Our group animation is called “Football”. It focuses on a football that is lost by a child in an abandoned part of a park. We see time pass, seasons change and the condition of the football slowly deteriorate. This, in a way, personifies the football and gives it its’ own personality, that the audience can connect with and show sympathy towards. The football is found by the same boy who lost it years ago, but he is a lot older. Showing that the man still cared for the memories this ball gave him as a child. Still cherishing them to this day.
We started our process by developing the story to ensure the audience could in some ways connect with the football and feel saddened when it is lost, and joyful when it is found. This included things like showing the deflation of the ball, seasons change to show how much time is passing and slow pushes in the camera movement to tell the audience to dive deeper into what the football could be feeling.
We then decided to start creating models to include in the scenes background such as benches and trees. I created the models to use incase we decided to have parts of the boy seen throughout.
After clothing was added to these models, the body parts were completed to use in the final animation, as not much detail will be seen by the audience.
The next step was making the terrain and general layout of the scene. My group member Cain started on the previs and while he was doing so I created the ground of the scene to look like bumpy grass land, to have the general shape resemble something like a field.
I then added a pathway that moved through the ground that was more level. This was to make the scene look more like it was a park that lead into a more unlooked after section or the park that was maybe forgotten and lost, as the path moved straight into this abandoned section of the scene as well.
I originally created the path as a section of the original ground that was extruded. I used edge loops to create more faces to extrude and to make sculpting more effective when marking the pathway.
The sculpting tool I used to create the cracks and markings in the pathway was the “sculpt” brush. When holding shift it reversed the effect on the mesh and carved into the surface instead of making it bulge outwards.
My group had trouble texturing the pathway, as I created it as an extrusion from the ground model. Therefore I decided to separate the pathway from the ground using the “Edit Mesh – Detach” option. After the faces were detached, I used the “Mesh – Separate” option to make them appear as independent models in the scene. This meant that the UV’s could be edited separately and textured separately too.
The next step for my role in our animation was to setup some of the scenes layout when my ground and pathway was complete. This included using models created by other members of my group as well as my own, such as trees, benches and grass with my own rocks, and positioning them to make the scene look even more similar to a park.
I then edited the UV’s on my rock models to allow my other group members to texture them with more accuracy. This Included unfolding the original UV shape and sewing the edges together to better represent the real shape of each of the rocks.
Me and my group member Cain attempted to cut render time in half by me rendering the first half of the animation, frame 1-539, when Cain rendered the second half, frame 540-1250. This would have been very effective, but due to errors in importing Cain’s grass using cache we decided to let Cain do the entire render instead. This was because we had already wasted enough time trying to make the moving grass work in my scene, it would be quicker to have a single person rendering with a fully working and identical file.
This project has opened my eyes to how much time and preparation needs to be put into each animation we complete. working in a group has been a very worthwhile experience, especially when it is working on our first full 3D animated sequence. I have learned something from everybody in the group throughout this team working process and am looking forward to possibly working with them again in the future.
Overall, I am very happy with the outcome of our final animation, I believe it lived up to our original ideas, views and expectations we had at the start of this project.