We’ve recently launched a website designed to showcase the infographic community.

In case you didn’t know infographics are data visualisation. They say a picture speaks a thousand word – that’s absolutely true with infographics.

These days you can pretty much find an Infographic for every topic under the sun (and then some). Not only are they educational, but there’s often a humorous side to them that make great for social sharing.

So head over to the new site Infographics Central website, and join the new community!

So ive heard some really positive feedback regarding a recent auscloud seminar held in Sydney.

There were a number of guest speakers from all areas of the cloud industry. Experts in their particular field: commercial reps and users were present so it was really a great mix of industry greats.

The panel topic is Enterprise in the Cloud. The panelists included

• Jamie Pride, Partner Deloitte
• David Hodges, CEO Loc8
• Roger Lawrence, CTO Cloud Services South Pacific HP
• Suprise guest
• Keynote speakers include:
• David Yuile, CEO AAPT – Powering the Cloud
• David Werdiger, Chairman Billing Bureau – SmartBilling
• Sheng Yeo, Managing Director OrionVM – Carrier Clouds

In particular i personally know David Werdiger on a professional level. The guys over there at Billing Bureau have some excellent cloud billing solutions, perfect for a range of services from telcos to strata.

Next question is should blender models “enter the cloud”?

W’eve moved the blender BMR to a business hosting account, we should see some decent improvements over the previous setup.

Improvements Include:

• Faster access times
• Larger storage quotas
• Larger Bandwidth Quotas
• REGULAR BACKUPS (yay)

As usual the business web hosting is powered by Optic Empire The servers are all located in Australia, and the team pride themselves on helping communities.

Thanks 2 the old school crew at e2, for allowing us to revive the BMR and redevelop.

I made a little test scene for using them for controlling wheels when vehicle follows path.

I did not find any previous examples of doing this so here is my solution:
When the length of the curve (actual length, not path length) and radius of the wheel are known, the rotation can be calculated based on Speed-curve that controls the vehicle motion.

Here is the expression from my sample file:

b.Ipo.Get(“ppspeed”).getCurve(“Speed”).evaluate(b. Get(“curframe”)) * (47.5/21.1) * (-36)

47.5 is the lenght of the path and 21.1 is perimeter of the wheel.

I did not quite understand the logic of the rotation handling of this driver. Rotations are n * 10 degrees, so if I want to rotate object 90 degrees, the script must output 9. Thas why there is 36 in the expression above.

BLEND FILE

TUTORIAL AS QUOTED FROM SOURCE

Hi.. I made this tutorial for a while ago, but i think it is still usful, so sorry for double post

Camera Changer tutorial!

Hi.. This is my first tutorial (I think) so don’t expext it to be perfect 

NB. Some of the pictures may not be correct since i fixed the tutorial. So the place where you name the cams, call them “1″ and “20″ istead of “1.20″ and “20,100″

Okay, here we go:

There are many ways to change cameras, I think that there are a lot of plug-ins for blender. But we will only use the blender build in

I am going to teach you two methods, The first is the build-in that The Orange
Team made for blender, and the other one is my own way to do it. I haven’t played so much with the build in method (Orange) So maybe there is more to say about it than I explain here.

1. First we (as allways) start Blender, but we don’t delete the default cube, because we want an object to look at. Select the camera and duplicate it (Shift-D) and place it, so it points at the cube from another place.

Let’s say we want the camera to change at frame 20. Select the first Camera . This camera should start at frame 1 and end in frame 20. so call it “1,20″ like it is showed in the picture

Then select the other camera, and call it “21,100
” Beacuse this cam should start at frame 21, and end at frame 100.

When this is done, split the screen in two. In one of the windows, click the  button and change it so it looks like this:  Good! Okay, now press the “Scripts” button, drive the mouse over the “Animation” button, And Then, click “Camera changer”! like here:

Somthing has happened, but you can’t see it. If blender tell’s you somthing, It can be because you forgot to name one of the cameras. But anyway go to frame 1 Select Camera 1 (the one we named “1,20″) and press numpad0. now you should see it trough the camera. And when you press Alt-A (and you did this tutorial right) the cameras should switch at frame 20.

Nice uh?

2.

Okay. Now it is time for my own method. I use this because it is easier and better(my oppinion ). press “Erase all” so we have a clean window 

Now, we still want the camera to change at frame 20. so at frame 19, press “i” and select “loc, Rot, Size” as showed in the picture:

Go to frame 20, and grab (G) and rotate (R) the camera so it is placed where you want it to be and then again press “i” button on your keyboard and select “Loc, Rot, Size”… now you done!! easy huh??

Hope you like it 

TUTORIAL AS QUOTED FROM SOURCE

Introduction
I have attempted to replicate the functionality of Ludwig’s Foot Rig, but without using the action constraint. I think I think I accomplished the goal, here is theblend file if you wish to judge for yourself, before enduring the hardships of following a tutorial.

The following tutorial is NOT ment for first time blender users, so I’ll be just throwing out terms at you… hoping you know how to do it.

[update] If you are indeed a beginner, I’ve just discovered that a tutorial by YogYog has a similar rig (at least the beginning part) in a hopely more descriptive manner. Once completed that you should have enough knowledge to come back and complete my tutorial.. 

Getting Ready
Bones in an IK chain have a tendency to continue in the rotation they are in. So before you start rigging something I would recommend Deforming your mesh in the following way.

Here is a simple Leg rig.
 

- The Hip.L bone is parented to the LowerBody bone.
- The Thigh.L bone is parented to the Hip.L bone, but it not connected.
- The Thigh.L bone has an “IK Solver” Constraint at ChainLength 1, to the IKKnee.L bone.
- The Shin.L bone is pareted and connnected to the Thigh.L bone.
- The Shin.L bone has an “IK Solver” Constraint at ChainLength 2, to the IKLeg.L bone.

Blend: 01.blend

Create two more bones.

