Character Animation tools |
A detailed description of blenders character animation tools |
August 15, 2001
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Introduction I am writing this as a tutorial about blenders character animation tools that are new to blender from version 2.20. As I write this The tools have been released for about a day so there is still very little documentation about this, most of my experience with it has basicly been playing with it and hoping I would get the desired result. I will Explain some of the stuff I have found out about the system. As I find out more this tutorial will grow bigger There for I will give you a few of the subjects I'm going to cover (or atleast try). - adding armatures (page1) To keep things as easy as possible I will use a very basic object (1) to apply these techniques on. When you model a arm please make sure you have enough vertices near a joint so it will deform nicely Adding Armatures Now go to front view and add an armature at the beginning of the arm (2). I added only 2 bones to keep things simple (3), you can stop adding bones by pressing either on the [spacebar] or the [esc] key. The difference between [space] and [esc], is that with [spacebar] the current bone will be placed, and with [esc] it won't (simple huh :). The bones you just build have got 3 modes, editmode, posemode, and the regular mode. In editmode [TAB](4) you can change the layout of your bones, by grabbing and moving them, by adding new bones, or even by extruding bones. In pose mode [ctrl+TAB] you can rotate the bones, when parented to a mesh this will cause it to deform the assigned vertices.
well lets continue by setting up some groups for deformation. When you experiment with setting different types of weight you might notice that you don't get the result you expected. If you say add a vertice to a group with a value of 0.5, and this is the only group the vertice is added to you'll still see a deformation of 100%, while you expected it to be 50% right? .. Wrong, you should see the weights kind of as a balance, you have several groups, that all balance around the amount of deformation. So if you add a vertice to 2 groups, both at 1.0 or both at 0.5 or both at 0.261 (and so on) they will both deform the mesh by exactly 50%. now in order to say create a smooth joint, you could make your joint exist out of 3 rows of vertices, let the two outer rows be affected by only 1 group, and the inner row of vertices effected by both groups at the same amount, you will still have to tweak it a bit more to get a proper joint, so play around with it, and after a while it will feel pretty natural. But keep in mind the weights act as a ratio or balance. The way that determines which group belongs to which bone, is very simple,
if the group and the bone have the exact same name, the bone deforms that
group. Now you are set to parent your object to the bones, select the object,
then select the bones, and press [ctrl+p], select the use armature setting
(9). Using the weight painting feature I planned on writing somethin up about the weight painting feature today, but I gues more people are asking about how to do IK and how do use them in the NLA system, so that's what I'm gonna describe on the next page. However this will already get you started with the awesome weight painting tool, 1) do the first part of this tute
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