3D Design and Animation

In the past week, I explored 3D design and animation. Although I am still learning, I would just like to document some of my experience in case others might want to try too.

Blender logo

On Udemy, I started a course on Blender 3D design as I wanted to learn about rigging (including a bone structure so as to ease the animation process) 3D media files but I realised it was quite important to learn from the basics. The cool thing that I have learnt so far is how most 3D objects are designed using simple 3D figures that we teach our students in Maths classes in schools. 

le incomplete birdie

Starting with a cube, I added a sphere, as the head, a cone for the beak and more spheres for the eyes. Clearly, this low res, low poly 3D model of a bird (still without wings) need more work but this proves my earlier point on how 3D figures/shapes are used to design more intricate 3D objects.

Turbosquid homepage

Frankly, this was not my first time dabbling with 3D designs. In the creation of 3D effects for IG/FB and also in my previous explorations using Unity 3D and more, I have designed applications using ready made 3D objects or media files which I sourced for free from sites like Turbosquid. There are really quite a lot of interesting 3D designs there although free ones are rather limited. There are other sites too worth exploring like free3D or cgtrader. Also, for those who just want to try converting 2D images into 3D files, there are some sites like Selva3D which help to do so.

mixamo.com

Last but not least, assuming you have managed to get a rigged 3D character or if you want to try out 3D animation, go to Adobe's mixamo.com. There you can choose from a plethora of 3D animations and you can also choose some of the characters available on site. Otherwise, you will need to upload a rigged 3D character and ensure the 'joints' are correctly applied so that the generic animations could apply well to your chosen/uploaded character. Below are some that I did up for one of my workstreams at ETD.

Breathing bear

Patrick starfish's Starjump!

Have fun exploring 3D design and animation!