A Pawn in a Hurry

Squashing the pawn

To give the pawn a comic-like character, it should appear to be soft. When it hits the ground, it must be squashed a little bit. This can be achieved by changing the size of the pawn on frame number 16.

On frame 16, Place the 3D cursor at the base of the object. Enter scale mode and start decreasing the object’s size by moving your mouse vertically. Next, click the MiddleButton to indicate that you only want to change the objects Z size.

Change the size to about 0.7 (this value is printed at the bottom of the 3D Window while you are sizing).

To make the squashed pawn look more convincing, it should not only get shorter, but also a bit wider. After all, its volume should remain the same.

Repeat the previous step, but now move the mouse horizontally before you constrain the sizing process. Increase the object’s width to 1.3.

Switch to top view and repeat the scaling to increase the object’s Ysize to 1.3, too.

To finish this part of the tutorial, insert a new LocRotSize key for frame 16. Take a look at your animation now – did you expect it would be this easy to create elastic-looking objects?

Creating the Chessboard

Of course, this scene would not be complete without adding a chessboard. I will use a simple extrusion technique for this.

I start by adding a new plane to my scene. In front view, enter editmode ([TAB]), select all vertices ([A]) and extrude the vertices upward a bit ([E]). With the vertices still selected, scale them down somewhat to create beveled edges.

Still in editmode, I now duplicate the square, hold down [CTRL] and move the copy 2 grid units sideways and upward.

Press [A] to select everything and repeat this step. This time you can copy two fields at the same time. This way, you can create an entire chessboard in 5 steps!

In the previous step you have actuallly created half of the fields of the chessboard. Now leave editmode and copy the entire board. Rotate it 180 degrees (hold down [CTRL] again) and move it so that the copy ‘fills the holes’ that were remained in the original. You now have a chessboard that consists out of two objects: one for the white fields, and one for the black fields.

Add some material colors (I chose blue instead of black to make the board look more interesting) and take a peek at your new object in solid perspective mode.

Continued on page 4…