Merry Christmas (2021)... I'm a day late on this one...

B

BTT1024

Member
To All,
Have a Merry Christmas (Christmas should last all week) - Here's a Christmas animation I made for this Christmas.... Sorry it's late.

I hoped to finish this animation by Christmas Day and post it then, but I mistakenly shut my laptop lid the other night after kicking off a 14 hour render of the longest scene, and then went to bed and didn't notice until 8 hours later that lid was closed and my laptop was asleep - So, it set me back about 8 hours and had some other set-backs as well...

I originally started out 4 weeks ago just wanting to make a train go around a Christmas tree for fun, for my own amusement - But, ended up adding more stuff (/scenes, etc) and it turned into this video.. There's no story to it, just wanted a kind of animated Christmas card.

I spent the last 4 weeks, late weeknights and weekends working on this, I hope everyone enjoys it.

Merry Christmas 2021 - YouTube Link:
 
I am aware of most, if not all of my mistakes and things I could have done better - But, I was rushing to get this done for Christmas and "close enough" results were all I could do. I've really got to plan and start these things way earlier - So, I'll get back to my long term Bug animation work now where I'm not rushing things.

I created the Train Control box, power cord, wires, the tree power cord, wall outlets, the interior room walls, floors and trim, the Santa Bears Hat, the Fireplace Doors (glass and frame), the Christmas gifts, the indoor and outdoor Christmas lights, the Christmas balls, the Star, The front door, wall picture frames, laid out the train tracks, created train spline, animated train, added train headlight light, rigged dog and animated (was supposed to do more movements but I had mesh bind issue and no time to fix), long story on creating sledding person from a person and a jacket model to put in final sledding pose, but won't get into that now, I created the Fire animated image texture by exporting a nice fire effect from Apple Motion as a movie one with white background and one with black background for transparent fire - I did the same thing for the Chimney smoke using an apple motion smoke effect. For the large outdoor pine trees in the background I curved several vertical planes (long in and out curves) to give depth in areas and then used an image texture with bump map - Note, the sky areas are transparent and I didn't have time to clean up all of the white/gray artifacts at the tops of some of the trees. I had the outdoor house (model from turbosquid) and a version of the large pines setup for a Christmas thing I started last year but never did, so I re-used it, I had setup the lighting and snow but had to make the sledding hill for this video.

The rest of the stuff (3D Models) are free ones mostly from Sketchfab but some are from Turbosquid. Oh, I got the gift Bows and the Tree Garland from an old Cheetah3D (I believe 2010) Christmas thread - There were a lot of nice Christmas balls people made on that thread and I was going to use the C3D member Christmas balls (from 2010) but I just ended up using my own spheres with red, green, silver and blue colors.

I learned some things, using Sweep creator and a spline to create the train control box and tree power cords (never used sweep before), on the lampshades, I created an emissive texture (into emissive channel) and got a somewhat nice glow like from a lighted lamp...

Hours spent trying to get the dog walk cycle set right (just leg movement) in the limited time-frame I was working on, found a 2 dog walk cycle charts , one had 8 poses I ended up getting all 8 created but cut it to use just 4 of the walk poses, I added in some head, neck and tail movement for the walk (no time to get the rest of the body motion right, plus had a mesh issue with certain movements).


Anyhow, close enough for all of it, I guess - maybe next Christmas I'll come up with an idea and start working on it in the summer.
 
For humor I added another set of dog barks at the very end of the "It's The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year" (Andy Williams) song.
 
Very nice. Full and detailed. Tracking with the train is well done. Revealing the dog on the 2nd loop is a nice touch.
 
Amazing what you always animate in such a short time!
I was delighted too when suddenly the dog appeared. :love: The walkcycle looks very cute. I've never animated a four legged animal before. I'd have to finally try that too ...
 
Lydia said:
Amazing what you always animate in such a short time!
I was delighted too when suddenly the dog appeared. :love: The walkcycle looks very cute. I've never animated a four legged animal before. I'd have to finally try that too ...
Click to expand...
Thank you Lydia...
For the short time of 4 weeks for this one (or the Halloween animation) there were many late nights, working from 6:00PM (after my day time job) until 1:00AM, 3:00AM, sometimes up until 5:00AM...and working on things on the weekends...

I would probably have more time to focus on doing many things better, if I wasn't learning certain things on the fly - Or having to re-do so many things because my skills aren't fully evolved...

Early on with this project that kept expanding from just a train going around a Christmas tree, when I rigged up the dog following something I found on the internet (I lost the link for it) which had timing notes for each pose, I created some test walks cycle videos and it didn't look proper. Then I found a walk cycle picture for animating a dog (and was watching videos of real dogs walking and looking at pictures) and used all 8 poses and that didn't look quite proper, then I dropped 4 of those poses and it was "close enough", but the side view was distorted - and my plans for the dog bowing down and moving around (jumping, dodging, more movements) revealed that the leg bones were out of place and the body was getting distorted - I had to move on to work on other things, but planned to go back and fix the issues, but I ran out of time. So, that's why there aren't any movements other than the head and the front and rear view of the dog walking.

Here's a picture of the Dog Walk Cycle picture I used for reference - there's 9 poses, but Pose 1 and 9 are the same - in the end, I ended up using Poses 1, 3, 5, and 7. I believe there are some video tutorials out there on youtube.


DogWalkCycle2.png

Brian T.
 
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