Beer Fan animation
The Club de Animación is an uruguayan site pretty similar to the old 10 Seconds Club, and this month they presented a challenge in homage to John Lasseter: to animate an ordinary object using “You got a friend in me” as audio track. No eyes, no mouth, no nothing, only the object. I thought it was quite a challenge to give personality to a character only using limited resources. So I got in :-)I took one of these rare sundays when I have nothing else to do and modelled a beer mug, put some bones in it and started animating. It was quite fun I must say !. You can watch what I made downloading from here (warning to Windows users, not all players support FFMPEG DivX) or you can watch a low quality version at YouTube .
Regarding textures and fancy stuff: there isn’t any here. The whole thing about this was concentrating in animation. VenomGFX and Iván taught me how to use the Blender compo nodes to make a regular Vector Blur (what would I do without them!). I made the rig twice, first using only lattices but I couldn’t get a squash effect with it (because of a mistake I discovered later), and the second one using regular armature deformation. Only after redoing the whole thing I found my mistake abd why I couldn’t make the squash with lattices but it was too late !
With new features as Heat Equilibrium for skinning, and Double Quaternion (recently added in SVN) deformations are almost as smooth as a lattice.
In this screenshot you can see the control part of the rig (mainly a single IK chain) in action plus some features from our tailored “PlumiBlender” that we will soon put online at Plumiferos’ site for you to enjoy.
The animation itself still needs some work in some parts, I probably ended it one of those rare sundays 