Introduction

It’s been five years since the first edition of Introducing Character Animation with Blender came out, and a lot has changed in the world of Blender. Interest in Blender has exploded. When the first edition of this book came out, it was the only English-language book on Blender in print. Now, as this second edition of the book arrives, there are well over a dozen books that I can think of offhand, to say nothing of commercial training DVDs and professional online tutorial services, none of which were around five years ago. Clearly somebody has begun to sit up and take notice.

It’s clear why, too. Blender has been making its mark in ways that are increasingly hard to ignore. The first Blender Open Movie Project movie, Elephants Dream, premiered as the first edition of this book was being written. Since that time, two more movies, Big Buck Bunny and Sintel, have been released to increasing fanfare. Each of the movies has been more ambitious than the first, and each has fulfilled its ambitions impressively. In addition to the movies, the Blender Institute has released a complete game and a half dozen professional training DVDs by some of the world’s top Blender creators. When I wrote the first edition of this book, I felt I had something to prove. Now, five years later, it is clear that Blender is proving itself.

In addition to the prolific content output of the Blender Institute, the coding of Blender has progressed at a rapid pace. Between the release of Big Buck Bunny and Sintel, the underlying event-handling and data-handling frameworks of Blender were entirely rewritten. This made it possible to completely re-conceive the user interface and Python scripting API, both of which were also rewritten as part of the overhaul. The result is a completely revamped application that has managed to earn kudos both from longtime Blender users and from longtime critics alike.

If you’re new to Blender, there’s never been a better time to learn. Although there will always be a learning curve to acquiring 3D graphics skills, the new interface is more intuitive and user friendly than ever before. If you’re coming from other software, you’ll be pleased to see that the interface is fully configurable (there is even an option for Maya-style interface presets accessible directly in the splash screen).

The new Blender has been a long time coming, and it is designed to last. Now that it is finally stable and ready for professional use, adoption of Blender by users of all kinds, from young hobbyists to old pros, is bound to continue even more rapidly.

The Open Source Advantage

Blender is a powerful 3D modeling and animation software package available for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. Like other similar packages such as Lightwave, 3ds Max, and Maya, Blender offers a wide range of modeling, animation, and rendering tools. It also has a number of distinguishing features of its own, including its excellent cross-platform portability, the ability to run scripts in the Python programming language, a unique and intuitive user interface for efficient workflow, and extraordinary flexibility in importing and exporting files, scenes, and objects for use with other programs, including a variety of high-quality ray tracers. It has advanced physics simulators, and its new, lightning-fast implementation of UV unwrapping has already become the envy of the industry. These features alone are enough to make Blender a strong competitor in the world of 3D tools, but its biggest single distinguishing feature is that it’s free.

That’s not simply to say that somebody is giving out free samples that you can use in some capacity without paying for. Blender is licensed under the GNU Public License, the foremost license for open source software. This means Blender source code is freely available for anybody to download, use, copy, alter, and distribute for any purpose, provided they abide by the guidelines laid out in the GPL. These guidelines require that changes made to the code be explicitly identified and that resulting released code remain open and freely available. In short, Blender is truly, fully free, and the license is designed to make sure it stays free for good.

For people with a computer science background, the idea that top-quality software can be free is not new. Open source projects such as the GNU/Linux operating system, the Apache web server, and the MySQL database have amply demonstrated the robustness and quality possible with an open source development model. All of those are examples of widely used, high-quality, and commercially viable free software. Furthermore, software such as the TeX/LaTeX typesetting package, widely used for academic typesetting in technological fields, stands as a clear testament to the potential for innovation in open source software; TeX/LaTeX remains unrivaled in what it does by any proprietary consumer-oriented software package. Richard Stallman, the author of the GPL and longtime advocate of free software, likes to emphasize the notion of “free as in free speech, not as in free beer,” and many Blender users are quick to stress that their fondness for Blender is not based on cost.

Nevertheless, in the realm of consumer-oriented and graphics software, it remains true that most of the best industrial-strength software applications are proprietary. Even the best open source applications in these areas tend to come across largely as underdog imitations of their proprietary counterparts. For this reason, it is reasonable to wonder what the catch is with something like Blender. And the good news is that as far as the software is concerned, there really is no catch. Blender is a robust, fully fleshed out piece of software, remarkably free of bugs, and more stable than some proprietary packages with similar functionality. Its development is rapid, with new features and fixes being released at a steady clip. Development is overseen by Ton Roosendaal, the creator of Blender and head of the Blender Foundation, and the core programming team is passionate and committed to holding the Blender code to high standards. The Blender Foundation regularly participates as a mentoring organization in Google’s Summer of Code program, in which young programmers are given the opportunity to contribute to an open source project. So in the case of Blender, as with the best open source programs, being free does not imply a lack of quality in the software itself.

