BlenderArt Magazine - 02 - Animation Special

8/14/2019 BlenderArt Magazine - 02 - Animation Special

1/60

Tutorials

Blender learning made easy

Issue 2 | January 2006

Articles

Animation Special !!

www.blenderart.org

Animation Special !!


2/60

CONTENTS

January 2006 | Issue 2

A look behind the Project Orange team. Inan exclusive interview with Sandra Gilbert.44

Behind the scenes ofthe New Pengueon byEnrico Valenza

34Plumiferos, an up-com-ming short from StudioManos Digitale.

30

And more...

Exclusive !!

Learn how to animate feathers falling and how to rig a human and a spider

9 16 21

EDITOR Gaurav [email protected]

MANAGING EDITOR Sandra [email protected]

WRITERSSandra GilbertGaurav NawaniEnrico ValenzaJuan J. PenaDavid LettierZsolt StefanClaudio Male co Andaur

DESIGN & GRAPHICSGaurav Nawani

Website Design (underway)Nam Pham

COPYRIGHTBlenderart Magazine, blenderart andblenderart logo are copyright Gaurav Na-wani. Ask Blentuu and blentuu logo arecopyright Sandra Gilbert.

All products and company names featured inthe publication are trademark or registeredtrademark of their respective owners.

www.blenderart.org


3/60

Welcome to the 2nd issue of Blenderart. This issue we arefocusing on Animation. Animation is a actually a very large

eld, covering a wide variety of techniques and methodsfor adding motion, emotion and effects to an endless arrayof objects and characters.

The last few months has seen a major overhaul of theanimation system, making animation much easier and lesspainful for even the least skilled of us. The ease of settingup a skeletal rig makes animating your characters lessdaunting, tempting even the most cautious of us to try ourhand at animating.

We are very lucky in that Blender has so many tools foranimating. There is a method and tool for just about any-thing you would want to do. For those of you who have notyet explored the animation capabilities of Blender, hereare a few of the tools you may want to consider as youventure into the world of animation.

KeyFraming/IPO manipulationLattice deformationCurves and pathsDupliFramesPose Mode/IK & FK ChainsParticles/Dupliverts (Especially with de ection and forceoptions)Soft Bodies

Rigid BodyFluid Simulation

Shape keys

This is an impressive feature list and now you can use anyof these alone or in various combinations to create yournext animated masterpiece.

In this issue we are going to cover a few of these methodsand techniques to get you up and animating. We are alsobringing you up to speed on Project Orange and as aspecial treat, we even have a short interview with some of

the Orange team. On a personal note, the Blenderart staff would like toexpress our thanks to the entire Blender community forthe overwhelming positive response and support of our

rst issue.

Happy blending!

EDITORIAL

www.blenderart.org

Sandra GilbertManaging editor


4/60

Hi there Blentuu,

I have a question for your section of the Blender art mag. Iveused other 3d programs before like Maya, Max and XSI and theyall have a tool that allows you to split a polygon in half. I cant

gure out how to do this in Blender. Ive tried using the knife toolto split a polygon but when it cuts, polygons on both sides of theone I tried to cut would have cuts in them too.

My question is; is there a way to cut a single polygon? If so,how? I hope my question makes it into the next issue. Thanks inadvance,- Alonso

Well the answer to that is no. In Blender, cutting a polygon willalways create extra cuts/edges, but not all hope is lost. With therelease of version 2.40, you get some control over the number of cuts with the new improved Knife tool. Or you can use the new Mesh Rip tool. The Rip tool can be used for tearing or ripping

parts of a Mesh, in order to create seams to be lled in with new faces.

Rules for the Rip tool are (taken straight from the release notes);Use short cut Vkey to activate it (a V resembles ripping :). It im-

mediately enters Transform translation mode after.

It only works for quads, this because it internally uses the faceloop-select to detect the proper faces that need to be ripped.If only 1 vertex is selected, the edge closest to the mouse cur-sor de nes the direction of the rip seam and what part is being

grabbed. Note that in this case there are 4 possible rips, so posi-tioning the mouse has to be done a bit careful.

When edges are selected, the rip seam is de ned, so the mousecursor position only de nes which part is being grabbed.

With only 1 vertex selected, you can step by step rip a mesh seam;this also works on the edges of a mesh grid for example.

Hi,I read and enjoyed your Blender art magazine, and have a ques -tion for your Ask Blentuu section.

I have an application in which I would like to use Blender, how-

ever, I have not been able to determine if the following featureis available. (For my purposes I would be driving Blender from apython script.)

Is it possible to have Blender calculate the volume of an object inorder to calculate the objects mass?

Many thanks,Charlie [email protected]

Ask Blentuu

www.blenderart.org

Blentuu answers

Q

A

Q

If you have a problemor a tip you want toshare mail it to blentuu

manager@[email protected]


5/60

Python not being one of my greatest strengths, I did some searchingaround and discovered that there is a python script in progress rightnow that should cover what you need. It is named AreaVolume and

further information about its progress and usage can be found in the

python forums at: http://www.elysiun.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=50510&highlight=areavolume.

Hello Blentuu,I have a question I would like to see answered in the next issue of Blender art magazine.

I am new to Blender (using it about six months part time and haveworked through the tutorials in the Blender 2.3 Guide twice now). I

am just getting to the point where the application is familiar to me andcan easily follow most well written tutorials. I come from a scienti cbackground and I approach things the way I would, if I was executing alaboratory protocol (read procedure, gather materials and tools, followinstructions, collect data, analyse data, write a report). Now not havingany formal art education I have been thinking about how to approachthe work ow in Blender to produce a small animation project. Do theprofessionals have a general methodology that they follow: model char-acters, add texture and lighting, rig for animation, create animation,render animation les?

Some tips for a noob regarding typical work ow that professionals usewhen approaching a small project would be of interest to me. I like the

rst issue and am happily working on the included tutorials. Thanks forthe magazine hope to see something on work ow in one of your up-coming issues.

- Matt

Any work ow you use will be of course tailored to your individual workstyle. That being said, a commonly used work ow.

A) Planning Stage.B) Story line.C) Concept sketches, perhaps even do up clay models.D) Story boards ( even if only using stick gures).E) The next part is done in progressive stages of detail. Set up your shot/scenes with basic primitives, to get an idea of spacing and size Doa quick render with basic colouring and lighting to judge timing.F) Model low poly versions of everything, re ning colouring, lightingtiming issues. Add in rough dialogue and sound effects. Add progressive

amounts of detail, materials and texturing and lighting, ne tune thetiming and sound issuesG) Final render

This type of setup works best in a team environment, with everyoneas signed speci c tasks, but can be modi ed to an individual effort.

-- Blentuu

Ask Blentuu

www.blenderart.org

A

Q

A


6/60

The Blender version 2.40 has been released withan overwhelming list of new features that will keepall of us busy experimenting and learning. Althoughthere were a large number of new features, most ofthe attention has been given to the Animation codeimprovements and rewrites.

With such features as a new IK System, Stride Sup-port, Shape Keys, IPO Drivers, Skin Weighting andRigging improvements, animation has become notonly fun, but a lot less painful. The new ParticleGuides and Shaded Particles have added a whole newdimension to hair/fur/grass.

Having already played with a lot of the new features,I can tell you that it is well worth the down load. Afew features have been moved, but not removed.So before you panic, look in the new Modi er Stack,in the Edit Buttons. Most all effect features such as

SubSurf, Decimate, Wave, Build etc have found a newhome there, as well as a few new ones.

There have also been rather exciting changes andimprovements to the UV/Image Editing tool set. Anew Live LSCM gives instant feedback while UVmapping, while a number of new tools allows cloningand smudging of images within Blender itself. TIFFsupport has also been added for import and export.

News of this release has already reached all cornersof the Internet, even appearing of the front page ofthe prestigious CGTalk website, adding to the alreadygrowing popularity of Blender. So, if you somehow

managed to miss the news of the release, head overto www.blender.org and grab yourself a copy. Dontforget to read the release notes as there is a wealthof information contained in those pages and youwouldnt want to miss out on even one of the newfeatures.

Every Blender release is followed by a bug x re -lease. From the developers meeting notes, it lookslike 2.41 may see the daylight next week: Instead of2.40a we drop the a/b convention and the 2.40

bug x release will be called 2.41

The Gimp team has released the latest bug xrelease of Gimp as the new stable release in Gimp

2.2.10 and also released Gimp 2.36, the beta releasefor the up coming Gimp 2.4.

Although the Gimp stable release doesnt add anything in new features, it is recommended to upgradeyour older Gimp 2.2.9 or 2.2.8 versions with this.

For those seeking to play with the up coming fea-tures in Gimp you can also download the Gimp 2.36in source form from the www.gimp.org website.

