Animating with Blender
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Animating with Blender
How to Create Short Animations
from Start to Finish
D. Roland Hess
AMSTERDAM
•
BOSTON
•
HEIDELBERG
•
LONDON
NEW YORK
•
OXFORD
•
PARIS
•
SAN DIEGO
SAN FRANCISCO
•
SINGAPORE
•
SYDNEY
•
TOKYO
Focal Press is an imprint of Elsevier
Focal Press is an imprint of Elsevier
30 Corporate Drive, Suite 400, Burlington, MA 01803, USA

Printed in China
v
Contents
Foreword xi
Chapter 1 An Overview of the Short Animation Process 1
Creating a Short Animation 1
Avoiding Death By Natural Causes 1
Preproduction 2
Production 4
Postproduction 9
The Importance of Following the Work Flow 10
Chapter 2 Story Story Story 13
What Makes an Engaging Story 13
Writing It Down 19
Story Scope, Your Resources, and Reality 21
Scope Example: Adding a Second Character 22
Scope Example: Adding a Second Location 23
Scope Example: Adding Length 23
How Long Is My Story? 23
Chapter 3 Organization 25
Your Digital Assets 25
The Way That Blender Handles Assets 25
A Suggested Organizational Structure 26
Chapter 4 Storyboarding and the Story Reel 29
Storyboarding Basics 29
Suggested Tools 35
Pen Tablets 36
Paint Software 37
Blender’s Image Editor 38
Creating the Storyboards 40

Finding and Fixing Broken Links 93
Moving a Shot File and Maintaining Its Links 94
Moving an Asset File 95
Chapter 7 Rough Sets, Blocking, and an Animatic 97
Creating Rough Sets 97
Preparing the File for the Rough Set 98
Building Your Template Scene File 101
Matching Camera Angles to Storyboards 102
Placing Your Characters 106
Proceeding Through the Story Reel 109
Special Case: Reusing Cameras 110
Additional Detail: Moving Cameras, Moving Characters 110
Creating an Animatic 112
Replacing Storyboards in the Story Reel 112
Chapter 8 Good Sound 117
Finding Decent Equipment and Environments 117
What to Use 118
vii
Contents
Where to Record 119
Making the Recording 119
The Goal of the Recording Session 120
Some Sound Processing Basics 121
Removing Noise and Adjusting Levels 124
Previewing the Recorded Sound 125
Chapter 9 Rigging and Skinning 127
An Iterative Method for Rigging, Skinning, and Testing 127
Control Structures 128
Deformers 129
Helpers 129

Chapter 11 Animation 187
Creation of Per-Shot Working Files from the Scene Template 187
Animation Basics 189
Animating in Blender 192
Working in the Action Editor 193
Straight Ahead Animation 195
Pose to Pose Animation 196
A Practical Example 197
Timing 201
Overlap 202
Anticipation and Follow Through 204
Fine Tuning Your Animation 204
Analyzing Motion with Arcs 205
Facial Expressions 206
“Automatic” Motion: Breathing and Blinking 206
Production Techniques 208
Pick it Up 208
Hold On! 209
Walk This Way 210
A Final Note 214
Chapter 12 Lip Sync 215
Adding Audio Strips to Shot Files 215
Creating the Sync 217
Mixing and Exporting Sound for the Final Edit 219
Chapter 13 Final Sets and Backgrounds 223
Work Flow 223
Quality versus Render Time 224
Geometry 224
Matching the Rough Set 224
Movable Objects and Construction 225

