Hi all,
Well, my tutorial series “Animation Fundamentals in Blender” has been released, and I thought it might be a good time to start a support thread here on BA for any questions people might have.
If you’ve purchased the series and have run into any technical issues feel free to post them here.
If you’re considering purchasing the series, but have a few questions before you do, post away.
BTW, I wrote up the animation panel used in the Clive rig as an add-on. It’s pretty basic, but a few people have asked for it. You can find it here: http://www.pasteall.org/28987
Save the code as “animation_freens_tools.py”, and in user preferences/addons, click “install addon” and locate your saved file.
Background: I asked Beorn if the squash and stretch controls on the ball rig were connected to a lattice. He answered, no, they were connected to a bone with a stretch to constraint and maintain volume set.
My f/u Q: ok how can this work? aren’t bones controlling vertices that when rotated would change the direction of the action? For example I would expect that lengthening a bone, that is oriented up and down, in a model that has been rotated by 90 degrees by a rotation would then result in the model becoming wider, not taller. I guess that what I’m saying is how can a bone effect verts absolutely in some cases and relatively in another case???
My linked rig keeps getting broken, i.e. the ball is no longer parented or controlled by the rig. Keeps happening and I need some help, seems to be related to shutting down blender. I even tried to save all external data with blend and that didn’t prevent the problem:
I’ll attempt to attach the blend - hmm won’t upload again, small blend file, I can’t figure out why, nothing happens after I select it and hit the upload button
Hmmm, from looking at your file, it looks to me like you’re linking in the bouncing ball from “1_2_bouncing_ball.blend”, rather than from “basic_animation_rigs.blend”. Is that correct?
If so, that’s making 2 levels of links. You should link the group directly from “basic_animation_rigs.blend”, which is the file that contains the rig.
Also, I would suggest keeping all your work together. At the moment it looks like your animation blend file is being saved in a completely different location to the rig file. It looks like you’ve made a directory in the root of your “C:”, but your rig file sits in “C:\Documents and Settings\Lyle\My Documents\Blender\cg_cookie\source\rigs”
When you link a group, it doesn’t import the group into your animation file, but merely makes a link to the rig file. So if you move either file or the directory that contains it, the link will be broken. For this reason, I suggest copying the rig file to a “rigs” directory in your working directory or saving your animation file into a “working” directory in your cgcookie directory. That way when you need to back things up or move them around, the links will still work.
Regarding the rig, it’s kinda unimportant, since the training series is about animation rather than rigging. However, to answer your question, the squash_lower is a child of the location bone, and has a stretchTo constraint pointing to the squash_upper bone. The rotation bone is a child of the squash_lower bone and deforms the ball. I’m not sure if this is the best way to do things, (I eagerly await Nathan Vegdahl’s rumoured upcoming rigging dvd) but it’s good enough for practicing animation.
I haven’t moved any folders so it looks like links to links are broken on saves. ( I didn’t realize that I was loading the wrong rig) So its good to realize that this is a potential blender limitation. Don’t have the time to experiment with this to see if this qualifies as a bug unfortunately. So to prevent me making the same error, is there any way to look at an asset when linking from a blend file to know if it is within that file or a linked object?
I like your bookeeping idea, I currently have a blender 2.6 folder I keep folders of my working blends in while I stick all tut material in my documents, I suppose that i should combine for this tut series.
Thanks.
In the outliner, you can change it to “Libraries” view, which shows you all the blend files that are linked in.
At the start of the squash and stretch vid, I show the linking in of the bouncing ball rig. Also, in a later video, (2_1_Introduction-Rigs_and_Proxies) I explain in more detail how and why rigs and proxies are used.
In general, projects are structured in such a way that scene files are separated from asset files. In the case of the tutorial series, all rigs are found in the rigs/basic_animation_rigs.blend, with the exception of Clive, who has his own blend file.
Re: double level linking:
I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t call this a bug; assets should always be linked from their original files. Blender’s proxy system does indeed have some limitations, but this is not what I consider to be one of them.
I hope this clarifies things. In the videos I tried to explain as much as I could without getting too far off the the main topic of animation.