There is also a windows version of gimp 2.35 avail-able at source forge, though it is termed as unstableit is pretty useable and lets you experience the allnew organised menu structure, lots of elementarygoodies that nally made it into the text tools andmuch more, go play with it and provide feedback tothe Gimp team

News Flash

www.blenderart.org

6

Blender 2.40 released Gimp in news


7/60

The Linux Bangalore has always been a big event inIndia. Bangalore being the IT capital of India, has tre-mendous interest in FOSS. This year the LB was aptlyrenamed and transformed to FOSS.in as it has growngreatly over the years and due to the amount of at-tendance it commands it is no longer correct to call ita local LUG event any more.

Day 1I was there as a Blender user presenting the everincreasing quality and features of Blender at a booth.The event was launched by Atul Chitnis, one of thebiggest supporters of FOSS in India.

After attending the inspirational talk by Alan Cox,we went to fetch the machines which we were goingto use for our demos or projects. We got brand newmachines from the warehouse. Then I realised that Ihad a problem on my hands, this being the rst of anysuch event for me, I didnt bring a copy of Blenderwith me! Although I had duly burned all necessarystuff for demonstration a day before. No worries, justnext to me was the strong contingent from Delhi LUGand they had everything I needed ;).

After a short while I started demos of Blender anima-tions, using the recent Suzanne award winners. Slowlymany people gathered and started to discuss amongthemselves as to how Blender stands amongst othercommercial counterparts.

I did not answer any of those queries, but promptly

switched the animated demos to the rendered art-work. Their queries immediately changed to: how wasthis stuff done in Blender? How much time it wouldtake to do so? Exactly the questions I was waiting toanswer :)

Things were going ne for us, though we did not havenet access until Atul came in and suggested thatwe move to the Business Expo booth, as there wasplenty of empty space and ready net access there.By the time lunch ended we had shifted there. At theend of the day the crowd waned.

Day 2I was prompt to present myself at the event the nextmorning, however it seemsmorning does not wake

people faster. Since I hadnothing to do, I went andattended my rst FOSSevent of the day Ahem...LinuxChix. After attend-ing the event I returnedback to my stall and wastold that a few guys wereinterested in Blender andthey were waiting for mefor some time. After a

while a small group of fourguys came over, and askedwhat Blender could do. Ishowed them some stuff,Enricos Penguin Dancewas a favourite and so wasthe Cycles animation.

Shortly after noon a group of youngsters presentedthemselves at the stall. They were the enthusiastictype and one of them wanted to actually see how iswas done. There began my rst live Blender sessionand boy I was not aware of the usefulness it had.

Day This was the busiest day for me. I gave about 5-6 LiveBlender sessions, it was as if my stall had a high PRrating through word of mouth. Sartaj Kang, one ofthe KDE developers (and few others who have beenwatching the small groupings with amusement) wereof the view that I should have been giving a full

Foss.in report

www.blenderart.org

Foss.in report


8/60

talk instead, at other times they even wanted a BOFentirely for themselves. I nodded in agreement butluckily they were just too busy to attend one ;)

Just next to us was an HP stall. There they weredemoing a Blender version running on a modi ed

xserver which made use of three monitors and gavea large desktop real-estate for Blender. There wasMr. Manjunath from HP, with whom I discussed variousissues under which HP could be helping OSS. But asthey always say a commercial company has commer-cial interests in mind, well rightly so, but at-least heagreed in theory that there can be a chance that HPcan make use of Blenders growing capabilities. Thetalk went on to comparing the powerful features ofother commercial apps with Blender, which cameback to the development of features needed and

when I told him about the speed of actual develop-ment, I could see him getting excited.

Day Again a slow start in the morning, but this was oneof the most productive days of all. A professor fromone of the Goa Universities wanted to learn the basicsof using Blender himself so that he can introducethis useful tool to his students. There was only oneproblem though, he was looking for CAD featureswhich Blender does not readily offer. I discussed a

work around with him, like importing the mechanicaldrawings through images and building models withreference. They might not be accurate, but 3d modelswill keep students interest. I also suggested to himother OSS CAD tools. Despite that, I spent a good 1-2hrs. detailing for him how to use Blender, and I mustsay he was really interested in learning. I hope he canmake use of the small learning session.

Then there was Vaseem a engineering student, whowas interested in learning whether Blender can beused for his academic project on photo geometry.We discussed a lot on the issue and nally he agreedthat using python with Blender might help him.

Finally I met an very interesting person: Shree Kumar.He had worked on Blender scripting and was the onethose guys who made those Blender demos runningon the HP Cluster (or was it some thing else ?) And if I recall right, was one of the people who customisedthe Xserver to use multiple monitors asynchronously

on that machine. More importantly, we developed anmutual understanding that I can misuse his talentsto correct errors on python scripts which fail on mymachine ;)

At the end of it, I was lled with vigour, that I willreturn next year with a much larger role than this.

If Blender could generate such a good amount of in-terest despite being announcing as an entry very latein the event schedule, then it surely will have a much

better presence with a full edged talk on the sub -ject, and more importantly a developer friendly BOFon which I am sure Tom (Letterrip) will be nodding hishead in agreement ;)

-- Gaurav Nawani

Foss.in report

www.blenderart.org


9/60

O S O


10/60

With all that set we are nally good to go! By nowyou should have something like this:

Since this is an animation tutorial, Ill grant you someleverage with the modelling. You can get a ready touse scene at the blenderart website. If you dont feellike modelling all that stuff right now.

The First InstinctMost likely your rst instinct would be to create aparticle system, set the ground and our stand-incharacter as particle de ectors, and let Blender do its

magic. Lets explore that road.

We need to create a particle emitter that would castthe feathers; a mesh grid should do nicely for that.Place the emitter grid outside of the cameras viewand place the feathers object cent er in contact withthe grids object cent er .

How-to?Select the emitter grid (Right click on it)

Object |Snap |Cursor |SelectionSelect the feather (right click on it)Object |Snap |Selection |Cursor

Now make the grid the parent of thefeather, activate Dupliverts for thegrid and add a Particle system to thegrid. Remember to set some negativeZ force so that all feathers eventuallyfall into the ground.

First thing you will notice is thatunless you set the Key value to ahigh number the feathers fall will

be erratic to say the least. The bestresults are with key set to the maximum value of100, but you can get usable results setting it around80 or above.Second thing youshould notice is thateven with the de ec -tors damping set tothe maximum, feath-ers still slide over the

ground, just like if theground was slipperyice, eventually mostof the feathers nd their way to the edge and fall intothe void... not good!

The last, but certainly not the least important, is

that collision detection for particles isnt extremelyaccurate and you get plenty of feathers going brie ythrough the ground and then resurfacing. That maybe OK for feathers further away from camera, but itwould totally ruin any close up take.

Not everything is bad with this approach. The particlesystem allows us to introduce a certain amount ofrandomness to make the whole thing more believable.Speci cally, by making the particle motion path B-Spline interpolated and giving each feather a randomstarting speed the illusion of rain increases a lot. Thefeathers still behave kind of fake, but we will workon that shortly. Special care should be taken with theVect setting, as after certain point it tends to intro-duce a 90 degrees turns in the particles/feathers.

Summing it up, these are the settings I am talkingabout:

We will seek a way to overcome the drawbacks of theParticles approach, while retaining all the good stuff.

WORKSHOP - D Falling feathers -pg2

www.blenderart.org

10

WORKSHOP D ll f h


11/60

A Better ApproachAs mentioned before, the particles approach for thetask at hand has some serious drawbacks, the collisiondetection being the worst of them. However, particlesarent the only objects with Collision detection withinBlender. We also have collision detection for Soft bod-ies and Hard body dynamics inside the Game Engine.I nd the collision detection implemented for Softbodies far more re ned, so well use that.First thing that you should be aware of is that thereare two basic modes of using the Soft bodies feature.You have the Goal and the Spring methods.Without entering on technical details, the Goalmethod allows the objects to be animated using thestandard ways, thus giving you almost total control

over the animation result. With the Spring methodmost of the results comes from the dynamics systemand you have somewhat less control over the nalresults (although they usually look more realistic thanwhat you could get doing the animation by hand). Ofcourse we want a good compromise between the twomethods.

Ideally, we want to be able to in uence the fall byintroducing local transformations while the feath-

ers are moving, but we also want that the system totake care of all the collision detections and any otherdynamic forces, like wind gusts, that we might put inthe scene to enhance it.

So this is what I call a good compromise: (Image onright)

Please notice these settings:1. We had set the gravitational acceleration to 9.8(real gravity), so we are telling the Soft body Systemthat it should take care of the downward motion of

the feathers.2. It is indeed a Goal system, thus we can pass localtransformations to it (extremely important as youllsee), but...

3. It has both Goal In uence and Goal Stiffnessset to zero, so the actual mesh deformations willcome entirely from the dynamic system.

4. Goal Dampening has been set to the maximumvalue to help achieve point #2.

5. To prevent the feather mesh from deforming inunpleasant ways we are using both Edges and StiffQuads, with its settings all set to the maximum pos-

sible values. Likewise, G Min and G Max are bothset to zero, just to be sure.

