Hello and welcome to this tutorial series on how to animate a book with flipping pages in Blender 2.6!
In this advanced tutorial by Stanislas Paillereau you will learn how to create a detailed animation of a book with turning pages. This tutorial uses simple methods that allow you to easily add as many pages as you would like, while also being easy to control and modify.
What you’ll learn :
Part 1 of this series covers the creation and animation of a custom tool made of a lattice that will be used to deform a page during the turn. You will also learn a technique to duplicate a single page-turn and apply a time offset to achieve the effect of many pages flipping.
once upon a time, i tried to build a book page animation which was a failure…
i hope it will be easier now…
why does he have such rubbish speaking skills, it puts me down so much.
You can’t be in this career if you can’t handle perfect english with just foreign accent. This is international profession.
english isn’t my native language but understand him well I like french accent in english
I dont have problem with it at all. I know how hard is to do tutorials and and explain something in non native language it must be really hard.
This is so funny because i was just wondering how i could do something like this and here is a tutorial talk about luck
Glad to know our timing was good
Hope you enjoy the tutorial; the next parts will be coming soon.
-Jonathan
This is GREAT! I’ve been trying to create a trailer for my children’s book and this is an element that I wanted to incorporate. Thanks Jonathan!
Sorry, I meant to thank Stanislas too.
Check this link, maybe its usefull for you. It’s a after effects template, where you just have to replace the pictures…and them compile the movie.
https://www.fluxvfx.com/shop/baby-boy-scrapbook/
Wow … This will bring some good memories
Nice tut Stanislas. Like others above, I’ve been trying to do this. I was using bones – but could not get the “page curl” at corners.
Given me a lot to think about. Looking forward to parts 2 and 3.
gryff
I don’t know if there is any tutorial on how to animate hairs here.
But I think we can animate hairs with this way , can’t we?
Euma12,
Yes, you can actually use a lattice to deform hair particles. Using a lattice is great to pose your hair style but not sure for animation.
Everything depends on how you want to deform your hair I guess. The hair dynamic are not bad at all but involve quite a bit of tweaking (collision still need improvement also).
I found in one book mention about hair guided by curve and that curve animated by bones,but that was in 2.4 blender and I have no luck to find anything about it on web and how to do that
Quick newbie question – why are the deformation coordinates in the lattice modifier U V W and not xyz? Watching Stanislas use it reminded me about this.
DMan,
UVW would represent the local XYZ of your lattice. Using UVW make sure you don’t mixe up with the global XYZ axis I guess.
Thanks that makes sense.
Genius.
Very nice and useful tutorial, especially for someone like me who uses Blender to earn a living.
Great work Blender Cookie!
Hello Everyone,
Glad this tutorial helps. Part 2 and 3 are coming soon !
la prochaine foi ferme la fernetre
Yep désolé pour le bruit de fond (la fenêtre était fermée
) mais la rue ou j’habite est plutôt bruyante.
Yo,
Merci pour ce tuto bien utile.
Pour le bruit de la rue, c’est un peu plus bruyant chez moi et je me suis fait refusé la mise en ligne d’un tutoriel sur tuto.*bip* à cause de ça. ^^
Il faudrait presque être dans une pièce insonorisé pour plair à certains. XD
hello is it easy to add images to the turning pages? por example add a scanned image to the page?
Ihatelordoftherings,
I’ll cover that in part 3 as I’ll show you how to make a double sided material in cycle (to have 2 different textures in each side of the page). Stay tune for part 3 !
Most be covered in part 2 or 3
cant wait thanks
if you want to make a book where only a few page are turned.
You can duplicate all objects;
PageTurn, BendingController, BendCenter, and Lattice.
If you duplicate all at the same time, Blender will automatically change the entries in the Lattice modifier and in the SimpleDeform modifier correct. And Blender will also make the Hierarchy correct.
Now you can move all keys from the new page in the dope sheet in time.
This way will be better, when a Character is turning the Pages. And you have to make all Page turning a little bit different.
My Question is, how can I make different content on the back and on the front of the same page? But I have only to wait for the part 2 and 3!
Thank you for this great Tutorial.
