Breakdown of My Animated Blender Short! (Epoch)

all right hi everyone casual video i'm just going to give you a breakdown of the epoch short which i uploaded to the channel if you haven't seen it already it's i don't know how to describe it it's just a very visually pleasing kind of synth wavy uh art style that i've put together combining some of my favorite aspects of visual arts should we say so lots of emissive lighting and vibrant colors and statues which are obtained from the sketchfab website i did get a few comments from people asking were you inspired by the american gods intro and no i haven't actually watched that show but i can tell you exactly what inspired me if you've been around for a while you know that i've made the modular metals product and in that there's a fair amount of kind of statue based imagery from these 3d scans so i like working with those anyway but then i've been playing a separate game recently called neon abyss and there's a few areas in that game where they have these kind of ancient greek or roman statues that are surrounded by neon lighting and glow sticks and i just thought the idea of having like ancient imagery with rave culture was kind of like a really cool idea so that's obviously where this has come up we have rave washington right there on the screen but anyway we're going to take a look at the blender files and i'm going to give you a bit of a breakdown because i got a couple of questions about volumetrics because obviously that's quite a large part about this so i can come straight over to the first scene there's about 15 of them in total i can actually bring up the folder here my production folder notice that the blend files have a certain naming convention they have a number and then an underscore and this is basically the order that i made the scenes in so this isn't necessarily the order that they appear in the final video because when you edit it together sometimes you know you move things back and forth because it makes a bit more sense but i did it this way to make it more organized and this also means that when i go to render out the frames if i go to test shots i don't know why it's called test shots it started off as a test and then it became the final production imagery in here i have folders which are also given the same numbers as the scenes that the renders come from so inside of here i have all of the image sequences for the final renders so if i pick a random one and just open it up bring it over you can see this is a frame from this first scene why do i do image sequences rather than video exports from blender well it's because if your blender crashes well it's in the middle of a render you can just carry on straight from that frame also it really helps with updating the image sequence once it's imported into a video editing program like premiere which i can show you in a bit inside of the file i have volumetrics going on in the world shader as you can see here with the principled volume it's been plugged into the volume input of the world output node and if i go into the rendered mode obviously it's using ev for this because i wasn't going to render all of this in cycles that would have taken months we've got the lovely volume going on the bloom coming out of the emissive objects is reacting quite nicely it's not actually reacting with the volume but the way the light bleeds off of the side of the objects makes it kind of feel like it is so i like that combination effect one important thing that i did with these scenes that i didn't really think about doing beforehand is controlling the volume influence of each light that's in the scene so for example if we take a look around i've got a variety of lights area lights here and point lights point lights are ones that kind of move around the object as the animation is playing and you can see that because we have the keyframes down here at the bottom so if i go into the camera view maybe hide the overlays and move this around you can see how the blue kind of scans over the object you can see that in the light settings here i have a volume slider and it goes between zero and one and if i change this you can see how it influences the world volume to a greater degree now this is quite important because it means that you can balance out the color change within the volume so for example if i you know increase this blue here i have the contrasting light which tends to stay on the other side of this of the statue and this is the point light too so if i increase the influence of this over the volume you can see that now we have a red to blue gradient going across the screen and it's not just across the screen because it's actually in 3d space so controlling the influence of lights like this is a good technique for getting that kind of vibrant coverall over the frame but it's something that you should use in moderation because um it's very easy to go for the top of volumes and especially if you've got lights moving across the scene as they come close to the camera it may blow the image out quite a bit and you may end up with some more brightness than you expected so i think it's good going for more of a contrast you feel where you only have like you know one or two key lights going key colors and in some of these scenes i actually did it so the volume influence changes over time because you can keyframe these as well because if i right click and do insert keyframe you can change the influence of the light affects the volume over time one key point that i want to get across um something that gave me a fair number of frustrations when making this was that i kept leaving the um auto keying button on which i'm sure that if you've done animations before you'll understand the frustration there but if you leave that on and you move objects around it will add keyframes for automatically and no matter how many times i made that mistake it kept happening so this is just a reminder make sure you turn it off when you're done with it now let's take a look at the material for the actual object the main focus object of the statue in here you can see a few different things going on i should open this up a bit more and explain it but before i do that i will say there a lot of these scans that are uploaded to sketchfab under different licenses so there's a lot of them which are commercial and non-commercial usage and attribution and share alike and things like that a lot of them come with textures because they're kind of pre-packaged as a result of the photogrammetry output but if you're using them for an art scene because you have artistic control you don't necessarily need to use all the textures that are provided now that's a key point here because i decided for especially the darker scenes in this to go for a combination of diffuse from the original statue and roughness from a procedural source now there are a few reasons why i did this and i think it works really well it's because the diffuse gives you a kind of grounding in reality but the procedural roughness kind of adds an extra almost candy-like layer to make the statue feel like it's almost dream-like in a way i don't know how to describe it but i can show you the difference because if we remove the roughness here you see it's very flat we can see the individual pixels from the diffuse on the surface of the statue and it just feels a bit odd i've got my ambient grunge node which i'm a shameless plug which i'm pushing the diffuse through and so that's why we're getting these kind of you know splattered marks here but there's just something a bit missing like the specularity on the side of this is all just a bit consistent as you can see it's just smooth lighting going all the way around so if i take the roughness output from this complex iron node from my modular metals pack again shameless plug i'm sorry but you're on my channel let me take that and plug it into the glossybdf suddenly we can see all these finer details going along the edges so the light isn't smooth and consistent that procedural roughness just adds this extra noise going across the surface of it and i think this works fantastic when reacting with lighting because we get all these finer high frequency areas that the eye is just drawn to instead of just these basic pixels from the diffuse map i can demonstrate this even more if i go over to a different scene let's try the sclepios scene so let's scrub forward a bit because i think the lighting is better about two-thirds of the way through this animation zooming in here we have the same thing again if you look quite carefully you can see these high frequency procedural details changing the roughness here so again if i click on him go into the object mode unplug the roughness he becomes so much more basic we can almost see again the individual pixels on the diffuse so plugging that back in and we have all these extra details so i think just a little change like that if you can combine realism with proceduralism it just adds so much especially when reacting to the light as i said a note about the emissive lines going across forming these shapes these geometries and some of the extra details on the objects when it comes to doing things which have this high bloom coming off of them be careful to make them not too thin i really wanted to go thinner on these shapes so they weren't too overpowering but when you do that when the animation is moving you can see this weird kind of banding and the anti-aliasing going on and it just kind of looks a bit uncomfortable if i can find a demonstration for that then i'll put it up on the screen now the way that these geometric shapes were made is not actually using paths or curves these are basic objects if i go into edit mode with individual vertices just point one two and three and the modifier stack is pretty simple something that you might expect there's a skin modifier which is basically giving us thickness around the edges in between the vertices and a subdivision surface modifier which is smoothing that result because if it was just a skin modifier it'd be a rectangular shape going across the edges but the subsurf rounds out and the way that we can change the thickness of the skin effect going around the edges is by going into edit mode selecting the vertices then pressing control plus a and then move the cursor further away you can see it thickens it out so if i make this really large then go back into rendered mode then we have this really thick shape going on behind a scleros i want to make about cool lighting is that when we're looking at a subject like this sure rim lighting would look really cool but that's not the only way to get cool looking lighting having an under light i don't know what i would call it but kind of like a lower light that's kind of pushing up with a different color onto the object can provide a lot of depth because as you can see we have all these contours going around the statue and having this lower blue light kind of adds a different color to the base of those areas all right we're moving over to probably one of my favorite scenes just because it's got my quintessential colors going on you know the blue and the purple and this lovely kind of lion statue going up but just as a side note i left all of the credits at the end of the video for the short and in the description of that video there is a link to a blog post on my website where you can find all the individual links to all of the different models of the different scans that were taken from sketchfab to compose these scenes so let's talk about the foliage or the vegetation if you watched my rendering tips video for cycles where i had that kind of interior architectural scene you'll notice that i mentioned something about the plant pots that i put in there for a bit of nature so these objects come from the same pack which is botanic i've actually been really enjoying using it because the variety of options that it has and the variety of models that it has is quite amazing and i really liked how they worked both in cycles and in eevee so the transparency just worked perfectly fine for these objects i just needed to throw them in and i thought they looked good enough good enough to use i really liked adding these trees at the back because again thinking about big medium and small shapes in the scene this kind of added a nice almost fractal like pattern of high frequency details behind the subject which was quite contrasted by these larger vegetation shapes on the front which are more likely to react with the light because they're closer to the camera closer to the subject so as the light moves across the subject we can see it kind of moving across the specular shapes that are on the surfaces of these plants one thing that a few people have pointed out is the kind of depth that's provided by the emissive particles in the scene so as we're moving across you if you look carefully you can see that there are two types of particles there's a blue one and a pink one and i don't know if anyone actually noticed this during the short but they're not the same shape let me