PRE-PRODUCTION
To be honest there wasn’t much pre-production except for a few tries at modelling the chest and a basic idea of what I was going to animate.
3D MODELLING
For the modelling I left the chest fairly simple, because I preferred to keep it simple and learn the basics of modelling. As I was modelling I thought that the chest was a bit too simple so I added handles, which would prove to be a bit of a challenge later in in the process, it was a bit confusing at first but a quick google search helped me out.
UV MAPPING
The UV mapping was really confusing at first but once I did a few sections I got the hang of it right away. But a problem arose when it came to the handles as they were curved.
If you can see in the picture I noticed a weird circle happening in the map, so I thought to break every edge in the hopes that it would fix it. As it turns out it didn’t work because there was a line indicating the curvature of the handles which was causing the problems but I left it there. So I stitched every edge back together and moved on with the rest of the mapping and it was smooth sailing from then on.
TEXTURING
Creating the texture was fairly easy as it was just like colouring a drawing for me.
I used the program Paint Tool Sai as it’s what I’m most comfortable with using and I’m also not used to Photoshop when it comes to drawing and/or colouring. But then my luck ran out once I encountered a small mishap when the texture wouldn’t appear on my model.
I easily fixed it as I forgot a small step when adding the texture and the texture worked out perfectly on my chest.
RIGGING
The rigging was fairly simple as all I had to do was move the pivot point of the lid to the hinge of the chest. I had already before I did the UV mapping so I could go right ahead to the scene assembly and animation.
ANIMATION & SCENE ASSEMBLY
I did the animation and the scene assembly at the same time, it was actually really fun finally getting to the animation part as I could finally see the entire scene coming together.
LIGHTING & RENDERING
The lighting was also fairly easy, I decided to not have the light be a stark white as its not pleasing to the eye so I changed it to a light yellow. I also changed the shading to a mid-tone gray to give it a softer feel.
The rendering took a while mainly because at first I thought to save it, manually, frame by frame. Then I found out how to render the animation as video, so I did that, but I forgot that I was rendering so I accidentally shut my laptop off. So I had to render it again so I let it render while I was at classes.
COMPOSITING & VIDEO EDITING
The compositing and video editing was the easiest part out of the entire process because it was relaxing to know that the entire process was over and done with.
That was my experience with doing my first 3D animation.
Chiara Tallarico 