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Just a small reimagination of a classical character we all love. This project took me couple of months of weekend work, and even though not fully satisfied, especially the animation, I need to call it done before it never ends :wink:

I really wanted to dig deeper into geometry nodes hair and fur. Also as a fan of the Gremlin franchise, I wondered how Gizmo could be like as a “real” animal. Combining those two, I found the perfect idea for me to make it a project.

Even though initially not intended, I ended up to make it a little short film. The new hair system is just great !!! It may still feel a bit “unfinished” and unfortunately somewhat slow, but the flexibility we get by utilizing geometry nodes… amazing !!!

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Fantastic animation!

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Sorry, I can’t find the words to describe how much I like it (him). :heart_eyes:

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That’s awesome ! It’s amazing how much efforts you put into the whole animation rather than just showcasing the character ! Beside that everything is on point, which is particularly impressive given the overall quality !

That is beyond ! It’s all outstanding. The animation and the shading is awesome !
Maybe you could do some behind the scenes ?

oh, thank you very much for the nice words… I really appreciate it, yes, I am planning to put together a bit of a behind the screens

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Excellent work, even if I was expecting a tribute to Iron Maiden when I clicked on the thread.

Wow! That’s wonderful! Everything about this piece of art is so amazing! And I want to pet this sweet little cutie :slightly_smiling_face:

Amazing work!

Oh no - you didn’t get him wet did you ?

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I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I reckon this will get on the featured row! :grin:
Extremely impressive to say the least, stunning in fact. Well done on such fine work!

Just WOW, there’s not much else to say. Simply stunning animation!

Beautiful. Wonderful animation.

Great Work!!!

Ha ha, not yet. But the roof has a leak :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Beautiful!
Great attention to details as modelling, shading, lighting and animation.

Thank you all for those super nice comments. I hope I find some time this weekend to show some behind the screens material :wink:

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Just one word Awesome !! each scene is full of subtlety and the creature is splendid, I love it :star_struck:

Hello !!! as promised, here a little behind the screens post. First starting with some model and lookdev:


Raw body without fur


Raw body grey shaded and displace

Inner mouth

The meniscus is dynamically created through geometry nodes, by creating a line where the eyeball and the eyelid touch, so I didn’t have to worry about rigging this up:

I took this project as an opportunity to develop a face shape addon, which rather easily allows to create/adjust shapes and put them all together in a geo nodes setup.

The main shapes are being stored as an attribute on a separate head, which then drives the head of the main body. There are some nice functionalities, like a mirror function, updating the neutral version if this should have changed.

The geometry node tree then puts everything together and sets up any inbetween shapes, or combination shapes. This addon is still under heavy development and not ready for sharing yet.

As far as the fur is concerned, I decided to not work with a modifier stack, but rather (a rather big) single node tree

It looks very chaotic, however after all it really isn’t. The benefits of working in a tree and being able to fully utilize geometry nodes are massive. Literally everything can be controlled almost down to the single hair. Here I separated the groom into three parts, simply for performance reasons. Having 100s of 1000s of strands, quickly brings blender onto it’s knees.


Groom in viewport

For general control, I created a bunch of multichannel mask, so I have three mask in one file. A few examples are these:


Groom body parts


Groom density


Groom clump size

There are several more masks being used, in order to control specific areas, like thinning the hair, or where I want it to curl a little etc.

An additional mask is the probability mask, which is purely for lookdev

With this mask I’m using the red, green, and blue components, so determine the likely hood that the hair is white for example. For this workflow I did a little video a while back:

Also thanks to working in a node tree for the fur, there are several attributes which can be stored and used in lookdev. In my example I used the clump index to get a random value per clump, which helped even more to take out some uniformity:

Alright, I think that’s it really, I hope this is an appropriate insight.

Thanks a bunch,
Stefan

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Omg, no wonder it looks so good. That is some hollywood stuff.

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