When our environment was ready and all of our models for our 4 bunnies and fox had been finished we then started to split our shots between the group as equally as we could. The shots I got given to do was shots 1 +2 as well as shots 4 + 5 as I needed to take an extra shot as they didn’t divide equally amongst us all.
I chose to do all four shots as they came after each other so I knew that I could just create two separate blender files with the official environment in order to just animate the first two shots in one file and the second set of shots I had to do in another file which would definitely help for me to save time and ensure that the shots feel like they are fairly consistent with each other.
After choosing the shots I was going to work on I downloaded the environment file from our group One Drive and began work on animating the first shot of the animation. Our first shot was going to be a pan down shot to establish the environment our short would be taking part in which would then fade to show our main characters (The bunnies) inside the carpet where they are bouncing around and overall being peaceful and living their lives.
For the first pan down shot I wasn’t sure how I wanted the shot to move but I DID know that I wanted the camera to move towards the carpet to give the feel that we were entering the main world the short is set within. As a result of this I experimented with the panning of the camera through the room and rendered some of my attempts using the viewport render to show them my attempts and to allow them to pick what movement they liked the most for the first shot.
When I showed the renders of the camera movements to our group they all said that the “round the chair” movement seemed to be the most natural and overall best version and so that was the opening shot I decided to go with and then I moved to animating the second shot where the bunnies all show up for the first time in the short.
I tried to look at each of the bunnies personalities we seemed to construct for them over the course of production and then I tried to animate them accordingly to how I believe they may act if they were going about their normal day. I did however notice that on some of the bunnies there were constraints on some of the rigged bones for the bunnies, particularly in the ears which I found personally for me made it hard to make the bunnies very expressive in how they moved but I managed to work with what I had in the models to work with and my determination helped spur me on when it came to animating the bunnies. I also utilised the rigged strands of the carpet to make it look as thought Tiernan’s bunny Pompadour was pushing them aside to make his way into the main clearing area the other bunnies were.
I found it difficult mostly to animate Pompadour the bunny (The cream bunny) due to the restraints he had particularly on the bones in his ears which didn’t seem to have much freedom of movement in them but with enough stubbornness and working with what I could move on his model I finally managed to get his movement to look fluid enough and expressive enough to feel like he had come to life. Mint (The Green Bunny) and Bean (The Blue Bunny) both had little to no restraints on their bones which made it extremely easy to move them in ways that allowed for a variety of expressions, especially movement around Bean’s ears which both flop from his relaxation and then they are pushed back with the force of him hopping near the end of the clip, and the flopping up and down of Mint’s fringe added force to his hops which also made him feel much more life like.
After working with the second shot and getting it to a place which I was happy enough with I then moved onto doing shot 4 which I was hesitant at first of working on as Bailey who had claimed shot 3 hadn’t (and by the time of writing this [10/05/2023 17:04] hasn’t) finished animating so I was slightly worried about how the consistency would line up particularly within the location of the bunnies between shot 3 and shot 5 but I pushed on anyway to animate the other two shots.
Shot 4 I had to animate our fox Roomba trampling the carpet strands as it appears in front of the bunnies and I did struggling with animating the strands of the carpet in a way where you wouldn’t see the strands clipping through the fox as it travelled.
It did take a lot of tweaking and constantly watching the shot from the perspective of the camera to get the movement of the strands to happen quick enough that the clipping either didn’t happy or wasn’t visible enough to be a concern, but also to time the movements of the strands that they react in time to the movement of the fox as it would touch them. It took a lot of time to have these strands move in the best way possible and when I got the movement of them to a place that I was most happy with and had shown the lecturers the shot and got the go ahead that they thought the movement was fluid enough and worked well I moved onto Shot 5 where the bunnies would be reacting to the arrival of the fox to their carpet realm.
I knew I wanted the bunnies to turn at once and I wanted them to blink with surprise at the fact the fox seemed to come out of nowhere and when it came time to animate the shot Odhran who usually sat beside me during the class suggested that I increase the size of the bunnies to create a sense that they are jumping in surprise of their discovery.
During this shot I struggled big time with my own model Bean, who’s eye plane kept clipping into his body which I don’t know why it happened as his eyes were perfectly fine in the previous file I used for shots 1 + 2 but on this other blender file which was just a redownload of the original file his eye plane was acting up and I found myself needing to manually move the plane as I animated him because of this fact. That was the biggest issue I seemed to have for this shot, along with the eyes of Pompadour which became glitched while I was working with him and it took a long time for me to fix the eyes and figure out what was causing them to glitch out. In the end I still don’t really understand what happened to them but I ended up finding a solution to the issue by changing the keyframe number of the eyes from the start of the sequence to the end of the sequence which seemed to fix the issue I was having.
Once all of my shots were finished I then went into the one drive and go the lighting we had agreed to use which Teirnan had created for us to use since we had all been experimenting with lighting but his lighting was the the best we seemed to get to light up our set.
When I had finished my shots I then sent them into our One Drive so that Odhran could then edit them into our final animation with sound effects to accompany it.