Introducing Character Animation with Blender

 Experienced character animators who are considering making a transition to using

Blender instead of, or in addition to, another software package. These people can

expect to be quite familiar with the concepts dealt with in this book, but need to

know how the concepts are implemented in the Blender software.

• Highly motivated newbies to both Blender and the field of character modeling and

animation. These are the people who will be picking the bones of this book. I hope 

to supply these readers with all they need to use Blender to get started in character

modeling, and also to give them some good pointers on where to go from here to

develop their skills more fully.

For all of these people, the learning curve can be steep. At the time I’m writing this,

there are no published, up-to-date books on Blender available in English. There is some

excellent new introductory documentation available at the Blender Wiki page, thanks to

the Blender Foundation’s Summer of Documentation project, and I strongly recommend

looking at it. Aside from this, however, cohesive learning resources for Blender are still

hard to come by. Until now, the way to learn Blender has been to scour the Web for free

tutorials and online documentation, and to participate in discussion groups such as the

BlenderArtists group at blenderartists.org/forum. The fact that so many people have

become adept in Blender is a testament to the extraordinary quality of the tutorials and

the documentation available, all created by people who have donated their time and

expertise to supporting the Blender community.

These resources remain invaluable, and in this book I will make an effort to point you

to the best of them. Nevertheless, it requires some real effort to seek out up-to-date,

quality tutorials and to teach oneself from so many diverse sources, and it is difficult for

scattered tutorials, even very good ones, to get into sufficient detail and depth on a specific

topic. For this reason, I have taken a very broad view of what the topic of character anima-

tion encompasses. Modeling, texturing, and animation are all part of what I cover here,

and you can use most of the information in this book to apply to other forms of modeling

and animation than character animation. Likewise, although it is very much a part of this

book, I do not go into great depth on the art of animation per se. In Chapter 18, I recom-

mend several books to help you deepen your knowledge and skills in this regard.

With Introducing Character Animation with Blender, I aim to provide a clear, cohesive

overview of character creation and animation as implemented in Blender. I hope that this

encourages people to make the most of Blender’s capabilities, to exercise their own cre-

ativity, and to support the fantastic community that has developed around this software.