Book Image

Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook

Book Image

Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook

Overview of this book

Blender is an open source 3D graphics application that can be used for modeling, rigging, animating, rendering and thousands of other things. While modeling characters isn't the biggest of your worries, animating them to make them feel as-good-as alive is what differentiates a professional from an amateur. This book offers clear, illustrative, and easy-to-follow recipes to create character rigs and animations for common situations. Bring your characters to life by understanding the principles, techniques and approaches involved in creating rigs and animations, you'll be able to adapt them to your own characters and films. The book offers clear step-by-step tutorials, with detailed explanations, screenshots and support files to help you understand the principles behind each topic. Each recipe covers a logical step of the complete creation of a character rig and animation, so you're not overwhelmed with too much information at once. You'll see numerous examples and screenshots that guide to achieve various rigging and animation tasks, logically separated so you can understand each in detail. The rigging topics are divided by each region of the body (torso, limbs, face, eyes), and further separated by the specific topic (neck, fingers, mouth, eyelids, etc) for clarity. All rigging tasks are accomplished with the built-in tools in Blender, without the complexity of coding custom Python behaviors or user interface elements. The animation topics deal with common situations found in real world productions, showing good practices to understand and overcome the challenges.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

In the blink of an eye


Although a very simple body mechanism to animate, the blinking of our eyes is a very important method of communicating. We can look at the action of our blinking eyes in the following ways:

  • Organically, it's a way to keep our eyes moist. This is the technical aspect we needn't care about. Our audience really doesn't care if our characters' eyes are wet or not.

  • As an "editing" device: as we look around, our blinking eyes "cut" between scenes. When you turn your head quickly from left to right for example, your eyes normally blink in the middle of this action. This blinking helps your eyes accommodate the change of focus when looking at different things. If we think of it as a movie inside our head, it would be something like: "Looking at my left side". Cut (blink). "Looking at my right side". This is relevant to our animation process, but not nearly as important as...

  • Showing our emotional state: this should be our main concern when moving controls to make our characters...