- The toe.L bone, and the Foot.L bone.
- Parent and connect the IKLeg.L bone to the Foot.L bone.

Go into Pose Mode and try to rotate the Foot.L bone. The Foot.L bone now controls the IKLeg.IK bone!
But we have a slight problem, there is no limitation to the Foot.L bone. As you recall in the Ludwig rig, Sketchy added a roll bone in the back which was able to limit the rotation/roll.

Blender has a limiting feature, but it can ONLY be appied to a bone in an IK chain. So we need to make the Foot.L bone part of a chain of somekind, in order to do so we will now create another IK bone.

Because we are going to be using the Rotation feature of an “IK Solver” Constright, the IK bone must have an exact rotation of the Foot.L bone at default and be positioned at the Tip of the Foot.L bone. The following is a little trick to get that done.

- Snap your Cursor the the tip of the Foot.L bone.
- Change pivot to 3d Cursor.
- Select the Foot.L bone duplicate and rotate 180 degrees.

- Change the pivot back to median point, and rotate again 180 degress.
- Change the name to FootRoll.L

Now Apply the following “IK Solver” Constraint to the Foot.L Bone.

Now go into Pose mode and try to Rotate the FootRoll.L bone. Yep, pretty much the same thing!

Side note: Some people don’t like to accidently rotate along a different axis, using the transform window you can lock the rotation of axis you don’t intend to animate. Heck, you can take it a step furthur and lock the location. Since we are going to only use the FootRoll.L bone for the rotation sake.

Now click on the Foot.L Bone, notice that you now have limiting features:

We are going to be limiting the X Axis.
- Click on the Limit X Button.
 
- Notice that Blender has a visual presentation of where that limit will occur.
- We don’t want the bone go back any further, so we set the Min at 0.0. We we want it to stop at about 70 degrees, so we set the Max to that.
- Enable the “Lock Y Rot” and the “Lock Z Rot.”

Now try to rotate the FootRoll.L bone. TaDA!

Now lets create an All masterful FootRoot.L bone that will tie everything together.

- Parent the toe.L bone to the FootRoot.L bone.
- Parent the FootRoll.L bone to the FootRoot.L bone.
- Parent the Foot.L bone to the FootRoot.L bone.

Blend: 02.blend

Now go ahead an experiment!

######################################## Intermission ############################################

 Now try to move the UpperBody Bone, high up.

Notice that the Shin.L bone disattachs from the IKLeg.L bone, and leaves the foot behind. A non-lazy person will look at this and say, just move the FoorRoot.L bone. But as you probabley recall ludwig’s foot continues on it’s journey with the shin.L bone.

In order to accomplish this task we need to create 4 more bones. 2 bones being the duplicates of the toe and foot bones, and 2 for parenting sake.

What we are going to do is create extra bones that will always be attached to the shin.L bone, but copy the transformation of our setup.

 - Snap your cursor at at the tip of the Shin.L bone.
- Create a bone, called ShinAttach.L

- Parent and connect the ShinAttach.L to the Shin.L

This bone will follow the Shin.L bone whereever it goes, we will later attach things to it.

- Root starting at the same place create another bone. Call it DeformAttach.L

To this bone the duplicates of the foot and toe bones will be parented to later.

- Parent this bone to the IKLeg.L bone.
- Go into Pose Mode, Select DeformAttach.L bone and add a Copy Location Constraint to copy the location of the ShinAttach.L bone.

Now the fun part,
 - Select the Toe.L and Foot.L bones.
- Duplicate them.
- Grab them and move down a bit. (Hold shift while moving, we want to snap them back in place later.)
- Select the original toe and shin bones, and click “H” for hide. Or you can put them in a different layer.
- Rename the duplicate bones:
Toe.L.001 to DeformToe.L
Foot.L.001 to DeformFoot.L
- Snap Bone back into place. (Again hold shift while moving.)
- Parent both of the bones to DeformAttach.L

Go into Pose Mode
- Add a Copy Rotation constraint to DeformToe.L to copy the rotation of Toe.L

ALMOST DONE!
- Click on your Mesh and rename your Vertex Groups to use these Duplicate/Deform bones!
- Now either hide, or move into a different layer the bones we are not going to be using.

Choose which layer to place the bone in.	Choose which layers to display! Hold Shift key to display more then one.

Blend: 03.blend

######################################## Intermission ############################################
hehehehe…
ok, the Ludwig Foot Rig has another feature, when the FootRoll.L bone is rotated the other way… the foot rotates at the back tip of the foot. This is important because when a character walks, it’s leg/ankle bends to compensate for the fact that the foot is on the ground: being the toe, or the back of the foot. Well, alright lets do this thing!

First off, good thing we hid all the other bones or this would be really confusing… 

- Create a new bone, root at the back tip of our shoe and tip at the root of the toe.L Bone. Lets call it Backtoe.L

Parenting TIME!
- Parent Backtoe.L to FootRoot.L
- Parent Toe.L to Backtoe.L
- Parent Foot.L to Backtoe.L (if following along with included blend files, should be in 2nd layer.)

- Snap your cursor at the root of the FootRoll.L bone.
- Create another bone, call it BackRoll.L

- Parent BackRoll.L to FootRoll.L
As mentioned before, the effecting bone must have the same rotation as the effected bone. We are not using the FootRoll.L as our effecting bone because it has a different rotation, heck it’s even pointing the wrong way. But, since we want to utilize the FootRoll.L rotation, we parent the BackRoll.L bone to it.

Go into Pose Mode
- Add an IK Solver Constraint to Backtoe.L with BackRoll.L acting as the IK bone. (We want the rotation of BackRoll.L to effect the rotation of Backtoe.L)
- Now that Backtoe.L is an IK bone, you can set a Rotation limit.

Now try to rotate the FootRoll.L bone.

