Introduction to 3D animation

[mi4014antoninaadamska]

lFinal Animation

This is the final output I created after hours of modelling. After putting all the elements in the world, I created 5 motion path and attached cameras to them. All cameras had the same settings but unfortunately still some very visible cuts appears. I tried to get rid of them by adding more renders connecting motion paths together but it didn't work, and in the end I removed those additional renders. I really wanted animation to be smooth, and tried to make cuts as invisible as possible. The lack of time, skills and laptop that could render a whole animation at once forced me to just stick to what can be seen as a final animation. Even thought jumps between renders are visible I still like the outcome. I really like the black and white design of the elements, the movement of the cameras and the overal animation. When I rendered all the clips, I put them in after effects and adjusted colors, contrast and brightness so all clips looked the same, then I connected them in Adobe Premiere Pro and put the whole animation back into after effects. I added snow using shape layer with ellipse and here the next problem occured. My laptop couldn't handle so may shapes, the program crashed couple of times and I had many problems with making the snow look at least acceptable. Finally I was able to export animation with the snow, that can be seen in the final animation. It should look definitely better and I don't really like this element but I think it's better than not having snow at all.

When I had exported 30 second animation with a snow, I downloaded sounds from the website freesound.com and edited them in Adobe Audition. Then I put ready sounds into the animation.

[mi4014antoninaadamska]

How did I bend rails

I decided to make the railway more interesting, which means, I decided to add curves. In order to do that, I found this tutorial on the youtube and it helped me a lot. I used the "bend" function and manipulated settings to force railways in a way I wanted.

Here you can see how the settings looked like when I managed to perfectly bend the rail.

I created only 2 or 3 bent rails and then I copied them in order to save more time. Here you can see the beginning of my railway on the render view.

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Before rendering all clips I made this playblast to check if everything is alright. The movements of the camera where in my opinion a little bit to rapid and I changed them in the graph editor later. The rest looked great for me, so I rendered this piece of animation and continued making the rest.

[mi4014antoninaadamska]

House

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[mi4014antoninaadamska]

Bridge

In my storyboard, one of the panels contain the bridge. In my mind, the bridge had the old, medieval look. In order to model something similar, I searched on tumblr some inspirational looks, which you can see above. Those two photos helped me to create a perfect bridge.

Here you can see the finished model. It's simple, much simpler than bridges on the references, but one of the elements of my animation is simple design.

I painted the whole bridge white, except the middle part which I coloured on the rainbow colors to make the rainbow road.

Rainbow road

The rainbow road was very easy to create. I simply changed the dimensions of the rectangle polygon. I made 6 copies and coloured every element on one of colors of rainbow.

Here you can see the rainbow road attached already to the world. The colour of the bridge on this photo is brown because I forgot I wanted my animation to be black and white (I know, it's hardly possible, but I was tired and just coloured the bridge unconsciously). I changed the colour of the bridge immediately.

[mi4014antoninaadamska]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDmG1ymOdqQ

Cat tutorial

This video was very helpful for me during making a cat in MAYA. This tutorial uses blender but it didn't make any problems to me. The steps were easy to follow in MAYA and after watching the whole video I was able to create a cat you could see in the one of previous posts.

[mi4014antoninaadamska]

Primarily I wanted to make train move with the camera attached to it. It turned out the train is unable to bend because is made out of one cube, so I decided to remove it and leave only camera moving along the motion path. Here you can see how the train behaved after setting the bend option.

Finally , with the removed train animating became easier and faster. Also the lack of train is not visible in the final animation.

[mi4014antoninaadamska]

Tunnel

In my research task there is a mountain Chopok that is placed in the Tatry Mountains in Slovakia. I decided to use the shape of this mountain (or actually the very top of it) in order to design the shape of the tunnel that I wanted to include in my animation. I made this little sketch in order to visualise this idea and then I started modelling.

I started from a simple cone, bu then I added subdivisions and changed view to the vertex. I manipulated and moved the vertexes to create sharp elements and make tunnel look more similar to the mountain.

