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View Full Version : advice on animating Letters

amannin
04-06-2006, 04:30 AM
I want to animate the letters "BLINKit" -- perhaps either falling from above or boucing around (coming from the sides) and bounce into place... I say bouncing, because they won't have legs, but i want them to seem to have character. This first letter "I" will have eyes, and will blink twice, once all the letters are in place...

what would be the best way to go about this? make the letters, then setup a simple 2 or 3 bone skeleton? or animate them with, deformers? lattices?

i don't really need a walk-through, just point me in the right direction --- unless you should mention something i'm not familiar with, then i might ask... (whichever is easiest and yeilds better results)

thanks
Robken
04-06-2006, 11:21 AM
lattices will work fine for that, yeh.

but also, have a look at the squash deformer, it's a very powerful tool that isn't used enough imo :)
amannin
04-06-2006, 04:51 PM
i'm just curious, but is that how people would normally do this (with lattices)? or is it really just personal preference...?

any yah, i'll give the squash deformer a shot --- been playing around with it lately.

thanks
Dialector
04-11-2006, 10:10 AM
My preference is to use a variety of deformers on standard "create text" letters to make a set of blendshapes for each letter. Its a little more work upfront, but once Im animating I just find it easier to work with the blendshapes.
jdonnelly
04-13-2006, 06:59 PM
Personally, I'd say use a variety of deformers that are parented to each letter and skip the whole blendshape process. That way instead of trying to plan for the various blendshapes you may need, you can just animate the attributes of each deformer to get a more exact animation.
Any of the above ideas are good, it just depends on how complex you want it to be.
amannin
04-14-2006, 08:03 AM
I think a squash & bend deformer will be all I need --- thanks for the input...
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