Mesh Rigger Press Any Key to Continue

Blender is an open-source application for 3D modelling, 2D and 3D animation, drawing and game development. The software has large and established user community. You've likely seen Blender work in TV commercials and in news segments about 3D printing. High-budget television series like The Man in the High Castle sometimes use it for special effects.

A key feature of Blender, and CG animation in general, is skeletal animation. This tutorial will cover the following:

• Basic modelling.
• Basic rigging.
• Basic animation.

What will we not cover? Quite a lot. Blender is versatile enough to create studio-quality animations and photo-realistic images. Experienced Blender users understand texture painting, UV Editing, nodes, keyframe modifiers, Cycles rendering, post-processing, scripting, lighting, etc., etc., etc. This tutorial only covers the minimum steps needed to make a walking, human(ish) character.

What else won't we cover? The Blender interface. That is a separate tutorial. If you've never touched Blender before, take an hour or so to visit Unit 1 of this Wikibook: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro

Are you able to add a cube, put that cube anywhere on the board, and manipulate its size?

Great! Let's begin.

What is Blender, anyway?

Blender is the freeware equivalent to Maya and 3Ds; proprietary programs that cost thousands of dollars and are used by major movie studios. Blender costs nothing. The catch? Blender lacks huge libraries of objects and images. Major projects, say an hour-long movie or a PlayStation-quality video game, make Blender crash. And few employers need Blender artists. Maya is what professional animators train on and use. Another drawback: you can't call on Blender Support. There is no Blender Support.

However, learning Blender is a fun and rewarding experience.

Start by downloading Blender from www.blender.org. It's not huge: 100-200 MB, I believe.

Modelling

Here is my start screen. Your initial setup may look different. A nice feature of Blender is that you can set your startup screen. The default setup has a cube and one light. I have four lights. We won't cover lighting in this tutorial. If your renders are too dark, you can add another light by going to the menu in the lower left, select Add, then Light, then Point.

Add a cube if you don't have one already. Go to Add, then Mesh, then Cube

Next, scale the cube. Right click on the cube. An orange outline appears on the object (to un-select, press 'A'). Z is the height. X and Y are the horizonal dimensions. Go to Scale, found on the menu bar just right of the middle, and make X 0.5, Y 0.5 and Z 1.0. This is our robot character torso.

Gray is the default color. A book could be written about CG coloring and texturing. Books have been written about CG coloring and texturing. Here, we will create a simple material. On the far-right menu, a little circle icon appears. With the cube still selected, click on the Diffuse color. A color wheel appears. Click on the color you want. I selected a shade of blue.

Time to create the limbs. With the cube still selected, press Shift D (D for 'duplicate'). A duplicate cube appears. Drag this to the side. Scale the cube. You can write the X, Y, Z scale, as we did for the torso. Or you can press 'S', and drag the mouse. If you press S, drag the mouse so the cube shrinks, you can press 'S' then 'Z' and scale the height to make a long, thin arm.

The pivot point is the little orange circle in the center of the arm, roughly where the elbow would be. If you rotate the mesh, it would rotate around the pivot point. This would be fine if we were creating an airplane propeller. But arms rotate around the shoulder. Go to Edit Mode. Select all (Press 'A'). The mesh is highlighted. Drag the mesh down so the pivot point is on top, where the shoulder is.

Go to Edit Mode. Press 'A' to select all. Drag the mesh down until the little orange ball is on top.

Return to Object Mode. Click SHIFT-D to duplicate the arm. Drag the duplicate arm to the other side of the torso.

Time to make the legs. Select both arms. Press SHIFT-D again. Drag them down. It might help to have a head-on view. Press 5 on the keypad.

Now you can move the arms and legs into a more human-like position next to the torso.

We can't have a humanoid robot without a head. Press 'A' to un-select everything, then move your cursor to the top of the torso. Left click to relocate the cursor. Add Mesh > IcoSphere

Set shading to smooth (Or not. It's your robot). Do this by going to the far-left menu. Under "Shading" hit the Smooth button. The head looks smooth. Scale the head to a head-like size.

Move the head to a head-like location. In the materials options, click the "New" button. Create a new material for the head.

Select All Meshes. Do this by holding Shift while right-clicking on each mesh.

