Course Overview
Requirements
Before starting the course, if you are new to Blender, it is strongly recommended that you do the ‘getting started‘ short course.
Modelling skills are not essential but are recommended so consider doing the modelling course first.
Aim of Course
The overall target for the course is to make an short animated movie. Whether it is a simple movie like a jet taking off, doing some manoeuvres and crashing, or an animation involving fully rigged characters, depends on what you want to do and how much time you have got.
The course is free and permanently online so you can do what you want, when you want. Hopefully you will have some fun and learn some skills.
Sessions Outline
1 Basic animation Keyframing Location & Rotation
- Getting the cube to move
- Graph editor window
- Jet taking off
- Loop the loop by moving the center of rotation
- Victory roll
- Planets rotating
- Jet following path
- Car following path
- Train following path
- Emitting particles
- Explosions
- Hair
- Dominoes
- Jet crashing
5 Very Simple Character Animation
- Rigging
- Keyframing poses – walk cycle
6 NLA Editor (Non-Linear Action Editor)
- Storing animations as actions using the Action Editor
- Taking control of and blending actions in the NLA Editor
- Bouncing balls
- Car animation (using bitmap image files in 2D animation)
- Monkey robot – Rig made from cubes and cylinders
- Stick man – Rig with a simple deforming skin
- Using motion capture data with the stick man skin
- Using motion capture data with the monkey robot mesh objects
- Adding sound effects to an animation
- Titles and credits
- Rendering animation to video file, using Blender as a video editing package