The Work In Progress Introduction Post
The following text has been cut directly from the trueSpace Forum. This is my introductory post informing all members of my intention to bore them senseless with my Sun Catcher WIP.
The actual reason I bought trueSpace was because of my fascination with animation. I haven't really toyed with this aspect of the application properly yet as I wanted to get a grasp of the fundamentals of 3D work first, basically modeling, texturing and lighting. I'd dicked around with several pictures for a while - some of which have been posted on the forum over the last eight months - but most just fell to the wayside.
A while ago I was playing around with the modeling of an odd sphere. I had a problem with it and I posted the problem to the forum (#356.1) to which I had several responses. Anyway, I won't go into it here, but from that question and my eventual solution sprung an interesting idea - why don't I turn this into an animation? Not just a Jason's-eyes-only scene, but one good enough to post. I'm scared just thinking about it.
Now, the whole process of coming up with this mind-bogglingly, fantastic idea didn't just happen overnight - it took weeks. This was because it took a while for the idea to gestate while a scene was beginning to form on my laptop during lunch breaks at work.
Then the other day I thought I might post a message about it to the forum. From this thought sprung forth an even grander thought and I decided to post it as a Work In Progress. This WIP (if I accept the challenge) would be different to previous WIP in several ways:
- It's an animation and won't cover as much of the nitty-gritty of modeling, but rather talk about how I approached keyframing, third-party tools, etc.
- Due to the filesizes of animations, it will be difficult to include links to test animations, but we'll see how we go and play this aspect by ear.
- I have already done a part of the work so the first few posts will be on how I did it a few weeks ago, but this is mainly simple modeling and not animation.
- And finally, I've got no idea what I'm doing so often you guys (and girls?) will see errors in my text and methodology. When this happens, I plead with you all to stand up and yell. Please correct me so that we can all learn from my mistakes.
During the course of this wacky adventure I’d like to call upon others that have done what I’m about to attempt and give their input and advice. Greg has said that he’s been working on a 30+ second animation (my God!) and Mr. SOSILENCER also recently posted a curly one, so I know you’re all out there.
Anyway, this is probably enough yabber for one post - I'd better get on and do some good stuff. Let me make take this moment to point out that this WIP will go on for a while as it takes me ages to do things because I often use the old trial and error method to learn the package. And this often means days of rendering to try one thing when you're playing with animation!
Anyway, at its conclusion I hope we all learn something. I will anyway and that's what I'm here for.Jason
The Sun Catcher animation tutorial:
The Work In Progress introduction post