What happens is that when the FootRoll.L button rotates one way the limits of the Foot.L bone allow it to rotate in that direction, but when ithe FootRoll.L bone rotates the other way the limits of the Backtoe.L bone allow it to rotate in that other direction.

If there was no limits set, both the Foot.L bone and the Backtoe.L bone would rotate at the same time. But through limits we turn on and off the bones we want to rotate.

Blend: 04.blend

[update] Little bug discovered, this is a simple fix.
Even though I tried to disable the position aspect of the IK Solver Constraint effecting the Backtoe.L bone, the position of the BackRoll.L still seems to effect the rotation of the Backtoe.L bone. In order to fix this, we’ll just go ahead an mimic the position.
- Select the BackRoll.L bone and move it down, so the Root matches up with Backtoe.L‘s Root. (The length does not matter.)

Blend: 05.blend

############################### Conclusion #######################################
I am not sure whether this turned out any easier or any less complex then what Sketchy did with his foot rig. But I’m happy I found a different way to do the same thing.

Lip-Sync with Shape Keys

Here I will attempt to explain my recent dealings with using Blender Shape Keys to produce convincing lip-sync (Lip-synchronisation, ie: “speech”) for simple, humanoid characters.

This is aimed at people with an understanding of Blender fundamentals like vertex loops, face loops, sequencer and of course, Blender’s new Shape Key system. If these terms mean nothing to you, then you may well struggle to keep up. If you’re familiar with them then I hope this tutorial will prove to be a breeze and your characters will be speaking so fluently you’ll have trouble shutting them up!

Other Lip-sync tutorials, if you can find them, recommend using other software like Magpie, Papagayo and others but while I’ve no doubt they provide a valuable service and maybe make syncing easier, I will be using only Blender for this tutorial. I haven’t tried using lip-sync software yet so I can’t really say if it’s easier or not.

You will find links to interesting audio files you can use for testing animation and lip-sync near the bottom of the page.

The hard work first

 Setting up for Lip-Sync

First, set up your Blender screen so you have everything you need for this project. You’ll need a front 3D Window, an Action Window, the Buttons Window (showing Editing – F9 – panels) and a Timeline Window. If you’ve got the room, a Side-view 3D Window would be handy too.

The basic sound units are called phonemes and the mouth shapes we use to represent these phonemes for lip-sync are called visemes (or sometimes, phoneme shapes) and there are many references for these around the web. One of the most popular viseme sets was created by legendary animator Preston Blair and these are great for cartoon-style characters. Other visimes are aimed at more-realist, humanoid characters. The shapes you choose depend on the style of your model. (I’ll try to provide some useful links later)

Sample viseme shapes.

The first and most difficult step in good lip-sync is making the shape keys for these visems. How well these are made ultimately determines the success of the animation and it is worth spending time getting them right, although they can be modified and tweaked later. So choose your favourite set of visemes (or even look in a mirror and use your own face as a reference) and start setting your keys. A model with good topology - especially well formed edge loops around the mouth area – will be a big help here!

What on Earth are topology and edge loops?!?!

Topology refers to the way your 3D mesh defines the object, in this case your character’s head. Edge loops refers to the flow of consecutive edges around the character’s major features. Typically, good edge loops flow around the eyes and around the mouth in a somewhat deformed, “circular” manner. Selecting and deforming a single loop of edges and vertices surrounding a facial feature is much quicker than having to individually select a lot of edges that don’t flow naturally around that feature. Similarly, deforming a single loop or collection of related, nested loops is much easier and quicker than trying to deform a seemingly random set of edges. You can easily see these loops in the character screenshots above. The series of edges surrounding the mouth simply stretch from wide ellipses to almost circular to create a useful variety of mouth shapes. The faces defined by paired edge loops are referred to as face loops. The close-up image below shows selected face loops.

There are many tutorials on the web about these topics so if you need more information before proceeding then a quick search is probably a good idea.

Setting the basic viseme shape keys

First, select your undeformed mesh and create your basis key. Go to Editing (F9) window and go to the “Shapes” panel. Press the “Add Shape Key” button. Enter and exit edit mode to set the basis key. Then create your first key Key 1 and name it “M”. Enter edit mode and if your character’s mouth isn’t already closed (some people make them that way) then close it by carefully selecting the faces and loops around the mouth. You will usually use Size-Z plus a bit of grabbing and shifting to achieve this. Don’t forget to include the faces on the inside of the lips or the deformation will be unpleasant. When you’re happy with the shape, exit Edit mode and there you have it. You character can now say “Mmmmmm” whenever you like. Test it by moving the Shape Key slider back and forth but make sure to leave it at zero before making more keys. (If you made your character with a closed mouth then you can just add the new “M” key then enter and exit edit mode to set it.)

Selecting face loops

For most new keys, you will select the basis key first then press “Add Shape Key” then make the required shape from scratch in edit mode. However, some mouth shapes are very similar, like “OH and OOO” or “EE and SS” and it would be easier if you could start with something close to what you want rather than shifting everything from scratch every time. Luckily, Blender allows you to do just this. Once you’ve made your “EE” key, for example, you can select it and immediately press “Add Shape Key” then enter edit mode and the mouth will already be deformed and you only need to make subtle changes to it to make your “S” shape.

Remember that the keys you make are for sounds, not letters.
In general, you’ll need shape keys for the following sounds

• M, B, P
• EEE (long “E” sound as in “Sheep”)
• Err (As in “Earth”, “Fur”, Long-er” – also covers phonemes like “H” in “Hello”)
• Eye, Ay (As in “Fly” and “Stay”)
• i (Short “I” as in “it”, “Fit”)
• Oh (As in “Slow”)
• OOO, W (As in “Moo” and “Went”)
• Y, Ch, J (“You, Chew, Jalopy”)
• F, V

These can often be used in combination with each other and with jaw bone rotations and tongue actions to also produce other sounds like “S”, “R”, “T”, “Th” and a short “O” as in “Hot” – or these can also be specifically made with their own shapes. This decision depends largely on your character. Start with the essentials and make others if you need them.

