Kameron Niskefat
CS 161
Winter 09
Description:
My project was to create a 3D animation of a dog. For this project I used blender to create the model/animations and ogre to display it. Unfortunately the project did not turn out how it was supposed to. I was going to create the 3D model and play the animations in Ogre along with allowing the user to choose what animation was being played and have a mode that would allow for user controlled movement of the model.
As it turned out, modelling a dog was too hard and my model did not turn out, so I changed my animal to an octopus and made a model of that. I also animated this model using an armature structure and made a few different animations. I had many problems getting blender to work properly, but I will detail what went wrong at the end of this page.
First here is how my animations turned out.
Swimming Animation:
Idle Animation:
Grabbing/Eating Animation
What went wrong:
There wasn't one particulare thing that went wrong, although not having enough time was a big factor.
The problems started in using blender. First of all it took a while to get acclimated to using blender, I had to go through numerous tutorials to figure out what I was doing. Then when I was first trying to use blender on my computer it kept crashing and freezing my computer (still does but not as often) and it took me a while to fix this by updating everything on my computer and letting blender completely complete each thing it was doing before moving on with my next task in blender. Needless to say this took a while to figure out and cause many restarts of my computer. Once I get into animating my model even more fun computer crashes happened, this time a little more frequently.
The next thing that happened was that I could not export my blender file into the right format for Ogre. This took a couple days along with asking and reading many questions on the ogre forum to figure out how to install the converter correctly and get it working properly on my computer.
Finally I thought that all my problems would be over once I got my model/skeleton into the correct format, but they were not. It took me a while to get everything loading properly and then unfortunately my skeleton was not made properly and Ogre would not accept any of my animations, though I can just load my plain model. I tried everything I could to get my animations in and even started to try to redo them, but I did not have enough time to do that.
All the while during this time I was busy working through tutorials on Ogre and learning Ogre. I was going to try to co-develop a program along with my model, but I got stuck up in the model/animation phase of this project and by the time I had figured everything out there was not enough time to make a meaningful program in Ogre. In retrospect I should have tried to abandon the model earlier and make something else.
By the time I decided to make something else I only had a few days left, and could not come up with anything good. So my project pretty much just came down to the blender animations.
I think that using two new platforms was a bit much and the overhang time on learning everything, along with doing all my other work, really was too long. I do feel however, that I now have a good grasp on how things work in Ogre and blender and would be able to put something together if I ever tried to again.
My project was to create a 3D animation of a dog. For this project I used blender to create the model/animations and ogre to display it. Unfortunately the project did not turn out how it was supposed to. I was going to create the 3D model and play the animations in Ogre along with allowing the user to choose what animation was being played and have a mode that would allow for user controlled movement of the model.
As it turned out, modelling a dog was too hard and my model did not turn out, so I changed my animal to an octopus and made a model of that. I also animated this model using an armature structure and made a few different animations. I had many problems getting blender to work properly, but I will detail what went wrong at the end of this page.
First here is how my animations turned out.
Swimming Animation:
Idle Animation:
Grabbing/Eating Animation
What went wrong:
There wasn't one particulare thing that went wrong, although not having enough time was a big factor.
The problems started in using blender. First of all it took a while to get acclimated to using blender, I had to go through numerous tutorials to figure out what I was doing. Then when I was first trying to use blender on my computer it kept crashing and freezing my computer (still does but not as often) and it took me a while to fix this by updating everything on my computer and letting blender completely complete each thing it was doing before moving on with my next task in blender. Needless to say this took a while to figure out and cause many restarts of my computer. Once I get into animating my model even more fun computer crashes happened, this time a little more frequently.
The next thing that happened was that I could not export my blender file into the right format for Ogre. This took a couple days along with asking and reading many questions on the ogre forum to figure out how to install the converter correctly and get it working properly on my computer.
Finally I thought that all my problems would be over once I got my model/skeleton into the correct format, but they were not. It took me a while to get everything loading properly and then unfortunately my skeleton was not made properly and Ogre would not accept any of my animations, though I can just load my plain model. I tried everything I could to get my animations in and even started to try to redo them, but I did not have enough time to do that.
All the while during this time I was busy working through tutorials on Ogre and learning Ogre. I was going to try to co-develop a program along with my model, but I got stuck up in the model/animation phase of this project and by the time I had figured everything out there was not enough time to make a meaningful program in Ogre. In retrospect I should have tried to abandon the model earlier and make something else.
By the time I decided to make something else I only had a few days left, and could not come up with anything good. So my project pretty much just came down to the blender animations.
I think that using two new platforms was a bit much and the overhang time on learning everything, along with doing all my other work, really was too long. I do feel however, that I now have a good grasp on how things work in Ogre and blender and would be able to put something together if I ever tried to again.