Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to create oars and oarlocks to move the boat with, and discovered some tricks to make subtle shapes, such as where the shaft tapers into the oar. You found out how to control the smoothness of a surface. You learned to append objects to the scene so that you can combine and reuse objects. You created child-parent relationships to group objects for animation. You used kinematics to organize your animation. You learned to use animation cycles to save work. You tracked objects in motion with a camera, spot lamp, and camera rig.

As you have been making the boat, you may have been wondering how you can plan out your work, how you can use plans from the real world to model, and how you can organize these files to make it easier to work, and so that you can find them later. This is what the next chapter will help you with, and we'll get started with your main project, creating and animating a nautical scene.

Let's go!