Press CTRL-J to join the meshes. This converts the un-related cubes and sphere into a single mesh. Rename the mesh. The upper right menu, the Outliner Menu, has a list of objects. In it, the currently selected object is highlighted. Find the object and right-click over the name. Select Rename and rename the mesh "robot".

Why did you just do that? It doesn't matter on a small project, but good naming is essential for anything bigger than this dinky robot animation. In a scene with a dozen or more meshes, the Outliner Menu is the quickest way to find the mesh you want. Blender's assigns default names. Renaming is easier than guessing whether "Cone.003" means a tree or a hill. Good habits can begin here.

Rigging

There are many ways to animate. A common way to animate humanoid figures is to use bones. A bone determines the position of a mesh, just like our bones determine the position of our skin and muscles. Blender bones, like ours form a branching chain. The thigh bone's connect to the hip bone.

Skeletal animation has many advantages:

It preserves the mesh shape. When an animation is complete, the mesh is easily reset for the next action.

It is quick. A single rotation of a shoulder bone causes the entire arm to move.

It is natural. Since skeletal animation mimics the way people (and animals) move, it is easy to make life-like motions.

Let's get started!

Set the cursor to the center (Shift C). In the Add menu, add an Armature: Single Bone

The robot covers the bone. In the lower right menu, click the skeleton icon. Select X-Ray to make the bones visible.

Scale the bone the same way you scaled the meshes until it is as tall as the torso.

Now enter Edit mode. Click on the top of the bone. Press E for extrude. This creates a sub-bone. Grab the tip of that sub-bone and drag it. This is the shoulder. Click the original bone again. Extrude again and place the new bone over the other shoulder.

Repeat that click-extrude-drag process until the following bones are created:

Right now, you can move these bones. Also make sure none of the bones poke outside of the robot. Notice that the bones don't yet control the mesh. Go to object mode. Select the robot. Shift click to select the bones. Hit SPACE, then type "make parent". Another way to do that is hit CTRL-P.

Quick note: This is an example of Blender having many shortcuts and many ways to do each task. People say Blender is hard to learn, and I agree. Good thing it's fun!

Back to work. From the Set Parent To menu that appears after we "Make Parent", select Armature deform – Automatic Weights. A Weight is a zone of control, or how much of the mesh the bones moves. You can set each bone's weight by hand, but Automatic Weights works well and saves time.

Go to Pose Mode. Select a bone and rotate it. Press 5 to return to perspective view.

Well, look at that. We are in business.

Note that the elbow does not bend. My bad. The fix is easy. Hit CTRL-Z to undo the rotation. Go to Object Mode. Select the robot, then go to Edit Mode. In Edit Mode, make sure everything is unselected. Hover over the arm. Press CTRL-R for loop cut. Drag the pink line to where the elbow should be.

Why did we do this? A mesh is made of points, vertices. Our arms only had eight vertices each, one on each corner. Because there were no vertices in the elbow area, the bones had nothing to manipulate; only the eight corners could be altered. Adding a loop cut gives us extra vertices that allow the arm to bend.

Do a loop cut for the remaining arms and legs, then go to Pose Mode and test.

Create a Setting

Our robot has nothing to walk on. Before we animate, let's build a scene for it. Undo the rotation with a few CTRL-Z's and move the robot up so it is just above the grid.

Set the cursor to the center. Add Mesh > Plane. Set color to gray. With enough practice, minor tasks like adding a mesh with a color become easy. The more familiar you get with Blender, the less you need to think about how to create something. You are free to think about the art itself.

Set up the sky. This is done in the World menu on the lower right. Select 'Blend Sky', then pick a Horizon Color and a Zenith Color.

Adjust the camera. CTRL-ALT-0 moves the camera to the view in the 3D viewer window. Move the location and rotation as needed in the Location and Rotation panels in the Transform menu.

Make a test render.  The Render Menu, which we will use much more in the next steps, is on the lower right. Hit the Render button or press F12. This is how the scene will appear when complete.

I don't like my blue robot against the blue sky. The gray ground is bland. Press ESC to exit the render view. In Object Mode, tweak the colors as you need.

This looks better:

Animating

Animation is a huge subject that few beginners' tutorials touch on. To avoid writing an entire book, I will only cover what you need to get the robot moving. Plenty of excellent Blender Animation tutorials offer in-depth information.

Go to the Animation Layout.