NOTE: I use one jawbone in my current character and this is also used to control the mouth shapes. It doesn’t drive the shapes but it moves the bottom teeth and tongue (which can also be controlled separately) and the faces that make up the chin part of the character mesh. For some visemes, I move the jawbone into a logical position before adding the shape key. For example. I open the jaw for the “OH” key and close it for the “M” key. Later, when animating, the jawbone is animated along with the Shapes for a very convincing result.

Using jawbone with shapes

Load the audio

Once all your viseme shapes are set the time comes to get your character to speak. (Normally you would animate the body first and leave the lip-sync till near the end).

If you haven’t already done so, load your audio file into a Blender Sequencer Window and position it where you want it. Currently, Blender only supports 16 bit wav format audio files so you may need some editing or conversion software to process the file if it isn’t in this format. “Audacity” is a good, open-source (free) editor that will suit this purpose and much more.

Blender Video Sequence Editor Window showing loaded Audio Strip
Go to the Scene Window (F10) and press the “Sound block buttons” button –(in the three buttons near the frame counter. It looks like an audio wave)–. Press the “Sync” and “Scrub” buttons. The “Sync” button makes the playback in the 3D window closely match the audio when you press Alt-A (it does this by dropping image frames if necessary and it generally provides only a rough guide of how things match-up). The “Scrub” button is important for lip-sync as it means that whenever you change frames, Blender plays the audio at that point (Currently in some Blender builds you have to press Alt-A at least once to get this feature to start working).

Blender Soundblock Panel

Select your character and your Shape Keys should be listed in the Action Window, in the order in which you made them (I don’t think they can be shuffled). You will see a small triangle button labelled “Sliders” at the top of the list – press it to show the sliders for each shape. If you drag the mouse back and forth in this window, you should hear the audio play as you cross frames. This is how you will identify the main viseme/phoneme key frames.

Shape Key Sliders

Getting down and dirty

Before you begin your lip-sync, you obviously need to know what your character says. It might be worthwhile writing it down and even speaking it over and over, in time with the audio, to get a feeling for the sounds you’ll be dealing with. Some sounds are what I’ll call “key sounds” and others are almost dead, non-descript “in-between” sounds that fill in the gaps between the key sounds. Obvious key sounds are those where the lips close and those where they are tightly pursed or wide and round, other key sounds can differ with every piece of audio. Don’t make assumptions about the shapes you’ll use based on the words you know are there. What you are animating are the actual sounds – not letters or words (Keith Lango has much to say about this on his website and I recommend reading it)

The Timeline Window

Go to the Timeline Window. This window seems to have been largely overlooked in previous documentation yet it provides the basics for timed animation plus a few other goodies to make your animation life a little easier. Here you can turn auto-keying on and off at will (you’d normally go to the hidden User Preferenceswindow which is a pain and easy to forget), navigate frames, play and pause the animation in the 3D window, turn Audio Sync on and off, set the start and end frames for the animation and set frame markers. This last feature is the key to our project.

In recent Blender releases,the audio “Scrub” feature works in most windows. As you scrub through the audio, listen for where the key sounds occur. As you hit a key sound, scrub back and forth to find where that sound commences. In the Timeline Window, press “M” to set a frame marker at this frame. The marker can be labelled by pressing CTRL-M in the Timeline Window while the marker is selected (yellow). Enter a sensible name for the marker that indicates what the marker is for (like the phoneme sound and/or which word it starts or ends). Markers are selectable and moveable and can be deleted just like other Blender items.

NOTE: Depending on the speed of your system, you may find you get more pleasing audio scrubbing and better 3D window playback if you turn off subsurf for your model and hide any unimportant parts of the scene on different layers. The fewer things Blender has to calculate as you scrub or play-back, the faster it can draw the frames to maintain sync with the audio.

Turn off these buttons to disable subsurf setting in 3D window

Blender Timeline Window

Scrub through the whole audio – or sections of it in a long piece – marking and labelling all the key sounds.

Setting the keys

Now you have everything you need for your first lip-sync pass. Start at the first frame and click once on all your Shape Key sliders in the Action Window to set them all to zero. Move through the frames from start to finish setting shape keys where you marked the key sounds in the Timeline Window. If your character has a jaw bone and tongue bone(s), you will need to set these where required as you go.

Trouble in paradise? A quick lesson in handling Shape Keys

If you haven’t set shape keys before you might notice one interesting dilemma – they have great memories! Once you set a slider to any value, it stays at that value until you set another value somewhere. The shapes change in a linear fashion between keys. At first, this appears to be a problem if you want to key “MOO” because after you set the “M” key slider to 1 (one), it will stay there, making it impossible to get your character to say “OO” while his lips are trying to stay shut. So, you have to set the “M” slider on the “M” sound, then as the audio goes into the “OO” sound, you must set the “M” slider back to zero and then set the “OO” slider to its full value.

This introduces another problem. After you set the “OO” key, your “M” sound is messed up because the mouth is now also being affected by the “OO” shape that follows it. So, you must make sure the “OO” sound is set to zero when you want the lips closed in the “M” position.

In general, you’ll find yourself setting each shape 3 times

• once to determine where you want the mouth to begin moving to this shape (slider set to zero)
• once to set the slider at the desired level for this phoneme
• and once more to end this shape and move into the next one (slider set to zero)

The same principle applies to the jaw bone and tongue – 3 keys to each move.

Setting multiple shape keys

As you get more comfortable with this procedure, you’ll find you can leave some shapes set longer or adjust them to different levels as they can provide some interesting mouth shapes when combined with other shapes.

