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

Controlling the pupils


The size of our pupils can say a lot about how we're feeling. Some methods of marketing research relate the size of the pupils to the attractiveness of TV commercials, for example.

Greater sizes can indicate that the person is attracted, happy, or just likes what it is seeing. Smaller usually denote the opposite, and that kind of control can be very useful in close up shots to help indicate how your character is feeling.

How to do it...

  1. Open the file called 003-Pupils.blend from the book's support files. You'll see a rig to control the eyes and eyelids, with shapes applied to the bones. That's our starting point, as you can see in the next screenshot:

  2. First we need to create two Shape Keys for each eye. Select the Eye.L object, navigate to the Properties Window, in the Object Data tab , and locate the Shape Keys panel . Press the plus button to create the Basis shape. Click two more times to create our shapes. Select each on the panel and name them Pupil_Small and...