Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook

• Learn how to create efficient and easy to use character rigs
• Understand and make your characters , so that your audience believes they're alive
• See common approaches when animating your characters in real world situations
• Learn the techniques needed to achieve various setups, from IK-FK blending to corrective shape keys and eyes controllers
• The only book to cover advanced aspects of working with character animation in Blender.

What you will learn from this book

• Refine your animation with Blender tools
• Understand principles behind movements like walking, running, jumping and weight lifting
• Stay productive with an organized animation workflow
• Create flexible face rigs with a mixed approach
• Learn how to stretch the arms, legs and spine of your characters
• Create corrective shape keys
• Fine control your character's eyes
• Switching between IK and FK for arms and legs in a shot
• Create an IK foot setup with 3 pivots
• How to track your animation arcs and timing

Approach

Part of Packt's Cookbook series, each chapter focuses on a different aspect of animation. If you don't have the time to work your way through a long tutorial, then this is the book for you. The step-by-step recipes are independent from each other so you can dip in and out of the book to add great effects as and when you need them.

Who this book is written for

Blender users who already know the basics of adding, modeling and rendering objects within the program, but are eager to learn how to turn a character's mesh into a living creature.

In Detail

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.