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

Glory for your team: kicking the ball


Another common animation exercise to understand body mechanics involves your character kicking a soccer ball. It includes anticipating the action, the actual kick, and the follow-through movements.

As with all other animation shots, you should look for video references on the Internet or even record yourself performing the action. Then you should make quick sketches on the best ideas for poses prior to moving controllers around.

How to do it...

  1. Open the file 008-BallKick.blend. It has our character Otto properly dressed as a soccer player with a ball in front of him. It also has a camera set for this action, from which we see the objects in 3D view as default, as pictured in the following screenshot:

    During the research and planning phase, you should notice some peculiarities to this action. Let's assume that the character kicks the ball with his right leg:

    • The soccer player runs towards the ball looking firmly towards it.

    • His torso remains a bit curved to...