Well, genius has finally came to end. I have finished my animation, it looks very cheesy but the animation was not really what I was focusing on in the first place whenever I started. I have enjoyed this project and I hope that people will enjoy my presentation. Speaking of presentation, I have finally finished it over the week and I am getting Mr. Barker to look over it. Over the weekend I will be practicing it and seeing how long it will take to present. It is pretty lengthy, but who knows. I don't know how to feel now that genius hour is coming to an end. I can see that my progression has improved much over the past 12 weeks. I feel like I know what I am doing now, with full confidence. Without genius hour, I really don't know if I would have ever decided to use blender. I guess I am excited for it to come to an end, so that blender can feel more like a hobby now rather than a fun requirement. Looking over, my favorite project was the ice cream one. Mainly because it was completely unplanned. Not only was it unplanned, but it also ended up really solid. It definitely raised my confidence knowing I could make textures look really realistic. My least favorite was the ladybug one, the model had tons of issues and I even had to look at tutorials on how to make a ladybug (weirdly enough that they exist). That is definitely the first thing I'm going to work on after this project. I am proud of the work I have done these past 12 weeks, I hope other people are proud of their work as well. I am happy I chose a project that I am passionate about because it really makes the project easier. If I did that weight gain journey, it would have felt like a burden and a half. FINAL ANIMATION
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This week I have been extremely busy, with a mix of after-school activities and homework from other classes. AP World History has been on my case this week, taking up most of my usual blender time. On the good side, I am almost complete with my robot animation. Unfortunately, I do not think I will have the time to add any sound effects for it. It looks pretty good and I am highly confident that I will be able to get it finished and rendered by next week. Just modeling was the original plan for my project, but it seems I enjoy doing animations so that is something that went differently in my project. I am more proud of the robot than with the animation, however.
The robot animation did not go as planned as first, because making the robot walk normally is difficult, so I decided to for a different approach. It is going to be around 20 seconds and overall looks pretty cheesy but we will see how the final version goes. I looked at Veronicas Mills genius hour how it is a form of animation and it looks pretty interesting. One of the aspects of genius hour is to have your presentation explaining everything you have done. I have worked on that this week at I am excited for it. I have a sort of techy slideshow template that I got for free only and I am trying to make it as interesting as possible. I am not the best speaker but I hope that if I practice in front of some friends and family it could help me. I am honestly feeling pretty good about it being week 11. I know that I have done to the best of my capability to get as much done with genius hour as possible. I hope that my presentation goes well and that people are as interested in 3D modeling as I am. Talking to friends they said that they are wrapping it up as well so I am going to start doing that as well. Robot animating has gone okay. Come to find, rigging is very difficult. I have tried many times throughout this week, looking at many tutorial videos and nothing has worked yet. Whenever I think I am fished, a ton of errors occur. My guess is that it has something to do with the way I made the face, but I really do not know. I have decided to settle with keyframe animation. Because I was trying so hard to do the rigging, I only had but one day this week to do the animation. Consider this to be the beginner animation, and next week is the more advanced one. This week has been pretty relaxed, I have had plenty of free time how it is thanksgiving break. Working on the beginner animation took not too long, I'd say about 20 minutes. For the next one, I plan to make it walk or do a cartwheel or something (we will see how it goes). It was simple rotation, and location keyframes and is 400 keyframes long making it my current longest animation. The next one will be even longer and maybe if I can add some sound effects to it. We really are near the end of the project, and it is honestly amazing. I am honestly happy with what I have done the past 10 weeks, I don't think I would have ever developed an interest in Blender if it were not for this project. I hope that my advanced animation goes well, so it will mark a good ending for the project. Looking at other peoples projects, it looks like they are beginning to wrap up as well. I am excited to see all of their projects and their progression as well. I am most excited about Cj's and Tyler's project, I wonder how much of the movie we will be able to see in class. I will probably work on the presentation next week as well. ANIMATION I feel like I have not been doing as much work as I usually have this week. Now that I am starting Drivers Ed the time used for my project is getting replaced by that, so now I am replacing more of my free time on this project (which I do not mind). Modeling is enjoyable and