Blenderole

The biggest difference Blender bones have is that each bone is not one object. One armature is actually made up of ‘N’ bones. When you link the mesh to a skeleton you use just one armature. And you don’t do that with a skinning modifier, but with an armature modifier where you specify which armature the mesh is connected to.

Another difference is that the envelopes are set on the bones, not on the meshe’s armature modifier. You use normal scale (’S’ hotkey) to scale the sizes of the enveloopes. ALT+S though scales the falloff ratio of the envelope.

Where to find weight paint.

Painting weight is just like any other software. But instead is done on the mesh object. It’s better to have already an applied armature, then simply go to Weight Paint, like on the picter. There will be one more panel with the configuration for the brush. You can also hit ‘W’ to have the envelopes applied to the weights and go on from there.

Quickest procedure to create a chain of bones:

. Space, Add, Armature;

. Position this one bone over the length you want the chain to cover;

. Go to Edit mode (either through the UI or the with TAB)

. Press W to subdivide the bone into many others.

You can also add bones by going to Edit mode, pressing space, then Add/Bone. They will be on different hierarchies, if you want to add one bone to another chain, select both and press CTRL+P.

If you ever need to place the 3d cursor over at an exact coordinate:

Quite usefull if you need to get the pivot point of an object somewhere.

Ok, so the toon material on Blender is far from featured. It supports just two colors and a specular, where elsewhere you can get a wide variety of control over the shades. It can have edges for the shades, but you don’t have much control about their shape or size. But you can get something like this:

Hafunui, at blenderartists.org, posted an internesting workaround of the shading limitations using the ramp. I will use this to give a quick tour on the material editor:

. Preview: the usual preview. Trust this as much as you trust the preview from any other 3d software. (which is, not much).

. Links and Pipeline: technical stuff (will update this later), but you can see the object linked to a “nose” object.

. Ramps: the ramp shader. the trick here, for the toon shader, is using the third colorband next to the one before, which has the same value as the first. the material tab has settings for a plain color only.

. Shaders: actual shaders. here’s where you could find the toon shader (used, with 0 on all channels, on the specular)

The way you work with shaders in Blender is to choose them on the shaders tab, tweak the settings and material colors, and that’s it. Besides that you have a node system underneath everything where you can make much more interesting materials. This topic might be covered again on this blog but much more in the future.

Now it begins to get confused. There’s no way to move freely the pivont point (the pink dot) of an object, with a gizmo for example. You have to position first the 3d cursor to your liking then center the pivot to the 3d cursor. PLUS, sometimes the pivot is called “object’s origin”.

Extremely essential to this, thus, is snapping. Done through SHIFT+S. Options are clearly self-explanatory, but you have to understand what you are moving (Cursor to Selection means moving the 3d cursor to what you have currently selected, a vertex for example). After you’ve placed the cursor where you want the object’s origin to be, you use one of the following buttons:

Fortunately, you don’t have to go through all this when you want to just rotate/scale an object with a different pivot. On the pivot mode options, bellow, you can quickly change which pivot point to use:

References used for this post are:

Blender Underground post by penix1 with an in-depth explanation of Blender Objects Origin
2min video tutorial from Josh (3DMacDaddy)

All this is usefull if you are going to use Mirror, because it mirrors on the object’s origin point.

And if you want to rotate the pivot, you actually have to use a script named Object/Scripts/Axis Orientation Copy.