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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
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.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011
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Table of Contents
Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook
Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook
Copyright © 2011 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: June 2011
Production Reference: 1130611
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
32 Lincoln Road
Olton
Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-84951-320-3
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Virgilio Vasconcelos ( <[email protected]> )
Credits
Author
Virgilio Vasconcelos
Reviewers
Allan Brito
Martin Poirier
Acquisition Editor
Sarah Cullington
Development Editor
Hyacintha D'Souza
Technical Editor
Aaron Rosario
Project Coordinator
Joel Goveya
Proofreader
Aaron Nash
Indexer
Tejal Daruwale
Production Coordinator
Aparna Bhagat
Cover Work
Aparna Bhagat
About the Author
Virgilio Vasconcelos is an animator based in Brazil, who uses Blender as his 3D tool to produce animations. He is also a university professor, teaching digital 3D and 2D animation at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG). His specialties include character rigging and animation, and his first tryst with Blender was back in 2003. He has worked as lead 3D artist at Nitrocorpz Design Studio, and has several personal and commissioned productions recognized by the Blender community, being awarded and nominated for artistic categories in events such as Blender Conference and BlenderPRO.
You can watch his animations, read his blog and contact him at http://www.virgiliovasconcelos.com.
Acknowledgements
No book is the product of just the author—he just happens to be under the spotlight with his name on the cover. The contribution of a number of people was crucial to bring this book to fruition, and it would take far more space than I have available to thank each one individually.
A special note goes to Chaitanya Apte, Hyacintha D'Souza, and Joel Goveya from Packt Publishing, without whom this book wouldn't exist. Thank you for believing in me, and for all the wonderful guidance and professionalism throughout these months. You and the entire Packt Publishing team did an outstanding job to help produce a high quality publication.
I must also thank the coding wizards who don't get tired of making Blender such an amazing tool, which crosses the line of being just an open source graphics application to be a respected tool by all CG professionals, regardless of its license. I'm grateful to people such as Ton Roosendaal, the head of the Blender Foundation, who is the main man responsible for what Blender has become; artists such as Bassam Kurdali and Nathan Vegdahl, from whom I've learned a lot by studying their rigging approaches; and the active user community in forums and discussion lists, such as blenderbrasil-dev in Google Groups. Aside from Blender fellows, I'm also very thankful to the guys at Nitrocorpz Design Studio, where I gained more experience and knowledge working on projects to write about in this book.
Along with all these people, a book isn't worth without a reader. If you're reading this now I want to thank you and let you know that I've put a lot of effort into making something very useful for you and your projects.
About the Reviewers
Allan Brito is a Brazilian architect, specialized in information visualization. He lives and works in Recife, Brazil. He works with Blender 3D to produce animations and still images, for visualization and instructional material. Besides his work with Blender as an artist, he also has wide experience in teaching and researching about 3D modeling, animation, and multimedia.
He is an active member in the Blender users community, writing about Blender 3D and its development for websites in Brazilian Portuguese (http://www.allanbrito.com) and English (http://www.blender3darchitect.com and http://www.blendernation.com). Besides his two blogs, he has written three books about Blender, in both English and Brazilian Portuguese, covering topics such as architectural visualization, mechanical modeling, and general Blender guides.
To know more about the author, visit the website http://www.blender3darchitect.com, where he covers the use of Blender and other tools for architectural visualization.
I want to thank my wife Erica for the support during the review of this book.
Martin Poirier is a software developer with a Master's Degree in Computer Graphics, specialized in character animation and simulation. He's been involved with the FOSS Blender project since early 2003, soon after its open source debut, working on plenty of things here and there, but mostly on the transformation system. Lately, he has been developing a distributed rendering solution for Blender animations.
Martin has reviewed and contributed to the official Blender 2.3 Guide. He is also contributing to the wiki version of the Blender Manual (occasionally).
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This book is dedicated to my love, Suryara, who brings so much happiness to my days; and my mom and sister, Leonora and Letícia, who support me unconditionally when I'm trying to draw with a computer.
This book would not have been possible without your love and understanding.
Preface
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.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Get Rigging—It's about the essential concepts and recipes you need to know before creating the controllers for your character. Master them and you'll avoid lots of headaches in the future.
Chapter 2, Rigging the Torso—Here we'll begin rigging our character's torso. It's a crucial set of recipes where you'll learn how to control things such as the pelvis, the neck, and how to stretch them in a cartoony way.
Chapter 3, Eyeing Animation—Here's a chapter dedicated to controlling our character's eyes. The eyes are what our audience looks at the most, so we have to carefully create good controllers for that part of the body.
Chapter 4, Poker Face? Facial Rigging—This chapter is dedicated to teaching you how to enable our characters to talk and express their feelings through facial expressions.
Chapter 5, Hands Down! The Limbs Controllers—In this chapter, we'll see how to create all kinds of controllers for arms, legs, feet, fingers, and shoulders.
