A brief overview of the class today.
Got introduce to Mike our lecturer, who presented a slideshow giving a brief rundown of the module and what to expect from it, along with where to find some available resources found on blackboard. Next we opened up blender where Mike gave a rundown on some of the basic tools used within the software, like how to navigate with the mouse and some simple short cut keys. Our first task was to model and animate a snowman. I followed the videos Mike had uploaded to blackboard for this. I got to learn some new techniques in blender like how to move an origin point along with some basic rigging.
Above is a screenshot of how my snowman turned out. For my animation I also added some trees. I followed Mike’s video in order to properly rig the model via parent objects. (E.g. I parented the snowman’s hand to his arm and then to his body). Once I had done this I was ready to start making my animation using keyframes.
Here is a behind the scenes snapshot of how the timeline of my animation looks after I had added all the necessary keyframes. Still following Mike’s tutorial I was able to make the snowman sway side to side. For each section of the snowman, (Hat, Head, Mid section and bottom section) I adjusted the pacing of the keyframes so that the finale animation would move a lot smoother and appear more life-like. I also applied this method when animating the trees, making sure that their movements synced up with the snowman. To save time I animated only animated the tree on the right, then duplicating it in order to make the tree on the left, so that in the finale video their movements would be identical.
I wanted another character to briefly appear within the video so I modelled a polar bear, rigging it’s head to it’s body. Since you would only be able to see the head in the finale video I didn’t bother give it legs.
Next I wanted to add a background to the scene, so I made a simple drawing on my phone using the app ibisPaint and uploaded it too my OneDrive. When I was happy with how everything looked I rendered/exported the animation. After that, I added some additional effects to the clip using another app on my phone, (CapCut), and added some festive music along with it, as seen below.
Using what I learned today I can now make a basic character models.
I created this ragdoll character in my free time, parenting the head and limbs to the body, allowing me to edit it’s pose. I really enjoy being able to make my own puppets on blender, and will definitely be experimenting with this these techniques in the future. I enjoyed this class overall and feel pretty confident with my skills in blender going forward, and I’m also looking forward to learning more about the programme as well.