Furthermore, in addition to allowing programmers from all over the world the ability to contribute code and bug fixes to the software, the open source model also encourages a sense of community among users. The free nature of the software encourages users to share their expertise and abilities where they can. Aside from the core programmers, there are numerous users contributing useful Python scripts to the community, to say nothing of the countless high-quality tutorials created by users.

What we are left with is a first-rate, professional-quality 3D animation package that is available to everybody completely free. You don’t have to pay thousands of dollars for the software and commit to many more for upgrades, you don’t have to risk getting nabbed pirating software, you don’t have to worry about your chosen package falling out of favor or the vendor going out of business, and you don’t have to mess around with watermarks on your work or hobbled, semi-functional shareware. With Blender, you’re free to get right down to what’s important: creating.

Depending on your needs, Blender may be the only 3D animation package you ever have to bother with. If you are a hobbyist, a freelancer, or the head of your own production company, you may be able to do fine without ever touching another 3D modeling and animation application. However, Blender in its current incarnation as a first-tier 3D animation tool is comparatively new. Before the recent recode of the armature system in version 2.40, Blender suffered from a number of shortcomings as an animation tool. Even then, it was highly regarded for its modeling abilities and its versatility, but with the recent improvements in its animation capabilities, Blender has come into its own in the realm of animation. It is now fully capable of producing high-quality animation, and with time it will surely begin to be adopted into more and more professional studios and production houses impressed by its flexibility and workflow.

Currently, of course, Blender is not the industry standard. If you are hoping to get work in the field of animation, it would be a good idea to aim for basic proficiency in at least one other 3D application. You can’t really predict which application you may be asked to use within a job setting, but prospective employers will appreciate that you are familiar with more than one environment. Even so, there are advantages to using Blender. For building portfolio pieces and show reels, any quality software will do, and the freedom and flexibility of Blender are as much an advantage for students and job-seekers as they are for anybody else. Most of the skills you will need in the industry are general 3D and animation skills, and these can be learned with any fully functional software package. The skills you master in Blender will transfer to other software packages and greatly speed up your ability to pick up new applications.

Who Should Buy This Book

As the title implies, this book is intended for people who want to learn to create quality character animation using the Blender 3D software package. Such people probably fall into three basic groups:

• Blender users who have experience with modeling and rendering but have not yet seriously explored Blender’s character animation capabilities. It is likely that a lot of Blender users fall into this category, since Blender has been heavily used for years as a 3D illustration tool.
• Experienced character animators who are considering making a transition to using Blender instead of, or in addition to, another software package. These people can expect to be quite familiar with the concepts dealt with in this book but need to know how the concepts are implemented in the Blender software.
• Highly motivated newbies to both Blender and the field of character modeling and animation. These are the people who will be picking the bones of this book. I hope to supply these readers with all they need to use Blender to get started in character modeling and also to give them some good pointers on where to go from here to develop their skills more fully.

For all of these people, the learning curve can be long. When the first edition of this book was written, very little professional learning material was available. Blender learners had to rely on wiki pages and scattered web tutorials (some of which were excellent) to learn. A cohesive introduction to Blender was not available. For this reason, I took a very broad view of what the topic of character animation encompasses. Modeling, texturing, and animation were all part of what I covered, and most of the information in the book applied to other forms of modeling and animation than character animation. The book was very well-received, and in this second edition I have stayed with the same basic formula.

Likewise, although it is very much part of this book, I do not go into great depth on the art of animation per se. In Chapter 18, I recommend several books to help you deepen your knowledge and skills in this regard.

With this second edition of Introducing Character Animation with Blender, I aim to provide a clear, cohesive overview of character creation and animation as implemented in Blender. I hope that this encourages people to make the most of Blender’s capabilities, to exercise their own creativity, and to support the fantastic community that has developed around this software.

You can use this book in several ways. The most straightforward (and demanding) is to start at the beginning and follow all the steps to model and animate the rigged character described over the course of the book. Alternately, you can skip around from chapter to chapter and follow only the steps of the individual chapters. For this, .blend files are available for download from the book’s companion website to help: .

What’s Inside

Here is a glance at what’s in each chapter.

In Part I: Creating a Character with Blender, I take you through the Blender program, its tools, and the complete foundational process of building a character.

Chapter 1: Blender Basics: Interface and Objects introduces you to the Blender desktop and shows you how to navigate the various windows you’ll be using throughout the book. This chapter also explains the basics of how Blender handles 3D objects and what this will mean to you as you work with them.

