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

How to control where your characters look at


Unless your characters have a very unique style, their eyes will have to look at something. Based on this idea, there is a common practice of making this "something" a bone where the eyes will always point to. This is very useful when animating, since you can position this bone to the exact place where your character should look at without further worries.

How to do it...

  1. Open the file 003-Eyes.blend. This file has a head mesh with two eyes ready for you to work on them. Notice that the eyes are separate objects from the head.

  2. Select the left eye object, press Shift + S, and choose Cursor to Selected to position the 3D cursor into the center of the object.

  3. Add an Armature: press Shift + A and select Armature | Single Bone . Go to Edit Mode (Tab) in side view (Numpad 3) and move the tip of the bone so that it points to the character's front, next to the eye's pupil, similar to the next screenshot. Activate the armature's X-Ray display mode in the...