Setting the in-between sounds

Once the key sounds are properly set, you should be able to scrub slowly through the Action Window and watch your character speak in time with the audio. It won’t be perfect but it’s a start. To fix his speech impediment, you now have to fill in the sounds between the key sounds. Mostly these will be dull vowel sounds(“err, uh, ah”) and silence. These shapes are set in exactly the same way but here you’ll have to really watch the 3D view as you set the sliders. Try combinations of sliders like “EE” and “OH” to get the perfect shape for each individual sound. You have to be guided by your character. Does he look like he’s saying the sound you’re hearing? (Remember that exactly what’s being said is not important – it’s only the sound that matters). Test each sound as you set it by scrubbing a few frames over and over and watching your character mouth the sounds.

All that’s left, hopefully, is some polishing and tweaking. If it’s not perfect then don’t despair. Like other areas of animation, it can take a while to get a feeling for lip-sync and as the tools and workflow become more familiar you can pay more attention to the important work.

Putting it all together

Once you’re reasonably happy, it’s time to combine the audio and video and watch the result. Since Blender can’t do muxing (combined audio/video) you’ll need to composite it with the editing software of your choice (OSX users can use recent versions of iMovie, virtualDub is often recommended for Windows users and Avidemux2 is often recommended for Linux users.).

What Blender can do is provide a fully synced version of the audio file the same length as the animation – even adding silence at the start and end if need be to maintain the synchronisation. To make this synced audio file, go back to the “Sound block buttons” panel and press “MIXDOWN“. This saves a .wav file using the filename and location you entered in your output box (you did didn’t you?) plus a frame count (something like ‘speech.avi0001_0400.wav’). Then save your animation by pressing the “ANIM” button.

Combine the audio and video in your video editor and export a muxed file. You may find when you play it back that the mouth seems to be just slightly out of sync. This is for two reasons: sound travels much slower than light, so we see the lips move before the sound reaches our ears, and the lag is more the further away the person is (and the more exaggerated their expressions as they shout). The second reason is the way the brain processes faces and expressions and mixes it with sounds heard to comprehend speech. This comprehension phenomenon is barely understood and is a common challenge in animation, and some physiologists think our brains read lips and facial expression as a way of setting up to understand the context of sounds received and comprehending the meaning behind language. To solve it, you can go back into Blender, select the audio in the Sequencer Window and move it one or two frames backward (frame one to frame two or three – maybe that’s forwards?) then press “MIXDOWN” again to create a new .wav file with a split second of silence at the start. Remix this with your video and watch the results.

From here on it’s all a matter of testing and tweaking until you’re happy!

Audio Files

You can find some interesting audio files selected for animators at the [1] 10secondclub and [2]animationmeat. The files at animationmeat come complete with a pre-marked phoneme sheet. The 10secondclub has a large archive of soundfiles aimed at serious animators and there is also an archive of animations based on these files.

P.S.

One final note. Watch how the pros do this. When actors are doing voice overs for major releases their actions are recorded and even integrated into the final animation. If you have a digital camera, you may also try recording your own mouth performing your dialogue and aproximating its positions to your animation. This can give you a great visual reference, possibly frames for frames if your frame rates match, and save you time.

TUTORIAL AS QUOTED FROM SOURCE

(blend file located at bottom of page)

This is a little tutorial to show to new Blender users, the great character animation capabilities of the 2.40 version.
At the current state, Blender almost reaches the “ideal level” that combines automated tasks of the non-technicians software and the power of the professional ones.
The little animation above was completely ( Armature creation, Vertex Groups, IK constraints, Vertex painting, Pose) made in a short time ( few hours) with no planification, and, without the traditional ( to most of us, most of the time) stress of the animation work. Really!
It was a pleasure to make it, with almost no “pain spots”.
Of course, it’s a poor quality animation, but for many people it’s quite enough.
One can allready express many things with only this “quality level”.

Let’s start. Add a model to the scene ( or use my Flor model- click in the image above to download it).
It’s better to work with a fairly low poly model ( mine have 1477 vertices). We’ll add a “Subsurf” Modifier later to smooth the model. If you use a model of yours, place the center at the…center ( Centre New button) and then “clean the mesh” ( Ctrl-A keys). Place the model at the center of the scene.
Add the “Subsurf” Modifier. In the Editing window, F9, press the “Add Modifier” button in the Modifiers panel and choose “Subsurf” in the popup list.
A new block of controls appear.

These little icons let you control the display of the modifier in the 3D window ( useful if you have a low performance system or a heavy charged scene). Place the mouse cursor over each item in the block, a little help ballon will appear with useful information ( for more detailed help, please check the manual at the Blender official web site).
Set “Levels” and “Render Levels” to 1 ( like my tutorial), or maybe 2.

Now, we’ll start to “build” our skeleton ( Armature).
Place the cursor at the center, and add an Armature.
A little bone wil appear ( image above) with the “Tip” already selected ( yellow sphere). If you do G key and move the mouse you can deplace it. You can select the other sphere, “Root”, all the bone, “Body”, and move them too.

Withe the “Tip” selected, do E key to extrude a new bone. Move the mouse upward, click middle mouse button to get Z constrain and when the tip is at the middle of the body click the left mouse button. Repeat these actions three more times ( chest area, neck and head, like in the image above). Rename your bones meaningful; select the desired bone ( or all) enable the Draw Names button in the Armature panel, and in the Armature Bone panel enter the desired name in the “BO:” field.
We have our spine column done.

Here, we’ll use one nice new tool of Blender: the “X-Axis Mirror Edit”. Enable it in the Armature panel ( image above).
Why? Well, as we’ll start to “build” a symmetrical part of the skeleton, arms and legs, with this tool, we only need to make one half skeleton, Blender will do the other one for us.
Select the tip of the chest area bone, do Shift-E keys and move the mouse. Two symmetrical bones appear. Place the tips at the shoulder and click the left mouse button. Now, just do E key to create the rest of the arm and the hand too ( in my tutorial I’ve one bone for the hand and one for the fingers, of course, to do nice hand animations you must creat a complete hand skeleton).
Do the same steps as before to make the legs; select the root of the lower bone, do Shift-E keys and continue to create the necessary bones. When done, select the “horizontal” bones ( shoulders and pelvis) and delete them, we’ll not use them.

