Character animation is a high profile field with high salaries, high visibility tie-ins to TV and film, heavy recruiting, and few formal training requirements. This complete reference covers all key resources for character animation. Demos and sample files are contained on the CD-ROM, along with demo reel video clips and stills from major studios and individual artists.

Improve your 3D animation by understanding the key traditional 2D skills. Learn the basics for producing original and exciting animation.

Let this in-depth professional book be your guide to Blender, the powerful open-source 3D modeling and animation software that will bring your ideas to life. Using clear step-by-step instruction and pages of real-world examples, expert animator Tony Mullen walks you through the complexities of modeling and animating, with a special focus on characters. From Blender basics to creating facial expressions and emotion to rendering, you’ll jump right into the process and learn valuable techniques that will transform your movies. Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.

Whether you’re creating animation for television, advertising, games, or multimedia, [digital] Character Animation 3 can help you bring your imagination to life. In this updated classic, both newcomers to digital animation and old hands looking to hone existing skills will find essential techniques for creating lively, professional-quality animation that are applicable to any software application. Combining the fundamentals of modeling, rigging, and animation with advanced-level information on characterization, directing, and production management, author George Maestri has created an essential resource for digital animators. [digital] Character Animation 3 is packed with beautiful new artwork and Maestri’s invaluable expert tips. Along with clear instruction on the theory and practice of foundation techniques such as rigging, walk-cycles, and lip-synch–the tutorials and exercises in this book let you practice what you’ve learned. Maestri also offers in-depth information on creating nuanced characters that feel “alive” and win audience empathy and attention. The book’s final chapter guides you through the entire filmmaking process, from story development through voice casting and animation directing.

Do you have some experience and a reasonable knowledge of C++ and want to write your own computer games? Have you ever looked at a PC or Playstation (R) game with characters running and leaping through an exciting landscape and wondered how it was done? If so then this book will give you all the information you need to achieve this goal, whether you are a hobby programmer, student or even a professional wanting to add that third dimension to your website. Nik Lever takes you through the journey from the basics of 3D manipulation all the way to morph objects and sub-division surfaces. On the way you get Visual C++ project files to study and software that runs on the Windows desktop. The downloadable resources give you a full-featured development environment for 3D character animation, so even if you find some of the maths and the code hard to follow straight away you can still create your own games. The game engine (Toon3DCreator) provided free and fully functional on the downloadable resources, even has an ActiveX control that allows you to distribute your work on the Internet. All source code for Toon3D is included on the downloadable resources. You will also get an insight into the artist's problems; learn how to keep the characters interesting while not exhausting the game engine. Understand the complete picture and make the most of your skills to help you succeed in, or break into the computer gaming industry with this comprehensive guide to programming for real-time 3D character animation.

Expand your animation toolkit and remain competitive in the industry with this leading resource for 2D and 3D character animation techniques. Apply the industry's best practices to your own workflows and develop 2D, 3D and hybrid characters with ease. With side by side comparisons of 2D and 3D character design, improve your character animation and master traditional principles and processes including weight and balance, timing and walks. Develop characters inspired by humans, birds, fish, snakes and four legged animals. Breathe life into your character and develop a characters personality with chapters on acting, voice-synching and facial expressions. Expertly integrate core animation techniques with your software of choice featuring step-by-step tutorials, highlighting 3ds Max, Maya and Blender workflows. Adapt the tips, tricks and techniques for unique projects like character design for rotoscoping and motion capture. Advance beyond the fundamentals of 2D and 3D character animation with the companion website which includes short demonstration movies, 2D and 3D exercises and fully rigged character models.

Annotation Blender is an open source 3D graphics application that can be used for modeling, rigging, animating, rendering and thousands of other things. While modeling characters isn't the biggest of your worries, animating them to make them feel as-good-as alive is what differentiates a professional from an amateur. This book offers clear, illustrative, and easy-to-follow recipes to create character rigs and animations for common situations. Bring your characters to life by understanding the principles, techniques and approaches involved in creating rigs and animations, you'll be able to adapt them to your own characters and films. The book offers clear step-by-step tutorials, with detailed explanations, screenshots and support files to help you understand the principles behind each topic. Each recipe covers a logical step of the complete creation of a character rig and animation, so you're not overwhelmed with too much information at once. You'll see numerous examples and screenshots that guide to achieve various rigging and animation tasks, logically separated so you can understand each in detail. The rigging topics are divided by each region of the body (torso, limbs, face, eyes), and further separated by the specific topic (neck, fingers, mouth, eyelids, etc) for clarity. All rigging tasks are accomplished with the built-in tools in Blender, without the complexity of coding custom Python behaviors or user interface elements. The animation topics deal with common situations found in real world productions, showing good practices to understand and overcome the challenges.