BLENDER 2.5 CHARACTER ANIMATION COOKBOOK REVIEW
Written by Virgilio Vasconcelos and published by Packtpub Publishers.
Virgilio is professor of 3D and 2D digital animation from Brazil. He contributes to translations, consultations writing of articles for Edirtora Europa that publishes magazines such as 3D world Brazil.
He has worked at Nitrocorpz Design Studio as animator and 3D generalist.
http://virgiliovasconcelos.com/
This book is for users who already understand the Blender interface, know how to model, render and are eager to go the next step of animation. Bringing the character to life.
The book has 50 recipes describing each process to understanding character animation. The support files are available at Packtpub Publishers www.PacktPub.com
available for download.
The book has 277 pages broken down into 10 chapters.
In Chapter 1 there is a proper introduction to rigging. Explanation on what rigging is and how to go about creating rigs and complicating them enough but also simplifying them enough for an animator.
The complexity of an animation must be just right. Not too simple, not too complex. Just enough for an animator to create realistic animation.
Understanding orientation in relation to building bone structure.
In Chapter 2-Rigging the Torso. Gets more focused into rigging something specific .The torso. Some of what is covered here is rigging the character and making the character breathe. Interesting hah.
Despite the author writing the recipes, he encourages the reader to be free and explore different techniques of rigging a character.
He goes ahead to show us how to create the torso…stretch a character and also how to make your character look alive.
The other chapters covered include Eying Animation. Controlling the eyes…considering eyes express a lot of emotions. How do you rig a character’s eye. Surprisingly it’s one the hardest parts to rig properly. Virgilio describes the whole process pretty well enough for Blender user to understand.
Facial Rigging-Which also includes adding expressions. Pretty complex stuff to learn but explained very well also.
After rigging, what next. Animation. How do you go about animating the bones and making sure nothing turns the wrong direction and achieving that smooth realistic animation. The Chapter-Blending with the Animation Workflow covers:
- Animating layers
- Changing between forward and inverse kinematics. Grasping and throwing objects (always wondered about that)
- Non-linear animation and other equally important topics.
You get to understand the amount of time you spend in creating an animation whether for personal project or professional work. That’s why organization from the word go is absolutely vital from the word go.
Virgilio uses recipes that are pretty easy to understand and some good reference as well.
As much you might be happy when you are done with this chapter. It’s not exactly over yet. You still have to master the basics. When to pose, when to stretch…basically knowing when to move and when to pose.
Chapter 7 Easy to Say, Hard to Do: Mastering the basics.
Virgilio explains to you:
- Adjusting and tracking time
- How to handle poses
- Anticipating an action.
The fun thing about mastering the basics is it will become instinct, as you get better at it. You will always know what to do. That is quiet cool.Somebody else is going to ask you sometime how do you know what to do, but you just do.Enough practice.
The next few chapters put what you have learned to test. He still emphasizes on the importance of planning. It’s something that should not be overlooked.
He gives us a recipe on animating a tennis serve. We get to define the extreme positions that that tell a story of what is about to happen. How do you go about creating extreme positions then basic time adjustments.
It’s pretty fun.
Chapters 9 and 10 cover animation refinements acting in animation.
Make animations more fluid like and with consistency, you will deliver better animations.
He uses pretty good visuals (images) to pass across the message.
Next is why do you animate the character when you animate it. The reason behind everything. Fluid movements are useless without a reason behind those movement. That means understanding why the character does what he does.
Virgilio nails it on the head in this book.
The book is a fun read and with the recipes and time, one will be good in a position to engage in character animation and eventually be a master.
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