see if i can capture one of these fireflies in mid-air let's zoom in a bit here all righty here we go if you look carefully we don't need to look carefully zoomed in but it's a plus sign now why is it a plus sign i don't know i just liked it so the blue ones are round and the pink ones are plus signs but how is this done well if i can kind of decipher my very messy outliner here i have template emissive particle objects so they're kind of off to the side here we have the original sphere and the original plus sign and then separately i have objects which are basically cubes although i need to make these selectable in the outliner so if i choose one of these you can see that it's actually just a cube going on i try and make sure that it's always containing the camera so it doesn't exactly matter where the cubes are just so long as there's enough of the volume around the camera so that the particles that are scattered are going to be in front of it so when it moves we can get a good sense of depth because the particles further away will move at a slower pace but i can check the particle settings on this object here you can see that it's set to emitter we have a number let's put in the lifetime i've set to a thousand and these frames start and end values are zero basically i just wanted um objects to be scattered and to exist for the entire life span i just made the lifespan something that was much larger than the actual frame number which is 600 because well if i wanted to make the frame time longer which i did do for a couple of scenes then i didn't want to have to think oh no i've rented out this scene and then the particles suddenly stopped like two-thirds of the way through so if i just make it something longer than i need then that's gonna be fine now the key thing about making the particle spawn inside of the object is that under the source settings in the particle settings here we have the option emit from and it's a drop down and here you need to choose a volume and that means that it actually spawns the objects inside the volume of the object you have more options for how they're distributed but that doesn't really matter so much i made sure that all of the physics were kind of disabled all of the velocities were removed the physics type set to none to actually make it duplicate the template objects we made we set the render as option to object and then we set the instance object to a reference of that template object so you can see that we've got template underscore emissive particle so if i choose that take a look at it so this particle system would be duplicating the blue spheres another note to make about the particle systems is that you can have them kind of vary the scale of the template object but i wanted to make sure that they were the same size as the original so when i made the template object really small i pressed ctrl a and applied the scale and then i made sure that the scale was set to one and the randomness was set to zero so i didn't try to modify how large the particles were now i made a mental note here about making sure that the particles were still rendered even though the emitting object is hidden now this was a little bit tricky to actually figure out an eev and i made some notes so let me just try and find it all right hold on my notes here say object properties under instancing disable render checkbox hold on so first of all in the viewport display in the particle settings i have show emitter disabled so that gets rid of the emitter but that's not the only thing we need to do so under the object properties under instancing disable the render checkbox so if we leave this enabled when we render a frame the emitting box will still be visible so we want to make sure we disable this so the emitting box will be invisible of course but we can still see the particles that tripped me up a couple of times and i remember having to look up the stephen scott video to figure out how to get that done uh so thanks steven i want to go back to the waters grave statue scene and just talk a bit more about the emissive details on the surfaces of the objects so again it's the same principle as the kind of background triangle geometry it's made out of the basic vertices with the skin modifier and the subsurf modifier but these ones as you can see are kind of sticking to the surface of the object this was not done with a shrink wrap like you might think it was actually just done by manually placing them but we used the snapping mode set to face so let me give you a demonstration if i go into edit mode of course i've got like one of the edges here and if we look at the top i have the snapping turned off so i need to hold ctrl to enable snapping but if we look under the options here the drop down next to it i do not have it set to increment which is what it's usually set to because that's what lets you snap things to the grid instead i have it set to face which means if i make a new vertex and if i move it around it kind of waves around in the air it's not doing anything but if i hold down control to enable snapping it will then stick to the face the face that the cursor is pointing at so if i do this several times press e to extrude hold ctrl click here to extrude hold ctrl click and just keep on going you can see that we're drawing a line that's sticking to the face and then if i go into rendered mode you can see how this turns into an emissive line that's kind of going around the object so i just want to talk a bit more again about the image sequences so let me just open up this folder here the reason why i keep everything in this folder structure and i keep them all as image sequences is because when you're rendering out new frames if you swap over to your video editing program so in this case i'm using premiere it auto recalculates what that sequence should look like so one thing that's actually really cool is that when you're in the middle of rendering an animation sequence you can play it back in the editor and see the frames that have just been rendered even though it's still updating the sequence which i thought was kind of cool because it means you can rapidly prototype new ideas as you're rendering out the old ones but also just keeping all the files in the same place means that every time you make a new render of the animation you don't need to drag those files back into the editor and replace the old ones because it just automatically updates the old sequences now i use premiere which updates files which have had changes made to them automatically you