Come Join Us – 3D Animation

“Welcome to the Center for Spiritual Living. Here is where love grows, so come join us! For a drumming circle, or take a moment to listen to some sweet guitar. Of course, you can join us for every Sunday morning in our celebration service, so that you may awaken to your spiritual magnificence, and be a part of creating a world that works for everyone. Welcome to The Center.” *

May 2023 marks the first animation I have ever made for a business! Thanks to one of my classes at Skagit Valley College, I found an internship for the Center of Spiritual Living Mount Vernon. After a few emails, I became a Social Media Intern tasked with redesigning parts of The Center’s website. I was also responsible for creating content for their social media. While battling between school and work, I designed their “EVENTS” and “SOCIALS” pages. Afterward, I spent over 50 hours creating about 40 seconds of animation along with sound design and editing. I also scripted the narration in the video, voiced by the gracious Reverend Maggie Wattle.**

The process behind this animation was helped thanks to the two years of practice while simultaneously attending SVC. I first met with Rev. Maggie at The Center and recorded the room seen in the animation. Eventually, I modeled the most important aspects of that room in Blender. While entering the texturing phase, I realized I needed a more vivid idea for my animation process. That led me to storyboard the animation and the idea to add drums and a guitar. Once the modeling and texturing process was complete, I animated the camera throughout the scene using a script to time each keyframe. While waiting on nearly 30 hours of rendering, I found sound effects on “freesound.com,” along with music from YouTube Audio Library. As each shot finished rendering, I added it to my timeline on DaVinci Resolve. A short process of editing led to what you see now.

*Two versions of this animation exist, one with music and one without. The one you see here is with music and has been directly uploaded to this site. In the future, I will instead embed a YouTube video.

**This is version 1 of this animation. The script is being reworked by The Center and version 2 will come out sometime within a week of writing this. If you’re reading this, you’re one of the only people who got to see the original.

THE CUBE – 3D ANIMATION

A mischievous sci-fi robot is following their normal route until they come across a mysterious cube. It is incredibly bright and seems to be pretty important. What could go wrong with messing with something you don’t truly understand?

The Cube is the first 3D animation I have ever made. 3D art is something that I have ignored for most of my life. I didn’t have any interest in it and to be frank, I simply preferred 2D animation. That was until I discovered three things; Corridor Digital, Blender, and Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse. These three things opened my eyes to the capabilities of 3D animation.  Maybe I would create VFX? Maybe I would create 3D prints? Maybe I could animate my own short film? These were all just ‘maybe’ ideas until I found a tutorial online by Ryan King Art. 

Ryan King Art’s Sci-Fi Worker Robot Tutorial jump started my newfound passion for 3D design. From that tutorial, I was able to come up with my own story, my own animations, and my own journey to developing my skills. 

The whole thing was made in Blender and edited in DaVinci Resolve.

Come Join Us – 3D Animation

“Welcome to the Center for Spiritual Living. Here is where love grows, so come join us! For a drumming circle, or take a moment to listen to some sweet guitar. Of course, you can join us for every Sunday morning in our celebration service, so that you may awaken to your spiritual magnificence, and be a part of creating a world that works for everyone. Welcome to The Center.” *

May 2023 marks the first animation I have ever made for a business! Thanks to one of my classes at Skagit Valley College, I found an internship for the Center of Spiritual Living Mount Vernon. After a few emails, I became a Social Media Intern tasked with redesigning parts of The Center’s website. I was also responsible for creating content for their social media. While battling between school and work, I designed their “EVENTS” and “SOCIALS” pages. Afterward, I spent over 50 hours creating about 40 seconds of animation along with sound design and editing. I also scripted the narration in the video, voiced by the gracious Reverend Maggie Wattle.**

The process behind this animation was helped thanks to the two years of practice while simultaneously attending SVC. I first met with Rev. Maggie at The Center and recorded the room seen in the animation. Eventually, I modeled the most important aspects of that room in Blender. While entering the texturing phase, I realized I needed a more vivid idea for my animation process. That led me to storyboard the animation and the idea to add drums and a guitar. Once the modeling and texturing process was complete, I animated the camera throughout the scene using a script to time each keyframe. While waiting on nearly 30 hours of rendering, I found sound effects on “freesound.com,” along with music from YouTube Audio Library. As each shot finished rendering, I added it to my timeline on DaVinci Resolve. A short process of editing led to what you see now.

