That’s awesome, another great tool I should try thanks!
I wanted to start posing my character and try animate using your earlier keys related tips but… I ran into a problem.
Earlier when I tried to use the MIRROR on the arm and legs bones, it worked perfect!
Now, when I try it’s only working on the X axis or something… I’m not sure, this is what I do:
1 - selecting the two arm bones.
2 - ctrl+c to copy.
3 - ctrl+shift+v to past (mirror).
and… it’s not working as it was before, what am I doing wrong? because it worked before and now…
maybe I clicked something by accident, so how can I fixed this to work again?
Video file link here showing what I do maybe it will help to see what I’m doing wrong.
I only thing I notiCe, and I’d have to check the other file (gotta run out) is that the bone names may have been altered to not match naming convention. The way I always did it was arm.L and arm.R you seem to have arm.L and arm.L.001, blender allows a few different ways, just not sure if that is one of them…
It worked for me on your earlier rig… I’ll check later.
I didn’t rename the bones that’s why it’s weird and I just tried it with the legs… it works perfect there.
I wonder what I did to ruin it and how I can fix it so I won’t run into this situation in more complicated rigs in the future.
oh… and thanks to your tips AGAIN! I’ve managed to animate something… and it was easy and fun! and to think that it’s not even rigged with any fancy controllers or other goodies, that’s encouraging for sure.
so here it is, my very first animation in Blender(click to download).
That is really really good. It’s got a true organic and natural feel to the motion which is a real skill.
Toss on some materials and a some lights and go for a render. One thing to keep in mind is that in blender virtually anything can be keyframed. The camera location/rotation just like a bone. Just select the camera and hit i. You can keyframe the strength of a lamp or an emission plane. Right clicking on almost value that can be set will bring up a menu offering a keyframe.
And keep burning the manta: go to the frame, make the change, insert the keyframe…
In the render settings, under output normally this is set to .png or .jpeg fpr still frames, just change it to avi raw or another video format. You can also keep it at .png and output a whole bunch of stills to be turned into video later. That has the added benefit of giving you something if the power goes down halfway through an animation render, I do it for long “important” animations, and for quickies I just use avi.
Click render for a still, and animation to render video (or multiple stills) of all the frames.
It’s common to pick a frame or two and render a still first just to make sure everything looks good, as well as test how samples you need to get it noise free. For a scene like this, you can get away with somewhere between 100 -500 samples. If you’ve got GPU don’t let it sit there, go for 1000 or so.
It’s unusual for someone to come as far as this in as short of time, so well done!
Thanks for the compliment and for your help! I appreciate it and I wouldn’t know how to do the technical stuff without your great tips and supportive spirit, you’re awesome!
Maybe I used that “timing sense” I usually do naturally on my dayjob (I’m a professional 2D Animator BTW… I didn’t mention it because it may sound arrogant or something hehe.) but still it’s very different compare to animate by drawing frame-by-frame…
For some reason it felt natural for me to animate this simple movement, but that’s nothing much because it’s not a complicated rig… I bet that will be much harder to animate (hopefully I’m wrong ).
I will try to mess with the lighting and render something, I think I should stick to Cycles from the beginning and not even bother mess with the normal blender render, right? because it looks much better and it’s different in the materials area so I don’t want to waste time on the other one which is not the best anyway…
The big problem is that my current hardware, I don’t use a GFX card because it died (my poor Nvidia Quadro) and I can’t afford anything for now (maybe in the future).
my current machine:
Intel i7-4770k CPU 3.50 GHz
16 GB RAM
Wacom Cintiq
Windows 7 64-bit
It serves me for music production mostly and some 2D Animation whenever I don’t do anything serious at the studio. (on my free time of course).
I understand that Cycles true speed is with a GPU power and my poor machine use the CPU so it’s slower, but at least it works…
I will have to give it a try… hope my computer won’t explode! (even with 500 samples and a simple set… we’ll see hehe)
I had a thought you might be somehow involved in animation, and that sense of timing you have will be a huge asset. In my opinion the skill of animation (which I am not good with) is much tougher to learn than the simple mechanics of rotating bones and inserting keyframes. I mean I know how to pose, keyframe, I can create actions, and loop action strips them in the nla editor, but truthfully I doubt I could make a natural looking animation like your very first one. Well, maybe I could.
