For week one, we started simple and made a scene with a table and chairs. I didn’t get it finished as I had basically forgotten a lot of blender shortcuts because I haven’t used it in a long time. It was a effective warm-up as it definitely made my next task easier.
My homework assignment was to model and animate a snowman. During class, I had a tough time following the demonstration as I didn’t have much blender experience beforehand so I ended up watching the Blackboard tutorials and working at my own pace. I’ve previously modelled once with blender so the first part of the assignment wasn’t too hard.
I added some buttons and a scarf (using the ring torus mesh and joining it to a flattened cylinder) as I thought his body looked a little bare and I think it made it more visually interesting!
Next I worked on a swaying animation for the little guy, following the given tutorial. This was quite difficult as it was my first time animating on blender but it got easier with time as I learnt the interface and what each feature does. I had made a few errors such as accidental duplicates and missing parent links but it wasn’t that big of a deal to fix luckily.
After I completed every step in the tutorial, I decided to add a simple environment for the snowman as I was more confident with using blender after watching the demonstrations and it was really fun setting up a scene! While doing this I also wanted to add a snow effect which I did by following a tutorial and further messing with the particle emitter settings to achieve the effect I wanted. However while doing this, I struggled with lighting as the plane that emitted the snow was blocking the light which made my final animation very dark. For this reason I had to mess around with the light and camera positions, and the settings of the plane a lot to remove the pitch black areas. This took a few tries…
Final Animation
I’m quite pleased with how the final product turned out! I think the extra details added a lot more life to the overall animation! If I had to say what I would’ve liked to improve on it would be better environment lighting and colouring the shadows to fit its surroundings. Overall, I’m happy with my first blender animation.