Hey guys, I wanted to give a small summary on the latest animation challenge. First of all, I compiled the entries into one video, feel free to check it out.
Just to recap, I took part in animation challenge, it's a semi-regular thing organized by Nyl, where bunch of animators agree to make one animation per day, for 3 days straight.
This time around there was a twist to the challenge, where Nyl would randomly choose 4 moods for each participant and then they have to choose 3 that they should incorporate into the animation. Mine were arrogant, devious, envious and disappointing. The last one felt like a bummer (but it could be fun animation) so I went with the first 3.
Animation on day 1 went decently smooth, it was my first time doing something with feet and it was pretty fun. However I didn't set up the animation layers properly and it added some annoyance. The bigger issue was the rendering.
See, blender has multiple render engines, for my usual projects I use cycles. It uses raytracing and the results are almost perfectly physically accurate. This means that you can apply rules of regular lighting and photography and the results with proper setup look pretty good kinda by default.
However this engine is somewhat slow, it takes me 1-3 minutes to render one frame of animation which is not feasible for a challenge like this. So for the challenge I use eevee, this is more of a videogame engine that lets you render a frame in seconds. Now you can achieve very similar look to cycles, but there are lot of specific tricks involved and I am not very experienced with it.
So firstly, when I lit the first animation, I honestly don't think it looks that great, rendering wise. It always puts a damper on things when you work hard all day and the result looks meh because of rendering. I also ran into a bug and had to switch version of blender, that was annoying as well. Some day I really need to figure out eevee and learn the various tricks. (Or do I? I guess it's good to have in the back pocket).
The second day went better, I am much more pleased with the result, rendering wise. Even went in and had a little fun with the rendering 😈.
Last day was pretty straightforward, I planned from the start to make it easiest pose. I did have to rebake the money shot two times but I had plenty of time. I also finally found a good jizz shader for eevee.
One more thing I wanted to mention about the lighting, were the colors. I was super happy with how they turned out.
For first day we have golden - it makes sense for the mood (arrogant), is the main color of Domina and it fit naturally with the scene and time of day.
Second day was red - sun is lower and turning red, very fitting for the devious mood and also made sense for Black Widow.
Last one was green - artifical lighting in the security room, green is also the color of envy and also made sense for Black Cat, matching her eyes.
Overall the challeng was a fun one and I am looking forward to the next one :D (just not right away lol need some time to recuperate).