My Ident!

I am now creating my fourth animation with more knowledge of how to use the program.  My previous 2 files have been deleted so I thought I would use what I did with all of the animations that I have practiced with for my personal ident.  I first created my text name and used a rounder font as it looks better.  My ideas for this are that my character will swing on my name and the colours for it will be a sort of jungle theme. 

On my name, I have added a bend modifier with the bend angle of 150.  This means that you can still see the name on the front view.

I then started to create my character starting off from a cylinder and adding vector points to it.  The vector points were useful and allowed me to modify the shape of the character without added extra bits to the shape.  I added teeth and ears using this.  Having the vector points available also allowed me to modify certain parts at a time for example the colour or extrusion points.  This helped me to build my character.  The one thing I could not do was create round eyes from this but maybe if I had more vector points, this would be possible.  I had to create the eyes using extra sphere shapes.  At first, I had a white eyeball and black pupil for the eye but I found this hard for when I was animating the character therefore, I only kept the black pupil. 

When I got to the point of changing the colours of the character, it wouldn’t allow me to assign the colours in the way I was advised to by using ID numbers for the different parts therefore, I used my own choice of doing every colour selection part separately which I found a lot quicker, less confusing and easier to do.

To change my character’s expression, I had to go into the “edit polygon” menu and select vector to be able to move the different points of the character’s mouth.  To be able to do this accurately, I had to zoom in a lot and do every single vector point that it might affect.

For my ideas for my character to swing, I wanted to make the brown tree ropes bend and swing but as I could not apply the bend modifier to the ropes, I had to swing it from the top.  This still looked OK. 

 

For the first part of my animation after using the Auto Key tool, I made the character jump, bend and twist.  I found that I could not make it jump without applying the other modifiers first and separately therefore, I applied the bend and twist modifiers first.  I started the bend modifier at frame 3 and the twist modifier at frame 7.  The twist modifier was done in the centre so that only the head would twist and not the whole body.  These were applied accordingly to make it look like it was enough.  I started the jump using the move and select tool on frame 2.  At frame 7, I started to change the character’s face expression again. 

When I got to frame 32, I used the squeeze modifier to show the impact of the character’s bounce and when this finished, I started the swinging motion using the rotation tool from frame 56.

I found that when I was using the rotation tool when selecting the whole character, the point of rotation wasn’t right so I had to move the eyes separately from the rest of the character.  I found it hard to keep this accurate.