*Two versions of this animation exist, one with music and one without. The one you see here is with music and has been directly uploaded to this site. In the future, I will instead embed a YouTube video.

**This is version 1 of this animation. The script is being reworked by The Center and version 2 will come out sometime within a week of writing this. If you’re reading this, you’re one of the only people who got to see the original.

THE ALLEY – 3d animation

A cold and dark alley is all you have left. You cannot turn back. You cannot cry for help. All you can do is move forward and hope that you can find your escape. An EXIT sign greets your arrival. It’s pointing towards your left, but which way is the right path? There are two dividing paths and neither look safe. Worst of all, you keep hearing strange noises coming from below. Even weirder, you swear you saw something moving above you. You’re not alone in The Alley.

The Alley is what I would call a reality check to the highest degree. The Cube was a stressful yet fun project. I didn’t have to design every single aspect of that world like I did with the Alley. I had a nice YouTube tutorial series holding my hand for half of that adventure. The Alley, on the other hand, was a complete nightmare. EVERY single aspect of this animation was either created by me, or painstakingly put together from random sources. Don’t even get me started on trying to find good music. This animation is the reason I started learning piano, so that one day I might NEVER have to rely on finding free music that doesn’t suck.

With all that being said, I LOVE this animation. I think it worked out very well and I learned EVERYTHING I know today because of this. In fact, I now truly understand why credits for movies are SO LONG. It takes an entire team of people just to create ONE SCENE within a reasonable timeline. I am just one person, with a job, going to classes (at the time). I’d like to think that my expectations on how long it takes to get one of these animations done is way more reasonable. Regardless, THIS is what taught me how to animate and design 3D models, create entire 3D environments, texture and UV unwrap 3D models, and most importantly, edit to the royalty free music.

THE CUBE – 3D ANIMATION

A mischievous sci-fi robot is following their normal route until they come across a mysterious cube. It is incredibly bright and seems to be pretty important. What could go wrong with messing with something you don’t truly understand?

The Cube is the first 3D animation I have ever made. 3D art is something that I have ignored for most of my life. I didn’t have any interest in it and to be frank, I simply preferred 2D animation. That was until I discovered three things; Corridor Digital, Blender, and Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse. These three things opened my eyes to the capabilities of 3D animation.  Maybe I would create VFX? Maybe I would create 3D prints? Maybe I could animate my own short film? These were all just ‘maybe’ ideas until I found a tutorial online by Ryan King Art. 

Ryan King Art’s Sci-Fi Worker Robot Tutorial jump started my newfound passion for 3D design. From that tutorial, I was able to come up with my own story, my own animations, and my own journey to developing my skills. 

The whole thing was made in Blender and edited in DaVinci Resolve.

BUILDING A LIGHTSABER – 3D SHORT

After the intense month of January 2022 (the month I spent every single available hour working on The Cube), I decided to work on something very simple. In my free time, I played a little game called Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order. I LOVED that game so much, so I decided to pay some homage to the main character’s weapon of choice, the lightsaber. I didn’t want to make an exact copy, so I opted to create my own interpretation of the weapon. Literally, piece by piece, I created a working lightsaber that can be disassembled and reassembled by a skilled force user… or just by using keyframes and motion tween. 

I was still learning how to create materials/textures at this point, but I can definitely say I had a knack for creating models. Ever since this project, I can’t help but put as much effort into modeling as I possibly can. I thought animation was my dream job, but there’s something so incredibly satisfying about making something completely from scratch, only to see it end up as something awesome.

MV DOG WALKER – 2D SHORT

Yes, the quality is pretty poor, but I still wanted to showcase this animation because of, well, its animation.

I created this walk cycle for a submission for my Adobe Animate class. Unfortunately, a month after I submitted my work, I was hacked and had no choice but to wipe my computer hard drive. I didn’t think this was too big a deal because I had a backup of all my art in a tiny little 1tb flash drive. Well, near the end of 2022, everything added to that drive was blank, including this project. Guess a 30 dollar flash drive wasn’t the best choice for holding my entire life’s work. Luckily, I recovered a lower quality submission from my class and have it here to showcase.

Now, onto the work itself. I have only used Adobe Animate a couple times before I took my class on it. After everything I learned, I am very proud to show this piece off. Specifically, I wanted to showcase my ability to design characters in 2D. Thanks to Adobe Illustrator, I created each and every aspect of the scene quite easily. I also learned how to rig these pieces together to create characters that can walk around and enjoy the scene.