Missed a few sessions
I’ve been bad.
I’ve heard my alarm go off, but I’ve ignored it and missed a few Art Hour sessions.
Today I have gotten back into it.
I decided to do some more work on my little robot toy project I have been laying around with. I set myself a few tasks to see if I could get them done. The tasks were,
1: Texture, add some wall paper to the wall.
2: Light, watching my video at night it seemed ok, but when I watched it on the TV during the day it seemed way to dark, so I wanted to up the light level.
3: Timing, when I was scrubbing up and down the timeline the robot seemed to jump ok, but when played back at the correct frame-rate (24fps in my case) he jumped way to slow.
4: Glowing eyes, when he can’t get through the door, his eyes glowed brighter. This wasn’t two obvious. To enhance this, I made it so as well as getting brighter, they also turned red briefly, just to draw attention to them.
5: Camera movement, there is no movement of the camera in my little scene, so I had better work on that.
With my five objectives, I set to work. Number one on the list was texture. My wife drew me a quick (2D) wallpaper pattern for the room, and the task was to apply this. I tried it a few days ago and things went quite weird. The problem being the two planes which I am using for walls had been created, duplicated, stretched, rotated, and basically played around with quite a lot when I was deciding what type of scene I was looking for. Now with a plain yellowish material they seemed fine, but as soon as I applied a texture to them all of a sudden the patterns were different sizes and different orientations on each wall. Not what I had planned, after all if the guy putting wallpaper up in you room put the up different ways and it was different size pattern on each wall, you’d be pretty mad, unless it lucked out and just looked good. My luck wasn’t that good. I did a little playing, but in the end I just decided the quickest way to fix all the modifications I had done was to delete one wall, duplicate the other wall and give it a quick single axis and slide into position.
Moving on, I decided to work on light. I just upped the lighting level on both the bright and dark scene. This caused the problem where the scene which was suppose to be dark was throwing some pretty heavy shadows, and it was very obvious that I was using the same light source. To quickly fix this, I just turned off the shadows on that light source for the dark scene.
Timing was my next concern. I wasn’t to worried about this, but it just couldn’t be as slow as it was. For this I just went into the graph editor a few times and scaled down on the x-axies. Once I got a speed I was happy with, I just did a few duplications to make more hops.
Eyes glowing more was a simple operation. I just keyed in some colour changes for the eyes at the correct time, and now his eyes are a little more obvious after he bumps into the door.
Camera movement was last on my list. I didn’t really have any set desire for the camera itself, so I just had it follow him and get a little closer, more as a proof that I could make the camera move more than anything.
So here is the results of this session…
What did I think?
Well I’m happier with his bouncing, though it’s still not great. The colour/light seems better during the day. The wallpaper works and is on the walls. The eyes bring a little more attention to them. As for the camera movement, well it nearly works. Unfortunately during part of the scene the camera moves two far to the left for the actual scene, and the wall comes to an end, so I will have to either have less camera movement, or I will need to extend the wall a little more that direction. Either way, I had fun, and I’m working on Blender 🙂
Categories: Animation, Art Hour, Previz, Talk, Work In Progress
No Comments »
« The Robot that could | Home | Moving Pictures »
