Character Building

Character Building.
by Sara Goessi.
How would you like to create your own swamp-dwelling ogre in thrilling 3D?

 

That's the idea behind a school holiday programme held in Auckland over three days in April. Using 3D animation computer programs Blender and Corel Bryce, school students from around the country learned how to create characters in the same way that Shrek, Sulley and Buzz Lightyear were brought to life.

 

The course, run by Bubbledome (www.bubbledome.co.nz) with students from Media Design School as tutors, takes students step by step through the animation process.

 

On the fi rst day, they start with a box - it doesn't get much simpler than that. The next stage is to pull out the vertices to turn it into a 2D picture.

 

By the third day, they have modelled a character that's ready to animate. Modelling in 3D is complicated to begin with, say the students, but as you go along it gets easier and you don't have to be super-talented at drawing to get good results.

 

Some work in groups to pool ideas and encourage each other. Across the hallway, secondary school students are importing maps into Bryce and using them to create fantasy lands.

 

On the other side of the world, New Zealander Andrew Adamson is creating some of the biggest fi lms in history using 3D modelling - Shrek being the best known. And who knows? Some of the kids having fun on this holiday programme could one day follow in his footsteps.

 

Blender is a free program, available for download from the web, while Bryce costs about $150.

 

Matthew Kirk (left) is experimenting with shapes to see what he comes up with. Jason Cairns (middle) is concentrating on merging an elephant and a cuttlefi sh, while Odin Calder (right) needs a tutor's input into his drawing of a monkey.

 

Crossing land mammals with sea creatures starts on a whiteboard.

 

Danielle Purchase and Mallory Heslop have fun making monsters.

 

Jonty Scott (left) shows off his whale scorpion (whorpion), while Alex Purchase works on a model of a robot

 

Devon McGrath and Daniel van der Merwe fi nd out what you get when you cross a rat with an eel.

 

A Bubbledome tutor shows students how far they can take 3D animation using Blender and Bryce. It's how fi lms such as Shrek and Ice Age came to be: animators start with basic drawings and photographs of faces and use those to create facial expressions for their characters. Pixar Animation Studios (who made Toy Story and The Incredibles, among others) explains the 3D fi lm-making process on its website at www.pixar. com/howwedoit.

 

 

Lila Knight gets some help from a tutor in turning her box into a 3D character.

 

 

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