It goes without saying that the Soft body systemshould be applied to the Feather itself, not to theemitter grid. What does need to be said is that untilsome technical issues are solved, Blender cannotrender dupliverted particle s with softbodies..So, for now, disengage both the particle system andthe Dupliverts on the grid. The easiest way to do it isby un-parenting the feather from the grid and hidingthe grid on an unused layer. Dont erase the grid orits particle system because we will need them lateron.

It also goes without saying that both the ground and

the actor should become soft body de ectors so thatBlender can calculate the feather collision with them.

Starting from Blender 2.40, soft body collision calcu-lations are no longer limited to mesh objects. Nowcollisions can be calculated between two or more softbody objects. In other words, no more feathers goingt hrough its neighbours mesh.


www.blenderart.org

11

WORKSHOP D F lli f h 4


12/60

Keep in mind that adding those extra collision checksincreases by a great length the time needed for cal-culations, so I decided not to do it now. If after youhave rendered your rst animation test you realisethat you have no other choice them go ahead with it,but you are warned that it will take a long while to

nish each frame.

Likewise, to cut down the calculation time I tempo r-ar ily neglected to turn the ground into a soft bodyde ector, at least until all the extra magic is done.Just remember to turn soft body de ection back on;otherwise the feathers will pass right t hrough the oor.

Re ning It UpNow that we have solved the main issue of the colli-

sion detection it is time to start working on the nedetails.

Have you ever watched a free falling feather, or alight weight leaf coming off from a tree branch? Thenyou know they dont fall in a straight line, they havesome sort of soft rocking movement while they spinover their gravity cent er .

Certainly we could animate those movements by hand

using motion paths and rotation key frames, and itwould be easy to do for just a couple of feathers. Butwe are talking about hundreds, maybe even thousandsof free falling feathers, thus we need a more exibleand less work intensive way to do it.

Delta IPOsHighly underrated, but extremely useful those IPOchannels are. Delta is a letter from the Greekalphabet and is commonly used in math and physicsto represent how much a given magnitude varies overa given time. Translating it to common language, itmeasures how much something changes from its initialstate.

Blender offers delta IPO channels for location, rota-tion and size, in all three axis. Select any Object,open an IPO window and look for the channels whosename starts with d.


13/60

Before we get any further, probably you are asking why use dRot instead ofRot? Quite simple, had we used Rot instead, it would cause every feather torotate on exactly the same way... all feathers, at all times, would have the samerotation! It might look good on a choreographed dance sequence, but that is pre -cisely what we want to avoid on something as random as a rain.

Using dRot means that whatever rotation the IPO dictates is added to whateverrotation the feather previously had. So, if we give to each feather a differentstarting rotation, its rotation will keep being unique through the entire sequence,which is a more desirable result.

Continuing on with the re nements, now that we have the feather spinning overits own gravity cent er we also need to introduce the soft rocking movement thatis so signature to this kind of object. For that the dLoc X and dLoc Y will beof much help. Draw some IPO curves like the ones on the screen shot, making surethat you cross the zero line a couple of times. When you are done set the curve to

Cyclic Extrapolation, so that the rocking movement will keep going on forever.

For both curves I tried to remain within +/- 1 Blender unit around the zero line.Anything more than that and it will start looking unnatural. Of course, the actualvalues also depend on the weather conditions you are trying to represent and theglobal scale of the scene. You should also double check that when you zoom outthe curve it stays centred around the zero line.

It is quite easy to draw curves that look OK when you are working on them, butthat tend to progressively deviate from the zero line. After some testing and trial

you should be able to get the hang of it, it is not that dif cult, trust me.

Here is an example of what you should avoid: (Image bottom right)

In the screen shot you can see that the dLoc X curve progressively drifts away fromthe centre, so that over time it gets harder to predict where the feather is going

to move next. The situation can be recti ed with the techniques well see on thenext page, but better avoid the problem if you can.

Screen shot with the dLoc curves-->


www.blenderart.org

1

WORKSHOP D Falling feathers pg6 1


14/60

Further Re nementsIf you playback the animation one frame at a timeyoull see that now we have a much more natural mo-tion for the feather... now it is time to start polishing

the nal details.

First detail is that right now we only have one singlefeather. Do you remember the emitting grid and itsparticle system? Yes, the one we put away on an un -used layer some pages back. Now it is time to bring itback. As before, parent the feather to the grid and letthe grid create as many duplicates as you need. Dontbe afraid to play with the settings. The goal now is tocreate as much randomness as possible.

If you render the scene as it is right now you willsee that all the feathers are missing on the render.Remember what I told you about Blender having prob-lems with dupliverted soft bodies? Well, this is one of those cases.

To work around the issue we need to make all the du-pliverted feathers real duplicates. Select the grid andpress [Ctrl]+[Shift]+[A] or use Object >> Clear/Apply >>

Make Duplicates Real

You should expect a major slow down right after youmake the duplicates real, because now the Soft bodysystem is calculating hundreds or thousands of feath-ers at the same time.Playback the animation. Is everything ne? No? The

duplicated feathers keep falling on a straight line?Dont panic !!

When you make the duplicates real Blender doesntcopy over the animation IPOs, just the meshes andmaterials. We will solve it by selecting all the feath-

ers and making sure that the last one we select isthe original feather (so it is the active object of thegroup). Then use Object >> Make Links >> Object IPOIf you playback the animation or check each featheron the IPO window youll see that everything is nenow.

It is time to do a test render. Since the IPO curvesare just one set linked to all the feathers, xing anymistake on the IPO channels is as simple as selecting

one of the feathers, doing the needed changes and allthe changes will pass over to all the others.

The Final TouchesWhat about adding a few gusts of soft wind andmaybe a force eld vortex around the main character

to make the scene even more natural and emotive?Dont forget to place some of the air currents nearthe ground in order to justify why the feathers arestill spinning and moving around even after theytouched the ground.

For this particular case, these are the wind and mainactors force eld settings that are giving me the bestresults, but that is more of a personal preferencethan anything else.

If you previously disabled the Soft bodiesde ection for the ground and/or actor, remember tore-enable it before doing your nal render. On myexperience, rendering with de ection enabled forthe ground increases a lot the time needed to rendereach frame. On my machine, the change of speed is

really dramatic, jumping from 17 seconds per frameto almost 4 minutes per frame!


www.blenderart.org

1

Note: Depending on what you want toachieve, on occasions it may be wor thyoverriding the soft body system justbefore making the duplicates real... Forthat just go back one frame before usingthe Make Real command. I dont adviseto actually click on Disable Soft bodies before making them real because thenyou would need to manually select andre-enable it for each feather. When we aretalking of hundreds of feathers that isnt atrivial task.

Photo Credits:The feather textured packed within the .blend isbased on a royalty-free feather photograph that Ifound at Image*After (http://www.imageafter.com/).Other places where you could nd royalty freefeathers pictures are Stock.Xchng (http://www.sxc.hu/), morgueFile (http://morgue le.com/)and gettyImages (http://creative.gettyimages.com/source/home/home.aspx).

WORKSHOP - D Falling feathers -pg7 1


15/60

ConclusionSo far we have only scratched the surface of what

could be done with this technique, and that was thepurpose of this tutorial. Now it is up to you to keepre ning, customising and improving the idea.These are just some pointers of what could be doneto further enhance the scene:

1. An animated sky with moving clouds and changinghues (make it match the direction of your wind force

eld).2. Better grass for the green eld.

3. Increasing the feathers count.4. Adding more variation to the feathers, right now itis the same feather being copied over and over.5. Breaking up the feathers cloud into smaller groups,each one with its own set of IPOs.6. Replacing the red cube with an actual animatedcharacter.

After adding some wind gusts and playing a little with

the sky, this is what I got as my nal animation ( movielocation to be announced ). It took nothing less than14 hours to render its 300 frames, so I hope you likeit.

If you have any doubts about how something is done,the nished .blend is available at ( blend file includedwith this issue of Blenderart ) for you to inspect it.This is how we reached the end of our brief rain-mak ing tutorial. For any comments, dont hesitatecon tacting me at [email protected], or look

out for me at the various Blender forums on the net.

Ooh... By the way, do you remember the singlefeather that lands on the main characters hand atthe introduction of this tutorial? That is done witha normal path curve. Select one of the feathers andparent it to a path leading to the open palm


www.blenderart.org

1

Juan J. Pea M. (aka apollux) isa 27 year old Architecture studentin the Dominican Republic. Being along time Blender user has led himto become the Blender Linux FAQ maintainer. In his spare time he

follows his life long love of amateur photography.Before he re-entered University to study architec-ture he was a former Computer Science (for Kids)teacher.

http://apollux-designs.com


16/60

WORKSHOP - D Gameblender character rigging -pg2 1


17/60

Next, make sure the cursor is centred on the pelvicarea of Joe from the front and side views. [Space-bar] Add >> Armature . This is going to create a newarmature or bone system for our mesh Joe. Youshould have something very similar to the image.

