Foreign
Creativity in a nutshell is like using what you have to create something beautiful, you know
I think a lot of artists including myself
A lot of times gets caught up on I would be a filmmaker if I had a red can
I would be an artist if I had these sort of paints in a studio
creativity really shines with
Adversity and restrictions and all these things because you're forced to really think outside the box to get the job done
We're in a really
great time
to
be an artist and
to be
a creative and really just to be a learner in a very general sense because
a lot of information
Is just readily available online I grew up in
a generation where
Whenever I wanted to learn something, I wasn't limited by whatever my parents knew I wasn't limited by whatever
was in the library around me if ever I want to learn anything I
Just go online and look it up when I wanted to start learning how to make animation
You know, I just went on youtube and just did tutorials and looked up, you know
The most efficient way to make animations and like how to make a character how to do 3d modeling and that's how I learn
With any 3d animation the computer breaks it down as a series of triangles and the more triangles you have
the more detail you have however
The slower your computer runs. I taught myself how to do this on my own and
I was using like a really basic laptop that I just used for school
So I didn't really have a lot of horsepower to play with and experiment with like high polygons
So it was just a part of just my creative process
Let me show you how I uh make my characters. I'll make a sketch of a character then i'll take a picture of that sketch
and I
Send the picture to my computer and I 3d model
around
the sketch
Here's one of the character. Darius. I'll get it in here
And then i'll just add the image to an image plane. You can just add it in blender very easy
You know and if you want to do a tutorial, um, just look up image tracing
Once it's in there, then i'll go and i'll select a plane
somewhere
on
so
Add a plane
Rotate it move it over and obviously has to be in front of
The image so I can edit over it and
You know, ideally you want whatever drawing to be really centered and symmetrical and things of that sort
But you know, I just use it more like more as a reference than a direct
image to
Trace-overs so, you know, then I cut it in half
uh, whatever thing i'm using and
I mirror it so
Whatever I do on one side I do on another side
So, you know you can either take vertex points
or
Select the lines or select the face, but for just starting off. I usually just do the points just so I have more control
And you know very simple design
To this one
I'll just go through really quickly get the big details
Now honestly, this is like the biggest
cheap code to 3d modeling is like image tracing, you know, people kind of over complicate things, but
you can quickly just go in and create a cool, you know cool character quite quickly with image tracing so
Add some materials
And
Lean into the chicken aspect a bit more
So you can kind of see it coming together, you know go here for the eyes
Just make one eye
And i'm gonna try to make
This character darius look a bit cuter. So i'm going to just make his eyes really big
Extrude give some depth to his eye
Add it so it duplicates
I'm gonna add his mouth i'm gonna keep the mouth actually extremely simple
Just for the sake of time here
and
There's brilliance and simplicity
So when I design characters or when I design anything I try to
Use as few details
As possible. I like to design right on the edge of perception if I use any less detail
It may be
Abstract, but I just use enough where it's like, okay, you can see that that's an eye. That's a face
It's a mouth, you know your mind fills in a lot of the blanks
This works for me and I like the aesthetic
So there you go. And that's how I started making them and I would spend more time
you know making this guy make
more design
sense, but this is how I 3d model them and
This is how he looked in the end. There's our little redesign
Head but I would do the same thing for the body
and the little
Decal here
Which is actually a 3d model
This was before I was using textures. Usually you want to like actually
You know texture map this but I just flattened out a 3d model that I made
The next thing you do once you have your model you want to animate it?
Here are the keyframes. This part is where it takes the longest i'm going to just go quickly
Through it
let's get in there and
Make something happen
You select a bone and then you know, you move it just like that. Just kind of like a toy
once you get the
Desired animation you just add a keyframe
So you can either just add a keyframe to the location of all the bones the rotation the scaling
location rotation location and scale rotation scale or
In this case i'm going to just do select them all location rotation
and scale
The computer will fill in the gaps
So I think I might just add one more
Just so you can kind of just see like start to finish
So then the simplest run cycle
there ever was
I think i'm able to do this because well i'm a really patient person
and
It you know, you kind of zone out doing these tedious elements and it's it's sort of like a meditation, you know
pretty meditative process
That you just zone out doing at least I do and that's why i'm able to do it for hours
So and obviously i'll have a vision of how I wanted to move
in my head and then i'll do
What's called storyboarding and basically?
You know sort of outline
the keyframes
Of the animation. That'll just be like the big
exaggerated movements and then
Once I have those keyframes figured out i'll just go
and i'll sort of animate and pose the characters to
Meet those keyframes then, you know, I work in between and you know make it
Make sense in the middle
you know, it's just a lot of troubleshooting and
seeing what works and
Tweaking it playing it and tweaking it and then playing it over and over and over and over and over again
until
It really flows, right?
