Project 4 - Sean Walden

~ I started this project with the main object in the scene. The octopus. I initially made a single tentacle and broke it into 8 chunks. I then used the bone tool to setup the tentacle the way I wanted it. Once I had my tentacle rigged, I copied 7 more on to the stage and positioned them the way they were supposed to be. I then made a head for the object and used the bone tool to connect the head to the tentacles. Once I had it all rigged I animated the octopus. At this point my computer was working extremely slow because of all the details on the tentacles.

~ Once I was done animating my octopus, I imported my bitmap image and roughly traced out the main shapes with the pen tool. I then used the paintbrush tool to add in some minor details. Once the background was done I made a single piece of seaweed with the pen tool.

~ With the seaweed shape created, I used to bone tool to rig it in much the same way as with the tentacles. I then created a very simple animation for the single piece of seaweed. Once animated, I duplicated the object, and by offsetting the keyframes of the duplicate shape by 10, I had a very believable seaweed clump.

~ I created three seperate layers for the sound in my animation. One was for an ambient ocean sound that played continuosly through the animation, and the other two were keyframed sound effects. One a splash sound, and the other a bubble sound. I imported the audio files from flash's sound library. Next time I will have to remember to keep my object simpler so the animation process isn't so hard on my computer.

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