If you spent time with the first three chapters of Introducing Character Animation with Blender, then chapter 4 is what you’ve been waiting for. Tony Mullen takes the reader through building a complete character rig for Captain Blender, from building the armature to applying IK solvers and constraints. The most intriguing of these constraints is the Action constraint…

Action constraints allow you to set up bone drivers for straight forward and simple animations such as eye blinking or hand clenching. The latter is addressed directly in chapter 4 along with toe-heel rotation. While setting up action constraints at first seems complicated and time consuming, the time they save when animating begins to become obvious. In addition, there’s something very satisfying about developing bone-driven controls for your character’s movements; it’s a little like building a robot.

Chapter 4 ends with instruction on weight painting, which is vital in associating deformable bones with vertices in the mesh. This process, like any in character animation, is time consuming and non-simple. However once I committed to it, and stopped being in a hurry, I found the process satisfying. This is one area where technical know-how merged with artistic sensibilities, letting me lose myself in the process. While my own results were far from perfect, I have every confidence that with the application of some practice, I can only do better as time goes on.

My biggest criticism of chapter 4 is that it will be somewhat daunting for beginners. For a book dubbed as introductory, it dives right in to rigging, IK, Action constraints, the Action editor, and weight painting, all jammed into a 57 pages of a single chapter. My preference would have been to space these things out a little more, with a slightly slower pace and a little more explanation along the way as to the reason for certain rig decisions.

I was immensely satisfied with making it through this chapter. Some advanced tools were demystified, and completing the rigging process provided confidence that the rest of the subject matter is digestible. I’m looking forward to continuing with the rest of the book.

EDIT: Just to note, it seemed that the instruction on creating the ribs was absent, or perhaps I just missed it. Simply enough, if you find that the chapter speaks of ribs but your rig has none, they’re easy enough to add. Use figure 4.67 on page 180 as a guide. The table on pages 178-9 will give you the parents.

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LINKS:

Purchase Book at Blender.org

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