When I say work in progress (wip), the only work so far is the idea for a picture, and now this post to try and encourage myself to work on it.
I was dreaming the other night, or maybe I was just day dreaming in bed, but I came up with the idea for a picture I would like to work on.
The image that formed in my mind was of a creature reaching out of dark water, (clawed) hand reaching towards the sky.
The creature had hair of wavering tentailed-like hair. Less of the snakes like the classic Medusa, but rather more like eels, watery and smooth.
His body seemed rather smooth, but his arms had small scales on the outer facing sides of them.
His face was containing all the classic facial features, but they were irregular in appearance.
I hope to slowly work more on defining the image in my head, and then even more slowly start to create it.
While I picture the scene as a 2d image, I suspect I will work on it using 3d tools, as these are what I prefer, and also means I can concentrate more on the composition of the objects in the scene at first, and then at a later stage focus on the staging and actual composition of the scene itself.
Wish me luck, as can be seen from my post history, it has been a long time since I have attempted any work.
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 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 🙂