Now we will begin to build a skeletal system verysimilar to the image below.

To do this, extrude [E] OK? >> Extrude bone segmentsthe bones (beginning with the pelvic bone) to createa chest bone, neck bone, and head bone. Now placethe cursor at the shoulder areas and [Spacebar] Add >> Bone and begin extruding the bones to create an

upper-arm bone, lower-

arm bone, and hand bone.Duplicate this for each arm(two in total). Rememberto follow the picture forreference. Once you have

nished with that, placethe cursor at the top of thethigh area on the mesh andcreate a thigh bone, shinbone, foot bone just like

you did for the arms. Nowplace the cursor (viewingfrom the side view [Num-

Pad-3]) and add a new bone for the toe bone. Makesure to add one for each foot.

OK, now that the basic layout forthe skeletal system is complete it istime to parent certain bones to oth-ers and name each bone. While still

in edit mode for the bones press[F9] to get to the edit mode buttons(if you were not already there).Look for Armature Bones >> Select-ed Bones in the Buttons Window.Make sure to select all bones [A].To make it easier to explain, match

your bone names and parents to the image below.Note, that a typical naming convention is to add _Ror _L to either right or left bones respectively.

WORKSHOP D Gameblender character rigging pg2

www.blenderart.org

1



18/60

To recap we have appended our mesh object, createda basic layout for a humanoid armature system, andnamed/parented the bones together. Next we willassign the vertex groups to the armature system viaweight panting. (see box)

Trial and error is going to be the technique of choiceuntil you become familiar with the mesh and weight

painting in general. Begin by selecting the mesh [RM](right mouse button) then select the armature youcreated with [Shift] [RM]. The mesh should be a darkpink while the armature is a lighter pink colour. Nowwith both selected, press [Ctrl-P ] Make Parent to >>

Armature then Create Vertex Groups? >> Create FromClosest Bones. With the bones parented to the mesh,

select the mesh only and enter weight paint mode.You should see something similar to this

In rare instances, you will not have to change the

selected vertices that were chosenwhen you selected Create FromClosest Bones. In most cases youwill have to at least select or re-move some vertices from the vertexgroup. Other times, it is best toerase all selected bones by paint-ing over the selected vertices witha weight of zero and full opacity.As said before, weight painting can

be a bit of an art. Choosing whichvertices belong and which do notcan be dif cult at times. Select thebone you would like to begin weightpainting under Links and Materi-als >> Vertex Groups in the Buttons Window view. Topaint the in uence or weight value, [LMB] over the

mesh in the 3D View. As you paint over your mesh,you will notice the vertices being coloured either red,green, blue, or a colour thereof based on the Weightvalue under Paint in the Buttons Window view. Thesecolours indicate the in uence the bone has on thevertex. For most applications, painting in red seems

to be suf cient enoughyou may nd otherwise.Lastly, concerning weight painting (or vertex groupsin general), you may come across what is known aspinching or where too many vertices are attachedto too many bones creating too much deformation.See below.

To correct this, remove the vertices that should notmove along with the bone you are rotating. Again, thiswill be mostly trial and error.

gg g pg

www.blenderart.org

1

Weight painting: Weight painting in Blender is theprocess of painting of vertices which get assignedto the different bones along with their weightvalue or rather the in uence level that the bonehas on the vertex; blue being no in uence (weight0.0) while red being full in uence (weight 1.0).See Image below.



19/60

We nally arrive to the fun partpose mode or theactual animating. Select the armature with the [RMB]and enter what is known as Pose Mode under the dif-ferent modes such as Edit Mode or Object Mode. Yourscreen should look similar to this

.Before you begin, select the root bone or pelvis bone[RMB] and rotate with [R]. This will rotate the entiremesh/armature. If you see any vertices left behindyou must select the mesh and enter weight paintmode assigning the unassigned vertexes to their ap-propriate vertex groups. See image below.

If you wish to ever return the armature and subse-quently the mesh to original position press [Alt-R] toclear rotations applied while in pose mode. Note; thatyou can also select Rest Pos to return to the originalposition, however, this will not allow you to apply any

transformations and is not permanent.

When animating, it is very helpful tostand in front of a mirror and act out theanimation yourself if at all possible (youcan also ask someone else to act it outfor you and even recorded it for later ref-erence). To ease the explanation we willgo through a ridiculously easy animation.Begin by selecting the neck bone withthe [RMB] and press [I], then select theInsert Key >> LocRot option. You will now

see a key inserted under the neck bonein the Action Editor. Now advance the

frame count to 10 by pressing the [RAB] (right arrowbutton).

Rotate the neck bone about 30or so degrees (making him lookup) and insert another key likebefore. Bring the frame countback to 1 by pressing the [LAB]

(left arrow button) and press[Alt-A] in the 3D View. If donecorrectly, you should see themesh look up towards the sky.See image on the right.

Now move over to the game

engine buttons or Logic [F4] buttons. Create exactlywhat you see here (notice this action or AC is calledlook_up). See below. With that setup and your

mouse over the 3D View, press [P] and then [ENTER]

ignoring the no (correct) camera error message. Ifdone correctly, you should now be able to press andhold [L] making the character look up. For furtherpractise create a hand waving animation, an idleanimation, and a walking animation.

gg g pg

www.blenderart.org

1



20/60

Final thoughts.For video games, most animations will be simple andin place or in one location, for instance, the walk ani-mation will be the character walking in place. It is not

until you bring the animation into the game enginewill you advance the mesh position while playing theanimation to create the illusion of walking.

For in game movies or FMV, more complicated anima-tions will be needed obviously. Remember that themore frames you have between KeyFrames will makethe animation slower or faster if there are less Key-Frames. If, while animating, you nd the bones to betoo twisted or hard to work with than it may be easier

to clear the rotations for that frame and position fromthere. Every effort has been made to state correct informa-tion, however, if you nd anything in error pleasecontact me. Note, that I do not claim to be an expertso if you feel something should be done differentlythan go ahead and do what you feel comfortable with,for Im only providing this information to help ratherthan dictate

www.blenderart.org

20

David Lettier is a hobbyist game developerpractising and honing his development skills since2004. Being a lone wolf developer, David Let tieris a home grown programmer, animator, andsound designer. If you would like to contact Davidto drop a comment/question/suggestion and/or tojoin his cause you can reach him at [email protected]

LINKSYou can nd the accompanying .blend le athttp://www.cgartwork.com/dcl/characterani-mation.blend and an AVI movie of a more complicatedanimation than the one we did here athttp://www.cgartwork.com/dcl/characterani-mation.avi.

WORKSHOP - D Rigging a spider -pg1 21


21/60

Rigging a Spider inBlender

-by Gabriel gabio Beloin

Some basics thoughts before we startWe are going to rig a real-looking spider. The best wayto start is to get some real footage of our goal rst.

* To look like a usual spider having 8 legs.* The body is made of 2 rounds parts* The head has 2 mandibles* The whole thing is symmetrical

We will build a rig for this little thing. During thisprocess its important to keep in mind that our goalis to build something easy to use and that can givegood looking animations without too much work. Itsimportant to think about that, because you may wellbe the one who will use this rig. It must be simple touse yet give a lot of possibilities.

Building A Rig Just For HimNow have a look at the blend le (included w/ this issueof Blenderart) . There is a spider I modelled for thepurpose of this tutorial. We will use it as an example.

Start By adding an

ar mature to the scene. ADD >> Armature .Now you are in Ed it -Mode, editing thenew armature youjust added. Thereis a bone where thecursor is. Select all ofthe bone by right-clicking on the middle

of it (the body). Thiswill select both theroot and the tip ofthe bone. You canthen move it around.

The bone is made of

the root which is the lower ball, the body is the octa-hedron, the tip is the upper ball.move and rotate this bone around so its in the headof the Spider, the centre of the character:

This bone will have a name, we will call it Head. Toname a bone, go in EditButton [F9] There youll see

some panels useful to us.What we are looking for is in the Armature Bonespanel. If the Head bone is selected, youll see abunch of buttons under selected Bones. There theBO: eld will let you change the name of this bonefrom Bone to Head.

To see the result in the 3DView, toggle the Drawname button on. Its in the Armature panel.

www.blenderart.org



22/60

We will continue to add bones then.In side-view[3NumPad] select the root of the Headand extrude a new bone with [E]. Now you have twobones and each of the roots are at the same spot.Name it Abdomen. Make it a child of the Head bygoing in the Armature Bones panel with the Abdo-

men bone selected, clicking on the drop down on theright of child of and selecting Head.

Its already time to start to think about the hierarchyof your rig (example on right side).

