Animating with Blender

“Automatic” Motion: Breathing and Blinking

Depending on how you have built your rig, a simple breathing effect can often be achieved by slightly scaling a chest control bone. As long as nothing is going on that will alter your character’s breathing pattern in a shot (speaking, breaking into a run), you can keyframe a simple shrink and grow of the bone. Selecting that bone’s channel in the Action Editor, as in Figure 11.37, and changing its Extend Mode to Cyclic in the Key menu on the header will cause the animation in that channel to repeat indefinitely throughout the timeline. This technique was used to make the dogs breathe and pant throughout The Beast.

Figure 11.37. Setting the chest bone’s breath keys to Cyclic Extend mode

When keying ...