I animated this in 8 days… in Blender

How I went from this template to the final animation in 8 days using only Blender? I posted this online and it got so many likes so here's my full process. Hope you learn something new. On 29th of July a new 3D challenge began. One angle montage with great prices hosted by pwnisher. I had participated in previous challenges so I knew that I could make  something cool for this one. But, there was one MAJOR problem… Back then I was enjoying my summer holiday in the middle of nowhere and my PC was hundreds of kilometers away. I wouldn't be back home until the end of august, leaving me 8 days to work on this project. I needed to be really fast for this to work out. Best idea that popped into my head was a Dune related boss fight with a sandworm approaching the hero accompanied  by a huge dust cloud. Made in NPR style. I'm a big fan of the Dune novels and movies. So this idea got me excited. So what could I do before I got back home? I did have my phone with me so I took a screenshot of the  announcement video and trailers. Then I used the phone’s drawing tool to draw my idea and uploaded  everything to the cloud. Then I kicked back and took  it easy until I got back home. Where I took the project  files and my reference photos. I started by modeling the desert  using multiple subdivided planes that I sculpted for the shape I wanted. For the material I mixed noise  and wave textures for the bump, giving the desert a little bit of variation. I decided to use cycles  with relatively low samples because of the built-in world sky texture. Which is super awesome by the way. I felt like I had more control  over the lighting and shadows versus using a regular HDRI. I can highly recommend it. Next day I got my hero character from mixamo.com I chose this model with a goalkeeper  animation and downloaded the 24fps version. Back in Blender I scaled the  animation so it was slower. I projected another texture to the model Then I modeled a very simple looking  head scarf with a solidify modifier. Texture I got from blenderkit add-on. I also modeled simple hooks for the  character to hold and to rise up. I parented the hooks to an empty object and then to the arm bones so I could  make minor adjustments easier. Next day I did the cape I added a subdivided plane  that I sculpted a little. I assigned a vertex group to the top and added a cloth modifier with  a pin targeting the vertex group. Then I parented the object to the characters neck bone and enabled  collisions for the character. I also added a little bit of wind. This took a lot of tries before I was happy. Next day I made the sandworm  from a cylinder with no top face. I added some loop cuts in the middle and a displace modifier which  was using a cloud texture. I also added a solidify modifier  to give the cylinder some thickness and different materials for  inside and outside and rim. Material was basically a gradient and wave  texture hooked to the principled bsdf shader. Only difference was that the outside had a  more bright color and different rotation to it. I applied the modifiers and made more changes  to the inside of the mouth using sculpt mode. I modeled the lips using a simple shape together  with a solidify modifier that I applied. Then I sculpted the mesh a  little to make it more organic. Then I sculpted a simple fang shape and added hair  particles for the lips that used the fang object. I used weight painting to choose  where the fangs would appear. When you select that vertex group in  the density it works, most of the time. I had to apply the hair particles  because it kept bugging during animation. I didn’t have time to do any kind of  rigging in this project so I just moved   the origin point and added location  and rotation keyframes to the lips. I also added a circle object and  added a hair particle system for it. Now with a few hundred hair  strands that I converted to   curves so I could add shape keys and  change the shape when the mouth opens. Then I added an empty object and parented all worm  parts to it, so I could animate it going forward. I also added a lattice object  for the main body of the worm. With Lattice objects you can deform the mesh,  especially high poly meshes more easily. They also support shape keys so I made some minor  adjustments to the worm when the mouth opens. Finally I added a few point lights inside the  mouth to display it more when it was open. Next day I almost started to panic,   because I still had so much to  do and only three days to do it. So I started working with dust particles. I didn’t have time to mess with  mantaflow or geometry nodes,   so I used the good old particle systems for it. I had one icosphere that  had a subdivision modifier. And a displace modifier with  a voronoi texture that got its   coordinates from an empty object that  had a driver moving it forward slowly. Then a smooth modifier to ease the results. I added two modified planes  next to the worm and one in   the back and added the particle system for them. I had 40 000 particles that started way  before the actual animation started,   so there would be dust in the air right away. Lifetime was set quite low  so dust wouldn’t cover the   whole screen and you could see the  desert behind it at the beginning. I also added a duplicate particle  system in front of the mouth with   few particles appearing when the mouth opens more. I also had a force field drag to slow the  movement of particles and two wind force   fields pushing the particles away from the  mouth so they wouldn't clip inside the lips. Everything was parented to the empty controlling   worm movement so when I made changes  I only had to bake particles again. Next day I modeled the thumper  based on the first Dune movie. Made top and bottom parts separate,  added a cylinder in the middle Added A basic metallic texture from blender kit Also a little bit of back  and forth animation to it. Keyframes had an exponential easing to them. So they would start slow and accelerate faster. And parented the whole thing to an empty object   and animated it to go down  a little bit down each hit. I continued to tweak different parts  of the project for the rest of the day Next day I wanted to add some cartoony effects  and grease pencil is the perfect tool for this You can create 2D effects and animations that  you can combine with your 3D scenes very easily. I had a new file for these effects with  the same resolution that the main project. First I made the lines. I had radial guides on and drew around 8 different   keyframes worth of lines that  I duplicated up to 120 frames. I added a thickness modifier with a custom curve. Also blur fx and shadows. Thump text was its own object. It had a shadow fx on it. Lines were on their own layer. I added a build modifier targeting the lines. First was the build one, five frames length. Another was the vanish one,  also five frames length. I appended these into the main animation and  moved them in 3d space for the right position I matched the start of the  animation when thumper goes down And added blank keyframes after  the line animations were done. Then I duplicated this same set to the  point when the thumper goes down again Okay last day. Let's do this! I added a few images as planes smoke animations  with different sizes way back of the desert. Also one to the very front. So it would seem there was a small  wind that moved the cape for instance. I added a mist pass that I composited using a  mix screen node to have background fade out mode. So final tips before I wrap this up. Number 1  I always had a workspace open where I  could see how things looked at the camera. I could easily enlarge the space  using (ctrl + space hotkey) this   saved me a lot of time on guessing stuff. Number 2 When the scene got heavier and heavier, I  used Eevee with a solid view and rendered   the viewport animation straight to  video. So I could spot problems faster. Number 3  Every day when I was done I uploaded the  unfinished animation to the cloud so I could   view it from my phone and spot more problems  and come up with more ideas for the project. Without this step I wouldn't have made it. Did this get to the top 100? No, but the journey was a fun one and  I learned new stuff, hope you did also. See you next time

Channel: Dantti

Views: 177,804

Keywords: blender, 2d to 3d, dantti, blender 3d, blender 3d character, blender 3.6, blender how to animate character, blender how to, how to make a 3d sandworm render, blender animation, boss fight, boss fight pwnisher, I animated this in 8 days in Blender, boss fight breakdown, dune 2, sandworm

Id: PUWGGJYk0uo

Length: 8min 20sec (500 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 26 2023