work or whatever, you can get so crazy and say, "Okay, well, we can just drag the keyframe out." Well, we just drag, we're dragging now 360 degrees and maybe you could do 360 times, blah,downtime, die, but then what? If you want to maintain the same speed consistency, I'm giving you all these use cases. I promise you they will appear. This is what you should do. I'm going to go ahead and select my two keyframes and I'm just going to select this guy here now I notice at frame 80 boom stops so let's go over here to the animation tab and I'll open up the graphics editor if it's not already open .

I didn't know it was open by default, so now click on the animation tab right here, it will open what will hopefully be the graphics editor. If you don't have it, click here and click here, we're going to the graph editor, so I'm going to click on this object. here and it's going to open the Cycles that have nothing to do with the Cycle rendering engine, this means cyclical movement, so they want to cycle over and over again, so look what happens, we'll get up to frame 80. I'm going to press play and notice that this object will continue and of course it didn't, so let's click on the X Euler rotation as well and add the Cycles button, okay, now add these Cycles modifiers to both of them and I'll be.

I'm going to press play and see what happens at frame 80 right here, it goes on and what happened is it's going to take this animation literally, whatever it did and wherever it stops, it's going to continue like this forever and ever until it decides make it stop and in this case you can make a longer loop and since it's 80 frames we use that math and then we would stop at what 116 says we wanted to do this. Sorry 160 yes, let's hope my math is correct. let's stop our frames at 160. Please loop, okay, that's right, say you wanted to go longer, you needed to have other things, um, now that loops forever, that's another example, let's say we wanted the camera moved.

I remember one time specifically one. At the time when the animation was looping, but the camera was going too fast when you slowed it down, but it kept everything the same motion, I was able to use this Cycles modifier there to continue and I can introduce more things into the animation, so this will give you it'll save some time so you don't have to reanimate every little thing just go and add the modifier just add that Cycles modifier to everything it'll save your life it'll save you time um that's it that's the five things hope this helps you with your projects, um, these are a lot of fun and are things that I have to deal with every day with my animations, there you have it, don't forget about the Christmas sales.

Linked in the description, check out all the details about that 25 off, uh, but with that being said, thank you all for watching and I'll see you in the next

tutorial

.