you feel accomplished whenever you are finished. It is really hard to feel this though, throughout many of my projects I have felt that there is always something missing, but I have realized that perfection is something very difficult to achieve. Last weekend I was very bored so I hopped on blender and decided to do a mini-project as a sort of hobby. I decided to make an ice cream cone with my favorite flavor (creamsicle) and put it into blender. It took approximately 2-3 hours and was fairly easy to make. The cone was originally a cylinder and did not take much to get the shape correctly into a cone shape. I tried my best to give it a sort of rough texture and it looks ok. I also made a small camera animation because I am extra like that. It consists of 80 frames and is about 3 seconds long. It took about 2 hours to render I would say. So this week I finally decided what I wanted to do for my ¨Final Project¨. I would not say final project but my final project for genius hour. I decided to make my robot character and to rig it. On the outside would be my character, and on the inside, there would be my skeletal system. Consider it like a robot from chuck e. cheese, you have the character and then you have the skeleton that controls the character. So of course, I would be doing another animation for this project as well. I imagine it will be my longest animation so we will see how it goes. My robot has a screen as a face, and I nice little top hat. It seems that green blended in the best with the robot. I have already created a rig and will take some tutorials to see how it goes. I am very excited about this project because I am making something very original and unique. BECAUSE WEEBLY IS A PAIN HERE IS MY ANIMATION: ICE CREAM ANIMATION
I have finished my Ladybug project, and it only took around 1 1/2 weeks, it has been fairly hard modeling the ladybug, and it was the hardest part of this project. It still looks fairly jagged in some areas, but in the rendered view, or final view, it looks pretty good. I created a 4-second animation which I have attempted to render twice over the night, and sadly the second one got corrupted because of a restart my computer decided to have overnight. The second one was my revised animation so whenever I get that one loaded up I will update this blog post, but I will provide the lower-quality one. Along with that, I have finished writing the chapter for my low-poly project in the My Progress tab on my website, which is good. I will be going more in-depth about my ladybug project there starting about next week. I would say that this project was about an equal amount of difficulty to the low-poly project. Even though the ladybug project seems a lot more realistic, much more detail was put into the low-poly one, but more modeling was involved in the ladybug project. These past two weeks have been pretty tough in terms of motivation. I felt like I have not had that much free time on the topic of having a ton of homework to do. It feels like I am still having school days but at home these past two free days. But hopefully, I can enjoy myself over the weekend. I really am trying my best to live a balanced life. On the topic of what my next (and final) project is going to be, I want to make my own character, whether fictional or non-fiction. I had the idea of making me or making some sort of animatronic. I know I want to attempt to rig it, which is a technique used in skeletal animation for representing a 3D character model using a series of interconnected digital bones. So yeah this is probably going to be my most difficult project for sure, but I know I left enough weeks for me to attempt it and we will see how it goes. BECAUSE WEEBLY IS A PAIN: 1st Animation (The bad one) - Took around 2-3 hours to render (110 frames) 2nd Animation (Should Be Up This Weekend) So I have finished my low-poly project, which took around a week and a half to complete and I like it. I added another building this week and messed with lighting and overall I am very satisfied with the results. The next project I am going to work on is a big project, and I am going to use a picture I got from pixels and use modeling and animation to bring it to life. This might be my most interesting project so far. Looking at other people's examples it does not look like it might take too long, so I estimate it might take around the same duration of my low-poly picture. It was extremely hard to find a decent picture of an insect, but I managed to find one of a ladybug on a vine, and hopefully, the resolution of the picture will be satisfactory. The texture of the vine should not be too bad because I will be using UV projecting, so my models would use the texture that is shown on the picture, which is why I am mainly focusing on the modeling and the animation part. Other than the donut project I have not done too much animating which makes me wonder how much I will be able to get done. So whenever I finish this project which will hopefully be next week, I will begin making my character through the platform. I have some ideas of what it could be but I should have my eyes on my big project for now. This week has been way slower in terms of productivity compared to any other week because of the amount of homework I have had lately, and the pre-ACT we had on Tuesday. However, how we don't have school today I am trying to make that time up. I wanted to see how much time I have spent on the platform in total and it was a whopping 60.8 hours. I