From the course: Blender: Tips, Tricks and Techniques
Quick tree making - Blender Tutorial
From the course: Blender: Tips, Tricks and Techniques
Quick tree making
- [Instructor] Now let's say you had the goal of making a forest. How would you do that? What crazy expensive plugins and add-ons and simulation things will you need to make a whole forest that's moving with wind and leaves? Well, you don't have to buy anything because it's all included inside of Blender on a simple little add-on that we're going to take a look at today in Blender's tip, tricks, and techniques. First, let's enable it by going to file, user preferences, and typing in sapling. And then you can just check it on and go to save user settings. And then let's delete the cube, but leave the rest for now and go to layer two and hit shift, A, curve, sapling tree gen. Now, if you've been following along with Blender's tips, tricks, and techniques, you may recognize that this is one of those side add-ons here that will disappear the moment you click on something else. So, whatever happens in here, make sure it's final and don't click on anything until you're ready. So let's play with some of these settings. There's so many that we can go through. So we're only going to cover a handful of them. The first is, well, bevel, so we can actually see our tree. There's actually quite a few presets down here, like Japanese maple, Douglas fir, et cetera, et cetera. There's even a weeping willow. But I'm going to go with just the standard Douglas fir. A nice, simple little tree. And I'm going to come up here and then go to branch splitting. Branch splitting lets you, well, add more branches, really. You can actually add tons of these, but I recommend that unless you're having a super computer, you stick to two or three. Because anything beyond that can get really kind of dicey. You can also do base splitting, where you have three on top of each other. So you can see what's going on here. But again, for the purposes of this video, we're going to keep it pretty simple. Lots of little options in here. Trunk height, for example, if it's too high, secondary base heights, split heights, all sorts of fun little things you can mess with. And as I've said earlier, a billion options. But we'll leave it alone for right now and we'll move on to the next thing, leaves. So now leaves are really handy. I just click on leaves, and voila, there you go, you have some leaves now. You can also switch to rectangular leaves, which are really handy if you have a rectangular leaf texture, as most textures come in squares. You can also add more leaves, but be a little careful because if you put this value up really high, you're going to get yourself a really heavy, heavy scene. So I think I actually want another branch. There we go. And then let's come back to leaves. And let's come down to leaf scale. And just to exaggerate things, I'm going to make them one. You know what, that might be a little bit too exaggerated. Let's try .5. Yeah, that looks a lot better. Now let's come up to armature. And I'm just going to click on use armature. And that's really it, that's all I'm going to do on this one. There's a whole bunch of settings in here to make the armature a little bit more optimized. But for right now, just going to click on use armature. And finally, come to animation. Now, you'll note this warning that says, finalize all other settings first. And please do, because if you don't like the look of this tree, and you start messing with these options and then start messing with branches and leaves, you're going to be in a world of pain. So I'm going to make it really easy. I'm going to say, overall wind strength, all of this looks great to me. Armature animation, turn it on. It's going to calculate and do its thing. Depending on the speed of your computer, it may happen in a few seconds or a few minutes. If you see it taking too long, I recommend you lower your branch splitting and then re-run animation. And then finally, leaf animation, let's turn that on too. That's going to go ahead and animate every single leaf based on these wind settings. And now this option, leaf animation, may take a couple of more minutes or a few more seconds. Don't worry, it's happening. It's just taking its time. Okay, now how do you preview all of this stuff? Well, it's pretty easy. Just come down here and click play. And at first, well, at first it might take a while because it's such a heavy scene. And you can see, I'm getting a good ol' frame rate of .3. So I can stop that. And I'm going to do what I said I wouldn't do, which is change my branch splitting down to two just for the purposes of the demo video here. Come back to animation, click them back on so they get resent. There we go. And now play it, and hey, we now have a, kind of an awkward tree, but it's animating. But for the purpose of this little demo, it works out pretty good. Okay, so now, remember how I said the moment I click away on something, well, I'm going to select my trunk here, new material, and boom, it's gone. Now, if you want to, let's switch to cycles, use nodes, and let's make this brownish, dark brown. I also like to change the view port colors. So let's do that. Same with these leaves. Let's make greenish view port color. Now, with the leaves still selected, shift select the trunk, control, G, and then come down to groups and type in tree. Come to the first layer, hit shift, A, empty, plane axis. Zoom into it, hit T to get some more real estate here. Same object properties area, scroll down, look for duplication group. Come down here, click on it, and click on tree. Now, if I look through the camera view, this is a really tall tree. So I can hit S and scale it down some. Shift, D, shift, Z, shift, D, shift, Z. B for box, shift, D, shift Z. Do it again, B for box, shift, D, shift Z. And you can kind of get the pattern of what's going on here. We're just going to make a quick forest. And you can even vary some of them by hitting R and Z. Or if you really want to, just R and just rotating them a little bit. Just to get some variance there, so it's not all the same side of it. Now, of course, the proper way to have done this is to go ahead and make a few trees, not necessarily one tree, and use multiple instances rather than just one group instance. But hey, you've gone ahead and now made a quick forest using the sapling add on. It's animating, it looks pretty decent, and all we have to do now is get in there and mess with some of those materials and the leaf size and you've got an awesome-looking landscape. So like all things inside of Blender, I recommend you get in there an play with it and see what cool things you can discover. And until next time, this is David for Blender's tips, tricks, and techniques.
