Here’s a pretty neat fluid simulation render I did yesterday. I’m pretty happy with the results. It’s based off a tutorial I was doing. I intend to make one that’s a little more involved. This is really computationally intense and although it’s not VERY difficult, it’s not trivial either. Enjoy!

(Oh yeah, it’s about 4 seconds long)

Back to Basics - Fluid Simulation from djotaku on Vimeo

I set “Jose’s Dinner” to render from beginning to end to test the eye and mouth movements I’ve done so far. It’s almost done, but it’ll probably need another hour. So it took around 25 or so hours to render on one computer. Now I have a benchmark against which to see how fast the renderfarm is. Remember that most of my computers are old POS donated computers. So I don’t know how much it will be able to speed things up. Tomorrow I will probably do a test render with the bouncing ball to see how much more quickly that one renders. I’ll be excited to see the results.

Last night around 2300 I finished up the preliminary 3D render of Jose’s Dinner. Now I just need to tweak up the animation with the fine details such as blinking and mouth movements. After that I just need to create the soundtrack and credits and the short film will be completed. I’m excited about debuting it, so this will probably take up all my spare time (instead of playing games or watching tv).

This time, practicing getting jumps to work correctly. Also, it’s my first time getting camera cuts as well.

Back to Basics: Jump Animation Test on Vimeo

Next I want to try making him jump forward or in some other direction.

I discovered a great CG artist named Daniel Martinez Lara who has some great material on the web. I discovered him because he recently started using Blender, whereas he had been using commercial 3D software previously. If you want to see a great animation that’s only a couple of minutes long, check out Changes.

Blender Nation has been one of the really great rigged up characters available for use in Blender, mancandy. It’s very useful for people who want to focus on backgrounds or learn how to create a semi-realistic humanoid and rig. After seeing this story about different pictures people created with mancandy, I decided to give it a shot. It’s a very well rigged character and I think I will use it to practice facial expressions and body language. I only played for about 5 minutes, so I know there’s lots I’m not taking advantage of, but here’s my best shot. It’s now my Windows background image. Link is to a background-sized image.

I started working on a new animation project a couple of weeks ago. I’m pretty excited about this because it’s going to be my first animated short with a plot. Sure, the Penguin Flight animation technically had a plot. But it didn’t have a valid story-telling plot. There was no conflict - it was boring. (Not to make, but to watch) For this new animation I’m going through all the steps - starting with writing a story and storyboarding. Then creating a 2D animatic. This is not, by the way, the budgie video I was previously planning. That one has been shelved for now because it didn’t really have a plot and I am really into this new story. I’ll go back to it later, I think. Also, you may see the bird make cameos in other shorts. At the very least, it was a great exercise for me to learn more about modeling.

Just got a book today that I ordered from Amazon.com - “Inspired 3D Short Film Production”. As I watched the DVD of shorts that came with the book and thought of the dozens of ideas swirling around in my head, I came to terms with the reality of computer animation - the animation step itself, it pretty trivial with respect to the rest of the process. In other words, in a good animation package like Blender, the animation is actually the relatively easy part. The hardest part is making the objects, giving them textures/colors, and rigging them up with bones so they can be animated. After that, animation is relatively easy. Relatively easy because, it’s still pretty hard to create convincing animation. However, making a good model in the first place is tough. It takes the Blender character animation book until page 82 to finish up a character of moderate difficulty. Of course, the process gets fast with time. I was able to model the budgie a lot faster than I was able to model my penguin and Raul Domingo. However, it still takes a fair amount of time to model a reasonably nice character.

Luckily, my younger brother pre-ordered this for me for my birthday (which came months ago), because the book is now sold out. Ever since I heard about it in Oct 2006, I couldn’t wait for it to come out. There are really great tutorials online, but I needed a nice coherent, beginning to end book to guide me through the process at least once. As you know, I’ve already done one animated short, " Penguin Flight", and a few quick animated scenes in preparation for my next animated short, " Budgies". However, although I have the basic techniques down, I know there are enough gaps in my knowledge to make any reasonably length animation a pain in the butt.

Now this is MUCH better. Rigged together today after work.

Apartment Lights, etc Test 2 on Vimeo