After our winter break, we started on one of our new modules, Animated Narratives. We learnt a little bit about the template that a lot of stories, included animated stories, follow; the hero’s journey.
This graph is used to demonstrate the different parts of the journey, and how this template works.
Stage X is the first stage, the beginning where the main driving force of the story gets established, i.e. the call for adventure.
Stage Y is the second stage, where the hero faces some kind or trial or challenge and develops as a character.
And finally, Stage Z is the final stage where everything comes together, and the story resolves.
As a storytelling exercise, in class we were put into small temporary groups, given some dice and based on the pictures we rolled, we were to create a short story concept.
We misunderstood at first and only rolled three dice, which were a scientist, crater and robot, and we thought up the concept of a massive comet or star coming down to earth and the scientist having some drive to explore it, and either finding robots in the crater, or creating them to explore, or fight a danger in the crater.
When we realised that we were supposed to roll more, we decided to add onto this story.
The danger in the crater ended up being dinosaurs from space, and the call for adventure (stage x) ended up being the fact that these dinosaurs were rampaging all over the place. The scientist set out to fight them, creating robots to help fight against the danger (stage y). However, he ends up making friends with some of the dinosaurs and creates a communication device, and it turns out that the dinosaurs were only rampaging around because they were scared and confused, and after communicating with them they were able to make peace and everything gets resolved (stage z).
I was asked to present the story to the class. I was very nervous and accidentally started speaking before it was my turn the second the teacher looked at me but, it ended up working out. Even though it’s terrifying, the opportunities to present in front of the class in the course have been helping me a bit with my stage fright, which has been very helpful. I think it’s a useful skill to build for if I’m ever presenting my ideas in front of my colleagues in a work environment.
After a small break, we got into separate groups that we would continue to work in for the rest of the module, and began to brainstorm ideas for the theme of our assignment, “escape”.
I decided to create a share board for us to draw on, which you can view here: https://magma.com/d/LZeG5QPBmk
We needed to make sure that what we made didn’t have legs, as it’s stated in our assignment outline, likely because it needs to be a 3D animation and walk cycles etc might be too complicated for us right now. We were thinking of possibly incorporating some horror themes, as the horror genre often centres around having to escape from somewhere, or not being able to escape.
It was really fun just doodling together while we talked about different ideas!
I thought up that skateboard robot design, with the head shape like that to convey that it’s a character that’s more aerodynamic – it doesn’t have legs, only a skateboard body.
The idea we ended up going with, though, is Eoin’s, which had to do with a board game of an escape room, and one of the pieces at some point falling over and seeing the real people playing the board game and realising it’s living in a false reality – the escape theme is not only in the board game itself, but also with the board piece escaping the reality it was immersed in.
We created a group chat and throughout the next week, we worked on expanding our ideas for the world.
Chloë made a Pinterest board for us to collect ideas for the assignment that we were going to work on.
Even though this was in the other module, I wanted to keep the writing technique that I learnt there in mind – don’t use “and”, use “therefore and but”, meaning that everything in a story happens for a reason, instead of happening just out of nowhere. This helps a story flow coherently and helps it be more enjoyable, and more satisfying.
The “World of Animation” module does not require a blog for it, but it also helps with this module as we are also looking at writing techniques there.
Other than just continuing with our groupwork, though, we were also set some 3D animation homework to complete this week.
First, we were given some simple exercises to move a cube in Blender, and opening up the graph editor at the side and a dope sheet or timeline below helped with that.
I was already familiar with some basics back when we did a little bit on animation in my 3D Digital Literacy Module, but this time I was learning how to actually use the graph editor. For example, by pressing T I could change the graph type, for example to linear, so that the speed of this cube’s movement would be constant, as opposed to the slightly interpolated movement that Blender automatically gives otherwise.
When you duplicate an animated object in Blender, its keyframes will automatically duplicate over as well.
However, for the second cube, we messed with the graph settings in order to change its timing. I pressed A to select all the points, and pressed V and selected “free” so that I could freely move the handles for the points without it affecting the other points.
I adjusted the graph to look like this, which caused the movement of the cube to be initially quick, but slow down and ease in as it moved from one point to the other.
Before doing the last cube’s animation I pressed T on the graph editor and changed it to “constant” to see how it works. Because of this graph type having very sudden changes in it, it means that the cube won’t even move, just simply appear in the other location, when the points change.
However, for the last exercise I went back to a Bezier curve graph, and decided to also add some squash and stretch to the cube. I did this by stretching the cube in the middle of the animation, and thanks to the Bezier curve this stretch was gradual enough that it worked.
This was a decent exercise to introduce me to 3D animation in Blender, but then I moved onto doing the next task: animating a bouncing ball.
I created a plane as well as a sphere which I shaded smooth. I moved its origin down to the bottom to make it easier to squash and stretch later.
I brought up the graph editor at the side, and the dope sheet at the bottom.
I started moving the ball up and down, and adding keyframes by pressing I and then Location. As I did that, the frames started showing up not only on the dope sheet, but also the graph editor at the side, which is a visual representation of the timing.
It took a little while to get it to look fairly natural, but after I stopped trying to be a massive perfectionist about it, I got something I was pretty happy with.
