Use and Abuse Reference Videos [BLENDER 2.8 for ANIMATORS]

In today's video, we're going to talk about how to manipulate your reference in Blender. This is obviously almost exclusively for animators. So let's talk about video references. I'm Luciano and welcome to the adventures of Hollywood man. So I have my Maya scene here and I'm going to my Maya scene. I have my Blender scene here, default scene, and I want to import a reference and I'm just going to grab whatever video and I'm going to drag and drop it onto my viewport so you can see that the moment I dropped it, Blender already recognized that it's video, it put all the correct frames in place and you can just play it, it's that easy, which is great, super fantastic. This is one way of doing it. The second way of importing a reference is if you go into the camera, you can do exactly the same, but it will put it as a camera backplate. I should do it again. And there we go. And it's great because by default it's already behind the objects. So if we select the camera, we can go to the camera properties and then back down to background images and we can turn it on and off. By default, Blender will try to stretch it to the sides. So if your reference isn't in the same aspect ratio that your camera is, then it will stretch the reference. In this case, it's fine because they're all the same. You can see that I can change this here. I can put it in front of my objects. Um, again, I can, I can move it around as well and it's all fine. And then the, it's really cool, really easy, really simple, honestly, to handle them, and if you want several of them, you have to just drag and drop another one, drag and drop this one here. And now I get two of them and I can turn on and off one or the other one. Yeah, it works. So I can still put this one in front and the other one in the back and so on. So it's, it's fairly simple and fairly straightforward to just get them going. The typical question is how do I re-time it like I would in Maya? And the typical answer is you go into the video editor and the video editor in Blender is great. I used it for a long time to edit my reels and also to edit my references. But, um, I reckon for somebody that's new, that's just going to use it for the reference, might not be exactly what they want. It might be a little bit too much. And then you, it means that you need to import it and then export it and then this and that. I'm going to show you the easy way. So I got my reference here. And so the important thing is that you go here, you, you close that empty part. When you load your reference, you refresh always your frames. So it picks up the right amount of frames. And then let's say our animation is going to be a hundred frames only. Okay. Let's do a hundred frames. And now I'm going to move the start frame after that a hundred frames. So a hundred at one. Now that I have a hundred at one, you can see that now my reference is completely frozen. But I have this offset attribute. And so I can go to my frame zero. It's okay. I'm going to key it with I, everybody say I. And then I'm going to go to frame 120, which is the length, the original length of my video. Get 120 and a key frame. Now you see, I get my original timing of the video. So now I'm ready to just how well I'll just create a new key frame. So for instance, let's make sure that from here, he starts going slow motion. So I'm just going to keep there and there. Actually, let's make it until there for a dramatic moment and then let it go. And so this part, I'm going to make faster. This middle part, I'm going to make a little bit slower. This one, a little bit faster. And we're going to squeeze all of this into the a hundred frames because I want the entire reference to be there. So let's see how this goes. There you go. There's a reference that has a retime actually make it more obvious. Let's just refresh this just in case. So it refreshes the frames. Bam, you get the fast, slow motion and then fast again. Fantastic. Also, if I just grab this and make it bigger and change to graph editor, you can see our curves. So we can in fact, change this to Bezier and we can do that. We can do that. So I think that covers it. Learning Blender can be a very daunting process, but I think the key to be able to learn it without so much problem and the caveats and stuff like that is that you need to learn that Blender is not Maya. As much as you want it to be like Maya, it's not Maya and it will never be Maya. It can do the same things, but it can do it the Blender way. And if you understand how Blender thinks, the way you understand Maya until today, you'll, you'll, you'll set your mind free of all the hassle of trying to do everything like Maya. You just need to know that you can do the same things. It's just not in the same way because it's not the Blender way. Then it wouldn't be Blender and you'd be paying for it. So let me know in your comments below, if there's something else that you're trying to do and you haven't figured it out yet, remember to hit the like button and subscribe also. So you get the further videos in your inbox and see me next time.