Term 2: Week 1: Animation Begins

So I worked through the first two tutorials easily enough, they seemed straight forward but at the same time it seemed pretty pointless to learn two ways of doing the same thing but atleast I have that option I guess, the demonstrations also seemed to stretch on longer than was neccessary. The first thing I noticed when it came to blender was that whenever I went to animate it would crash, sometimes recovering itself before the finished result has rendered, I'm not sure if thats my computer, but I have pretty high specs so I cant see why that would be a problem, the second thing being it take a hell of a lot longer to render, so I'm going to need to keep that in mind when planning my work as I cant do a lot else while I'm waiting for it to finish.

Here are my final results from the two tutorials:




For the third task I decided to create something of my own choice, I decided to stick with having an indoor room, but instead of a mouse I decided to create a bee buzzing around, this was partly because I wanted to be able to play around with more space, as with a mouse you can only use the ground, and also because for a project I did last term I matchmoved a mouse on a piano so I'm sick of modelling one to say the least. I made the bee from a sphere exstuding the wings and head from the initial body shape, and then shaped appropriately, I then exstuded upwards then scaled inwards and then exstruded upwards slightly then scaled outwards to create the antenna on top of the head. I created the bee's stinger out of the back of the bee by exstuding and then scaling inwards to create a sharp point I smoothed and subsurfed everything on the bee. I tried to create some legs coming out from the bottom of the body but it just never looked right, they were far too blocky and large even when I subdivided loads of times. The trickiest and somewhat longest process was the texture I put a black over the whole thing, then selected individual faces for the yellow stripes and white wings, this was such a long process as I had to subdivide many times to get the faces in line for the stripes, so the faces were very small and there was a lot of them. I couldnt just select aload of faces at once as it picked up too many of the ones I didnt want. This completed the main element. I made the backing by scaling a cube upwards and deleting a few faces so the camera could see everything, put a wooden texture on the bottom and made coloured the walls pink. The animation process was really easy to pick up I didnt have any problems, I've done a fair bit of animation in 'Maya' so the process was reletively easy for me to complete. I simply just played around with where the bee was going the direction and the angle, I made a few mistakes and had a few problems deleting some keyframes but once I learnt how to do that it looked fine. I found it quite a long process, as its not just animation you need to model everything first thats the time consuming bit, but I found the animation really fun to do, much more so than modelling, I think it's because you can completely change a model as to how you decide to animate it, change the emotion, the view it is to be seen in.