Animating with Blender

Roland Hess is the leading expert on Blender. He is one of a handful of people who has been involved with Blender since its inception, and is a key voice in the community. Hess brings a unique perspective to Blender instruction that bridges the difficult gap between technical knowledge and artistic expression. Hess wrote Focal Press titles: Animating with Blender (2009) and Tradigital Blender (2011) Roland Hess is the leading expert on Blender. He is one of a handful of people who has been involved with Blender since its inception, and is a key voice in the community. Hess brings a unique perspective to Blender instruction that bridges the difficult gap between technical knowledge and artistic expression. Hess wrote Focal Press titles: Animating with Blender (2009) and Tradigital Blender (2011)

1: An Overview of the Short Animation Process
1.1: Overview
1.2: Importance of following the workflow
1.3: Common pitfalls and how to avoid them

2: Story
2.1: Story scope, your resources and reality
2.2: What story to tell? Objective vs. Subjective story lines
2.3: Incorporating Theme
2.4: Putting together a short screenplay, and how it can help

Organization

4: Storyboarding and the Story Reel
4.1: The benefits of storyboarding
4.2: Suggested tools
4.3: Recording a temporary soundtrack for timing
4.4: Assembling a Story Reel in Blender's Sequence Editor

5: Character Design and Creation
5.1: Finalizing design in line with your theme
5.2: Modeling based on storyboard requirements and theme
5.3: Creating level of detail proxies, and mesh animation issues
5.3: Believability and render times with materials

6: Libraries
6.1: What are libraries and why should you bother?
6.2: Creating groups and libraries
6.3: Linking libraries from your production files
6.4: Animating library assets

7: Rough Sets, Blocking and an Animatic
7.1: Creating rough sets
7.2: Setting cameras to match storyboards
7.3: Adding static characters and doing general blocking
7.5: Adjusting timing of the Story Reel with real blocked shots and the dialogue track

8: Recording Good Sound
9: Rigging and Animation Testing
9.1: An iterative method for rigging, skinning and testing
9.2: Maintaining the scope of the project (i.e. not doing a full rig for a character that needs 3 seconds of animation)
9.3: Creating shape keys for facial animation and deformation tweaking

10: Character Animation: Blocking and Finishing
10.1: Creation of per-shot working files, with links to character and set libraries
10.2: The Pose-to-pose method is shown
10.3: Using Blender's various animation tools to enhance timing and show weight, anticipation and follow through.
10.4 Enhancing your ability to get real-time previews for better feedback

11: Lip Sync
11.1: Adding portions of the dialogue track to the per-shot files
11.2: Audio issues and scrubbing
11.3: A general workflow for lip syncing entirely within Blender

12: Special Effects: Physics, Fluids and Particles
12.1: When to make it and when to fake it
12.2: Common rigid body effects and how to record them
12.3: Common soft body effects
12.4: The fluid simulator
12.5: Particles
12.6: Integrating effects with keyframed animation

13: Final Sets and Backgrounds
13.1: Minimizing the use of live (fully 3D) sets
13.2: Assembling the final sets to match the roughs
13.3: Breaking the sets into different libraries based on storyboard requirements
13.4: Taking and tweaking background shots for static backgrounds
13.5: In each per-shot animation file, the final sets and backgrounds are linked in

14: Rendering and Post-Processing
14.1: Using the renderer and in-line compositor to put everything together
14.2: Help with optimizing render times
14.3: Adding common post effects like color enhancement, motion blur, depth of field and bloom/glow.
14.4: Setting up and using a render farm

15: Editing and Final Output
15.1: Compiling the rendered scene into the full short in the Sequence Editor
15.2: Using the SE to experiment with timing and cuts
15.3: Mixing the sound
15.3: The different finished animation formats