petunia robot

Petunia the little monkey robot

These pages explain how you can animate the Petunia robot model.

There are three pages to read
(if you're an experienced animator you may not have to).
petunia robot This page (shows some general things about the file and editing/animating)
petunias bones (shows you how to use all normal bones in the model)
perunias specials (shows you how to use all those pretty orange things)

You may not be aware... but Petunia is actually a boy robot!

Perhaps not the very happiest boy robot ever, but then you can't blame him, someone (yes Asbestos... you!) called him Petunia after all.

You can download Petunia by himself in a .blend file here: Petunia.blend

Background

I made the model for the 2007 Blender Conference Suzanne Awards. But since I am putting the model online for anyone to use for whatever they want this page will concentrate on the model by himself.

If you use the model please do link to this page or give some sort of credit to me or this website.

If you want to join in and help us out animating read this thread at the blenderartists forums if you haven't already!

Requirements

The rigg uses some constraints that need a version of blender newer than 2.44 .
Also I have set up the default lighting to use Matt's new soft shadow casting sun lamp code.

You will need an svn build or something newer than 2.45!!!

If you are unsure what blender version to use... this one works for windows

TIP: Use the timeline recording option mentioned below! That's really the easiest way to animate this bot!

The easiest way to test if your version of blender will work is by selecting the hand shaped orange thing above Petunia... make it bigger and see if anything happened to Petunia's hands. They should do something!

What you can find in the Petunia.blend file

All data is distributed over layers to make things simpler.

On layer one you can find a camera and a sun lamp.
On layer two are all the mesh objects that make up the robot.
On layer three is petunia's armature.

But the armature has layers too!

I distributed the bones of the armature over sepparate armature layers so they're easier to find.

On layer one you can find all the "normal bones" that you can simply move around (more about these later).

On layer two are the "special bones" these are normal armature bones but they have all got "custom bone shapes" that help you understand what they do (more on these later as well)

On layers three and four are bones that either help other bones or are parts of chains.
You do not need to animate these at all! Only use layer one and two!

Use your widgets!

I have done my best to make it so that you can only do what you should be able to do.
So a lot of things have been locked. Some bones can be resized only, some only rotated in a certain direction.

You want to use widgets because they allow you to see exactly what you "can" do.
In this case you can only see the rotation widget handles (the round coloured lines), but not the handles for moving and resizing.

You also want to use normal orientation so that the bone only ever rotates around it's own axis and not the view or something else that won't work.

You can also see that this bone's rotation is limited.
That is what the little shape at the tip of the bone depicts. So you can't rotate it completely freely.

Recording animations

The very simplest way to record animations is by doing so automaticly.

Simply open a timeline window, press record and start moving around the armature.
It will automaticly record all your edits. (I did edit this image a bit... normally the record button is further to the right)

So whilst recoring just switch between frames and move things around.