I’ve developed a new love and appreciation for 3D. It’s SO FUN! After finishing the donut last week, I asked Nathan if he would be comfortable with me making more assets for the episode. Planets were an easy one, since they’re just… spheres with added texture and environment. Honestly, the texture painting was the hardest part, and something I still kind of struggle with. After that, and another check-in to see where Nathan was with animation, I was tasked with trying to find some stock music and sound effects for the episode. We used a site called elements.envato, because Nathan has a subscription to it, so I was able to make a playlist of potential songs/sounds for the episode. We’re aiming for a lofi-hip-hop-spacey-sci-fi vibe.
Next, Nathan needed some background assets. He had me design some transparent illustrations of nebulas/galaxies/star clusters that he could drop into the background. These were incredibly therapeutic to illustrate. Oh! I also downloaded a free trial of Maya to practice some easy animation tutorials, and oh man that program is daunting… I have an easy time with Blender, because in some ways it resembles illustration software, but Maya is a whole other world (with whole other keyboard shortcuts). I might not make it far with this program, especially with just a free trial, but I think it’s worth a shot!
But… I still had an itch for more 3D. After catching up on the animation process and making sure all of my assets were successfully loaded onto Dropbox, I spent the remainder of Wednesday and Thursday developing more 3D assets! We want to have some junk floating around in space while Big Dinosaur is in his rocket ship, and I thought rather than paying for and downloading random objects, I could make them! There are hundreds of tutorials available on Youtube for pretty much anything you can imagine. I ended up making a UFO, a potion bottle and a banana so far! I’m very, very slow with Blender and have to pause the tutorials a lot to see where I’ve gone wrong, but overall I think I’m getting the hang of it.
