This animation revolves around a machine room where old scrap metal is being crushed then sent to a different place to be used for different purposes.
The animation shows some scrap metal arriving and being crushed then takes you for a quick look around the room, then when it comes back, a piece of an old
robot is laying on the floor after falling from the moving belt.
For modelling/texturing/animation I used Blender which is a free 3D creation suite and to do the tiles and neccessary graphics I used GIMP.
All the models I did by hand and most of them were cubes with Catmull-clark subdivision which I manipulated to give different effects (such as creating the robot's head out of a cube with 8 vertices but when you look at it rendered, you see it smooth as if it was subdivided a few times. For some of the effects I used the Difference tool which made it easier to create holes in the walls without having to use too many vertices, and this was achieved by adding a cube then resizing it so that it looks like a wall, then creating another cube and using the Bevel tool on it so that the edges are smoothed out then I added the two together then ran the difference tool on them which gave a new object which has a cube-shaped hole inside of it (the hole in the wall which the scrap metal arrives/leaves from/to. For the pipes and wires on the ground I use a Bezier curve with a Bezier circle then I manipulated the curve until it gave the desired shape, then merged the circle with the curve to give a 3D pipe-looking shape which then I converted to a mesh and applied the material to it. To create the fliers on the wall I used a simple plane and mapped the flier image onto it (used GIMP to create the image) and then I just duplicated the plane (with the image map) and then stacked them on the floor. Also on top of both holes in the wall I placed a red light which is basically a cube (used Catmull's subdivision to make it look like a half-sphere) then made the material red with some high emittance value to simulate a red light. Some of the smaller objects took a while to create, for example, the keyboard on top of the desk, I created a cube then started creating and duplicating smaller cubes and arranging them on the main cube to create all the keys. For the lighting I had to use 3 lights, 2 spot lights and one directional light which only creates shadows (doesn't emit any light). For the blast doors I used a cube which I resided to a certain size then subdivided it a few times, used the bevel tool to give it a smooth realistic look then after doing the pattern for the two doors to make them look like they interlock with each other, I removed the extra vertices and rebuilt the faces.
All the models for the animation is available in the "models" directory on the CD, you will need to install Blender to be able to open it (I included it on the CD as well). The reason I didn't export it to a different format is because some of the details will be lost once its exported (such as Catmull-Clark's subdivision), thats why I chose to keep it in the original format.
For the animation I used Blender's IPO curves (Interpolation) to get a fluid movement of the objects (such as for the camera, the crushing arm..). Most of the time all I had to do is set keyframes and then set the Interpolation type (Linear, Bezeir or constant) and let Blender do the rest. Once the keyframes get added, the motion can be tweaked easily by grabing a point on the curve (usually a keyframe point) and then either resizing/grabing/rotating, so there are a lot of neat effects that can be achieved that way. Blender supports multiple channels in the IPO window, such as the object's location (x,y,z), a displacement to the object's rotation (x,y,z), materials, rotation (x,y,z)....etc. The most interesting one is probably the Time IPO which allows to freeze a momenet or repeat a certain segment which allows for neat effect such as the slow movement we see in a movie like the Matrix or bullet time as in Max Payne, I didn't have the time to use it in this animation but I did change some of the IPO curves properties from the IPO window.
After doing a quick render to make sure that all the timing and the other details were correct, I chose the options that I want it to be done at the rendering time (level 8 OSA and the size of the window), I saved the project, then ran it as a batch job to render it which took around 25 minutes to complete. For the video output format I chose Raw AVI and then passed it to "mencoder" (the program I used to encode it) and chose the Libav codecs, at the end of the encoding time (which took a few seconds), I ended up with a 2.3 mb AVI file.
Doing 3D modelling was harder than I thought and it takes a lot of time to get things working especially if you're modelling everything from scratch. Blender has come a long way from its early days and it does a good job and has a lot of tools, but as any other 3D modelling program, it has a learning curve and it needs some time to read the documentation and online tutorials. I did learn something that I consider useful during the last two weeks and I'm hoping I can make better quality models in the future.