From the course: Houdini Essential Training

Keyframes - Houdini Tutorial

From the course: Houdini Essential Training

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Keyframes

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- Now we're going to take a look at how to set keyframes on parameters in Houdini, and this, of course, is just one of the basic fundamentals of how we animate over time in any 3-D application. So let me open up our model object. And for this video, now we've got this series of rings that we're going to use to illustrate how we set keyframes. So I'm going to go up to our ring up here. Inside there's a little bit of a modeling network to build this thing and assign some shaders. And so what I'm going to do at the end of it is right click and type transform, so it's basic transform node. So now I'm going to highlight the display flag on this, and let's set a keyframe at the beginning and the end to rotate this around on the Y axis. Alright, so I'm going to go to the first frame of our sequence, I'm going to go to the rotate Y field, I'm going to right click, and we're going to go to channels and keyframes, and then go down to set keyframe. We could of course also do this with the alt left mouse button. I'm going to scroll to the end of our timeline. I'm going to change this value to 360, and you can see that now this field is green like it was in the beginning, and now it's a little sort of less saturated green, meaning it is a key-frameable parameter, but there are no keyframes yet on this field. So what I'll do again is I'll right click, go channels and keyframes, set keyframe, and now you can see that green has changed, and now we have 360, and now you can see as I scroll from the beginning to the end, we have interpolated values between zero and 360 as this rotates around. So now we'll go to the rotate X field, and now we'll do this with key shortcuts. So I'm going to hit alt left mouse click to set a keyframe there, and I'm going to scroll to the end of my timeline, and I'll make this negative 360 this time on the X. And I will do alt left mouse click, and there we go. So obviously that's a faster way to set keyframes because we aren't diving into menus. And now I will rewind and press play. And there we go. Now we are rotating this around two different axes, and we've set keyframes in two different ways. Alright, so now, for our final keyframe here, what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn on Autokey, which is this big key icon down here, and on the first frame, I'm going to use the alt left mouse button to set a keyframe at zero. I'm going to scroll to the end of my timeline, and I'm just going to type 360 now in this field, and you can see that it automatically became the brighter green, and this is because Autokey is on, so whenever we change a value in this field, it sets a keyframe for us. That's obviously the fastest way to keyframe because then we aren't having to actually click or do anything. Okay, and so now we have set keyframes on three different parameters of our ring, and we have looked at three different ways to set those keyframes. I've got a little copy node down here, which is just copying this thing out, and now you can see because this copy node is actually rotating each of these copies around by just setting keyframes on one of those objects. Now we have created some different animation on the different objects because they are being rotated further down the line as they're copied out. So, just a little insight again, and just sort of the work flow and ways of thinking in Houdini where we can often do just a little bit of manual work to get something to be a certain way we want and then copy an instant to iterate something out to create more complex variation out of that.

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