Conclusion

This is the first time I have used the 3D animation, although I am confident in using the technology I have experienced difficulties with it. Rescaling the smaller frog, took time and the skinning and biped went wrong. In the end I had to redo the skinning. The jaw went out of shape and the frog’s position on the lily pad became out of line, these took time to readjust. For these reasons I kept the whole process as basic as possible, now that I have gained some experience I would use these skills to create more technically advanced 3D animations in the future.

Rendering was the biggest problem; it took so long and was very time consuming. This was something I had not expected; it was frustrating as I was working to a deadline. This proved to be very problematic as after the first rendering the frog’s bipeds were still on show and I had to redo the process again. I did consider using three lights in my animation, an omni light, a spot and a skylight. These lights give a very natural effect and they create shadows but they also considerably increase the render time. I chose to use a skylight for my final animation, as this reduced the render time and it kept the animation simple.

I used websites to find tutorials on how to use different tools, methods, effects and techniques. These I included in my design of my two frogs’ and the background scenes. I am pleased with the final 3D animation, although I realise there is always room for improvement.

Final Animation

At last here is the final video. There was no option that I could find to export to AVI, which may be because my Premiere Pro and Adobe Media Encoder are on a Mac computer not on a Windows so my final video is in MOV.

Premiere Pro Editing

Once all 1600 frames had rendered I imported the animation clips into Adobe Premiere Pro. In here I created a start and an end title to play at the beginning of the animation and at the end with my Sid. I also added some croaking sounds effects I had gathered for the frogs. I added a blowing up sound for the scene where the frog explodes. I also made my subtitles and the cartoon talking bubble.

Rendering Problem's

I made a few mistakes whilst rendering, I had to re-render a scene because I forgot to hide the biped, which was frustrating since the biped would poke out sometimes. From these errors I made sure I checked everything before hitting render and would do a test render without the skylight on which would render 300 frames in 20 minutes.

Rendering

After animating I had 8 different files that require rendering. I was rendering after I finished each scene that I was happy with.

I decided to render at 720 x 486. I chose this format because each time I used a bigger size the render was going to take over six hours to render 300 frames. So by using a size lower I would render 300 frames in less than four hours.

My scenes all had a skylight in them; I set the ‘rays per sample’ for the skylight to 8, which was a good compromise between the quality, and render time. Depending on the specific scene I was rendering each scene between 0.55 to 1.02 minutes.

Animating

The main part of the animation involved the character talking to each other. To make the jaw move I used the ponytails of the biped by rotating and setting key frames so that the frogs mouth move up and then back down.

As well as the mouth moving I have made the characters eye blink when they are taking to make them look more frog like. I did this by using the eyes and rotating them down setting a key frame then rotating them back up because, the back of the eyes are green it makes it look like the frogs are blinking.

The last bit for animating is the old frog blowing up and up until he goes bang. I did this by using the spherify modifier to increase his size to make him look like he is taking in air and blowing himself up.

Rendering Test

I tested to see how long it would take to render a scene of 300 frames. This was an early animation test. Having a skylight in the scene increases render time to one minute plus per frame. But with no skylight the render takes six seconds per frame.

Lights Camera Action

For my animation I have set up three cameras and one light. The three cameras are:

· A side view of both the young frog and the old frog.
· A front view of the young frog.
· A front view of the old frog.

For the light I have gone with the skylight because it gives a more natural lighting. As you can see from the images with the skylight it makes the image look so much better with the skylight than without. The only problem is that with the skylight the rendering is going to take so much longer to render but I believe it is well worth it.

Young Frog

After redoing the skinning of the young frog, the outcome has come out well and he has been placed on he lily pad ready to start animation. But before I start the animation I have the lighting and the cameras to set up.

Copying Model Frog

Copying for the frog was easy but when it came to rescaling the frog that went well but when I wanted to movie it, the biped moved out of the frogs skin or if I moved the biped the skin would collapse in on itself.

When looking into the frog I found out that the skin of the rescaled frog had gone wrong. So I had to redo the skinning for the young frog, but because the skinning was so messed up, I tried copying the skin from the old frog and pasting it on to the young frog but it did not work, so I decided to delete the skin and restart skinning.

