Animation

QuickTime mov animations with audio from Blender, how hard can that be?

By The Illustrator  |  2009/06/21 15:50 Posted in 3D, Animation  |  Comments (1)

 

My animation was starting to take shape. I had a cat – admittedly a cat that looked like some kind of evil robot sock puppet (but I’m going to work on it) – and the cat moved, so now all I had to do was add a little music and a few sound effects and I’d have worked out all the elements I needed for creating animations. All I’d have to do next is improve and work on each element of my new 3D animation until it reaches the sort of level I’m aiming at.

Simple, or at least that’s what I thought.

I started my “journey into sound” with this page Doc:Manual/Sequencer/Audio – BlenderWiki and it looked good. It looked like Blender has some very useful and complex tools for adding sound to animations. For my test sound I found a great sample of a cat meowing at this site (unfortunately things have changed since my last visit and now you have to register to be able to download – and then you are only allowed five downloads per month for free. Why is everyone always trying to monetize? Ok I’ve got a couple of Google ads on my site myself, maybe I’d better shut up about that and get on with trying to put sound on my animation).

Of course the sound didn’t work first time, but I wasn’t expecting it to; I’d had some experience of how complex a thing sound files can be. So I kept tinkering with settings and crossing my fingers. I played version after version of my animation but it resolutely remained a silent movie. I saw movement and heard sound when I played the animation in Blender, but not when I played the complete rendered version in QuickTime; so what had I done wrong?

It was time to search the internet for poor unfortunates with the same bad luck and technical difficulties as me but more advanced problem solving skills. Luckily I found the answer, or at  least I thought I had, I found some very clever settings for the Blender sound controller. The only problem was they didn’t work and apparently this is a problem with my XP setup, the version of Blender I had was never going to be able to add sound to a QuickTime movie. The new Blender version 2.49 on the other hand promised “Plenty of fixes in Sequencer ffmpg support and audio…”, so I downloaded it, and the sound controls did have lots of new buttons and toggles to play with. But the program still wasn’t able to add sound to QuickTime.

So now what was I going to do? Lots of the people with same problem had written about buying horrendously expensive Adobe software to add sound to the .mov files that Blender produces. There was no way I was going to wimp out and do that. I searched sites with free and open source video solutions and ended up finding out that I could use VirtualDub with the QuickTime Plugin to add sound to my animations. This would produce a .avi output however and I wanted to stick with .mov – not for any good reason, but just because I had already set my site up to play QuickTime movies and didn’t ant to change everything to get .avi working instead.

I finally found MPEG StreamClip on this list of video editor software and it did the job. It would have been great if I could have found a way to add the sound directly in Blender, but at least I avoided paying megabucks for Adobe software to solve the problem.

Blender sculpt mode is easy and super cool

By The Illustrator  |  2009/06/13 23:01 Posted in 3D, Animation, Illustration  |  Comments (0)

 

cat_with_better_fur This Blender 3D tutorial has really helped me with my latest problem. The problem was that no matter what I did the body of the 3D cat mesh that I’ve been working on refused to look like anything other than a piece of hexagonal metal. I desperately needed to smooth it but I didn’t know how. I checked out this amazingly simple tutorial and, although it doesn’t seem to be written by a native English speaker, it sure helped me with my Blender problem.

fur The mesh is still far from done however; the ears look more like they belong on a Gremlin, the fur is very similar looking to that of a sock puppet which has been lost behind the sofa for a couple of years rather than a sleek cat with plenty of time for personal grooming, and it has the blank dead eyes of a killer robot. I’m experimenting with the fur at the moment based on a little jpeg I knocked together in Photoshop in about ten seconds flat. The next step is probably to do another less shaggy looking jpeg to be used as the texture image for UV mapping onto the mesh.

witches_den_colour_and_legs

When the cat is seen at the size it will be in the finished animation this is all less important – as you can see in the image above the major problem was the hexagonal metal robot look, and that’s solved now – but when it comes to a close up there is a lot of work to be done on this little 3D creature. I am happy with the way the 2D elements and 3D elements I have been planning are going together in the animation though, I think in the end it’s going to look good.

3D Witch Cat animation prep going nicely

By The Illustrator  |  2009/06/13 14:52 Posted in 3D, Animation, Illustration  |  Comments (0)

witches_den

I need a background for my 3D witch’s cat animation and I’ve decided that the easiest way to go is simply to sketch one, scan it in and colour in the resulting image with Photoshop. Then all I’ll need to do is finish the cat mesh, a mouse mesh and possibly a mousetrap mesh as well. I’ll then animate the meshes against the Photoshop background, add a catchy mp3 soundtrack and Bob’s your uncle, a great new 3D animation from the Starbright studios. That’s the theory any way.

I’ve got a free account for creating and hosting animations at Deviant Art and I already have one animation, a short 2D film with a naughty bat, hosted there. So as soon as I’m done creating the Witch’s Cat I’ll post it straight to Deviant and embed it in this blog.

The hitch of course is that I’ll be working exclusively in Blender which is something I’ve never done before. It is apparently possible to create very professional 3D animations with Blender, but it’s also a very steep learning curve.

Anyway I got out my 0.5mm propelling pencil and set about creating a backdrop for the hilarious Pixar-quality (just kidding) 3D action. I’m happy with the sketch of the witch’s den I just did – I’d even quite like to move in, I love the medieval look – and the next stage is to start faffing about with it in Photoshop. I’ll post the results of the next steps in this combination 2D, 3D animation experiment as soon as I have them.