My Final 3D Animation; The Animating (College Work)

The Animation Steps (To Beginning and End.)
Hand Animation.
Originally I was going to hand animate each of the steps and scenes, however I heard about the Gravity Tool which enables an object to free fall in side the scene. This never worked, so I went on to hand animate each and every scene I needed to do. Using the animation timeline I put each stage into segments of movement. If a snow ball was to fly into the air there would be a point in the timeline where it started, the highest point of where the ball would reach and the drop point. (Which is what you can see beside this text!) This is part of Scene 4 where you see the snowball fly into the air. I wanted all the animation style to be cheesy and contain style. I never used any splines for my objects to attach to, instead I made my own splines by moving/placing and rotating my object to where it needed to go and then recording it into the timeline.

Rolling Animation.

For some of the scenes, I had to use the rotational tool quite a lot. Take Scene 2 for example, the first rolling ball animation in the whole video clip. Sadly, where the object (The Snowball) it self was quite temperamental, and rotated in an inconvenient place, making the rolling animations less realistic and more stylised. On each point of the timeline, I was rotating the ball to 360° and even more when it was needed in certain areas. This gave the full rotating or falling effect to the snowball.

Emitter and Different Lighting for near End Scenes.
From Scene 10 to 13, all had different lighting screens for different times of the day. This was never added into the storyboard, but I thought would be a good show of time passing by and the snowman melting due to changes and damage. However, I felt like I could change the shape of the scarf in each scene, but I was unable to do so because the shape of the scarf was quite complicated in itself, making it harder to work with.
The Emitter on Scene 11 could have lasted longer, but I will be able to edit this. I used a sphere and made it the snow's texture as well as material to match the snow present. The emitter was making 100 spheres each 20 frames to represent falling snow. (Video underneath is Scene 12.)

Camera Placement and Stitching Together the Scenes

Camera Placement.

With the camera, it wasn't moved around a lot in the scenes, but made a big impact (I feel) to the whole animation all together. The camera was also moved around by me selecting the camera perspective and then moving and recording the cameras movements into the timeline below. I would watch the flow of the animation the camera is watching over and follow in its footsteps to make the right viewing. I like Scene 10 the best for this one, where there has been additional add ons to the snow man as the days go by. The camera shows the sky, noticing that it is now night time, and then pans down to the snowman its self. 

My Final 3D Animation; Making the Scenery (College Work)

The basic layout (The Begining/ Setting the scene.)

The Landscapes.

I wanted to get the plain of the whole animation out of the way, so I sprung up a couple of "Landscapes", which you can select from the Object Selector, and picked seed 3 for the Landscapes at the front and the one at the back is seed 10, the one on the far end is seed 8. However, I wanted a flat surface from where the Landscapes ended, so I fixed up a Cube and flattened it, giving the plain a nice straight surface I can work on.

The Grass.

The grass you can see poking through the snow is actually a fur texture you can select from the Material tool (Materials > File > Hair Material > Fur). and can be placed on top of the landscape its self. What I did was copy the already existing landscapes and renamed them "Grass", making them much smaller and a little more underneath the landscape its self so it's not too little or too much "Grass", it's just enough. 

The Sky.

The sky is a simple thing; A sphere with a picture taken of the clouds and sky. I placed the image into a sphere because I believed that it would look more realistic. We do live on a round planet after all! Also, it won't have the nasty edges a cube has, making the scene more beliveable.

Adding Texture, Lighting and the Snow Balls

The Texture.

Getting a snowy texture to pull off is quite hard, specially with limited lighting. I created a texture, selected White for the base colour and then in the bar on the side of the Materials window, I clicked bump and gave the snow a "Rusty" texture, so it had bumps and lumps, like snow has. 

The Lighting.

The lighting was very hard to come up with, but I decided on a pastely yellow colour mixed with a normal pure white light. It gives it all a real life feel, as light isn't pure white or pure yellow, but a mixture of the two on a clear blue day. Snow also isn't purely white, but if I was to pick another colour but white to make it look realistic, it would look fake. 

The Snow Balls.

Snow balls always have that unevenness to them, so I made a sphere and played around with the shape with the Magnet tool. To use the magnet tool and make multiple parts of the snow ball to disfigure, I used the live selection tool to pick out the places I wanted the magnet tool to focus on and then I pulled the sphere apart into rough lumps.

The Rock, Snowman Base and the Scarf

The Rock.

I will make the rock the same way I made the landscapes; Select the Landscape Object from the Object Tool and select seed 1. After I have shrunk it down and formed it the way I would like it to lay, I made a Material for it and named it "Rock", selecting a dark grey and selecting a bump texture called "simple turbulence". This gives the rock a gorgeous rough texture.

Snowman Base.

Just the same as the Snowballs; used the snow material, made the sphere editable, live selection tool and then deformed it with the magnet tool. However, the snowman base is actually a semi-circle, or how you would like to call a Hemisphere in 3D terms. I wanted this so that when I added the texture it wouldn't stretch out around a sphere but instead, around a hemisphere instead.

The Scarf.

The trickiest of them all, I decided to do the scarf above the snowman base, as it will be there through out the animation. I first started off with a free hand spline and did the grooves and shape of a scarf. After I had did that, I placed the spline into a Lathe NURB, creating a circular cylinder which turned out to look like a scarf (But to make it editable I clicked the "make object editable" button). I wanted to change the shape of it, to make it more flexible, so I reshaped it with the Magnet Tool, selecting bits and pieces to reshape it.

All done! The stage is set for the animation to begin.