Kitchen Warfare

Final Animation

I managed to finish the animation recently and have been able to render my video in cycles as I was hoping. I had a lot of different ideas and had to modify the animation based on my schedule and skill level. I used the camera to help emphasise the violence of the combat. When me and my friends did something similar to this it was slow motion with cartoonish explosion sounds, but I wanted to see what it would be like as a proper fight so I decided not to hold back and exaggerate all of the movements to try and make it feel satisfying.

Today I wanted to get a start on my animation now that most of my props have been made and the environment is set in place. I started by doing rough movements for the start of the animation so that I can start getting a general idea for how I want my characters around the map. I tried doing a very rough previs by moving the master control for each character around the environment but it made giving weight to their movement difficult because it would make the feet slide around when I would start animating. So I decided to move the characters by the hip first and that way I could see where the feet needed to go to support their weight. I want to keep the camera following the action with little to no cuts being made. I am currently working on adding weight and exaggeration on any hits that happen although I have a long way to go before I can refine my work.

I have set the animation to play at 30fps, although my laptop is running the scene at around 20fps on performance view so I have to occasionally do very low quality renders in order to see the actual speed of the animation. This hinders my ability to show timing in my animation although I have no doubts I will be able to work around this to make a satisfying animation.

Today I decided I wanted to make the rest of the props used in the fight, I started to use a frying pan as the man's primary weapon as I remember always spinning it around whilst getting ingredients ready to cook and thinking it would be a really fun weapon to use in a silly fight.

The model was simple to create, needing only a few cylinders and spheres to make. Boolean was used to fuse the handle, bolts and base together. I used a bump map with a noise texture for the black base of the pan so that it had some roughness and looked like there was grit on it like on my references.

I decided to do a quick pose and render the scene to see how the frying pan would look during the animation. The metallic shader mixed with the rough black shader really helps to make it look like it fits in the scene with the characters.

After making the colander, I decided that now would be an optimal time to set out my environment so that I can plan where the action will take place and what props could be used. I based the room on my kitchen which I share with my housemates. For the lighting I have used a HDRI called "Noon Grass" from the website HDRI Haven - https://hdrihaven.com/hdri/?c=outdoor&h=noon_grass

For this competition I have decided to go with something me and my housemates have done when we were getting really bored during quarantine, although I will be able to use more dynamic movement during my animation as I wont have to worry about cleaning up or injuring anyone! 

I really enjoyed doing things to keep myself entertained and so being able to share this experience with others and bring it to life through animation will make this project especially fun to undertake. 

I have been animating for just over a year and so I am aiming to push myself and go outside my comfort zone so that I can improve and become a better animator. I have many ideas so the hard part is keeping it at only 10 seconds long!

I have been using blender for a couple of months now and have recently discovered some free rigs which are amazing. The 'Rain V2' Rig is almost industry standard and you can get it for free! It's almost too good to be true! The 'Vincent' Rig is also free and both are available from the blender foundation.

I hope you enjoy and I can make you laugh with my work!

Rain V2 Rig: https://cloud.blender.org/p/characters/5f04a68bb5f1a2612f7b29da

Vincent Rig: https://cloud.blender.org/p/characters/5718a967c379cf04929a4247

First I decided to model a colander for my character to wear as a helmet, I got my references from google images with a couple of them being on peoples heads already which game me a good scale.

I cut a sphere in half and duplicated it slightly smaller and joined them together to make the bowl. I then used boolean 'difference' with many small cylinders in order to create the holes. I used cylinders for the handles and then used boolean 'union' to join them with the rest of the colander. I made sure to bevel the colander and also make sure it was shaded smooth in order to keep the poly count lower whilst still making it look smooth and round. Some normals were messed up during this process so I used the edge split modifier in order to cut the bowl, allowing for the normals to be fixed.

My 3 references for the colander:

https://www.stuff.co.nz/world/australia/87063987/this-australian-guy-is-wearing-a-pasta-strainer-in-his-drivers-licence-photo

https://www.crosbys.co.uk/front-of-house-c1/crockery-c134/genware-tableware-c819/genware-mini-stainless-steel-colander-10cm-diameter-p8376/s12741?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=genware-mini-stainless-steel-colander-10cm-diameter-msc10&utm_campaign=product%2Blisting%2Bads&cid=GBP&gclid=CjwKCAjwlID8BRAFEiwAnUoK1dkruWZMZZHYF4X4F-fV0ALRZLtZ-tQxyF_aC8xHpTOITo6Rw7itPhoCtfMQAvD_BwE

http://adamtschorn.blogspot.com/2014/01/project-cubbins-hat-247-colander-for.html