End of Marking Period 2 Blog Post

Intention Definition & Exploration of Ideas: 

The concepts I chose to follow in my animation are Nature and Looking Outward. This combination is about looking around in our everyday lives and finding that nature is there everywhere we go, throughout our whole lives. No matter how old you are, we all experience nature in some of the same ways. We all watch the snow fall outside of our window in the winter. We see the leaves fall from the sky during a walk in autumn. We feel the wind as we roll our car windows down in the summer. And we watch as colorful flowers bloom as spring rolls around. That is why decided to try and capture that experience in my project. One of the reasons why I chose to do this theme is because I have been inspired by how nature looks in digital art, film, and games. For example, I have played the game "Legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild," and I love how they incorporated nature into the open world landscape. They have trees everywhere, they have mountains, bushes, lakes, and so much more. All of the nature in the game adds so much to the experience and makes it more enjoyable. They are not just for the looks either, you can interact with each of them, and it makes the game feel more like real life. So overall, I really liked the idea of Nature and looking Outward, and the meaning it entails.




Planning: 

To plan this animation, I first wrote down all the ideas I had about different animations I could make. Once I did this, I chose which animation I wanted based on the things I wrote down. When I had officially decided which one to pursue, I made a storyboard so that I had all my ideas and plans drawn and wouldn't forget them. The storyboard I made here was my initial design and outline that I based my actual work on. As you can see I showed the leaf growing, changing colors, falling, and landing in a hand. To make this possible, I also followed tutorials so that I could learn new skills. I learned how to create a realistic tree, I learned how to texture paint using a stencil, and I learned how to create a leaf, all using tutorials shown below.
















Producing: 

Here is what I have created up until now in blender. So far I have only completed the modeling and texturing, but I just started animating the leaf.








Evaluating:

Looking back at what I have accomplished so far, I would have hoped to have more done by now. Initially I was hoping to have my project done by the second marking period so that I could do two projects. The reason I did not meet this goal is because the modeling and texturing took longer than I expected, and I also experienced problems on the way. When I initially made the grass, it used a lot of particles. Because of this, when I started texturing the tree it would crash the laptop because it couldn't handle everything that was going on in the file. To fix this, I decided to wait to add the grass until the end of the project, and to also made the grass plane smaller to avoid a particle overload. I think I underestimated the amount of work and time it would take to complete this project. If I would have taken a tree from blend swap, it probably would have cut the amount of time in half. My starting goal was not met, but I am hoping the animation doesn't take as long as the modeling and texturing did. Overall, I don't think the project is going terrible, but I would have wished I would be done by now.





Integrating:

Learning from my prior experience and what I discovered working on my project so far, I hope to make some changes in the future. I know now that it is easy to underestimate how much time or work a project that seems small might take. Because of this, I feel that I have a more realistic grasp on how much each project takes. I hope to take on smaller ideas in the future so that I have time for multiple projects. I also plan to be more willing to take things from blend swap so that I can cut down the time of my projects. Hopefully I can also have better time management in the future and know ahead of time what order I want to do things in to be the most efficient. My goal for the future is to have my project done by or around the 3rd marking period. This is so that I can do a second small project after I finish this one.





 


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