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

Controlling your tongue


The tongue is very important when animating your character, helping to create good facial expressions which are fundamental when animating dialogues. Although subtle in essence, it makes a big difference when animating your character while it's saying things such as "hello".

Not only when speaking, but what if your character wants to have an ice cream?

How to do it...

  1. Open the file 004-Tongue.blend from this book's support files. You'll find our character's face rigged with shape keys, lattices, and a jaw controller as the result of previous recipes.

    If you move the Jaw controller down, you'll see that there's a mesh called Otto_Tongue inside the character's mouth. It is parented to the D_Jaw bone, so it follows the jaw movement.

  2. Enter into the armature's Edit Mode and add a chain of two bones for the tongue, as you can see in the next screenshot. Name them D_TongueBase and TongueTip and make them both children of the D_Jaw bone : (Ctrl + P) | Keep Offset.

  3. Enter into...