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

Grasping and throwing objects


When animating a scene, you will often have to animate a character interacting with props, such as grasping a cup of tea, a sword, a gun, or a flower bouquet. These props are not part of the main rig, but you need a way to control them easily.

Let's imagine a scene where our character finds a giant diamond and picks it up with his left hand.

How to do it...

  1. Open the file 006-Props.blend. It has our character Otto in front of a stand with a big diamond on top. The character has a very basic animation with three Extreme positions defined to pick the diamond with his left hand. The next screenshot shows the first keyframe:

  2. Press Alt + A to see the animation. The character reaches out for the diamond with his left hand and tries to take it from the stand, but there's something wrong: the diamond remains still. That's because we need to tell Blender to make the diamond follow the character's hand at a certain point in the animation, and we're going to do this with a...