Blender 3D: Animation Techniques and Problems.
The work
These are animations I have made in Blender 3D — character animation, camera experiments and abstract movement. Each one is a short sequence, often built from several separate files and put together at the end.
Tools and techniques
Across these animations I use various techniques, including keyframes, rigging, camera choreography, lighting and compositing. In the animation software I use, Blender 3D, there is a 'timeline' feature, which lets you place keyframes, which are key for animation. Keyframes are used to create any action in an animation sequence. It's pretty difficult to animate these characters with no character rig, using just the parts, so I installed a modification I found, which helps add character rig presets that I could use to help the character move in a far easier way. Using lighting to my advantage, Blender has different light and render settings, which give me a broader range of styles to add to my animations. For example, using an "Area Light" to project a beam of light towards the main focus of the scene, adjusting its position and its angle to my preferred choice. Lighting is, once again, crucial to animation, as it adds a lot more depth to the scene you are animating. Placing the camera (also known as camera choreography) is where the audience looks and what they see in an animation, or in any filmmaking project. Usually, I use multiple different animations and merge them into one to create one final animation. This is called compositing. This is where I use multiple different files when the animation gets too heavy to allow the project to be created in an easier way.
Challenges
Some challenges I came across were crashing, unsaved work and lag. Sometimes, when I load a model with slightly overused parts or lights, I would encounter lag that would be a problem for creating an overall animation or image render. Sometimes, if the model was too heavy, the lag would be extreme enough to crash the app. This would only be a huge problem if I had unsaved work, which would result in me being forced to restart the project from the last saved point, which could even potentially be from scratch if not careful.
