Enough with the excuses, onto the animating! The first step towards making my very own version of Avatar was keyframe animation. It was a fairly easy task to begin with, I watched the Hirsig tutorial just to get a taste of what is expected, and then found a nice tutorial for it in Max. (I decided to go for 3ds max as I heard it was used in the industry, and also a little bit because I despised Blender with a passion)
I did more or less the same thing as the Blender tutorial said. I made a box and a sphere and just made them dance around each other for a few seconds. Here is what it looks like: :)
Seeing as I found that pretty simple animation so easy and boring to make, I thought to try out my own idea for an animation. So I came up with the genius idea to model and animate a Rubiks Cube. Little did I know, this would be incredibly difficult and in the end, would not work. Before we get to that however, I will tell you exactly how I got to that.
I started off making a small box and then cloning it 26 times, and successfully made a Rubiks cubey looking cube. Then came colouring the faces. At this point I didn't know how to assign a material to a single face so after about 10 minutes of finding out, I converted them all to an editable poly and then selecting the face and assigning the colour. I don't know if I was doing it the slow way or the only way, but I had to select and colour each face individually. After 54 individually coloured faces I was quite good at it though.
So I have a pretty good looking Rubiks cube now, with all the colourfulness. But then came the fun part of animating it. Well, I thought this would be fun, and relatively easy. First thing I had to do was move the pivot points of all the cubes, I tried rotating them but they all just individually spun round. So after a bit of Googlizing I found out that I had to go to Heirarchy>Pivot>Affect Pivot Only and then just move all the pivot points to the centre of the cube. Now I thought the rest would be a simple task of just, well, keyframe animating. So I selected the one side of boxes, toggled Auto Key and rotated it by 90ยบ. I watched the animation back and it looked fine. When I tried to animate it any more than that though, it all went horribly, horribly wrong. Random boxes seemed to forget where they were before and some went in wrong directions, some disappeared and then reappeared on the other side of the cube, and there was just a mass of disorientated boxes. So, after trying everything I knew (which I'll admit is very little right now) I could not solve this mysterious problem. I managed to render the best one I could get after I manually set the keyframes, but it is by no means working.
I won't be giving up on this idea, just keeping it in stasis until I have a clue of why it went wrong. I would like to see it done after all that time I spent modelling it.
No comments:
Post a Comment