might use a different editing program which may or may not do that if it does then that's perfect but just for the sake of showing you how to import an image sequence into premiere if you go to file then import then you find a folder which has your image sequence and say you click on the first one so number one you want to make sure that the image sequence tick box is ticked of course and then you can open that up and it will import it into your scene and you can basically put it in and play it back like a video file alright but what about the render settings this is where it gets a little bit subjective because it depends on how much storage space you're willing to use up and how long you're willing to wait for the previews in the video editor to take and how long you want the final render to take so i'll show you what settings i used first of all the samples when i was making the scene so just previewing them while putting them together i had them set to 10 for both render and viewport but then when i did the final renders i moved them up to 32 samples and this was to help with the shadowing of course because eevee's rasterization engine you don't need particularly high samples but there comes a point where it doesn't make any difference so i think 32 for me was a kind of maximum before i'd seen no difference whatsoever taking a look at the dimensions i had it set to 2560 by 1080 now i could have gone higher but i didn't want to waste too much time on the rendering i knew that i just wanted enough for it to take up the entire wide screen aspect for youtube you know that when you put youtube into the large mode especially on a 16x9 screen it will take up the entire width of the screen so that's why i went wider than 1920x1080 for the actual image output i did not go for lossless which would have been png i went for lossy which means we lose some quality on the renders so for jpeg at 90 quality now the reason i did that was to save on storage space and to be honest it doesn't make that much of a difference 90 quality is still pretty good especially with this resolution as well if we open it up and zoom in you can only see the kind of compression for the jpeg going on if we zoom in this far again i don't expect anyone's going to be watching the screen that close up but for what i wanted to achieve and for the sake of making it easier for premiere to build the previews for the image sequences when editing it together i thought this was really good enough this was fine so just give you an idea for the amount of storage space used for the entire animation for this scene scene number one this took up about 150 megabytes which really isn't that much and just to give you a little bit of a reference in the sneak peek as well i just rendered out a kind of 4k animation in unreal engine because i'm doing some tests it might do a video about it soon with the new nanite and lumen system this is i think under a minute long and it comes to about five gigabytes and you can have a look at that here very smooth but this is 60 frames a second and i was doing 30 frames a second for the epoch short but i'll probably do a video about unreal engine soon because i'm very impressed with it and there's a fair few things i want to say about it but we'll have to wait and see but yeah looking back as i said i've got the frame rate set to 30 fps even though the final export on premiere is set to 60 i believe the only reason why i didn't move this down to 30 frames is because i'm lazy so the final export for the whole thing came out to about 245 megabytes which i think is fantastic size especially given the quality which you can actually experience when watching it on youtube so i just feel like there's no point going over the top if it's not needed if i want to do more high quality renders of this in the future then i can do that now there's still a lot more i want to say about this project because i learned a lot while doing it i've tried doing other shorts before in the past in between my regular youtube videos i give myself about a week to make every video this took about four days to make in total so i was on a bit of a productivity high when it comes to putting together all these art scenes and one thing that did make it a lot more enjoyable was just the wide amount of free to use content available on sketchfab but i played around with different techniques in terms of psychology and my approach to how i made these scenes which kind of actually helped me to put together the entire thing in the end and a lot of it was to do with forcing myself not to think about individual things for too long and to try and force myself to move on because sometimes i fall into the loop of watching what i've made more than working on the next scene it was very tricky to overcome but i did it and i'm very happy about the result it may not look like much of an achievement to people watching but this was a lot for me to do and to get over so i hope those of you that watched it enjoyed it and hopefully this breakdown has taught you something new i'm thinking about going deeper into the psychology of putting it together and maybe talking a bit more about why i chose certain statues and what i think they represent on my personal podcast which is the haltcast so if you're interested in maybe listening to that then make sure to head over to that separate channel and subscribe to that there as well of course i mentioned a few extra things in this video i mentioned my ambient grunge product which i use the modular metals one and botanic which i'll leave an affiliate link for below you know just in case you want to check them out but again thanks for watching everyone and if you haven't watched the show already then please go and check it out put it on the biggest screen you can find turn the vibrancy way up and make the volume as loud as you can because i find these things just very satisfying to watch and make and listen to so yeah oh and another thing you'll notice that i put patrons in the credits at the end of the short if you want your name to appear in the future videos then make sure to go and sign up it's only one dollar one dollar a month and you can help me put these things together and get credited for it so thanks everyone see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Curtis Holt

Views: 6,396

Keywords: blender, animated, short, eevee, abstract, tutorial, sketchfab, photogrammetry, colorful, synthwave

Id: Qj5HIOHrL8E

Length: 21min 26sec (1286 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 02 2021