would subtract around 10 hours because I left the application open for animation rendering for the donut, and spent around 2 hours before I started the project. That means I have spent around an hour a day on average throughout the genius hour project. Time fly's whenever you are on that platform. Coming into a new project was difficult because I had no idea what I wanted to do. Thankfully, one of my teachers, Mr. Poller, came with the idea that I should create a low-poly scene. Low-poly is a technique of 3D modeling that uses a small number of polygons. The poupous of it are to create a simplified sort of world rather than a realistic set. I was set to use my creativity and decided to make my low-poly scene. I have spent about an hour a day this week Monday through Friday on my scene and I have gotten a lot accomplished. I wonder if I should add more to the scene, or make another polygon scene. Another project I have planned is designing my character, which might be saved for the last 2 or 3 weeks of the project. I will maybe spend about half of next week cleaning up the scene and adding a few more details, and beginning another poly-scene. I am proud of myself and feel like I have gotten much done over this week. The incredible thing about doing this project is that I am enjoying myself with this. I enjoy dedicating time to this project and working through my projects in blender. It is great that I dedicated the first few weeks to doing a beginners project because I feel a lot more familiar with the platform and have had very few complications. The few issues that I have had are concerning lighting and the positioning of where I want things. I am not that caught off guard with genius hour being halfway done. I have had a good balance between doing this project and keeping up with homework for other classes, which makes me feel good about myself knowing I have a good work ethic. I have finished the My Progress page for my first project, where I go into more detail into the project itself instead of how I am keeping up with it.
I am so excited to say that I have completed my beginner's project. After completing the coffee cup I have worked on the scene, and have made many small adjustments. I changed the tile into a marble texture using an online website called Poliigon and also inserted a brick wall texture using the same website. I added a plate for my Donut and adjusted the resolution of my camera. I decided that I would like to add a simple animation and it worked out perfectly. Rendering animation takes quite a while, even while having a decent computer rig it took approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes. This was because I had a total of 33 frames in the animation, and each frame took 2-3 minutes to download. I then had to composite the images together using their video system. I also looked at a tutorial on lighting which helped it give a more natural look. What I learned this week: Photorealism Compositing Animation Rendering I could spend more time refining it even more, but I think that this would be a good start for my next project, an advanced project. Because of how common the donut is for it to be everyone's first blender project, it was easy to find tutorials when I was stuck. I want to create something that comes from my imagination, and the only person who can figure it out is me. I have not figured it out yet, but for next week I should and I will be finishing up the My Progress page along with that. These first 5 weeks have gone quickly, but I am glad I finished the Donut Project sooner than later. Now that I am willing to challenge myself more for this next project, I feel like there will be greater pressure for the next weeks to come. However, I think the most important thing about genius hour is that you enjoy what you are doing, and I surely am. BECAUSE WEEBLY IS A PAIN HERE IS MY ANIMATION: DONUT ANIMATION Grammatical Corrections Made 10/29/2021 Overall this week has been fairly tough, I have been struggling with it a lot. There were lots of attempts on the shape of it and the coloring and adding some sort of condensation, and overall it has looked terrible. The foam would not even appear and I would have no idea why, the condensation does not look like it came out of a horror movie and it has been quite frustrating. What I have learned: Precision Modeling Transparency Photo Texturing Volumetrics Advanced Mapping My final result for these two models will be completed next week. With some scenery, better lighting, and more. I have built the "my progress" page going into full detail about what I have learned so far, and how I did it. This platform is quite amazing and can really bring creativity in you, and also problem-solving in you. This week was by far the most difficult and I had to look at several tutorials on how to do different things. I can not believe we are 1/3 of the way done through genius hour, I do not feel like I could have put more effort into this project, considering the amount of spare time I have with homework and activities. I have spent about an hour a day on average on blender, Monday through Friday. And I have worked on the majority of the "my progress" page on Wednesday and did this blog page on Friday. I have been looking at other people's genius hour and it seems like they are experiencing similar emotions. It is in my opinion that if you feel 100% confident about yourself during this project, then you're doing something wrong or you're treating