[mi4014antoninaadamska]

Cat

Here you can see the process of modelling gigantic cat. I really wanted it to be similar to my cat that can be seen on my reasearch task or just British shorthair cat. It can be seen that even though I used photos as a guide the finished cat is not very similiar. Still, it was my first cat ever made in 3d and I am really proud that this model looks like a cat. Maybe it doesn't look exactly like my cat but still it's a cat and I put it in my animation.

[mi4014antoninaadamska]

Railways

Railways

Here you can see, step by step the process of creating the railways. I used a single cube to make the whole object. I removed and extruded faces and edges and in the end I added cuts in order to make whole thing smooth and pleasantly looking. When I was done I imported this one small object into the file with the whole world and build a whole road, using copy and paste

[mi4014antoninaadamska]

Inspiration

It was hard for me to quickly find the idea for the style of the animation. I am not experienced in 3d modelling and to be honest, I don't really have a knowledge what I can or can't do. What I was sure about, was that my animation has to be simple, and at least a little intimidating. Primarily I wanted to use, dark colours in order to create wanted atmosphere of the picture but then I got the suggestion from the lecturer that maybe it would be a good idea to use black and white only. Then the final animation would fit to the storyboard, that I created in black and white on order to keep things simple and clear. I started to look for some inspirations in the internet, and I haven't found anything very influential, but sill I was able to find some interesting productions.

First of all I have never seen black and white 3d animation, at least I don't remember such thing. I found videos, showing simple animations in black and white that proved me that it's possible to create such animation.

part I

part 2

After watching those I started to think about potential problems that making black and white animation can bring. These include:

- what materials to use?

- how to adjust the lighting to make black look real?

- how to use those two colors, without confusing the audience?

- should I include any other colours in the moments when two colour animation could be too confusing?

Those questions cover the topics I will try to touch, research and test in the next weeks.

[mi4014antoninaadamska]

Train

Since the beginning I wanted to have a train included in my animation. What;s more, I wanted it to be specifically modern train, like Pendolino or so. I started the whole process of modelling from this object because I found it quite simple and suitable for someone who has no experience in 3d modelling. Above, you can see the photos I used as references. I took the from google graphic and decided they show exactly what I want to model.

I uploaded images to the MAYA, and started modelling. Unfortunately I haven't found any tutorials about trains so I had to figure it out by myself. In the beginning I felt a little lost as I had no idea where to start. I started from a cube that I modeled by moving edges, vertexes and faces. It was pretty easy to create a basic shape of a train. At first it wasn't so smooth, but I used "smooth" in mesh options and it worked perfectly. Then the problem appeared with windows of the train. I decided to use UV mapping in order to create a UV shell with windows and all necessary things for the train. However, the train's uv template had elements too small to colour them. Also, I wanted the train to be shiny and UV mapping doesn't allow for that (at least that's what I know so far). I created windows using flat square elements. I put all windows in one group so it was easy to manage them, I combined them with the rest of the train and put a proper texture (on both elements I used preset "car paint"). The outcome was perfect, the train is shiny, modern and beautiful. You can it on the picture below.

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Trees models

Here you can see 3 models of trees I created using the tutorial, I posted before. From these trees I am going to create the forest. It was quite easy to model those objects. It took me a lot of time to become fluent in using MAYA, but now I am capable of creating a simple 3d model, pretty quickly. I hope, that other parts of animations will go much faster.

[mi4014antoninaadamska]

This video  was a great support for me in the first stage of making the project. I decided to start with trees models, as my animation starts with the forest. As I’ve never used MAYA or any 3d modelling software, I had to watch couple of tutorials in order to know what I need to do. This tutorial was in my opinion the best and provided well understandable explanation. Also I’ve learned couple extra options, functions and hot keys. Now I feel really excited and motivated to continue making project.

[mi4014antoninaadamska]

 Lego Man

This is an old task I forgot to post. During classes we were supposed to change the clothes of this lego man and create the materials such as chrome, plastic, rubber, etc, in order to make this model look more realistic and authentic.In the beginning I struggled a lot, but after classes I felt much more confident about working in Maya.