Thankfully, after pressing A on the graph editor to select all the frames, and pressing V and setting the points to “Free”, I adjusted the handles on the graph editor to change its shape, and the ball bounce started to look a lot more natural!
For comparison, I duplicated the ball I had animated and put it to the side, and reverted to the original look of the graph be selecting all the keyframes with A, pressing V and selecting “Auto Clamped”.
After doing that, the difference in timing of the two balls was very clear, with the one whose graph I had edited looking a lot more natural.
I was able to hide the Z Location keyframes on my graph editor, and insert Y keyframes by moving the ball and right clicking on the Y axis on the side and pressing “Insert Single Keyframe”. To my surprise, I only had to do this twice for the animation to work! However, I did add an extra keyframe at the end to help the movement ease out, and it ended up working very well.
The animation rendered as an mkv file so I screen recorded it on OBS with an mp4 output so that I could put it in this blog. I’m relatively happy with how it came out!
I wasn’t done, though, because for my homework I also had to animate a heavy ball, a regular ball and a light ball, in order to practice different timings.
For the heavy ball I imagined a bowling ball, and it took a lot of tries before I had something I was happy with, but eventually I got it.
Now, all was left was to move it across the plane, so I repeated the steps from before.
As I was trying to imitate a bowling ball, the distance that the ball moved was longer than I had originally anticipated, so I decided I would need a longer floor for the ball to roll on. I moved the origin of the plane to the far left, so that I could easily extrude to the right in order to make the floor longer.
I was a tad more specific with the Y keyframes that I inserted and I really wanted the ball to look like it was actually being thrown. Manipulating the keyframes on the graph really helped, as by moving them on the graph you can actually move the position of the ball itself. I changed the Z keyframes slightly by keeping the ball in the air a little longer than I had originally set it to be.
I added some materials and extruded some holes in the ball to make it look a little more like a bowling ball. However, especially after adding the holes, I wanted to make the ball roll so that it would look more convincing.
In edit mode I pressed Shift S and pressed “cursor to selected”, and then in object mode went to object > set origin > origin to 3d cursor in order to get the origin in the middle of the ball.
I did this in an attempt to get the origin in the middle of the ball to make rotating easier, but it didn’t work. So instead I went to object > set cursor > origin to centre of mass (volume) and that ended up working better.
For the rotation, I simply put a rotation keyframe at the beginning and at the end of the animation. At first I thought 3 full rotations would suffice, but they seemed too slow so I did 5 instead and that worked much better.
I’m not sure if it was in the process of trying to set the rotation but I noticed that the ball had moved down and seemed to be rolling inside the floor. I fixed this simply by moving the Z keyframes up on the graph editor.
And finally, all that was left to do was set up the lighting and camera and render the animation.
For fun and for practice, I decided to animate a spotlight following the ball as it moves along the floor.
As well as that, I animated the camera moving and tracking the ball as well.
I adjusted the scene slightly by for example adding another light source, sun, to make the scene generally brighter and more visible, and also by adding an extra bit of roll and distance to the ball’s movement so that the holes in it would end up facing the camera.
Here is the finished result:
I’m super happy with how this turned out and it definitely gave me some good practice with animation in Blender!
Next, for the regular ball, I decided to animate a baseball.
I started off by creating a basic plane sort of area for the ball to bounce on.
I ended up extruding from this plane so that the walls and ground would be thicker, so that it would be easier to look at from the side in orthographic view when I was placing the ball in different positions for the keyframes.
I set basic positions for the ball, making it come from the side and then bounce off the wall and fly away.
Of course at this point the timing and the way that the ball moved looked unnatural, however I would adjust this later.
In the graph editor I changed the lines to vector lines, which of course made it look kind of stiff for the time being, but I found it to be a far easier bouncing off point (pun not intended).
I went in individually in the graph editor to the Y axis and Z axis. Doing things one by one made it far easier to make little tweaks. In the end I really like how it was turning out!
However, it still looked a tad off, but what helped was finally adjusting the X axis graph a little bit, and changing it from vector lines to automatic.
After that I was happy with the basic movements, so what was left was to make the ball and environment look a little more interesting and then add some details!
I decided to change this “baseball” into a tennis ball as I figured it made more sense, as tennis balls are generally bouncier.
Trying to create a tennis ball was a little awkward but I figured it would be a little easier than trying to recreate a baseball anyway.
I took a bezier curve, adjusted its depth and tried to align it along the ball as best as I could, with some help of snapping.
It was a little awkward trying to align it but eventually I had something.
I turned the curve into a mesh and joined the points from either side of the curve together.
I originally wanted to use the boolean modifier to cut out the shape into the ball, but I didn’t really end up liking how it looked.
I tried to realign the curve a little nicer, however at the end of the day I thought it might just look a little better to keep the curve on top of the ball anyway.
Although it looked a little messy, I stuck with this for the time-being as I didn’t want to spend too long on what was supposed to be an exercise.
Thankfully, it ended up looking decent! So all that was left other than adding some colour to the plane was to make the ball roll.
I didn’t go too crazy with the camera or lighting this time, but I’m really content with how it turned out!
These exercises definitely helped me become a lot more comfortable with animation in Blender, and with ball bounces and weight as well as the graph editor.