For my final project, I created a short animation that tells the story of a sleeping cat who is deeply afraid of snails. As the cat settles down for a nap in the forest, he is awoken by his biggest fear, a little snail looking for a decent place to rest as well!
To create my animation, I had to work through multiple stages. First, I set up the environment. Then I added a skymap. Next I worked on adding shading and colors. Next, I added and animated the snail. Then, I spent a really long time getting my hierarchical cat model set up. Because I was using my own, I had a lot to work out on my own and this ended up taking a huge portion of my time. If I had more time, I would have loved to do more compex animation with my set-up cat model! Once I got the cat set up, I added an animation handler for the cat that transitioned the model from poseA to poseB over X time. This allowed me to create keyframes for my animations. Finally, once everything was animated and placed, I set up the camera positions for each scene.
Once you're ready to get out of this sample project and edit your own code, you can use the dropdown in the left sidebar to switch folders. Right now, the dropdown says "Getting Started" - that's the folder containing the file you're looking at right now. Click on the dropdown and choose "Open Folder…" to open your own folder. You can also use the dropdown later to switch back to folders you've opened previously, including this sample project.
I couldn't find a multi-object cat to use anywhere so I used blender to break apart a .fbx cat into pieces. While 3D modeling isn't a part of this course, I actually learned a lot by messing around in blender and seeing how the changes I made to the file affected the outcome .obj file.
This is what the cat ended up looking like: I decided to go with cartoon colors, as I felt they best matched the feel of my environment. Originally I texture mapped the cat and used the blue to help me visualize joints, but I ended up liking it.
Along with the cat, I also created a hierarchical model for my snail.
To animate the snail, I stretched and squished his body to give the appearance of moving. The shell remained a constant size.
The animation will begin paused.
Press "P" to Play the animation.
Press "R" to restart the animation from the beginning.
Some OpenGl / Animation resources that I found useful:
Models used: