Recently as part of some curriculum I was writing I made a video of the history of the Near East from 2000 BCE to 100 CE. It’s not an extremely complicated animation or anything, but I thought I would post it here anyway because it’s actually done (which makes it a rare project for me).
Each nation is a simple nurbs circle animated with shape keys. What I did was make two files and every year was a frame so that year 2000 BCE was frame 2000. Then I just played it backwards. Year 0 to 100 was another file counting years forward. The year timer was actually the frame stamp from Blender, with a simple crop and chroma key.
Compositing was donw at render time with nodes which just made the render partially transparent, overlaid a water layer and underlaid the ground.
Here is a link to it on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNxPA0PKFNI
