Call us: 866 YOUR K12
New and Getting Better for 2012–2013
We held online sessions in early May to talk with parents just like you about what's new this year and answer their questions.
Download and Print
We've provided a printable version of this helpful information for easy offline reference.
In this advanced course, students will build on the skills they developed in 3D Art I to learn 3D animation techniques. Using Blender, a powerful open-source modeling tool, they will master the basics of animation— rigging, bones, and movement — while learning how to apply traditional animation techniques to their 3D models. They will also learn about jobs in the industry.
Students learn how to move through the course, how to set up their computers to view the course, how to download the resources they will need, and how to complete and turn in assignments.
Project 1: Bounce a Ball
Students learn to set up the Blender interface, create a UVsphere, and use the Transform Properties panel. They create and scale lattices, position spheres, and add planes. They change the length of an animation and create starting, ending, and bounce keyframes. They learn how to use script, trajectory, IPO curve, curve point, curve handle, vector handle, squashing, and stretching. They decorate a sphere and plane, change render settings, and render the animation.
Project 2: Light a Stage
Students learn about spot lamps, energy, additive color mixing, ray tracing, fill lights, and linked duplicates. They add and position a fill lamp, remove shadows, and create linked duplicates. They add backlights, overhead lights, and ambient lights and set them to track the movement of a ball. They learn about types of lighting keyframes, the IPO Curve Editor, and negative lights.
Project 3: Grab a Ball
Students learn to move pivot points, then create a chain of parent/child relationships to link a robot arm's parts together. They learn about layers, looping animations, start and end keyframes, data, and datablocks. They create a lattice that shares the bouncing ball's IPO datablock. Then they add a new ball, make the lattice its parent, squash and stretch it, and render the animation.
Project 4: Make a Walk Cycle
Students use controller bones to move a model's body, identify the main poses in a walk cycle, and lower the character's center of gravity. They pose the arms so they swing as the character walks, rotate the shoulders and hips, create a mirrored keyframe, and add forward motion. They add passing, high-point, and recoil poses; add the rest of the poses for a looping walk cycle animation; and render the animation. Then they convert the animation to an action strip, repeat the action strips to increase the length of the animation, and scale the action strips to change the walk cycle's speed.
Project 5: Make an Explosion
Students turn a UVsphere into a particle emitter system and make the faces of a UVsphere explode outward. They add a second sphere particle emitter to create a fiery explosion effect, and put a lamp inside the two spheres to increase the brightness of the explosion.
Project 6: Pour Liquid
Students add a fluid simulation inside a shape, bake the simulation, make the fluid look like realistic water, and render the simulation.
Project 7: Make Fireworks
Students make an emitter particle system that sends out rocket-like particles and a reactor particle system that makes the particles explode into fireworks. They add another explosion of fireworks, make the fireworks colorful, and render the animation.
Project 8: Fill a Fountain
Students make a half-sphere particle emitter that sprays particles out of a fountain, then make the fountain solid, so particles bounce off of it. They make the particles look watery by basing them on a 3D object, and render the animation.
Project 9: Start a Fire
Students create a random vertex group from the vertices of a log model, then turn the random vertex group into a particle emitter system. They add a fire sphere with a shrinking animation, give the fire sphere a colorful material, and use it as the base for the particles. They create a texture for a force field, add an empty object and a turbulence force field to make the fire flicker, and bake the turbulence field into the particle animation. They turn on a node system to make the fire spheres look more like fire and render the animation.