Hello there,
this short film was my entry for the Kitbash3D Competition ‘Mission to Minerva’.
This was my very first fully animated Short Film using Blender Cycles.
PreProduction took about 2 days. Building and rendering the shots took about 22 while rendering was mainly done during the night. Compositing was another 7 days of work. Editing, music composing, and grading took approximately 2 weeks to complete.
There are 46 unique shots. Every single one was rendered in Cycles.
Because of the deadline I had to use an external renderfarm for some of the more complex shots to be able to work while some shots were being rendered. Otherwise I would have lost a couple of days just because of rendering.
The settlement models as well as the rover itself are part of the “Mission to Minerva” Kitbash Kit.
The terrain was done in World Creator with just a few filters to give it a lunar surface look.
I bought the spacesuit for the main character from CGTrader and edited the geometry and textures so it would fit to the rover, like there was some corporate identity to it.
For the rover I created a rig with the “rigacar” addon. It really worked well.
To visualize the storm and the dust I used Embergen, which does a remarkable job. I never used it before and just needed a day to understand how it works. It is ridiculously intuitiv and easy to learn.
I rendered all Embergen animations separately and composited them with the Shots in After Effects.
If you have any question left I will do my best to answer you.
I hope you enjoyed the shortfilm and there is also something valuable for you in this post.
Cheers
