Rough Sets, Blocking, and an Animatic - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 101

motion blur problems. If each angle is its own fi le, you simply adjust the characters as
needed for each shot.

● Bad animation: There is a bit of animation you are displeased with or for some other reason

would like to replace. If your character has a 2-minute long stream of animation in your single
fi le production, you have to make sure that removing or replacing the bad animation doesn't
mess with the good animation and maintains proper transitions. If your animation is broken up
into smaller portions, each with its own fi le, this once again becomes easy to solve. Replacing
the animation for a discreet shot does not endanger any of the work done on other shots.

● Render management: You are ready to render your animation. Whether you are using a ren-

der farm or just your home workstation, having to babysit your single BLEND fi le along the
way can be a pain. For each camera angle, you have to make sure that the proper camera is
selected, the right frame range is designated, and the right combination of sets, props, charac-
ters, lighting, and render options are used. Each time you want to render a different angle, you
have to reevaluate and possibly reset all of these. If you need to go back and rerender a par-
ticular shot, you have to make sure you set things up just like the fi rst time. When each shot is
its own fi le, all of the optimizations and render settings for that shot are permanently saved in
the fi le. All you have to do is open it and render, or send that fi le as is to the render farm.

Building Your Template Scene File

Each shot (different camera angle) in your production will eventually have its own BLEND fi le. While each
of those fi les will have an optimized population of characters, sets, and props, they will all be traceable back to
the master fi le for the scene.

The template scene fi le is a BLEND fi le that contains
links to all of the sets, props, and characters that are in a
scene, as well as all of the different cameras that will be
used throughout. It will act as a baseline for most of the
shot-by-shot fi les that you will create later. If there is
more than one scene in your animation, each scene will
have its own template fi le.

To create the template scene fi le, start with an empty
BLEND. Save it with an appropriate name so that rela-
tive path linking will work. In The Beast , it was called,
“beast_scene_template.blend”.

Use Shift-F1 and navigate to the fi le containing your
rough set. Make sure that Relative Paths and Link are
enabled, and fi nd the Scene (not the objects!) that con-
tains the set. Figure 7.9 shows the rough set selected from
the Scene section of the BLEND fi le. When you link the
set scene, Blender will not show any noticeable differ-
ence in the 3D view, but rest assured, your scene is there. Figure 7.9 Linking the rough set