For our first class of the entire course, we started off by learning the fundamentals of Blender as it would be the main software we’d be using to both model and animate. Although I knew most of what we covered in the first half of class given my experience with Blender and other similar 3D programs, it was nice to start off slow so we could get ourselves properly acquainted. To reinforce what we had been shown at the start of class, we were instructed to model both a chair and a table which I ended up turning into a small lit scene as I had finished earlier than I anticipated.
After the warmup, we were introduced to what would be our first homework; modelling a snowman and creating an environment to animate him in. My first idea was to do something a little more complex, like having him be hit with a snowball and cartoonish fall apart by utilising squash and stretch but, after some experimenting, I decided to settle on a simple scene as I didn’t want to over-burden myself with complicated animation on my first day. Modelling the snowman wasn’t too challenging and was actually quite a relaxing way to get back into the flow of using Blender as I was a few months rusty. I pulled up a reference from google and, using my second screen to my advantage, I split Blender and the reference I was using between the two for an easier workflow. In hindsight, I could’ve split my Blender viewport into two and used the UV editor as a way of viewing the reference but oh well, I can do that next time!
After some tinkering around, I finished my dapper little snowman and started developing the environment which I decided would be a baron expanse of snow and fog below a blanket of stars in the night sky. I feel the never-ending nature of it all contrasts well with the well-dressed happy snowman. My go-to engine is always Eevee and although I thought about trying out cycles for the animation, I figured I’d be best sticking to what I know best so I could put my best foot forward for the first project. When applying materials to the snowman, I kept things simple and high in roughness as I wanted the scene to look a little cartoony and soft, almost like something you’d expect to see from a clay-mation short. As for my composition and lighting, I changed my camera’s resolution to 1080×1080 (1:1 ratio) as I felt it looked better to put more emphasis on the snowman rather than the environment since there wasn’t much going on around him.
I lit the scene with blue lights, added a space HDRI I found online to the sky and added some depth of field to my camera to help my snowman stand out that extra bit more. I also added some ground fog to the scene to further the cold feel, achieved with a simple node-setup that utilises volume scatter and a gradient texture to create a thick, easy to manipulate fog. As a final touch, I wanted some snow falling down on the scene and to do this, I had to find a tutorial online as it wasn’t something I knew how to do. The tutorial was pretty easy to follow and gave me the effect I was going for! Animating the little fella felt pretty unorthodox as I’m used to using rigs but nevertheless, I was able to produce something I feel is simple enough but still reflects my understanding of 3D animation. I threw the final export together in After Effects and came out with a pretty neat lookin’ animation. 🙂