Our first official project this semester was to create an avatar and some environmental aspects to go along with it, and it was a lot more fun than I anticipated.
I was a bit lost at first soI started out doing some of the tutorials on Cinema 4D’s website, but it was like the instructions were going in one ear and out the other—Probably the result of trying to learn a bunch of new platforms within a short time through tutorial videos, they all Blender together at some point.
So, switching tracks I decided to pick a scene and build up my knowledge from there. I’ve been watching a lot of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia recently, so the scene I chose to recreate (loosely) was when Mac tried to kick the bell in the bar for the friendship ceremony (about 1:35–2:12).
I used MakeHuman to create my avatar and Mixamo to rig it, but I couldn’t figure out why none of the colors and textures transferred over (I had the same issue with the beer bottle and the bell, I’m hoping there is a simple solution since it happened with all of my files, but more research is needed).
Since I was recreating a scene from television it was fairly easy to choose the action my avatar was going to enact, but messing around in Mixamo was so much fun I spent an extra hour or two interacting with my little dude.
Next I designed the bell with the help of a youtube video made by CG Shorts. The video was an incredibly helpful step by step guide to making an animated bell, the only downside is that it did not tackle the color/texture issue I was having.
I decided to give my ‘Mac’ an excuse for missing the bell (every. single. time.), a pile of empty beer bottles. Taking what I learned from the bell tutorial, I drew out half of a bottle silhouette as a Spline then used the Lathe tool to auto generate the rest of the bottle. I initially tried to animate the bottles to fall all over each other, but since those tests came out poorly and my avatar wouldn’t be able to interact with the bottles and the bell at the same time anyway, I decided to leave them where she dropped them.
Next up is figuring out the texture issue and learning how to rig an animal form, I can’t wait!