Yes you are right Kleselsteine, there is always the solution of duplicating all the elements and apply the time offset on the NLA editor. It can start to be complicated though as you are going to have a lot of objects in your scene.
To make pages turning a bit different, I would just export different mdd files and import them back on several pages. That will help keeping your scene cleaner.
I think in the case of a character turning pages, I would probably drive the IK hand with an empty hooked on a vertex of the page (not sure on this one).
Little hint for the double sided in cycles : have a look at the backfacing option in the geometry node. I’ll show you that in part 3.
AH! I was looking for a way to animate my scroll. This could teach me what I need to know. Can’t wait to watch it.
Great!
[min 22:20] cntr + alt + left click in the Graph Editor (on a Mac) dont resize the curve. someone know wich is the right shortcut?
Larrotino,
That would be ctrl + middle button mouse. I’m actually using a mac too but with “Emulate 3 button mouse” check on (my middle button on my mouse isn’t that great
). Let me know if it works for you.
Hi Stan,
What do you think would be a good way to make the pages bend properly near the spine as they turn? I’m sure you ran into the same problem – near the spine of the book the pages pass through the (deformed) cubes that represent the mass of pages on both sides… this is obviously crucial if the page turn is seen up-close. You would be even more of a hero if you addressed this issue in one of the follow-up tutorials
Thanks!!!
Galonce,
If I understood well your concern, this is something I’ll cover in part 3 (combining book + flipping pages) because I’ll show you how to wrap the flipping pages onto the mass of pages.
This is really scary. I just received a request for this exact effect and had no clue how to do it. I started browsing blender sites for anything that would help and found this right away!!! Thank you!
Glad to help! Stan is working on the two follow-up parts to this tutorial, which should be awesome.
Cheers,
Jonathan
This was great!
You are kidding me, aren’t you?
About few months ago I tried the same
…and it took me a lot of time to figure this out.
(I’ve chosen “simple deform modifier” with regular rotation on each page
and rigging the book cover.)
Good, very useful topic for tutorial.
There are things in CG that needs to be known.
(like making some realistic foam, for example on the surface of beer or similar. Yes, it is a suggestion for someone able to do that)
my personal attempt from past here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rdz8-dMgqT4
(there’s no such thing as Insane studio, it’s made up to get some intro)
You guys are reading my mind. I actually just started working on something similar. I hope your method is easier than mine.
Thank you so much! I’ve been waiting for one of these!
Excellent tutorial. Thank you. I learned a great deal, can’t wait for the rest.
Great tutorial, thank you very much !!!
Stanislas,
Great tutorial! Well paced, informative and a pleasure to watch.
Thank you and I look forward to those to follow.
This is excellent. I saw a similar tutorial on a different site using a deform modifier but it doesn’t include the page starting at a corner. Yes, this is more time consuming but it is far more realistic and well worth the extra effort. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with us.
Thank you, Stanislas. I am often baffled by how to construct or animate these sorts of things and the same simple but obvious answer always eludes me until I see someone else do it… “Parent some of your objects to Empty objects or even chains of Empty objects and then animate those Empties” is now tattoed on the inside of my eyelids in the hope that I eventually will remember it.
This is probably the closest i have gotten to a mograph tutorial in Blender. thanks so much!
Hi Nickbenkhoo,
Yeah, unfortunately Blender is missing some Mograph tools but hopefully it is powerful enough to find good alternative solutions
Stanislas,
when I duplicated page one and moved the action inside the NLA editor it did not turn violet and also when I flip through the animation the second page for some reason starts at frame one but does not do a full page flip and then actually remains flat like the in frame one.
Any idea what can cause this?
Hi Claas,
I’m not sure what could it be. Can you actually move the action in the NLA ? If not just check on the track if the little locker in unlock. Also, the fact that it stays flat is very strange (maybe check that the relative option is check on the shapekey basis on the duplicate that doesn’t work).
Can you post your .blend somewhere that I can have a look ?
Cheers,
Stan
Here is a blend file:
http://cl.ly/1W2w0P0l3r0F3c0f0E10
and here is a screenshot:
http://cl.ly/1W0O3t103U1t0S2u2f2r
As you can see there is some sort of secondary deformation happening before the actual action shape keys kick in.
