these are great tutorials, please please keep them coming,
thanks again
can someone explain to me how the scene is lit in the example files? I can’t seem to replicate in my own test file. I have looked in the example files and I can’t see a lamp in the scene?
In the Material Panel “Shadeless” is selected for every Material!
Hey guys! Thanks for all the great reply’s. It’s really helping me work up some ideas for some new tutorials
as well as some ways to improve the ones I’ve already done. I consider these just the first draft. As
soon as I am happy with everything and every else seems happy I will make a nice permanent website for all the
tutorials… as I expect there will be quite a few.
I’m actually on vacation right now so I can’t reply too often unless there is wireless Internet access. But I
will be back in a week or two and working on more tutorials. Just wanted to take the time to reply to
a few people here.
Nozzy: Thanks! This is totally the kind of discussion i was hoping to get going here. I think for the way the example character is constructed your method is great. Certainly quicker than the one I presented. However I really wanted to show how to use the envelopes for a couple reasons. In certain situations I find the envelopes to be a little more versatile for rigging. An example would be if the character’s arm wasn’t broken into the top arm and the lower arm but was instead one whole piece. If you used envelopes in that situation you could get some movement out of the arm. Obviously it’s tough to make the arm rotate correctly using that method but if you don’t need a lot of animation and you need to get something done quick it can really help you out. Another trick I like to use…is to make a bone for each vertices’s and set the envelope influence to only affect that vertices’s. So say I’m rigging an arm. I make a bone for the top arm and a bone for the lower arm with envelope dist: turned down to 0 for each. I then parent the tiny bones that control the vertices’s to the main bones I want to use for rotation. So using the tiny bones is like being able to make a vertices’s group for the curve object and then assign those groups to the bones you want to use for control. I’ll include an image with some examples of what I’m talking about.
Vassilios: Hey! Thanks for the links. Yeah I’m a big fan of Expression and DTP-Blender. Actually now that you mention expression. I remember Microsoft bought up that company that owned expression. That same company also made a really cool Animation Program I always wanted to try out called “Living Cells”. Has anyone ever used this program? Microsoft bought the company, killed Living Cells off, and then gave out Expression for free… crazy! Hadn’t heard of Sodipodi but I certainly plan on checking it out now. I like all the links on your site with all the opensource software! What an awesome resource!
Burns: Yep the materials are all “Shadeless” so just hit the Alt-Z key to turn the veiwport shading to “Shaded”. That should fix your problem.
About “Living Cells” i never used this program!
About the link to the Open Source Programms…yeah, its a awesome resource!
The Site is not mine!
Its a France Community ZOO-Blender!
Great Tutorials…again!
waiting for more…!
seeYA
Where do you get the plug-ins ( edges2curves ), jazzdalek ? I like it.
I believe it is in the file on the bottom of the first post…
here my try at 2d
Try this! DOnt make your materials shadeless and click on ambient oclusion
and edges. you will get a cool effect.
and I think that it is easier to just parent the individual body parts of the character to the bones its a lot less work trust me.
The Preperation Tutorial link does not load I have tried now for 2 days. The others work fine could you take a look at it.
Thanks
I am inspired by the other two tutorials.
My extrude’s seem wrong no matter what I try in illustrator
edit: Got python script running ok - think it was working I just did not notice see it 
Anyone got any ideas on Illustrator CS2 saved as version 8 not extruding - object seems to extude but not out but within the object and stays flat - have tried simple objects like a circle with and without a stroke.
Wicked tutorials thanks - cant wait for flash ones
Adam
cool idea for a tutorial, a long time ago I did a 2D anim ( a non participating entry for the WC ) called ‘spaghetti blender’. I don’t know if it’s still up, but I’ll have a look for it, and maybe post it again, if it’s not already. I actually started another one, called ‘Billys Walk in the Mountains’ in which, instead of modelling the edges of my objects, I used shadeless alpha textures that were painted in photoshop. I came up with some stuff that was very similar to the monty python anims. If you are using textures in this way, it’s good to make use of the ‘montage’ buttons ( in the texture buttons, they’ll appear if you load a movie or image sequence as a texture )
Here’s the texture for Billy in case anyone wants to try using the alpha texture on card method.
http://home.att.net/~yorik/bchunks2_a.png
just right click and choose ‘save target as’ to save the png, then…
- load the pic into the ‘view background image’ window, and add some planes, and adjust their dimensions to frame the various body parts.
- join with ctrl J, open up a UV editor window, and hit F to go into face select mode, and U for the UV options, and choose ‘project from view’.
- with your UV coords now in the UV editor window, browse for the image. scale your UV coords with S until they fit the image.
- now give your planes a material set to shadeless, load the image into a texture channel, check ‘use alpha’, and set mapping ( in materials ) to ‘UV’
- select all verts of your plane in edit mode, and press P, to seperate, and choose ‘all loose parts’. Now you just rearrange them a bit, and he’s ready to rig.
hey modron!
freaking awesome! thanks for posting that. Your character looks really good I really like it. I like your method a lot for putting a bitmap 2d character together. I think I will add a video tutorial for bitmap 2d animation using your
method if you don’t mind. thanks for posting!
Hello Jazzdalek!
Thanx again for the nice tutorial!
Just one question!
How do you succed to not f**k up the curves in blender?
When we inport your own “cutout.ai” artwork file the curves get corrupted.
Your curved is not tampered with in any way and the blender version we tested this with is 2909 both pc and mac…
Any idea?
We followed your excellent tutorial and we have tried this many times before every time uncusessfully. 
any help would be great!
Thanx!
The people at WGV Factory
wgv factory:
“How do you succed to not f**k up the curves in blender?
When we inport your own “cutout.ai” artwork file the curves get corrupted.
Your curved is not tampered with in any way and the blender version we tested this with is 2909 both pc and mac…
Any idea?”
Hey WGv-
that’s pretty strange. are you using the blender build from the main blender.org downloads? I’m not sure what 2909 means? But I’ve tested
this method with blender 2.42a on winxp 64bit & 32bit, Osx & Ubuntu… and
never had any problems. Maybe you can post a link to a .blend file and I can take a look?
Maybe try a simple test. With either illustrator or inkscape… or xara… or whatever you have available. Try making a simple closed circle and see if you can get that to import into blender? This way you could maybe rule out the possiblity of a corrupt .ai file?
Hey I’m new to Blenderartists.org , (thanks to you forum)
Wondeing if you could maybe help me out. :o I wanna make my own little animation move/show thing but really need help, wanna make something like SOuth Park but living in South Africa you don’t really have any practical help. No studio where you can freelance and see how it’s done or materials or anything. SO plz!!! help me!!!
1 Like
First really good Tuto but…
I have similar problem with my own cutout and with the one of the tutorial.
The extrusion doesnt work fine, I thought it was because of my .svg curve but I also try your .ai with same result isn´t it curious
(I´m using Blender 2.4 under windows XP)
Yeah curves are odd creatures in blender. I know exactly the problem you are having and I think I tried to cover it some what in the tutorial. It has to do with where the Y axis is in the curve. I’m not quite sure how to explain it. But I have found when you import a curve into blender you should make sure your in the top view (num key 7). Then you tab into edit mode
and rotate the curve 90 degrees to show up in the front view. That seems to work. The next tutorials I’m currently working on deal with just meshes. Curves are cool… but I’m starting to find them limiting some what… I have a wish list for curve features which I’ll post at some point too.