Hello World - 3DAnimation!

(Hello World - The canonical minimal test that proves everything works.)


Voovees Director: The world's easiest 3D animation tool.

"Oh really", I hear you say, "Prove it".
I accept your challenge. Follow these easy steps and five fun-filled minutes from now you'll have made your first animation complete with a walking, talking character set in a park-like tranquil out-door scene."

In this tutorial you'll learn all the basics on how to make a 3D animation like this in 5 minutes.

It may not seem all that special but once you get all the foundamentals we will move on to more exciting stuff.

Ok let's get started.

Create Scene:

1. Open Voovees Director, choose 'New From Template'. Pick a skybox 'cloudy0' and terrain 'field0'. Click 'Next'.

2. For the character we are going to choose Mika  and click 'Finish'.

3. Now you should have a scene created for you:

Make Mika Walk:

1. Right Click on the Mika to see the radial menu opening around her
2. Left Click this button   and this program will activate Way Point Mode

3. In Way Point Mode, Right Click on the ground a few times to set way points. Make Mika walk toward the camera.
( I understand this left click | right click business can seem quite a headache at the start. When you're unsure, refer to the help panel on the bottom left corner of the screen. I promise it'll become second nature before you know it.)


If you made a mistake, just press Backspace or ESC to delete a way point or reset.

4. When the way points are set, click the big green tick to confirm the waypoints. You'll see a red trail and the timeline pop up with the travel event.

If you click on the Play button, you'll see Mika walking toward you. Bravo!
(Right Click or hold down right mouse button on the timeline to access an arbitrary point on the timeline.)

Make Mika Wave her arm:

1. Next, right click on Mika again and click on 'Character Animation' button on the radial menu this time. 

2. On the Character Animation Window that just popped open, click on the Body Animation Tab.

3. Click on the stick figure's left arm (which is on its right side since it's a mirror image). You'll see all the left arm animations being filtered out, open the left arm animation list on the right and scroll down till you find wave->side0. Click on it to preview the animation. (You'll see Mika waving her left hand.) Click the Add Animation Button with the little plus sign on it to add the animation to the animation mixing pool.

4.Now repeat the process for the right arm, but for animation 'right arm-on-waist0' this time.

5. Drag the right arm on waist animation so it happens on top of the left arm wave animation. And drag it's right edge so the ends at the same time like this.

6 Click on 'add to timeline'. You'll see the body animation appearing on the timeline control.

Make Mika Speak:

1. Go back to your character animation window and click on the Facial Animation Tab.

2.  Click on 'add speech to timeline' at the bottom.  Fill out the form like this:


Click on Add To Timeline. You'll see a speech bubble icon appear on the timeline.

3. Go back to character animation window again. Click on Mika's left eye and change it to  do the same to the right eye. . Change Mika's mouth to .

Click 'add to timeline' to add this facial expression after the speech. Now your timeline should look something like this:

Render

1. (optional)Hold down shift and the middle mouse button to rotate the camera down a little bit. Scroll the mouse wheel up so you zoom in a little bit on Mika.  

2. Press F12 to bring up the render window. Click on 'mid - resolution for online sharing'. In the file dialogue that's opened, give your animation a file name such as 'helloWorld.wmv'. Click 'Save'.
Your animation will be rendered.
Click on the 'show renders' button in the render window to quickly access your video file. Play it in windows media player to make sure everything is ok.

Remember to save your scene by pressing 'ctrl + s' or clicking on the save scene button in the pop up menu before we move on.

Post-production:

Now, let's add sound and pre-roll/credit to our 3D Animation. If you don't wanna read more text you can watch this video tutorial.

1. Open up Windows Movie Maker and create a new project. Drag our video from from your Voovees/Videos folder to the Window Movie Maker window. It will be added to the media collection.

2. Drag the video from the media collection to the timeline.



4. Drag the timeline slide bar to the place just before Mika says 'Hello World' and go to Tools -> Narrate Timeline:
Do you voice acting by clicking 'Start Narration'. Choose a place to save the temporary narration sound track when prompted.
Click 'Stop Narration' when you're done. Try a few times till you get the sound to match Mika's mouth.

3. Find the 'Movie Tasks' menu and click on 'Make Title  or Credits' and then select 'title at the beginning'. Type in the title and production information and click on 'Done, add this title to movie'.


4. To add the credit roll at the end, follow a similar process as step 3, click on 'Make Title or Credits' and select 'credits at the end' and type in your credits page.

5. Go to File -> Save Movie File. Choose 'My Computer' as your movie location. Choose the filename and folder and click next. Adjust your quality settings if necessary and click next again.

Optional: If you want to add a background music, import the resulting movie file back into Windows Movie Maker again and then add a your favourite music onto the timeline.

Congratulations! You've just made your first 3D animation!