Week 2 – 3D Animation

This week in class, we started to tackle doing some more animation in Blender.

This time, we were given a ball that had some controls attached to it which we could animate in pose mode.

There wasn’t any class videos to follow along to, so I missed a few details and struggled a bit, however I was able to get at least a bit of movement with the ball. I wasn’t too happy though as it looked a bit unnatural.

However, what using these controls in pose mode gave was some tools to make animating a little easier.

I made a second attempt of animating this ball later at home, and after watching the lecture recording back, I realised that I made the mistake of moving the ball itself rather than the controls attached to it.

The red control was to be used for location and scaling, and the green was to be used for rotation.

I went a little overboard with the animation and it isn’t entirely perfect, however I was overall pretty pleased with how it had turned out, and I think it was definitely some good practice.
The separation of the tools for location/scale and rotation made squash & stretch and rolling a lot easier to animate, as when I rolled the ball I didn’t need to worry about it squashing & stretching sideways.

I’m not sure why but when I went into render mode, the background was filled with these sort of squares.

Here is the finished animation:

These squares clearly translated over into a pitch-black background, although I’m not sure why.

However, in class after trying out the ball exercise I also tried the exercise to make the pendulum swing. I didn’t really have to redo this at home, as I liked how it had turned out in class!

What really helped with this exercise was selecting each of the rotating points and setting the rotation to be around the individual origins, so if I rotated all of them together, all of them would rotate rather than just the parent.

At first I accidentally made the rotation a bit wonky because I forgot to work in orthographic mode, so I had to redo some of the movement, but hopefully I hadn’t done too much by the point when I realised.

First I just set out basic keyframes of the pendulum arms swinging back and forth.

However, as you can see, although the animation looked pretty good, there was still a bit of a sense of stiffness to it.

So to solve that, what I did was move the keyframes for the individual parts of the pendulum to the side, so that they should follow with the action a little bit later.

And as you can see, that made it look far more natural! I’m really happy with how it turned out.

Honestly, this exercise was a lot of fun to do and generally felt pretty intuitive. I think there could maybe be some improvement done in the animation, but that also just comes with time and experience.

Moving on from those exercises, however, after the lunch break we got into our groups and started talking some more about our group project.

I decided to bring in some figurines that I have that could possibly fit into the project, as we were thinking of basing the project around a DnD game. So I thought some of these fantasy figures could help as inspiration or reference.

I started sketching out some ideas based on these, thinking that maybe I could make a phoenix type character, or some other kind of animal with the look of a board piece.

I also had the idea of maybe making a sort of bee soldier character, who could multitask using his different arms.

I especially liked this figurine, and thought that I could draw some inspiration from it to create some kind of creature type character.

I felt inspired and thought they could make a good character, so this was what I drew up about them, just kind of trying to get a sense of how I’d like them drawn. I thought it would be kind of funny to have a small animal character be a bard who carries a massive tuba way bigger than itself, however it was just an idea and I wasn’t fully set on it yet.

Between this class and the next, however, we had to prepare a short presentation for our class to get everyone up to speed on how our work was coming along and the progress we had made, so I did some more work leading up to then.

The basic jist of our story so far was that these characters were board pieces in a board game, which would get revealed later. They would be exploring a dungeon, which would contain some traps in it, like an Indiana Jones kind of environment. A pressure plate would be triggered causing a massive ball to roll at them, and one of the characters would get knocked over.
Thinking back to what I was taught in other module, I figured it might be better to have there be an actual reason to why one of the characters fell over, and I figured a good reason might be if it was my bard character whose instrument fell off them and instinctively, they went to grab it, which would lead to them getting knocked over by the ball.

                         

Therefore, I thought maybe a more typical guitar-like instrument may be a little easier to model, as well as animate. I looked up “medieval guitar” and found the instrument called a bouzouki, an instrument coming from Greek culture, which also had an Irish variant. I thought that this would definitely suit my character and so I decided to give him a bouzouki to play.

The reason I drew him with such a long cloak was because our animation isn’t supposed to feature any legs, as animating legs would be a little bit too complicated for our level at this point.

However, I generally really liked this design and how it was turning out! I thought he looked pretty cute but also wise in a way.

I really enjoyed designing and drawing this character a lot, and I gave him the name “Clarence” as I felt it fit. I made him a casual but wise traveller sort of character.

I also sketched out another potential character, who could possibly be a sort of angry mage. I really liked how the sketch turned out, but generally I drew more for Clarence as I was happier with his design, and generally more attached to him. The idea of him losing the instrument leading to him getting knocked over also appealed to me as I felt it would make sense story-wise. However I did put this guy into my presentation slides as a potential character and to show development.

Finally, I drew out some storyboard ideas for how I visualised the story progressing.

First, the group approaches the cave and walks around for a while before they encounter a swarm of bats, which they have to run away from.

They finally get away and rest in this little area for a while. The bard rests their back on the wall, accidentally pushing a pressure plate which makes the giant ball start rolling towards them.

They’re running away until the bard loses his instrument in the escape, reaching out for it before getting knocked away by the ball. Finally, it’s revealed that all of the characters were actually just pieces on a board in a board game.

We discussed a few things among our group such as what kind of board pieces to make the characters as we were still figuring that out, however for the time being we just created our own storyboards to put forward our own ideas that we would get feedback on during the presentation.

We decided to call the project “Dicey Dungeon” as a reference to the DnD inspiration, and we worked on our presentation together using Google Slides.

This is the slide where I put all my character design work into! During the presentation I would talk about the inspiration for my character as well as its development process. I also put in my storyboards as separate slides as well.