Contents
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Handy Blender settings and add-ons3m
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PBR workflow for Blender3m 51s
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Light it on fire!5m 23s
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Filmic and HDR in Blender3m 33s
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Quick animation tips and tricks6m 48s
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Camera tracking like a pro8m 20s
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Materials and Multiscatter GGX3m 13s
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Destroy everything with dynamics4m 21s
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Kill fireflies with good render settings8m 39s
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Rig a character with Rigify10m 44s
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Let's make clouds!4m 59s
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Quick compositing tricks5m 18s
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Rig a mouth using Shape Keys7m 32s
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Ignite a fiery tornado4m 11s
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An in-depth eye rig8m 12s
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DupliFaces3m 5s
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Particle armies6m 9s
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Let's make grass13m 4s
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Make it rain5m 49s
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Cloth simulation: Flag4m 46s
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A quick ocean8m 20s
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Dynamic painting7m 24s
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UV like a pro10m 37s
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Camera tricks8m 53s
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Shrink wrap your life6m 10s
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Alembics and offsets7m 51s
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Work with modeling tools5m 33s
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Orphan data7m 6s
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Sculpting in Blender6m 29s
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Lattices4m 43s
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3D printing13m 31s
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New add-ons for Dynamic Sky5m 48s
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Magic UV4m 4s
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Import Images as Planes3m 49s
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Projections in camera6m 50s
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How to data transfer5m 57s
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UV without UVs6m 55s
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Work with the Grease Pencil8m 10s
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Random color nodes5m 48s
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Tile textures6m 48s
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Wood floor textures10m 47s
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Pointiness in cycles5m 27s
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Box mapping in cycles6m 4s
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Undo History4m 12s
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Quick mesh cleanup with Decimate5m 37s
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Useful geometry with Archimesh6m 56s
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Take measurements inside of Blender4m 5s
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Create cutouts6m 55s
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Quick render tests with overrides6m 23s
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Quick Fluid6m 11s
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Simplify AO7m 54s
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Add-ons: Dynamic Context Menu4m 6s
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Python: Quick renaming6m 14s
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Animating cameras: Turnaround4m 3s
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Animating cameras: Following objects5m 15s
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Using multiple constraints on one object7m 42s
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Fun with constraints: Elevator and Pivot4m 53s
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Face rigging with Rigify6m 51s
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Quick tree making6m 58s
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Quick strokes in freestyle and line boil6m 11s
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Advanced freestyle lines7m 13s
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Cartoon shading in cycles5m 1s
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Quick animation with functions7m 48s
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Python: Set viewport color6m 6s
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Making quick fur8m 22s
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Dealing with a dense scenes, part 2: Scene background6m 32s
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Dealing with a dense scenes, part 3: ID mask8m 35s
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Dealing with a dense scenes, part 4: Cryptomattes7m 46s
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Modeling: Quick Bend, Solidify, and Fatten5m 18s
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Rigging: Molding and fixing your rigged character8m 52s
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Modeling: Remeshing with Blender9m 49s
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Groups are now collections4m 34s
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Driving animation with the new Drivers tools3m 11s
