My goal is to tinker with 52 small/weekend projects for 2015.

Basically at least one project per week, whether I feel like it or not.

The projects will be anything from tinkering with small electronics projects, computer animations, music, interesting hacks, mods or big weekend projects.
So, here's what I did over the weekend.

Type: Animation
Software: Blender
Platform: Ubuntu

Okay, kids. The first of my 52 projects is some tinkering in Blender 3D.

I modeled out a simple humanoid character in Blender 3D, then rigged it.

Blender 2.72 has a neat built-in rigging tool called rigify. This made the rigging process relativity painless. It supports Inverse Kinematics but it is a pretty basic rig. No facial controls or anything like that, which is why I modeled a character without a lot of facial features.

I could have animated manually but I wanted to test Blender's motion capture features.
I found some free motion capture files at http://www.cgspeed.com.

Adding the mocap data to the character was pretty simple. Blender did most of the work. I just had to make tweaks at points in the animations where the bones twisted in a weird way. I found this process relatively painless as well.
I posted the results on the Project 52 youtube channel.