Chapter 18
Resources for Further Learning
At this point, you should know all you need to get started with character animation in Blender. There’s plenty more to learn, though, both about Blender and about character animation. This chapter directs you to resources to continue your study of these topics.
First you’ll get a rundown of freely available online tutorials in Blender and paid offerings from the Blender e-Shop. Some of the introductory tutorials overlap in coverage with this book and might provide another angle to learn from. Most of the intermediate-level tutorials and resources I’ll be pointing to, however, cover aspects of using Blender that I haven’t been able to address at all in this book. Becoming familiar with these resources can also help you stay on top of new features and functionality of future Blender releases.
Then you’ll learn about a few of what I think are truly indispensable books on computer graphics and animation. If you are an experienced 3D animator already, you probably have all these books on your bookshelf; if not, you should. If you are just beginning in the field, these books will prove to be invaluable references.
- Selected Blender Resources
- Recommended Non-Blender-Specific Books
- On Becoming a Blender Master
. Better still, purchases at the Blender e-Shop go toward supporting the development of the software, making the e-Shop the ideal one-stop shopping resource for Blender training goods.
In the e-Shop, you’ll find all the available Blender Open Movie DVDs as well as the spin-off training DVDs of the Open Movie Workshop. These are training DVDs created by the world’s top Blender artists covering a wide variety of topics. William Reynish’s Learn Character Animation Using Blender, Bassam Kurdali’s Mancandy FAQ, Andy Goralczyk’s Creature Factory, and David Revoy’s Chaos and Evolutions are available as of this writing, and more titles may well have been added by the time you read this.
Of course, the Open Movie DVDs themselves, including the epic four-DVD set Sintel shown in , are packed full of extra features including tutorials and Creative Commons–licensed assets that you can reuse in any way you like. The truth is that there are no better resources for intermediate and advanced Blender learning than those directly from the Blender Foundation.
The Sintel DVD package
You’ll also find selected commercially published books (including this one) from various publishers covering a wide variety of Blender topics from animation to architecture to video editing and compositing.
When you stock up at the e-Shop, don’t forget to toss some stickers and T-shirts into your order to support development and tell the world about your favorite 3D software!
Official Documentation
Even with the high-quality learning material available on the e-Shop, there will be times when you want to work with newer features or features that are not extensively covered in the available books and DVDs. To learn about these things, you will need to turn to the official documentation at the Blender website.
The best up-to-date information about the new features and functionality for each Blender release are the release logs for that release. You can find all the release logs here:
For general documentation, look at the Blender Wikibook:
These resources should take care of most of your Blender learning needs. But given the open source nature of Blender and the active community around it, there are often interesting things happening in the world of Blender that you won’t learn about from any one wiki. For this reason, it’s worthwhile to maintain contact with the wider Blender community to stay aware of new resources.
BlenderArtists Forum and BlenderNation
Blender has a very active, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users at . This is where you should go first for technical questions about using Blender or any other Blender-related help. Use the search function first, and you will probably find the answer to your question immediately. Otherwise, post your question in the appropriate forum, and an answer will certainly come quickly, often within minutes.
BlenderNation at http://blendernation.com is a regularly updated source of Blender news. This is a good place to keep up with what’s happening in the Blender world. It also has one of the best collections of tutorials and video tutorials available anywhere for Blender.
Other Recommended Online Resources
A huge number of tutorials and learning resources are available for Blender on the Web, and more are popping up daily. It is inevitable that I will fail to mention many excellent ones, but you will surely come across them if you read and search for specific topics in the BlenderArtists forum and BlenderNation. Still, there are a few outstanding sources of free and paid tutorials that are frequently updated with useful, novel techniques and presented with a high degree of professionalism.
Blender Cookie, located at , is a very professional site where you can find a growing collection of top-notch video tutorials by a team of well-known Blender artists and teachers. There’s good material for beginners and more advanced users, and Blender Cookie has been one of the leaders in putting out tutorials for Blender 2.5.
Andrew Price’s Blender Guru website () is an ambitious and wide-ranging resource for Blender enthusiasts. Andrew’s tutorials are very well presented and understandable and always yield compelling results. Best yet, Andrew is open to requests from the community. If there is an area you’d like to learn more about, let him know, and he just may delve into it for his next tutorial.
Kernon Dillon’s Blendernewbies blog () has become one of the longest-running regularly updated sources for high-quality free tutorials. Kernon covers a lot of topics here, and in spite of the site’s name, the material is often of interest to intermediate users.
cmiVFX () is an excellent subscription-based resource for top-quality streaming video tutorial content, including tutorials on modeling, texturing, shading and fur, compositing, and more. CartoonSmart () also provides introductory Blender video tutorials, with freely viewable samples available.
