Introduction
Models
All models and the environment were built by myself, including the mouse and the armature that allows him to move, the bomb squad mousetrap snapper, and the rooms in the house.
To make the models, first I worked through the tutorial created by Ryan Dale, which can be found athttp://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Tutorials/Animation/BSoD/Character_Animation . I found this tutorial to be very informative and detailed. After practising on this tutorial, I was able to start building the mouse, and setting up an Armature to allow for easy and efficient animation. The biggest difficulty in creating the mouse was in trying to create a realistic creature that resembled a mouse enough that a person could take one look and understand immediately what it was. I feel that I was able to create a character that not only resembles a mouse to the point that there is little question as to what it is, but also a character that is sufficiently cartoonish for comic effect.
The robot was also built the same way. The whole body is attached to one main bone in the armature. Each of the tires is also linked to that main bone. This way, when the robot moves, the tires move with it. The armature extends into the claw to operate the fingers of the claw. Each segment in the claw has it's own bone with which to operate with. Moving a bone farther from the tip will cause the hand to open faster while more detailed movements can be gotten closer to the tip.
The room was the most simple of all the objects to build. It is simply a plane that has it's edges extruded to make it convex in a sense. Simply extruding a few more times renders the inner walls.
The mouse trap was more complicated to make. The wires for the trap were made by extruding the end of a cylinder, and rotating several times to create a bend in the 'metal'. The animation of the trap is aided by an armature bone which controls the square wire that snaps and another armature bone which controls the wire that holds the trap open. The spring is created from a cylinder which has a texture applied to it. The texture is a Voronoi noise effect which I felt made it look much like a spring. In hindsight, I would have liked to make the spring more realistic using the same extrude, rotate sequence over and over again to create the spring from a simple cylinder. I could have even combined the spring with the snapping mechanism.
Lighting
Animation
Animating the mouse was easy once I grasped the concept of Blenders key frame system. Learning about what key frames were in class helped me understand immediately what they were doing. Also the tutorial given by Ryan Dale in which I built an armature, or bone structure for my character was extremely helpful. Without an easy tutorial that walked through each step and it's importance, I would never have been able to create the mouse and a working armature on the first try. I would have had to scrap the entire mouse and start over again. I am glad that with the guidance that I had and the easy system Blender uses, I could manage to produce a decent animation on the first try.
Once the 3d section was done, it was time to import the .avi files into Windows Movie Maker. After finding some (reasonably) appropriate sounds on the internet and adding some wording and stills at the beginning and end of the movie, the animation was finished.
Sounds
The sounds were all downloaded from various sites except for the sound of the mouses feet. That was made by my fingertips on the plastic lid of a CD-R container. The “Law and Order” gavel sound at the beginning came from stopokaygo.typepad.com , specifically, here. The incoming robot sound was taken from racejesus.com, specifically, here. The mousetrap snapping sound is taken from download.gamezone.ro, specifically here. The chewing sound was taken from simplythebest.net, specifically here. The outgoing robot sound was taken from autospeak.com, specifically here, and the final laugh was taken from ftp://ftp.mathematik.uni-marburg.de , specifically here.
