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

Introduction


Even the shortest piece of animation may require a lot of time to be made. For the uninitiated, producing 60 seconds of animation may sound like an easy task, but you can spend months until these few seconds are ready to hit the screen. Since animation is a very time consuming activity, having a streamlined workflow is a must.

You have to be organized in order to make things quicker and be able to fix errors easily. Imagine yourself having to throw away a week of work because things got so confusing in your scene that you found it easier to restart from scratch rather than try and fix it. That may sound acceptable if you're only making personal studies, but in a professional scenario with tight deadlines you're simply not allowed this luxury.

From this chapter on, we'll see some practices to help you stay organized, productive, and approach several kinds of animated shots. Of course, this is not a "one size fits all" set of recipes. There are various ways of bringing your characters...