Week one was our first introduction to Blender, to get us used to the interface and controls we were tasked with creating a table and chairs using primitive shapes.

 I have previous experience with Blender which made navigating around much easier, since I was familiar with the software; I decided to try to make a simple low poly scene using the extrusion tool to give the furniture more shape.

After this task, we were given our assignment task to complete over the weekend, this task was to create a simple snowman and animate him rolling about while giving a little wave.

To start off my scene, I placed a plane on the ground, subdivided it, adjusted some vertices, and then used the default Blender add-on “Real Snow”. By using the add-on, it gave me a nice fluffy, snowy ground to place my snowman onto. I then created my snowman by subdividing some cubes and adjusting them as I saw fit, by using the cubes I was able to make them lumpy and textured rather than a smooth sphere. To create the arms, I used vertices and placed them in a way that I wanted, I then used the “Skin” modifier to give them some thickness, I then scaled the vertices when necessary. To create the eye, I scaled down some cylinders and extruded the middle to give it a “sunken- in” look; like a button. To place them properly onto the head I used the “Snap to Face” tool, I then created Linked versions and placed them onto the torso. For the carrot and hat I also used a cylinder, the carrot was extruded and scaled as needed and the hat was simply scaled to fit.

Now that I had the snowman finished it was time to move on to the animation. I am not too familiar with animating in Blender so I struggled a little when it came to the timeline and keyframing. This will hopefully no longer be an issue as I continue using Blender to animate.  I made sure to carefully follow along with the tutorial and ended up with a wobbly, waving snowman

After the animation was done, it was now time to render out my snowman. I downloaded a snowy HDRI online and added it to my scene to give my snowman some proper light, after I was happy with the settings I ensured my render settings were correct and then rendered out as an .MP4.