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

Stretch those limbs!


If you want to build a cartoon character rig, it's a good idea to enable it to squash and stretch. Even if your character is not cartoony, some animated shots may require a little stretching in order to achieve more convincing and clear poses. Depending on your project and schedule, it can be a good idea to enable this feature in all of your rigs.

How to do it...

  1. Open the file 005-Stretch.blend. It has an IK leg setup similar to the result of the previous recipe. Move the Foot.L bone around and see how it works. We need the leg to stretch to the position of the foot controller.

  2. Select the IK_Thigh.L bone and go to the Bone tab, under the Properties window. You'll see a panel called Inverse Kinematics. Change the Stretch field value to 0.1. Do the same for the IK_LowerLeg.L bone.

    If you move the foot controller, you'll see that IK chain bones change their size, but the leg mesh doesn't follow. It happens because we have two chains: one for deforming the mesh and another for...