Frog Model & Pond Scene Merge

I decided to merge the frog model and the pond scene to ensure that the models were in correct ratio to each other. I did not fine any problem when importing the scene to the frog model the materials were automatically put into the materials library.

Now that the scene is finished I must copy the frog and modify the size of the model to create the second character the young frog. Once that is complete I can start animation.

Modeling Background Scene

To tell if the scale of my frog model is correct I started creating the main parts of the pond, which would be main stage where the action will take place. By making a box and simply extruding polygons to create the pond.

The water was created from what I learnt from the water simulation tutorial. I used the created pond that I made and when to animation, reactor, create object then water. I drag the water so it covers the hollow hole in the box. I then created a panel so that I could apply a water material to it.

I created more panels to be used for a fence panels around the pond to make it look like the pond was in a garden. Wooden materials were diffuse and bump to give it a realistic wooden effect. I applied a UVW map, which allowed me to manipulate the material.

Material & UVW Mapping

The material I used was dark green shade for the frog’s body and a dark red for the inside of the mouth. For the eyes I copied the dark green edit it in Photoshop by drawing a white circle on top of the green background cut the top of the circle of then I drew a second circle for the pupil of the eye. Then imported in to the material panel then applied it to the frogs eyes.

Skinning Frog

Before I started skinning I watched appropriate tutorial videos to provided helpful tips. I then started skinning the frog model using the skin modifier because of the nature of my model the process took a longer time then I thought it would. Once the initial weights were complete I then started to test the movement, there was still deformation in the movement. So extra tweaks were needed to get the deformations to the point that there was none.

Biped Frog

Creating the biped was the easy part editing the biped was the hard part. I stated of by creating the biped then going to motion panel and turning on figure mode on. I was able to manipulate the biped to fit my frog mesh. I spent hours moving, scaling, rotating more moving, scaling and rotating until I got half of the biped all lined up with the frog mesh.

I then copied the right leg of the biped and pasted into the opposite position on the left leg of the biped, I then did the same for the arms.

To make the jaw I used the ponytails of the biped so that I could make my frogs mouth move.

Modeling Frog Part3

I applied the turbo smooth modifier to get a nice smooth body shape for the frog. I came to a problem when I turbo smoothed the frogs body, the mouth of the frog went squishy. I then had a go at editing the mouth. After spending a good hour I found out that I had some extra polygons that were hidden it was these that were making the mouth squishy. So I deleted them and had to reline the vertices back up.

Modeling Frog Part2

I made some legs by using cylinders and using the edit poly I played around with the vertexes, edges and polygons. I then bend the leg into a frog like position. I then extrude two polygons to make the arms of the frog.

To create the mouth I moved vertices to fit the mouth shape of the fog and selected the polygons and deleted them. Then I selected the edges on each side of the mouth and use the bridge tool to bridge across to close the open gap.

Modeling Frog Part1

To start with I created two plans and set them a long the X and Y angles and added a material of the two different angles of the drawn frog.

I then created a box and moved and edit the vertexes, edges, borders and polygons to line up with the drawn frog pictures.
I then cut the box in half then used the symmetry-modified effect to get a copy of the other side of the frog.

Characters

Here are my two characters hand draw then draw over in Adobe Illustrator. The characters are the old frog and the young frog from The Frog and the Ox Fable.

Storyboard

Characters
In my story I am going to have two characters that I am going to model, the first is going to be an old frog, he is going to be the one that blew himself up by thinking he can be as broad as an ox.

My second character is going to be a young frog that thinks he has seen a monster, but it’s only the Farmers ox.

I’m not going to have the farmer in the animation because I feel he not prevent and I’m only going to have an image of the ox like in a cartoon talking bubble.

Materials/ Textures
I am going for a cartoon animation so I am going to get cartoon colours for the two frogs, dark green and red for the inside of their mouths. The eyes are just going to be white with black pupil.

I am going to have a pond for the background for the frogs there are going to be lily pads in the pond, wooden fence panels and tumbled garden stones for the pond and floor.

AudioI have decided not to have the frogs talk but to make frogs sounds and have subtitles at the bottom of the screen and have background sounds.