good documentary/tutorial about making CG animation.

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
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:slight_smile: Hey Guys

Just been looking on youtube and trying to find a good docu or tutorial about making CG movies, actually the main thing I am trying to find out is 3D sets.

I would like to know, and I guess everyone is different, but what would the work flow be for building your scene please?

I know, story, screenplay, modelling, animation, texturing, rendering etc etc but I cant find much info on 3D sets.

Say for e.g your scene is set in a town, do you build the entire town first? or just build what you need for that particular scene? i.e the first room and would you build a room with a ‘floating’ wall you move back and forth for the camera etc

any info would be great as like I said, I cannot find any good videos covering the process of 3D sets within 3D animations

thank you :slight_smile:

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Anyone got any ideas please?
Also what are people’s workflow on how to organise for a CG scene?
i have a folder named shot one for e.g. And in that folder anything for the scene. The Blender file, models, any textures etc
is this what you would normally do? What are other people’s workflow please? I.e how they organise their folders and work.

3

Shonuff I guess everyone works differently but think about those old westerns. The set builders constructed the entire town before a camera was bought in. My current, some would say forever, project is a interior. And, since the camera will be moving the entire place needs to be constructed down to the last receptacle before a camera is panned or starts moving.

I see no reason why a exterior would be any different. Whatever the camera will possibly see needs to be in place. Because when you move into the actual animation stage that is a whole new world of study. And, you don’t need to be concerned about your camera running into something you half assed months ago. With a exterior it probably makes no difference but when deciding on interior dimensions first decide what lens you are going to use. I prefer 45mm for indoors.

Regardless don’t forget the scale. Scale several buildings to real world dimensions in feet or meters. You can measure or simply use the N - Panel. Once a scale has been established you can then eyeball some objects. As far as YouTube try Archviz. And, best of luck in your endeavors.

If I might another thought here. You don’t have to be a master modeler to tell a story. But, some modeling and lighting skills are required. I bring this up because I got way ahead of myself in Blender since I wanted to at least animate a camera. But, having a entire set ready to shoot should resolve that potential problem. It’s all about time. Time you don’t have available and the time required.

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[INDENT=8]TL;DR version
[/INDENT]

K.I.S.S. for environments
Use groups and linking (+ proxies) for management.

***Asset Managementaddon is very great. Before it, I always saved my things on my desktop or in a folder and just labelled them by date and maybe[u][b] a name.

***[INDENT=8][B]Asset Management
[/INDENT]
***In order to use it, you have to organize the files in a hierachy: {root}assets\Background\Architect\blends\house
for example. Four original folders are made [assets/hdri/materials/scenes], then you create a subfolder like a type, then a sub-sub folder like a category. (after that are folders for .blend files/thumbnails/favorites for the addon).

I’m still messy with my organization so my root folder has a bunch of junk but in addition to those four, I have a sounds folder, textures, scripts, and downloads folder(s)…and some other junk.

[U]Assets >> individual items for use, such as objects/characters or a background/building which I may or may not link with any other background.
Materials >> treat materials like color picker palette, apply them generally to background elements without having to worry about reloading textures, setup, etc.
Scenes >> Link items/groups from other files and put them together into a single file with small file-space. Link some of these scene files into another scene file if you want. For example, you could build an environment with nothing but linked objects, and save it as a single background/scene file. (note: I use symbolic links to duplicate some folders between assets<>scenes)
sounds/textures >> When I’m ready to add sound to the sequencer, I can just D&D audio from here without having to search for the files around my computer (same for textures)

This presentation from MAD has some nice methods, some of which are (to my knowledge) also what Blender Foundation does.

