Advanced 3D Modeling Class
On this page, you will see documentation of my step-by-step process of completing a series of projects that led to one final presentation done in the duration of my time in the Advanced 3D course at ESU. The project I had in mind was to test and learn the capabilities of Blender's rendering abilities and animation by making a minisode based off of VeggieTales, an early 3D animated cartoon.
Step 1: Create a Central Character
An important first step in this project, was to create a central character that this minisode would focus around. Thinking about VeggieTales, I wanted to make him a type of food. Since VeggieTales' ideals are to appeal to all that is good and righteous, such as portraying vegetables that are good for your health that reenact stories of the bible, a symbol of the christianity faith, I wanted to mimic that in an opposite direction. Thus Carlos the Hotdog was born. An unhealthy, 'cool guy' hotdog.
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To start this, I first worked on the textures setting up the model; just basic colours and gradients to make up for various parts of the model. Later came the actual model building, and then a test animation.
Step 2: Create an Environment
Now that a central character has been created, it was time to work on the environment that the character would be animated in. For the purpose of this minisode, I decided that a city environment would be the best choice for this project.
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The modeling process of the city started conceptually, as I needed to think of a way to make a city that looked enough like a city, while not causing too much strain on the computer to be able to render and play with ease. To do this, I went with a simple approach of making the buildings as low poly as possible, while relying on the textures to carry the detail of the city. The textures were taken from a SEGA Dreamcast game known as Sonic Adventure and then edited by me to better serve me in this city.
Step 3: Create Minor Characters
The central character and the city now exist, but we need more to make this project a reality. What was needed now, was more characters to help the central character progress the.. "plot", and for some background elements to make the city feel more alive.
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Since these characters represent the normal good nature of VeggieTales, I needed them to be healthy foods, so I made four minor characters to help the project. A young skater carrot, an old man banana, a little girl grape, and a school boy celery.
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After making the characters, I decided to make some vehicles to occupy the background during the animation, to give life to the city, as well as reusing an old model of the DeLorean from Back to the Future I once made.
Step 4: Polishing Up
Now that the characters and the vehicles are done, it was time to import them into the city and to prepare for the final animation. Along with the characters being added, the city needed a few touch ups as well. The story of the minisode so far required a clock tower to be built, and needed final touches such as a skybox and lighting to help illuminate the environment.
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After adding the characters, I had to arrange things as if it were a movie set, as in setting up a camera, planning where the camera would move, what would be seen in each shot and what shouldn't be, etc. It was also here that I realized that my scale for the models and the city were off; but thats not a problem as it could have been easily fixed. Made for a few funny seconds though!
Step 5: Animating and Rendering
With the skybox rendered, with the characters in position, it was now time to start animating. I used this setup to help me with that process, where on the left I would have the entire rendered environment, with the left screen displaying what my camera was seeing at all times, and the right screen showing me my environment as solid meshes where I would animate them. Using both screens, I could move something and see how it would look like in my frame when rendering.
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When done with a keyframe of an animation, I would record it on the timeline on the bottom, then move to another point on the timeline and make another keyframe. This allows me to interpolate the models in between the keyframes and make an animation.