Project Plan

CGI Project 1 Report
Team Members: Ashley Thai, Liya Yitna, and Lauren Wiginton

Project Goal:
Our group hopes to learn the fundamental techniques of Blender and other basic 3D modeling skills. By the end of the project, we would like to have created a fun and visually interesting 3D rendered scene and animation. Specifically, our scene will represent what could be found under a child's bed. Obviously, we do not expect our animation to be the best quality, seeing as we are only beginning to learn all of what Blender has to offer. Still, we would like to demonstrate our current skills to their fullest potential. Through this process we will no doubt acquire a greater respect for 3D modelers and animators while experiencing what it takes to create a simple scene or animated sequence.

Team Members and Roles:
Designers: All members (Ashley Thai, Liya Yitna, and Lauren Wiginton)
Modelers and Animators: All Members
Rendering Lead: Ashley
Webmaster: All Members may post items on Google Groups page

Brief Description of Story:
The story begins with a scene under a child's bed. There is a cowboy boot, a pull toy, and a tennis ball. The boot and pull toy approach the tennis ball and begin to toss it back and forth. The game gets going between the two toys. Suddenly, the tennis ball is thrown into the cowboy boot. The boot struggles to get the ball out for a while, unsuccessfully. Finally, the pull toy comes up behind the boot and knocks the ball out by tipping the boot over. The cowboy boot is angered by the whole situation and kicks the tennis ball out of the scene.

Work Break Down:
In Project 1, everyone worked individually on creating their own chosen 3D character. Each member chose an object they think would be found under a bed and modeled it using Blender and the help of tutorials found online. In the final stage, everyone’s 3D models were compiled to create a cohesive scene of what could be found under a child's bed.

Brief Description of Each Model and Techniques:

The Push Pull Dog Toy (Ashley Thai):
Ashley created this model with a combination of cubes and cylinders. The cubes and cylinders are subserfed and both have several extended regions.

The Tennis Ball (Liya Yitna):
Liya's model was created from a UV sphere. Furthermore, she created mirror images from selected faces and vertices. She then scaled and modified the object to come to the final product.

The Cowboy Boot (Lauren Wiginton):
I created the cowboy boot model using a variety of mesh objects and molding them together by moving the vertices. I am sure there is a more efficient way to achieve this same goal, but this is what I chose to do while learning. The hole where the foot would go was created using the Boolean modifier to make the difference, using a cylinder. The leather texture was created using a Musgrave filter under the textures tab.

Lessons Learned:
In particular, our group would have benefitted from selecting specific objects that could be explained through a tutorial, considering our lack of experience with the program and computer graphics in general. In the beginning, we chose a fairly complicated storyline and complex characters. Our first ideas involved a group of shoes learning how to dance in a studio. We each tried to create a certain shoe for our model. These proved to require more experience than each of us had. Being that it was everyone’s first time using Blender, we should have taken that into greater account. In the end, we chose to go with a simpler story line. We decided upon two toys playing with a ball, and chose characters that we were confident we could model. We each also found techniques in Blender that work better for us than others. For example, Ashley found that it was easier for her to create her model using subserfed cubes and cylinders, rather than spheres.
Overall, Blender has proven to be a very complicated program to learn. We each expected Blender to be hard to learn, but it was even harder than our first impressions. Learning the interface has taken a lot longer than expected, and we am still continuing to learn the finer points of it. The whole process has been incredibly overwhelming and frustrating at times. We seemed to have higher expectations for our models and skills, which were unrealistic given our experience. However, online tutorials have been fairly helpful while working on this project. We have realized that the best way to become familiar with the program is to jump right in, trying to solve problems while we are modeling and learning from experience.

Plan for Project 2:
Our team's plan for Project 2 is to use the characters we have created and place them within the environment described in the story outline and storyboard. We hope to animate each of these characters using Blender. Hopefully we will continue to increase our familiarity with Blender and the animation process in general. It may be best if everyone is responsible for the animation of their individual character. However, we will all need to work together to create a cohesive animation style. The group should meet at least once a week to go over progress we have each made individually and work on the animation cooperatively. By midpoint the group should have completed the rough workings of the whole animation sequence, including camera angles and sequencing. From this point until the end, we should focus on tweaking the transitions and detail work. At the end of the semester, we should have met enough times to have created a complete animation that runs for approximately two minutes and follows the storyline we have set out.