User:Marenzelleria/Intro

From BlenderWiki

The reasoning behind this tutorial

This is an intermediate tutorial designed to teach you the more advanced tools available in Blender. It is written in the spirit of the Gus the Gingerbread Man tutorial.

When you complete this tutorial, you will have a fully rigged character (with facial expressions and skeleton) and an animation, lip synched to sound, starring your character. You'll end up with the tools and knowledge to make your own character and make it do whatever you want.

The Gus tutorial took me several hours to do when I first tried it, despite the "30 minutes" in its name. For this tutorial, I make no claims as to how fast you will finish it. I do suggest, though, that you take your time and don't worry about finishing it within some time limit.

Format of the tutorial

To accomodate the widest range of skills, I've tried to assume as little as possible on the part of the reader. To prevent beginning users from becoming lost and more advanced users from getting bored, I will introduce new topics and concepts as side notes that beginners can read and advanced users can easily skip over.

My primary goal with these side notes is to give you enough information so you understand the concept and understand why you're doing a particular step, without uneccesarily bogging down the text with details. In other words, short but sweet. The links in the side notes will allow you to learn more about a concept in detail.

You'll notice that for each step, I include the hotkey or menu item. It's easy enough to skip over them if you know them already, but they'll be helpful if you take a break and come back later. You won't have to page back looking for the hotkey if you forget.

Prerequisites

As I mentioned above, I'm not going to assume a lot of knowledge on the part of the reader. I will, however, assume you've read over the content of the following pages, in the Introduction section of the Blender manual:

• Navigating in 3D Space
• The Interface
• The Vital Functions
• "Gus" tutorial, Part I
• "Gus" tutorial, Part II

Don't worry if you don't remember everything from those pages. I'll explain everything as it comes up in this tutorial.

Caveats

Not the only way: Please keep in mind, this is only one way of doing things. There are many different work flows, I'm just showing you the way I do it.

The right balance: I've tried to strike a balance between keeping the character simple enough so that a beginner can follow along, but complex enough so that it can be used for more advanced techniques.

What you'll learn

In this tutorial, you'll learn:

Modeling

• Mesh modeling
• Basic vertex selections and editing, extruding, proportional editing
• Modifier stack: Mirror and Subsurf, toggling views
• Creating faces out of component vertices
• Edge loops

Texturing

• Basic materials
• Multiple materials on one object
• Basic textures

Rigging

• IK vs FK and when to use them
• Envelopes vs Vertex groups
• Pose mode vs Object and Edit modes
• Bone draw types
• Constructing an armature:
  • X-axis mirror editing
  • The different ways of adding IK constraints
  • Constraints: track-to, copy location, copy rotation
  • Elbow- and knee-lock bones
  • Foot rig
  • Stride bone
• Skinning/weight painting, posing bones in weight paint mode
• Custom bone shapes

Shape Keys

• Basic phonemes: open, narrow, smile, upper lip up/down, lower

lip up/down, inner eyebrows raise/lower, outer eyebrows raise/lower, eyelids open/close

• Making asymmetrical shapes via weight painting

Lighting and rendering(combined here because both will be simple)

• Basic lamp types
• Basic 3-point-plus light setup
• Camera setup and movement
• Basic render controls (size, output, OSA)

Animation

• Using the Timeline
• IPO curves and curve types
• Action window
• Adding keys via sliders (for shapes) and IKEY
• Scaling and moving keys to adjust timing
• Combining keys into actions
• Onion-skinning
• Tweaking IPO curves
• Adding sound
• Lip synching
• Blending actions together in the NLA editor

Next section: Part I: Modeling the head.