Introduction to Character Animation

Word from author “This tutorial is the result of about a month of intense work as part of the Blender Summer of Documentation. I created it with the hope of introducing many new users to Blender, as well as providing a resource for experienced Blender users.”
Even if you’ve never heard of Blender before, you will be able to do this tutorial.

What to expect from this tutorial :
Modeling
Setting up the mesh – Start up Blender, add a plane, and set up symmetrical editing.
Creating the mouth – start shaping and extruding the mouth.
Face and eyes – Keep extruding the face, and add eyes.
Finishing the head – Finish off the head.
Neck shoulders and arms – Create the upper body by extruding neck, shoulders, and arms.
Torso legs and feet – Create the torso and lower body.

Materials and lighting
Lighting – Add lights to the scene, and do a test render.
Materials and textures – Add materials to the skin and eyes, and add textures to the skin.

Rigging
Upper body: building the armature – Build a skeleton for the upper body.
Upper body: Weight painting – Configure the skeleton for the upper body.
Lower body: building the armature and weight painting – Build and configure the skeleton for the lower
body.
Final rig adjustment. – Make some final improvements to the rig.

Animation
Animating a simple action – Animate a “Wave” action using the Action editor.
Animating a walkcycle – Animate a walkcycle using the Action editor.
Mixing actions with the NLA – Combine the wave action and the walkcycle action together in the NLA Editor.
Facial expressions – Create a set of facial expressions.
Adding sound and lip syncing – Use the facial expressions to lip sync to sound.
Final animation – Mix everything together into a final animation and render the output.

Download Introduction to Character Animation

animation_character_modeling

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