Animations
What a Beautiful Day, Blender, 0:56
Sep 2023
Some mornings are just so beautiful that it would just be a waste to sleep through them unless some unforeseen rain comes out of nowhere. After making 3D models for about a year I wanted to finally create a 3D animation in Blender that can tell a cohesive story. What I was most excited to do for this project was character rigging, back when I was using Cinema 4D I only animated objects such as cubes or cameras moving around a 3D space because rigging models in Cinema 4D was extremely difficult due to a lack of helpful tutorials for the newest version. Blender on the other hand has an extraordinarily vibrant community so any time I had a problem it was very easy to find a solution online or from my peers.
When modeling the props and characters I had the most difficulty with fabric based materials such as clothes or the pillow. Clothes specifically would not move with the character when it would animate or the collision of the object would completely freak out. I was able to resolve the issue by extruding specific parts of the body where as the pillow and blanket had the collision modifier and then applied in place.
Mixamo was a great help when looking for premade animations especially for walk cycles. I tried using Mixamo before in Cinema 4D when making I Love Wendy's but the program did not like it when I tried to edit the key frames. It was much friendlier to use in Blender which saved a whole lot of time.
To quickly create this neighborhood I used the array modifier and the particle simulator for the rain coming off the tetrahedron. The rain was the most difficult thing to get to work in this project since sometimes it would not work or it would drop all at the same time rather then the designated key frames.
There were instances when producing What a Beautiful Day where I had to record myself punching or stopping a clock so that the timing in the animation looked right. When I tried doing this punch without a reference the movement looked very robotic and the arms positioning was way off.