Introducing the Terrycloth Tiger singing “Oops! I just ate myself!”
This is an animation I made for one of my YouTube channels. It was based on a weird idea I had for a song a few months back.
To date, it’s one of my most Blender-heavy projects. Very little Flash went into it, with the only major exceptions being the outro splash and some occasional test compositing.
I wanted to try to do as much of the animation and actual compositing in Blender as possible this time.
Big Things Learned on this Project
- The Vector Blur (motion blur) for the fur came out not according to expectations. To compensate, I exported two OpenEXR Multilayer image sequences, one WITH FUR and one WITHOUT FUR. I then used the Depth and Vector Passes of the one WITHOUT FUR to feed into the Vector Blur node of the one WITH FUR.
- I quickly realized the foliage would take WAAAAAAY too long to render unless I were to use the pseudo-shading trick with “Emission Shaders” and the “Dot Product”, but I was concerned about the lack of ACTUAL shadows from overlapping leaves. So, I created a separate packed PNG of a fake shadow and, depending upon distance along a certain axis, adjusted the prominence of the pseudo-shadow.
(That way, foliage in the back could appear as though it had shadows from leaves in the front, even though we’re using only emission shaders.)
- The “Particle Index” for Hair Objects, which I wanted to use to vary color, seemed to give an inconsistent value when the parent object moved. A good workaround seems to be going into “Advanced” settings, unchecking “Random” and “Even Distribution”, zeroing out the “Jittering Amount”, and manually using the “Particles/Face” field.
Anyway, I had a lot of fun making this very weird animation 
Any feedback (even highly critical feedback) is appreciated! Peace and God bless!
