The powers that be have decided to put the ludwig thread in both the gallery and tutorial sections. The thread you are currently reading is the Tutorial thread. These are tutorials written by LGM about animating with Ludwig. These are not rigging tutorials.
Learning to Walk (Animating walk cycles)
Learning to Talk (Lipsyncing to a sound clip)
Please post any comments/questions etc about the tutorials in this thread. Post comments and questions about the Ludwig character here: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=63614
original post:
Hello fellow blenderheads,
Ludwig is a character that I’ve been working on for the past several months. I originally started Ludwig when I began to get interested in lipsync. It occured to me that the Blender community does not have any free characters and rigs that are quite to the level of characters such as Generi (for Maya). Thus, I built Ludwig with the goal of him becoming Blender’s “Generi”. It is my hope that providing this character to the community will allow Blender users to compete in competitions such as the 10 Second Club on an equal footing with those using expensive proprietary software.
To give some credit where credit is due: Ludwig wouldn’t be what he is today without the excellent feedback from LGM. He’s been testing the Ludwig rig since before Ludwig could move his face ;). Also, I can’t claim that everything that went into the rig was my idea. I took alot of inspiration from Nozzy’s “Skinny Guy” and Slikdigit’s “Mancandy”.
So have fun! Lets see some animations!
Known bug: If you turn Ludwig’s head or torso so that he is looking backwards, the facial controls become inverted. No big deal really, but something to be aware of.
~sketchy
Update!!! Walk Cycle Tutorial
LGM has put together a very detailed and indepth tutorial on making Ludwig walk. You can view the tutorial online here:
Learning to Walk
Or download the entire tutorial here:
Learning to Walk (Download)
The following is the official press release for Ludwig:
Ludwig is a fully rigged and animation ready character for Blender. His features include IK/FK arms, stretch and squash head and spine, and a lip sync ready face controlled by a custom UI. Ludwig was created to provide the Blender community with a high-quality humanoid rig and to promote Blender as a character animation tool.
The Ludwig rig and model were created by Jason Pierce. Extensive testing and feedback was done by Nathan Dunlap.
Ludwig was not designed with the beginner animator in mind. While every attempt was made to keep the controls as user-friendly as possible, functionality was put ahead of ease of use (personal preference played a role as well). That being said, someone new to animation shouldn’t have much trouble getting this rig to do what they want it to do. Most of Ludwig’s functions are accessible and intuitive.
Ludwig’s rig may be used royalty-free for both commercial and noncommercial applications. The Ludwig character may only be used for noncommercial purposes.
Download Ludwig at http://cs.unm.edu/~sketch/gallery/resource/ludwig/ludwig.html