Then you can even change the scale of bones which I like to do. Um, which is you know,
You get pretty interesting effects make his head huge
Very happy now that his head is big
Here's our two new animations
Boom and we could just zoom in from the start frame just so we could just go back and forth with it
And
And so now we kind of have him jumping for joy just jumping
for joy animation and it's pretty silly and pretty crazy and if I was
You know actually animating this
for
You know a project or an idea, I would go back and you know, maybe tweak it or maybe add another
you know frame like
The middle way through to just add some more flavor or just to have specific elements move
like this and you just you know, you just keep adding stuff and I
You know right now I think adding all this stuff is making it worse
but
It can make it better. But still I feel like it's awfully mechanic and humans are somewhat gelatinous and
One effect that I like a lot is called the wave. Oh, I already have it applied to this guy
But what are they doing? It must be very, uh
Great in my newt but i'm gonna turn up the volume is the wave editor
You can kind of see it from this angle
A bit better. It kind of just adds a little bit of noise
and distortion to it, but you could also change it so it gets really
It gets really crazy
I've always really been into science and physics and as a kid I used to want to be
like a
scientist inventor
So I think with 3d animation it really satiates
my desire for
Science
And creativity in a really cool way
Because I am able to play
with the physics and honestly, what's even more cool than the physics actually working the way it's supposed to is when the physics
Ends up
not working and glitching out and that's a space that I really like and I really like to experiment with and i'm really
interested in okay, so
You know now i've added, you know some more physics dynamics and it's a really quick animation so you can't really see it
go super crazy, but it you know glitches out and
I kind of like it
So i'm going to show you just kind of an example of something I needed to look up for
creating um a few of the elements in
Daytime new war I started making this like three years ago. So i'm still learning a lot and
Back then I needed, you know some help like making
textures
Here's just something. I looked up and learned how to do just for this and I continue to use it in my practice
but as we see on this cup
From you know chandler's cup. Um
In past I would do this the same way
I created my faces I would
3d model like the pupil 3d model and I 3d model the lid and 3d model his no like
his whole face is 3d models, but this
Is like a texture, you know, so when you go into just a solid mode
It's just a solid cup whereas his face is like a 3d model. It has depth in the image on the cup
It doesn't have any depth
So what I did just did a quick tutorial
and one tutorial taught me so much and
If you look over here
on the right
This is the texture I want to apply
And I made this in another scene and these are actually 3d models, you know 3d models for rectangular prisms
And then I 3d model
Stankburger and all this and I took a picture of that but you can use a picture of anything
This was the the model that I had just modeled that I was going to put the texture on
I would just go into edit mode
and
You project the uvs
onto a uh
Canvas here. So then you can see here. This is like 3d model flattened and this is the image so
You know, you can stretch it out. Move it around
get the image you want and then even just take
particular points
On this and stretch them out. So it's more balanced. You know, I just learned how to do this
On youtube and I kind of relatively recently started using textures
And you know, you can keep your uh models low poly, but give it detail
in a really cool way here with this with this technique, you know, you can see other examples of
texturing in in daytime new or but
Uh, it was just even still in my career. Like there's so much to learn. There's so much to know
Like i'm 10 years in the game now and i'll still go on youtube look up a tutorial created by some 14 year old
across the ocean and who knows where and learn and
my best piece of advice for anybody who
wants to learn how to do animation or really any sort of
new skill
I would say
Do it
with a project in mind
Like say you want to make a video?
about
walking
Your dog then instead of like learning everything about the software at once which can be overwhelming
Just take it piece by piece be like, okay. Well, this is about a dog. So how like typing how to 3d model?
a dog
boom how to 3d model a person how to make that person walk how to make a dog walk
And then it's like, okay. Well, I want them to be in a neighborhood hide a 3d model
a um
Building and go from it that way and then once you have these little skills use what you know how to do
And like build the animation and then it's like, okay
Well, I want to add some birds and clouds how to make clouds, you know
And I think that's the best way to learn and that's how I learned. You know, I had an idea of uh, you know,
little projects I wanted to do and
once I learned one thing I would just use that over and
Over again then i'm like okay, I gotta figure out how to do something else and do it that way. It's a little bit
uh less
Overwhelming and then you can see that like with these little restraints
There's so much I can do so then once you do get to that point where okay now I can't afford to use
A high poly count you know how to do
A lot with a little so then once you have a lot you can obviously do a lot a lot with a lot
you know if that makes sense, that's definitely a part of uh,
of my my journey
You