Protip: Right click the video and set to “Loop” for maximum fun!
View on YouTube here: MST3K “Movie Sign” v2 Loop (bumpy motion, widescreen)
VR version here: MST3K “Movie Sign” v2 Loop (VR 360°)
I’m pretty excited for Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Rifftrax Experiments, which is coming out later this year, and it motivated me to finally tackle the second version of the iconic theater hallway from the second half of the TV show’s run. This is the result!
This version took quite a bit longer than the original one I made in 2024, which only took a few days to produce, particularly because this one has way more greeble on the hallway walls. And while I do love greeble work in Blender, it turns out recreating someone else’s greeble work, based on low-resolution reference videos, isn’t exactly fun.
Still, it was satisfying to see it all come together, and I learned a few things along the way, which I’ll outline below for those interested.
Everything in the scene was created from scratch in Blender 5.1 and procedural except for a few of the number textures on the doors and on the video screens on door 2. Those are textures I created in Photoshop.
Here are some screenshots of each room’s door. Read on below for a more in-depth write-up of my challenges and failures with this project.
Procedural Elements
As mentioned above, save for a couple of images on the numbers on the doors and screens, most of the elements in this scene are procedural. I used Geometry Nodes for many things:
- The ridges on the piping around each of the doors
- The chains on door 4 and door 2
- The bubbles in front of door 3
- The holes in door 3 and on the ceiling of door 2’s room
- The bumps on the blocks around door 1 (the vault door)
All of the materials are procedural as well, but there are a few that I am most proud of:
- Door 5’s Pollock-esque paint lines
- The wood and bricks on door 4, which don’t look particularly realistic, but look exactly like the reference
- The frame around door 3, which has a pattern of inward and outward circles
- The video screens flanking door 2
Challenges
There were a few challenges that took some work to solve. The first is the chains, particularly the one on door 2’s right half. I had previously developed a Geometry Nodes setup to create a chain from a series of connected points or a curve, but it wasn’t designed for animation.
It turned out to work surprisingly well with a cloth simulation on the underlying points (which is what door 4’s chains are) but for door 2, the chain needed to interact with the lock and door, and a strand of points doesn’t work with physics colliders in Blender.
After experimenting a bit (and a decent, but not good enough, attempt at animating it by hand with an armature), I discovered that a ribbon of geometry works just fine with colliders. So I created a ribbon from an extruded curve, subdivided it so it had a central strand, and marked the central strand with a special vertex group. I ran the cloth simulation on that, then used Geometry Nodes to remove the verts that weren’t in the central strand and finally applied the same chain setup as before. It worked great!
The second challenge was an issue I had with the lights on the back of door 4. Originally, I was instantiating different copies of the light bulb object into place, using math to determine which should be what color, how bright it should be, and whether it was on or off. There was a strange thing happening when all the lights but the ends were off, though, and it was making the rest of the lights in the scene go brighter for a few frames here and there.
So instead of using copies of the light bulb objects, I ended up instancing just one, then passing the lighting/color data off to a material shader and handling the rest there. It was a much more elegant solution and had none of the problems of the original.
Failures
There were a few points of failure in the process of developing this animation as well, but the main one was making the video loop. I thought I might use a Portal BSDF-based material shader to replicate room 6 at the end of the animation. It worked, mostly - but had some odd issues with light not being exactly the same from one end to the other.
It also looked really weird at the looping points in VR, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. Maybe it was depth appearing differently between the end points? I don’t know. But it was odd enough that I eventually scrapped the idea and ended up replicating a few of the rooms on either end of the animation in order to make it loop correctly.
The other rough patch was just simple burnout from building all that greeble. It isn’t really a ton of actual models in there (outside of room 2) but going back and forth between the reference video and Blender, trying to make things look at least a little like what I was seeing was tough, and I took many breaks from the project as it progressed. I don’t know if I would call that a challenge or a failure, but it oftentimes felt like both.
Put on your 3D glasses for this one!
Ultimately, though, I am really happy with how this turned out and I’m glad I get to share it with other fans of the show before the new episodes arrive later this year!
