Throughout the years, many people have requested a video teaching everyone how to make their own 3D animations, similar to the ones on this channel.
At long last, the secrets will now finally be revealed.
All the 3D animations on this channel are created by Eugene Khutoryansky, using the software "Poser."
Poser costs money to purchase, but there are also free 3D animation programs available, such as "Blender" and "Daz Studio."
Another important free program worth mentioning is the 3D modeling program, "Wings 3D."
Wings 3D is not an animation program, but a free program that allows you to create 3D objects that can then be imported into any of the animation programs as OBJ files. (*.obj)
For example, all the letters and numbers along each axis of these graphs were made with Wings 3D and then imported into Poser.
Once you have your objects in your animation program, there are many different ways to animate them.
One fun way is to run a physics simulation program.
There are a variety of physics simulation programs available, each with their strengths and weaknesses.
Some of the animations on this channel were made with a "Cloth Simulator" which is included with Poser and other animation programs.
Others were made using the simulator called "Bullet Physics", which also comes included with Poser and other animation programs.
And some were made using the simulator "Poser Physics", a program purchased separately from Poser.
Other simulations on this channel were created through algorithms that Eugene wrote himself using the programming language "Python."
Poser and other animations programs are able to read Python scripts, which tell the program how to animate the objects.
If you want to write Python Scripts for Poser, you may want to check out a very good online tutorial titled "Python for Poser" written by Phil C.
However, you do not need to know any of this to start creating simple animations.
An easy way to animate the objects is to do it manually inside Poser.
An animation consists of a series of frames.
Suppose we specify that we want an object to be at this position at frame 1.
Suppose we also say that we want the object to be at this other position at frame 30.
Frame 1 and frame 30 will then become what we call "Key Frames."
The animation program will then interpolate the position of the object for all the frames in between.
If we don’t like this path we can, for example, add an additional Key Frame at frame 15.
We may also tell the animation program whether we want it to interpolate the positions between the key frames as straight lines or as a smooth curve.
In the same way we are able to, for example, specify the positions of various lights at different key frames...
…Or determine the position of the camera at different key frames.
The animation program will interpolate all the frames in between.
Similarly, we can specify the poses of a character at different key frames, and then the program will interpolate the character’s pose in all the frames in between.
If we don’t like the results, we can add additional Key Frames in between.
The software program "Poser" comes included with a very large library of props and characters, such as all the people, animals, robots, and aliens that appeared in the video "Thermodynamics and the End of the Universe."
The cat in Quantum Mechanics videos is also an example of a character that is included in Poser.
Regardless of which animation software you use, you can always create your own props and characters, or buy additional props and characters from a variety of websites.
To purchase a character, you first buy what is called a "base figure."
Then you can purchase various characters for that specific base figure, which consist of different textures and morphs.
And you also can get various hairstyles, clothing, and other accessories for that figure.
You can combine different aspects of different accessories and characters to make a completely new one.
This is how Maxwell’s Demon, who first appeared in the video on Maxwell’s Laws of Electromagnetism, was created, and she has subsequently become an audience favorite.
Another who makes a regular appearance is the photon who is the icon for this channel.
She was conceived through the feature that allows you to change the texture of the hair, clothing, and even the skin of a character.
Any texture can also be made reflective.
There are many different capabilities for changing the texture of a material.
For example, you can import an external two-dimensional picture to be the texture of a material.
You can instruct the animation program to use an external two-dimensional picture to create a three-dimensional displacement.
You may also use an external two-dimensional picture to tell the animation program where the texture of the object should be transparent, and by how much.
The Galaxies were animated by importing external two-dimensional pictures of Galaxies, and then using these to define the texture, transparency, and three-dimensional displacement for many different two-dimensional rectangles in the animation.
Inside the animation program, you can also define the texture, offset, and transparency of a material using mathematical equations that you define.
As you work on your animation, you will not be able to immediately see what your final animation will look like.
You will first have to render your animation using a render engine.
Rendering a few minutes of animation can take your computer several days, depending on how fast your computer is, and how complex your animation is.
You will still be able to use your computer for other tasks, including setting up your next animation, as the computer runs the render engine in the background.
With some programs, including Poser, you can render an animation by simultaneously making use of multiple computers connected together in a network.
The various 3D animation programs, such as "Poser", "Blender", and "Daz Studio" are used to create images or relatively short video clips.
A separate video editing software is then used to combine all these images and video clips together into your final video.
For this task, many of the videos on this channel used the video editing software "PowerDirector", but there are a lot of other options available, including free video editing software that typically comes preinstalled with many computers.
It is with these video editing programs that you will add sound, transition effects between scenes, and extra text on the screen if desired.
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The link to the Patreon page is available in the video description.
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