While Mike and Cameron have been keeping busy with coding and promoting, I've had it pretty easy the past few days. That was before I remembered one of my long lost hobbies: 3D animation.
About 3 years ago I got into 3D animation when I read an article in GameInformer about how to make your own games. The article mentioned Blender, a free, open source program that allows you to create, animate, and render 3D models and scenes. I took a stab at making some 3D scenes, but I never really had a purpose to this hobby, so I made some lackluster stuff.
During a meeting last week, Cameron, Mike, and I were discussing how we wanted our brand to appear on the app we were discussing. We had a few options. Either we have a static image appear before the app loads, brand the app itself with some sort of text, or design the info section of the app to contain all of our branding. Cameron then mentioned how he liked one app on his iPod Touch that had a movie clip intro. That would fall under my job description, so I said I could easily do that.
When I got home that night, I made a mockup intro scene, rendered all the frames and exported it as an .AVI file. I wanted to show the guys how it looked on the iPhone and iPod touch, so I decided to upload the video I created to YouTube so that we could watch the intro on the device itself. It looked good, but we knew we could do better and improve.
On Tuesday during a chat with Mike and Cameron, we talked about the intro and how we could improve it. Cameron wanted the box to bounce more and he wanted 4 of them instead of 1. I thought about it and decided he was onto something, so off to work I went. I quickly jotted down some ideas for the new intro and got a basic storyboard in my brain.
I hopped on the Mac Pro at the Library at Valpo Univ. (not literally) and started rendering the movie, first without motion blur, and then with motion blur on. The difference is obvious, and the first movie took about 2 minutes to render. The movie with motion blur is still rendering because each frame of the clip has to render 12 times to account for the small movements that are made in each frame. So far each frame has taken around 30 seconds to render completely. Unfortunately, it did not finish before the library closed :(
Once it is done I'll upload it to YouTube and share it here.