Recommended Non-Blender-Specific Books
CG animation is one of the most multidisciplinary art forms there is. To be a good CG animator, you must be technically inclined and also artistically gifted. You have to master modeling, texturing, posing, timing, lighting, rendering, and many other skills. And in addition to talent and practical skill, you must also have a wealth of knowledge. These books are a small selection of what I consider to be required reading for anyone wanting to create animations with Blender.
Character Animation
Animation has been around for about as long as cinema, but the art of character animation was perfected by the Disney studio in the 1930s and has not changed much since then. The techniques used to express motion and emotion in The Incredibles are not appreciably different from those used in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. These books cover the principles of character animation, regardless of the technical tools you use to implement it.
Animation by Preston Blair (Walter T. Foster, current ed. 1987) First published in 1948, this book is pretty much the classic text on character animation. Almost everything in this book has since appeared elsewhere dozens of times, and anybody who grew up on Saturday morning cartoons has probably acquired most of the content of this book unconsciously by sheer osmosis. It has stood for half a century as an indispensable guide to the basics of character motion and is an important document of the period when animation came into its own as a fully developed art form.
The Illusion of Life by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston (Disney Editions, revised ed., 1995) This is a beautifully illustrated, hard-bound coffee table book that also happens to be very informative for animators. It presents the origins and methods of animation as created and used by Walt Disney and the Disney studio. It’s interesting not only as a historical document of the art of animation but also as a guide to the principles and the ideas behind them. There’s plenty in here that is not at all pertinent to CG work, but if you have any interest at all in how animation used to be done before the dawn of the Ipo curve, this is required reading.
The Animator’s Survival Kit by Richard Williams (Faber & Faber, 2002) This book covers many of the same principles dealt with by the two other books I listed here, but it stands out in the wealth of visual examples included. There’s hardly any printed text in the whole huge book. Every page is filled with drawn animation sequences with text handwritten on the illustrations. Richard Williams is a true master of the art of animation, and this is likely the closest most of us will ever get to peering over the shoulder of the likes of him.
CG-Related
I am deliberately leaving out references to a number of general digital character animation books because although there are many of them, I think that studying old-school character animation, combined with mastering one’s own chosen software package, tends to make these books somewhat redundant. There are a lot of specific digital techniques that do need expanding on, though, so here I list a few CG books that mostly deal with issues not covered by this book or the tutorials to which I’ve referred:
Stop Staring by Jason Osipa (Sybex/Wiley, 2nd ed., 2007) This is the quintessential book on facial modeling and animation in 3D. Lip sync and emotional facial expressions are all dealt with in depth and in a way that is very practical for the digital artist.
Building a Digital Human by Ken Brilliant (Laxmi Publications, 2005) This book covers polygon modeling of a human figure from beginning to end in great detail. Realistic organic modeling with polygons is far from trivial, and this book does a good job of explaining the practice and the theory behind it.
Digital Lighting and Rendering by Jeremy Birn (New Riders, 2nd edition, 2006) This book does a great job of covering the topic of lighting and rendering. Pretty much everything you need to know about lighting and lights is in here, and most of it is fully applicable to Blender’s lighting system. With regard to rendering, this book will leave you with a much clearer idea of the strengths and weaknesses of the Blender internal renderer and an understanding of the differences between the various rendering engines and ray tracers. The book also does an excellent job of highlighting the similarities and differences between digital lighting and traditional film lighting and is terrific looking to boot. The book’s sister volume Digital Texturing and Painting by Owen Demers is also a beautiful and inspiring book, but in my opinion it lacks the practical focus of Digital Lighting and Rendering.
Inspired 3D Short Film Production by Jeremy Cantor and Pepe Valencia (Course Technology, 2004) This book gives a nice overview of the full process of producing a 3D animated film. Although it doesn’t go into the individual steps in great detail, it will give you an idea of what the process is and has a number of practical tips for people trying to get started with a 3D short. Even if you have no intention of doing all the work yourself, this book will help to give you an idea of where the animator fits into the larger scheme of such a project. It’s also a nice-looking book with an accompanying DVD filled with entertaining and inspiring short animations.
If you’ve followed the steps in this book, sought help on the BlenderArtists forum, and investigated some of the other resources mentioned in this chapter, you are, without a doubt, well along the path to becoming a master of Blender. As your own skills improve, bear in mind that as a free software application with still-limited industry support, Blender relies heavily on the energy and enthusiasm of its users. Your own contributions to Blender and the community have a special weight. These contributions might come in a variety of forms. If you are a top-notch coder in C or Python, you might consider getting involved in coding Blender or creating useful scripts. Creating good, clear tutorials is also an excellent way to contribute to the community (and to learn!). Likewise, making yourself available at the BlenderArtists forum to answer questions from people less experienced than you is also an important contribution. And as an artist, simply creating work in Blender and letting that be known has great value for the Blender community at large.
I hope that you’ve gotten something out of what I have attempted to contribute with this book. I’m looking forward to seeing your work.
Happy Blendering!