Go to Pose Mode. Pose your robot for the first frame. Make sure your coordinates are local, and you are on Frame 1. The ruler at the bottom is a timeline. It is 250 frames long by default. Clicking on the ruler takes you to the current frame. Since this scene has no animation yet, every frame looks the same.

With the Frame set to 1 and the robot posed, in Pose Mode, Select All (A) so all bones are highlighted. Press 'I'. Select LocRot. 'I' stands for "Insert Keyframe". A keyframe is a group of locations and rotations of an object that occur in a frame. In Frame 1, the location and rotation of each bone is set to the pose that you have now.

By setting the keyframe, the Animation Layout side panels fill with information. This is the location and rotation of each bone. In the timeline, go to Frame 20. Repose the bones. The pose can be anything – you're not limited to subtle changes. Blender fills in the in-between poses. Press 'I' and select LocRot again.

Go to Slide 1. In the Pose menu, Select Copy Pose. I'll explain why after a few more steps. At this point, you can see what happens in frames 1-20. At Frame 10, the robot pose is half way between 1 and 20. If its arm's Y-Rotation is at 0 degrees on Frame 1, and 60 degrees on Frame 20, then Blender assumes the arm's Y-Rotation is at 30 degrees on Frame 10. It fills in the gaps and makes the animation smooth.

Go to Frame 40. Paste Pose. Press 'I'. Go back to Frame 1. Test your animation by pressing the play button (forward triangle) near the Frame ruler. ALT P also works. ESC stops it. Notice the Robot stops moving at Frame 40. Let's fix that.

In a menu on the left, to to Channel, Extrapolation Mode, Make Cyclic. This makes the animation repeat itself until the last frame.

Play the animation again. The robot moves for all 250 frames.

OK, what did we just do? We created a basic (very basic) walk cycle. On Frame 1 we created an initial pose, then added a 'mid-stride' pose in Frame 10. To make the pose appear cyclical without an awkward shake, we copied the Frame 1 pose and put it into Frame 40. Thus, the robot moves seamlessly when we have the motion repeat itself.

The animation is smooth, but the robot stays in place. I don't feel like modeling a treadmill, so let's have the robot go somewhere. Go to Slide 1. Go to Object Mode. Do not go to Pose Mode. The bones are already animated. We want to move the whole robot this time. Select all the bones. Press 'I', then LocRot. Why did we select the bones and not the robot mesh? The bones are the "parent" of the "child" mesh. Unlike human parents and children, Blender children do whatever the parent tells them to do. The mesh will follow the bones wherever they go.

Go to Frame 250. Move the robot to the oppose end of the plane. Press I, then LocRot. Blender will gradually move the robot from its starting position on Frame 1 to the end position on Frame 250.

Play the animation. The movement might seem unnatural, sliding on ice. It depends on the size of the robot's leg strides. Stop the animation. Right click over the keyframe so it is highlighted. Hit Key. Select. Delete Keyframes. CTRL-Z (undo) is another way to remove that keyframe on Frame 250. Move the robot closer or further out, press 'I' to make a new keyframe and see if the movement looks more natural. Unless you are lucky or really, really good at animation, trial and error is the way to go.

When everything looks good, animate the camera. Position the camera as we did earlier. Pressing 'N' gets you the side panel if you need it. With the camera highlighted, to to Frame 1. Hit 'I'.

Go to Frame 250. Move the camera so the robot is in view. Press 'I' again.

Play the animation. Chances are the robot might disappear from the camera's view. If that happens, add extra camera keyframes. I also added extra objects to make the scene more interesting.

Rendering

Does everything look OK? Let's render!

Rendering, like Animation, is a huge topic. We just want to put something out there to say we know how to make a movie. In the Render menu, select Output, then H.264, then Format: MPEG-4. By default, the render goes to the C:\\TMP

Click "Render Animation". Our scene is simple, so should render quickly. Complex scenes take a long time. If you want Pixar quality on a personal computer, even a high-end one, expect a single frame to take hours. Many artists use Render Farms; multiple processers that divide and conquer frame rendering.

When the render is complete, go to C:\\tmp and play your movie.

Look at that! You just made a movie with Skeletal Animation.

Happy coding,

-Nate

maciasench1952.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/basic-rigging-animation-blender-nathan-otto-mpp?trk=pulse-article_more-articles_related-content-card

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