Character Animation: The Fun Part - Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6 - page 321

to float, like they do near the end of this example. In the end though, you have to be able to look at the
Alt-A playback and be able to honestly tell yourself, “What's wrong with this motion?”
The Web Bucket video workshopped.mpeg represents the same idea, but approached a little differently. I
rebuilt the animation from scratch for this video. I've often found that, like projects in the real world,
you're only really ready to animate a shot or scene once you've … actually animated that shot or scene.
I tried to give the character some more life in this attempt, by making his movements a little fast, making
holds last a little long so the resulting velocity of motion is higher, and making him lighter on his feet.
While I didn't give it the full studio-quality treatment, I think that in this iteration, the animation has
gone from “not horrible” to “not bad.” I've seen worse on TV, which isn't saying much.
We haven't talked a lot about “art” in general, but one piece of advice I'll give you is this: Don't be afraid
to throw it away and start again. It's entirely possible that what you learn about a particular project while
working on it the first (or second, or third) time will enable you to do it much better the next time
around, even if your first attempt isn't salvageable. Be merciless to your digital creations. They'll thank
you for it.
Grabbing the Chair
If you watched the “workshopped” video, you'll notice that the character's hand locks nicely onto the
chair when he grabs it. Remember the IK/FK slider we constructed back in Chapter 9? When the char-
acter “grabs” the chair, the arm becomes a weight-bearing limb and should use IK.
To make use of the IK controls for the
arm, we need to put the controller itself
in place and properly keyframe the
custom property we created for the IK/
FK switch. First, we need to identify the
frame on which the “grab” is going to
happen. Scrubbing through the timeline
on the sample file, frame 123, shown in
Figure 11.35 , looks like a good spot.
Also, find the left arm's IK controller,
which is probably still hanging out near
its initial location at the beginning of the
animation.
With the IK controller selected (called
arm_control_IK_L in the example files),
move it near the wrist of the left arm.
Leave Pose mode for a moment, going
back to Object mode, and use the N key
to show the 3D view properties panel. Figure 11.35 Where we'll activate IK for the hand and arm.