Animate and Light a Candle with Blend Shapes

Below is a short free tutorial on how to create, animate and light a candle using Blend Shapes in Autodesk Maya.  The goal is to understand how to use Blend Shapes to morph simple objects in Maya from one shape to another, and then animate them. 

Blend Shapes are used mainly for facial animation, but they can also be used to animate inanimate objects - in this case a flickering candle. 

Candle Flicker

What you will learn:
By the end of this tutorial you should be able to:
1. Create blend shapes in Maya
2. Morph objects from one shape to another
3. Create shape change animation

Rigs & Sets
We will not use any rigs or sets. We will create our own simple shapes and adjust them.

Videos to Watch
1. Blend Shapes General Theory Video

2. Technical Video - how to create Blend Shapes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWS1X2QOYBo

Thumbnails
Begin with pencil and paper, and sketch out some target shapes you would like your base shape to morph into. What shapes would you like to create? Keep them simple. We want a flickering candle so we want to make a few "poses" that we can morph back and forth. 

Blend Shapes Work Method

Part 1 – Create a Base Shape and a Target Shape
1. Thumbnail out your ideas on paper so you have a plan. Create some candle shapes.
2. In Maya, create a project, and set to it.
3. Under create/polygon primitives, make sure that interactive creation is turned off
4. Create/polygon primitives/sphere
5. Name the sphere baseShape.
6. Now cntrl D to duplicate the sphere. Move the 2nd sphere upwards in Y out of the way.
7. R click on the new target shape you have just created and select vertex mode. Now adjust the vertices to create a new shape, such as a long skinny candle. Try to keep the volume of the object roughly the same as the base.
8. You can also use the scale tool, but make sure you are in vertex mode first.
9. Name the new shape: targetShape1.
10. Go back to object mode, and select targetShape1. Shift select the base shape.
11. In the animation menu (top left), choose create deformers/blend shape. You will see blendShape1 appear in the inputs in the Channel Box.
12. To see the slider, go to Window/Animation editors/Shape Editor

Part 2 – Add more Target Shapes
1. Return to your original base shape and Cntrl D to create a new duplicate of the base shape. Name the shape targetShape2
2. Adjust the vertices so you create a new shape - perhaps a short fat candle shape.
3. Select the new target shape, shift select the base shape, and go to edit deformers/blend shape, and select add (Do NOT select create deformers/blend shape)
4. To see the slider, go to window/Animation Editors/ Shape Editor. You should now have two blend shapes.
5. Now create a few more Target Shapes so you have 5 or 6 of them.

Part 3 – Animate your Blend Shapes
1. To animate the blend shapes, go to window/animation editors/blendshape
2. Press the button labeled Key to set a key frame. Key frame your blend shape at frame 1, then set a different value at, say frame 13.
3. In the timeline, scrub between the two positions. You should have some animation.

Part 4 – Adjust your Blend Shapes in the Graph Editor
1. To find your keyframes, first go to the Channel Box.
2. In the Channel Box, scroll down to the target shape channel (they are purple in colour) so that you can adjust the key frames in the graph editor.
3. If you still can’t see the curves in the Graph Editor, try clicking on the little plus sign next to the top node in the Graph Editor.

Tutorial Part 1

Tutorial Part 2

More on Blend Shapes in Maya

To see more on how to animate with Blend Shapes in Maya, see this tutorial and blog post.

To find out more about Animation Apprentice, click here for a link to Frequently Asked Questions. To sign up for our next classroom at Animation Apprentice, follow this link.