Squirrel In The Forest Animation

As part of the ALIVE animation course (purchased and accessed on the P2Design Academy website), I've completed my first animated video. *To clarify, all the assets (the models, rigs and such) were provided by the animation course itself, as my focus was animating the squirrel and the camera.*

Following the animation tutorials has taught me a lot about the overall process of bringing an animated video together in Blender.

Before I brought this animated video together, I made a climbing animation for the squirrel character. In a similar fashion to the run cycle, I needed to pay close attention to the positioning of the feet when they make contact with the tree, to make sure the feet don't slide. Alongside this animation, I created a bezier curve to act as a motion path for the squirrel to follow as they climb up the tree.

I learnt about the non-linear animator in Blender, that allows me to re-use animations by placing them on a timeline similar to a video editor. New animations can also be created and combined with existing animations to make subtle adjustments (such as tilting a character's body when turning) or to animate the root bone to control where the model travels to.

As for the camera, the course taught me that blender has a camera with a dolly rig, which allows for much greater control of the aim of the camera, the focus and so on. This allowed me to follow the camera movements of the course quite accurately.

Once each scene was animated and rendered, I put each render into the video sequencer to bring them all together, while also adding some effects, like a fade-in to the tree climbing shot, or using the adjustment layer to adjust the contrast/colours of each shot.

Overall, this part of the animation course was very informative for me and I'm very proud of the animation I've created. Next, I either plan to continue with the animation course and refine my animation skills further, or try out the rigging course to make my skillset more versatile.