Animating with Blender. How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish

349 Pages·2009·46.561 MB·English

by  D. Roland Hess (Auth.)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hess, D. Roland.
Animating with Blender : how to create short animations from start to fi nish/by
D. Roland Hess.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-240-81079-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Computer animation. 2. Three-
dimensional display systems. 3. Computer graphics. 4. Blender (Computer fi le) I. Title.
TR897.7.H485 2009
006.6(cid:3)96—dc22
2008026274
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-0-240-81079-9
For information on all Focal Press publications
visit our website at www.elsevierdirect.com
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Printed in China
Foreword
Prenatal Vitamins
The Beast is a 4 minute short animation produced entirely by me in a little over 200 hours. Although those
200 odd hours were spread over many months, it could have been compressed down to fi ve 40 hour weeks,
or, even worse, three or four 60 hour weeks. While the fi nished project has its shortcomings (I am not a hard
core animator), it was designed from the beginning to work as a learning tool for this book.
Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish assumes a great degree of familiarity
with Blender. It is not for the beginner. Users who are entirely new to Blender are encouraged to read my
previous work, T he Essential Blender, which is a no-knowledge-assumed guide to learning this wonderful piece
of free software. T he Essential Blender is available from the normal book outlets through No Starch Press, directly
from the Blender Foundation’s e-shop ( http://www.blender.org/e-shop ) , or for free online in Wiki
format at http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Books/Essential_Blender_%28text%29 ..
On the disc that comes with this book you will fi nd all of the production fi les for The Beast. If you start dig-
ging through the fi les before reading this book, there are a lot of things that probably won’t make sense, but
they will be a valuable resource for you as you go through the examples in the chapters. Once you reach
Chapter six, the organization and structure of the fi les will hopefully become clearer to you. Before you start
fi ddling with the production fi les, though, please watch the “production release” of The Beast, which can be
found in the folder called the_beast. The video itself should play fi ne on most computer systems out-of-the-
box, but if you have diffi culty with it, the VLAN video player included in the software directory is the best
all-purpose player I have found, and will play it without a hitch.
A ll of the production fi les for The Beast, including the fi nished animation, are released under a Creative
Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unsupported license, of which a plain language summary and
full legal text are included on the disc. What this means is that you can use the fi les themselves—the textures,
sets, models, sounds—in your own works as long as you credit the original creator. This also means that you
can examine, copy, and redistribute the fi les in noncommercial ways: as part of a tutorial, a library, etc. While
the Blender Foundation’s own projects such as Elephants Dream andBig Buck Bunny have also made their pro-
duction fi les available in a similar fashion, the complexity of those projects make them extremely diffi cult for
xi
Foreword
even a dedicated Blenderhead to pick apart and analyze. Hopefully the fi les included with The Beast will be
straightforward enough that anyone can learn from them.
However, the fi les for The Beast that come with this book are not the fi nal set of production fi les. Deadlines
and production schedules meant that, while the animation was “fi nished ” in time to make the disc, it was far
from “fi nished ” for my own sense of artistry and animation. So if you notice discrepancies between the ver-
sion ofThe Beast that you can see online and the version included with the book, it simply represents the dif-
ference that one or two more rounds of refi nement and two more months of render time can make in your
own production. A piece of art is only fi nished when you run out of time.
One of the great truisms of learning a skill is that by the time you’ve fi nished a project, you ’re fi nally ready
to begin it. This will certainly be true of your experience creating a short animation. I hope this book func-
tions as a bit of a substitute for some of that fi rst-time experience, giving you a better shot than most people.
So don’t be too hard on yourself during your initial foray into animation. Well, be hard on yourself during
production. But when you’ve put your short animation to bed for whatever reason and have called it “done, ”
take one hard, critical look at the fi nal product so that you can remember the lessons you’ve learned for the
next time. Then forget the pain and bask in your accomplishment, just a little.
xii
Chapter 1
An Overview of the Short
Animation Process
Creating a Short Animation
Creating a short animation from start to fi nish is a complicated, time-consuming task. It uses all of the skills
you have developed while learning your way around your 3D software, while calling for an even broader
range: storytelling, asset and time management and organization, acting, and editing. As you work through the
process, you will fi nd that each step necessarily builds on everything that went before, and that to shortchange
or entirely skip one of the steps will lead, surely, to disaster.
No single step in producing a short animation is diffi cult by itself. Certainly, no individual portion of the
short animation process is harder to learn to do than, say, getting the hang of doing back handsprings or
integral calculus. The steps are fairly easy. It turns out that the single most diffi cult thing to do with a short
animation is, simply, to fi nish it. Doing so takes dedication, lots of available time, a willingness to keep pushing
through when things are less than fun, and, most importantly, a plan.
A voiding Death By Natural Causes
No doubt you’ve seen a hundred animation projects announced on web forums, in chat rooms, and inside
cozy little restaurants over too many coffees. Although born with zeal, they slowly fade away into a shadowy
death.
Say, why’d that project die?
W e’re not sure. It just kind of . . .fell apart.
Oh. “Natural Causes, ” then.
Natural Causes, indeed.
How to avoid your project fading into the oblivion of Natural Causes? You need a plan.
1
Animating with Blender
Fortunately, there is a time-honored structure for actually fi nishing animation projects. It consists of three
stages: preproduction,production, and postproduction. Mysteriously and oddly named, to be sure, but
there they are.
Preproduction
Preproduction encompasses everything you do before you touch a single polygon of 3D. Story development,
storyboarding, a rough sound track, and the assembly of a story reel become the bedrock of the rest of your pro-
duction. The time you spend here will make the modeling, animating, rendering, and compositing worthwhile.
