Book Image

Blender 3D: Characters, Machines, and Scenes for Artists

By : Enrico Valenza, Christopher Kuhn, Pierre-Armand Nicq, Romain Caudron
Book Image

Blender 3D: Characters, Machines, and Scenes for Artists

By: Enrico Valenza, Christopher Kuhn, Pierre-Armand Nicq, Romain Caudron

Overview of this book

Blender 3D is one of the top 3D animation software available. As the Blender software grows more powerful and popular, there is a demand to take your modeling skills to the next level. This learning path is divided into three modules that will take you on this incredible journey of creating games. The first module will take you on a journey to understand the workflow normally used to create characters, from the modeling to the rendering stages, using the tools of the last official release of Blender exclusively. You will be making production-quality 3D models and characters quickly and efficiently, which will be ready to be added to your very own animated feature or game. The second module will help you develop a comprehensive skill set that covers the key aspects of mechanical modeling. You will create many types of projects, including a pistol, spacecraft, robot, and a racer. By the end of this module, you will have mastered a workflow that you will be able to apply to your own creations. The final module will help you to create many types of projects using a step-by-step approach. Each project in this module will give you more practice and increase your knowledge of the Blender tools and game engine. This learning path combines some of the best that Packt has to offer in one complete, curated package. It includes content from the following Packt products: ? Blender 3D Cookbook, Second Edition by Enrico Valenza ? Blender 3D Incredible Machines, Second Edition by Christopher Kuhn ? Blender 3D By Example by Romain Caudron and Pierre-Armand Nicq
Table of Contents (5 chapters)
4
Index

Chapter 7. Rat Cowboy – Learning To Rig a Character for Animation

This chapter will cover the rigging and the skinning of a character. This character will be a Rat Cowboy that has been already modeled for you. Here, you will understand what the rigging process involves. We will start by placing deforming bones. After this, we will learn how to rig these bones with controllers and constraints such as IK or Copy. Then, we will skin our character so that the mesh follows the deforming bones. As a bonus, you will learn how to use shape keys in order to add some basic facial controls that will be controlled by drivers. The rig, which is covered here, will be basic, but you will have all the necessary knowledge to go further. We are going to use this rig to animate our character in the next chapter. Enjoy!

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Making a symmetric skeleton
  • Using the basic bones constraints
  • Rigging the eyes
  • Correcting the deformation of the meshes with...