Independent Study Project 2&3 Artist Statement

Wow, I can't believe this project is over. This animation has challenged me in ways that I didn't even know were possible but I'm so thankful that I overcame them and got a great outcome! This project took me every bit of two months to complete through the character design, background, fish tank, animation, and rendering but taught me valuable lessons within my Blender comprehension. First, we started with the basics and getting everything set up, which I can do quickly because I've played around in Blender before. Something I hadn't done before was sculpting my character, which I found a little difficult to do with just a computer because I couldn't always fully make the specific details I wanted to, whereas if I had some of the correct drawing tools for Blender, I think it would have gone a little smoother. We worked with weight painting a good bit, and I had to tweak it sometimes because it kept messing up when I started doing the animating part. Corrina helped me with that greatly when I had questions. Animating was pretty self-explanatory to me as I've also done that a good bit before but I really wanted the fish to glide across the water seamlessly so I kept playing with that for a while until I got what I wanted. After animating, we worked on making the water seem more liquid-like, setting up the fire in the volcano, as well as adding some more detail inside the fish tank like those little bubbles that come from the stones and the water ripples. These were processes that I had not previously worked with before but will be very helpful to me in the future when making some of my next animations. This video also helped me know the difference between scenes like EEVEE and cycles where EEVEE will help you look at your scene with much clearer visibility compared to cycles. We used HDRI Haven to get a wrap-around photo for the background. I didn't love the image the creator of the video used so I went with my own that I found and liked it so much more. I included both images in the gallery above. After this, we started rendering. My first take with rendering took an entire day to get 27 out of 140 frames but I decided to stop that, take a look at my scene collection, and take some parts out that I didn't want in my render anyway. I saved each frame as a PNG first so that my program wouldn't crash and used Blender's video editing software to put them all together. Honestly, I was really surprised when I saw the end product because it was only 6 seconds of animation but I'm really happy with my outcome and I learned so incredibly much throughout the video that I went along with. Can't wait for the next Blender project!