I continued to work on the revised opening scene for "The Barrier" this week.
Progress has been slower than I hoped, but I enjoy most of the work, and I've
learned quite a lot from what I've done so far.
In the opening scene, my hero, a young transportation
planner drives down a road and is almost hit by a truck. In the scene in the
current version of "The Barrier" this isn't very clear. I hope to get
a much more impressive opening scene with Blender.
It took me most of the week to create the car for the scene.
I wasn't happy with the first version I did, so I scraped it. I did learn a few
tricks when I did it though that helped me when I did the new version. When I
did the second version, I based it on a specific car. It didn't look much like
it when I was done, but it did look more realistic. I don't want it to look too
realistic though. After I got the initial version done, I added some seats. At
first I made them a dark brown, but then decided a light tan would look better.
I gave the windows for the car a slight blue colour, a
little reflectivity and a slight opaqueness. I thought that looked good, but then
ran into a problem where the inside of the car was too dark to see anything. I
made the windows more transparent and even deleted some of them. I lightened
the colour of the seats, and moved the Sun so that it would better illuminate
the interior. Finally I put a light inside the car. I was reluctant to do that
because I was concerned that it would look wrong. However, it didn't look too
bad.
I did some more animation tests, mostly to see how the car
looked when I travelled down the road. One of the issues I have to solve is
that car can fly up above or drop below the road unless I get the key frames
right. That is finicky work. The river beside the road is static, so I did a
test to see if I could animate it as well.
At the end of the week I started to work out the animation
plan in more detail. I need to know where to put the car, the truck and the
cameras for each key frame. I have the car worked out, but ran into trouble
with the truck. I'll try again next week. I haven't done anything about the
cameras yet. The ones that move need to stay in the same relative position to
the car throughout the scene. I hope that I can find a way to link the cameras
to the car, so they move when the car moves. I find it difficult to work with
the co-ordinate system in Blender. It seems like each object has its own
system.
I wanted to add new objects to the animation, so I searched
for a video demonstration on-line. I've found that videos about most everything
I need to learn about Blender are available on-line.
I still have a lot of work to do before I'm done with this
video. I need to finish the car: I want to add head lights and a steering
wheel. A rear view mirror would be nice, but I think I can skip that. I also
would like to add some detail to the interior of the car.
The one major piece of work I have to do is create the
truck. In the script I have it as a semi, but I think that would be too
difficult to animate, so I think I will do some sort of van. That will be a bit
trickier than the car. I don't think I will need the interior detail, which
will help.
I'm not sure how much longer this scene will take me to
complete. Every week I start with the thought that I'll get it done this week.
It turns out to be wishful thinking.
This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog
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