[...]... Chapter 18, I recommend several books to help you deepen your knowledge and skills in this regard With Introducing Character Animation with Blender, I aim to provide a clear, cohesive overview of character creation and animation as implemented in Blender I hope that this encourages people to make the most of Blender s capabilities, to exercise their own creativity, and to support the fantastic community... and click Go to get to the book’s update page PART I Creating a Character with Blender Before you do any actual character animation, you need a character to animate The goal of the first part of this book is to get you comfortable enough with the modeling and rigging tools in Blender to translate your own ideas into actual 3D characters Blender has powerful mesh modeling tools and a very flexible system... expect to be quite familiar with the concepts dealt with in this book, but need to know how the concepts are implemented in the Blender software • Highly motivated newbies to both Blender and the field of character modeling and animation These are the people who will be picking the bones of this book I hope to supply these readers with all they need to use Blender to get started in character modeling, and... that still goes on Many more teams and individuals now work on animation and movie creation with Blender, providing valuable feedback for design of better tools With so much work done in this area, I was very happy to hear from Tony Mullen about his plans to write a book on character animation with Blender And even more delighted when Sybex decided to accept his proposal and work on publishing this... Life: Animation, we turn to animating the character we have created in Part I Introduction Chapter 6: Basics of Blender Animation looks at the simple example of a bouncing ball to introduce the ideas of interpolation (Ipo) curves and keyframes, which are the underlying components of all animation in Blender Chapter 7: Armature Animation shows how posing, keyframing, and pose ipos work with the character. .. basic groups: • Blender users who have experience with modeling and rendering, but have not yet seriously explored Blender s character animation capabilities It is likely that a lot of Blender users fall into this category, since Blender has been heavily used for years as a 3D illustration tool Introduction • Experienced character animators who are considering making a transition to using Blender instead... In Part I: Creating a Character with Blender, I take you through the Blender program, its tools, and the complete foundational process of building a character Chapter 1: Blender Basics: Interface and Objects will introduce you to the Blender desktop and show you how to navigate the various windows you’ll be using throughout the book This chapter also explains the basics of how Blender handles 3D objects... as you work with them Chapter 2: Working with Meshes covers the most important mesh modeling tools, and shows several approaches to organic modeling The chapter culminates with the completion of the Captain Blender character mesh, which we will use throughout the rest of the book for animation tutorials and examples Chapter 3: Materials and Textures continues with modeling the Captain Blender mesh,... around with watermarks on your work or hobbled, semi-functional shareware With Blender, you’re free to get right down to what’s important: creating Depending on your needs, Blender may be the only 3D animation package you ever have to bother with If you are a hobbyist, or a freelancer, or the head of your own production company, you may be able to do fine without ever touching another 3D modeling and animation. .. “3D open movie.” With the team of artists and developers that was involved, two key issues were defined that had to be tackled to make Blender suitable for serious animation movie production One of them was the rendering pipeline, but we decided to start with the most crucial issue: improving character animation tools During the second half of 2005, most of the animation system in Blender was rebuilt . Introducing Character Animation with Blender TONY MULLEN WILEY PUBLISHING, INC. 02608ffirs.qxd 1/17/07 12:41 PM Page i 02608ffirs.qxd 1/17/07 12:41 PM Page i Introducing Character Animation with. skills in this regard. With Introducing Character Animation with Blender, I aim to provide a clear, cohesive overview of character creation and animation as implemented in Blender. I hope that. of all animation in Blender. Chapter 7: Armature Animation shows how posing, keyframing, and pose ipos work with the character rig we created in Part I to create our first real character animations.