Hello Blenderphiles! I wanted to put together a little short scene with visual storytelling, and this is what I came up with. I just recently finished the Animation Bootcamp and wanted to apply some of the skills I’ve learnt.
I used the Rivet rig from the course, but modified the neck to make it longer for the purposes of the scene. The bulge when the bolt gets stuck is created and animated using a lattice.
I put the set together using assets from BlenderKit and PolyHaven. The ball tail rig is from Blender Studio, and I created the particle fur on top of it in Blender (I know there's a new hair system driven by curves but I just haven't got my head around that yet so I did it the old fashioned way haha). I designed and modelled the nuts ‘n’ bolts chip packet myself, modelling in Blender and texturing in Photoshop (the bolts on the packet are rendered in Blender). The deformation on the chip packet is done with shape keys.
In terms of workflow, I had to do some research on Blender Studio to see how they structure their short film projects. In my scene, the characters, sets and props all have their own blend files, and are linked into the shot files. Before I built the set, I did a layout of the entire scene with only very basic animation. This layout informed how much set needed to be built. Then I filmed myself doing the reference for Rivet's animation, and cut that together in a split-screen with the layout, tweaking both to get the timing right. When I started doing the final animation, I ended up deciding to do it all in one blend file, but each shot has it’s own Blender Scene.
The animation is rendered in Cycles and I did the end credits with Davinci Resolve.
My boyfriend has experience in sound design, so he helped me with that part of it.
My ultimate goal is to make a short film where I design and model all the characters myself, and with more complex character animation, but I think this project was a good stepping stone in that direction. I’m very excited to continue studying animation, and my next stop is Wayne’s body mechanics course!
I would love to hear any feedback for improvements or suggestions. Thank you so much and have a lovely day!
In fact, I'd love to feature this in the 2023 CG Cookie Student Reel. I'm going to send you an email 👀
This is fantastic!
Amazing work :) Makes me inspired to one day be able to do this level of animation
That was cool: not far from this https://youtu.be/D-N9r6zZiEo
I can’t say much about the quality of animation: those few times when I tried it, I just chose the BVH MoCap shortcut, for I’m too much of a product of an instant gratification culture and have a big, fat zero for patience so, doing it manually is beyond me.
To me, the most amazing thing is rendering it in Cycles (!!!) 😲 Last time I tried it in Eevee, a 400+-frame affair took 8 hours to finish on my M2 Pro Mac Mini (not the fastest, but also by far not the slowest rig out there): you must possess the power to fold space and compress time, to have lived till the end of it in Cycles. Either that, or have an exclusive access to a Hollywood-scale render farm.😉
Hahahaha I love the Rivet dance, it's so fun! Yes, the rendering was a challenge and very frustrating haha. I actually did experiment with using Eevee and it looked okay, but I just love the result you get with Cycles so much that I ploughed madly forward with it haha. I did it on my laptop, which has a RTX3070 8GB graphics card. Setting the noise threshold to 0.03, and 1024 samples, with denoising, it averaged slightly over 2 minutes per frame. I found this to be the minimum amount of noise I could get away with. Although the close-ups of Fluffball took longer because of the fur sim, maybe 4 or 5 minutes per frame. I did some research and learnt how to render from the command line, which meant that I could queue shots up, so instead of rendering one at a time, I could put two or three shots on to render through the night, which allowed me to get it done in a more reasonable time frame. I didn't actually time it, but I would guess it was around 40 hours of rendering in total. I wish I had access to a Hollywood-scale render farm though haha. I actually did look at render farm pricing, but it was way too expensive, even for a short animation like this.
One other thing I learnt that saved time was to select Persistent Data in the render settings, which keeps the mesh, shader, texture data etc in memory so it doesn't have to reload everything for every frame.
I can't believe it took 8 hours to render 400 frames in Eevee, that's so long! How did that video end up coming out? :)
Oh that last response from Guest was from me but I didn't realise I wasn't logged in haha
Well, my Eevee video took long because it had all the fancy things in it: new curve-based hair, SSS, mirrors, carpets created with tiny Voronoi textures, semi-transparent curtains, etc. In Cycles, a single frame took 4 hours to render – and denoising wasn’t an option as it immediately made things look like a web jpeg compressed too much (I mean, bands of colour instead of gradients). Never mind: I’ve always had the talent to test Blender to its limits. I just wish (hardly can hope) to live till quantum computers become mainstream to perform photorealistic raytracing instantly.😉
That must've been a lot of work Sophie, you should be proud of putting all that together and sticking to it till the end. I guess the critiques are around some of the animation, at times it feels a bit stiff? It's not much, some movements that are probably very hard to animate, around the 18 or 19 second mark where he is coughing forward, or at 24 or 25 second where he is banging his chest, the movement lacks a bit of punch. I guess the thing that caught my eye the most was the fur creature, when he passes his hand over the fur, it doesn't interact that much with all the hair. Again, just minor stuff, overall it looks good and it's a great idea for the short. I love how he is eating nuts and bolts lol. It's an awesome result people usually have an idea and when they realize how much work it actually is, never see it through the end. So huge congrats on achieving such a great final animation. Keep it great 🤟🏼
What an awesome animation, I love it.
It's hard to critique such awesomeness, one thing does catch my eye, the fur ball pet, does it have a name?
It's a little, how to put it, a little rigid, like the character ball, only I think it needs a little more emotion in the character.
Hard I know, with no facial expressions.
You use the squash and stretch well on the movement, use the squash and stretch to show emotion too.
Think longer face (stretch), open mouthed shock, for relieve use a little slow squash, with the right timing the viewer will get it.
At ~00:20 when fur ball lands on the couch, an additional little bounce would look great. It seems to just thud on a hard couch cushion.
That's about it for critique, I had to watch it several times and examine it closely to find this.
Truly excellent work,
worthy of a staff pick 🏆 I think it's the first I have given for an animation.
Well done!
I love it and I think it was a lot of work, but the result is edifying. bravo !!
Wow! Extremely excellent work! Really nice tight modeling and smooth animation. Great story, expressions, movements and timing. Great work! You're definitely a pro animater already.