Rename the new bones. The old .L and .R naming method is still useful, but now it’s more easy to use it.
Select the two upper left arms, rename the left one as “uparm_L” or “uparm.L” or “uparm.left”, put the cursor above the name field, do Ctrl-C to copy the name, put the cursor above the right upperarm name field and do Ctrl-V to paste the name.
Now in the 3D window select the right upperarm bone and do W key to flip the extension name. Easy!

Here’s the complete Armature setup ( image above).
It’s time to “glue” the body ( mesh) with the skeleton ( armature). But…
The old system of Mesh parenting with the Armature and the creation of Vertex Groups it’s only available for backward compatibility. The new way of working with 2.40 version is with “Envelopes”.
Unfortunately, with the little knowlegde I have about the subject, I couldn’t get them to work efficiently. So I’ll continue to use the old Vertex Groupx method, but in a new fashion.
But maybe you want to try the new “Envelopes” technique, so I’ll explain it a bit.
First thing, no more the need to parent the Mesh to the Armature. It’s the job of the new Armature Modifier. So select the model and add one Armature Modifier. In the “OB:” field enter the name of the Armature that will deform the model.
Enable the “Envelopes” button too. Now, select the armature, enter Edit mode and in the Armature panel enable the X-Ray and the Envelope buttons. A grey area surrounding the bones will appear. It’s the “influence zone” that will control who’s vertices will be deformed by the current selected bone. You can edit the “influence” in two ways: selecting the “Tip”, the “Root” or the complete bone and scale them to fit the desired area with S key, or edit the “grey area” only with Alt-S keys. Now, in Pose mode, if you select a bone and rotate it, the mesh should follow.
A way to create Vertex Groups quite fast, is to select the mesh, enter Paint mode, Ctrl-Tab keys, select a bone with right mouse button click and paint a bit over the bone’s area. Blender will create a Vertex Group automatically. Do the same with the other bones.
Now, we’ll continue with our old fashion Groups method.

You probably know the technique. Select the model then the Armature and do Ctrl-P keys. Popup windows will appear. Choose “Make Parent To” -> “Armature” in the first one and “Create Vertex Groups?” -> “Create from The Closest Bones” in the second one.
Now select the Armature, enter Pose mode, Ctrl-Tab keys, select a bone and rotate it, the “good” mesh zone must follow. Do the same with ALL bones! Quite surely, many wrong deformations will survey.
To correct the problems, select the model, enter Edit mode and in the editing window, in the Links and Materials panel, a Vertex Groups buttons zone appear. Choose a bone with the double arrow button, press the “Select” one, and check in the 3D window, the undesired vertices. Deselect the “good” ones and press the “Remove” button. Repeat these steps for all the ( necessary) bones.
Yes, painfull work.
Check and recheck the model deformation. No errors must remain. Don’t skip this step, it’s very important.

Now we must control the way that the Armature will move.
The classic Inverse Kinematic method is now very easy to use in Blender. As easy as to select a bone ( whatever ) and press the Automatic IK button in the Armature panel. Now, all the bones that are linked to this bone wil follow the movement. Nice. We can do great things with only this tool.
But Blender have now another easy tool that gives us some more control, the “IK Solver” constraint. Select ( always in Pose mode) one bone that will control the IK chain ( usually the hand or the foot), and in the 3D window do Ctrl-I keys. A popup window will appear with two items: ” To new Empty object” ( more powerful?! the official way?!) and “Without target”. Choose this one. The bone turns orange, and a doted line appear, showing the lenght of the IK chain ( image above).
Sometimes the lenght of the IK cahin it’s not correct, but you can tune it precisely in the “Chain Len:” field. Choose the desired lenght with the arrow little icons ( watch the orange doted line in the 3D window).
Ok, add IK Solvers to the hands, feet, and the head bone too ( to control the spine). For each solver set the “Influence” value to 0.5. This way we canstill rotate each bone in the IK chain ( useful for more precise poses).

More great functions. Blender can now lock bone rotation in the X, Y and Z axis. And Limit it too. There’s an example in the image above. You enable the Limit function with the Limit X, Y and Z buttons in the Armature panel ( only available when an IK Sover it’s applied to a bones’s chain). Then in the “Min:” and the “Max:” fields you set the desired values. Blender will display a nice graphical aid in the 3D window; a grey sphere with a red and a blue axis. Change some values, the sphere will change to show the bone’s new allowed movement area defined by the intersection of the two axis ( image above). The bone at his maximal movement amplitude will follow the dark line that surrounds the grey zone.
Now, go ahead, select each bone of the armature and define “movement zones”. Z values will control the blue line, X values the red one and the Y ones, the roll of the bone around it’s own axis. When used to this it’s quite easy and fast to set.

In the image above you can see the complete armature Limits of the Flor model.

Finally the last step ( it was time). The “Weight Paint”.
Unfortunately, when animating mesh models, it’s almost sure that some deformation problems will occur. Lool at the image above ( 1), please. As you can notice, the elbow area presents some disgracious deformations. The good news is that Blender now have a nice tool to repair this ( well it already have one, but this one is much more useful).
Select the mesh model, do Ctrl-Tab keys to enter Weight Paint mode, place the cursor over the desired bone ( arm) and left mouse click while pressing Shift key. A popup window will appear ( 2), with one or more bones names. Select the desired one, in the Paint panel select the 1/2 button “Weight” button and start to paint near the elbow area ( carefuly, don’t paint over other bones) until the zone near the elbow becames green ( 3).
Now select the other bone ( uparm) and repeat the previous steps, you’ll notice that the mesh will deform in real time ( 4). Magic ( 5)!
You can do this each time you notice mesh deformation problems ( but take care, this can damage the mesh modelling and it’s hard to recover).

