Working with Huge Assets in Blender to Promote Borderlands for Entertainment Weekly

We talk frequently enough about all the uncommon and unconventional ways that Blender gets used in all manner of industries that it’s sometimes easy to forget that Blender is also used in media and entertainment. After all, it’s a creative tool for creating stunning 3D visuals and animations. Film, television, and advertising are absolutely a natural fit for our favorite 3D tool. In this episode of Denoise, we talk in detail about one of these examples.

Guest host Jason van Gumster speaks with Wyatt Winborne from Studio Khimaira along with Nick Pitts and Ben Johnson from Wolverine VFX about a recent project they completed for Entertainment Weekly magazine. In this project, they created an animated magazine cover to promote the recently-released Borderlands movie. And yes, they used Blender to get the work done.

For reference, you can see the piece that they created on the Entertainment Weekly cover story (you'll need to scroll down a little bit to see it).

To build this impressive motion cover, the teams at Khimaira Studio and Wolverine VFX were provided with a fairly limited set of starting assets, including video plates of each of the actors and a handful of mesh assets from the movie, most notably the model of Claptrap and a digital double of Kevin Hart. The models were complete re-rigged for animation in Blender and, amazingly, assembled to render as a single scene file. Other tools used in this production include EmberGen for particle/flame effects and Nuke for compositing.

You can see a bit of behind-the-scenes on the creation of this piece in the following breakdown video:

In the podcast episode, the guests talk about how they started their work with Blender, including earlier work that they’ve created as well as side projects that they continue to work on. They speak a bit about the wide breadth of opportunities to use Blender. Blender is used a lot in film and television, but it’s not always on the productions themselves. Still, there are plenty of ways to make use of your Blender and CG skills on projects that connect to media and entertainment, especially for small and independent teams.

The episode ends with each guest giving their thoughts on their favorite and least favorite features of Blender… with a hint at the possibility of these studios even doing some Blender development and pushing patches upstream. Exciting stuff!

You can find out more about this episode's guests at the following links:

• Wyatt Winborne - Studio Khimaira
  
• Nick Pitts - Hughey House Productions
  
• Ben Johnson - Hello There Animation, Ben Johnson VFX
• Wolverine VFX