A Short Movie/Cinematic
Egert Jaansoo, Henri Tein, Hugo Martin Teemus
Description
A curious cat explores the backyard of an house, encountering unexpected surprises. A mysterious noise from a bush reveals a barking dog, sending the feline friend running up a tree. A concerned cat owner joins the scene, attempting to rescue the cat from the tree, only to discover that he has gotten stuck on top of tree as well. Only way down seems to be to jump on top of the trampoline. After rescuing the cat, the human realizes that the cat has managed to already climb back on top of the tree.
Milestone 1
Progress:
Characters and house models are in progress, first iteration is done, but will be improved.
Learned sculpting in blender
Learned texturing
TODO:
Continue modeling, refining the characters and house.
Rigging
Animations
Lightning
Camerawork
Final project
Link to the project files (Google Drive)
Finishing the house and trampoline.
We made finishing touches to the house by using different textures and adding details. Than we started researching on how to make a trampoline. At the start we thought about using blender physics, but after doing more research we found an easier way. We built a trampoline by making a circle and than extruding additional vertices. After making the outline of trampoline we added skin modifier to it, to make it look like a trampoline. Than we started designing springs for trampoline using screw modifier. Lastly after adding the springs to the trampoline, we made the netting of trampoline and added it.
Finishing the cat and refining the scenery
One character in this short movie is a tuxedo cat. Initially we tried to model the cat with the default editing tools in Blender, this means modelling by extruding and cutting faces. The model had very few faces and sharp edges all around. After researching for tools to create a smoother model, we decided to model the cat using sculpting tool. For reference, we used pictures of cats from multiple sides and free-to-use models, so the model parts would be in proportion.
For animating the model, we used Rigify plugin inside Blender, to get the initial rig for the cat model. Rig had to be further resized according to the model's dimensions, so the bones would be correctly aligned with the model. After the model had a properly configured rig, we would animate the cat by keyframing animations. Cyclic animations were made for walking, sneaking and running. We used different videos and free-to-use animations for reference to help make the movement look more realistic. Moving animations were paired with Path objects, to match the direction and the speed.
We used free-to-use trees and bushes to enrich the scenery. Particle system was used to simulate grass on the ground. For sounds, we used sound effects from YouTube. Sound effects were processed using Audible. Examples of processing audio are reducing background noise from recordings, cutting out parts with low sound quality and syncing footstep sound effects with the speed of character animations.
We also added many different cameras, some animated and some stationary. We animated some cameras with keyframing the locations and rotations and some of them follow the character's movement.
Finishing the main character
The character's face and hands were made with the sculpting tool, the clothing and shoes were modeled. After the face was done, we had to decrease the vertices count, because it was too high and our model didn't need so much polygons. We used decimate modifier for it and we decreased the vertices count significantly. Initially, our character had hair, but due to complications between the rig and the hair, we decided to remove the hair for now.
After sculpting, we added the rig to the character with Rigify plugin inside Blender. Once the rig had been set up, we made the animations by keyframing. Some animations were also made with path following in Blender.