3D Modeling and Animation

Ive not updated my blog at all during the creation of the 3 animations i created, So this should be a big update, ill link to a few tutorials and techniques that i used alot during the creation of each movie before i explain what i aimed for with each movie.

Character animation

Well i discovered this form of animation while trying to create models for XNA game studio using blender, and then exporting single models as .fbx format.  The main site i learnt the basics from was the stromcode tutorials which explain how to design models in blender, but focuses alot on designing them for use within games such as saving specific animations, Walking, shooting, jumping etc etc which then would be used in a game.

First part of a 4 part tutorial on basic character animation in blender

http://www.stromcode.com/2008/03/10/modelling-for-xna-with-blender-part-i/75/ 

The basic steps to designing a character that you can animate are quite simple once you get it done first time and pass all the small errors you make while learning, Such as not weight painting a single vertex in your whole model, as they are very very easy to miss, this causes the model to leave behind a vertex and it stretches it around when you move a limb.  Another frustrating aspect of character animation is that you cannot apply lattice deforms to them, unless you move the model in Real Time at the same time as when you Pose your model, as within the pose mode the bones aren’t affected by any deforms, as they are under the control of the Armature, aka the skeleton already.

Basic guide to character animation:

1. Draw your Character you wish to animate
2. Create an armature in the middle of your character, and map it out to the desired skeleton (as simple or complex as you wish, the more complex, the more laggy it is, and harder to pose)
3. Add a modifier called armature to your character, and link it to your current armatures name
4. Click on the armature, and go into Pose mode, then click on your character and go into weight paint mode
5. Weight paint your character, this is the process of telling blender what vertices’s apply to what bone, you can change what levels of strength each bones have on vertex’s, but its easier just to Max out the strength of all vertices’s, Unless you have a Grade A knowledge of the human biology and how each bone in the body effects what Muscle/body part. Make sure you don’t miss any vertices’s!
6. Open the Action editor panel, and create a new action.  From there you simply design the desired action like any other animation,  Drag the bones or rotate them and the vertex’s you painted will follow them, If you enable Auto-IK in the toolbar, when you move a bone, the rest of the body will try to move realistically as well, Just set a pose and insert a key frame for each bone, then set the next pose on another frame, and go from there.

Here’s a link to the group blog for the XNA project i was working on, it will show some of the techniques i described above, and some earlier models of mine in action.

The main use of character animation i used was in the first and second animation, the first one, as guessed was the man running down the hill, He was meant to be “squished” when he entered a Lattice deformation when he fell over, but as i explained earlier, Lattces and Amatures dont mix sadly. The second movie was simply a character dancing on a stage using some character animation. I didnt want to go into to much detial for the Models and Skeleton of the Character(i used the same one twice), as then there would be about 20 bones in each hand, about 6 bones more for the spine, and i didnt feel like doing Jazz hands.

Fluids

This was quite a tricky technique to get down to a tee, it also is  VERY VERY time consuming and Laggy and is a total system Whore.

The basics of the fluids techniques i found from the Mojo blog Link, the fast fluid tutorial:

http://mojo.csd.anglia.ac.uk/cgat/marie/2009/03/03/blender-fluids-quick-n-dirty/

I didn’t expect how difficult getting a realistic Water or X fluid effect would be, but i searched around on more youtube videos and tutorials and such to create a more realistic Water effect, especially as what i had in mind was a bit more tricky to achieve than water in a box that most tutorials offered.

The basic method i used was an inflow up the top of the animation, looking like a tap, that lets water flow into the scene, it then Flowed down my N and into the top og my G, each of these being hollow to allow the water to flow through it.

This required the resolution of the water to be turned up from the basic resolution of 50, to 300 to look anything near decent. The real time duration of the domain was the tricky part, as it defined how far in the X frames of your animation the water would flow for, As i had 400 scenes i had to put this up quite high to achive a realistic Look.

I also added Particle effects to the water effect, this realy looked good as it let the water split up more into little spittles of water that flew everywhere, giving it a much more realistic feel. With that i also added a glass like water texture that looked like sea water, i tinted it blue so that it would stand out more to the glass background of the N and G.

The most frustrating part of the fluid technique is the Baking time required for water samples such as my own, the one featured in my animation took 4 hours to compose 400 frames. So needless to say i didn’t want to cock it up first time round, which i did, i somehow managed to loose my baked water, and had to re-bake it for another 4 hours.

This blender wiki Page was very usefull in explaining what each aspect of the fluid engine did:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Physics/Fluids

First movie

Well the first movie was the basic idea of having a man being chased down a hill by a wheel or something, and basicly getting splated and running into a lattice deform, then the camera panning in, and Norfolk and goode popping up. I achived this fairly easy, however i think i spent a bit much time on the backdrop and the creation of the scene than the animation aspect of it, but with all 3 of my movies, most of my time went into the scenes than the animations

Second movie

Well the second movie i wanted to origionly do a realy realy detailed character animation, with a high quality UV maped texture, and have him dancing with some rotating lighting, however i decided to try remake the Rick-Roll youtube video, at leist a part of it,  It didnt look to bad, but i didnt want to design the 4 or 5 scenes he danced at, so just picked one and had him dancing on that one. However im unduer if im allowed to Legaly use the soundtrack for the video, as without it it doesnt sound the same.

Third Move

The first movie i still rendering since last night at 10:00, this morning it was at frame 40/200.  Im hoping it will be ready for friday, the reason it takes so long is due to the fluid texture being water, and the glass side of the N and G, it looks Realy Realy decent however from the still frames i have rendered so far.