Before anything else, though, comes the story. Without a good story, your production will be little more than
a study or an extended animation test. A “good” story, though, is not only one that will interest or amuse your
viewers, it is one that is producible with the time and resources that you have available. Choose too ambi-
tiously, and you’re on your way to “ Natural Causes ” before a pixel ever hits the screen.
A good subject for a short anima-
tion is more like a “ short short
story ” than a novel or any of the
longer narrative forms. It will grab
the viewer’s interest, sympathy, or
comedic sense almost right away. It
will focus exclusively on express-
ing the theme of the story, or
setting up the joke, if that’s what
you’re going for. At this stage, it is
a balance between your resources
and ambition, and you are advised
to save the 20,000 character epic
battles for later in your career.
When your story is in order, you
proceed to creating storyboards.
Storyboards are shot-by-shot (and
sometimes pose-by-pose) break-
downs of your story in a visual
format. Usually done as line illus-
trations, they help to organize
your thoughts on how the written
story will translate onto the screen.
You don’t have to be the world’s
greatest sketch artist to pull off an
effective storyboard for your short
Figure 1.1 A script
2
An Overview of the Short Animation Process
Figure 1.2 Several digital storyboards
animation, but the more time you spend on
it, the less effort will be wasted later when
it’s time to actually animate.
W ith your storyboards in hand (or on
disk), you create a simple, very rough
soundtrack. This is most easily done by sit-
ting in front of an inexpensive PC micro-
phone and speaking all of the dialog and
making the sound effects with your mouth
while you visualize the animation. It’s cru-
cial not to let anyone get their hands on
this rough track because it will probably
be personally embarrassing and most likely
cost you any chance of ever running for
political offi ce. Figure 1.3 Storyboards assembled with a soundtrack
3
Animating with Blender
The temporary soundtrack is matched to the storyboards so that it forms a primitive version of what will
someday be your masterpiece. This rough representation of your animation is called the story reel. It will be
the Bible for the rest of your production.
Production
Now you get to do all the things you were aching to do from the start of the project: character design and
construction, and, if you’re a masochist, rigging. Modeling and rigging your characters reaches both backward
Figure 1.4 Character sketch
Figure 1.5 W ireframe model of a character
4
An Overview of the Short Animation Process
Figure 1.6 T he rendered character
and forward in the production process. It is informed by the themes of the story but bows to the require-
ments of animation, and later, to the minimization of render times.
A t this point, the modeling of the lead character can be fi nished,
but as long as you organize your project properly and use the
correct tools, things don’t need to be completely fi nalized before
animation begins. Unlike creating still images, surfacing (materi-
als and texturing) can be skipped almost entirely at this stage.
W ith a good start on your characters, you set up your control
rigs. This is the fi rst place that good storyboarding pays off. You
build and test your rigs to the specifi c actions your characters
will take. It could be that one character never gets out of his or
her seat—you can skip IK leg controls. It could be that another
character’s face is never really seen—you can skip facial anima-
tion controls. By looking at who does what in your storyboards,
you can decide what sort of controls each character is going to
need. Of course, you could spend several months creating a bril-
liant all-purpose rig for each and every character, but it would
only be a waste of time, both now and later when the calcula-
tion of each and every bone takes its toll on rendering times. Figure 1.7 A control rig and mesh for a character
5
Animating with Blender
Along with the characters, you build
rough sets, as in F igure 1.8 . Really, all
you need at this point are placeholders
for fi nal set elements—boxes that repre-
sent chairs, rocks, or statues of Abraham
Lincoln. Whatever your animation needs.
When characters and rough sets are cre-
ated, you can begin to build scenes, one
fi le per shot from the storyboards, try-
ing your best to match camera angles
and composition in your 3D scenes to
the images in the storyboards. You may
fi nd that certain things you had drawn
Figure 1.8 A roughed-in set, consisting of placeholder blocks
for the storyboards don’t work out so
well when you have to recreate the scene in an environment that obeys the laws of size and proportion. In
those cases, you can adjust your composition on the fl y, or, if the change is drastic, rethink that part of the
scene and redraw the storyboards.
Figure 1.9 A blocked scene featuring characters and a rough set
6
An Overview of the Short Animation Process
A t some point during the character creation and rough set portion of the production, you need to obtain a
quality recording of any dialog that may occur in the animation. Environmental sounds will be fi lled in after-
ward, but any quality character animation that must accompany the spoken word needs to be built correctly
from the beginning.
Figure 1.10 A character during the animation process
Only then, after weeks (or months) of buildup and work, do you actually get to animate. The best way to
accomplish this stage is to lock yourself away from the rest of humanity so they won’t see you obsessively per-
forming the same intricate hand motion over and over to learn e xactly how the fi ngers fl are and in what order
and position they come to rest when your character performs a specifi c motion. It’s also better if no one sees
you doing the silly walk that your character needs to perform, around and around and around. Regardless
of the level of self-ostracism you choose, the process of animating will require time and patience. It may also
require that you go back and adjust your models and rigs. If you’ve done things correctly, though, if you’ve
followed the plan, this sort of minimal backtracking will not hurt the production.
A s you complete the animation for each shot, you get to do what is probably more fun than any other single
part of the process. You put your animated version of each shot back into the story reel, covering up the rel-
evant portions of the storyboards. With each new shot you fi nish, the story reel evolves from a series of still
images into a moving compendium of your animation genius. And frankly, at this point you hope it’s genius,
because you’ll have soaked months of your life into it.
7