Final Project

"The story of a sheep"

final video.MOV

Project Proposal

My inspiration actually comes from an esports player I admire. At the beginning of this year, his team won its first championship in five years. I want to depict his journey of striving toward the goal of “reaching the peak” and “seeing what lies beyond the other side of the mountain.”

The general storyline is as follows: the little sheep has a dream of reaching the mountaintop — other animals surpass it (symbolizing other players from rival teams already reaching the top) — it gets hit by rocks (symbolizing ridicule and criticism) — it falls but recalls its dream and regains its spirit — it continues to climb and overcomes the previous obstacles — it finally reaches the summit — and sees a breathtaking view it had never imagined before.

Process

Sky

I didn’t know how to do this part, so I looked up a tutorial online: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV14H4y1H7Sm/?spm_id_from=333.337.search-card.all.click

Following this video, I created the sky. However, I noticed that the part below the horizon was black. This caused the sky to appear black in the final shot of my animation, which is a flaw in my work. (With my current knowledge, I don’t know how to fix this issue.)

Mountain

At first, I tried to shape the mountain using cylinder deformation and sculpting in Blender, but it didn’t look natural enough. So I searched online for “Blender mountain” tutorials and came across this video (Blender Quick Mountain Modeling - Bilibili), where I learned about a plugin for this purpose.

After adjusting the parameters, I further shaped the mountain using Sculpt Mode and added a green material. (I didn’t use textures or other details since the overall animation leans toward a cartoon style.)

The rendered result looks roughly like this (I’m not sure why there are blocky shadows on the surface—maybe it’s caused by Sculpt Mode?).

Sheep

The modeling of the sheep was actually quite simple—I mainly used a cube along with modifiers like Subdivision Surface and Mirror. The horns were colored directly using Texture Painting. As for the facial expressions, I drew three images for the UV textures (although the first and third ones only differ in the eyebrows and mouth, which isn’t really noticeable unless viewed up close).

Unwrapping the UV and applying textures was a bit challenging, and I later realized there was a small issue with my texture, which caused some black spots on the sheep’s body—this was due to a texture error. I had to keep adjusting it to get a satisfying result.

Flower(s)

I learned how to make the flower from this video (Blender Flower Modeling - Bilibili). The main techniques I learned were using the Spin Tool to arrange the petals in a circular pattern and applying the Solidify Modifier to turn flat shapes into 3D models.

Animation

Due to limited time and energy, I gave up the idea of modeling other animals and decided to focus on depicting the little sheep’s growth as it faces challenges. I chose to animate the project in segments (not sure if this is the correct term—what I mean is animating frames 1–50 as the first part and exporting one, then animating frames 51–100 as the second part and exporting the other).

During this process, I realized that I hadn’t merged all parts of the sheep’s body when modeling. As a result, when I tried to animate the sheep turning around, each part seemed to rotate around a different pivot point. So I merged them at this stage, but that caused new UV texture issues. This made me reflect on how important the steps are.

Also, I didn’t get the sheep with an armature, so its walking looks more like floating. Finally, the uneven terrain of the mountain caused clipping between the sheep and the ground when moving from one keyframe to another. (I haven’t found a good solution for this yet, though I tried adding more keyframes, the effect was limited. )

While making the animation, I also learned how to animate camera movements. I mainly followed the tutorial in this video (Super Easy! Blender Camera Orbit Animation – Bilibili). I learned how to use the camera’s Follow Path function and how to use it in the animation. I used this technique to create the final shot.

Editing

I edited the exported animations by mainly using keyframes to control the camera movements. I also added background music and sound effects, and adjusted the speed of certain video clips.

Conclusion

Although this final project is quite simple and still has many small flaws, I truly did my best to complete it. Throughout the process, I not only learned many 3D modeling techniques, but more importantly, I received great support from my instructor, John Brumley. During a semester when I faced many personal challenges, he actively helped and communicated with me when I applied for an Incomplete grade. His support meant a lot to me—it helped me overcome psychological barriers and gave me the strength to finish this project.

To be honest, for someone who started with absolutely zero experience in 3D modeling, the workload of this course was quite heavy. I often had to search for tutorials online (and because of my lack of proficiency, I had to follow along multiple times before I could remember the steps) in order to figure out how to model and animate. At the beginning of the course, it took me a long time just to memorize the keyboard shortcuts. And since 3D modeling is such a broad and complex field, I often felt overwhelmed by how much there was to learn—the more I learned, the more I realized how much I didn’t know. This sometimes made me feel tired and discouraged.

However, when I completed my project and looked back, I found that I had become fairly familiar with Blender’s basic functions, could use the shortcuts smoothly, and was even able to turn my ideas into a rough but complete work. That gave me a strong sense of fulfillment.

Overall, this course is a great introduction to 3D modeling. I truly gained a solid foundation in 3D concepts and had the chance to apply them in practice. In just seven weeks, I was able to take my first steps into a completely new field, and I’m really happy about that!

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