Final Sets and Backgrounds - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 225

before you reach this point in the production process. If the fi nal sets change in any material way from the rough
sets where the characters interact with them, you will have to go back and adjust your animation to compensate.
Figure 13.1 shows the rough set from The Beast side by side with the fi nal set. The points of contact between
characters and set are the fl oors, the couch, the Beast's high chair, and the kitchen windowsill. Animation was done
completely with the rough sets in place, so at those locations, the fi nal sets had to match identically. As you can see
in the illustration, the placement of structural and major elements is almost identical. To create the full set, a dupli-
cate was made of the rough set fi le, and new geometry was created directly on top of the old to ensure congruence.
Figure 13.1 The rough and fi nished sets
In one instance, I messed up, causing me to have to retool some of the animation. When animating the open-
ing scenes with the Beast on the fl oor, I had forgotten when creating the rough set to add adequate depth for
the carpet. When I switched to the fi nal set, which included the carpet, I found that the character was passing
through the fl oor rather frequently. Fortunately, a move and rekey of the Beast's master bone upward on the
Z-axis fi xed the problem, although I had to adjust several shot fi les this way.
Movable Objects and Construction
If you examine the fi le “fullset.blend” in the sets folder of the production directory on the disc, you will see
that many objects in the fi nal set are linked dupligroups attached to Empties. In theory, you could build your
entire set this way. However, I chose to create structural elements—the fl oors, walls, ceilings, and cabinetry—
all directly within the set fi le. Having done physical construction work before, this just seemed the natural
way to approach it, and it worked out very well. Anything that was going to be “bolted down” existed as live
geometry in the set fi le. Everything else, including furniture, would come in as a linked dupligroup for easy
manipulation. In Figure 13.2, local elements are on the left, with linked dupligroups on the right.
NOTE
The procedure for building dupligroup assets and linking them into your fi les is covered in Chapter 6.