  • Linking characters into a separate animation file. Create a proxy-rig from the grouped-instance to animate them
  • Link other scenes for compositing (I.E. scene1 contains character+BG plus animation; scene2 contains scene1+camera animation+sounds+compositing)
  • Create groups for low poly version of characters during animation. This keeps the animation playback fast, then you can switch the group with the hi poly version whenever you want to see or render it in higher quality

***Building your scene

***After you get your idea/planning or however you want to prepare, if the environment isn’t the “highlight”, then you can put it on the backburner by creating super simple meshes approximately located to represent the scene.
A brick road can be as simple as a plane, you don’t need a bunch of bricks or even a texture to show it; it’s just a flat surface for something to go on.

You don’t need a bunch of models of people to represent a crowd, just make a stick figure with skin modifier and use Suzanne for a head if you want. Hell, you could skip all that and just use a bunch of cubes.

Buildings? cubes. Planet? Sphere.
Tree? Cylinder with more cylinders/boxes/sphere.
Grass? A plane.

If you argue: what about the details then? A single plane can’t represent a field of grass.
My rebuttal is: does the detail of the grass affect the animation?

Point is, you prepare the scene the same way you prepare an animation: K.I.S.S. - Keep It Simple Stupid.

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thank you very much Old Ghost, that makes great sense and very informative. Yeah I guess building the entire set is best as I have come unstuck in the past, swinging the camera around to a back wall that wasn’t finished or not even there. It’s kinda like failing to prepare is like preparing to fail :slight_smile:
thanks again.

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Thank you very much for taking the time to reply. This has some great techniques, and will look into the methods you described.
Yeah I agree with K.I.S.S. and I think sometimes even a few images made blurry can represent the background I.e those far away hills or a distant town.
thanks again :slight_smile:

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Also I wanted to ask, in my folder I make to keep all my assets in would you have sub folders for each scene please? I know its personal preference but say for eg, my movie has 50 scenes/shots, would I have a folder for shot 1, then in that folder have the blender file plus the materials, sound fx, images etc or is this being too anal?

I was asking as maybe someone got really far into their project then thought ‘damn I wish I would have done it like this’ etc

I was going to organise along the lines of a folder with the name of the movie of course, then in that folder have my blender file, the prem pro file and after effects file for post, plus separate folders for materials, models, the actual 3D sets for my movie, sound fx, images etc
in fact anything from my project then if I have to move the folder for whatever reason, everything should be in place.

(I prob wont move it as past experience has taught me this can be a very bad idea lol)

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Well, I already told you how I organize.

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about set creation :
There is no general rule, as it can change a lot from projects to projects…
If you choose to model the whole town first, you may lost your energy and loose focus on what’s important. But it’s also more straightforward…

I would have made a blocking version of the town (very lowpoly with some cubes) and only the minimal details to help understand where we are.
Then I’ll put camera ,characters and shots in place , and from that I’ll add more details to the buildings.

Generally you’ll try to get rid of unseen objects , (if your shot is inside a building, you delete all the other building for this shot) . That will be faster to render and to manage, but it also depends on the level of complexity of the models.

About folder structures, you can have many variations, here it’s how blenderfundation does it :
https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Org:Institute/Open_projects/OpenMovieProduction

I’ll do something similar :
Your_Project/
Your_Project/LIBS/

Your_Project/LIBS/Characters/
Your_Project/LIBS/Characters/Homer/Homer.blend
Your_Project/LIBS/Characters/Homer/Homer_backup_V01.blend
Your_Project/LIBS/Characters/Homer/textures/homer_color.png

Your_Project/LIBS/Sets/

Your_Project/LIBS/Props/

Your_Project/SHOTS/
Your_Project/SHOTS/S001/S001_V01_layout.blend
Your_Project/SHOTS/S001/S001_V02_animation.blend

Your_Project/RENDERS/
Your_Project/RENDERS/Shots/S001/S001_####.png

The more complex the project is , the more it gets divided in small chunks, with a more complex folder structure.

This will work well if you use library linking as much as possible, so when you modify a set the change occurs in every shots…

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Yes I know and thank you. But just wanted to know how people do it different etc
Your reply post was very informative. Thanks again.

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great stuff. Thank you so much. I guess it comes down to individual preference but I like my stuff to be organised.