Finally, it’s time to animate our model. It’s quite simple. Place the frame counter at 1 and select the armature, enter Pose mode, Ctrl-Tab keys, select all bones, press I key and in the popup window choose the “LocRot item”. Check the Action window, there’s now a little yellow dots column ( keys).
Now, change the frame number location to 20 ( very important, do this before each bone manipulation) with Up and Forward Arrow keys, select one of the IK Solvers, let’s say the hand, and move it a little. Again select all bones, and insert LocRot keys. It’s done! Your first character animation. Congratulations!
To watch it, return the “player” to 1 ( Down and Reward Arrow keys) and do Alt-A keys to play the aination in the 3D window ( check in the Anim panel the Sta: and End: values, they must be at least 1 to 20).
While in Pose mode if you set the “Ghost” value to at least 1 or higher in the Armature panel, Blender will draw the different interpolations of the armature ( image above).

There’s many ways to animate a model. With this tutorial I’ve tried to show one, that was quite easy and fast to set. Of course, it’s a limited way, but with practice, you’ll start to develop your own, more sophisticated ways. I hope so. Here’s the .b file of the animation.

TUTORIAL AS QUOTED FROM SOURCE

How to make a ball bounce convincingly!

This tutorial assumes basic Blender awareness and some knowledge of using Blender Lattices as well as keyframes basics regarding the Blender Panels. Knowledge of IPO curves will prove useful later as we progress to more advanced techniques.

How hard can it be to move a ball?

It would be easy to just put a sphere on the screen and animate it to move up and down but in all honesty, it would not look like a bouncing ball. It would not be convincing in any way.

To be believable, the ball must use some of the most fundamental principles of good animation. In particular, the ball must squash and stretch and change speed as it falls, hits the floor, bounces and rises ready to fall again. With a little effort we can make that boring sphere look alive!

Why use a lattice?

It is possible to make a simple bouncing ball animation without using a Lattice object but with the Lattice we can do more than just bounce the ball. For example, once we have a ball that bounces how we’d like it, we can later add rotation to the ball so it spins through the air and bounces then, as the bounces decrease, the ball can roll to a halt. Doing this without lattice would be a far more complex exercise as a rotating squashed and stretched sphere would look like it was wobbling in space (like having the flat part of a flat tyre spin around the tyre instead of staying on the bottom, even while the wheel is turning).

Let’s begin then

To begin, add a UVSphere in Top View (NUM7). It is important to add the objects in top view to keep their Z-Axis aligned upwards. Set Smooth and Sub-surf on the sphere if desired. Tab back into Object Mode then immediately add a Lattice. Resize (SKEY) it so it closely surrounds the sphere. Make the edges of the lattice align with the circumference of the sphere as this will make animation easier.

(By default the Lattice Object Name is “Lattice”. It is good to give all your objects unique and sensible names, especially if you are planning a complex scene. So you might call the Sphere “Red_Ball” and the Lattice “Red_Ball_Latt” or something similar for easy reference and recognition later.)

Make the lattice deform the sphere

Prior to Blender 2.4, objects were parented to Lattices with a Lattice Deform option. In version 2.4x you can select the object (the sphere) and apply a Lattice Modifier to it (Ob: Lattice). However, if you use this new method then the ball will not move where the Lattice moves and will not squash when the Lattice squashes and we want it to do both of these things.

Luckily you can still use the good old Parent option then use the Modifier palette to make the Lattice Deform “Real” . So select the sphere THEN select the Lattice then CTRL-P to make parent and choose the “Lattice Deform” option. If you now select just the sphere, press F9 and look in the Modifiers palette, you’ll see a listing for “Lattice parent deform” with a button for “Make Real“. You can either ignore this button or press it. It really won’t matter for now. If we wanted to do some weird things to our ball, like kicking it or deforming it in other complicated ways, then we would have to use the “real” Lattice modifer option.

So, this may not be the purist approach to using a Lattice but it is a convenient way to achieve the results we’re after. Basically, it works and is reasonably intuitive.

You can easily check if the Lattice is working the way we want it to by selecting the Lattice and resizing, moving or rotating it. The ball should do everything the Lattice does. I don’t wish this to be a full lesson in Lattices so if you don’t understand any of the above, or you’re certain your Lattice is not working as it should, then please learn a bit about Latticesbefore proceeding.

Time to animate!

For our basic animation, we’ll use just 23 frames starting with the ball high then falling, squashing, bouncing and ending up back where it started. When this is played back in the 3D window, it will loop and we’ll see the ball bounce forever in one place.

This part is easier done in “SCR:1 – Animation” Viewport configuration. It is also useful to have multiple orthographic views open in the viewport by right clicking on the resize viewport arrow and choosing “split area” then making a top view, side, etc…

Go to Front View (Num1).

Press F10 and set your start (Sta) frame to Frame 1 and your end frame to Frame 23. Then make sure you’re on Frame 1 (Shift+Left Arrow) to start animating. Note that we are animating the Lattice, not the ball. Everything we do to the lattice will directly affect the ball too.

Select the Lattice (NOT the ball) then do the following on the corresponding frames:

• FRAME 1: Press IKEY and set a key for LocRotSize – the ball’s start position (high).
• FRAME 11: Move the Lattice to ground level and key LocRotSize again (keep the fall distance small for now).
• FRAME 13: Leave Lattice in same position as frame 11 and key LocRotSize again.
• FRAME 23: Move Lattice back to start position (use Num (N) Panel if you need to)and key LocRotSize again.

These four frames give a basic up and down animation with a pause at the bottom. We can add squash on Frame 12 to finish off.

FRAME 12: Place the cursor at the base of the Lattice then set the Rotation/Scaling Pivot to “3D Cursor”  Scale the Lattice down along the Z-Axis SKEY-ZKEY and see the ball squash. Key LocRotSize again.

