Animation - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 214

When the main walk is done, you will need to go back and refi ne the animation, adding opposing arm swing
and all of the secondary motion that normally accompanies a standard walk. Make sure as you tweak things
that you don't damage the nice path you created for the main line of the torso's motion. This is also one place
where a separate controller for hip rotation can be useful, allowing you to key the rotation of the hips with-
out affecting the rest of the pose for a more realistic walk.
A Final Note
Although it is diffi cult, animation should be fun. It is a strange mix of acting, puppetry, art, and engineering.
The principles and techniques presented in this chapter seem like a lot of information to absorb, and, in fact,
they are. You will fi nd, though, that as you progress as an animator, these things become second nature to
you. That is the goal—to embed these methods and ideas so deeply into your understanding of the subject
that implementing them is no longer mechanical, but intuitive. When that begins to happen, you will be able
to extract more believable and resonant performances from your characters.
Summary
When it's time to actually start animating, you create working animation fi les from the scene template fi le. Using
the principles of animation and Blender's animation tools, you keyframe the motion of your characters. One
way to do this is to create key poses, then adjust their intervals for proper timing. Overlap, anticipation, and fol-
low through are added. The animation is fi ne tuned by analyzing motion paths and through real-time previews.
Outbox
A series of fi les, one for each shot in your production, that contain fi nished character animation.
The Peach Perspective
On animation: What's the most unexpected thing that you discovered about the actual character
animation process during the production of BBB?
Nathan: The most unexpected thing about animating for BBB was the whole director thing. I'm
used to classroom-style critiques, where it's all about the quality of animation, but the artistic
control is still yours. So having animation rejected not because of quality concerns, but because
it didn't fi t the director's vision, was a totally new experience that took quite a bit of getting
used to.
Sacha: Defi ning both the characters and the animation style was extremely hard. There are many
possibilities for a style of toony animation, and every animator had different ideas and visions
about this. When not having enough time to predefi ne this, it can make things very hard during
production. The same goes for the character defi nition in a way. A certain evil character can look
evil in a lot of different ways, so the danger of having a character look too different every time is
always present. Again, it's time that could solve this, which we didn't have in most cases.