Be The Ice Sculptor

Back in the summer of 2019, I took an intense 6-week animation course built by School of Motion. We studied the animation principles (squash & stretch, overshoot, anticipation, etc.) that make animations look great. In this final project, Be The Ice Sculptor, we were asked to build a 60-second animation using all of those principles. They gave us some beautiful 2D boards and professional voice-over to get started.

Earlier that same year, I was introduced to 3D animation through another course of theirs called Cinema 4D Basecamp. I became obsessed with 3D and couldn’t help myself with this project. I used their 2D boards for reference, while introducing a little bit of the fun that comes when you play in the third dimension.

The 2D boards from the assignment (designed by School of Motion)

The top five things I learned from this 3D experience

1. You will plan your life around rendering. I went to bed with my PC rendering. I went to work with it rendering. The few hours each night I had to work on this project were the only times I could actually get some work done. Save yourself a lot of trouble and either make sure you have a beast machine, use a render farm or build your own team render. I built my own team render and it was magical. Even still, I’d estimate my computers spent at least 60 hours rendering this 60-second animation.

2. You will have to make trade-offs. Maybe it’s just that 3rd dimension, but the stakes feel a bit higher with 3D. With renders taking so much time, mistakes are more costly. I found myself having to drastically reduce the quality of my renders just so I could tolerate the render times. I wanted you all to see each scene with beautiful global illumination and high quality sample rates and ray lengths on my shadows and ambient occlusion settings. But, as you probably noticed, you ended up with lots of grain. I’ll be fixing that in the future.

3. 3D doesn’t require an army, but it helps. Embrace there are so many deep facets in this world that people make careers out of being great at look development, or modeling, or rigging, or animating, or texturing. Sure, I was able to explore each of these areas with this project. However, like everything else in life, you can go faster by yourself, but you can usually go further with others. I had some awesome people help me get unstuck a few times throughout this project. I’m so grateful for them.

4. While it might be tempting to put your whole project together in one file, don’t. I thought I would make life easier because I could re-use lighting set-ups, cameras and textures. While I could do all those things, that also meant I had to constantly toggle when things would be visible. I had to watch for unwanted shadows from objects on camera. Oh, and don’t forget about dynamics from three scenes ago still making objects go all cattywampus. Okay, so maybe you’re okay with managing all of that stuff in one project, but I think I learned my lesson after trying it for the first 1,000 frames.

5. More communicators need to learn 3D animation. This medium is so powerful. While the process also produces some stress tempting you to buy $8,000 computers, there really are no limits to what you can produce.