yay, I followed a YouTube tutorial and made my first Blender animation!
made with Blender by Loco using a YouTube tutorial by Ducky3D converted to gif and cropped with ezgif.com Anyone familiar with Blender could crank this out in 10 minutes. I took me hours because I haven't used Blender in years and had to stop to look up tons of things. The final animation was only 10.4 seconds long and took around 2 hours to render but it was super high cinematic quality, something I've dreamed of being able to do for many years now. Technique-wise the methods were to subdivide a mesh cube into a sphere, Boolean cut a torus from around the sphere to create a groove around it, then another torus cut at 90º to finish the X groove around the sphere. Then you create a new, smaller sphere, position it in the groove and assign it to a circular path that follows the groove. Offsetting the small sphere over 250 animation frames makes it circle the larger sphere perfectly in the groove, then you duplicate the small sphere a couple of times and offset them at different amounts until you have 3 spheres all following the same groove. Repeat this process with 2 more small spheres in the 90º groove, being careful to check animations and adjust offsets so the balls come close never collide. The smaller balls also have a small inward extrusion so you can better see their rotation and the two halves have different materials, the same color but one half is much shinier. Lastly a bent plane is smoothed and used to create the background and there are 3 simple area lights just out of camera view... An overhead at 300 watts and 2 more at 800 watts for strong shadows to show off that X groove. Having balls almost collide enhances the satisfaction of the animation so likewise care was taken to ensue that the lowest ball throughout the animation almost touches the floor of the background thingy <--- highly technical term