I’m of to a pretty bad start with this series, it might just be me who is missing a lot, but I’m new to blender. First of I couldn’t figure out what file to start from. The one in “chapter_1” seemed to be the finished project. Where I just supposed to delete the keyframes and start over? Secondly the grease pencil in that file didn’t match the movement or the one in the video. I wrote Jonathan, and he said it looked like you were linking the objects from the beginning. So my half solution was to create a new file, link to the simple ball, and proxy it. Then I took a screenshot from the video to get the right grease lines, and opened it as a background image in blender. I’ve gotten to the second video now, and have linked to the squash ball and the rig, and copied the keyframes, but then the offset is wrong, because the old and the new ball are jumping in two different places.
It would be cool if you have the time to explain a complete newb like me how I should have opened up the file from the beginning at the first exercise, but what I’m really looking for an answer for is why the offset is so wrong after I copy and paste the keyframes? Here is my blend file: http://www.pasteall.org/blend/11105
I know these problems must have simple solutions, but I have fought with them long enough now, and I just can’t seem to get it right.
Gobias: Don’t feel bad. We all had to start somewhere. When I was starting out I definitely had many questions, I promise you!
So, to answer…
I think you are taking it a little too literally. The files provided are of the finished projects, and are merely supposed to serve as examples. The idea is to make your own animations, which is the best way to learn. The first few videos are intended to show you around the editors and introduce the first few basic concepts of animation.
So, I encourage to make your own sketches, even to observe some reference of a bouncing ball. Make notes about timing and spacing. Then jump into blender and start animating. This can be either with a basic sphere you create, or with one of the ball rigs provided. This is why the grease pencil sketch is unimportant; it was just a way of illustrating my plan for the purposes of the video.
I’m guessing that the cause of your offset issue is that in the video I start out by animating a default sphere, (with a radius of 0.4). Only later, in the squash and stretch video do I transfer the animation to the bouncing ball rig, causing me to have to offset the location to align the bounces to the ground. If you started out with the simpler ball rig, an offset is unnecessary.
The reason I didn’t use a rig from the beginning is that I wanted to keep things simple, and introduce rigs later on.
Good luck, and let me know if you have any more questions.
Not sure what you mean… in the first few exercises the camera is set to orthographic. This is done in the properties window>object data tab (the one with the movie camera on it).
Does that answer your question?
If I can put in my 2 cents: I have messed up way too may tutorial blends by using them Instead, if you do want to use a tutorial’s blend, open it and then re-save it immediately to a different name. I go so far as I try to not even have them in the same folders.
While motion path is potentially a great tool for some things, the point of doing the bouncing ball is to learn the basic principles of timing and spacing, and squash and stretch. It’s to prepare you for more complicated animation. Doing things manually is what it’s all about.
Just watched the first two vids - intro and bouncing ball; loved em and they made it clear enough for even me to understand. Hopeing to be able to make time later to try out some ‘ball’ experiments.
Start again from scratch -> how often have you heard artists say / seen them do, it in timelapses? Well I worked out a beautiful tail flick for the tailball - only it lasted over 1.5 seconds at 30 fps and had way to many keys and handle tweaks to allow me to crunch it to a quick action. The more I flail the worse it looks. So experience gained using the tools and realization that sometimes you don’t know what you want to do until you try.
May I suggest that if you have the time, you sit down and DO all the exercises in the vids but with your own minor modifications. Its a lot harder than it looks but most useful.
Maybe there’s another one in the works, but Nathan has already released an extensive rigging tutorial (rigging a mammoth) on cmivfx. He said the same principles apply to rigging any creature including people.
I’ve found that the timing of a tailflip to be more challenging than I anticipated. Nothing like actually getting in there and doing the work to make you appreciate the subtleties. So here are 3 timings. I think that the first is too slow, the second still retains my polish steps but the third is quicker and more “perky”. So which do you prefer where my goal is cute and perky?
Instead, if you do want to use a tutorial’s blend, open it and then re-save it immediately to a different name. I go so far as I try to not even have them in the same folders.