Chapter 15 Rendering and Compositing 287
Goals and Overview 287
Lighting Your Shot Files 288
Compositing for Better, Faster Renders 290
Faster Renders 290
Better Renders 302
Contrast Boost 302
Midtone Brightness 303
Combining the Techniques 304
Color Adjustment 305
Motion Blur 307
Getting a Good Render on Your Local Machine 309
Final Animation Review 311
Preparing for Render Farming 312
Setting Up and Using a Render Farm 313
Using Render Farm Software: Farmerjoe 314
Running Farmerjoe Remotely 321
Checking the Final Frames 322
Staying Organized 322
Chapter 16 Final Edit and Output 325
Putting All of the Renders Together 325
Color Correction and More Post Effects 330
x
Contents
Editing for Timing 332
Sound, Music, and Foley 333
Music 334
Sound Effects and Foley 336
Output Formats 336
The Wrappers 336

can examine, copy, and redistribute the fi les in noncommercial ways: as part of a tutorial, a library, etc. While
the Blender Foundation’s own projects such as Elephants Dream and Big Buck Bunny have also made their pro-
duction fi les available in a similar fashion, the complexity of those projects make them extremely diffi cult for
xii
Foreword
even a dedicated Blenderhead to pick apart and analyze. Hopefully the fi les included with The Beast will be
straightforward enough that anyone can learn from them.
However, the fi les for The Beast that come with this book are not the fi nal set of production fi les. Deadlines
and production schedules meant that, while the animation was “fi nished ” in time to make the disc, it was far
from “fi nished ” for my own sense of artistry and animation. So if you notice discrepancies between the ver-
sion of The Beast that you can see online and the version included with the book, it simply represents the dif-
ference that one or two more rounds of refi nement and two more months of render time can make in your
own production. A piece of art is only fi nished when you run out of time.
One of the great truisms of learning a skill is that by the time you’ve fi nished a project, you ’re fi nally ready
to begin it. This will certainly be true of your experience creating a short animation. I hope this book func-
tions as a bit of a substitute for some of that fi rst-time experience, giving you a better shot than most people.
So don’t be too hard on yourself during your initial foray into animation. Well, be hard on yourself during
production. But when you’ve put your short animation to bed for whatever reason and have called it “done, ”
take one hard, critical look at the fi nal product so that you can remember the lessons you’ve learned for the
next time. Then forget the pain and bask in your accomplishment, just a little.
1
An Overview of the Short
Animation Process
Creating a Short Animation
Creating a short animation from start to fi nish is a complicated, time-consuming task. It uses all of the skills
you have developed while learning your way around your 3D software, while calling for an even broader
range: storytelling, asset and time management and organization, acting, and editing. As you work through the
process, you will fi nd that each step necessarily builds on everything that went before, and that to shortchange
or entirely skip one of the steps will lead, surely, to disaster.
No single step in producing a short animation is diffi cult by itself. Certainly, no individual portion of the

longer narrative forms. It will grab
the viewer’s interest, sympathy, or
comedic sense almost right away. It
will focus exclusively on express-
ing the theme of the story, or
setting up the joke, if that’s what
you’re going for. At this stage, it is
a balance between your resources
and ambition, and you are advised
to save the 20,000 character epic
battles for later in your career.
When your story is in order, you
proceed to creating storyboards.
Storyboards are shot-by-shot (and
sometimes pose-by-pose) break-
downs of your story in a visual
format. Usually done as line illus-
trations, they help to organize
your thoughts on how the written
story will translate onto the screen.
You don’t have to be the world’s
greatest sketch artist to pull off an
effective storyboard for your short
Figure 1.1 A script
3
An Overview of the Short Animation Process
animation, but the more time you spend on
it, the less effort will be wasted later when
it’s time to actually animate.
With your storyboards in hand (or on