I think your i7 will be fine for cycles, and if you get into things like massive hair systems, the gpu won’t do you much good anyways.
Truthfully most rigs aren’t that complex, and having that touch on timing is the most important thing.
As for leaning BI, well, I am not much of a BI guy. Here’s is a quick pro/con for BI
Pros:
Super fast
Noise Free
Cons:
Biased, so no hope for realism
Not under development like cycles
Lacks the awesomeness of cycles
You might want to check out blendswap.com It’s got thousands of all free models (they do not sell anything) most are cc-0 here’s a [=&s[blender_version]=0"]link to the search for ‘characters’](http://www.blendswap.com/blends/search?keywords=character&s[blend_license) But if you want to just mess around with animation and skip modeling and texturing (for the moment) make an account and download some. You’ll want to check if ithe model is cycles or bi though,.
From what I saw with your work, I’m very impressed and inspired I bet you are super skilled in so many areas I can only dream about and I can’t wait to see more of your future projects!
I just start a setup (with cycles) I made a plane, extruded it’s back (back compare where the character stands) extrude so it looks like in your video: floor+back wall and for the first time I used the bevel on the edge between the floor and wall and scrolled for 30 segments to make it smoother. added a fast sun lamp and it’s already looking really good!
Now I will start mess with tweaking… the complicated part! I will try simple for start of course like you suggested, colors and basic materials just so it will be something worth for rendering.
I still wonder about that mirror problem with the arm, I always try to understand my mistakes and errors in order to solve them in the future if I ran into them, both in real life… and in software as well hehe.
I’m VERY curious about the Hair feature! wonder how flexible it is and if it’s easy to learn! maybe on my next “test” …unless it’s super advanced and hard to learn so I will get to it only later.
This website is a real treasure, you got a good point it’s great to practice on their models and stuff… I’m from these guys who used to do everything by myself because that’s the best way to learn from the experience. but I’ll have a look because it looks really rich of high quality content, thanks for sharing!
I will try to render something right after I’ll finish the setup and post it.
I already have an idea what I want to model and animate to practice more depth of character animation! something with a eye-lids and mouth… so I will be able to play with the shape keys, this won’t be easy… I hope you will help me out with the progress thanks to your experience, skills and knowledge of Blender
On the mirror issue, I would start by making sure the bone names follow convention go with arm.L and arm.R and fooxyz.L and fooxyz.R
forget if blender will automatically update the corresponding vertex group names or not. I always make sure they follow convention from the start.
The render look good, maybe a little underlit, I would increase the strength of the sun. Lamps have their own settings (looks like a sun icon). Check the checkbox for multiple importance sampling when using cycles, and increase sun strength to 1.5 - 5 maybe.
You can give your objects simple diffuse materials with a touch of color without venturing into the node editor. In the materials tab just select your object and hit the new button, It will create a diffuse material by defualt and you can set the color.
After few hours messing with the node editor, the set, some lights, camera and stuff…
I decided to render the scene… it took around 2 hours to finish render in half HD resolution (640x360).
It looks like the ball is rolling but believe me it’s all composition, the only thing that moves beside the character is the camera from left to right with a tiny rotation.
It’s not the best but it’s much better than the openGL preview version
Good description! That’s right a texture or even if I would add few more objects next to the sphere would make the illusion go away, but I didn’t focus that issue the reason I put the sphere because I was curious if I can use the focus on the camera hehe.
Congrats on the winning! I should check it out and see stuff people do for inspiration, and your work is really something that I would love to see more of.
BTW - How does the winning works? by using of polls to vote or there are judges?
Challenges are amazing for the learning experience for sure! I’m not sure if I’m ready for a challenge yet because I’m not that fast on Blender yet and also whatever I do in blender now is in between my work which is kind of hard to combine since learning a new software takes long time, especially in the 3D area.
Still I’m going to have a look on the link because I’m curious, Thanks for letting me know about it I didn’t even know about a weekly challenge since I didn’t browse much on the forum yet.
