Date of Completion: May 2021
Been working on this one really hard - my biggest project to date and my first stylized NPR render done in real-time with blender Eevee - whoo!
The project started out simple... animate my first run cycle. Then after that was done, I felt like I wanted to showcase the run cycle in some way. So I started working on a simple story. The idea I was going for was to capture the feeling of an anime's intro.
Compositing and post-FX work done in After Effects. About a month and a half of work and learning from beginning to end.
In this project I was responsible for the concept, animation, and modeled everything except the character, the moon texture, the palm trees, and building models.
Programs Used: Blender, After Effects, and Premiere Pro
Obligatory viewport to final render sweep shot - always wanted to do one of these things!
A shot I like showing the harbor and the main character Abi as I animated her to turn her head and smile at the viewer. Then the same shot showing off all her rig controls. Character model created and rigged by the talented Dillon Gu.
The City
City assets kitbashed from Kitbash3D. I stripped their textures and applied a few of my own to all of them. I didn't need all of that texture detail and resolution, it weighed heavily on memory. I made two textures for the buildings in photoshop using smart objects, noise, and blur.
A few other textures, like the tile and the concrete were taken from textures.com. I found that very few textures were needed to make it work. I colored the textures brightly using an RGB curves node passed through to an emission shader. I wanted things to glow bright and feel like a neon city.
Animation
I used a combination of IK and FK. The arms and legs had IK/FK switches which were very useful. I found that FK was very nice for making arcing motions, but IK was very helpful for initially setting up poses.
I added inbetweens and made sure her motions followed through properly. I started to let Blender interpolate between poses and was happy to see things looking better!
Lastly I polished the animation best I could. I animated her hair, tail, and accessories, along with her hoodie. I also animated, eye blinks, head turns, and a smile later on using animation layers. That isn't pictured here but is in the final animation.
Procedural Shaders
Sky
I made a day to night cycle for the animation procedurally using blenders node tree. My node setup is pictured on the right. Sky gradients were made with the color ramp node. Stars were made using a combination of voronoi, color ramps, and noise nodes to mask the voronoi into tiny circles that could be stars. I also use the mix node to blend between the different skies as the day goes on.
Lastly I made a shader node group that would make the stars twinkle by animating the movement of a black and white noise texture. I linked that animated noise to the "fac" of the mix node, causing the noise to drive the visibility of the stars.
Water
The water was made procedurally using a combination of voronoi and musgrave noise, keyframe animated to flow like water best I could. I was inspired by one of my favorite games, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and wanted to see if I could take that style and modernize it a bit. I used the displace modifier in blender and bound it to a null/empty object as a controller. So I could move the empty to control the up and down y-axis motion of the water. The node setup I used to create the water is pictured above.
Clouds
The clouds were also made with 3 voronoi generators. I mixed between these three voronoi to get my overall fluffy fat shape. It's amazing how much voronoi can do. With the power of voronoi, I could rule the world!! Ahem - excuse me.
One of the things I learned very early on while working on this project is that things take a bit more work to integrate into a scene.
The clouds initial color is a light blue-white. But I noticed that as my day/night cycle changed colors, the clouds were not taking on the sky color like they would if the sky were really emitting ambient light. So I had to go into the cloud shader, and animate the color change from day to night so that it better integrated with the scene - as pictured above.
During my studies about Blenders nodes, I learned about the object info node and one of it's very useful outputs - random! I used the random output to randomize the vector mapping of my voronoi generators. Every time I duplicate a cloud, the randomize kicks in and generates a new cloud that looks different from the last. So freakin' COOL. Shout out to Kristof Dedene for the workflow! I will be using this node more in the future for procedurally generated stuff.
Compositing
Lastly a breakdown of my favorite shot of the animation! I rendered out the animation utilizing render layers in blender. This allows me to break my shots up into pieces to be composited back together in After Effects.
Then I used curves and levels in after effects to get the brightness and shadows dialed in, as well as more contrast and color out of each element. I used this in conjunction with cryptomattes when needed to mask off sections of each render layer. Also added glow to help things feel a bit more magical.
That's everything! My favorite project I've ever made and I've loved learning about stylized rendering. I will be revisiting this more in the future!
