After following the abstract sphere tutorial on youtube, I was advised by my tutor to try and animate it as it was a still image – this at first seemed like a really daunting task as I had to consider so many more variables within this animation that I have never really dealt with. My first instinct was to make the sphere rotate as the whole object was really unique and I thought showing the whole back portion of the sphere might be interesting. Furthermore, it was suggested again by my tutor to try and make the small black spheres on the shape move or grow/shrink in size – as the original sphere was in a cloner I wasn’t able to make them move, however I was certain I could make the grow/shrink with key frames. This whole process was fairly easy, it involved the simple process of setting key frames, changing values slightly and then moving the timeline forward and repeating the process – at the beginning of the animation the sphere size was 0.6 and then I further increased it to 0.9 roughly every 15 frames, I didn’t want it to seem regular as the shape is fairly organic, I wanted the growing and shrinking process to be organic looking too. Additionally, I learnt something new by doing this process. Within the animation there is a short pan done by the camera, before I didn’t know how to doit but with the power of the Motion Camera Tag, I was able to set a start camera and a end camera and key frame the blending strength between them to create an aesthetically pleasing transition – this was good to know as I might be able to use this within my animation, however, I will more than likely just key frame the positional co-ordinates to make the camera move (which I didn’t think of doing at the time).
Overall, I feel like the process went well of turning the still image/project into a moving animation, however, I feel a number of factors could have been altered to improve it. Firstly, I feel that the ‘marble’ texture that was on the outer shell of the sphere could have been made less glossy, when the sphere rotated you are able to see the hdri map in the background very clearly – although this could be regarded as a good element about the project, I feel that it wasn’t very aesthetically pleasing in my personal preference. Additionally, I also should have made the black spheres on the outside grow & shrink more in size – I don’t feel that it was very noticeable so having them grow larger might have resolved it – as well, even having the sphere’s grow/shrink at a faster rate might have had a better effect too.
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