Chapter 2: Working with Meshes covers the most important mesh modeling tools and shows several approaches to organic modeling. The chapter culminates with the completion of the Captain Blender character mesh, which you will use throughout the rest of the book for animation tutorials and examples.

Chapter 3: Completing the Model with Materials, Textures, and Hair continues with modeling the Captain Blender mesh, now focusing on creating clothing, skin, and hair using such tools as material shaders, UV mapped textures, and the particle system for hair.

Chapter 4: Armatures and Rigging introduces the armature system with simple examples and then moves on to creating a high-quality armature for the Captain Blender character using the new Rigify automatic rigging add-on.

Chapter 5: Shape Keys and Facial Rigging moves beyond the basics of armature deformations to show how more precise animation of mesh shapes can be accomplished with shape keys and how the behavior of these can be associated to armature poses to create easily controllable facial expressions and improved joint deformations.

In Part II: Bringing It to Life: Animation, you will turn to animating the character you created in Part I.

Chapter 6: Basics of Animation looks at the simple example of a bouncing ball to introduce the ideas of animation function curves (F-Curves) and keyframes, which are the underlying components of all animation in Blender.

Chapter 7: Armature Animation shows how posing, keyframing, and F-Curves work with the character rig you created in Part I to create your first real character animations. You will create actions such as jumping, walking, running, and others.

Chapter 8: Facial Animation and Lip Sync turns your attention to the facial rigging you did in Chapter 5. Using these methods of facial posing, you will see how the character can be made to express emotion and how lip movements can be created to sync with a sound file.

Chapter 9: Animation for Production looks at tools for animating within the context of a larger production, specifically, using Blender’s armature proxy system and its powerful Non-Linear Animation Editor.

Chapter 10: Further Issues in Character Animation covers a number of worthwhile topics in character animation that have not been addressed in other chapters, such as interacting with props and using features such as lattices and the Mesh Deform modifier, soft body simulation, and metaballs.

Chapter 11: Lighting, Rendering, and Editing Your Animation tells you what you need to know to output your animations to fully realized, finished works using Blender’s built-in rendering engine. In this chapter, you will learn how to use the Sequence Editor to edit separate animated segments together to create a complete animation.

Chapter 12: Python Scripts and Add-Ons shows you how to use Blender’s powerful Python-based add-on system and highlights some of the most useful add-ons. In this chapter, you’ll also learn the basics of how the Python API works.

In Part III: Blender in Production, you will look at real-world cases of Blender being used in professional-level animation projects.

Chapter 13: The Fruits of Freedom: Open Movies and Open Content introduces the two best-known Blender-based animation projects: the world’s first “open movie,” Elephants Dream, and the eagerly anticipated CG feature film from Argentina, Plumiferos.

Chapter 14: A Look Inside the Blender Open Movies peeks into the Elephants Dream production files to see how the characters of that film are modeled and rigged and highlights some of the interesting approaches to character animation taken by the creators of the film.

Chapter 15: Behind the Scenes with Sintel takes a closer look at the production of Sintel. This chapter includes in-depth interviews with members of the Sintel creative team.

Chapter 16: Feifi the Canary—Plumiferos Takes Wing presents a very special look at a fascinating character rig from Plumiferos, an inspiring behind-the-scenes glimpse at this exciting project.

Part IV: Blender and Beyond wraps up by giving you some pointers to where you can go to continue deepening your skills and understanding, beyond what’s contained in this book.

Chapter 17: Other Software and Formats gives a brief overview of the import and export possibilities of Blender to and from other 3D formats and surveys a variety of open source software that will likely be of interest to Blender animators.

Chapter 18: Resources for Further Learning directs you to some recommended books, tutorials, and other resources for deepening your knowledge of animation and CG techniques in general.

Online Companion Files

On the book’s companion website, , you’ll find the project files you’ll need to jump in at any point with the book’s tutorials and exercises, organized into folders by chapter. Among these are the .blend files for the Captain Blender character you see throughout the book.

You can download Blender 2.5 any time from the Blender website at . Note that future versions of the software may have slight changes and deviate from descriptions in this book. This is no problem. Either you can adapt the lessons to the new versions yourself or you can download version 2.5 from the older versions archive on the Blender website. All Blender versions remain permanently available.

How to Contact the Author

I welcome feedback from you about this book or about books you’d like to see from me in the future. You can reach me by writing to [email protected]. You can also find me among the regular posters in the BlenderArtists forum at .

Sybex strives to keep you supplied with the latest tools and information you need for your work. Please check the book’s website at , where I’ll post updates that supplement this book if the need arises.