Have a snowly Christmas

Christmas will soon be upon us so I wanted to finish off the modeling assignment before then...at least the main animation bit. That way, I don't have to worry about this assignment and can focus on my programming assignments. Funny, I thought I would enjoy my programming lessons and assignments more but this modeling assignment is not so bad after all. Maybe it's due to past experience or getting better tutors.

Fittingly, the final part represents winter so naturally there is snow. The sword will also go into a deep slumber. Unlike last time, there was no problems with animating the eyes besides resizing the pupils so that they fit inside the eyelids.

Here's the full preview (not rendered yet).





The animation is fully complete. The only things left to do include polishing the scene up like perhaps making the background look more like a mountain.

It's Raining Swords

Today, I've managed to get the rain falling to represent Autumn. Apart from my birthday being in October, Autumn is my least favourite season. It's the season where it gets colder and wetter. Adding rain was quite simple even though it may look like there's lots of rain that it blocks the scenery as you can see below:




In actual fact, the rain looks more natural in render as shown below:

Also managed to increase the size of the flames and tackling a problem I've had with the sword's eyes. You see, for some reason, the eyelids were moving erratically on their own in between the time frame from angry to sad when they're supposed to be still. This was a problem that happened in my last project too and I have no idea why it does that. To solve it, I had to copy and paste frames in between the gaps.

There is now only one more season to animate.

BURN IT WITH FIRE!

Moving onto spring and entering summer (I wish it was summer now actually. So cold this winter) with fire.

In order to make the fire appear at a certain time (six seconds onwards) and make the grass disappear, I've used the Visibility check box under the Attribute section. It is checked when I want them to appear and unchecked when I want them hidden. At both events, a keyframe is set on the timeframe.

There are probably other ways to achieve this but this is the method I've found and tested myself. You can have a look below:



Although I think the flames could be bigger...

In addition to the flames, you can see that I've got the sword's eyes to look angry. This was also achieved by using keyframes, moving the eye lids where appropriate. Its looks give me shivers down my spine...

Is it Spring yet?

Today I was leaving Blend Shapes for now and moving onto animating the scene (as there's about a month to go before the deadline).

One thing I've learnt is that it is better to have a couple of small patches of grass than one big one. When I've tried painting in a huge chunk of grass onto my scene, my computer started to load very...very....slowly...so after I've managed to delete the huge grass, I've made a few smaller patches. I can justify this reason by setting the scene in a mountain area as you don't get that much grass in the mountains anyway. It's mainly rocky. Speaking of which, I've needed a rocky texture to make the setting look more convincing. There are no mountains nearby where I live so I took a picture of the gravel in my back garden instead.

More background scenery could be added soon but this will do in the meantime as you cans see in this five second preview which represents Spring. The ideal total time could be 20 seconds, 5 seconds per season. You can see the grass blowing in the wind and the eyes moving from side to side as if it's waiting for someone and examining its surroundings.




The "Es" that were used to move the eyes (from the Aim and Constrain tutorial used earlier) are hidden off screen so they won't appear in the video but I can still use them while animating.

Gone with the Wind

I've added my first paint effect onto my project today. It's a grass to represent Spring. It can blow in the wind rather nicely as you can see here in a short preview:




I wish I have more paint effects to show you but I was also busy with a technique called Blend Shape which allows you to animate your model even easier than before. You create two different shapes and this option will allow to swift between the two even if you delete the original shape.

Here's how it works:

• Select the altered shape before shift select the original shape

• Under the Animation window, select Create Deformers -> Blend Shape toolbox

• Type in: blendShape (exactly as shown) in Blendshape node before clicking "Create"

• To actually alter and animate the shape, you need to open its window in Window -> Animate Editors -> Blend shape

• Move the slider up and down to alter the shape.

...unfortunately I have been having problems myself. My shape would not change as you can see below...


I've followed the steps shown above so I'm not sure where I've went wrong...