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E'llo, and welcome to this old dwagon's worlds. };8>
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General Audience Animation Gallery
This is a general animation of the first ship Falcor is going to fly in future animations. It's very rough right now, only 'sketched out' if you will as a mesh, but it give one a general idea at what the ship will look like.
This little animation was quite a pain the old hind end. I was looking for an interesting effect to use for when a ship activates it's jump drive at a navigation beacon or jump point. I've always been somewhat partial to the animation used in Star Trek, The Undiscovered Country when the Klingon mining moon Praxus blew up. I didn't want to duplicate the effect exactly, as it wouldn't fit my world's science model. (Not to mention nothing is blowing up!)
This is what I call an orbit animation of my first simple actor. At present he's articulated, but I don't have enough IK solver constraints in him yet to be able to animate him proper yet. Probably in about a week. :) Enjoy for now.
Now the animation is starting to take true shape and form. Rather than just an orbital path around the static model I've pulled out a few of the things I've learned over the past few months and targeted the camera on a null, just like in the first animation. What I've done now is animate both the camera and the null to make a smooth pull away effect that actually pulls our actor into the camera's frame. Then the magic begins as the actor, well, acts! };8> Enjoy, theirs more to come in this little spoof that will probably end up being my 'splash' animation logo, provided certain parties don't sue the dragon.
Hold on, New name, same lamp! As this one is starting to move a little more realistically than I thought I could make it, I've decided he should have a proper name. Meat Djinn. True, it's not original, but It fits for me. Djinn now moves (with a few burps as exceptions) in a darn live like manner, if I do say so myself. You might be asking yourself what happened to wips 4 to 8. Well, call them training experiments, as I learn how to literaly think not only in 3D space but also in the fourth dimension. (Time) Because of the file size and rendering times (considering these are just works in progress) all further updates of this sequence will be at half the resolution. (It's in full widescreen DVD res right now) This is to be courteous to folks like myself who have dial up and to the kind folks here at furtopia who host my files.
Smaller size, faster download, more animation! }:8> Now we see Djinn getting ready to take his first step, or jump so to speak. He seems to have just noticed he's kinda springy, and it's just dawned on him he might be able to move his base if he bounces enough.
This is the first animation I've released that uses blenders sequence editor. I had to go back and break the animation up into several pieces and assemble them in the sequence editor, mostly because re-rendering the whole animation from the first frame was simply taking way too long! (To the tune of several hours for EACH test animation) So far I've broken the action down into four separate stages, each about five or so seconds long. (give or take, some are longer, some shorter) The animation is now about 25 seconds long. Almost the time of a average US commercial!
I've had to guess a lot while messing with the sequence editor as my antiquated book seems to just confuse me, so I'm learning this whole thing by guess and by experimentation. Fortunately the kind folks that designed blender made it intuitive, once you understand how they work with things, so my guesses have thus far been nearly spot on.
It's not much I know, and it's ugly on top of that but it's my first walk cycle. (With a wave even!) Preserved so I can laugh at myself soon.
A nice big file to show off his hair and the transparent masking effect.
All images and artwork © 2006, 2007 Phantomgraph };8>
