Here we are, at the very end of my undergrad studies and my final post for this website. I suppose I should first start with the initial point of this post: to talk about my artwork and how I accomplished this piece. As stated previously, I wanted to try a different type of animation that I had not tried before and decided to do this stormy ocean piece that I found on YouTube. I wanted to be able to play around with how choppy the water would be and was interested in how people make landscapes within blender. We started with one plane, playing with the settings so we could make each of them look like waves crashing and deciding on how the waves would look as well as how they would render. We next made other planes and put them together at the exact perfect point where the water would be coherent with each other, rather than just one large plane, which would have been fine, but we wanted it to render a better way. I next found where I was going to put the buoy and made a plane there, then made a vertex group so the buoy would look more cohesive and coherent when the waves were crashing. We did the exact same thing for the camera, which helped the camera move with the waves swiftly, not just stay in one place the whole time. We next added a noise modifier, which helped make the rotation of the camera look smoother. After making the vertex groups, we made the bottom of the ocean so that when the camera went under the water, it would look like the actual sea, whereas if we didn't make this, we wouldn't be able to see anything under the water and it would just look plain and boring. To do this, I made another plane around the same size as my sea and extruded it below the surface. I ended up making another vertex group for this and then having the top shrink-wrapped to the sea so that it moves with the waves. After this, we made a particle system for the rain, so that it's raining over the water and gives it a more stormy look. We used an icosphere and proportional editing to make the raindrop and then made a new particle system so that the top plane is like our "clouds" raining down those raindrops from above. We then went and did the backdrop which was this stormy look through the world nodes and connecting all of the properties to the correct place. I then did the same thing for the color of the ocean and the foam on top of the water. The last thing I did before rendering was setting the location keyframes for the camera, so that I could control the animation for when I wanted it to go underwater and then come back up. Finally, I rendered the animation and got my final product! I absolutely loved this tutorial and thought that after the previous project I did, it went so much smoother and I understood what to do so much better. This project just flew by so quickly because of my previous knowledge. Toward the end of the tutorial video, the creator said he found a great tutorial to make lightning and I think I will try to do that in the next few weeks for myself, just to make the animation look even cooler and stormy.
Now, I just wanted to finish off my final blog post to just thank my professor, Corrina Espinosa, for all of her help along the way. I started DA2 last year not knowing what I was getting myself into, thinking it was somewhat like Digital Arts 1 where we were using Photoshop and such, which I didn't end up understanding in depth because of Covid classes. I was pleasantly surprised that it was nothing of the sort and we were learning new things like working with AI, animation, virtual reality, and augmented reality. After falling in love with this class, I just had to take it again to learn some more and found that I actually gained a friend along the way. When I needed a final upper-division art class and couldn't take DA2 for the third time, you allowed me to do an independent study even though you were insanely busy and just had a newborn child. Through my four years in college, I have never had a professor through whom I had learned so much, while at the same time, seeing that they were always there to help whenever needed because they wanted their students to feel accomplished and foster a love of digital art. And for that, thank you, Corrina. You have truly shown what it means to be a friend in art and cannot thank you enough for your patience and care throughout this year and a half <3
and just like that, I'm signing Spshittyart off (for now).
Always a friend in art,
Sophie Parsonnet