However inside the NLA editor there are NO keyframes so I am confused about what deforms the second page at first.
Hi Claas,
Got it ! Just delete the lattice modifier on your duplicated pages and everything should work fine.
Best,
Stan
How embarrassing. I totally overlooked that one.
Still dont get why its so unintuitive, hard to bend along X or Y axis. You need two extra empties to do it. why are there still no extra checkboxes on (x,y,z) in the modifier? or am i missing something…
Hi Comoris,
I have to agree with you. It would be quite useful to have the possibility to select the axis to indicate wich way to deform.
The possibility to choose a target object is still super useful though in some cases.
Here, we need an empty anyway because we also need the bending to start at the tip of the lattice. We actually need just one empty to indicate the bend direction and origin. The second one is just to have something more convenient when moving the lattice and the empty in our particular case here.
Thanks for pointing that out,
Best,
Stan
Thanks for your quick reply. Any idea to who (developers) i can adress this (and a lot of other issues).
I often work with C4d too and , i start to love it more and more because of its (parametric ) workflow, physics, mograph tools are so intuitive… Boxmodeling and texturing still works faster for me in blender. Hopefully after mango there will be some time spend on rethinking some existing stuff : parametric objects, nurbs, physics, mograph tools ( or at least a decent array modifier)…
Another way to make many copies of an animated object is with groups. If you make the page, lattice, and empties part of a Group, you can place instances of the Group wherever you want. Then to apply time offsets to the animation, make all the IPO curves part of an Action, and you can move the timing of the Action to a different frame in the NLA editor.
(Note: You can’t animate elements inside a group instance directly, only if you make them part of an Action. But in this case, we want the same motion for each group instance, so Actions do the trick just fine.)
Thank for the tip John. I did consider using groups but unfortunately, it won’t work with the rest of the modifiers we add in following tutorials to make the pages wrap on the mass of pages.
Thanks for pointing that out,
Cheers!
Stan
Hi
great Tutorial but i can´t scale my f-curve-editor panel at 22.17.
could you please type me the keyboard key compination?
Because i can´t undersdant you in this moment. Thanks for your helb.
Hi Felix,
I’m using a tablet so I used ctrl+alt+left click. But with a mouse this is alt+middle mouse.
Cheers,
Stan
Stanislas, thanks a lot for your tutorial!
It’s nonsense because it’s too long and presents a lot of info that is already known by advanced users!
It shows the great technique but I think you ought to work on your manner of speech. It’s toooo much tranquilizing. Also it’s the tutorial for ADVANCED users but you explain EVERYTHING
After 20 minutes of looking and listening this tut I started to fall into some kind of a dream ) Make me feel like being in a hypnosis. Your voice sounds good and I don’t mind about the french accent. But I like energy of Jonathan Williamson and Andrew Price’s voices much more – they aren’t “welcoming to sleep”.
IMHO the ideal version of this tut must be about 7 minutes long (maximum).
Stan,
Thank you so very much for posting this tutorial. Your tutorial was very easy to understand, even for a beginning Blender user such as myself. As far as your accent and language is concerned I found it to be a very small distraction, so I believe it was petty for those few negative comments on that. Looking forward to following this series to its conclusion and please keep sharing your knowledge with the Blender community.
Can anyone please help me with this question please.. when im doing this tutorial and i get to saving the lattice in different shapes/sizes for the
turning page.. i make the first corner, set key frames on all of it, lattice included.. when i go to set up the next bend though.. it over rides the first? and when i bring it back to the start, its bent like the last lattice..
if that makes sense.
any help would be appreciated!
please?
On duplicating an animated object, about 30 mins in or so you asked if anyone
had a better method to leave it in comments.
Of course i’m a noob .. so don’t hold it against me if it’s wrong!
I was able to group the page, the lattice, the empty etc etc, duplicate that group.. in turn duplicating the objects animation as well as the object.
sound good?
Thanks for doing all of this Stan! So awesome it makes me wanna weep!!
(sob)
Stanislas:
Great Job. Wonderful way to use shape keys! Now my magic book in my little film has a heart. Thanks so much.
Tim
Thank you for this Tutorial.
I think this is a fine way to make a Book.
Next watching part 2 ^^