Animation 101

Student learning animation

[pdarbyfsb]

Reflection on still life

So this project was hard, mainly because I really set my standards way too high. Because of this everything kind of stunk. That being said I learned a lot, so I guess it was worth it. Moving forward I have a lot more skills in blender, but I definitely need to learn to set realistic goals as well

[pdarbyfsb]

Reflection

This is a reflection on the past two assignments, the sculpture disaster video and the lock render. The major theme behind these for me was overcoming adversity really. Despite a bit of technological difficulty, i was still able to make something i am proud of and can't wait to show people. 

The video was pretty cool because I really liked the perspective in which i filmed the ball rolling. It looked like you were standing on a brick walkway that goes through a sculpture garden at the time the sculpture broke. What really made this perspective have some verisimilitude to it was the grass and the brick walkway. Just playing around with blender, I was able to find out how to make brick textures and something called the seed effect. These effects are realistic in a sense but also feel like a cartoon, which is what i was going for. 

The lock picture was really cool because of the real-life size and function of my object I was able to really make it look plausible. The goal of this assignment was to make a something look real. To be honest, the actual animation of the lock wasn't the best. However, i was able to make up for that in my background so that it blended in more or less.

[pdarbyfsb]

So this is a render of...Hmm should I tell you or let you guess? Since you'll get it sooner or later, it's a lock, see it on the door? Now that you see it it's pretty ovbious. I'm pretty proud of that little lock as it, just like the video I just posted, gave me a lot of computer trouble. I probably had to start this one over from scratch about 4-6 times because whenever I tried to save, my computer crashed. (Never let the computer sale assoicate tell you RAM isn't that important.) Anyway i think it's pretty cool how i was able to manipulate the photo background (everything except the lock is a photo) to make it harder to tell the lock is animated. That is probably what I am most proud of with this render. Enjoy!

[pdarbyfsb]

This is a cartoon-ey, short, video about a sculpture that had a slight malfunction where the ball on top broke off and started rolling down the ramp. This is meant to be an incredibly short (1 second) video because of its simpicity. If it was any longer, it would be pretty darn boring, right? This was really a challenge because I had a lot of computer trouble, mostly crashes when I tried to save. Just finding a way to get this up to tumblr is something I am proud of, and I think it's a decent animation as well!

[pdarbyfsb]

So this is a render, my first one, that it call magic monkey. I call it that because the positioning of the light and texture of surfaces create a glistening effect. The grass creates this mystery, hiding part of the monkey. Just an FYI, I did not actually create this monkey myself, it was a preset object that I added and manipulated. I think this is really cool because it's very mysterious. So this is my first post, you can look forward to some more complex ones as we go along.

[pdarbyfsb]

First assignment

So this is my first assignment. Last class we learned about sculpture in General, which is really what animation is, just a moving sculpture. We researched the different principles, like light, color, gravity, etc. What was really surprising to me was the fact that time also affects sculpture. Think about it, you've probably seen an old bronze statue right? Doesn't it look all green? I'm really excited for this class, I took sculpture last year and created some pretty cool stuff. But I'm super excited to make some even cooler stuff through the computer. That's what I like about animation, it's not real, so you can do ANYTHING your imagination can dream of.