Introduction
The main idea for this project was to experiment with 3D animation in the program “Blender”. Blender is a 3D modeling software that is open source and completely free. I have been working with blender for just about a year now. During that time I have created many 3D models and completed countless tutorials. I have never taken a class or course, but I have done all that I can to teach myself the basics of 3D. What I have created is a culmination of all of that time and effort.
Project Goals
With experience in the program, the question was what would be an opportunity to push myself? I decided that the best way to do that was to create and rig a 3D character. Static renders or “flat renders” had been the majority of my experience before starting this project. The goal I set myself was to create a scene to house a fully rigged 3D character. Working with animation was a difficult prospect that I was excited.
Starting Out
Beginning anything in blender starts the exact same way. A cube, a light, and a camera. And just like anyone who has spent time in Blender would do I deleted all of those. I had an idea for a mountain hiking scene. I added a plane in and used a plugin called “Terrain Mixer” to subdivide the plane and make a basic start for my terrain.
I ended up completely hating the way that this looked. I knew the ideal style I wanted for the low-poly look, and the topology felt way too messy to be a good starting point. I deleted the whole scene the next day and truly started into my project.
Day 2 – The Beginning
Day one was spent creating a start for my scene that I absolutely hated. So on day 2 I came back with a fresh perspective and some new ideas. I decided the absolutely best way to capture the simplistic animation I wanted was to swap for an isometric view. I started blocking out a plane with a subdivision surface modifier to create a terrain base that was more modular for me.
Day 3-5 – Testing the Waters
For days 3, 4 and 5, I started to build my shaders. Shaders are the basis of all of your textures. I originally wanted to do a color ramp style that I had done in the past that assigned colors based off of light levels. I also added the med light levels as a more saturated color, trying to match the style of GameBoy Color Palettes. I eventually ditched this idea due to the difficulty of matching that style throughout.
Eventually I made a shader for my rock texture that I liked a lot, and will most likely implement in a lot of my stylized renders in the future. For this one, I added two differently mapped voronoi textures to add more variance. Compared to the flat color ramp (left) the texture is incredibly obvious.
Days 5-10 – Asset Creation
Days 5 through 10 were spent on getting the scene as prepared as possible. I textured my ground and created tree trunks and a leaf object that could be displaced in side of shape for my trees. I also made some basic rock shapes for my texture to go on.
Days 11-15 – The Good, The Bad, and The Broken
Days 11 through 15 were incredibly frustrating. During this time, I had so many ideas for what I wanted to create that were just not working. For example, the trees did not like me trying to implement that rock shader. But during this time I also created my character model. I used a tutorial by “Garbaj” called “How To Make Low Poly Models (That Don’t Suck)” for inspiration.
Days 15-18 – The Final Push
For the last 3 days, all of my time went into composing my final scene. I created a small dock for my character to sit on, started animating his rig, and created animations for my leaves and grass. The scene really came together in those last few days.
What’s not seen in this still is the animation on the leaves, grass, water, and character model. The leaves use a simple frame reference node for random scale and rotation that falls within a small margin. The grass is a similar system, but without a scale and only a horizontal transform. The ripples are made from a complex texture made from a line texture created in Affinity. To see the full animation, check out the link here.
Conclusion
Ultimately, this project taught me a lot about the workflow that works for me. I’ve been asked several times throughout my project “what would you do if had to do it all over”. And my answer to that is do it faster. Just like any project, the methods and goals become much easier to understand AFTER you’ve completed them. I think a project like this would take about 5 days for me now. And that was the goal. To create a style and strategy that works well for me.