2026 Reallusion Contest

[BillyPilgrim]

I got a late start on this contest because I had to refinish our deck, along with other resposibilities, so I haven’t had time to keep an ongoing work in progress record. I had an idea to do a story about a witch recently, but I wasn’t sure how I could make something work for the contest, since my idea was more of a long form thing.

The first few days were spent just trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I thought maybe she could fight with some sort of strange forest creature guy, which I thought I could make from a CC5 guy and just make him look strange by hiding his eyebrows and changing his skin color.

I didn’t like that idea, so I thought I would have her try and take out a robot. I had a robot but didn’t know what to do with it yet, so I decided to use that.

The little story that happens was just a broad idea, I didn’t write anything down or do storyboards, just a few notions of how I wanted the thing to go. I did have some shots in my head, and in the end some of those came pretty close to what I had in mind, while others became something else entirely. The mocap actually informed me quite a bit on how she should behave overall in terms of timing and energy, so I just sort of allowed the thing to become what it wanted to. I started animating in the middle and worked out from there, and when something happened that I liked, it gave me ideas on where it might go or where it might be coming from earlier.

Like I said, I had been thinking of doing a story about a witch before the contest, but I hadn’t really gotten anywhere. As I was trying to figure out the story, I started getting the character ready in Character Creator, which is the only Reallusion software I already owned before the contest started, so I was able to get going without not knowing what I was doing. It started with me trying in CC5 to capture my wife’s face with Camilla as a starting point, but I never quite got there. Once the contest started I was able to take a photo of her and use it with Headshot 3, which got me closer, but still not quite there, I called it good and moved on.

The witch originally had a dress I made in Marvelous Designer, but as the thing evolved she was doing more and more athletic things that made the dress tough to deal with, so I chopped it off and made it into a shirt. The jeans are the ones that come with CC5. I think they’re men’s jeans.

For the animation, I started by using some clips I got from actor core that seemed close to what she would be doing, spliced them together in iClone, then animated them to work in blender. For the face I used Accuface after the animation was working, doing multiple takes while the animation played until I got ones that worked.

I started the first part by using three mocap clips from ActorCore: Duck Walk Shield, Hold Branch Move, and Alert Search.

I’m only allowed five photos per post so I’ll continue in another one.

[BillyPilgrim]

When she takes off on the broom I used Parkour Cat Vault and a swimmer diving from Mixamo.

[BillyPilgrim]

When she falls onto the robot I used another one from Mixamo of a soccer player being slide tackled and animated into the last ActorCore clip, Climb Fall Hang on Ladder, then got her back up with a Mixamo clip of someone climbing to the top of something.

[BillyPilgrim]

[BillyPilgrim]

For other shots, like her flying on the broom, I filmed myself sitting on a painter’s extension pole and used video mocap in iClone.

The rest is just me trying to make the whole thing work in Blender. I don’t know how to do hair really well, so her hair is the basic one that comes in CC5, which is hair cards, with a cloth sim done in blender. For the pony tail I just duplicated the bangs and stuck it in the bun.

The shots that have physics on her shirt and hair were done with Blender cloth, which when she was moving really fast had to be done with the animation slowed down either two or four times the normal speed. All the physics had to be done with her being static. Once the animation was working I deconstrained her from the empty that was moving her through space at however fast she’s going, like 70 miles per hour? More? Less? I’m not sure. I put a wind on her and added noise to the rotation, since the noise in the wind settings wasn’t doing enough. Then I exported the shirt and hair as alembics and brought them back in, retiming them if necessary, and reconstrained her to the animated empty. I’m not sure if that’s the right thing to do but it seemed to work.

The enivironment is made with the TrueTerrain Add-on, with most of the background trees being from the Alpha Trees Add-on as a biome distributed with Geo-Scatter. The hero trees are from Botaniq, as is the grass, also scattered with Geo-Scatter. The background is just an HDRI with transparent turned off in render settings. I wanted to put a lot more variety into both the terrain and the plants and trees, and a bunch of rocks and whatnot, and I plan to moving forward, but I decided to keep it simple.

The Cycles renders are at very low samples because my computer just isn’t super amazing. It worked well enough to get stuff done, but render times were just too intense to make it look right. I did some test frames with the GarageFarm remote rendering service, but some of the Geo-Scatter didn’t make it, so I just did it myself.

In the end I couldn’t finish the story, since I worked on it for only about six weeks, which is a bummer, but I will finish it. There’s a million things to fix in the animation, and the environment is much too simple, but I had to try to get something done by the deadline.

If it weren’t for Reallusion letting me use their software for the duration of the contest, there’s no way I could have gotten even as far as I did.

It was a lot of work but a lot of fun, thanks Reallusion, for letting me give it a shot.

[Duthomhas (Michael Thomas Greer)]

Is there a link to the video?

[BillyPilgrim]

The Hunt

[Wisdom_GamesArt (Selim Kesici)]

this is very nice, i cant imagine how long it took

[BillyPilgrim]

Thanks so much. It’s about six weeks so far. It has a ways to go but it’s a fun little thing to work on.