Of horses and maidens...

Sorry I haven't posted anything in quite awhile, but I've been doing a lot of modeling and re-modeling... As I said, this whole project is for my personal animation education, so I'm just taking it one thing at a time, and thoroughly mastering each step before heading to the next one. And I am happy to say that I'm to the point where I can easily model simple meshes pretty fast! I know I don't know all the tips and tricks; indeed, "the more I learn the less I know"! But I'm happy with the progress I've made over the past few months, so that is all that counts!

But now, turning to the little bit of progress I have made. I've learned that LEGO company is profusely swayed towards feminism! I know it sounds scary, but it's true. What do modern LEGO girls look like? Men with long hair, or sometimes not even that...
And what do period LEGO girls look like? I don't know. I guess they're only drawings on simple boring LEGO blocks... Looks nice in a picture, but start animating them and you will soon see how stiff and unnatural they become!
So with those two models staring me in the face, I had a decision to make regarding my female actors. I decided to chart new waters and create my very own model. The difficulties? I would have to create a dress that looks like plastic, yet still reproduces the feminine qualities of modesty that the dresses back in the early 1800's portrayed. And then there's the problem with walking. When a real young lady walks with a dress on, her legs move the dress back and forth allowing her to walk. How do you reproduce that if you're supposed to make it look like rigid plastic? After several attempts, I was finally able to create a simple yet good-looking dress style that still allows for free motion of the legs underneath. This will be one of the main things in this film that are truly of my own creation!!!
And then there's the horses. I loaded a picture I took of a LEGO horse (believe me, I've used real LEGOs as references throughout the entire modeling process!!!) and traced around it to make a 2d horse. I then extruded it into a 3d model; it was that simple! The tail was a little more difficult, because it had many tiny grooves in it which took me quite awhile to make, because of all the vertices I had to move around... But anyway, here's a quick screen shot of my horse right now, with only simple materials mapped to it. Don't worry, I'll have way more detail on the final product.
Other than that, I'm even now trying to figure out how to link my different models into one main file for the actual animating part, and then I'll start animating the actual film! But of course that won't be 'till after we record the audio...

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!!!!