Tutorial 1: Creating the gingerbread man

The gingerbread man creating tutorial was pretty easy. Once you get used to the most used shortcuts in Blender, modelling itself is easy. However, if one is used to a tool like AC3d, it is frustrating when the modifiers one is so used to in that tool, take a lot of time to find.

Also, it was a nice time to play with materials and textures.

Tutorial 2: Rigging Gus and animating simple motion.

Frankly, it is here that it hit me...that motion is so dam easy with a skeleton.Making the armature is quite easy, if one knows what are the kinds of actions we would require of the character.

There are ample of ways one can mess it up though. :)

I messed up in the first try, when I ended up renaming a vertice group in its window, overwriting the earlier one. I still dont know what happened there. But I leart quite a few lessons experimenting on Gus.

Tutorial 3: Introduction to character animation.

This is one I referred to endlessly during the entire project. There are so many tips here which can ease things ini life for one (and mess it up too, if you happened to miss the important line).

I tried out the modelling of the head of the character....it came out kinda ok. However, the rigging I tried out on Gus. This tut orial was important for understanding the relationships of various bones in armature depending upon the parameters.

The Action editor piece needs more examples, in order to make us think of the various kings of mixing possible.

Tutorial 4: IPO Curve Editor

A very basic tutorial...should be linked in the basic wiki manual. (is it already?)

I found the curve editor a nice interface- helps us control the interpolatoin, which otherwise would be a tough job for some scenes. I used it quite a few times, during my animation, to control the falloff rate of curves. Doing this purely by keyframes - takes 10 times the effort.

Comments:

It would be nice to cover a tutorial on lighting and reflections (shading). While it is not strictly animation, it would point out the importance of using approriate lighting while animating, at an early stage. Especially a tutorial which deals with a variety of object textures and the effect of lighting on them, and the role of those tens of parameters.