Introducing Character Animation with Blender Book

Forewords     viii
Introduction     x
Creating a Character with Blender     1
Blender Basics: Interface and Objects     3
Work Areas and Window Types     4
Navigating the 3D Space     9
Objects and Datablocks     18
User Preferences     24
Working with Meshes     27
Polygons and Subsurfacing     28
Extrusion Modeling and Box Modeling     32
Completing the Model with Materials, Textures, and Particles     89
Material Datablock     90
Material Properties     92
Textures and UV Mapping     99
Using Static Particles     116
Armatures and Rigging     129
Blender Armature System     130
Building a Simple Armature     131
Rigging Captain Blender     141
Shape Keys and Facial Rigging     187
Shape Key Basics     188
Building a Shape Key Set for Captain Blender     198
Facial Bones and Controls     217
Improved Mesh Deformations Using Driven Shape Keys     234
Bringing It to Life: Animation     239
Basics of Animation     241
Keyframes and Ipos     242
Using the Ipo Editor: Bouncing a Ball     244
Interpolation and Extend Types     252
Armature Animation     259
Posing and Keyframing with the Action Editor     260
Walk and Run Cycles     273
Pose-to-Pose Animation     288
Facial Animation and Lip Sync     299
Facial Posing     300
Lip Sync     306
Playback     312
Nonlinear Animation     315
Using the NLA Editor     316
NLA in Action     325
Mixing Actions: Walking and Talking     337
Further Issues in Character Animation     341
Interacting with Props     342
Deformation with Lattices     350
Softbodies and Metaballs     356
Lighting, Rendering, and Editing Your Animation     363
Lighting Basics     364
Rendering Your Animation     379
Editing in the Sequence Editor     383
Using Python Scripts     387
Installing and Executing Python Scripts     388
Standard Scripts     389
Extended Functionality with Scripts     396
Blender in Production     399
Full-Scale Productions: Elephants Dream and Plumiferos     401
GPL, Creative Commons, and the Blender Artistic License     402
Elephants Dream, the World's First "Open Movie"     403
A Preview of Plumiferos     405
A Look Into Elephants Dream     407
Proog and Emo Rigs     408
Texturing Proog     421
Ways of Walking: Following a Path vs. a Manually Keyed Walk     422
Tips on Studying the Elephants Dream Files     424
Feifi the Canary: Plumiferos Takes Wing     427
Introducing Feifi     428
Rigging a Cartoon Bird     432
Blender in the Pipeline     441
Production Pipeline     442
Using Libraries     445
Collaboration with Subversion and Verse     445
...and Back Into Blender     446
Blender and Beyond     449
Other Software and Formats     451
Importing and Exporting Other File Formats     452
Useful Open-Source Software for Blender Artists     453
Blending into the (Near) Future     457
Resources for Further Learning     459
Selected Online Resources     460
Recommended Books     464
On Becoming a Blender Master      466
Index     467