First Animation

Well folks, hope ya'll are doing well after the holidays! Sorry I haven't posted a blog update in awhile, but I've been using my Christmas/New Year's break to do a lot of animating. I was also kind of busy writing up a medieval story for a writing contest; you can read it here. But I've made TONS of progress since my last post, and I'm really excited to be able to share them with you!

First of all, I've finally finished modeling my first LEGO guy (tweaking till past perfection is my worst pitfall...) Here's a quick close up screen shot of him so you can see the details. As far as my knowledge goes, he looks exactly like a real LEGO guy!


Secondly, I've gotten all his materials under control. I finally figured out how to paint his clothes and face, which has been wonderful! I've also got "all" the textures under control! Of course the only texture I'm using right now is the guy's face, but I'm still happy to have it figured out! I was able to draw them up in Word and them transfer them to Gimp to key out the background. Then came the hard part of duplicating and naming a face for every frame, in this case I was able to cheat and only make 184 pictures even though the animation was longer. I'll probably be doing the faces as videos from now on, since I don't have a file renamer program on my computer. But be that as it was, after I'd done all the renaming it was very easy to tell Blender to read all the pictures as an animation sequence.

And that brings me to my third thing I've done - put together a VERY SIMPLE animation video for you to see kind of what's happening in my "real" animation world. Hope you enjoy it!

First Animation from Aspen Ridge Family Media on Vimeo.

And with that I think you're pretty much up to date as to what I've been working on! Now that the holiday break is over, I'm heading back into the grind of school so I can't promise how much animating I'll be getting done each day from here on out. As soon as I get the PC computer from our neighbor (I know, I like Macs also...), I'll be able to build the background sets; cabins, forts, forests, indian camps, beautiful valleys, etc. etc. That will be very exciting!!!!