Animation - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 200

Figure 11.24 Ready to strike! Figure 11.25 The big grab

Finally, he fi nishes the motion by drawing his hand up to view the rattle. In the fi nal edit, this upward motion
will not be seen in its entirety. There is a camera cut to the next shot, a close-up of his face, which splits the
hand raising action. It is important, though, to animate the motion fully so that the edit looks natural.

Each of these poses was created by maximizing the 3D view and dropping both the character mesh and con-
trol armature into local mode with the number pad “/” key. Doing so not only gives you more screen space
to work in, but it also clears out visual clutter and makes your system respond more quickly. Sometimes the
full screen window was quickly set to the camera view (number pad 0) to see how things would look from
that perspective.

NOTE
Remember to include any squash and stretch that is a part of your character rig in your posing.
It's easy to build the tools to do this and then forget to use them as you are working on station-
ary poses. Each pose should convey the dynamic of the moment, and if squash and stretch are
going to be a part of your character, including it from the beginning will help to convey that.

With the initial poses created (in a straight ahead fashion), I adjusted the timing and overlap. When working
with timing, it is crucial to receive real-time feedback. Regardless of how well you optimize your meshes and
backgrounds, any preview you get from the 3D view in Blender will be inferior for this purpose. The easiest
way to get a real-time preview of your animation is to:

● Set the output format to AVI Jpeg .
● Ctrl-left mouse button click on the “OpenGL Render” icon on a camera view's 3D header.
● When it is done “rendering,” press the Play button on the Anim panel of the Render buttons
( Ctrl-F11 also works).

Your animation will loop in a render window in real time.