I did a quick render over the weekend to try my hand at key-framing some animation again. This is a quick scene that has some water bubbles rising up in front of a wooden wall.
The problem? The bubbles cast shadows! Damn it. This took almost 24 hours to render in Cheetah so I’m not eager to do it again just to get rid of the shadows at the end. Oh well.
For what it is, I think it looks decent enough anyway.
I’m trying to figure out Cheetah’s implementation of skeletal animation because that will allow me to do more advanced renderings in the future. Once I master this, I’ll be able to pose models in scenes, output animations instead of just stills, etc.
And surprisingly, it’s not that tough to do! Cheetah handles it in a pretty simple way. For a test case, I decided to do a Quake3 style undulating tube thingy. Here it is in motion:
And here’s a look at the bones in the Cheetah viewport:
Each of the red diamonds above is a bone and the red dots between them are joints. Once I set this up I just had to set keyframes on the various joints and make them move, rotate and scale the way I wanted them to.
So far, so good!