Make a character dance.
You may remember Oto the cleaner from a previous article. We’d like to draw attention to another of his tutorials, an excellent beginner’s look at rigging, setting up constraints, weighting and animating a female figure.
The tutorial comes out to be about 14 pages printed and while it doesn’t go into a lot of detail within the animation portion of the tutorial, despite the tutorial using the now dated 2.40, it still is an excellent quick walkthrough on setting up a basic rig in Blender.
An excerpt from the tutorial:
More great functions. Blender can now lock bone rotation in the X, Y and Z axis. And Limit it too. There’s an example in the image above. You enable the Limit function with the Limit X, Y and Z buttons in the Armature panel ( only available when an IK Solver it’s applied to a bones’s chain). Then in the “Min:” and the “Max:” fields you set the desired values.
The tutorial can be found here.
and if someone has the urge to do some dancing animations, this 1 min youtube
break dance is a great inspiration:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXu0go1pHKI&NR=1
Do you know of a 2D program for a beginner. I am looking to animate my characters but have zero experience in animation. I have crazytalk but it only animates the face. Thanks
this is old news…..
Keep in mind all news is NEW to someone.
Another excerpt from the tutorial “This is a little tutorial to show to new Blender users, the great character animation capabilities of the 2.40 version.” That was when? Christmas 2005?
Don’t get me wrong, this is a good tutorial, but when I saw “OTO the Cleaner has posted” I was hoping to see something I hadn’t seen before, because OTO is very knowledgable and a good tutorial writer.
Well Willie althought the tut is realy old the techneaque is all that matters , one cannot aspect a tut to show how a aparticular work is done but to explain a special technique that will give you a finished project, this is all the filosophy around creation , one cannot aspect a tool to be creative but instead it has to learn the tool potencials and then use those potencials to become a great graphical artist (excuse my rusty english but i hope i made my point), and yes this is a usefull tut althought some buttons have changed position
you are in luck @tracey martin: http://www.blendernation.com/2007/06/03/pencil-2d-animation-software/
@tracey martin: For 2D animation, I think I would STILL recommend Blender. Just set up the camera to point straight down (rotation 0,0,0) and set it to orthographic mode. There is also synfig but that’s sort of difficult especially if you’re on windows. Try Flash. It seems to be what everyone gets started with these days. – or get monkeyjam and some paper and a pencil.
I think there should be a reminder that this is really only for beginners. It makes a bad picture about blender if people come here and there’s an article about some tutorial as a great one, even when it is intermediate.
Otherwise, I think the tutorial IS great if you need to learn the basics. And even the author admits the animation isn’t great and that it was a learning experience for him.
@vildanovak: Please reread the article and my comments. I do state its an excellent walkthrough on creating a BASIC rig. Never said anything about this being advanced. Please guys lets stop the complaining, we’ve established its older and not advanced lets move on. If its simple enough, then work through it and lets see some examples from everyone.
Hello
once I’ve made a little fake 2D/3D animation movie/real time quite basic, maybe suited for beginners, specially if your focus it’s about “storytelling”.
Here you can get the .b file:
http://otothecleaner.free.fr/Works/works.html
And here in AVI format ( 8Mb):
http://otothecleaner.free.fr/downloads/Nocturnes-XII-X-MMIV.avi
Sorry, this probably will tarnish even more the Blender image.
Thank you Brian, to highlight my work, very Kind.
Bye
Brian, sorry if my judging seamed to be offtopic or invasive here. This is technically the best anim in blender i’ve ever done:
http://plant.ffa.vutbr.cz/~novak/files/mucha_xvid.avi
if anybody wants to check the rig:
http://plant.ffa.vutbr.cz/~novak/files/mouchaRENDER.blend
but it’s from an older version, so the particles won’t be probably ok. I am not telling I could do it better than what’s in the tutorial, actually I think that compared to what’s in the world out there my work is very noobish.
otherwise i specialize more on realtime content.
bye
even though this tutorial has been featured here before, its a good tutorial so nice to see it here again ;)
No apology necessary. Just no need to devalue the contributions of others. Nice bug, great modeling and texturing!
@Felix_Kütt: really? When?
The trick is not to find the people to whom some information is news, but to know your audience and tell something new to them. This information was totally new to me.
@Bart: I think he is referring to one of Oto’s other tutorials in which we referenced the tutorial page.
The problem is not the quality of the tutorial, which is excellent. The problem is in the presentation, on a site that bills itself as “Fresh Blender News, Every Day.” And the solution, Brian, is not to say “all news is NEW to someone.” “Breaking! Earth is round! News at 11!” [/snark] You could easily have written a lede that mentioned the age of the information, rather than making it sound like the tutorial was recently posted (which is the default assumption for people reading a “news” blog.)
For example: “OTO the Cleaner wrote an excellent tutorial on on rigging, setting up constraints, weighting and animating a female figure using the (then) new features of Blender 2.40. While these features have been improved in the past year and a half, this tutorial is still an excellent quick walk through on setting up a basic rig in Blender. It comes to about 14 pages yada, yada, yada….” See?
@HyperCity: I have no clue what your point is, but apparently you completely missed mine.
Well, Oto, I appreciate the tutorial very much. It has helped me tremendously with understanding how to use the bone rotational limits. I have been trying to understand this for some time and now, thanks to your tutorial I finally can do it. Thanks again for a wonderful tutorial.
@Everyone: While I appreciate you all keeping me in line, do keep in mind that we highlight many things here that may not be new. And it really is to bring it to the attention of those that haven’t seen it, and to collate it into somewhere that is easily searchable. I’ve made corrections in hopes of appeasing one and all, please lets return to Blending.
“While I appreciate you all keeping me in line”… Well, that’s news to me.