You can parent a boneto another one. Thismeans the child bonewill do what ever

the parent does. Thisgives you the abilityto build solid rigs. Iffor example you movethe body, all the legswill follow. Its impor-tant to know what willdepend on what. Ageneral way of build-ing a rig is to start

with a master bone.This bone will be theparent of all the oth-ers. This is importantin case you want tomove everything,you will only need to

move this bone. This master bone is generally namedRoot. Add a new bone while in editmode (Add >>Bone), name it Root and put it somewhere awayfrom the character (at the bottom is a good place).

You can parent the Head to the Root, but there

is a faster way. Select the Head bone, then theRoot bone so Root is active, then do [CTRL-P] andselect Keep Offset. Connected is another type ofrelationship. Its basically a parent-child relation, butthe root of the child will follow the tip of the Parent.This will let you create chains of bones like the bonesin your arm. If you raise your arm, the rest also fol-lows, doesnt it?

So we now have something looking like this:

We will now rig the 8 legs. Dont worry, there is a wayto do just half the job. Since the Spider is symmetri-cal, its possible to tell Blender to rig the other halfwhile we do our part. Go into the Editbutton paneland toggle X-Axis Mirror Edit. Go into side view[3NUMPAD] Select Abdomen and Duplicate it using

[Shift-D]. This will give you an other bone with thesame parent as Abdomen, Head. Move it to oneof the left legs so its placed where a leg is plugged tothe body and the tip is in the middle of the rst joint.Rename it to Leg.L:

www.blenderart.org



23/60

Make sure the bone is in the middle of the leg in sideview too. Now Using [Shift-D], duplicate this bone forthe other 3 legs. Do not touch the right side.

Now, forBlender to mir-

ror our moveson the X-Axis,there must be 2bones follow-ing the nameconvention. Thename conven-tion will letBlender knowwhat is the

left part andwhat is theright part of arig. The namesmust end with.L .l .left .Leftor .R .r .Right.right. If there is

number after (like name.L.001), its not a problem.So if you have a bone on the Left named leg.L and a

bone on the right named leg.R, Blender will mirrorour move for the matching bones.

For this to work we will copy the 4 bones we did andgive them proper names. Select the 4 Legs bones andduplicate them. Move the duplication away, it doesntmatter where. Press [W] and select Flip Left-Right

Names. This will change the names from Leg.L toLeg.R. Re-select the 4 original bones (.L) and movethem a little. The 4 new bones will get the mirroredposition. Nice isnt it? (Image below).

Now you can start extrud-ing all the bones on theleft to ll the legs. Thereare 4 more bones neededby each leg, make sure thebones are in the middle ofthe geometry by looking inside-view and top view. Each

joint should be where thegeometry is more narrow.The names are automaticallygenerated and are OK. Asyou go, youll notice Blenderwill copy your moves andbuild the other side of the

armature with you.

When done, recalc the rotation of all bones to besure they are facing up. To do so, select all the bonesand do [CTRL-N]. The result should start to look quitecomplex, see the image below.

www.blenderart.org



24/60

The Armature Modi erWhen your are done with that, we can start looking todeform the mesh using the Armature. To do so, exitEditMode with [Tab] and select the Spider. Go intothe EditButton [F9] and look for the Modi er panel.

In the Blend le there is already a modi er, theSubSurf. Press the Add Modi er button and selectArmature in the list. Look for the OB: eld and typein Armature, which is the name of the armatureobject.

Now when you select the r ig and go in pose-mode

[CTRL-Tab], moving a bone should move somethingof the Spider. But in general its going to be far fromperfect. This is where we start tweaking envelopes.Go back into the EditButton, in the Armature panel,there will be a Envelope toggle. Turning it on willlet you see and tweak those envelopes. Basically theyde ne an area for each bone where the geometry will

follow the bone. Changing the area to better matchwhat we want is done by selecting a bone and scal-ing the zone with [ALT-S]. Its also possible to tweakenvelopes in EditMode of the armature (by pressing[Tab]) and there is generally more options, like scalingthe tip or root ball. At rst the envelopes look like

this:

Tweaking the zone to touch all the geometry yetblending each zone into each other nicely is hard. Itspossible to visualise the result of scaling the zone inpose-mode: Move a bone, if there is some verticesnot following, scale the zone a bit until you see thevertices move where they should be with the rest ofthe gang.

Some bones like the Head and Abdomen will notbe feasible using the envelope option, so we will needto do it by hand. Just scale it to 0, so we dont usethe envelope for this bone. There are 2 ways for mov-ing vertices: Envelope and vertex groups.

When you are done with the legs. We will make surethe Head and Abdomen work. For this select theSpider and go into EditMode. Go into the EditButtonand look for the Link and Materials panel.

www.blenderart.org



25/60

There you can add a group by pressing the New but-ton. Name it Head, the same name as the bone.Blender will naturally match those two and will usethis vertex group when you move the Head bonearound. Select all the geometry in the head like this:Press the Assign button. Thats it. The Weight

number is the weight youll give to this group whenassigning. For now a constant weight of 1 everywhereis enough. Do the same for the abdomen:

Test it by moving the armature around, all parts ofthe spider should follow. In case it doesnt, assign themissing vertices to the proper group.

Automate Some Tedious Tasks:ConstraintsNow it would be possible to keep it this way but itwould be rather long to animate each bone of eachleg. Let add some magic to the pieces.

We will add a IK solver to all of the legs. This will letus animate a complete leg by moving just one bone.

Select the Armature and go in EditMode. Select thetip of all the last bones of each leg, go in top viewand extrude a new bone from them. With all of thenew bones selected, press [ALT-P] >> Clear Parent.Then re -parent all bones by selecting one of the newbones, then select the Root bone and pressing[CTRL-P]. You will have to re -parent each bone one by

one, sadly it doesnt work when there is more thantwo bones selected.

Just before adding IK solvers all over the place, itswise to put all other identical constraints and copythem all around. Its a time saver. We will add a oor

constraint to one of the newly extruded bones, thencopy this constraint all over the place because itsidentical (all constraints target the same bone [the

oor bone]). Then we will be able to add each IKsolver one by one, as they each have a unique target.Doing it in the wrong order would screw it all up,since copying constraints erase all the constraints thatwere already there. So always create and copy simpleconstraints (such as the oor constraint), then addspecial constraint (such as IK solvers) one by one afterward.

www.blenderart.org



26/60

To do so. Add a new bone by going in side view andduplicating the Root bone, place it at on theground as if it was the ground. This new bone willnot be parented to anything, and its better like that.Name it Floor and go in pose-mode. Go into the Edit-buttons and press the Add Constraint button -->

Floor. It should look like this:

Tell Blender that the OB: to use as target is Arma-ture a new eld will appear, BO: enter the name of the bone you want to use as oor, here we made thebone Floor.

Time to copy this to all the newly extruded bones.Select them all and selecting the one you added theFloor constraint to last. Do [CTRL-C] in 3DView -->Constraint. Tada!

One last thing, with all the newly extruded bonesselected, go into the EditButton --> Armature Bones

panel and toggle all Deform buttons off (one foreach bone). Do the same for the Root bone andthe Abdomen bone, since they will not move anyvertices at all.

Now the IK solver. Go into pose-mode [CTRL-Tab].

Select one of the new bones you just extruded thenthe last bone from the leg you extruded the new bonefrom and press [CTRL-I] --> to selected bone. Thiswill add an IK solver constraint to the legs last bonetargeting the new bone you just extruded.If you try to move the target now, you will noticethe entire body is moving and the orange dotted linego to the Root bone. This is because the IK Solvergoes up in the hierarchy until it nds the top. To limitthis, you can use the chainLen: number button. Its

located in EditButton --> Constraints panel in the IKSolver Block.

Setting it to 5 should point to the root of the rstbone of the leg. Repeat for each leg.

The result should let you pose this little Spider in aneasier way. You only need to move one of the IK tar-gets to move a leg. You can also move the head and

all the legs will move accordingly. Its possible to raisethe Floor or move the Root. According to this, wecan hide all the useless bones. Select all bones youdont need when animating and press [H] The resultshould be like this:

www.blenderart.org



27/60

www.blenderart.org

Climbing a wall... Annoyed by some thing...

Attacking... Ho he is dead!

NOTE :Check out the blend les at blen -d erart website for this tutorial. Oneof them contains pre-made poseslike the ones at left.

Gabriel Beloin (gabio) is fromSherbrooke,Canada. He isnow working as annetwork administra-tor. Gabriel usedBlender for 3 years,since version 2.26.

Active in many comunities such as

Elysiun, Zoologique and CGtalk, healso take part of the Blender deve-lopement process as python coder andbeta tester.

WORKSHOP - D Making of : The age of steam -pg1 2


28/60

Making of:The Age of Steam - by Zsolt Stefan

ConceptAll good pictures have some story behind them. I gotthe idea for this machine from a real one that I sawin a local historic park, essentially an huge open airmuseum. There it was, a huge beast of iron, all rustedand old. But you could tell that when it was made, itwas worth a lot more. It is a steam mobile, basically asteam engine, placed on wheels, so you could trans-port it wherever it was needed, and then run othermachines off it. Already when I saw the thing, I knewthat I wanted to make a 3D render out of it, so I madethe best of the situation, and made two photos, oneof them exactly from the side. Plus two more close-ups of the metal covering. These later came in handyas references, and textures.

