Audiovisual Project 4: Animated Character

In this project you will be animating a character in Blender to do a dance using an online motion capture libary called Mixamo. This process will get you started making cool stuff quickly!

4.0 Basics of Blender

If you have never used Blender before it can be a bit intimidating at first. In this tutorial we are only going to be going over the animation and video making side of the software rather than the modelling side. If you are interested in modelling for your project check out the Learning 3D Modelling page. This tutorial is part of a series but in this project we are only interested in the skills in the first tutorial.

4.1 Setting up a project in Blender

Start off by saving your project. You will want to make a folder called "Blender" within your file management system. You can create a new folder by clicking the create new directory button in the top left of the saving menu. Save your new blend file as "project_4_dancing_character.blend"

4.2 Adding some sweet music

As you are going to make a dancing character the first stage is to get some good music for your character to dance to. We are going to use some creative commons music that we can freely use without infringing on someone else's mana. This is a good idea as it shows kiatiakitanga towards being responsible digital citizens. A great source of high quality audio is Pixabay so quickly choose a song from there.

4.3 Downloading Assets from Miximo and adding them to Blender

Lets go find a character and get them moving. Rather than making one ourselves we are going to use some from Mixamo an online libary of characters that have been rigged and animated for you using motion capture.

Make an Adobe account if you don't already have one
Choose a cool character to animate.
Choose some cool moves that you want to stitch together using the tutorial video.

4.4 Adding Background Objects and a Skybox

Lets get that character out of the grey void. We are going to get some background objects to put in our scene. A great source of Public Domain 3D assets is Kenney. Which can be easily imported into blender using these instructions.

Lets also add a Skybox which is super easy by downloading a texture from PolyHaven and following the very short tutorial.

4.5 Adding Lighting

Lets add some interesting lighting now! You can change the colour and intensity of your lights. If your feeling super into lighting you could even do some animation to make flashing lights or rainbow effects.

4.6 Moving the Camera

Finally we are going to make a dynamic camera maybe with some zooming in and out or swapping between a couple of active cameras! Even better if you are able to sync some of the camera movements with the music.

Basics of Humanoid Modelling and Rigging

Modelling and rigging characters is a huge topic. In fact its so big that if you are interested in this you should really do our Modeling Course instead. But below are some of the basics if you want to give it a go.

Basics of 3D Modeling

Rigging Characters

Learning Reflection

Now make a copy of this document and fill out a learning reflection.

Teachers: You may want to assign this as a task and have students hand it in when they are done.

Tutorial Learning Reflection

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