Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook: With this highly focused book you‚Äôll learn how to bring your characters to life using Blender, employing everything from realistic movement to refined eye control. Written in a user-friendly manner, it‚Äôs the only guide dedicated to this subject.

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4.3 (12 Ratings)

Paperback Jun 2011 308 pages 1st Edition

€18.99 per month

Paperback Jun 2011 308 pages 1st Edition

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Preview Book

Key benefits

Learn how to create efficient and easy to use character rigs
Understand and make your characters , so that your audience believes they're alive
See common approaches when animating your characters in real world situations
Learn the techniques needed to achieve various setups, from IK-FK blending to corrective shape keys and eyes controllers
The only book to cover advanced aspects of working with character animation in Blender.

Description

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.

Who is this book for?

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 living creature.

What you will learn

Refine your animation with Blender tools
Understand principles behind movements like walking, running, jumping and weight lifting
Stay productive with an organized animation workflow
Create flexible face rigs with a mixed approach
Learn how to stretch the arms, legs and spine of your characters
Create corrective shape keys
Fine control your character s eyes
Switching between IK and FK for arms and legs in a shot
Create an IK foot setup with 3 pivots
How to track your animation arcs and timing

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Free for first 7 days. $19.99 p/m after that. Cancel any time!

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50+ new titles added per month, including many first-to-market concepts and exclusive early access to books as they are being written.

Innovative learning tools, including AI book assistants, code context explainers, and text-to-speech.

Thousands of reference materials covering every tech concept you need to stay up to date.

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Amazon verified reviews

Amazon Customer Apr 04, 2017

This book is Great. Don't mean to sound like Donald Trump, but I mean this book is really really great. So Great that I read it everytime I run into a problem.

Amazon Verified review

matt sewell Dec 04, 2016

Really good book, everything is explained perfectly with examples would recommend if your new to blender or want to expand your skills

Gleek12 Aug 05, 2011

I've used maya professionly for years and have only recently started learning blender. I had seen a lot of strong character examples in the past, but its been very hard finding good training on blender's character tools. What's worse, is that whenever i could find decent training, it was never very comprehensive, just going over small specific areas. Well, i can say now without a doubt that blender now has an excellent resource for new riggers and animators. This book shows you how to rig a complete character from scratch, and does so in a very straightforward and easy to grasp manner. It's a testement to both blender and this book that it can pack so much information into such a seemingly short book. It even goes over high level concepts like facial rigging! I can't recommend this book highly enough for learning to rig professionally in blender.

Kevin M. Smith Aug 25, 2014

It purely concentrates on Character animation which are still relevant with 2.71. It covers intermediate and advanced character rigging concepts. I highly recommend this book if you are a character rigger.

Lioney Jan 29, 2013

Cela fait plusieurs années que j'essaye d'utiliser Blender et le rigging m'a toujours découragé. Ce livre présente toutes les astuces pour créer un rig fonctionnel de A à Z, en passant par l’utilisation des drivers qui maintenant me parait simplissime et l’utilisation des lattices pour les déformations du visage à la volée. N’oublions pas aussi les Shape Keys qui permettent de remodeler le personnage au cours des animations pour corriger les aléas d’une armature qui de toute façon ne peut pas être parfaite.Si ce que je raconte vous semble obscur, dites-vous bien que ça l’était également pour moi avant l’étude de ce livre!Mais ce qu’il y a de mieux, c’est que maintenant j’arrive à optimiser mon propre rig et je m’amuse à créer tout un tas de contrôleurs pour animer des mains plus rapidement par exemple. Merci le constraint « Action » que je ne connaissais pas du tout !Alors certes, le livre est en anglais ce qui peut poser des problèmes pour certains, mais pour moi qui possède plusieurs bouquins en anglais et français sur blender, celui-ci est incontestablement le meilleur pour apprendre et assimiler rapidement le rigging sous Blender.Les fichiers exemples présents tout au long du livre sont disponibles en téléchargement sur le site de l’éditeur, en version « exercice » et « exercice complété », ce qui est franchement appréciable.

Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook: With this highly focused book you‚Äôll learn how to bring your characters to life using Blender, employing everything from realistic movement to refined eye control. Written in a user-friendly manner, it‚Äôs the only guide dedicated to this subject.

What do you get with a Packt Subscription?