Where I put my online stuff…..
Finally got through the tutorial to get to this point – colour and detail applied to the model! The next step is to rig and animate this…
There are a couple of minor glitches but overall it looks pretty decent!
Hopefully the next thing will be a little animation once it’s rigged…
After a the first sessions of modeling…
I spent yesterday rigging my moose. Once the rig (think of it like connected bones) is joined to the mesh that the makes the body of the moose, the bones can be moved and animated – and as the body now follows along, the moose can come to life…
I started working on a walk cycle but ran into a few troubles with my reference images but it’s a great start! I thought I’d be a little further along after yesterday but this stuff all takes at least twice as long as I think and multiple attempt to get it right. Thank goodness I have worked saving multiple iterations of the files into my workflow as I can always go back a couple of steps and try again (and I usually have to)!
I have a raven on the go as well – but the wings/feathers are a little problematic…
Once these models are roughed out, they still need to be rigged for animation (tricky process as I’m still sorting this stuff out)…
It ‘sort of’ looked like a moose until I added some hair…
then it turned into a sheep… Not bad for a first try, though.
I put some colour on the Otter and made a 500 frame animation (just under 20 seconds) using a slightly different picture technique for the background (three layers). Here’s a single frame as an example:
I discovered a couple of problems with the animation (mainly to do with shadows) but may or may not fix them as I’m just trying stuff out.
I’ve been working on a fairly basic model of an otter that I could “paint” orange and black for various video projects – and have it roughed out now.
The next step is to add some colour to it…
I’ve been mucking about with some more models for my “big idea” and produced a little scene with another short animation a while back. I haven’t rendered the animation for posting (as it was just to try out a few things), but here’s a frame grab from near the end…
You might recognize some of the models – Mammoth (which was also turned into a young one without the tusks), Pinching Beetle, and some of my lame trees. The big green thing is my first attempt at a “jade boulder”. The mountains are the Seven Sisters taken from an exceptional photograph from Bob Wall Photography (thanks, Bob!) and although it just looks like blue sky in the background, it’s actually a clouds time lapse that runs in the animations.
I’m starting to flesh out a few ideas of how my larger project might work so there may be a few glimpses of those ideas from time to time…
One of the big hurdles with these types of projects is render times – particularly for animations – so I’m trying to always keep the complexities in mind and find efficient solutions.
I used the Fluffy Bunny from the course and a couple of trees I created in Blender for other projects/ideas in my “Happy Easter” wish for 2017:
I had no idea when I started this Blender process that it could be used for still images as well as the animations that (are still) my main goal…
Happy Easter, everyone!!!
As I’ve been learning Blender and the art of 3d Modeling (and by extension, animation using the models I’m building), some have wondered what (if anything) the master plan is. I have to admit that I don’t really have a really good answer for that. I originally started out with the goal of learning how to create an animate a small character or object that I could insert into my more traditional videos.
However, I think I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole! Every time I learn something new in Blender, the possibilities of what can be built/done with these tools stretch out a little further – and all of these other, bigger ideas come flooding into my head.
Without really giving anything away, here’s a render of an model that I roughed together later in the day yesterday…
I still have to work out some of the hair details to become more efficient (the render times on this frame with “particle hair” added and the samples turned up to 512 was around 8 minutes). I have a few ideas of how to speed up my renders but have to learn a bit more yet… But it’s a start.
I also was working on this model the other day. It started out as a picture of a pinching beetle that had landed on my RV window while I was at the Holloway Bar Place Mine and turned into this:
I rendered this out to a transparent background – and even rendered a 250 frame animation to try out a few things, but haven’t figured out how to render a short video in Vegas with a transparent background rather than my usual compositing methods, so I have to learn a bit more about the video editing end of things. It’s actually pretty amazing to think that this stuff can be cranked out in the basement rather than some big animation studio! This is an interesting time to be learning all of this stuff…
I also built this “island in the sky” that I call “floater”. Not sure how this ties into my big ideas but it was a fun exercise.
Every time I do one of these, I learn something! That’s what it’s all about…