BSoD/Introduction to Character Animation

From BlenderWiki

Welcome!

This tutorial is the result of about a month of intense work as part of the Blender Summer of Documentation. I created it with the hope of introducing many new users to Blender, as well as providing a resource for experienced Blender users.

Even if you've never heard of Blender before, you will be able to do this tutorial.

Enjoy!

-Ryan

Marenzelleria 05:46, 26 July 2006 (CEST)

Feedback

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Visit the support thread at blenderartists.

Introductory material

• Introduction: What to expect from this tutorial.

Modeling

• Setting up the mesh - Start up Blender, add a plane, and set up symmetrical editing.
• Creating the mouth - start shaping and extruding the mouth.
• Face and eyes - Keep extruding the face, and add eyes.
• Finishing the head - Finish off the head.
• Neck shoulders and arms - Create the upper body by extruding neck, shoulders, and arms.
• Torso legs and feet - Create the torso and lower body.

Materials and lighting

• Lighting - Add lights to the scene, and do a test render.
• Materials and textures - Add materials to the skin and eyes, and add textures to the skin.

Rigging

• Upper body: building the armature - Build a skeleton for the upper body.
• Upper body: Weight painting - Configure the skeleton for the upper body.
• Lower body: building the armature and weight painting - Build and configure the skeleton for the lower body.
• Final rig adjustment. - Make some final improvements to the rig.

Animation

• Animating a simple action - Animate a "Wave" action using the Action editor.
• Animating a walkcycle - Animate a walkcycle using the Action editor.
• Mixing actions with the NLA - Combine the wave action and the walkcycle action together in the NLA Editor.
• Facial expressions - Create a set of facial expressions.
• Adding sound and lip syncing - Use the facial expressions to lip sync to sound.
• Final animation - Mix everything together into a final animation and render the output.
• Summary - A recap of the tutorial, and a final note from the author.

Finished product

Here are some static poses of the character you'll create in this tutorial. The end product of the tutorial is 5-second animation of the character, including a walkcycle and lip sync.

Note: The review in the latest Blenderart 6 magazine (thanks Blenderart!) refers to three sections of the tutorial that were referred to in my original outline: envelopes vs. vertex groups custom bone shapes using the stride bone If you're looking for these somewhat advanced topics, they aren't in the current version of the tutorial yet. They're on the way. -Ryan

Ready? Start with the Introduction . . .