Welcome to the first video of the Character Animation Series! Hopefully by the end of this series you will have the skills to create your own character animations! Be it for film, games or even just for YouTube, this series will help you gain the essential skills without having to fork out thousands of dollars for animation courses. Of course if you do want to become a PRO animator one day then paid courses would be a good idea but for the rest of us that just need to know how to do create relatively believable character animation in Blender, this course would be quite valuable! I guess one way you could pay me is to SUBSCRIBE to my YouTube channel! Will be MUCH appreciated! This motivates me to keep making more video tutorials and blog posts. This series may also benefit myself as I will also learn a few things along the way and will be happy to share it with you guys!
The 12 Principles of Character Animation
Before we dive in and open up Blender with your character rig ready, we need to learn the essentials first. So no Blender for this tutorial, just some *(hopefully not boring)* theory stuff. The 12 Principles of Character Animation are really important and although it was made for 2D hand-drawn animation back in the days of Disney (back in the days where cartoons were all the rage), these principles also work beautifully for 3D characters in Blender. Learning these principles will help you create REALISTIC and APPEALING Character Animation. By using these principles in your own character work in Blender, you will very likely have really good looking animation that doesn’t make people cringe. So in this video, we are going to learn those 12 Principles!
Here are the 12 Principles just to recap:
- Squash and Stretch
- Anticipation
- Staging
- Straight-Ahead/Pose 2 Pose
- Follow Through/Overlapping Action
- Slow In and Outs
- Arcs
- Secondary Action
- Timing
- Exaggeration
- Solid Drawing
- Appeal
Thankfully, Solid Drawing and Appeal won’t really feature in our work. You could say those principles are more on the Character Modeling and Development side which we won’t cover in this series. So in essence, we have 10 Principles of Character Animation in Blender!
