Chapter seven bounces right into covering your first skeletal animation with the Action Editor: making Captain Blender jump. Building this animation involves developing key poses, then filling in the “tweens.” Key poses, or “key” frames, is a concept that carries over from traditional animation, when the lead animator would draw the primary action poses, and another animator would fill in the “in betweens.” This is how the term keyframes gets its name…
In this chapter of the book, Tony Mullen temporarily puts aside the ongoing project, and focuses on the basics of Ipo Curves, beginning with the perfunctory bouncing ball animation. This introductory project is simple, and not uncommon in texts that teach animation basics; however there’s a reason for this – it works very well, and makes for a more than adequate foray into Ipo curve animation…
A whole new world opens up with chapter 5 of Tony Mullen’s book. It begins with Shape Keys. For those not familiar with these, they are basically vertex animation key frames. The main difference between vertex animation and skeletal animation is, with vertex animation the positional data for each vertex is recorded for each key frame. With skeletal animation, only the bones are key framed, and “vertex weighting” tells an algorithm which vertices to move, corresponding to bones in the armature…
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…
Not to be outdone by chapter 2, the third chapter of ICAWB squeezes a huge amount of instruction and knowledge into just 37 pages. According to the outline, chapter 3 begins with the Material Datablock, and progresses through Textures and UV Mapping, and Static Particles. Don’t let the brief outline fool you. There’s a whole lot of material in those three segments…
The second chapter of Introducing Character Animation with Blender makes no apologies about jumping right in to character modeling. Similar to chapter 1, this chapter covers a multitude details with a minimum of fluff…
The first chapter of Introducing Character Animation with Blender is very much what you would expect: an introduction to the essentials of Blender. Even intermediate or experienced users may glean something interesting or previously unknown from this first chapter, I know I did, even though the author invited those familiar with the basics to skip to chapter 2…
I just received my copy of Introducing Character Animation with Blender by Tony Mullen yesterday, which is available for purchase at the blender.org e-shop. It has an attractive cover and looks like a good quality product, with just under 480 pages including the index…
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