For my first assignment I was asked to create and animate a snowman in Blender, with extra credit (yes please!) given for adding a simple background.
So, armed with the information from my Blender tutorials to date, and the image of the snowman firmly fixed in my head, I set about creating my version from a range of basic 3D shapes, and resizing them to the classic cartoon proportions I’d so often seen in photographs, videos, and movies.
While a snowman’s body could also take a triangular form, I decided to use three UV spheres to create the torso and head, before adding and colouring several much smaller UV spheres to resemble coal, which would eventually form the snowman’s features, and buttons. A cone then became the carrot nose, with the arms, hands, and fingers created from cylinders, that were resized, using the S shortcut, to the different lengths and diameters to roughly mimic branches and twigs.
Next, the top hat was constructed from 3 cylinders which were modified and fine-tuned in Edit Mode until they took on the hat’s instantly recognisable form and the scarf fashioned from a torus and nurbs surface; the location, rotation and scale of which were altered using the Transform option, before both the top and scarf were appropriately coloured.
Turning to the background, I added a variety of basic shapes that would become a rock, snow mounds and trees. The trees, reminiscent of those in my childhood Tomy Thomas the Tank Engine playsets, were created by adding and overlaying cones, with the trunks simply fashioned from cylinders. The snow mounds were also made from cylinders that were stretched, compressed and resized in Edit mode until I had achieved the required shape and dimensions.
Once happy with the outcome, to add depth and dimension, I moved the objects I’d created to positions in the foreground, middle ground and background, and given its position with the scene, coloured each appropriately. At this point I also added a number of nurbs surfaces to the trees to give the impression of snow that had blown into their branches, but on reflection, even though the brief was to use basic shapes, these appear much too solid and geometric. The nurbs surface added and resized to depict snow on the top of the rock however, was more successful.
To make the scene more interesting, I then imported and applied various textures from textures.com (https://www.textures.com/), to recreate footsteps in the snow around the snowman, granite for the rock, and snow of both a smooth and uneven texture to represent icy, compacted mounds and those comprising of more freshly fallen snow. At this point I also added a light source which produced shadows and added a frosty, blue tinge to the scene.
Finally, I added a plane behind the snowman onto which I could insert an image I’d found online of the Northern Lights. However, when the entire image was transposed onto the plane, the result was so blurred it was unusable. Therefore, with no experience of, or access to image-editing software such as Photoshop, my work around was to copy the image into Paint, select and save a much smaller area, and to then add this to the plane. While still blurred, this was a major improvement, giving the background the feeling of the Northern Lights and snow falling. However, in retrospect, the image I chose is quite dark, making the snowman’s hat less readable that I would have wanted.
It was then time to animate! First, to set up my snowman for animation and ensure that all of the constituent parts would rotate and move in unison, I modified the origin point of each before then parenting each one in order, starting at the top of the model and moving downwards to the bottom, to ensure none were missed.
Next, wanting my character to appear friendly and endearing, I created key frames in the timeline to animate my snowman swaying from right to left, arms moving comically in time, before giving a little wave, and doffing his hat which finally, to appear less static, wobbles playfully on his head.
However, on playback, while I had used the principles of ease in and ease out to gradually speed up the animation at the start, and slow it towards the end, producing a jerky movement, the overall speed of the animation was too fast and needed to be slowed down in order to smooth the animation between key frames. My snowman also needed to be repositioned so as not to merge with the background objects.
Having joined the Digital Domains Zoom talk on 18th October, and hearing that being receptive to feedback is important if I’m to improve and evolve, I posted my completed animation on my YouTube channel, where I’ll hopefully receive feedback from my subscribers. Here’s my finished animation – I hope you enjoy it.
All in all, I’m happy with my first 3D animated outcome, and while with limited experience and wanting to learn in the way taught I haven’t strayed too far from the tutorial content, I’m sure I’ll stretch myself more week upon week as my confidence grows.