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

The eyelids controllers


A blink of an eye. That's a pretty fast action, but the mechanics behind it may require some thinking by the rigger to be applied correctly. With careful weight painting, some constraints and bones correctly positioned, we can accomplish good results.

How to do it...

  1. Open the file 003-Eyelids.blend from this book's support files. It's a head with some bones already set up for the eye's tracking. That's exactly what you would end up with in the previous recipe.

  2. Select the armature and enter into Edit Mode (Tab). In side view (Numpad 3), select the base of the Eye.L bone , press Shift + S, and pick Cursor to Selected in order to move the 3D cursor to that position.

  3. Add a new bone by pressing Shift + A, and move (G) its tip roughly to where the upper eyelid makes contact with the eye. Name that bone as D_UpEyelid.L . With its tip selected, extrude (E) to create another bone. Select it, name it as T_UpEyelid.L , remove its parent relationship by pressing Alt + P and choosing...