Chapter 6, Blending with the Animation Workflow—It's time for animation, and in this chapter we'll see some important concepts and techniques to get started on the right foot and work efficiently.
Chapter 7, Easy to Say, Hard to Do: Mastering the Basics—Here we'll see some very important principles of animation applied to our characters. These principles are crucial for virtually every piece of animation you'll need to create.
Chapter 8, Shake That Body: The Mechanics of Body Movement—In this chapter we'll mix everything we've learned until here and apply them to real world situations.
Chapter 9, Spicing it Up: Animation Refinement—Now that we have achieved proper movement in our characters, it's time to take them to the next level with refinements.
Chapter 10, Drama King: Acting in Animation—Animators don't just move puppets around; they make you believe the characters are alive. Here we'll see some recipes about why our characters move, instead of how.
Appendix, Planning Your Animation—The Appendix talks a bit more about some concepts related to animation and how you can prepare yourself to make the perfect shot.
Who this book is for
This book will be handy for those 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 more life like entity.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "Select your entire bone, open the Specials menu (press the W key), and choose Subdivide."
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Open the file 001-Orientation.blend from this book's support files."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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You can download the example code files for all Packt books you have purchased from your account at http://www.PacktPub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.PacktPub.com/support and register to have the files e-mailed directly to you. Alternatively, the author also maintains a copy of the code on his website at http://virgiliovasconcelos.com/blender-animation-cookbook/.
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The author also maintains a copy of the graphics as well as the other code files from this book at http://virgiliovasconcelos.com/blender-animation-cookbook/.
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Questions
You can contact us at <[email protected]> if you are having a problem with any aspect of the book, and we will do our best to address it.
Chapter 1. Get Rigging
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
Introduction
So, you've successfully modeled an awesome character in Blender. After hours of careful and detailed work you have built a very appealing protagonist with a good topology for your next animation, but there's an issue: how do we make it look more life like, and also, how do we make it move?
Since a character model can be made of thousands of vertices, moving them individually across the 3D space is virtually impossible. We need an easier way of moving our models, and this way is called rigging.
Rigging is the process of creating a series of controls (the "Rig") to deform another object, which is often a character mesh. It involves creating special objects that move selected groups of vertices at once. This is the principle behind Skeletal Animation, where objects called "bones" are used to control parts of our models.
In Blender, there is a special object called Armature, which can be described roughly as a set of related bones that are used to control a mesh. To use an analogy, bones are for armatures as vertices are for meshes. Armatures can be added within the 3D View by pressing Shift + A and choosing Armature | Single Bone on the menu. Similar to meshes, armatures also have an Edit Mode accessible through the Tab key, where you can add, change, and remove bones as you wish. Bones can also be linked, creating a chain of hierarchically related bones.
Rigging is often referred to as one of the most difficult subjects in 3D animation. When creating a character rig, there are many aspects that you have to keep in mind, and two of them should be observed as major guidelines:
Finding an ideal balance between complexity of features and ease of use is the Holy Grail of character rigging. On one hand, if a rig is too simple it can be harder for the animator to give the character an "illusion of life". On the other hand, an extremely complex rig can be a nightmare: the animator should not require a tutorial to be able to start posing a character. It has to be straightforward enough to be used instinctively. Of course, a skilled animator should be able to achieve an amazing piece of animation even with a very simple rig, but the job of a character rigger is to make the animator's life easier.
Because every animation project has its own sorts of challenges and demands, there is no absolute right or wrong way to build a character rig. What we will see here are best practices that should apply to most situations. These recipes should be dealt with just as in a traditional cookbook: feel free to add spice to suit your personal taste.
Defining good orientations for your bones
When creating rigs for 3D characters in Blender, there is one mistake that is probably the most common of all, and it is also responsible for lots of headaches in the future: the orientations of the bone chains.
Every time we have to create a bone chain to allow our character to do a specific movement, some people (maybe in a hurry) often overlook this foundation of a good character rig. Since our characters and its bones live in a three-dimensional space, everyone familiar with 3D concepts should know that they are subject of the three world axes: X, Y and Z.
Along these concepts, we should be comfortable with the idea of "local" and "global" coordinates. Global coordinates are the ones relative to the scene: every scene has its Up or Down (Z axis), Left or Right (X axis), and Front or Back (Y axis) coordinates. Every object in a scene also has its own, or local, coordinates to allow easier transformations. To make an analogy with our world, "going East" would be the global coordinates while "turning right" refers to your local coordinates.
For instance, we should be allowed to bend a character forward regardless of its rotation and position relative to the scene. This "bending forward" would be too difficult to achieve using only the global coordinates; that's why we can use the local ones.
