I’m finally done with my animation. I made it a bit harder for myself by wanting to make it loop-able from start to finish as well as for the middle segment.
I hope you like the result. Made in Blender and rendered with cycles with a bit of cheating with the internal renderer for the crepuscular rays.
This is awesome :o I really like the hair system on your dog, it does give the feeling it’s a very fluffy one.
How long render time for the whole scene?
I also have a small question ; How did you animate the branches and leaves of your scene? Lattices? Modifiers on the particles? Both?
this is really great. for the future: animating a dog is not easy. you got all details, but you missed one major thing: a dog does not stand still in such a position. let it change the position of its feet a little, like correcting the stand on rough ground. let it move its head like hearing something and than look back into the camera again. just ideas
Thank you for the advice. If you look at the full video I actually had ear twitching and looking around and I tried it for the loop as well, however I didn’t like how it looked in the loop, it was too twitchy and and far too apparent when the loop actually loops so I tried to make it more of an ambient scene. I might expand it with more diverse motion in the future.
Thanks! One frame took about one hour with 512 samples. Mostly due to the volumetric fog and adaptive subdevision. The fur by itself takes less than a minute.
Regarding the branches, my approach was influenced by the fact that I wanted the scene to loop.
The fern, big background branches and tree particle group objects are driven by a rotating empty as the object setting the texture coordinates on a cloud texture with a displace modifier. The objects had slightly different modifier settings for influence, strengths, etc. so it wouldn’t look too monotonous. Thus each time the empty rotates 360°, all the objects will be in the same place as at 0°, 360°, 720°, etc.
As for the foreground branches, I animated the rotation for the start and end of the loop (450-550) and in the curve editor added the noise modifier and manually shifted so the starting frame and ending frame had about the same value as well as slope. Although if you’re not making a loop you don’t need to bother with that and can just animate one frame to make the curve appear and than add the noise modifier to it.
I hope that helps
Beautiful to look at and an amazing achievement. The modeling texture and fur work on the dog is fantastic. The face and eyes. It all blends together so naturally and convincingly. I’m sure many here clearly know how hard that is.
I would agree a bit that some secondary movement in the standing posture would help in the future. Some very subtle drift and twitch. Also possibly some sign of breathing in the rib cage area. I would expect him to be breathing quite fast and be slightly more twitchy after moving around so quickly. Small dogs twitch and fidget all the time. Although really this is a tiny little criticism. The works stands.
Did you use any dynamic effects for the fur ? I just ask because I tried something similar to this some time back with a small feathered dinosaur. I needed to go back to an earlier version of Blender as the dynamics were badly broken in later versions. It seems it won’t get fixed until 2.8 as the plan is to totally re write it.
You need to add some balance “wobble” to her overall, the overall feel is kinda slow-motionesque due to lacking that - but man, just generally this is mind blowingly good, so it’s really not that kinda critique, just want you to make it look perfect, because you’re so friggin close to that as it is.
Thank you very much! Means a lot coming from a great artist. Yeah, I do need some work on my organic animations. I need to make my dog jump off of a stone and film it for reference