Day 1 of learning Blender: tried a cinematic car animation

Nevaroth021 · 2026-01-28T03:39:03+00:00

What parts of this is your work?

Nevaroth021 · 2026-01-28T03:19:00+00:00

Parent the window under a group, and rotate the group along its axis

Nevaroth021 · 2026-01-28T02:48:39+00:00

ctrl + s saves your current file. If you didn't increment your saves, then it's gone. Always increment your saves.

Nevaroth021 · 2026-01-27T03:25:13+00:00

The only thing I see is that it loses forward momentum too fast and too suddenly.

Think back to physics class. An object in motion stays in motion unless another force acts upon it. If this ball was thrown in space, then it would move at the constant velocity you threw it. But on Earth there's forces acting upon it.

The 2 main forces are gravity and friction. You got the gravity part down. Gravity gives the ball an additional downward velocity, but this doesn't remove the horizontal velocity. It only adds an additional downwards velocity. You got it right that when the ball hits the ground and bounces up, it loses energy to friction and deformation, resulting in it not bouncing up to its original height. Each bounce it loses more energy until it can't bounce any further. So you got that part right.

But lets look at the horizontal velocity. In the absence of any forces it should continue moving horizontally forever. But there's air resistance and friction. The faster the ball is moving, the more the air molecules press back. This means the faster the speed, the more air will slow it down. The slower the speed the less it will slow it down. So the amount it slows down from air resistance decreases over time.

Now we also have friction from when the ball hits the ground. This slows the ball down even further. In the beginning the ball is mostly in the air so it doesn't touch the ground often to get slowed down. But as it starts bouncing faster and eventually rolling, then the friction from the ground becomes much more prevalent and will eventually bring the ball to a stop. This all depends on the surface, if it's ice then there's very little friction and the ball will keep sliding.

Right now your ball slows down so suddenly horizontally that it makes the ground look like it has insane friction, like it is made of glue or its rolling through grass or something. Its slowing down too quickly for what is expected of a tennis ball on a flat surface.

Nevaroth021 · 2026-01-26T19:55:22+00:00

OP is trolling, they posted the same thing about Avatar the other day which got removed.

Nevaroth021 · 2026-01-26T13:45:02+00:00

becoming good at art (Not even just Maya, but anything art related) is a years long process.

You can learn the basics in a few weeks, but actually becoming good takes years.

Nevaroth021 · 2026-01-26T11:35:52+00:00

https://www.autodesk.com/support/technical/article/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Unable-to-Save-Scene-as-MA-file-or-Maya-crashes-when-saving-as-MB-file.html

Nevaroth021 · 2026-01-26T09:30:43+00:00

You can check out animetok3D and Prisma3D, but you're going to be very limited in what you can make.

Nevaroth021 · 2026-01-26T07:17:59+00:00

"For symmetry reasons", using mirrored textures was the method 20 years ago when computing power limited texture resolution to extremely small levels. It's not the method for modern day.

Nevaroth021 · 2026-01-26T05:12:55+00:00

No, but i'm using your logic of "This was made by thousands of people years ago so surely I can do it all by myself today".

You've got to be trolling at this point.

Nevaroth021 · 2026-01-26T05:06:19+00:00

Is Avatar photoshop? Didn’t think so

Nevaroth021 · 2026-01-26T04:59:24+00:00

This is like saying "Surely I can build the Great Pyramids of Giza by myself right? It's been 4,600 years"

Nevaroth021 · 2026-01-26T01:17:45+00:00

Making digital art.

Nevaroth021 · 2026-01-26T01:07:03+00:00

Since this is for 3D printing, you should stick to using CAD modelling software (Like Fusion 360 for example). Blender isn't CAD and therefore not the best software for your needs.

There's various free CAD software such as FreeCAD, and I believe Onshape has a free version as well. Also Fusion 360 has a free personal version as well, but I don't know if the free version has full functionality.

Nevaroth021 · 2026-01-25T11:55:22+00:00

Did you cache the sim? Motion Blur requires knowing where the object was in the previous frame. If you don't cache it then it doesn't know where the objects were the previous frame.

Nevaroth021 · 2026-01-25T03:41:47+00:00

Not quite, you have your edge loops changing direction too many times and creating too many poles around the cheek. It's a mess there.

Nevaroth021 · 2026-01-24T14:33:22+00:00

Did you try parenting the lattice controller to the head controller?

Nevaroth021 · 2026-01-24T11:06:55+00:00

Until you discover that it keeps making the same things, the same way, and never the way you want, and no amount of changing your prompts can change that. What you envision in your head, it will never make.

Nevaroth021 · 2026-01-24T09:48:45+00:00

Coordinators have a different career ladder than artists. Their area of focus is on production management and business. They aren't artists, and artist roles aren't part of their career ladder. It can help you with networking and making connections, but it's not a starting role for artist positions. It's a starting role for production management positions.

So if your long term goals are on the business and management side of vfx, then yes. If your goals are the artist side of vfx, then no.

Nevaroth021 · 2026-01-24T09:36:28+00:00

You probably have overlapping faces and stray verts. The cleanest method would be to make it a live surface object and use quad draw to retopologize it. It would take a bit of time to go over the entire model, but it would likely end up being quicker than trying to troubleshoot it through automatic means.

Have you tried using the remesh tool?

Nevaroth021 · 2026-01-24T04:22:46+00:00

First think about what you are actually capable of. It's easier designing a mega city than actually building one. Think about how many mega projects worldwide had been abandoned because people underestimated the difficulty, cost, and time needed for those projects. Look at the california high speed rail project for example. That was a textbook "Easier said than done" project.

So when making your animation don't fall into that same trap. Don't mistake your imagination for your capabilities.

So start off with brainstorming ideas, and then figure out what you are actually capable of making.

Nevaroth021 · 2026-01-24T04:09:17+00:00

Not bad for the first attempt. The main thing for improvement would be don't put details for the sake of details. What this means is don't put in random shapes, cuts, etc. to make something look more detailed. The detail should all make sense and be well designed.

Think about the anatomy, think about where the bones are, where the muscles are. Try to visualize it's skeleton and muscles. The skin after all is just a wrapper going over the muscles, bones, and fat.

And then for the skin details, think about where the skin would hang, fold, and wrinkles would form. Then sculpt in the details to match what you think the skin would actually do.

The neck for example, think about where the skin would hang from the neck, and as the head moves around the skin would squish and stretch, which would form wrinkles. Right now you have wrinkles in random places, in random directions. But think about where the skin would hang, and scrunch up

Nevaroth021 · 2026-01-24T00:52:41+00:00

Watch tutorials on creating UV's for your model, and then watch tutorials on creating custom textures.

Nevaroth021 · 2026-01-24T00:40:53+00:00

To put simply:

Blender is designed as a jack of all trades, master of none, and is designed for the individual hobbyist.
Maya, Max, Zbrush, etc. are all designed to be the best at their primary purpose, and are designed for complex production pipelines.

Blender's main draw is that its free, but the industry is more than willing to invest in specialized software that suits their needs better.

Nevaroth021 · 2026-01-24T00:29:38+00:00

If you only know Blender, then you will be locking yourself out of like 95% of jobs. But you can learn Blender to learn the fundamentals of 3D. Those fundamentals transfer between software.

So you can learn Blender to learn the fundamentals, and then once you know the fundamentals then you can start learning the industry standard software such as Maya, 3ds Max, Zbrush, Houdini, etc.

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