Introducing: Blender Animation Fundamentals

After the announcement of the "Stylized Character Workflow" training by Julien, we are back with some more exciting news!

Have you ever wanted to get started with character animation? Using Blender? Keep reading.

The animation team at Blender Animation Studio is producing a "learn by example" course that will gradually introduce you to the core principles of character animation, starting from a simple bouncing ball, all the way up to full-featured character acting.

Blender is our tool of choice. For this reason all principles will be illustrated with it and --most importantly-- we will make use of a brand new set of characters, compatible with Blender 2.80.

Animation characters lineup

This character set features a squash-and-stretch ball, a ball with tail, a ball with legs, a humanoid (designed and rigged by Hjalti) and of course Rain! The rigs will be published together with the videos.

Training outline

Here is an overview of the training. Each topic will be presented as a walkthrough of a fully animated shot, where the animator will break down the key steps of the animation process. The source files for each step will be available along the video.

• Introduction to the training
• Principles of Animation
• Workflow and Terminology
• Bouncing Basics (Simple Bouncing Ball, Sideways Bouncing Ball)
• Drag And Follow Through, Single swing
• Creating Personality, Single jump
• Walking Biped, Walking vanilla
• Basic Body Mechanics, Jump
• Advanced Body Mechanics, Weight shift
• Character Pantomime, Walking
• Character Acting

This is an ever-expanding training, expect more chapters and examples to be added in the future!

Coming soon!

This training will be available in the upcoming weeks, stay tuned for a release announcement. Make sure you follow Blender Cloud on Twitter or Facebook to catch the latest news