ModellingIt was fortunate, that I took a side photograph ofthe engine, making the modelling easier. Here is anearlier version of the blend le, during the initialmodelling phase: See the pic on right.There is a plane in the middle, with the picture I tookplaced on it with UV mapping, so that it shows up inthe 3D viewport. This plane is scaled to the correctheight and width for the engine. A very importantstep before starting modelling is determining thescale. Blender uses its internal units, not any real

world units, so to make a realistic scene, you mustdecide what 1 Blender Unit (BU) means. In this caseI went with 1BU=10cm, the whole engine is 4 meterslong and 2.4 high.

Modelling is mostly starting with a plane or cube, and

then go-ing fromthere,withextrude,subdi-vide,and theloopmodel-

lingtools. All of this with the help of the UV mappedplane in the middle. As most of the engine is me-chanical models, I barely used any SubSurf, so all ofthe detail is modelled by hand. A useful little scriptthat I often used is the Bevel Centre. This allows meto add little bevels to all the objects, as there is nosuch thing as a totally sharp edge in real life. Bevelscatch the light, and give it more realism, and alsoadd to the wear and tear. But be careful! Only addbevels when the model is nished. There is no way toundo them, and you cant really change or add to themodel once the edges have been bevelled.

Details... Very important to add that nal touch of realism to any scene: adding the small details, theseare what make it real. Here is a close-up of one part

of the model, with the wires visible. Note the nutsand bolts, the connections are all modelled. Somemodelling, like the parts at the back of the enginecant be seen in the nal render any ways...

Another view of the engine, from the back:

www.blenderart.org

WORKSHOP - D Making of : The age of steam -pg2 2


29/60

Materials, texturesDuring modelling, I already start adding materi-als and texturing. Most of the metal parts use onematerial, a rusty metal. This was made with a littletechnique that I use to hide repeating textures. Theway it works is: there are two metal textures, bothmade seamless, one is a simple metal, the other oneis a rusty metal, similar in colour. These two texturescame from the close-up photos I took. They are sepa-rated by another texture channel, a clouds texture,with colour-band turned on. The colour-band is halfwhite and opaque, the other half is white and trans -parent. This is then put between the other two tex-tures, and the Stencil button is turned on in the Ma-terial settings, Map To panel. This makes some partsof the rusty texture to show through, and some not,

randomly.The resultingmaterial. (Im-age left)

Then the MapInput settingsof the threetextures isadjusted

until the place where the rust shows up on the modelis satisfactory. A similar technique was used for thewalls in the background, as well as the oor.

The sceneFrom the beginning, I envisioned the large ma-chine left to itself in a warehouse of some sort,with just a little light shining in. The following isa preliminary render of the room. I added justa few objects to the scene, to give a sense ofscale and realism, but not too much to draw theattention away from the large steam mobile inthe middle. The room itself is simple, with a few

columns at the back wall, and some windows: on theleft wall, the ceiling, and the wall behind the camera.These are the ones casting the shadows. As a smalldetail, the windows are broken

The lights: there are three lights on the outside of theroom, behind the camera, shining through windows,casting shadow mapped shadows. Plus Yafrays globalillumination was used, this added the realistic spills oflight, for example around the windows at the top left,

though increasing the render time several times. Thecamera was placed low, pointing upwards a bit to con-vey a sense of a large machine. The strong contrastbetween light and dark also added a de nitive moodto the scene.

Final render, post-proI did the nal render as an A4 @ 300 DPI, 3636*2657pixels, this took about 15 hours. As a nishing touch,I loaded it back into Blender, and used the glow lterin the sequence editor to add a bit of glow to thelightest parts of the image, eg. around the windows.Then some post-pro colour touch-ups and sharpeningresulted in this nal image

www.blenderart.org

I live in Hungary, and am currentlystudying industrial design engineer-ing at the Budapest University ofTechnology and Economics.

Some of my hobbies are: 3D graph-ics of course :) , concept design/product design,plus watching good movies, going out with friends,hanging out on elysiun and other forums, draw-ing.

WORKSHOP - D Making of : The Plumiferos Project -pg1 0


30/60

The Plumiferos Project -- Claudio male co Andaur

IntroductionIn this article I would like to brie y summarise the

realisation of the trailer/teaser of the PlumferosProject, a commercial full length 3D animation lmproject we are making in Argentina using Blender.This trailer was rst screened during the Blenderlectures at Siggraph 2005 and later on was nomi-nated for the 2005s edition of Suzanne Award atthe Blender Art Festival. If you couldnt watch it,pay a visit to http://www.plumiferos.com .

The lms storyline is about a little male sparrow

named Juan and a female canary named Fei ,and their journey to nd themselves. It is aimedmainly for a children audience with lots of hilariousgags and psychological background for the grown-ups.

This project started around a year ago, when directorand original script author Daniel DeFelippo came toGustavo Giannini from Manos Digit ales and me withthe idea of making a 3D animation lm. Gustavo and

I were already using Blender and other Open Sourcetools to create CG animation and VFX for primetime television shows, TV commercials and also forteaching 3D character animation in a local digital artschool.

Figure: Visual FX made by Manos Digitale AnimationStudio for Pol-Ka Producciones (all Blender 2.36!)

Daniels 3D experience was mainly based on 3D StudioMAX and he was quickly convinced by us (bwahahaha)to switch to Blender as a main animation tool. We

soon gathered a team of local Blenderheads (most ofthem former students of ours) and started making atrailer with the characters created by Daniel.

Even when we werent a big team, it soon becameapparent how hard it would be to coordinate everybodys work and assemble all parts of a every singleshot. Sometimes a texture was missing, on othersthere were two versions of the same model or differ-ent lighting set-ups for sequential shots. Besides, allof us had (and still have) full time non-CG related jobsto attend and that forced us to work in our spare time

and weekends. Organisation was one of the rst andhardest problems to solve.

Daniels original characters and designs were modi-ed, modelled and textured at the same time that

sets were created to resemble certain parts of Buenos

Aires city where action occurs. There were manyissues to address, we had characters with featherson their wings, lots of trees, many cars around, andmotion blurred wings, plus Blenders own limitationsand caveats. Keep in mind that we made it all usingBlender 2.36, so we had no fancy character animationtools available at that time.

www.blenderart.org


31/60

WORKSHOP - D Making of : The Plumiferos Project -pg2 2


32/60

Future work and plansThe making of these videos was not only a fun andexciting experience, it was important to realiseBlenders own capabilities and limitations. Most ofthe problems we found during this production werereported to the Blender coders team and were being

worked on together with Orange Projects own nd -ings.

We strongly believe in Blenders potential and power,and the recently added animation features onlydemonstrates that we werent wrong when we choseBlender as our main animation platform. Moreover,during the making of these trailers, we also usedBlender for making of visual FX in local TV shows inprime time, TV commercials and other professionalapplications with great success.

There are still many issues to overcome to reach ourgoal of making a full feature 3d animation lm, forinstance we are in the process of setting up a realStudio to gather all artists so we can work together ina creative environment.

Acknowledgements and thanksOf course none of our dreams could become true ifit werent for the continuous and excellent work ofthe Blenders coders team hunting bugs and develop-ing new features. We cant thank every one of themenough for making such a pro tool as Blender.

I would like to thank Chris Want, Roland Hess, and

Martin Poirier for their help and advice, and of courseTon Roosendaal for just being Ton !

A special acknowledgement should be made from mypart to all the Plumiferos Team and all the peoplewho gave their time, effort and even the lending of

their machines to render expecting nothing but theProjects success, in no particular order:

Manuel Prez, Diego De Gennaro, Ivn Hoffmann,Ral Medina, Alejandro Am, David Teres, Alvaro Vidal,Claudio Dobniewski, Felipe Snchez, Lorena Maza,Pedro Knigge and Ale Barbesi

The Plumferos TeamDirector: Daniel DeFelippoExecutive Producer: Gustavo Giannini3D Supervisor: Claudio male co Andaur

Animators :Manuel PrezDaniel DeFelippoIvn HoffmannClaudio Andaur

Models, textures, lighting:Ivn HoffmannDiego De GennaroRal MedinaClaudio DobniewskiAlvaro VidalAlejandro BarbesiClaudio Andaur

Python scripting:

Claudio DobniewskiClaudio Andaur

C/C++ programming:Felipe Snchez

www.blenderart.org

More pictures on next page...

