Since the last clip, I have changed the lights. I reduced the energy of the yellow light by half, and added a white light, which doesn’t cast any shadows. This makes the shadows a little lighter, and takes a little yellow out of the room.
I have worked out what was wrong with the textures in the picture frames, so now as the scene moves, the pictures inside the frames don’t move. That was weirding me out!
After the door closes, and the light switch changes colour, there was some flicking of colours for a few frames. I tracked down those rough keys and removed them, so now the lights drop, and the shadows drop on the same frame rather than bouncing back and forward for about 3 or 4 frames.
That’s all the changes I can think of. I was going to do more, but had a friend come around and installed a new graphics card in my machine, and then set it up to run three heads, so that took a bit of time.
Either way, what i have is now up on YouTube, and presented below 🙂
Had a couple goals. I wanted to fix the error where the camera went to far to the left near the beginning of the animation, and I wanted to add a picture frame.
Below is the result;
Did it work?
Well the camera doesn’t go off scene anymore, but the camera action isn’t very consistant. Some parts of it are very slow, while other pats are quick and slightly jerky, so I think I may drop the entire set of camera movments and start from scratch at some stage.
As for the photo frames. Well since I haven’t done the tutorial on basic modelling in Blender yet, they seem to be ok. They meet the shape I had in my mind. My said she plans on sketching a couple portrait pics, so that is why I made them that shape. From the test texture I have on them though, it seems I have more playing around with the settings to get them right, as they seem to move when the camera moves.
What are my next tasks?
Well I have to have another play with the picture frame textures, I may re-do the camera movements, and I want to play more with the lighting, as there is a flash of light after the switch goes off, so I must have missed a key in the lighting, also I want to make the dark scene more noticeable but not by just making it darker, so I am thinking a different shade of colour for the dark scene.
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 🙂
Art hour lasted a little longer than an hour this evening. That is good, I am getting into it.
Todays scene has the robot from last time, but this time he is in a room, a man (stick figure) walks across (slides) the room, out the door, before our little chap gets into action.
I am still doing nearly all my work in object mode, so soon it is time to go looking for some more tutorials, and start doing some modeling rather than just using primitive objects for all of my work.
The result is below (ok, will be in a few minutes, still rendering out currently).
OK, that took longer than expected, had to try a few different formats to not lose all of the quality due to compression, but here it is…
I have a problem, and I’m willing to admit it. The problem is motivation, and more importantly my complete lack of it.
It is not that I don’t have the tools to make wonderful stuff, as I do. Its not that I can’t learn how to do things, I can.
The problem is that I can never make myself put any effort into doing anything.
I want to become good at blender, but I spent less that 2 hours all of last year working on blender.
There is no way I’ll ever get good at blender, or for that matter anything, if I only put in 2 hrs effort a year.
So, based with this problem, I am trying a new approach.
The new approach is Just Do It. Kind of sounds like a Nike ad doesn’t it?
I have decided that every evening, at the same time if possible, I’m going to have an Art Hour. To start with Art Hour will probably just be 5 or 10 minutes to get myself into it, but I hope to work my way up to an hour (or more) every evening.
Yesterday evening I was tired, and couldn’t be bothered (same old excuse I used all last year), but I decided that Art Hour must go on. I sat and watched a few tutorials.
This evening Art Hour was delayed a little, but in the end I managed to get myself going, and I actually spent nearly an hour on it, which makes me half way through my progress for last year.
So, as my first post about Art Hour, I should put something up, so here is what I did this hour (year).
Just a simple Robot which wobbles across the screen. It was mostly taken from the animation I did last time, but now I have worked out how to add materials, colour, etc.
While I was playing with blender, my wife decided to get into Art Hour, and using a tablet and GIMP came up with this…
She says its not finished, but our Art Hour ended for the night 🙂
I haven’t done anything new today. Its my lunchtime, and I haven’t had lunch yet, and it is approaching time to return to work.
All I have done is dropped the video clip onto YouTube so I could post it here.
I used to use a different video player, but when it comes down to it, YouTube is pretty universal, and if you can’t see it on YouTube, odds are you wouldn’t have been able to see it on the other player anyhow.
I haven’t bothered with a download link this time, after all, there really is no point 🙂
The Project was due in on Friday, so I was happy that I managed to hand it in on Thursday.