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The new Weighted Normal modifier2m 41s
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Mesh analysis for 3D printers4m 3s
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Subdividing beautifully4m 12s
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Modeling: Photogrammetry with Meshroom6m 43s
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View layers and masking your objects3m 52s
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One simple trick to rendering faster2m 20s
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Quick viewport renders in Blender 2.85m 13s
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EEVEE for beginners: Materials3m 54s
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EEVEE for beginners: Light and shadow5m 4s
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EEVEE for Beginners: Indirection lighting probes4m 12s
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EEVEE for Beginners: Reflections5m 31s
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Blender physics 101: Hair dynamics8m 7s
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Blender physics 101: Rendering volumes faster7m 29s
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Blender physics 101: Particle smoke6m 49s
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Blender physics 101: Smoke magic9m 26s
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Quick tip: Clipping plane4m 36s
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Intel Open Image Denoise to make images pretty and faster6m 30s
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UI improvements in Blender 2.81 and 2.824m 7s
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Library Overrides6m 43s
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Let’s make balloons: Cloth simulation with air pressure6m 3s
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Mantaflow: New physically based fluid simulation6m 9s
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Smoke and fire simulations with Mantaflow5m 51s
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Mantaflow guides4m 5s
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Advanced Cycles nodes updates6m 40s
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Blender and UDIM5m 59s
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New sculpting tools in Blender5m 25s
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Remeshing sculpts in Blender5m 41s
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Actual sun positions in Blender4m 57s
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New helpful Blender preferences6m 57s
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Blender 2.83 and virtual reality5m 7s
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Adaptive sampling in Blender 2.835m 29s
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Wave and noise texture updates in Blender 2.835m 6s
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Volume rendering speed-up trick5m 5s
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New sculpting brush: The Cloth brush4m 59s
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Quickly organize sculpture with Face Sets3m 15s
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Projected textures with lights5m 25s
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New Unreal Engine tools for Blender7m 55s
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How OpenVDB improves Blender volumes6m 34s
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Expand UVs automatically with Blender 2.904m 25s
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New Transform Fill for Grease Pencil3m 1s
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Grease Pencil Vertex Paint tricks4m 22s
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Easy way to manage collections4m 41s
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An incredible update to Sky in Blender 2.903m 51s
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Unsubdivide High Polygon meshes in Blender 2.905m 26s
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Modeling updates to Blender 2.905m 18s
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Preview scenes with Viewport Denoising in Blender4m 35s
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Library overrides updates in Blender 2.904m 39s
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Use BlenderKit to quickly build out scenes3m 12s
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Updated Physics tab for fluids6m 45s
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The latest in quality-of-life improvements5m 9s
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Command the high seas with Blender's updated ocean4m 29s
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Using heat to make explosions hot8m 37s
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Importing SVGs to make beautiful logo renders7m 36s
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Quickly create a dog or cat rig in Blender6m 48s
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Animating animals in Blender7m 28s
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How to use the NLA editor in Blender6m 14s
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Grease pencil to 3D mesh4m 17s
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Cloth, collisions, and Alembic caches5m 33s
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Data transfer for porting character rigs7m 46s
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How Geometry Nodes Changes Everything4m 38s
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Point Clouds8m 56s
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Getting Sticky with Viscosity6m 48s
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Camera Tracking in Blender 2.92 Improvements6m 36s
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Image Trace Your Drawings in Grease Pencil!4m 9s
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Move Along a Curve8m 20s
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Sculpt like a Pro with MultiRes and Sculpt Mode4m 9s
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What data-blocks are and how to use them5m 38s
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Helpful animation tips and tricks6m
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