The final evaluation of my animation, in my previous post I wrote about my work ethic and how it needs to improve, along with the reasoning / excuses given that led me up to this point. However I want this post to delve in to my feelings on the prop itself.
The concept:
As evident by the mixed mess of a blog when I first started this, I had no clue what I wanted to do. Originally I wanted to create “Soul Eater Evans” from Soul eater, as it’s a show / manga that’s near to my heart and I would have loved to create it. However I didn’t take in to account the challenge of creating that prop at my skill level, along with the animation (the transformation animation was hand drawn in 2D and rigging a character to move in that way appeared too difficult to me); and thus I decided to move on to pokemon.
I thought about animating a pokeball opening, yet on the opposite end of the spectrum I thought that would be too easy. A sphere with a row of faces extruded inwards, then opening from a hinge point, it didn’t feel like it would test me – I also did the exact same movement and used the basic idea on the treasure chest I created (the pivot point was changed so that if you selected the chests’ lid in the Hypergraph hierarchy, you could rotate the pivot point on the hinges to open – in hindsight I should have created a NURBS circle to parent everything).
From here I was thinking of what pokemon I could create that would challenge me for both the model and animation, whilst also being realistic to my skill level. I was casually browsing Pokemon Go and then the idea came to me to use it as a reference, while most sprites and animations of pokemon are 2D so far, Pokemon Go has fully 3D models that I could refer to and use to find the correct pokemon.
Forretress (the prop in question) is a personal favourite of mine, it’s visually appealing, symmetrical and has a lot of simple components moving at once which is why I chose it, believing it would fit my skill level.
The prop itself was surprisingly easy to create, extruding spheres and inserting edge loops to create the basic shape. My biggest dilemma is grouping the objects and giving them a parent NURBS to allow me to move them together.
The pirate theme came from my idea to add complexity to the prop, specifically in the cannons, it allowed me to add details while also having creating freedom. Thanks to this, texturing the prop became quite simple as well due to the pirate theme generally consisting of stained woods and rusted metals.
Something I wanted to do that I was unfortunately unable to execute was making the cannons collapsible, however as it was all one solid object I wasn’t able to individually move the segments, causing that idea to be quite problematic.
Overall I believe I learned a lot during this very stressful time. My skills improved over the past couple of weeks and forcing myself to work within deadlines has helped (and hopefully will continue to help me if I keep it up) me keep up with consistency.
Jonathan's University Blog 