WORKSHOP - D Making of : The Plumiferos Project -pg4


33/60

www.blenderart.org

Claudio male co AndaurI was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1970 (man, I feel old!) Im a chemi-cal engineer and working with Blender since 1.80. I teach Blender in aDigital Art School in Buenos Aires, and have written Blender documentationboth in spanish and english (been coordinating the Documentation span-ish translation effort and traslated several docs available at mediawiki.blender.org). Made several Blender presentations in linux communities anduniversities from Argentina and other american countries. Currently I leadthe 3D and character animation of Plumiferos Project. I have a lovely littlebaby girl, and a marvelous wife.

WORKSHOP - D Making of : New Penguoen -pg1


34/60

Making of : New Penguoen 2.38

--by Enrico Valenza

IntroductionThe goal of New Penguoen 2.38 was to try toreconstruct with Blender the wonderful 2005 CitroenC4 spot (the dancing transformers one, made byEmbassy VFX).I loved that spot as I saw it, so I had the idea:wouldnt have been funny to replace the giant robot-car with a giant silly penguin? In the meantime, theSuzanne Awards deadline came out, so I thought tosubmit it, if only it could be nished in time.

The gag of the roasted penguin at the end of theanimation came out in progress; so, as the headlineof the original spot was New Citroen C4 - Alive withTechnology, the headline for my parody becameNew Penguoen 2.38 - Cooked with Blender 3d. 2.38was the version number of Blender I used, with allthose new marvellous animation features!

From a few researches I did, it came out that the C4spot was located in Vancouver, Canada, on the roof of

a post of ce. Actually, Embassy crew shot high resolu -tion photos of the environment and then re-mappedthe images on 3d geometry. Thats exactly what I didinside Blender: the only difference was I hadnt thehires photos of Vancouver, so I had to paint in TheGimp detailed textures of the buildings and of the far

landscape. But rst, I had to set the environment.

The environmentThere are a few python scripts that can be used tohave camera-tracking in Blender; I preferred to do allthe work by hand. I didnt want a too perfect match-

ing. I loaded a low resolution AVI of the original spot(found on the web) as background in a camera win-dow, to use it as reference (a template, if you prefer).

OK: rst, add a plane to your scene( Add>>Mesh>>Plane ), then assign a material (F5); goin the texture window (F6) and load the animationas Image, selecting the Movie option. Then put themouse cursor on a 3d window and press NumPad0to have the camera window; in the window headergo to View>>Background Image>>Use BackgroundImage>>Load texture and load the texture of thematerial.

At this point you can delete the plane, its onlypurpose was just to have a texture to be selected.

In this case, the background AVI worked as astoryboard too; I had all the shots and discoveredthat the total length of the spot was 751 frames.

I started to add a simple plane for the oor (actu -ally the roof of the post of ce) and some cubeprimitives for the main elements.

Looking in the camera window, I moved the

cam era (select the camera, G) to match the perspective.With a few tests I found that the focal length wasnear to 31.0 (Lens value, F9; I>>Insert Key>>Lens withmouse on the camera panel to animate).This way, by adding IPOs keys to the camera positionand rotation (I>>Insert Key>>LocRot) and always look-

ing for the best correspondence between the originalspot elements and my cg primitives, I made all theshots and at the same time I restored an almost simi-lar environment.

By putting a sphere in the centre of the scene andmaking little renders, I matched also the directionand the intensity of the sunlight. A lamp under the

oor provided a fake radiosity effect.

www.blenderart.org



35/60

751 frames may take a very long time to render;ray tracing lamps casting shadows add a lot of timetoo and if you have a very big setting, the octree(bottom of render window, F10) must calculate veryfar objects. In the end the rendering times becomehuge, not the best for animations. So my priority wasto lower rendering times in every possible way.

A way to do this is to let the octree calculate onlythe main or the moving elements in the shot, bysetting the materials for the motionless and far ele m-ents to shadeless and de-selecting the traceableoption in the material window. The octree wontcalculate the untraceable materials and, as they areshadeless, there are no shadows to be calculated.

But what about the penguin casting a shadow onthe shadeless oor? A small OnlyShadow plane hasbeen constrained (CopyLocation constrain, Con-straints panel F7) to an Empty parented (Ctrl+P) tothe armature, so to follow the penguin movements. Ideselected the Z axis of the constrain, so the planedidnt rise as the penguin jumped.

Of course, every shadow and light effect for theshadeless objects had to be painted in the textures,or baked in some way.

www.blenderart.org

The casted shadows of street-lamps andbaskets have been baked by a rendering fromabove, and the alpha channelled image hasbeen mapped on an untraceable plane tomatch their location.

WORKSHOP - D Making of : New Penguoen -pg3 6


36/60

The main building on theleft mid ground has shade-less materials as well, buthas been modelled (onlyfor the visible sides) justto increase the perspec-tive effect while thecamera is moving. Then,it has been unwrappedwith the ArchiMap UVUnwrapper python scriptand the layout exported inGimp by the Save UV FaceLayout script.

Left is a Gimp screen-shot of the main buildingtextures with paintedshadows.On the bottom right, thebackground mattes: farbuildings and sky havebeen saved as separatedlayers, the buildings withalpha channel.

www.blenderart.org



37/60

The penguinThe penguin has been modelled starting with a cube and extruding faces, theusual polygonal modelling (Modelling Bongo tutorial here). Actually I had alreadymodelled it some time before, it was the Pengzilla (modelled just to try the newBlenders softbody feature).Basically the body had two different materials, the white skin and the dark skin;

several procedurals have been used to reach the nal appearance. Procedurals arereally useful but the more of them you use and, again, the longer are the render-ing times. Image textures render faster.

In this case, I baked the procedurals textures with the Other texture Baker scriptby Blenderhead z3r0_d; the script works great but sometimes mirrors in some areathe baked procedurals. No problem, a bit of painting in The Gimp and everythinggot xed. A damned useful script! Then, more painting to add better details.Materials are very important too; all the penguins had Oren-Nayar and Blinn shad -ers with ramps; the ramps colours matched the colour of the sunlight and of the

ambient shadows.A single Blend procedural mapped on the Nor Map Input (material buttons) pro-vided a fake Sub Surface Scattering effect.

A Gimp screenshot of the baked penguin textures.

www.blenderart.org



38/60

Next steps were the rigging and the skinning of the mesh (I must be honest: I usu-ally do texturing, rigging and skinning almost at the same time. It works better tome).

With the new animation features, the rigging work ow has been tremendouslyimproved; now it is enough to click on the screen to add bones, and by assigningthe IK constraint to one of them you can quickly build the IK chain. In just a fewminutes, I remade the basic armature for the penguin and then started to addconstraints to automate some functions.

For example, I assigned two Action constraints to the back bone, targeted to thepelvis one: as the pelvis rotates on the left or on the right,

the back rotates onthe opposite direc-

tion to balance the position.Or else, I added bones for the fat, with Locked Track constraints targeted to emp-ties parented to root bones in the armature; the empties had a Slow Parent (inthe objects window, F7) of a few frames, to create automated effects of followthrough and overlapping for the fatty areas.

I added also bones with Stretch constraints in the legs areas, to simulate amini mum of muscles stretching.

The skinning of the model by creating Vertex Groups (editing window, F9) tookmore time; by the way, this is a too long of an issue to be covered here.

www.blenderart.org

it diff t f th d i g b I d ti g ff t b l i ibl ! S I d d it



39/60

I didnt use the Non Linear Animation in this case; thewhole animation has been made in a single Action.Using the original spot template as reference forthe key positions, I animated with the Pose to posetechnique.

In short: assign KeyFrame positions for thecharacter, setting all the animation IPOs to constant(in the Action Editor select with A all the keys; go tothe Key menu in the header and then InterpolationMode>>Constant). This is to establish the animationtimes. Then switch the keys to linear and start toadd in between, creating also arcs in the movements.Third, switch the keys to bezier and shift them whereneeded to avoid actions happening all at the sametime.

In the IPO window (IPOCurve Editor) selectcurves, go in edit modeand modify the curveshandles, to slow or speed up starting and ending ofsingle movements. Of course I had to rear range theacting to conform it to the penguin shape,

quite different from the dancing robo-car. I madeseveral tests of the animation by rendering thewhole in OpenGL (hold Ctrl key and press the lasticon on the header of the 3d window, pointed bythe red arrow in the image).

Usually I render the different elements as sepa-rated steps and then make a composite in theBlender sequencer (Ctrl+Left Arrow to changescreens, or else in the SCR: menu on the topheader); this time I made all the rendering in oneshot. Also the quick transition from the jump -ing penguin to the roasted chicken version hasbeen made by switching in middle animation thepenguin mesh with a Shift+D copy with different

textures, by layers keys assigned to both the meshes(I>>Insert Key>>Layer).

But the sequencer has been used anyway to add the

horizontal bars on the top and on the bottom of theframing, for the headline at the end and for the lightdarkening on the sides (just to mimic the C4 spot ap-pearance).In Blenders sequencer I loaded also the mu sic(made with the open source software Audacity).By selecting the Sync button in the sound panel Icould watch my animation with sound in real time,and pressing the MIXDOWN button Blender exporteda perfectly synchronised wave le. I then combinedsound and animation in VirtualDub.

