Wow… time goes by so fast! I didn’t realize that it was that much time that I didn’t post anything here.
So this is what I’m up to… it is a character I’m working on, Rene… First one that I’m doing from scratch in Blender. For now The hair and eyebrows are just temporary, I need to add some texture and right now I’m still working on rigging the face. For now there are no control for the eyes and eyebrows.
Comments are welcome!
Mathias.
Hello everyone!
As we know, one of the best way to start learning animation is by animating a bouncing ball. Then we can play with different type of balls since they are going to react differently. For example, the animation of a beach ball will be completely different from a bowling ball, or the bounce of a golf ball will be different than the bounce of a ball for kids made of plastic…
To help you to enjoy this exercise and to help you to focus only on the animation part, I’m happy to share with the blender community this set of rigged ball that represents most of the balls we know.
All these balls should be at the right proportions which is 1 blender unit = 10cm. The controls are the same on each one of them except the football which doesn’t have the rotation (use the main controller, the big red circle, to rotate it). The controllers allow you to stretch and squash the balls, but also to deform them even further and to rotate the ball while keeping the deformation!
You can download them on this page free props blender – set of rigged balls
I’m looking forward to see what you will do with them!
Mathias Aubry
Hi everyone, here is part 2 of the series of tutorial on how to animate the hand into our little shot. In this part, I’m using the grease pencil to create a rough 2d animation that will help me to do the 3d animation. I find that when I’m creating a 2d animation, I’m thinking in a different way than when I’m animating in 3D and that’s really helpful for later.
Here it is, Enjoy!
Mathias.
As promised, here is part one of the tutorial on how to animate the hand. This is the introduction, but in this tutorial I speak about preparing your animation, having references, thumbnails, importing a reference video in blender and placing your camera.
Sorry that It took me a little bit of time to post it, I did this video a good 20 times before posting it… it’s not that easy to create video tutorial! lol.
I hope you like it, if you feel it’s missing some information, please comment under this post, it will be interesting to share our different experiences!
Thanks for watching.
Mathias.
Hi everyone,
As promised, I’m working on the tutorial of the hand. I’m going to post part one very soon. In the meantime, I’d like to let you know that the actual Rig is now available for 5$. Why 5$? I’m asking for this little amount so that I can work on adding more to animation lounge. More tutorials, more rigs and other features. If it’s working well, maybe in the future I will be able to create some contest with Prizes. And let’s face it, 5$ is less than a beer 
, anyway it’s a way to support animationlounge and I hope I will be able to continue to maintain and develop it!
This Rig is a good rig to start animating, it’s interesting but not overwhelming. You don’t have to think about animating a whole face or a whole body. Just a hand and its box! Show me what you can do!
Here is a little video I’ve made to test this rig.
And this video shows how to use it. Some of the features.
Thank you for reading.
Mathias.
Hi everyone, I just found this amazing tutorial and I want to share it. It’s Alejandro L. Garcia who wrote it and it’s an awesome tutorial that show what the center of gravity is, it touches on weight shift and a lot more interesting points.
I’m especially amazed by the picture of the hammer attached to the bottom of the board and keeping the all thing up! But the whole thing is just so useful to animate with proper weight… I’m always obsess with “weight” in my animation so you can imagine how I felt when I found this tutorial!
there are also other tutorial available on pdf on this pages here: www.algarcia.org/AnimationPhysics/
Enjoy!
Hi everyone,
I think this is the final animation of the hand, or close to… in case someone has a good critic, I might retouch it!
Edit: So I updated the video after receiving some C&C on the forum Blender Artists, especially this one from Exzema here.
I added also a tiny bit of anticipation around frame 210 as Colby suggested in his comment on this post. Thank you Colby for your comment. I added just a little bit of anticipation down because it’s a very slow move! But I think it works!
Edit end
you can download the MP4 file of the Hand here
I’m going to work now on the tutorial to create this animation… or at least, really close to that one!
Hope you like it.
Mathias.
Ps, I’ve been busy with a lot or work lately but I hope I will be able to start working on the tutorial soon. Mathias.
Hi everyone, I’m sure most of you knew about this, but I just discovered it! Kenny Roy is working on his own short movie, called “The Little Painter”, and on March 5th, 2012, he animated LIVE in front of an online audience for 24 hours straight.
In this 24 hours, he did the first 15 sec of introduction of his short. From the prep, thumbnails and reference video to the finish animation. The 24 hours of this day are available to be download… It gives a good idea on how an animator works!
here is the link: 24 hour marathon download
He made these videos available for free in order to finance his project! So if you want to help, you can donate to support his project on this page: support the little painter
If you want to know more about Kenny Roy, there is a lot of information about him on his website, but you can also read an interview he did for the 11 seconds club blog.
Enjoy!
Here is a test of a rig I created in blender, I called it “the Hand!”… yeah, I know, it’s not too creative! lol. I did this test to see if everything was working properly.
I’m going to use this rig to create a tutorial on how to animate,
this tutorial is going to speak about:
This tutorial will be created using blender, but the principles and most of the tools are available on every 3d animation software.
For now I’m creating the animation to make sure that everything will work at the end for the tutorial.
Here is my prep, it’s kind of animated thumbnails created directly in blender using the grease pencil… it’s such a good tool!
So stay tunned and feel free to comment!
Mathias.
This is a little post for those who don’t know blender. This was the video representing Blender at the SIGGRAPH 2011… it’s pretty amazing for a free software!
Now they are working on the 2012 presentation, so if you have a nice video to offer done with blender, here is the link
