I’m still working on my 3D cat animation. My playful and magic little 3D cat is trapped in a boring grassy landscape and decides to play a little game and use his magic to spread flowers over the 3D hills surrounding him.
Of course the poor cat’s magic is going to have a sting in the tail, but we’ll have to wait until the animation is complete to find out what that might be.
Creating the special effects for the cat’s magic in blender has proven to be a little tricky however. I wanted a cloud of magical little dancing lights that turn into flowers, which then appear all over the surrounding hills. Unfortunately Blender’s particle system was only spitting out big cloud-like blobs. I kept trying though, I’m nothing if not tenacious.
I really enjoyed reading Blender documentation, and this one is the latest to get the Mobipocket treatment and go on my phone> Central Dauphin High School | Blender Course These random readings helped me with the particle problem I was having. The document mentioned that particles are very sensitive to scale, and sure enough, when I dialed down the scale – to 0.01 – the particles suddenly resolved from an indistinct blur to individual magical looking motes.
Then I set them moving and dancing with a vortex, which again took lots –hours in fact – of button twiddling before it was just right. I was very happy until this complex animation died at frame 250, “What frustrated again,” I hear you cry, “just as things were starting to work.”
Worry not, I found out why my particles wouldn’t go past frame 50 here.
So here’s that animation now, looking much better. The magic spreads across the whole landscape.
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» Render given concept art style makover
