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

Using video for background reference


Some animators say using video reference is cheating. Don't be fooled by that. Since the days of the Nine Old Men—the core pioneer animators of Walt Disney Productions who created classics such as Snow White and Pinocchio, which helped define the art of animation as we know it—animators have studied and used video reference. The main difference is that today it's much easier and more accessible for us to do that.

Reference is something extremely important for animators to get inspiration from and understand the essence, physics, and motivation behind movements. From video reference you can get good visual ideas to apply to your animations, especially for acting subtleties, secondary actions and timing.

Blender allows us to easily insert videos or image sequences on the 3D View background to use as reference, and we're going to see how to do it. For this recipe, an excerpt video is used from a public domain movie called WILLIAM BENDIX IN RILEY, SAVINGS BONDS...