3D World’s question of the month

Most animators, when asked to recreate any kind of realistic, natural animation, will first head for the local library or video store to find some reference material of the subject in question. More often than not, when analysed in close up, this material contains plenty of subtle movements that will not only add interest to your work but also feed subtle visual cues to your viewers that help to anchor them in the reality you’re trying to create. Furthermore, you may well find that your preconceptions about how something moves are flawed, in which case you’ll need to rethink the whole piece before you create something that looks too simplistic, stereotyped or just plain wrong.

In this scene, we’ve studied several video sources to add detail and authenticity to the animation. All the scene elements are animated with random noise wherever possible: the camera, the dragonfly itself and elements of the environment don’t simply sit still but are constantly moving. Hence, not only is the motion of the dragonfly erratic, but the camera work is similarly randomised, so the dragonfly drifts in and out of frame.

However, what seems a plausibly random flight path is in reality carefully controlled, as we want to choreograph the sequence to create the most dramatic effect. In the walkthrough that follows, you’ll learn how building the animation in layers applied to different nulls gives precise control of the variables concerned. This will give you a solid base to finesse. For instance, our dragonfly has subtle footsteps animated on its legs, random shivers that pass through its wings, tiny twitches of its tail and fleeting head turns – all based on observation of the video reference material.

This issue, there isn’t space to walk you through the process of setting up the animation step by step, so we’ve provided a final scene file in the supporting material. Over the course of the walkthrough, we will deconstruct this file, picking out key features of the scene set-up.

Click here to download the support files (15.5MB)