What this book covers
Chapter 1, Basic Keyframes in the Timeline, to ease ourselves into the subject of keyframes, will cover how to create a rudimentary animation in Blender using the default cube and Blender’s most basic animation editor, the Timeline.
Chapter 2, The Graph Editor, discusses Blender’s graph editor, which is indispensable for creating more complex motion. To realize the usefulness and importance of this tool, we will use it to animate a bouncing ball.
Chapter 3, Bezier Keyframes, discusses Bezier keyframes. These versatile keyframes offer direct control over the shape of the F-Curve, allowing the animator to directly “draw” the animation. This will be useful for our third exercise: animating a unicycle!
Chapter 4, Looking into Object Relationships, by examining the ways objects can be parented, constrained, and driven by other objects, teaches us how objects can be made to move in precise ways without being directly animated.
Chapter 5, Rendering an Animation, discusses rendering. Your animation can’t just live inside a .blend file forever. You’ll want to render it as a sequence of still frames and export those frames to a video file that can be shared with others.
Chapter 6, Linking and Posing a Character, looks at linking and posing a character. An aspiring animator should become familiar with character animation using a professional-quality rig. In this chapter, you’ll be introduced to Rain, an excellent rig provided for free by the Blender Foundation.
Chapter 7, Basic Character Animation, discusses character animation, which requires managing hundreds or sometimes thousands of keyframes for a single scene. Two new areas in Blender are needed to do so effectively: the Dope Sheet and the Action Editor.
Chapter 8, The Walk Cycle, explores making a character walk, which is essential but tricky! We’ll have to use the tools and techniques from previous chapters with even greater care and precision. Along the way, we’ll learn some additional techniques for ensuring symmetrical animation and smooth footwork.
Chapter 9, Sound and Lip-Syncing, will guide you through the process of importing a voiceover audio file and animating Rain’s mouth to match the spoken words.
Chapter 10, Prop Interaction with Dynamic Constraints, covers proper interaction. Picking up an object and throwing it is one of many acts that are simple to do in real life but not so simple to animate. We’ll need to add our own constraints, apply their effect at precise times, and even animate their influence.
Chapter 11, F-Curve Modifiers, returns to the Graph Editor. There’s still more to the Graph Editor than meets the eye! F-Curve modifiers allow an animator to generate endless motion without endless keying! Animating a clock will be our exercise for applying this useful feature.
Chapter 12, Rigid Body Physics, explores the physics of rigid bodies. Why animate lots of objects by hand when the computer can do the work? In this chapter, we’ll animate a wrecking ball destroying a wall – a perfect opportunity to use Blender’s rigid-body simulation features.
Chapter 13, Animating with Multiple Cameras, covers various methods for using multiple camera objects in one animation. Most films and television shows are shot with more than one camera. There’s no reason 3D animation can’t be the same way.
Chapter 14, Nonlinear Animation, explores what is possibly Blender’s most mysterious and esoteric feature, the Nonlinear Animation Editor, which allows you to animate your animation.
