Glowflies forest animation.WIP

This is gonna be my own animation-intro. So far glowflies done and rigged. And nature is almost ready. Still a lot to do, underwater world, some fishes for example. Thousands of this glowflies will be flying in the dark forest.





The Catfish is ready. She will be swimming in a little pond in the forest. She will lie on the bottom of the pond and then will swim and bring up some dust and sand particles from the bottom.




Made some rig for my catfish

Nice bit of auto-swim rigging. Test animation next?

Thanks. Yes, the next will be first part of animation, where this fish will swim and bring up some dust and sand from the bottom of the pond.

I like the way the fireflies are glowing :slight_smile:

Thanks, I like them as well. Initially I was going for realistic look but later changed my mind for the stylised look. Because in reality firebugs are ugly and scary like other beetles, so I wanted to make them beautiful and made not only the butt glowy, but all the parts of a body. And what really helped and made this to pop up is adding fresnel, so it’s more glowy at the edges.

Hi guys here is the test animation and a tutorial also. I have applied a soft body physics and spline IK so now my fish fins and glowflies whiskers have that soft jiggly automatic motion when i move a root bone.

Made animated laminaria for my underwater scene
This is just a test from Blender viewport

My goal will be like on this image


But everything will be animated, even frogs jelly eggs


Looks real good, thanks for the rigging tutorial!

Thanks for watching!

Awesome project! Did you animate the plant the same way as the whiskers stuff? Looking forward to seeing more. The frog eggs post’s attachment doesn’t show for me btw.

Thanks Meshmonkey. No, its a bit more complicated because it didnt work that way for such a plant. So here you can see what is going on


The stem consist of two parts - mesh-stem (hidden underneath) and curve-stem (you can see on the top). Mesh-stem has a cloth simulation affected by the wind forcefield. For all others objects wind force is disabled. Then curve-stem has many hook-modifiers each of them parented to the vertex of the mesh-stem. Also the mesh-stem is pinned from top and bottom and hooked with hook modifiers from top and bottom only so it can follow the circle rotation on the top of the stem. That circle rotates and spins the stem around. Each of the leaves parented to the vertex of the curve-stem and each of them have its own soft body simulation and vertex group with a gradient weight which is selected in the soft body settings. Same about those curly lianes that are hanging down.

Starting to arrange some assets that i created for this scene, such as relatively low poly rocks with a moss and weeds and animated laminaria plants. Have to be careful because camera will be moving through so have to make sure everything seamless and nice perspectives around. Though i think when i add a mist and blurry plankton animated particles and more animated weeds on the stones, all of the detailes will be covered anyways. But just in case made proper seamless rocks. At the moment learning how to make proper animated caustics. I know there is a special tool called “Caustics Generator”. But will try to do it in Blender firstly and will see if it works.



Great, thanks for sharing! I hope one day I’ll be able to come up with stuff like that myself. As it is now, I understand only half of what I just read, lacking experience with rigging and simulating stuff like this. Your explanation is very useful to me, because it provides me with a long list of things to look into.

Made animated underwater grass also. Will use it a particle system

And made looped underwater caustics video. Will use it as a gobo animated black and white plane with a spot lamp to cast caustics shadows and light rays onto the bottom of a lake

Also created some roots of a trees by using skin modifier


Hi guys. Here is the image that i posted for the Weekly CG Challenge. Thats how approximately will look second part of my animation (on the surface).Just will remove the lamppost and will add my wolf walking somewhere there. Soon i will post second image so you will see how will look first part of my animation (under the water).