Day 8 - Finishing the arm animation and Final render

What I did today:
Today I finished up the animation for the arm and rendered it as well. For the last additions in the arm, all I did was make certain keyframes that were a bit robotic move more naturally. I'll also show how I render animations in Blender.

When the arm going downwards to the palm up position it looked a bit robotic so to fix this I deleted a keyframe on frame 60 for the bicep that I originally made as a middle spot for the arm when it was going down. Deleting this immediately fixed the problem.

There was also a small problem where the arm on frame 50 would stop very robotically and then keep moving, it only happened for a split second but it was very noticeable, so to fix it I increased the slop on the y-axis rotation point on the graph editor.

I also added in some small movements in the wrist to give it a bit more motion because I noticed that when an arm in real life does that motion, the wrist slightly moves up and down.

Once I had finished up all the small adjustments I was ready to render. To start the render process you first have to go to the output side tab that is labeled with the printer logo.

Then go down to the output tab and first change the file format to AVI Raw and then by clicking the folder logo find a place to save the animation.

Then at the top, there is a tab labeled "Render" by opening that you press render animation

Then Blender will start rendering the animation frame-by-frame and then automatically save it to the chosen save location.

This is the final render for the arm animation. I did this project to first improve my animation skills on smaller objects and then slowly move my way up to larger animations. I really like how this animation turned out even though the rig isn't the best and limited how well the hand-animated. Even threw these challenges the final product I believe looks really good and accurate to the reference I used.

What I am doing on Monday:

On Monday I will start my next project. I already know that my next project is going to be a smaller one but I'm not completely sure yet what it will be and will think more about it over the weekend. The reason my next project will be smaller will be because I still want to start off slow and make really good small animations then really poor made big ones.