Computer Animation Project

This past summer I took an animation course at university. The main component of this course was a group project to make an animated short film. The only requirement was that it had to be roughly 5 minutes long. This project took up the majority of my summer and was a lot of difficult and time consuming work but was extremely fun and I really enjoyed it.

Our group created the animation using an open source 3D modeling program called Blender. I had experimented with this software a number of times before the course but had never created anything nearly as complicated. Since I had used this software previously, and using it was not covered as part of the course, I took on the role of expert and taught the other members of my group. And this was no easy task, Blender is a very complicated and powerful piece of software. What made this assignment more difficult was that even though the course was a computer science course, creating an animation is more about art than anything else. Luckily, we had a couple of artistic computer science students in our group.

Planning sketches and the finished character

There are many steps required to make such an animation. We started with several planning meetings where we developed a rough storyboard, characters and setting. We then took the sketches of the characters and scenery objects and created polygonal models of them using Blender. Then we created textures to overlay onto the characters to add detail. We created some of these texture ourselves, such as the hieroglyphics and the details of the characters. For other textures, like the sand and rocks, we used stock photos from the internet.

The model and skeleton of our cat character

Now that we had finished the models for our characters and scenes we next had to animate these models. To animate the characters we added a virtual skeleton which was connected to the model. By adjusting the skeleton we could pose the character. And so to create the complete animation we just had to pose the characters, camera and objects in each key frame. Key frames are a the important frames, and a frame is just the name for a single image. By defining the positions and orientations of objects in the key frames, Blender is able to interpolate to get the positions and orientations of the in between frames.

A rendered scene with lights and fire

The most time consuming part of this project was when we started to render our final animation. Rendering is the process of drawing a frame. The time consuming part is calculating all of the lighting, shadows and other special effects like motion blur or depth of field. Some of our more complicated scenes took a couple minutes for each frame to be rendered. And when you consider that our animation is 24 frames per second and roughly 5 minutes, we probably rendered roughly 7000 frames. Rendering was still in progress on the last two days before the due date. It was after most students had finished exams so we found a relatively empty computer lab and rendered segments of our animation on up to twenty computers at once. Even this took a long time, but remarkably we managed to finish and then add sound effects before the deadline.

What I just explained is only a brief summary of how we spent the majority of our summer creating this animation. It is probably hard for anyone who has never worked on such a project to understand the amount of work we had to do just to make 5 minutes of animation. However, I have stayed away from some of the more technical details to keep this article from getting too long. I may talk about some of the details in a future blog entry. In closing, watch the video if you have a chance, its at the top of the article.