After spending the last couple of weeks on this Minimate animation I've realized that it might be a bit more than I can handle right now. There's probably a good four minutes of storyboards all layed out. The scene and characters are all modeled and textured. Unfortunately, I'm running into problems with the animation process. Things that should be simple and straight-forward aren't working properly for me.

It's not the end of the world, I think I just made some mistakes early in the process that weren't apparent until now. The bad part is that I don't know what those were. So instead of starting over and repeating my mistakes, I'm going to scale back and accomplish smaller projects like a creating a Wolverine with functioning claws, Cyclops with an optic blast, Banner transforming into Hulk. Try to learn something from each little success.

I'm not scrapping the large animation project either. I'm just postponing it until I have more experience. Here's one of the many test renders I made for it. Click the image for a 1080x720 version.

Not only does the Blender community want to share their work, they want to share their knowledge. Many people take it upon themselves to produce tutorials (text-based and video) to demonstrate how to accomplish a particular task. I used a couple of these to figure out the best way to 'unwrap' and flatten a model so I could apply the Spider-Man texture. After unwrapping, I copied the layout and sent it to GIMP (an open source image editing program) where I re-created the familiar red and blue webbed suit.







It's not an easy process, but I'm sure as I create more textures I'll get better at it.

One of the great things about the Blender community is they like to give stuff away. Blender is an Open Source program which means the code and application itself is freely available. This engenders similar acts from Blender users. Many people will make their models, animation rigs, textures, etc. available to anyone. I spent some time looking for a good plastic material and came upon the Blender Open Material Repository. I didn't find a plastic that I liked, but some of the materials made for interesting Minimates.


Gold


Hot Metal


Ice


Soap Film


Mixed Metals


Honey


Red Tinted Glass

You'll notice in some of the transparent images that I didn't model the interior of the torso block. It's on the task list.

The next few posts will be about the 3D Minimate model I created in Blender. This first one has a group of images from my earliest saved renders. By this point the model was basically complete so I wanted to get a good turnaround view. The camera circled the Minimate about three times, slowly moving down over the course of 300 frames.



Being new to Blender I was using most of the default settings. By default, it dumps all renders out to a temporary folder and the filenames are simply the frame numbers. With these settings it is very easy to overwrite old renders. That's why I no longer have the full turnaround.



Of course I could just set up the scene and re-render it, but I've tweaked the model quite a bit since then. During the animating process I found a lot of little things that didn't look quite right. The arms had flicker due to smoothing issues, the hands had shading problems, and the legs had normals flipped in odd ways.



You'll notice the feet are the old pre-C3 style. I knew the first character I was going to animate was the iconic Wave 2 Spider-Man. Sure, there have been other Spideys with holed feet but not this one.



Next up, materials.

I guess I have a knack for biting off more than I can chew when learning something new. My first attempt at stop motion animation was rough and undisciplined so I was eager to make the next project more memorable. Since Spider-Man is arguably the most iconic Minimate figure, it was an easy choice. Check out the full video in the link below.
Read More...

I like to use the descriptor 'experiment' for a lot of the things I do. It really helps to displace responsibility for my actions. You can get away with a lot of crappy stuff if you call it an 'experiment'. You were just messing around, seeing what you could do. You weren't trying to make anything good. If it's good, cool. If it sucks, it doesn't matter.

The perfect cop-out.



I learned some valuable lessons from this initial stop-motion project:

• It's very important to lock down your camera's tripod.
• It's very important to lock down your subject matter.
• Pet's should be isolated for the duration of the shoot.
• Crouching is not comfortable for long periods of time.
• Make sure subject is in focus.
• Pants are optional.
• Dancing is forbidden!

I though I had everything fairly secure and there wasn't going to be much jitter. After assembling the frames, I found I was obviously quite wrong. I thought about reshooting or modifiying the frames, but after working with it I realized the subject matter didn't warrant the extra effort. It just wasn't interesting enough to devote more time to. There was no vision.

I intend the next one to be much more interesting.

Sometimes you just reach a point where you say, "It's not getting any better." I've reached that point. Not in a good way though. I keep trying to tweak things without really improving them. Time to just call it done and move on to the next project.
Read More...

I've written previously about my fondness for the propaganda-styled imagery. It was brought back into the public eye with the Obama "Hope" image and its subsequent countless parodies. The annoucement of more Battlestar Galactica Minimates as Toys'R'Us exclusives gave me a chance to get in on the act.
Read More...