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

Anticipating an action


In nature, most actions have a preceding movement. Be it a subtle eye or eyebrow movements to anticipate a head turn, or a full-body preparation for a jump.

Giving proper premise to your characters' actions will not only make them look more natural, but will also give visual clues to your audience so they know what's happening on the screen and where to look next. If you think of it like that, you may conclude that the anticipation principle is a storytelling resource in the animator's tool set.

As any other animation principle, you can use it (or remove it) for dramatic or comedic purposes. For instance, a character may leave the screen without anticipation, leaving only dust in its place and a proper sound to make the audience laugh.

How to do it...

  1. Open the file 007-Anticipation.blend. It has our character Otto with some basic poses for a jump. From right to left in the next screenshot: he is standing before the jump; the start of the jump; the moment where he finishes...