Explainer Video Tutorial

By Mark LaBarrwww.blenderpassion.com

Welcome to the Explainer Video Tutorial!

If you haven’t already, I would recommend watching the explainer video I made for RewardCo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6fYChaKdCM

For further resources and information check out these previous tutorials:

Creating a Laptop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu9ar5kJTlE

For more complicated effects and an overview of shapekeys, the Professional Text Animation Tutorial is for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyWmOFj6wi8

I created the explainer video entirely using Blender 3D. I opted to choose Blender instead of an Adobe program such as After Effects or any others geared specifically towards these kinds of videos because of Blender’s versatility (and definitely the 3D laptop). I feel that Blender has been developed thoroughly enough over the years to tackle any sort of problem and be a viable choice of program to use.

The knowledge and skills required to create an explainer video such as this are not demanding. Basic modeling techniques and animation skill is all it takes. By following this tutorial, and additional resources, you will be able to create your own explainer video with ease!

Here is an overview of the 3D viewport and scene. It’s rather cluttered and messy, but that’s how it is when all objects are shown. I used layers to organize the objects and Dope Sheet Actions to organize animations and copy similar animatic transitions.

Naming conventions and organization is extremely important, especially in larger scenes and projects that require many revisions.

If there is anything unclear or anything you want to know more about, Google it! There is documentation and plenty great tutorials out there.

Or leave a comment on my website. If you want to contact me: marklabarr@blenderpassion.com

To avoid complications later down the road, decide on the resolution of the video (aspect ratio more importantly). And set the frame rate before you begin animating. If you don’t, you will likely encounter many timing issues.

I chose 30 FPS for a smoother look as opposed to a lower amount (increasing FPS will increase render times).

[In the World properties] For this particular video I went for a clean off-white look. In all my projects I rarely ever go full #FFFFFF (Full white) or full black.

The world settings are also important for mask materials (further explained upon in the Professional Text Animation Tutorial).

Make sure you’re in Cycles Render. Everything here is possible in Blender Internal, though the tutorial is in Cycles.

To achieve that final, clean cut and professional look I checked the Motion Blur box and after some testing found a Shutter speed that worked well for my scene (yours may be different depending on scale and movement in your scene).

You may want to set this after getting a few objects in your scene to play around with.

Open up the User Preferences (Ctrl + Alt+ U) and search for the Images As Planes Add-on.

Click the checkbox to enable.

Add an Image as a Plane (Shift +A)

Select the image to import.

Select Emission & Transparent. We will be primarily using Emitting materials for the objects.

Finally, click Import Images as Planes.

Your material setup should look something like this. You will notice that I have added an extra Mix node to change the color of the image from gray to light blue.

Text is just basic typography skills. A Text Object with an Emitter material instead of Diffuse. Most rules applied to Emitter objects later in this tutorial should also be applied to Emitter Text objects.

Because this material is an Emitter, but is not a light source we can uncheck all but Camera Ray Visibility. This will decrease render times and artifacts in object masks.

To start off with a basic animatic transition, find a spot on the timeline and set a location keyframe (The “I” key) where the object will be afterthe transition. (You can do it vice versa, I prefer this way at times.)

Go back 10 frames (Shift + Down Arrow) and move the object out of the boundaries of the Camera and add another location keyframe.

(Alt + A) to playback. Simple right?

Click the “eye” icons to hide the Y and Z Location Axes, as they are not used in our transition.

Open up the Graph Editor to take a look at the keyframeinterpolation of our transition. A solid understanding of the Graph Editor is valuable for any kind of animation. (Those math classes you took back in school have purpose!)

Bezier interpolation is the default setting for all animations. I usually choose Bezier for natural movements and these simple transitions.

With the X axis of the graph being Frames, and the Y axis Blender units, it’s easy to see that the object starts roughly around -1.2 and moves to 0.0 on the X axis in 3D space, which is the origin and where the 3D cursor lies.

Bezier is only a template, we are able to change and define our curve by right-clicking an endpoint handle and rotating it (“R” key) then left-click, and scaling (“S” key) it the same way.

Try to get the same shape as shown. If you have difficulty, you may need to zoom and pan (Ctrl + Middle Mouse + Move Cursor) until you find ideal unit scale.Play back the animation repeatedly and edit the graph until you get a nice “bounce” effect.

You may need to distance the keyframes to get a smooth effect. Simply right-click the top yellow diamond (Dope Sheet Summary Keyframe which selects all keyframes on that frame) and move it (“G” or hold right-click and drag).

Another simple transition is starting the object behind the camera then bringing it into view.

Set a location keyframe for the object’s starting position.

Move the object to the center and set another location keyframe 10 frames later.

Now rotate and scale the endpoint handles to create a similar bounce effect that we had for our horizontal transition.

That’s all it takes for some easy transitions!

Samples are an important part to any animation. Test a few renders out and find the optimal number of samples. Not too low or too high to compromise quality or speed.

For my animation I used 1-10 samples for simple emitters and 10-100 samples for the laptop.

An efficient way to cut down on render times is to animate samples depending on how complex the scene is. The frame before a complex object set a keyframe for the Render samples.

On the next frame where the complex object appears, set another keyframe for Samples, increasing or decreasing depending.

Due to request, here is a little bonus to show how I animated the laptop screen!

[If you know a more efficient way tell me! This was a quick fix, but for something more texture intensive I would control the Mix Fac. values with drivers and a rig.]

The Mix node’s Factor value was used to animate the different image textures. 0 corresponds to the upper input and 1 to the lower input.

To animate and transform the actual textures, simple keyframe and manipulate the Mapping values.

Because I render on the GPU, I set my tiling to the optimal 256x256 (64x64 for CPU).

Be sure to check Cache BVH and Persistent Images to decrease overall render times.

Spatial Splits can come in handy at times, but for 1-7 sec. render times each frame, I find they increase overall render times.

Another quick tip for an efficient workflow is the Output. Make sure to set it to PNG and select a folder to render to before pressing Ctrl + F12 to render the animation.

This way, if for some reason you need to stop rendering, you can stop at any frame or utilize multiple computers to render out the animation.

In addition, if there are any changes that need to be made in sections of the video, simply render out those sections and overwrite them in the PNG sequence.

Afterwards, you can input the sequence into Blender’s VSE or third party software to output as a video file.

By Mark LaBarrwww.blenderpassion.com

If you enjoyed this tutorial, check out the other tutorials on the website!

I am currently looking into viewport rendering so there won’t be so much time wasted rendering, there are many limitations with OpenGL, but I’ll see what I can find.

And so, have fun making those explainer videos with an entire 3D suite at your fingertips!