Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook

Glory for your team: kicking the ball

Another common animation exercise to understand body mechanics involves your character kicking a soccer ball. It includes anticipating the action, the actual kick, and the follow-through movements.

As with all other animation shots, you should look for video references on the Internet or even record yourself performing the action. Then you should make quick sketches on the best ideas for poses prior to moving controllers around.

How to do it...

1. Open the file 008-BallKick.blend. It has our character Otto properly dressed as a soccer player with a ball in front of him. It also has a camera set for this action, from which we see the objects in 3D view as default, as pictured in the following screenshot:

   During the ...