Coyote3D

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 🙂

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 🙂

Ok,

I’ve got a confession. I really want to be good at 3D, but I just don’t put any effort into it.

You probably think this means I just do the odd thing now and then, but no, it actually means I do nothing.

I haven’t touched a 3D package since November last year apart from today.

I spend a few minutes with blender. I opened it up, realised it had been two years since I had actually looked at blender, and that I had forgotten everything I had learned from the course last year. To top it off, I couldn’t remember any of the blender commands, so it took me like the first 5 minutes to remember how to rotate the screen again, and make a new box (it starts with a box).

Once I had that figured, moving around the screen, making boxes, and moving them around in 3D space again, I added another box, parented them to the first box, had them rotate around in circles as the time line advanced, and then added three more boxes.

The end result was terrible. It was supposed to be, and I suppose it was, a very simple robot that wobbled and moved through the screen, while some of its knobs rotated on its chest.

Even though, I was happy, it was the first thing I had done in 10 months, and it was the first thing I had done in blender in 2 years.

I forgot to add lights, so there was just the default. I didn’t add any textures, and I even forgot to point the camera at the scene. So it was just by blind chance (and because the first box was in frame) that any of the actual animation was in the camera at all. It then proceeded to move out of camera, with shadows all over it, but I was still happy, because it was more than I had done for ages.

I will post it. Not because it is good, not because I want people to tell me what I did wrong (trust me, I know my errors), but because it is something, and something is better than nothing.

I can’t post it right now, as I am about to start something (no, not more 3D), and it was done on a different computer than I am posting on now, but I will post it.

I am thinking maybe next time I will make a car, just as simple, just as basic, and then maybe put them both in the same scene, and maybe I will even remember about the camera.

This may happen, but it took me 10 months to post this much, so you never know.

either way, I AM BACK! (maybe)

I said there wasn’t going to be much posted here until sometime next year. If you didn’t believe me, I bet you believe me now though.

But onto a different, and slightly more on topic subject. I passed my 3D animation course, and last night had my graduation in the town hall.

My wife took a quick photo of me with a camera phone, something to remember it buy until the official photos show up.

posted it below.

My Graduation Photo (unofficial)

Hi, two posts today.

Looking at the last post, the title was tired, and my wife said this time she thinks the title should be lazy, and well you don’t want to disagree with your better half, so the title is lazy.

The report is that I really haven’t done much since last time I posted. Last week and last weekend I was busy with a bee-keeping course, and this week I really wasn’t feeling good.

And my wife also reminds me I may have spend a little time playing xbox rather than sculpting, but that doesn’t take any thinking, so I reckon that’s an OK excuse.

Either way, this post is just to say, sorry, not much progress, nothing to post right now.

Since there is nothing to post, I am doing a post right after this with another story idea, just to have something fresh on the site, so I will start writing that now…

Well, I’m sitting here feeling a little broke.

Its amazing how easy it is to spend money from your keyboard these days.

Either way, I just brought my own copy of Zbrush (v4), for NZ$859.99 (US$595). So will have to cut back on the spending for a while, but can now do more work at home as the trial version I was using expired. It is a lot easier to work at tech and at home, rather than having to do everything at tech.

Seems it has been a week since I last posted.

That is really bad of me, so here is a post.

It is just I don’t really have anything new to post yet, so I haven’t.

I skipped a few days of school due to sore feet, and haven’t made any real progress.

I did a little more work on the previz of that first slide of my storyboard. I won’t post it this time, as its not much different than the one in my last post. All I have done is slowed down the timing a little, added a little colour, changed him, so he stands up, before he looks around, and also added a few squares in front of his eyes so I know when his eyes are to first open when we are looking at him. Ok, it sounds like more that I figured now I list the changes. Maybe I should have posted it, but I didn’t really consider how much I changed, so I didn’t make a copy of it onto this computer.

Since then I have been working on the next slide.

I figured this would have been an easy one. He just runs around a little bit so you can tell he is young and full of energy.

This just hasn’t been working for me. I have had him two far from the camera I believe, so you lose some of the energy, but when I have him closer to the camera I have two fast camera movements and it just doesn’t look right.

I think I will have to have him closer to the camera, and have more than one shot/sequence. I think the problem is that I am thinking one slide, one animation sequence, but that is clearly not going to be the case for this slide, and I suspect most of them.

I guess I have learned something after all, but all the same I didn’t even bother saving most of the sequences I made (yes, I was that unimpressed with them it wasn’t worth pressing save), so I have nothing to show you at present.

I’m figuring that tomorrow and Wednesday, I will try closer up, and make a few different sequences, rather than one. If that works better for me, I will try to stitch them together, and then I will actually have something interesting to post, rather than just my rambling.

Oh, I did make a draft model of a rock and a flower. But as I haven’t gotten to the scene where my preziv uses them, I never posted them either. They are really draft, not anything to look at at all really, so I don’t think I will post them, but if you look in a previz or two from now, odds are you may see them, as I believe scene three in my storyboard requires a flower, and I think could also do with some rocks.

“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).

Its a previz, and its a start, so I guess I have made some progress today 🙂

Just a quick note.

I’m sure you are all dying to know, and yes, my paragraph has been approved in theory.

The proposal can’t be accepted until my tutorials I have been doing have been marked off. So the begining of next term we will be marked and the tutor will check that we understand the principals in the tutorials, and after that we can start our projects.

At that stage our Paragraphs will be ‘officially’ reviewed, and a week after that they will be set in stone and we won’t be able to change them, as we will be marked based on if we completed the goals we listed.

He has said that at this stage he believes he will accept the paragraph, but until it is official, it is still just a proposed proposal 🙂

As for my tasks now, the next on my things on my list are…
1: Learn some of the basic animating
2: Create a storyboard
3: forgot what it is, but I have it written down in my work book.

Cheers all.

Well tomorrow I am expected to hand in a paragraph describing what my project for the fourth term is going to be, so lets see how the following sounds…

I plan to make a short cartoon/animation of the adventures of a young dinosaur who is trying to figure out what is his correct food source. It is aiming to be comic in nature, and not worried whether or not it is (pre-)historically accurate. There will be at least three rigged, animated, characters including the main character which will be based on the appearance of a Triceratops.

Well that is the paragraph as it stands currently, guess I will find out how it needs to be changed tomorrow. If I’m lucky, it will stand as it is, and I can move onto the next stage.

Either way, holiday starts on Friday, ya.