All language subtitles for 4. Animating Parameters and Transferring Animation Between Nodes

Let's now talk about animating some of these values inside NUKE,

and we go about doing that by setting keyframes.

Now if you've used another animation package in the past or

if you've animated in another program,

you know that keyframes are basically just data assigned

to specific frames in our animation,

and the computer just uses that data on those different

frames to decide how to move the picture.

So let's say we want to transform this earth with the Transform node,

and we want it to rotate.

Well let's go ahead and let's set the time slider back to one,

and we're going to say, this is the natural resting state of the picture.

So we want to set a keyframe of a 0 rotation,

like we have right here, at frame 1.

So, being on frame one, we want to click on this icon and say Set key,

and this box is going to turn bright blue,

telling us that we have a keyframe on frame one,

and you see a little blue tick here to indicate that

that frame has animation on it.

Now on the timeline I want you to go to frame 60 and click on frame 60,

and you'll notice that the box that we set a keyframe in goes

from being a bright blue to a dim blue,

and the dim blue just means that this property has

animation on it at some point in the timeline,

but this particular frame doesn't have a keyframe on it yet.

So, we're going to set a keyframe on frame 60 by just changing this value.

I'm going to change it to 180 and you'll see that this box turns bright blue.

Now since we've already added animation to this attribute by setting a key,

NUKE knows that whenever this value changes,

it should lay down another keyframe.

Now go ahead and scrub the timeline.

Scrubbing the timeline just means left-mouse button clicking anywhere

in the timeline and just dragging it back and forth,

and you'll see that now our picture is animated,

it's rotating.

Now I'd like to pause for a minute here to tell you about interpolation,

and I don't want to get too much into it because we'll examine it in

another module later when we dive deep into the Curve Editor.

But right now I want to let you know that what the

computer's doing with these values that we gave it on these

keyframes is called interpolation,

and it's essentially taking the data we gave it with this

keyframe on frame number one and the data that we gave it

on the keyframe on frame 60,

and it's determining what the value of this attribute

should be from frame to frame as it goes,

and that's just called interpolation.

That way you don't have to give it a specific keyframe for every frame along

the timeline so that you're not animating frame by frame,

the computer's just kind of taking the beginning value and taking the end value,

and determining how to get from A to B for you.

So let's go in here and add a couple of more keyframes,

I'm going to go to frame 25,

and you can also right-click in this box and the same options

pop up as pop up in this animation button.

So sometimes I like to just go to the attribute itself and say Set key,

I'm going to go to frame 50, I'm going to set another key,

we're just setting a couple of random keys in here so

that I can how you how to delete keys.

Now that we've got a couple of different keys in there,

you can go to a selected key.

So let's go back to frame 25,

and if you want to delete that you can just

right-click up here and say Delete key,

and you'll notice that the little blue tick goes away and that means that

we've deleted the keyframe on that particular frame,

and you'll notice that this box turns back into a dim blue box,

signaling that there's still animation,

just no specific animation value for this frame.

Now let's say we want to wipe out all of the animation.

Let's say we don't like the way this thing's rotating,

we don't want it to rotate anymore, and right now we have one,

two, three, four keyframes that are flagged here in the timeline,

but we want to wipe out all the keyframes on this attribute at once.

Well you can right-click here and you can select No animation,

and it's always going to ask you if you're sure you want to do that

because it's going to wipe out every keyframe.

So it's going to wipe out all the work that you've done

animating this thing on this attribute, and if we click Yes,

you'll notice all of the text disappear,

this box goes back to being gray,

showing us that there is no more animation on this attribute.

Now let's say we have animation on one of our attributes and we want

to transfer that animation to another attribute.

So let's say we have animated the skew X,

so I'm going to go to frame 1, I'm going to set a keyframe,

I'm going to go to frame 60, I'm going to change this value to 2,

and it skews, and if we scrub the timeline,

you'll see that the value is animated.

And let's say I want to transfer that animation over to skew Y

so they get the same values at the same time.

Well to do that,

you can just right-click in the skew X box and go down to this Copy option,

and you can say Copy Animation, and then if you go to the skew Y,

select it with the left-mouse button, right-click and say Paste Absolute,

we're going to get the absolute values in there.

And so now we're going to get the same skew,

the same numbers, the same interpolation between those keyframes,

so now skew X has the same keyframes as skew Y,

and to delete that animation we just right-click on

those boxes and say No animation, No animation,

and we're back to normal.

Let's say you want to control two transforms at the same time,

which happens all the time when you're comping.

So I'm just going to go in here, hit the Tab button in the Node Graph,

and add another Transform node,

and let's say the animation on Transform3 is what we want

to drive the animation on Transform2.

So on Transform3,

I'm going to go to frame 1 and I'm going to

right-click and set a key on frame 1, go to frame 60,

I'm going to change this to 180 like we did earlier in the clip.

So this value is now animated on this node that's not connected to anything,

and we don't see a change in the picture because what we're looking at is this

Transform node that's connected to our original picture.

So let's say we want to take the animation from

Transform3 and put it into Transform2,

and to do that I'm going to go to Transform3,

I'm going to right-click on the animated value,

and I'm going to go to Copy, and I'm going to say Copy Links,

and what that's going to do is it's going to copy this

attribute as a link into whatever we tell it to.

So now if I go to the parameters for Transform2 and I

right-click on this parameter and say Paste Absolute,

you'll see this little green line gets drawn telling us that

this is borrowing values from this node.

So we've copied the animation from this node into this node.

So it's actually the values present in Transform3 are

being transferred to Transform2.

So we can see that if I go to frame 60,

and I clear out this Properties tab and I just look

at the animation on Transform3, and I want to change this keyframe to 60,

for example, it's going to update the information down in Transform2.

So now this node is controlling this node.

So I hope that didn't get too complicated,

I just wanted you to be aware that animation could be linked between

different parameters and different attributes in NUKE,

and that's really powerful later down the line,

and hopefully should make a little more sense as we get

into some more advanced operations later.