Me, several years ago: "I'll never try digital 3D art... just have no interest to learn it. Already have learned other art forms that I barely use anyway... so why add to that ?..."
Me, currently: [Is attempting to model a donut in Blender]
"... uh... I can explain..."
Today's endeavor was to learn something new in Blender, and I came across this neat tutorial on how to create clay animation. Although it was a node-heavy tutorial, I found it surprisingly easy to follow, thanks in large part to the author's clear explanation of the process.
After achieving the neat effect I was aiming for, I felt inspired to animate it! I stumbled upon a video about mouth animation and learned about Visemes, which involve the study of lip reading and mouth movements in animation. I did purchase a mouth pack for $5, but the video also detailed how to create your own mouth animation pack. It was incredibly informative and added a lot of value to my learning experience.
Tomorrow I want to animate this so keep posted ^_^
Woo, environment is all set up and ready to go! Next part of the tutorial series is making a butterfly, then we're gonna animate a little walk through the forest with the butterfly flying by :)
I want to start posting a bit more in order to keep things a bit more documented and hopefully keep me on track. So I am going to try and make a blog post every week in order to do so! (Not every post will have an animation though. That would be a lot.)
I also forgot to mention this on my last post but even though I made the vending machine and animation, I modeled the vending machine off of a tutorial from lacruzo! It actually was a great way to practice modeling for my project and to see how Grease Pencil interacts with Blender's 3D aspects. Overall, a great tutorial and a great way to learn a bit about Blender. Check it out on YouTube if you are interested.
Lastly, in terms of progress on the film, it has been a bit rough. Turns out I am still figuring out how to decide on story beads quickly so I ended up taking WAY too long on storyboarding. I even had to redo a lot of it over the weekend...
I managed to FINALLY get to a place I wanted though. It feels a lot more concise and manageable now so I happy with it! I'll probably have to make it look nicer but I do have it timed out properly now and have now started on modeling the scene.
To end this week's post, here is the model I made of Pocket's cup elevator that he jumps into at the beginning in the film (without the fancy illustrative shader.)