This is MOONDOG, my first animated short. Before this I had no experience with 3D but I was a studio art major in college (painting focus) and have done a lot of freelance graphic design work. I did my first doughnut tutorial almost exactly one year ago today, did one more chair tutorial by Blender Guru then wanted to try to make something on my own, so I decided to model a cartoon version of my dog. It took me about a month of on and off work and lots of youtube videos to model and texture the dog. Then I learned about rigging and thought it would be fun to try to rig and animate it. At first I rigged it myself, bone by bone, but then wanted more control and a more professional rig, so I used rigify and it was much better and way easier. I was just going to do a simple animation of the dog chasing a ball, but then I thought, “what if he chased a glowing orb?”, and that turned into, “what if the glowing orb was the moon?” and the story kept growing and growing. I originally would’ve been thrilled with being able to make a 30 second animation, and that was my original plan, but it kept growing and growing and here I am a year later with a 7 minute short film. I work part time and was able to devote a huge portion of my time into this project. I treated it as a job and spent anywhere from 4-8 hours each day animating. I was mostly finished with the animation by mid November, but had a busy winter and had to put the project to the side for a bit. I would chip away at it here or there and in mid February I was able to really start working on it again. I finished up the animation and then spent a month or so on the sound design. It was a great way to learn Blender, I spent hundreds of hours creating this and researching the ins and outs of Blender and animation in general. I made the majority of this on a 2015 Macbook Pro, just using the trackpad and rendering in Eevee. I’ve since upgraded my machine but pretty cool that it’s possible to make and render something like this on a computer that you could get for about $150 on eBay and a program that is 100% free and open source. I know I still have a lot to learn and improve on but I’m really excited to finally be finished with this project, and pretty happy with how it turned out! Would love to hear what you all think!
PS I wish I learned about this site earlier, I would’ve loved to have been able to share my progress and get insights from all you amazing blender artists! Now I know for the next one!
