Making a Spring Rig in Blender (and more)

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finished.jpgBlender Underground has been posting their experiences working through Tony Mullen’s “Introducing Character Animation with Blender”. Its an excellent read that starts here. In addition, recently a detailed Spring Rig tutorial has been posted there that came about while answering a question from the forums. Find it here.

Apollos wrote informing us of his tutorial and blogging series on Tony Mullen’s book:

Over the last few months I’ve been blogging my way through Tony Mullen’s
“Introducing Character Animation with Blender.” I’ve been doing this, in part,
to help increase exposure for the book.

I just posted a lengthy bit on chapter 5 today, which was a fantastic chapter.
In the blog entries, I try to record my experiences, including difficulties
I’ve encountered and how I resolved them. It would be great to get others’
comments and insights about their experiences, or suggestions and corrections
on those things in the entries.

Make sure to thank Apollos for sharing his learning experiences and share your own thoughts and experiences. It looks like Apollos is up to Chapter 7 on his blog now. Check it out.

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    • Marco

      Year ago i posted a similar question,

      http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=35946

      somebody ended up suggestion RVKs, odf which i did not know a lot, at the time… i will give a really INTERESTED look at this spring tut… thanks!

    • Sterling Roth

      I made a different spring tutorial a few months ago that is a bit easier to set up. you can find it here –>http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=91782

    • http://www.blenderunderground.com Apollos

      @Marco, in the Spring Rig 2.0 blend there’s a shape key version that is based on a setup by Gimble of the Blender Artists forum. I made it work like the hook version, and there’s no Z twist!

      @Sterling Roth, I saw your tutorial and thought it was pretty ingenious. I actually commented last week about it on the Spring Rig post. I thought your use of shape keys and the array modifier was clever and unique.

    • Tony

      Actually, coincidentally my next book includes a rigged spring tutorial also. The basic spring setup itself is in fact based on Sterling Roth’s approach in the BlenderArtists tutorial, and I added an armature with a PyDriver to rig it and a simple soft-body setup to make it bounce. (You can see it in action in the teaser vid I posted a few days ago here in BlenderNation).

      By the way, I’ve been following your posts over at BlenderUnderground, Apollos, and it’s really rewarding to see you working through the book so thoroughly and getting something out of it. Thanks for keeping such a nice record of your progress!

    • http://www.blenderunderground.com Apollos

      Tony, looking forward to the next book also! I’m getting a lot out of it actually. Glad to hear you’re enjoying the blogging. I’m gonna need to get back to it soon…so much Blendering…so little time.

    • amdbcg

      @Tony :Do you think you could you give us a tutorial on how to do the whole pyDriver / softbody with the spring ? :D