If you press Alt-A now in the 3D window, you should see the ball bounce. Even though the squash happens on just one frame, it still reads properly in our minds and is a vast improvement over an animation with no squash at all. (Press RMB or ESC to stop the animation playback).

If you have a camera and lighting suitably set up you could render the animation out and use Blender’s “PLAY” button to loop the rendered animation. See the bottom of the page for an OpenGL render made from the steps above. Add material to the ball and a ground plane for a more interesting result.

Looking at the IPO Curves

If you want the ball to bounce three times then you could repeat the above instructions three times over – if you have the patience – but Blender has a better, easier way.

Select the Lattice then open up an IPO window and zoom into the group of keys. If you select LocZ and SizeZ from the channel list on the right, you should see something like this (I’ve added labels to the screenshot):

Note the the IPO Type here is “Object”. Purists may be disturbed or perplexed by this but if you remember, we’re not really using our Lattice in the purist, Lattice Modifier form. Don’t worry about it though. It works.

his shows the relative position on the Z-Axis and size in the Z-Axis of the Lattice. You can see that the Size remains constant until frame 11, then reduces, then goes back and remains constant until frame 23. Similarly, the LocZ curve shows how the ball starts high, falls then stops before rising again. The rounded bottom of the LocZ curve occurs because the IPO curve maps the centre point of the Lattice and when we squash it, the centre point lowers slightly.

Of special interest is that by default, Blender uses Bezier curves for IPOs and this gives us rounded tops on the curve. This means the ball starts moving slowly downward then moves faster until the reaches the bottom. Also, as it nears the top, it slows down again. This is good because this is exactly what happens in reality when a ball rises and falls (It could be better – but it’s a good start).

While in the IPO window, select both curves then press KKEY and you’ll see each key frame indicated by a vertical line.

Press AKEY to select all key frames then duplicate (Shift-D) them. The curves will seem to deform but when you drag the frames to the right, they will sort themselves out. Position them so the “first” frame is at Frame 24 and the new end frame is now Frame 46. Reset the End Frame in the Scene (F10) window then watch the animation again. It’s not bad. You can repeat this process for more bounces. (To have it bounce forever throughout a long animation, ignore the above procedure and just set the “Extend Mode” to “Cyclic” in the Curve menu. You’ll have to adjust the curve a little on the first and last frame but you only do it once and Blender repeats the change for all other cycles.)

It’s not bad for a start but there’s a lot more to do to this ball before applying for that animation job.

So what next?

In real life and in a typical cartoon, balls don’t just bounce forever in one spot. They move along and slowly lose their bounce before rolling to a halt. And they have more character than our bouncing ball.

Things to consider next:

• Perfecting the squash – maintaining volume
• Adding stretch
• Look at acceleration and deceleration
• Rotate the ball as it bounces
• Reduce the bounce height over time
• Move the ball around as it bounces

TUTORIAL AS QUOTED FROM SOURCE

This tutorial is written for Blender version 2.41

The bones thigh and shin are connected, as are the bones foot and IK_heel. The bones “toe” and foot are parented to the bone IK_foot.

Place the 3D cursor at point A, press space, and select Add >> Armature. You automatically go into edit mode – stay there. Press G(grab) to arrange the bone “thigh”. Press E (extrude) and arrange the bone shin.

Place the 3D cursor at point B, press space, and select Add >> Bone. Press G (grab) to arrange the bone toe. Then create and arrange bone “foot” in the same way, and extrude bone IK_heel.

Then place the 3D cursor at point C and create the bone IK_foot.

Next, name a few of the bones. You only really need to name IK_foot and IK_heel. Press F9 for the editing panels. Select the bone that I call IK_heel, click where it says BO:Bone.004 and replace the name Bone.004 with the name IK_heel. Then do the same with the boneIK_foot.

Blender names are case-sensitive, so make sure you use the same capitals. You don’t really need to do this, but it makes the next section easier if the bones have names, not just numbers. If you like, you could name all the bones.

Another good idea, that I’ve completely missed out here, is to give all the bones in the left arm and leg names that end in .L , and all the bones in the right arm and leg the same names, only ending in .R . This will allow you to copy poses from one side of the body to the other.

Anyhow, back to the tutorial. Select the bone toe and where it says child of click the blank drop-down menu and select IK_foot. Don’t click the Co button. You have just parented the bone toe to the bone foot but not connected them. If you move the bone IK_foot in pose-mode (which you use to pose bones for animation) the bone toe will move as well. If you select the bone shin you notice it is the child of bone Bone (or thigh if you bothered to name all the bones and yet didn’t come up with your own names for them) and, as theCo button is selected, they are connected. This is because you created it by extruding from the previous bone.

Now, select the bone I call foot, and parent it to the bone IK_foot.

While you’re here, make sure the button Automatic IK is not selected. I’ll explain what IK is in a moment.

Put an IK solver on the bone shin, IK’ing it to the bone IK_heel.

Now, select pose mode from the drop-down menu at the bottom of the 3D window. Select the bone I call shin, and press Add Constraint. Where it says OB: type the name of the object, and where it says BO: type the name of the bone. Unless you renamed the armature object, or have more than one object in the scene, type Armature in the OB: box, and type IK_heel in the bottom box, unless you named the bone something else.

The leg bones move! IK stands for Inverse Kinematics and is a method by which you can position (for example) the hand and the shoulder, and the computer will automatically position and bend the elbow accordingly. In this case, the computer will automatically position the bones thigh and shin to reach the bone IK_heel. I assume the name Inverse Kinematics makes sense if you know the maths behind the process.

The rig is finished!

To use it move the bones IK_foot and Thigh and let the IK do the rest. But what’s good about this particular rig is…

You can create this pose by rotating the bone IK_foot…	…and you can create this pose by rotating the bone foot…

…and the foot won’t slide. You can pull the foot clean off the leg, so you’ll have to be a little careful when animating it.