Building Our Heroine: Rintiala from Watercolor Sketches to 3d Animation

This is the first time I've written a computer graphics tutorial, and I'm going to take the perspective of an accomplished visual artist starting from traditional media--in this case watercolors and pencils--and move into the daunting realm of 3d graphics.

Most of the necessary illustrations can be viewed at:

http://www.nuegua.ca/images/characters/index.html

Okay, it's almost a year later, but I've stayed on it. I now have a working knowledge of armature rigging and weight painting. There's lots to learn yet, but it seems that the most practical way to use Blender to animate a character is to: (1) create the mesh first, (2) build the armature and add it to the mesh as a modifier; (3) run the animation, and add shape keys to correct mesh deformations.

With a mesh as complex, and subtle, as a MakeHuman, the shape keys are the real trick here.

So, I'm going to start with this first animation of Rintiala in her Dreaming Body of Water Woman.


You'll notice that the rig doesn't have any fingers (phalanges) or toes (tarsals) yet. I'm primarily interested in the mesh deformation problems. Since I haven't set any constraints on
leg and arm motion yet, I can discover just how bad it be with simple weight painting.

You can download the .blend file from:

http://www.geekopolis.ca/blender/rintiala1.blend

So, let's see what a quick set-up animation looks like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP48td6qhgg

The first thing I learned: don't paint a single vertex more than necessary.

Next problem: Shape Keying (Morph Targeting).

And here's the solution. I had to separate out the top and bottom Dentures, so that create the Preston Blair/Gary C. Martin visemes would be doable.

Okay, it's February 15 2010, and everything has changed, except the nature and goals of my heroine. Makehuman is now on Alpha 4 of Version 1.0 and fully rigged, and shape keyed. So we're going to start from there.

Make sure to download a nightly build from http://www.makehuman.org and
then you'll be able to see what you'll need for your creation. For example, I'm using Blender 2.49b hair, but the Makehuman mesh makes more sense for medium-to-low resolution models.