yourself too easy. Overall I am excited to see what will come next after this donut/coffee starter project. Grammar Corrections Made 10/29/2021 I am feeling great right now! There is some sort of feeling of completion whenever you do these sort of things. I have managed to make a great amount of progress on my donut. I have done a bunch of texturing and have messed around with particles to add sprinkles and to make the donut have a more realistic look. I believe I am finished with my Donut! What I have learned: Particles UV Unwrapping Texture Painting Procedural Texturing Displacement Because of the progress, I have done I have decided to continue with my model, and I plan to add a scenery for my Donut that is more appropriate than just a Pink Tile. I imagine this will take one or two more weeks but I have good hopes. I am still planning what I will do after I finish my beginner project. I have gotten very familiar with the platform. I still plan to have a progress site showing off all of the things I have done. I believe that with this site I will be going more in-depth by providing deeper explanations of how I did these certain things. Hopefully, it would be put up sometime next week and will be available in my next blog post. Surprisingly, it has been already four weeks in this project, and I won't lie it has caught me off-guard a little bit. However, I am still proud of my current consistency and determination of this project, I have currently worked on this project evenly every day and it has not been too much of a stress on me which is good. I hope by the end of the next week I would have a solid idea of what I want to add to my scene, but for now I can take a break in peace. Grammar Corrections Made 10/29/2021 This week I have made great progress. I feel like I have gotten familiar with much of the platform in a week. The tutorials have been very useful and I feel more confident with the platform already, which makes me excited to see what is to come. I have made great progress with my donut and I have decided to add a page soon on my website showing my progress over time, with screenshots and an explanation of what I am doing. I realized while doing my project that learning all of the basics of blender, will for sure take more than two weeks. I plan to continue with my donut and explain what I have learned along with it. I will hopefully be doing more advanced things with my donut along the way. I still plan to make something huge whenever the appropriate time comes, to show the combination of all the things I have learned, but I have just started with this project so I am not too worried about it. What I have learned this week: User Interface Modeling Sculpting Materials Lighting Rendering I am very excited to see what more is to come, for I will be continuing on the donut and continue to monitor my progress so far. I plan to add more texture to the donut and hopefully be adding a background. I am very excited about this project and it has given me a passion already to work my best on this project as well. There have been times where it has gotten frustrating, I messed up the shadow while doing the tutorial and it took me quite a while to figure out what I have done wrong, but I did eventually figure it out, which made me proud of myself at the end. I just know there will be more struggles to come. Grammar Corrections Made 10/29/2021 ![]() Progress before rendering, proper lighting, and coloring. ![]() Here is the mistake I was talking about, as you can see the donuts shadow is definitely problematic. ![]() Here is my final shadow, it is still not perfect but it is way better than it was before. I did this by messing with the lights intensity and adjusting where the light came from. This week is my week to focus on the base of my journey, on very simple things. In order for this project to work properly, I will be having to do some basic things. One of the first things I will have to do is actually download the application. The application itself is very intense but I do have a good computer at home.
My plan is to become familiar with the platform for the first two weeks, and then start making some small models, and for the final 6 weeks, my plan is to make one large and very detailed model, which I have not yet come up with. One of my teachers (Mr. Poller) informed me that a YouTuber known as Blender Guru gives very useful and basic tutorials. I will be looking at his tutorials this week and inform hopefully in the next blog post what happens. I will hopefully go into more detail about what I have learned, and have created as well. It seems in the first video that we are going to learn how to make a donut! I myself right now am feeling really confident in this project right now, and I am looking very forward to it. I am looking forward to seeing what my creativity brings, and to see my improvement over time. I was a little bit hesitant at first thinking of this project, because of how I am actually going to do it, but I have figured it out now. P.S. Yes, I was working on a weight gain journey, but I am very much more passionate about this project. I had no plan whatsoever of what I was going to do for the weight gain journey, and some how I came up with this idea overnight and loved it so much more. Grammar Corrections Made 10/29/2021 |
Christian PopeChristian Pope is making his very own blog page explaining his journey through blender. CategoriesArchives
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