Monkeying around

Blender comes with a built-in monkey. Well, just a head actually. Her name is Suzanne.

I finally made my first animation. Its a very short one, just 4 seconds. You take your fixed model, and move, rotate, and scale the objects in it at specific frames. You don't have to do every frame, just key frames, and Blender interpolates for you to do all the ones in between. You can have multiple objects moving simultaneously.

As the banana swings into view (on a very thin and invisible line), rotating as it does, Suzanne turns and moves towards it, and as she sees it, a smile breaks out on her face. The smile, and the crinkling of the eyes, is done with a different set of animations that involve deforming the original mesh.

All of this is controlled with a set of curves that define how the motion happens, how it speeds up and down, and even lets you create a special Time curve where you can make time itself speed up, slow down, even stop, and go in reverse. Which I use to make the banana swing away and Suzanne get sad again, without having to add specific animations to do that.

If you play this in a loop, it looks smoothly continuous, as if Suzanne has only a two second memory, and is repeatedly surprised and then saddened by the appearance and disappearance of her favorite food. Feeling sorry for her yet?

Animation is really cool. But of course it takes longer. Will be spacing my posts further apart as time goes on and my projects get more ambitious. The actual rendering of this animation only took a few minutes (which will grow as I add objects), but it takes longer to edit the animations themselves. Luckily Suzanne is a very patient monkey.

Click to see video

The quality of the video is not as good as I would like. The raw movie looks much better. Except for the banana - I didn't do a very good job on that.