I decided, before moving forward with the course, to make an animation that tells a very small story, in this case, a cube trying to cross the street, just to test everything I’ve learned so far.
This is the “custom rig” I used for the little character.
Green color represents right, red color represents left, the pyramids are his feet, the circles his arms, he can twist from the middle and top and can move his “eyebrows” up and down, also there’s a body that moves all the bones.
The process of creating this little animation went this way:
-
Create the concept of the story: It was a very small animation so no story board was needed.
-
Character: It took 1 minute or so, it’s just a cube with bevel and 2 cuts.
-
Rig: This took a little longer, around 10 minutes, I had to be very clear as to what I wanted the cube to convey and how I wanted it to move.
-
Scenario: The street, the building, the sidewalk, that was fairly easy and simple. I used two lights, one with shadows disabled.
-
I tried to keep everything as organized as possible as you can see in the Outliner but I just noticed I never rename the starting Collection, I should start doing that.
-
Extra character and rig: They appear like for 10 frames, so no detail was needed other than the color and the most basic of armatures.
-
Animate: This took me around 2 hours. If I polish the animation it would probably take me around 5 hours, there’s much work to be done in the graph editor but I didn’t want to spend that amount of time yet. I used a total of 3 actions: one for the cube, and one for each ball.
-
Render: Took around 20 minutes. Oh, and please, always save before you start rendering, Blender might crash.
There are many ways to improve this, like animating the camera, the lights and more, but I wanted to keep it as simple as possible.
Final result: I liked it, for a simple animation I think I was able to convey a lot of emotions with this simple cube, like fear, determination and a good all sigh.
I used everything I’ve learned so far in this course and no other skills or tools outside it were used but I do have a little experience animating, I make 2D animations for games, pixel art basically, that did help a lot, and that’s why I’m a little afraid to animate the camera, I’ll try to animate it in my next little project.