Animated Weapons
Team members: Allan Alikas, Jaanus Arukask, Siim Anderson
Main idea
The goal of our computer graphics project is to practise creating different types of medieval weapons that could be further used in the development of computer games or the production of cinematography.
Tools
- Blender for modeling and creating animations
- Github for our project repository
Link to repository : https://github.com/allanalikas/AG_Projekt_WA
Initial progress (15.11.2020)
Our goal for this deadline was to create some weapon models and also a human model. There will be more weapons however as plans are even for lightsabers. After that we will start by trying scripting animations for our human model. If that doesn't work out that well, we will go the old fashioned way of modeling by moving the vertices ourselves.
BattleAxe
Hammer
Human
Spear
Coach Meeting (14.12.2020)
Our goal for this deadline was to texture the previously made weapons and make some basic animations. We tried to script the animations but we werent able to make them work so we went with the old fashioned way of moving the vertices ourselves. We also made a new model of a sword that we textured.
BattleAxe
Sword
BattleAxe attack motion
A forward slash with a battleAxe.
ˇSuvaline näide animationi screenist speariga (keyframed)
Final Report (04.01.2021)
Team members: Allan Alikas, Siim Anderson, Jaanus Arukask
Supervisor: Raimond-Hendrik Tunnel
Coach: Jaanus Jaggo
Introduction
The main goal of our computer graphics project was to practise creating different types of medieval weapons that could be further used in the development of computer games or the production of cinematography. In order to achieve this goal in a timely and logical manner, we decided to divide our main assignments into three separate steps.
First of all, we chose one specific type of a weapon for each member in our team for them to model - Allan modeled a sword, Siim modeled a battle axe and Jaanus modeled a spear. Then we created the actual models of our weapons in Blender from scratch and added custom textures to them. We had no specific plan in mind when designing the models or deciding which textures to use, however we did want to maintain the realistic look of these weapons and to model them in a way of how they would have appeared in real life.
Secondly, we needed a model for simulating how a human would wield our weapons and use them for either attacking or defending. Since the emphasis of our project was on modelling and animating specific types of weapons, we felt it was easier for us to find a free basic human model from the Internet and in the end we managed to implement one of the models from the Turbosquid webpage. Of course the implementation did not go as smoothly as planned, because we had a few issues with animating the model as something that would actually resemble a human being, but we will shortly discuss this later. (https://www.turbosquid.com/Search/3D-Models/free)
Lastly, we created some animations of attacking and blocking by adding our freshly modeled weapons into the arms of a gray faceless human model. At first we thought it would be extremely simple to create these animations and we even wanted to do it in two different ways - by writing scripts or animating in the GUI of Blender directly. Later on however, we decided that quality is worth more than quantity and we relied only on animating the models in the GUI of Blender, because it was more intuitive and thus easier for us.
Coach meeting & challenges
Halfway through the course we had the first meeting with our coach! By then we had already created the first prototype models of weapons and had started trying to animate them with the human model. There were several issues though of which the main problem was that while animating the human model, its body shape kept morphing into inhumane forms due to vertex weights. Our coach gave us multiple very useful tips about how to fix this issue and talked to us about how in general animating humans and weapons should work. Everything needs to be natural, humans are not robots, every movement usually means that the whole body is slightly moving etc. After this we decided to watch some videos of these weapons being used in real life by real people. Also, our coach helped us to plan the final scope of our project.
Examples
“Sword of Justice” by Allan Alikas, animation “Attacking”
“Battleaxe of The Gods” by Siim Anderson, animation “Smash”
“Slipperiest spear” by Jaanus Arukask, animation “Thrusting straight into the eye with a slippery spear”
The human model morphing too hard
Final version
This is a short and conclusive video of the final result of our computer graphics project: [A link to a video will be coming shortly. Probably by the final presentation deadline, but it will be worth it!!]
Additional comments
We ran into multiple troubles during the final deadline while trying to prepare our animations into videos and gifs. First of all, we had troubles actually making the renderer visually display the animation. In the renderer, the animation was not displaying so while trying to fix it, we looked into the keyframes. While investigating the keyframes, we accidently deleted a lot of our progress through some magical key combination and then Blender decided to crash on us, which resulted in a great deal of progress being lost. We tried to replace the lost progress fast, which is why some of the animations look quite stuttery, and recorded the gifs with LiceCap, a screen recording software.
As we did not know that Blender was this complex of a program, we were hoping to accomplish a lot more. Unfortunately with the setbacks that we already experienced, we were not able to accomplish anything really satisfactory for ourselves.
On the upside, we learned a lot about how to use Blender for animating and texturing. And the truly satisfactory part of this project was learning to deal with the many problems that we faced with Blender.