The first piece of work I did on this project was drawing up the first storyboard once we had decided what was going to happen in this piece. It didn’t take us too long to decide on a direction for the story so once we discussed how it should play out, I drew up this storyboard.
I was quite happy with this storyboard because it served as a good foundation that we would later go on to build upon and eventually animate without straying from the original point intended with this first storyboard. At around this time I also put together a 3D pre vis for the project to get an idea of the length and camera angles we would end up using in the final piece.
Once this was completed we moved onto trying to sculpt our characters in blender. I found this to be a difficult task at first as I had very little experience with sculpting on blender however after a few attempts I managed to create the sculpt of a tree character that I was very pleased with.
(two very early trees I made)
(Evolution of my final design^)
I was quite happy with how the sculpt of my tree turned out so at this point I just had to retopologise it before I could go on to add all of the textures. As this was one of my first tries at retopologising a 3D model I found it somewhat difficult to get the hang of at first however I did eventually manage to achieve fairly good results.
Above on the left is the wireframe view of my original sculpt and to the right of it is the retopology.
Once I had this finished. I could move onto UV cutting and mapping. This was one of my weaker areas previously so I did my best to do a better job at it for this project.
When this was done I was able to move on to texturing. At this point, 2 of my group members had already textured their models. This made things much easier for me as I just had to keep the design of my tree consistent with theirs. We decided to go for a more simple cartoon look rather than anything realistic and I think that choice was a wise decision as it made it much easier to keep the look of all of the characters consistent and not anything overly complicated.
(model rendered with textures applied)
For our characters faces we decided to draw them separately and just place the expressions on a plane attached to the characters bodies. For 3 of the characters in this piece, I drew up the expressions. This was a relatively simple task as by this point we knew exactly what expression each character would have at any given time.
Once we had each character modelled and textured we had to move on to creating the rigs for their motion. I found this part to be surprisingly easy although my group were also there to help me with any issues I did still come across. I came across a few issues with rigging my model like certain parts moving where I didn’t want them to but these issues I did come across did usually have a fairly simple solution to them.
At this point we were finally able to begin animating the piece which was a relief. I also had surprisingly little issues with the animation itself. Most of the trouble I had during this project was getting certain things to work properly in Maya but as for actually animating the piece I came across very little problems. I was very proud of how the finished piece came out.
Reflection
Overall I am pleased with the work I have done during this module. I had fairly little 3D experience beforehand but I feel like I am managing to learn at a decent pace and keep up with any work that I need to do. I think that working on a 3D animation project has really demonstrated the importance of storyboards for me since I definitely wouldn’t want to waste any time working on the technical side of things for it to end up not fitting in the story. I am also glad to have learned that I actually still do enjoy doing the more technical side of 3D animation despite how difficult it can be at times. During this module I have gotten much more comfortable with blender which I am happy about since it is a very daunting task trying to create something on blender at first when you have little experience. I feel like I’ve generally learned much more from the 3D side of things as compared to the 2D animation from the first semester. Altogether I am fairly pleased with the work I have done so far with animation.