EMAIL: tigger@interthingy.com
NAME: Simon Kirkby
TOPIC: Dancing
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Boogie Bot
COUNTRY: Australia
WEBPAGE:
RENDERER USED: Blender
TOOLS USED: blender-3.22a, ucbmpeg (debian)
CREATION TIME: 50 hours
HARDWARE USED: Duron 1300,debian sarge
VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: with computer ;)
ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:

Dancing bot thingo dooing the boogie on a brick walled stage

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:

I started using blender again recently ( after it had become GPL ) with a 19 inch monitor it was quite a pleasure to use. :)

I started to mess with the IK/armature system of blender and realised that I could make and entry for this comp. 

1. create flat plane to act as a floor
2. created a back plane for wall , and spot lights
3. created the skeleton of the bot, and used parenting and IK solvers to create a marrionette puppet. There is a single empty object that will move the entire bot model around.
4. animated the gross movement of the armature, with a camera that follows the head of the bot.
5. added the limb movments and used cyclic actions for the left are and body to get the "boogie" action I was looking for.
6 added in the particle system and spent _ages_ fiddling with the texture to get it looking correct.
7. tweaked the leg and arm movement and added in more spot lights to give it more of a stage feel

for my first decent foray back into blender I reckon its pretty cool! ;)

Art is often about making not having so I have included the source file for the blender model in my entry.