Blender
Tiny Frog Animation
This project was created as part of a school assignment where the goal was to create an animation of your own choice.
The Project
For this project, we were asked to create an animation of our choice in Blender. Inspired by nature and Studio Ghiblis vibrant style, I decided to create a small scene featuring a frog jumping from the edge of a stream onto a rock.
Altough focus of the project was animation, I ended up creating everything in the scene (except for the HDRI) myself, including frog, enviroment, animated water, and vegetation. This made the project much more technically demanding than I had initially planned, but also gave me the opportunity to explore several different areas of Blender.
Modeling & Rigging
I decided to model the from myself after not finding a free model that matched the look I wanted. The modeling went relatively smoothly, but rigging became a much bigger challenge.
I used a human armature as a base, as its structure worked well with the frog´s anatomy. The rig went trough several iterations, as some bones affected the wrong parts of the body and weight painting was not always enough to correct the deformations. After several adjustments and re-rigging, I eventually achieved a setup that gave me the control I needed for the animation
Enviroment
Once the frog was rigged, I created the enviroment around a small stream. I experiemnted with animating the water directly trough it´s material, using procedural textures and animated coordinates to create the illusion of flowing water.
I also spent time experimenting with Geometry Nodes to create and animate the grass. This added another layer of technical difficulties to the scene, but also gave me the opportunity to explore procedural workflows beyond the original scope of the project.
Animation
Animating the frog was the part I enjoyed the most. Creating a convincing jump required many iterations to get the timing, body movement, and landing to feel natural.
The animation was also affected by the complexity I hade built in the enviroment. The large materials used for the stream and grass caused significant lag, making it difficult to work smoothly and judge the animation in real time. This was something I had not anticipated when building the enviroment and taught me the importance of considering performance troughout the entire workflow.
On top of this, I occationaly broke parts of the rig or accidentally altered keyframes, forcing me to repair the setup or redo parts of the animation. Despite the setbacks, these iterations gave me better understanding of how rigging, materials and animation work together.