Because of this, I am listing this version of the animation as final.
I may well go back to this project, and do things differently, with different software, at my own pace, but that will probably be called Rex 2011. As for this project, Rex 2010, my first animation project, I have finished 🙂
You can see the result, you need to click on it to start it playing. Note the flash video file is 89.6s long, and is 15MB, so that is why I don’t have it start downloading/playing until you click on it. If it is a little jerky when playing back, you may wish to (click on it to) pause it until your machine has downloaded more of the video file.
I have to hand my project in next Friday, so i have been busy working on getting something to hand in.
This won’t be the end of this particular project, as I will probably re-do it, and complete it better next year, using different software I want to learn.
My status is…
All primary and secondary models completed (sculpted, rigged, textured). Landscape completed for now (if I get extra time, I may touch it up, but it is sort of having the feeling I was after when I first envisioned my project).
I am now in the middle of putting scenes together to carry the story through. At present I have 8 scenes completed (though two need re-working if I have time), adding up to 490 frames (19.6s at 25fps).
Below is a quick flash render of the current project. As I said, still needs a few scenes to make the story and timing work.
Yes, I’ll post something next weekend after I have handed in something. And then it will probably be next year before I return to the project, with a different software package.
I have been working on my previz. I want to make some progress on it, so I can start looking at the timing, and maybe the camera angles, so I have been pushing a few scenes through.
Done enough for today so I thought I would do a render and show what I have done so far.
The images are a little better this time than the previous previz renders. I haven’t done anything more to the models or anything, I just told it to render to a higher quality.
For that reason the file is a lot bigger, 7 Meg in fact. Because some people have slow internet connections, I don’t want it to just start playing on the page without warning. For that reason, I have this time uploaded the video in a way that you have to click on the link to start downloading or viewing it. If you have any problems, let me know, and I will look into a better solution, but I’ve done enough thinking this weekend, so that is why I am just looking for a quick easy solution to make it available to anybody who wants to look at it.
Often you will see models, mainly the chicks, jumping up an down, and moving side to side. This is often meaning I am trying to demonstrate facial expressions, but don’t have any on the model at this stage, so I just move the entire model around a little to remind me that is what is supposed to happen.
I suppose I should add some audio to say what is happening, but if you follow the video, keeping in mind the last storyboard I posted, you will probably be able to work out what is happening.
Remember, this is just a previz, mainly so I can start working on what needs to be in the video and what doesn’t, and also start thinking about timing and camera angles.
Ok, enough talk, the following link should play in most players, and also work for iTunes, iPod’s, and iPhones link to the video in mp4 format.
“It took me ages and I did next to nothing”, that’s the quote I used over lunch today. No I wasn’t talking about my life, I was talking about the morning I had spent working on my previz.
Now my storyboard has about 21 slides in it at present. I though I would start doing a quick previz on it this morning.
I had already watched a video on the basics of animation, so I figured I would be ready for the basic stuff I had planned.
I started, placed a few objects, set a few keys, moved a few objects, reset a few keys, did a quick preview, and I decided that my camera movement was two fast. I figured, “No problem, I’ll just move the keyframe”, and that is where my morning ground to a halt.
I quickly realized that I knew what I needed to do, but I couldn’t remember how the video told me to do it. No problem I figured, I’ll just quickly have a look at the video and remind myself.
Now I watched the video, I watched him do it, and it seemed pretty easy, but the problem was that he was doing it, but he wasn’t telling me what keys and mouse buttons he was using to do what he was doing on the screen. I knew what I needed to do in principal, but the video wasn’t giving me the technical knowledge.
Luckily I was able to ask a fellow classmate (thanks Richard), and he set me right.
After that, I went back to my scene I was working on, and spent the rest of the morning slowly moving frames around, trying to make my previz for my first slide look kind of like I would hope for a first attempt at a previz.
Well, I finally made something. Its just a camera coming up to Rex’s cave, Rex looking either direction and coming out. Rex’s body isn’t animated, just using him as a solid object with the entire thing moving.
Hopefully you can see what I did in the frame below (if it doesn’t show up, you may have to refresh your browser, if it still doesn’t show up, let me know, and i will look into it).
