I remember finishing my previous animation 3 years ago. Back then I wrote that it was my biggest Blender project I had ever worked on. And it really was, until today. Well - here is my new biggest project! “Death to Squishies” is a recreation of an animation from 20 years ago, from the third installment of the Ratchet & Clank series. I worked on this video for the last 2 years and I can’t believe how much work, time and patience it took to produce such a short clip. I spent almost the entire first year of work creating all the elements of the scene, lighting and characters. Then another year spent fooling around in front of the camera for references, animating, rendering and endless fixes. During this time there were better and worse moments. Moments when I would sit down with enthusiasm to take the next step forward, but also days when I couldn’t even look at the opened Blender file anymore and honestly doubted that I would ever be able to finish this project. But I did it!
In my previous animation, the camera was static and the characters were mostly sitting. Here, each shot is dynamic, the characters are moving a lot, and the editing pace is dictated by the rhythm of the music. It may not sound particularly spectacular, but for me, working on this project was some a kind of personal challenge. From the appearance of the characters, through the design of each element of the scene, to the optimization of the rendering time and post-production. But also organizing the disk space. Believe it or not - the entire project in its raw state takes up a staggering 1.2 TB on the disk. Yes, 1200 GB! I can’t believe it myself.
That said, I didn’t achieve everything I wanted to do here. I still don’t know that much about lighting. I have over 20 different lighting versions on my hard drive that I tested and none of them were good enough in my opinon. In the end, I simply chose what seemed closest to my original vision. Although I think the entire animation could have been lit much better. Maybe I’ll learn how to do it someday.
The physics of the character’s rigid, metal hair also proved to be not an easy task, though it may not look like it at all. For most of the time I was working on the project, I was not sure how to animate this element of the characters well. I thought about manual animation several times, but quickly came to the conclusion that it would take way too much time. In the end, I decided on a mixed method. To animate the hair, I alternate between 2 addons, depending on which one gives a better effect in a given shot. In some places, I animated some parts manually. Besides, even when physics is used, it is often supported by a whole bunch of manual corrections in various places. I hope the effect is acceptable.
Rendering took about 4 months. It could have been shortened a bit, but I decided that I wanted the final video to be available in 4K. I worked a lot on some details, so I simply wanted them to be visible. Of course, I tried to split the animation into layers to speed up rendering. But since all the shots are always dynamic, there was not that much room for optimization. Splitting the render into layers simply didn’t give any effect, and even added unnecessary work. Honestly, taking all this into account, I think that 4 months isn’t that bad at all.
I hope it was worth spending so much time on this project. I don’t know what I expected from it. But I know that after some time I see a lot, really a lot of mistakes in it. Some are small and unimportant. Others make me wonder how on earth I could have done it so badly. But the most important thing is that I managed to finish the whole thing. This fact in itself is a great achievement for me because I know how often such projects never see the light of the day. Fortunately, I managed to find enough self-determination to work on it until the very end. It’s time to move on. I’m not sure yet what my next project will be, but I know that I have a lot of ideas. And with that I’ll end my lengthy argument that no one will read anyway, haha. Cheers!
W.I.P. thread: Courtney Gears - #88 by Mortus4
Courtney in “Finished Projects”: Courtney Gears
DeviantArt: https://www.deviantart.com/mortusk/art/Death-to-Squishies-Blender-Animation-1165014265
ArtStation: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/lGL18k
