The Animation

The Story

A ginger bread man gets an unexpected visitor at his house, and he's not very happy. Can the ginger bread man escape with his life intact?

Creation Experience

Blender has the least intuitive user interface I have ever used, and as such has a huge learning curve. The only way to do anything in it is through memorization of keyboard commands. The tutorials were very helpful but its still a daunting task to get anything up and running. The Gingerbread animation tutorial took me a lot longer than the advertised 30 minutes to get through.

I found that 3D Modeling is not my forte, and what I saw in my head was much different than what I could achieve with my level of knowledge with Blender and 3D modeling in general. So rather than focusing on creating great models I focused on timing animation with sounds, and trying to create a cartoony exaggerated look.

The only tip I have for working with Blender is to try and divide things up into scenes. Rendering the animation in Blender even with a fairly powerful machine can take awhile. So rather than trying to render the whole thing at once I found it was better to divide the animation into scenes and work on those. Using the camera view (in the 3D view use 0 on the number pad) I would play through the animation with texturing enabled by just cycling through the frames. Once that looked correct then I would let the animation be created, and hopefully it wouldn't need any additional work done to it.

Tools Used

The following tools were used in creating the animation

  • Blender - For the video
  • Audacity - To touch up any audio
  • Paint.NET - To touch up any textures
  • Windows Movie Maker - To put the video and audio together

I also got a good chunk of my sounds from a website called FindSounds which is just a search engine for sounds. Through this I stumbled upon the sounds used in the animation

Animation Stills





Tutorial Stills