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

Non-linear animation


Along with the more "traditional" way of animating characters, Blender offers the Non-linear Animation (NLA) Editor, where you can mix different actions to produce new movements. This editor allows a lot of flexibility, with the ability of stacking simple movements to create a more complex animation. Tasks such as repeating and reversing an animation, which demands time and care to do in the DopeSheet, are very simple to do on the NLA.

How to do it...

  1. Open the file 006-NLA.blend. It has our character Otto with a basic animation of a jumping jack exercise. You'll notice that the arms movement is missing. Let's do them using the NLA Editor. The following screenshot shows our starting point, with the first pose in the 3D View and its keyframes set in a DopeSheet window:

  2. Press Alt + A to playback the animation. You'll see that, along with the missing arm movements, there is only one jump. We need this action to be repeated for a number of times so we have a real jumping jack...