After some consideration, I signed up for School of Motion’s All Access subscription, and joined their “Cinema 4D Basecamp” class. I already have a bit of 3D knowledge from my Blender practice, but C4D has a different setup, so it’s taken a while to get the hang of that program. I just completed my first animated assignment for the class, a Rube Goldberg-like ball going through an obstacle course. It took a while to have each element move the way I wanted, but I like this result. 

I’ve also continued Blender practice by entering monthly contests on The Rookies website. Each contest has a specific theme, and October’s was “Power Source.” I immediately thought of giant robot and spaceship startup sequences from anime, and decided to 3D model a startup sequence of my own, using a glowing orb as the key to turn on my starship.

I set up the scene with a dome on top of a cube, then added rails and a hole in the floor so the spaceship chair could rise up from below and slide into place near the console. I got the chair and console models off Blenderkit, and I added an indentation and light up “wires” to the top of the console so the power source sphere could be placed into it. I also put a light under the console and timed it to light up once the power source sphere was placed in. 

The space scene was an HDRI I placed outside the dome, then I keyframed its transparency so the outside would slowly appear as the spaceship turned on. 

As with any 3D project, I ran into some issues. Animating the chair to move without going off the rails was pretty tricky, and took several tries from multiple camera angles to get right. I also found that I needed to change the camera motion I wanted, as it would clip into part of the chair at certain angles. Nonetheless, I’m pretty proud of the final result, and I added some cinematic music, (“Duty Calls” by Rod Kim) to the final piece to make the scene feel more epic. 

While I do enjoy weekly challenges, I’ve found I prefer monthly projects, as they let me make more detailed scenes while fitting the modelling around my busy work schedule. The March challenge theme will be revealed on the first day of the month, so if you’re interested, give it a shot!