animation begins. Unlike creating still images, surfacing (materi-
als and texturing) can be skipped almost entirely at this stage.
With a good start on your characters, you set up your control
rigs. This is the fi rst place that good storyboarding pays off. You
build and test your rigs to the specifi c actions your characters
will take. It could be that one character never gets out of his or
her seat—you can skip IK leg controls. It could be that another
character’s face is never really seen—you can skip facial anima-
tion controls. By looking at who does what in your storyboards,
you can decide what sort of controls each character is going to
need. Of course, you could spend several months creating a bril-
liant all-purpose rig for each and every character, but it would
only be a waste of time, both now and later when the calcula-
tion of each and every bone takes its toll on rendering times.
Figure 1.6 The rendered character
Figure 1.7 A control rig and mesh for a character
6
Animating with Blender
Along with the characters, you build
rough sets, as in Figure 1.8 . Really, all
you need at this point are placeholders
for fi nal set elements—boxes that repre-
sent chairs, rocks, or statues of Abraham
Lincoln. Whatever your animation needs.
When characters and rough sets are cre-
ated, you can begin to build scenes, one
fi le per shot from the storyboards, try-
ing your best to match camera angles
and composition in your 3D scenes to
the images in the storyboards. You may

too frequently, you fi nish the sets, surfacing, and lighting. Of course, what you do with the sets and lighting
can be helped along by the storyboards and a careful
analysis of the current state of the story reel. Just like
rigging, you could spend a nearly infi nite amount of
time creating beautiful, detailed surfaces for every ele-
ment of your imagined set. But it could be that only
certain items and spaces that appear in close-up need
that level of attention. Some things may appear at a
distance, or only briefl y, or moving so quickly as to
be smudged by motion blur, and those elements can
be given an appropriately smaller slice of your time.
And then, when you’ve surfaced, built, and lit appro-
priately, you render. Go get a cup of coffee. This is
going to take a while.
Figure 1.12 Render time for a single frame out of thousands
Figure 1.11 The story reel with several shots in place
9
An Overview of the Short Animation Process
Postproduction
So you have gigabytes of rendered frames that must be compiled into a fi nal animation. You bring them into
an editor that is designed for cutting audio and video sequences together. You watch it over and over, adjust-
ing the timing of the cuts between the different shots so that the action seems to be continuous throughout,
even though it probably isn’t.
Figure 1.13 The editor with fi nal shots in place
When the timing is right and the animation does exactly what you want it to do, you raid the kitchen and
the garage for anything that will make noise. Turn on a microphone and act out the shots, trying to sync
your noisemaking with what happens on the screen. Get a friend to help you, if you have any left. Find some
music that suits the theme of the story and approximates the running length of the fi nal cut.
Put the sound effects and music on top of the dialog track you recorded earlier, and you are . . . fi nished?
Maybe.

From these few examples, it may be apparent to you that most of the really crushing problems will come
from skipping or short changing the preproduction steps. And really, if you’ve done the preproduction prop-
erly, you’re not going to skip any of the normal production or postproduction steps.
Summary
The short animation process is a time-tested set of steps that, if followed, will help you to see your animation
project through to completion. The process involves an extended preproduction phase during which you
develop the story and work out the overall timing through the creation of storyboards and a story reel. The
production phase fi nds you working directly in your 3D application, building models and sets and actually
performing the animation. Finally, postproduction is where you render your work and composite and edit it
into a fi nal animation.
The greatest mistake committed by fi rst-time producers, and the one that will certainly kill a project, is to
jump into the production phase without adequate preparation. Without a producible story and the planning
provided by good storyboards, so much time will be wasted that the project will never see a successful end.
Skipping the preproduction process is like furnishing your house before you draw up the blueprints, lay the
foundation, and build the walls. It may seem quick and easy to put the decorative items into place, but it will
almost certainly turn out poorly in the long run.
11
An Overview of the Short Animation Process
Although the work fl ow as presented in this book has its idiosyncrasies, it follows a proven formula. To ignore
this formula is the animation equivalent of criminal negligence, and if you do it, I promise that a bunch of
little key-framed lawyers will show up at your house, exhibiting crowd-simulated swarming behavior and
waving tiny digital court documents in the air.
On the other hand, if you follow the steps and keep yourself focused on the process, in the end you will have
something that very few other people have produced: a successfully completed short animation project.
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