Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook

Chapter 8. Shake That Body: The Mechanics of Body Movement

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Animating a tennis serve
• Heavy metal (weight lifting)
• Glory for your team: kicking the ball
• Run, Forrest! (in cycles)

Introduction

The previous chapter was about some basic aspects of character animation, things you should learn and know by heart. With practice you'll notice that these principles will become second nature to you when you animate.

In fact, the next few recipes don't require much more than what we've already learned in the previous chapter: we're going to use what we've learned, and more than one principle at a time. We're going to apply what we know about timing, spacing, anticipation, asymmetric posing, squash-and-stretch, ...