T0886 - Blender DVD Training The ManCandy FAQ

The 3D character ManCandy has been created by Bassam Kurdali for testing and teaching animation techniques. Over the past year it has become a wonderfully flexible character, deserving to become the first of the titles in the Open Movie Workshop series.

The ManCandy FAQ is a collection of animations and video tutorials for rigging and animating with ManCandy. The animations are in question and answer format (hence the title) and are intended to be a fun way of documenting the rig.

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The video tutorials are a little more serious, and are divided into animation and rigging topics. Animation tutorials cover setting up files and linking, animating an arm motion in FK, doing a cartoony take and walkcycles. Rigging topics are arranged according to the parts of ManCandy's body - there are sections for the hands, torso, face, legs, etc.

While this is not a basic rigging tutorial (viewers should have a basic knowledge of the Blender interface and the bare minimum of armatures and animation ) there is a basics/primer tutorial that quickly goes through blender rigging and animation features, such as lattices, armatures, weight painting, etc.

There is also a short bonus rigging breakdown tutorial on a simple surprise character (not ManCandy.)

The information presented overall captures most of the Elephants Dream production rigs with many improvements that were aimed at assisting the Plumiferos project.

The DVD includes an HTML interface that itself contains some written tutorial/reference material, a collection of videos (Animations in 640x480 resolution, Tutorials in 1024x768 resolution), the ManCandy 2.0 blend file, the mystery character blend file, all the blend files for the animations on the DVDs, and of course some helper blend files for the tutorials.