figure 1. First try

figure 2. Final animation

WEEK 1

This week's assignment was to render and animate our ideas for final projects in Blender. I had no problems downloading and installing blender, but because of my lack of expertise in 3D modeling, the program was a little tough getting used to. Figure 1 is my first attempt at modeling a hand in blender.

After Seth Raphael showed us SketchUp, I decided to do some preliminary work in it to get some practice.  Since the program ended up working quite well for quick prototyping, I decided to build my objects that I wanted to animate in SketchUp and then import them into Blender.  This made the use of Blender much easier since now I could just manipulate objects.

My final animation ended up being huge  (93.5Mb) so I had to make it an MPEG-4 rather than an .AVI. This brought down the size considerably, but I still could not load it onto the "site" tool. The temporary solution was put it on the Media Lab server until I could figure out what to do about its size.