3D Modeling, Animation, and Video Games

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As my 3D modeling and animation class has come to a close, it became hard to think of what to write about for my final blog of the class. So I figured part of this blog will be about my final thoughts and the other half will be about me being a nerd about a video game (and yes it does tie in with 3D modeling and animation).

I enjoyed the class, it was one of the classes I was looking forward to. Of course I still had trouble, I had stress, and of course, I had a huge headache figuring out how to work the program we used and how to animate in general. In the end, I learned from my mistakes, became more knowledgeable in the subject, and can be easily amazed by the simplicity of just making an object move. Will I consider this aspect of Graphic Design as a possible job career? Maybe, we will see where life takes me, but I will heavily consider it especially since I enjoy animation.

Now for the part of me tying in video games into this conversation. I am in love with the Persona video game series (Shin Megami Tensei). I haven’t played all of the games, in fact, I only played Persona 5. I first heard of the games from watching gameplays of it on YouTube, the first one that caught my attention and introduced me to the franchise was Persona 4. From there I became entranced by the storyline, art, and overall mechanics of the game that I decided to purchase Persona 5 and try it out. Sadly, I never finished the game, but I got far enough into it to pinpoint what exactly makes it better than the rest and for that I say is its animation, its graphics, its art style and of course its 3 dimensions and various camera angles.

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The overall concept of this game is to fight against time. The player faces various decisions that they must make that will affect the course of the story and its ends. There are dungeons and stats building and various animated cut scenes, but the best part is the point of view you are put in. You are a phantom thief that steals people’s hearts. You are essentially making criminals, corrupted people, and just overall bad people pay for their mistakes and crimes. You are playing in the shoes of a teenager in high school who was wrongly accused of a crime he did not commit and now has a criminal record because of it; while at the same time your individual choices you make throughout the game affect the course of the story.

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Long story short, I wanted to tie this in because of the camera angles I mentioned earlier. 3D animation heavily relies on different camera angles and the position of them will influence how one captures the story. This game has a way of putting you into the scene of what is happening in the story, it puts you into the perspective of a “thief” and it is just overall interesting. It is a game I would highly recommend, especially since a new one was announced to be released.

Animation Takes Time

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Recently I have been doing some research on how to animate with Adobe Animate. So far I have only learned the basics which are things like knowing about the timeline, creating frames and keyframes and just the overall layout of the program. I created a few short animations that each last about a second because I wanted to use them for my final project for my course in 3D modeling and animation. Let’s just say I deviated from the 3D aspect and stuck to 2D drawings and animating those, but no matter what kind of animation it is, it takes a lot of time and planning.

A perfectly good example of how much time and planning animation takes is by looking at it from the perspective of stop motion animation. You have to storyboard each scene before posing all your characters as well as plan out the story, create your main characters and their poses, their environment, every little detail that would make a huge difference in the film must be planned out before filming. All this planning is done so that you not only waste your time having to redo so many shots and take longer in the production, but also it saves you a lot of time because you can pinpoint what aspects you want to change before filming.

Stop motion animation is much more time consuming because you have to plan it out frame by frame, move a character take a picture of that character and then move the character again and take another picture. Essentially animation is an abundance of still images played back at a rate that gives the illusion of movement. With that being said a good example of a movie that was produced in stop motion was The Nightmare Before Christmas by Tim Burton.

As a child that was my favorite movie, but I never knew that it was a stop motion animation until I saw the making of the movie. It fascinated me and made me appreciate the movie so much more because of how much time and consideration and work that it took to create a 1 hour and 16-minute movie. Putting it into perspective, a movie-going into the big screen is shot at 24 frames per second, that is 24 different images you have to take and many poses you have to manually change for just one character for stop motion animation. As a rough estimate, for a 1-hour stop-motion animation one needs to create around 86, 400 frames!

3D Modeling

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Graphic Design is very fascinating as there are many different career paths one can take. One of them, which I never gave much thought about before, is 3D modeling. I never even knew that 3D modeling was of major importance until I took a class on it.

3D modeling is widely used in the making of films, 3D animations, video games, architecture, and just about anything that requires the creation of three-dimensional elements. When creating a 3D model many programs will offer pre-made, mathematically based shapes, like cubes and cones, called primitives to choose from and begin building your character, landscape, etc. Beginning with those shapes is where the transformation begins as you essentially can create just about anything by reshaping and sizing them to your liking.

Depending on the type of program, there may be more tools that are offered to better create your 3D model. This field interests me from the video game perspective, which I may do more research on in the future to gain more skills and practice in creating 3D models.

Animation and 3D Modeling

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I have begun my new class for this month which is Principles of 3D Modeling and Animation. I am very excited about this class, well at least for the animation aspect of it. Animation is something that I was always interested in, but the more I looked into it, the more complicated I realized animation truly is.

You have to keep proportions in mind as well as what kind of animation you want to accomplish, whether it is a fast animation meaning- you’d have to draw fewer frames or a slow animation meaning- you’d have to draw more frames in between the actions. Long story short, animation takes a lot of time and many details must be taken care of to create a short scene that may last only a few seconds! Imagine having to make an entire animated film, it makes sense as to why a whole team of people is needed to complete one since it would be too much for one person to handle.

For me, 3D modeling takes a bit to get used to as you have to take into consideration the perspective of what you are creating as well as the fact that there are three-axis that you are working with: x-axis, y-axis, and z-axis. Since I’ve been so used to only using the x and y-axis in the math classes, I have taken previously, adding the z-axis is a whole new learning experience. However, 3D modeling can be pretty useful as it can be used in things like animations, video games, movies, and just about anything that you want to create in 3D.

I am already deeply intrigued by some of the projects we will be creating in this class, so I look forward to expanding my knowledge on this subject.