Into Animation: Character Animation Fundamentals in Blender 3D

Character animation can be a fun hobby or an exciting and rewarding career. Whichever path you wish to follow, this class will teach you the essential skills you need to get started.

Animation combines many aspects of art, design, and filmmaking into one exciting medium. This complexity can make it both time consuming and difficult to learn.

This class aims to demystify the fundamental principles on which quality character animation is based, enabling you to create believable characters, and giving you a solid foundation on which to continue to learn and grow.

 

What you will learn:

• By the end of this class, you will have gained a solid understanding of the 12 Principles of Animation and how to apply them to your own character animation.

 

What you will create:

• Once you are familiar with the 12 Principles of Animation, you will apply your freshly gained knowledge to the classic animation exercise, the bouncing ball.
• Building upon what we learn with the bouncing ball, our second exercise starts to introduce some character with a fun and simple, looping, bouncy bird animation.
• With these initial exercises complete, you will go on to create your first true character animation. A fun, animation of a character jump using the provided character.

 

Good to know:

• Throughout this class we shall be using the 3D software application Blender which can be downloaded for free from blender.org
• If you are not already familiar with Blender then I would highly recommend that you start out with my Blender Essentials for Animators class, which will teach you everything you need to follow along.
• This class has been updated to be fully compatible with Blender 4.1 or higher.
• This class is all about bringing characters to life so you will be working with a prebuilt character rig which can be found on the class Projects & Resources page. This class does not cover character modelling or rigging since these are complex topics which require in depth classes of their own.

 

Learning the 12 Principles of Animation will provide the fundamental knowledge that you need to go on and create anything you can imagine!

Let’s get started!

 

Once you have finished this class, don't forget to check out the other animation classes here on Skillshare.

 

Music: Bensound.com

• Introduction
• Class Overview
• Class Updates
• Animation Terminology
• The 12 Principles Of Animation
• Class Update: Keyframe Menu
• Ball Bounce: Simple Loop
• Ball Bounce: Settling
• Ball Bounce: Arcs
• Ball Bounce: Squash & Stretch
• Ball Bounce: Rotation
• Ball Bounce: Output
• Bird Bounce: Scene Setup
• Bird Bounce: Body
• Bird Bounce: Head
• Bird Bounce: Multiple Birds
• Class Update: Library Overrides
• Character Jump: Scene Setup
• Character Jump: Layout
• Character Jump: The First Pose
• Character Jump: Auto Key
• Character Jump: Anticipation
• Character Jump: Launch
• Character Jump: In Air Pose
• Character Jump: Refining Poses
• Character Jump: Landing
• Character Jump: Timing
• Character Jump: Fixing the Eyes
• Character Jump: Breakdowns
• Character Jump: The Graph Editor
• Character Jump: The Arms
• Character Jump: Fixing Glitches
• Character Jump: Soften the Turn
• Character Jump: Moving Hold
• Character Jump: Eyes & Brows
• Character Jump: Mouth
• Character Jump: Hair on Jump
• Character Jump: Hair on Turn
• Character Jump: Hat Animation
• Character Jump: Material Preview
• Class Update: Rendering in Cycles
• Character Jump: Lighting & Render
• Final Thoughts