Stickman Rowing a Boat Next to a Crashed Ship.

I decided to make a simple animation of a stickman using paddles to row a simple boat. I decided to make this to help experiment with blender and how it works because I am relatively new to blender, so I thought that starting off with a easy and simple project would make me more familiar with blender. I am aware that I could have done many more things to improve and add on to this, such as sound effects and better building, but I am still very happy with the final product and proud of what I have done and I will explain how I created it.

The only things I used for this was blender and a few google searches. (For help with certain controls and helping me learn)

The big boat in the back is fairly simple to make, first you want to create a cube and then transform it into a rectangle. Then, what you can do is subdivided the line at the front to extend the point, but I decided to bevel the front, allowing the line to have curved edges. Then, I played around with the end potins, trying to line them up so that they resemble the front of a boat. after you get that done, create a cube and put it on top of the boat, then transform it into a tall rectangle that doesn't take up all of the top of the original part of the boat. For the edges on the top, I created long, short rectangles and then attached them to the side of the boat, with the goal making it look like railings on the upper part, sort of a like a cruise. After joining them all together, the last thing is to change the color by creating a new material and changing a color to whatever you would like the color to be. I choose a darker color because I took the photos and video in rendered view.

The boat might be a little tricky, but i'm going to explain it the best I can. First, start by making a sphere, and then make the segments 12 and the ring to 10 and then slice it in half. After that, give the sphere a deform modifier and set it to stretch and make the factor 0.8, then apply the modifier. Then, enable snapping and put it on vertex. select the front and back lines and play around with them until the front one is pointing forward and the back one is a flat surface. Do the same thing with the little part at the bottom of the back vertex, trying to smooth it out to make a curved shape. After that, give it a solidify modifier, set the thickness to 0.04, the offset to 1, enable equal thickness, and then apply it. It you want the edges to look more curved, select the corner lines and bevel them slightly. After that, you can smooth the surface or you can give it a subdivision surface modifier for a smoother boat. Now for the paddle handles, make a torus, and then remove a few of the rings so that there is a open part of the torus. Then after that, make a thin cylinder and attach it to the torus, grouping them, then size it and attach it to the boat. For the paddles, make a thin cylinder, then add a square and transform it into a rectangle. after that, add a edge loop in the middle and bevel the bottom lines. (this is done so that the beveled lines aren't to big, rather when you bevel the whole thing.) Make two of both the paddle holder and the paddles and attach them to the boat, but don't join the paddles otherwise you can't animate them individually.

For the stickman, it's not to complicated, you really only need 2 shapes, spheres and cylinders. First you want to start with the legs, so create one cylinder, add a sphere that is small enough to not look to big on the knee. Then attach another cylinder to the sphere at a angle to make it look like the stickman is sitting, and make sure it is facing towards the middle cylinder that we will add in a second so that the parts look attached. (A easy thing you can do is make one of the legs and then duplicate and then rotate it to face the other way so that it looks like the other leg, saving you time and is pretty easy.) Then, at the top of the middle cylinder, add a big sphere, which will be the head, and if you want, put on eyes and other facial parts to give your stick man a distinct look. Finally, add materials to all of them to change them to what color you want them to be and then join them together so they are all one piece. If you want to animate the arms with the paddles, don't add the arms yet, but if you don't want to, use the same method with the legs for the arms, using spheres as joints and attach around the head, but not to close, and remember to add material and joint them to the main thing. make sure to move the arms around before you join them otherwise you won't be able to move them unless you make it a rig.

The water is probably the trickiest part out of everything here, but I will try my best to explain how I did it. First, I started with a plane, then I subdivided it into around 50 cuts added a displace modifier. Then I clicked new and set the texture type to cloud then gave it a new material and changed the surface to principled BSDF, then changed the transmission to 1, the roughness to 0.02, then the IOR to 1.333. After that, I set the refraction depth to 0.2. After that, I animated the waves by adding a empty and key noting 2 different frames by moving the x axis a little bit for the water to repeat, and then added its color.

The background is pretty simple. you can either make a plane or a square (I prefer a plan since its thin and easier to work with), then you can add a new material to the plane, then you can change the color to what you want the background to be, I chose a dark blue since I had my view in the rendered view. Then set it up against the ocean so that when you look at it from the front, you won't see any of the floor.

The clouds are very very simple, all you need to do is to make a bunch of spheres, put them around each other until they form a cloudish shape, then shape them smooth or auto smooth, depending on how you want them to appear. Remember to join all of the spheres together before you smooth or auto smooth.

The animation is simple, but may take a bit of time. Before you start the animation, you can add the arms and hands of the stick man so they move when the paddles are moving, but since I didn't have a lot of time, I wasn't able to do that. the animation consist of 4 main points, basicly a circle, having the paddle circle around until it reaches its original position. depending on how fast you want the person to row the boat, change the amount of frames so that the speed increases. make sure that you are keeping the rod of the paddle in the paddle holder, otherwise it won't look as good. remember to key note the four positions at different frames, or it will just go back to the original frame.

After you have done the other 7 steps, set up the character and the objects in the correct positions to make your scene, and make sure to angle the camera in a way so that it doesn't show the grey parts of blender, just your scene. This is the final result of what I made. (Please note that because of time and lack of experience, I wasn't able to put it into an actual video, but rather screen record it, sorry for the inconvenience.)