My Project

Below are my findings with tutorials that I have found useful when creating my final project. Some of which were necessary for me to learn how to do do things that I couldnt work out how to do very well on my own.

The first of these was how to make rain, as I wanted to have rain in the background of my scene. I found http://feeblemind.tuxfamily.org/dotclear/index.php/2004/12/24/4-blender-faire-pleuvoir---making-rain very useful when trying to do this. The tutorial helped me out, but to be honest the effect is created from particles which I have already tried in a past tutorial in class. I did have to play around with the tutorial as I had a few problems getting the rain to go downwards onto my scene, as for some reason it was going up in the air, no idea why but after some rotating I manged to fix it.

Here is a screenshot of the rain in motion, currently in the middle of a render of the rain which is taking forever. I think it has come out quite well. The overall effect I am going for is a windy one. To add to this effect I will have wind shaken lamposts, sign, grass and rubbish out of the bin. Once this has rendered I will add each one and do a render as the detail progresses. I then need to make the planet seats move around and create birds to fly in the sky, however I am currently unsure whether I will add them to the same file or create each aspect in a different one.

Right So i've just spent 2 hours waiting for the file to render and it had an error as it came towards the end so I dont think I'll be doing any animation renders for a while, I'll just document my progress with images until a later date, when hopefully the animation render will begin to work again.

Below are some images of the planet seat key frame animations:

The below screenshot shows the current stage of animation, so far the sign, lamposts and planet seats have been animated. Rain has also been animated on a different file. The sign, lamposts and planet seats were created using keyframes I found these two tutorials very useful for this: http://www.screencast.com/users/Neal/folders/Flash/media/77702fe9-8c56-41b9-817a-728ef125dbf2 and http://www.screencast.com/users/Neal/folders/Flash/media/e9ea8293-025f-4183-8df1-6185c3aa7a79

The below screenshot is the rubbish flying out of the bin and around the scene. I decided to make it a page from a newspaper and gave it a newspaper image as the texture. I think it works really well. To create rthe flying rubbish I created a series of key frames I found these tutorials really useful for that: http://www.screencast.com/users/Neal/folders/Flash/media/77702fe9-8c56-41b9-817a-728ef125dbf2 and http://www.screencast.com/users/Neal/folders/Flash/media/e9ea8293-025f-4183-8df1-6185c3aa7a79

Below is a screenshot of the pond added to the scene, I have created it on a different file as it was too slow to try and edit and move around otherwise. You can't really see the detail on this shot as the water does move, that can only be seen in the animation, however what I can say is that the water moves naturally and I'm really happy with the result.

I wanted to create realistic moving grass so that it looks as though it is swaying in the wind, I found this tutorial really helpful for this: http://www.blenderguru.com/the-secret-to-creating-realistic-grass/.

Below is my result, the screenshot doesnt really give it justice but it will be more noticeable in the end animation itself.