CPSC 424 Blender 4: Animation

Due: Tue 11/25 at the start of lab

This lab is the last of four "application labs" introducing Blender. The four Blender labs will be grouped together, counting as two (regular) labs.

This lab addresses keyframe animation in Blender, as well as tracking and path animation.

Much of the material for this lab was originally written by David Eck.

Collaboration and Use of AI

This is an individual lab. You may get technical help from others, but the effort and ideas that go into producing solutions should be yours.

You may not use AI for this assignment. (There is no coding, and you should create your own scene.)

Handin

Hand in your work by copying your ~/cs424/blender4 folder into your handin folder (/classes/cs424/handin/username, where username is your username).

Check that the result is that your files are contained in /classes/cs424/handin/username/blender4 — if not, fix it!

Preliminaries

Setup

Reference

Sections B.3 in the textbook should be your first stop for how-to-use-Blender questions for this lab. Note that the book covers Blender 2.93, but it should still be fairly accurate for Blender 3.0.1.

To adjust the length of a path animation (section B.3.3), go to the Data Properties for the curve rather than the Object Properties as stated in the text.

Additional resources:

• Blender manual (version 3.0)

Exercises

Make sure you have read section B.3 (and previously B.1 and B.2) in the text, as they contain essential information on using Blender. It is not a bad idea to make yourself a one-page quick reference sheet summarizing the various commands and operations.

Note: To adjust the length of a path animation (section B.3.3), go to the Data Properties for the curve rather than the Object Properties as stated in the text.

Remember to set the 3D View to the "Rendered" view ("Z" key for the view style selector) or periodically generate a fully rendered scene (F12) to see the results of lighting and materials. Note: the provided scene is configured to use the Cycles render engine, which is slower to render but needed to see all of the lighting and materials effects. You may want to use Eevee instead if you are working in the "Rendered" view, just remember to switch back to Cycles occasionally to see the full effect. (The render engine setting is in the Render section of the Properties Editor.)

The shuttle is a hierarchical model with the body as the parent of the two nacelles. This means that you should be able to manipulate just the body and have the whole shuttle come along.

"Fairly uniform speed" for the shuttle's flight means that you may need to edit the F-curves to control the interpolation as the default Bezier curves result in slow in / slow out for each keyframe. (This effect might be appropriate at the beginning and end of the shuttle's flight, however.)

Turning a light on and off means controlling its strength (power), and to have a sharp on/off effect instead of a more gradual brightening and dimming means editing the F-curves to use a constant function for interpolation instead of linear or Bezier curves. The shuttle's light is set up as an emission material, so you will need to look for the emission strength rather than power in the Data Properties. Be sure to turn the shuttle nose light's power up high enough to be able to see the light when it is on.

See /classes/cs424/demo/scene-4-demo.avi for an example of what your animation might look like, though note that you do not need to copy the demo exactly. (You can use the VLC application, found on the Start menu, to view the video.)

(extra credit) Feel free to add to the scene/animation if you have time — add additional objects, change materials, add fancier animation, etc — as long as the elements specified above are present.

Note that rendering the animation can take several hours. Make sure you plan time for this! You can render at a lower resolution for testing purposes in order to save time, but make sure that your render-for-handin is as specified.