Animating a book opening

#1

Hello everyone, I was wondering if anyone had any advice on what the best approach would be to animate a book opening. I’m new to animations and tried some stuff with blendshapes, but it distorts the geometry of the book too much for my liking.
Any advice?
Andrew

#2

Perhaps you can create a rig with joints and skin/weight the pages (thin cubes or planes) like you would with a character. You can then create a character set and manipulate each page easily. Or you might be able to take a more creative approach with Bend Deformers and Set Driven Keys. All you would have to do is make sure your pages have enough divisions along the proper axis (so that the pages bend properly) and place your pivot point at the correct end of each page. I haven’t made something like this in Maya but I did create a similar “book rig” with C4D a while back. I’d be happy to share the rig for C4D if you’d like.

Hope this at least gives you some ideas.

#3

I created this years ago in 3DS Max:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkquVU1lyJA

To open the book itself, I used bones to drive the cover (the green part).
For the pages that do not flip, so the purple mesh that opens with the cover, I used an animated FFD modifier and a lot of segments.
For the flipping pages, I used a plane, also with a lot of segments, and a bend modifier.

It has been a few years, this is what I can recall from it. As you can see it has some flaws because the pages are crossing each other at the start of the animation. But I hope it helps.

#4

I imagine skin binding joints to a curve could give you a pretty nice control for the pages. I am pretty sure I saw some book rigs before they shouldn’t be hard to find (they were a random internet find)

#5

Just buy http://nitro4d.com/blog/donationware/nitrobookcase/

it will save you a bunch of time.

I´ve rigged a book before and it take some time and if you have a lot of pages its tricky to avoid intersection.

#6

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.