For our first week’s homework task, we tried to create and animate a snowman. It took me aback at first how quickly we were jumping into not only creating a full character and environment, but also rigging and animating them. However, thankfully, going step by step, it was actually much easier than expected!
At the end of the day, a snowman is made of pretty basic shapes. I created some spheres, and put them on top of each other. For the eyes, mouth and buttons, I decided to make the spheres a little asymmetrical to make them seem a bit more natural!
As for the nose, I created a cone and stretched it out, rotated it and put it on his face! I also experimented around in sculpting mode and accidentally gave the nose this kind of texture, but kept it because I figured it made it look a little more like a carrot.
Next I gave him some arms and hands! These are basically made of a bunch of cylinders too; one for the upper arm, one for the forearm, one for the hand and three for each finger. Then it was just a case of duplication and positioning them on either side! I was slowly getting more comfortable with positioning things in Blender after the table and chairs exercise, so this was easy enough to do.
And, of course, the top hat! Again, more cylinders – one for the main hat part, and a flatter one for the edge of it. I also decided to tilt it slightly on the head to make it look a little more natural, and then the model was done!
But of course, it wasn’t done completely – I went into material preview mode and started adding some colours! I also learnt a tiny bit about how to give materials different kinds of textures. I generally stuck to making things rather rough and I think this gave off quite a pleasant look, I think the colours I used weren’t too saturated and the snowman generally looks pleasant. In the second image here, I was just experimenting around with making things shinier, I didn’t keep that level of shine for the hat – I did, however, add a little bit of shine to the eyes, mouth and buttons, which I think ended up looking quite good!
Now, of course, I had to face the animating part. I have done 2D animations before, but I had never done any 3D animation at ALL up to this point. This entire class has taught me about things that I previously didn’t know anything at all about. Because of this, I was a little worried for how it would go, but thankfully I actually managed to complete the animation with minimal difficulty!
… for the most part, anyways ..
But in all seriousness, it actually wasn’t as difficult to get the hang of as I’d anticipated! In some ways, I think that I found 3D animation to actually be a lot more effective, as Blender sort of helps you out a bit and does some of the work for you. You of course still need to have an understanding of how animation works and set the correct keyframes, but it’s very nice that you don’t need to set keys for every single frame. Personally I would be most familiar with 2D hand-drawn animation, so I’m used to having to draw almost every single frame, so it was relieving to not have to lay out a frame every single time – in fact, I think if I had attempted that, it would have been much clunkier than the way that I did it here.
Another thing that I decided to do with my snowman is create a little environment to be in! I learnt about how the camera works and how to position it just right where you want it, as well as learning to link it to and empty which it can follow, which I decided to do! I parented the empty to the snowman, so that as the snowman swayed side to side, so did the camera. I find it really interesting and really quite handy how in 3D animation, you can create the actual animation part, but then change the camera settings in the way that you want, move things around if needs be, add things as you go along etc. It was really such a different approach to animating that I had never experienced before and I really enjoyed it!
I had a little trouble with the lighting at first as my Blender was being a bit iffy in general, but eventually I got it to work and decided to go with some relatively cool, darkish lighting to give off more of a wintery feel. As for the enivironment, I created some mounds of snow as well as some trees! I decided to create the trees from a set of four cones progressively getting smaller as they go along, and decided to colour them all slightly differently, with the darkest colour being at the bottom and the lightest one being at the top!
Overall, I’m very happy with how my scene turned out, and I’m very excited to work more in this program, experiment around and learn more techniques as I become more familiar with it!
Finally, here is my final animation for my snowman, swaying side to side and lifting up his hat for a brief moment before returning to his starting position.