It's Alive!

    If you've noticed a lull in activity lately, it's because I've been stuck in a rather rude rut over the past couple of weeks trying to figure out how to rig and animate deformable meshes in Blender.  In other words: how to make a 3D stick man move.  Picture a boneless, flabby body laid out on the floor, and then imagine trying to build a tailor made skeleton from scratch to fit it.  Now imagine that your skeleton and flabby body don't naturally obey the laws of physics, so you have to reinvent how each bit interacts with the other--  how far the knees can bend, where the center of gravity is, how much influence one bone has over the other, etc.  That's 3D rigging in a nutshell.  The fun part comes after the mesh is properly rigged to the armature.  3D animation is an animator's dream, because the process is basically no different than posing a doll in various ways throughout the duration of a sequence and then watching the computer create motion by automatically filling all the bits that come in between.  All that's needed from the animator are the key frames.

    So here's my green guy waking up and discovering this strange new 3rd dimension.  He has some shading problems with his arms, which he's a little embarrassed to talk about, but he promised me he'd fix them as soon as is stickly possible.

Blender Stick Man from Alexander Cooney on Vimeo.

Comments

[Davish]

This is actually pretty cool. Now you just need a 3D equivalent of a forced-animation gimmick movie like The Maltese Conundrum.

[Alexander]

Indeed. I may be smelling a sequel... Or I could pull a George Lucas and release a special edition where they suddenly make pointless prat falls and utter inane, cute sounding gibberish that makes you want to hurt people.

[Rob]

ooh. Cool. So are it's arms supposed to be malleable like that or are they supposed to be stick-like?

[Alexander]

Yeah... it's supposed to be stick-like, but I think some of the vertices were ultimately attached to the wrong bones. Kind of gives an interesting effect though, almost as if he's in a spandex suit or something. However, When the mesh gets too distorted, the shading goes to hell. And I still don't know why his right arm slowly shrinks during the course of the animation.