ConclusionNew Penguoen 2.38 took almost three weeks ofwork in my spare time, plus 40 hours for the render-ing. I rendered it (at the resolution of 800x600) withmotion blur enabled at 16 (middle of render window,F10), to discover at the end that with mb the slow-

parenting effect was barely visible! So I rendered itagain without mb, and except for the rst and the lastshots (where slowparenting werent needed) thatsthe footage I used.A lot of things cant be covered here: the de tailedbuilding of the armature and the skinning of the mesh, the atmospheric perspective effect for the 3d elements, the egg disappearing at the beginning of the animation, many materials tips to increase the reality illusion,the painting of the textures and of the backgroundmattes and so on.Hopefully, in the future all this (and other) will bematter for a step by step book

Have a good time blending!

www.blenderart.org

ResourcesThe Embassy Visual Effects Inc., makers of

the Citroen C4 Ad CampaignLuxology article about the Embassy CitroenC4 Ad Campaign, C4 spot location in Vancou-ver. Audacity, VirtualDub, Blender Documen-tation Blender Resources, scripts and plug-insModelling Bongo, polygonal modelling tutorial for Blender.

Enrico Valenza (aka EnV) isa freelance illustrator and helives in Italy. Besides all thetraditional painting techniqueshe used for 20 years, he startedto use cg with The Gimp andBlender almost 3 or 4 years ago.Thanks to Blender, hes hope-fully moving towards animation.

WORKSHOP - 2D Galvanized texture -pg1 0


40/60

Making a galvanizedmetal texture in Gimp

--by Gaurav Nawani

IntroductionSome times using a image base texture is prefer-able to the procedural texture as it provides morecontrol over how the texture should appear in the 3dmodel. Hunting for a perfect looking galvanized metaltexture can be a problem, 2d image manipulationprograms like Gimp can be of pretty useful help inthis regard. This time we are going to teach you howto make an galvanized metal texture completely inGimp in just a few simple steps.

Step 1 Create a new Image in Gimp [Ctrl + N] of reso l-ution 400x320. Create a selection of about 320x200as shown in gure. Add a layer above the Backgroundlayer. Rename the layer to base-color.

Step 2 Using thecolor selectordialog select thefaint grey color,you can replicatethe setting belowin the color dialogbox. Now ll theselection in base-color layer withthis color.

Step Keep theselection and add an-other layer, renameit to noise. Fill itwith white color. Nowgo to lters | Noise|Scatter RGB. In thepop up dialog boxun-check Independ-ent RGB and movethe slider to 0.28 andpress OK.

Step Now we will generate patterns of galvanizedakes from this noise layer, without disturbing the

selection go to Filters |Blur |Crystalize and changethe settings as in the image. This will create the

akes that will roughly resemble the galvanizedmetal, and a new layer will come up the by the nameof Crystalize.

Step The texture looks pretty at right now. Nowduplicate the noise layer and on it apply Filters |Blur |Gaussian blur of 5. Rename the layer to noiseblur and in the layers stack move upwards of Crys-talize layer. Change the layer mode to multiply. Youcan also adjust the layer opacity to your liking.

a) Before Noise

www.blenderart.org

Step 6 The texture is almost done now we need to

WORKSHOP - 2D Galvanized texture -pg2 1


41/60

b) After Noise

The layerstackafter step

ve.

Step 6 The texture is almost done, now we need tointroduce some weathering into the texture, to makeit look more authentic. First I am assuming you havekept the selection alive, if not then in the layers tabright-click on the base layer and do Alpha to selec-tion. Now add a layer at the top of the stack. Then goto Filters |Render | Noise and generate a colorful

plasma noise.

We need only the variety of the rendered plasmanoise so we will desaturate the layer. Go to Layers|Colors |Desaturate. Change the layer mode toMultiply and adjust the Layer opacity.

Your galvanized texture is now ready to be used.The Final texture on the right was created with thismethod and few other details added

www.blenderart.org

Gaurav Nawani is a graphicsartist at IronCode Software .

He is an open source enthu s-iast and loves writing articlesas a freelancer.

Apart from his usual habbits of photography andtraveling he also dabbles with cooking often ;)

Animation tips - pg1 2


42/60

Animation Tips

-- by Sandra Gilbert

IntroductionJust like any art form, when it comes down to it, it

isnt the tool being used, it is the artist and his/herknowledge/skill. Animation is no different. While afancy program with lots of cool tools can make ananimators life easier, the animation will still fall atif not done properly. It has long been held in the animation industry,that there are 12 basic principles of animation. Youcan nd them written, re-written and paraphrasedall over the net. With the advent of Blenders new

animation features, it is a good idea to review theseprinciples before we all get animating.

Thats right, here is another incarnation of the goldenanimation rules. :)

At a glance, here are the 12 Basic Principles ofAnima tion:1. Squash and stretch2. Anticipation3. Staging4. Straight Ahead Action and Pose to Pose5. Follow through and Overlapping Action6. Slow In and Slow Out7. Arcs

8. Secondary Action9. Timing10. Exaggeration11. Solid Drawing (same or different as Weight)12. Appeal

Squash and StretchOne of the most important elements to master as ananimator. It gives the illusion of weight and volumeto characters, facial animation and objects such as abouncing balls. It can also be useful while animatingdialog. One thing to remember when using squashor stretch, is to always maintain the same volume.Think of it as a balloon lled with water. Squish yourballoon, the water moves to different sections ofthe balloon, but always maintains the same volume.Tools in blender that can help in your use of Squashand Stretch are lattice deformations, Soft bodies andShape Keys.

AnticipationAnticipation the act of starting a movement beforethe movement actually starts. Generally staged asa backward movement just preceding the forwardmovement. It can be done broadly or subtly, depend-ing on what effect you are going for, with broadanticipation usually used for comic effect.

StagingStaging is the animated equivalent of photographycomposition. Use staging to convey your actions

clearly. Proper use of close-ups, medium and wideshots can help direct your audience to the tone, moodand action of your scene. Be sure to plan your shotsand scenes out carefully so as not to confuse youraudience.

Straight Ahead and Pose to Pose AnimationStraight ahead animation goes from frame to frame,allowing complete control over movement. Pose toPose is the use of KeyFrames at set intervals, allow-ing the computer to ll in the missing frames. Bothmethods have their uses and most likely you will use acombination of both. In blender it is easy to set Poseto Pose with KeyFrames at your set intervals and then

ne tune those actions on a frame by frame basis us -ing IPO manipulation.

Follow Through and Overlapping ActionBy observing the world around you will notice thatobjects in motion never stop all at once. In animationthis is called Follow Through and Overlapping Actions.Most obvious examples hair owing and settling intoplace once the character has stopped. An animal withloose skin, different parts are all moving, but atdif ferent speeds and stop at different points.

www.blenderart.org

Animation tips - pg2


43/60

Slow-Out and Slow-InSlow-out and slow-in will soften an action and renderit more life like. The basic concept for setting themup is as follows. You bunch up the KeyFrames towardthe beginning and end of each action with only oneor two in the middle of the action. More KeyFramescreating slower actions, fewer KeyFrames creatingfaster actions.

ArcsRemember your math teacher saying youll use thissomeday, here it is. Most all movements are on anArc. A soft semi circular motion that gives a morenatural feel to the movements. Test it yourself, raiseyour arm and move it around, there is your arc. Lookfor arcs in movements all around you.

Secondary ActionSecondary action provides the extra little details thatmake a performance more believable. Adding armmovements to a walk cycle, head bobs, and dialog allare examples of secondary action.

TimingTiming can make or break an animation. It is one ofthose things that is best learnt through trial, errorand experience. A stopwatch can greatly increaseyour grasp of timing. Go into a room, shut the doorand act out your scenes, using a stopwatch to recordwhen the actions start and stop. Dont forget tooverlap actions from different characters and objects.

Grab a friend and play out your scenes that involvemore than one character

ExaggerationIn computer animation it is very easy for your move-ments to look stiff and staged, minor exaggeration offeatures and movements can soften your movementsand make them more uid. But be careful with howmuch you exaggerate, unless you are going for a verycomic look.

Solid DrawingSolid drawing covers the basic principles of givingform, weight, and volume solidity to your objects.This actually applies more to traditional hand drawncell animation, but should be kept in mind even forCG animators. Make sure that your characters and ob-jects have the look and feel of a solid object. Checkfrom all angles to ensure that you havent forgottensomething.

AppealOften we get so caught up in all the mechanics ofanimation that we forget all about appeal. The wholereason for making the animation was to tell a story,is your character believable, will it connect with theaudience? These are questions you need to keep in

mind when creating your characters. Make sure theyhave personalities, even if they are evil ones.

Okay now we have covered the very basic of the

basic pr

Documents

BlenderArt Magazine - 02 - Animation Special