First Character Animation

First block of summer semester is over, and second block is well under way. I thought I would take a moment to show you what I did in my Principles of 3d Animation class.

The Instructor had us each purchase a stuffed animal that we would first model, then texture, then animate. Here is the Stuffed Animal I chose.


And here he is again on the computer.

The model has a skeletal structure hidden inside. Both the model and the skeletal structure are real easy to mess up if your not careful. One of the ways we prevent this is to make them untouchable, and instead we give ourselves "Controls" to work with. That is what those colored lines are. Since it is easy to get turned around when animating, my controls are color coded. Red for Right, Blue For Left, and Green for anything down the center. This makes it easy to identify certain body parts using a shape, then add a color for the side. Then you can move him, like so:


Here are a couple of animations I made with him. First we have a walk. Note in the final 3 seconds the moving colored lines.






Next I have a run sequence posted. Initially, I liked the walk better, but in retrospect, I think this run is best.






In related news, The senior Animation project is floundering and several of us new to the 3d program were recruited to assist in the animation portion of it. I really don't know that I'm going to be able to contribute very much, but I'm giving it a go anyway. It's not for school credit or money or anything, but having my name in the credits as an animator won't hurt a resume.

Keeping up with reality

So I thought I might show some of what I've been working on. After 2 1/2 years of playing with various ways to model water, I finally found one that works, and not just works, but works on a very simple level. Up to this point, I had been trying to model water as a three dimensional object.

Imagine a globe, with latitude and longitude lines. Each place where the lines interconnect you get a vertice (also known as an angle.) You can deform the globe by grabbing a vertice and pulling it out, down, any direction you want. However, each vertice you add to a model makes it both harder to deal with AND takes longer to compute a full picture.

The water in this animation is just a solid plane. Basically a piece of paper with only four verticies, one at each corner. But then you paint a series of light and dark shadows on the paper. In a 3d Program, the shadows can become anything. they can represent different levels of reflection, or light absorption, color, or in this case, height. Then you cause the shadows to move in one direction or another. The painted image adds about one percent of computation time compared to what it would if you doubled the number of vertices to eight.

In addition I have found ways to tell the 3d program that repetative objects, like carvings on the temple, are just duplicates of one object. The end result of all these changes is that it now takes 6 minutes to compute one frame of animation. It used to take nearly 4 hours. Here is one I did a couple months ago.