Getting ready
Using the concept of local coordinates, we have also to define some conventions such as which axis we are talking about when bending "forward". We have to pay attention to the sane organization of the bones, where a chosen local axis (for instance, local X) would be the same for all "forward" transformations, be it a finger or a knee. The character Otto, which is used throughout this book, uses the X local axis for the most common transformations, such as for bending the elbows and knees, closing the fingers, or bending the torso forward. This makes it easier to pose our character without having to worry about which axis you should use: if in doubt, use X!
Here we'll see how to create and correct bone chains in order for them to be more coherent and easier to manipulate.
How to do it...
Let's suppose you want a chain with three bones for a finger:
Note
In order to view better what we're doing, I've enabled the X-Ray and Axes display modes, in the Properties panel, under the Object Data tab.
Now you just move the tip of this bone until the finger's first joint and extrude the bone two times, right? WRONG!
Extruding bones is just what one would normally do in order to create a bone chain, but that brings to our new bones some unwanted rotations.
Select the tip of your bone and move (press the G key) it until the tip of the finger, as seen in the next screenshot:Select your entire bone, open the Specials menu (press the W key), and choose Subdivide. Select one of the bones and repeat this process.Move (press the G key) the joints to the appropriate places of the finger, and the orientations will be consistent. Note that the X axis of each bone is always pointing toward us, while the other bones on the hand have their Z axes pointing up. We need them all consistent.Select the bones you have just created, press Ctrl + R, and type 90. This will correct their rotations, making their Z axes point toward us (check the Axis conventions section at the end of this recipe to know more about this).Select the hand mesh, hold Shift, select a bone, and press Ctrl+ P. Choose With Automatic Weights to get a basic deformation on the hand.Now you can rotate the bones under their local X axis (R + X + X) to see what happens.Note
When you tell Blender to rotate (R), move (G), or scale (S) an object, you can use some key modifiers to tell it in which axis that transformation must happen. If you press X, Y, or Z one time, you're telling it that one of these global coordinates must be used. If you press the modifier key twice (X + X, Y + Y, or Z + Z) you're demanding that the transformation happen regarding that local coordinate.
How it works...
When using a correct bone orientation upon its creation, you avoid the need to correct the armature later. The orientation of the bones is often overlooked, and problems at this stage will be painfully noticed on later stages, when the animator tries to move the bones in a coherent way.
To demonstrate that, I've created the index finger bones with the usual "extrude" technique. Let's say the animator wants to close the fingers: this should be accomplished by selecting each bone and pressing R to rotate and X twice to select the local X axis. The next image shows the results of the previous action with the bones hidden, to demonstrate how the extruding technique on the index finger leads to unwanted results. We wanted to close the finger, not twist it like that. An animator would have a hard time trying to figure out which axis should be used for every finger. Talk about being counterproductive!
There's more...
What if you have already created bone chains with this orientation disorder? Do you have to recreate everything from scratch? No, there's hope for us all. This process is just to avoid the need for correcting the bones later, by creating them with the right orientations from the beginning. This means we can adjust the orientation by hand at any moment.
Correcting the orientation
You can always correct or define the orientation of a bone through its Roll value. In the Armature's Edit Mode, select the bone(s) that you want to correct, press Ctrl + R, and move your mouse. As with any transformation in Blender, you can use it along with Ctrl (to do it in steps of five degrees) or Shift (to get softer transformations).
You can manually view and set the Roll angle of a bone through the Properties Panel (press the N key), just below the Radius slider, as shown in the following screenshot:
Another shortcut for automatically correcting the Roll value is Ctrl + N, which tells Blender to guess what the best roll angles are based on their Z axes, which will all point to the same direction ("Up" or the cursor location).
Axis conventions
Another important thing to keep in mind when creating bones is axis conventions. It means you should always set the "front" of a bone to a given axis. This "front" is the default axis for a transformation, usually a rotation.
For instance, a humanoid character has some default movements, such as bending an elbow, knee, or finger. The bones for all these parts point in different directions, but you can set their roll values in a way that the animator's life becomes a little easier. A common approach is setting the X axis of a bone as the default transformation angle, so when the animator wants to bend and elbow, a knee, or a finger, it's just a matter of using the X local axis for that. There's no need to wonder "what local axis should I use for this transformation?". In the case of our armature, we can select all the bones, press Ctrl + R, and type 90, so the bones' X axes point at us in the Front view.
This way you get consistence throughout your rig, which is a must in professional workflows. I've seen rigs where different fingers in a hand required a different default axes for bending. A nightmare!
Rigify
A very cool way to add new bones and chains is by using the Rigify add-on which comes bundled with Blender 2.5. You can enable it in the User Preferences Window (press Ctrl + Alt + U), in the Add-ons tab.
With this add-on enabled you can add predefined bone chains for body parts or even a full human body. The great advantage is that you don't need to worry about names or orientations, since they come configured. You only have to worry about correctly adjusting the preset chains to the proportion of your character mesh.
See also
Chapter 5: Controlling fingers
