Week: 26 Apr – 2 May

After I proposed my personal project to Luke last week, I started thinking more about the short animation story, the characters, actions and suitable places that I can shoot for the background footages.

I planned to use Blender for every part of this animation as I learned this software can do compositing and camera tracking as well. I have a limited experience for modelling and rigging in Blender, plus I never done any camera tracking in this software before. So I think this is a great opportunity for me to polish and learn new techniques in this software.

Concept & Characters

My main reference for the character is from a Killer Bean animations by Jeff Lew. I actually have done a very simple short animation inspired by Killer Bean as a test when I started learning 3D modeling & rigging several years ago. I made the character designs from a battery and called it ‘The BatteriX’ as a parody to the Matrix films.

The old animation was done in 3dsmax. So this time around, I want to redo everything again from scratch using Blender. While I’m at it, I’m improving the character design as well. I did some sketches as guides for the 3d modelling process and the main character is now wearing cloth. Finally!

I planned to start modelling the characters early next week and hopefully finish it before the 6th May session with Luke that I booked last week. I want to show them to Luke first to get his feedback before I rig the characters.

Camera Tracking Practice in Blender

I didn’t proceed for the modelling yet because I want to research and practice on the camera tracking first to see if I can do it properly in Blender since I never done it before. I watched several video tutorials on Youtube on how o do it. Below are some videos that really helped me understand the technique.

This last video is not really about camera tracking but I did watched it and learned few techniques and understand more about Blender tracking capabilities.

I then proceed to do some practices using footages that I shoot near my house and a test footage from the indie film project. I used both the manual and auto tracking function in Blender.

I actually did more test on several other videos but below are 3 of them which I think turned out quite good. They may not 100% accurate but I’m now understand how it works in Blender.