Blender 2 5 Character Animation Cookbook

Annotation 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.

Let this in-depth professional book be your guide to Blender, the powerful open-source 3D modeling and animation software that will bring your ideas to life. Using clear step-by-step instruction and pages of real-world examples, expert animator Tony Mullen walks you through the complexities of modeling and animating, with a special focus on characters. From Blender basics to creating facial expressions and emotion to rendering, you’ll jump right into the process and learn valuable techniques that will transform your movies. Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.

This book will take you on a journey to understand the workflow normally used to create characters, from the modeling to the rendering stages using the tools of the last official release of Blender exclusively. This book helps you create a character mesh and sculpt features, using tools and techniques such as the Skin modifier and polygon merging. You will also get a detailed, step-by-step overview of how to rig and skin your character for animation, how to paint textures and create shaders, and how to perform rendering and compositing. With the help of this book, you will be making production-quality 3D models and characters quickly and efficiently, which will be ready to be added to your very own animated feature or game.

A recipe-based guide to give you practical information on Unity 5.x animation techniques and tools About This Book A straightforward and easy-to-follow format. A selection of the most important tasks and problems. Carefully organized instructions to solve problems efficiently. Clear explanations of what you did. Solutions that can be applied to solve real-world problems. Who This Book Is For This book is for Unity developers who have some exposure to Unity game development who want to learn the nuances of animation in Unity. Previous knowledge of animation techniques and mecanim is not necessary. What You Will Learn Importing animations to Unity Work with different animation assets and components Create, visualize, and edit animated creatures Animating game cut scenes Design character actions and expressions Create gameplay by animating characters and environments Use animations to drive in-game logic In Detail This recipe-based practical guide will show you how to unleash the power of animation in Unity 5.x and make your games visually impeccable. Our primary focus is on showing you tools and techniques to animate not only humanoid biped characters, but also other elements. This includes non-humanoid character animation, game world creation, UI element animation, and other key features such as opening doors, changing lights, transitioning to different scenes, using physics, setting up ragdolls, creating destructible objects and more. While discussing these topics, the book will focus on mecanim, the Unity 3D animation tool, and how you can use it to perform all these tasks efficiently and quickly. It contains a downloadable Unity project with interactive examples for all the recipes. By the end of this book, you will be confident and self-sufficient in animating your Unity 3D games efficiently. Style and approach This practical no-nonsense guide is recipe-based with real-world examples of almost all the techniques mentioned.

Expand your animation toolkit with foundational animation techniques, software expertise, professional best-practices, proven and time-tested work flows. Roland Hess, a leading Blender artist and instructor, expertly navigates you through Blender's character animation systems and controls, with a focus on each of the classical principles of animation like timing, anticipation, appeal, staging, exaggeration, squash and stretch and much more. Unique from other software titles, the Tradigital series offers a specific tool-set of practical instruction and foundational knowledge that all great animators will need to know. Expand your digital workflow to include the practical resources with the robust companion web site that include demonstrations, project files, links to further resources, available at www.tradigitalblender.com.

Each chapter in the book follows a themed approach to creating materials using the new Blender 2.5 features. As you read through each chapter you will learn approaches to create materials and textures. These materials and textures will help you to create a flawless simulation of real-world objects. You need not read the chapters in any particular order to learn to use the Blender 3D suite for materials simulation appropriately. Every recipe in this book will enable you to create a usable material or texture effect as well as teaching you techniques that save your time. If you are a Graphics Designer looking to master the features for materials and textures to create realistic looking models in Blender, then this book is for you. It can be read by both beginners and experienced Blender users; however, prior understanding of object creation and manipulation in Blender would be an advantage. This is a must-read for Blender users who want to learn the concepts and at the same time experiment with the different Blender Material and texture functions.

Learn how to get professional results from Blender Start from scratch-the way it happens in the studio-and create fully rendered objects with Blender open-source 3D animation software and this real-world, roll-up-your-sleeves guide. No time is wasted-this book plunges straight into step-by-step instruction designed to help you build skills and create solid assets for film, video, and games. Blender is gaining clout in professional settings, and you can get a running start with this series of hands-on tutorials that encompasses multiple disciplines. The book includes a DVD with starter, intermediate, and final files, as well as movie files to help you every step of the way. Helps you harness Blender, the free, open-source alternative to commercial CG packages such as Maya and 3ds Max Presents projects that start from scratch and encompass multiple disciplines, thoroughly teaching you the Blender software Shows you how to use Blender attributes and tools for professional results Allows you to emerge with finished, renderable objects and assets for use in film, video, or games Includes a DVD with starter, intermediate, and final files, plus movie files for reference This unparalleled book contains everything you need to know to take your Blender skills to a new level. Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.