Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 11
Character Animation: The Fun Part
What We Missed
I'm going to put this section at the beginning of the chapter because for more than any other topic we've
discussed, what we're
not
doing here is almost as important as what we
are
doing. We won't be doing a
walk cycle, which is a repeating walk animation in which the character appears to walk on a treadmill.
While it's a great way to learn motion basics and to work on the character of your actor's motion, there
are hundreds of walk cycle tutorials on the Internet, and for most animation situations, it won't help you
all that much. You
will
be learning how make your characters walk around and do what they need to do,
which is much more helpful in general.
We won't be doing an in-depth study of the principles of animation. Entire lifetimes have been devoted
to both learning and teaching them, and we certainly can't do them justice in the few pages we have here.
We will explain them as we craft a few seconds of animation for our character though, pointing out where
they fit into the process.
Finally, we're not going to deal with blending animation from different sources. Blender has a major tool
called the Nonlinear Animation Editor that lets you mix and build animation in different passes. It's pretty
useless though, unless you have a solid grounding in using the animation tools to begin with. Instead of
rushing through just to get to that, we're going to focus on the basic character animation tools to make
our character wave, walk across the room, grab the chair, and throw his cube toy onto the table. Believe
me—there's plenty to do.
Pose Mode and the Dope Sheet
Character animation in Blender follows the same method as the object-level animation that you learned
way back in Chapter 3. You set the current frame, move things, and create keys to store their transforma-
tion at that point in time. However, when animating a character, you are working with a different kind
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