Blender For Dummies » Chapter 11

New Feature! Bone Sketching

Jason — Thu, 07 May 2009 22:51:48 +0000

Taking a quick moment with this tutorial to give a preview and explanation for a totally awesome new feature in Blender 2.49, which should be released soon. There is a release candidate for Blender 2.49 available on blender.org, so you’ll have to download that to follow along with this tutorial. The feature I’m talking about is Etch-a-ton, which allows sketch-based rigging. It’s an incredibly powerful tool that’s certain to help speed up and simplify the process of rigging in Blender. This tutorial walks you through the basics of how to use it. Of course, there’s a lot more to this tool that what I can show in 10 minutes, but this should plenty to get you started. As with before, you can download this tutorial directly to your computer and it has also been uploaded to YouTube and Vimeo. Have fun!

bone_sketching.blend
bone_sketching.mp4 (65MB)

The Stickman Rig

Jason — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:23:30 +0000

This is the Stickman rig that I walk you through creating in Chapter 11. I love using this little guy to block out my animations and get the timing right before moving on to do more detailed work. So go ahead and have fun with him! Dissect him and his rig to see how they work. And of course, I’d love to see any animations you come up with.

A couple notes:

Stickman’s leg bones are on Armature Layer 8 (the first layer in the second block of Armature Layer buttons). I’d recommend hiding that layer
There is no IK on Stickman’s arms. If you want to use IK there, you’ll have to either add it yourself or work around it by using the AutoIK button in the Armature panel. That won’t give you real IK (you’ll have to key all bones in the arm rather than just a single controller), but it will allow you to place the arm where you want it to be.
Have fun!

Files:

stickman.blend

Shape Keys

Jason — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:21:36 +0000

In this file, I’ve created two shape keys for Suzanne: one with her eyes bulging and the other with her screaming. To the right you can see that these keys can be animated using both the Ipo Curve Editor and the Action Editor. The cool thing about the Action Editor is that it gives you sliders with your pre-defined limits.

Files:

shapekeys.blend