Blender Film: The Story of Ven (Discontinued)

Replacement Project: Animals of War: Project Menagerie (Season 1)

Latest Update: (July 14, 2019)

Scroll to the bottom of the thread for the latest work and updates!

This project used to be a fan fiction of the Movie G-force, named The Story of Ven. Have a book written and everything. Recently this grew into an original but you can read the original idea below.

BELOW IS THE OLD THREAD STARTER
(Dec 2016) Okay everyone, if your reading this thread, be prepared as I essentially give you my life story. Or at least with blender, kinda. This is a film project that’s currently in the concept stage, but has been planned out since 2013. This is a prequel and a sequel to the film G-force that came out in 2009. Now okay, a fan fiction? I mean so many people have made good fan fictions of so many things and g-force was no exception. I wanted to take it a step further, pushing a fan fiction into a film. This is the tricky part, how do I know if I can do this G-force style film if the characters are copyrighted from Disney? Am I even capable of doing this? Will Disney sue me? I obviously cant make money with it… Well, first off, I had NEVER intended to make money off of this, or for any of it. Heck, I’ve already spent hundreds of dollars on things I know I’m going need to just make it. I’ve bought a ton of audio equipment including a condenser microphone and a upright piano to score the film.(Ironically, the piano was cheaper than the microphone:)).

Why? It’s more of me being persistent and stubborn. I don’t care about monetary value, all I care about is making a film that everyone can enjoy, and making characters that people remember and love. Or in my case, I love taking existing characters that have little or no background information and exposing the audience to it.

Second, I’m actually not too sure about using the original characters in general. In fact, in my story, the main characters from G-force are rarely in the film. With the exception of Darwin, all the other characters are in like one scene. My film spreads out to a village of guinea pigs far east of where G-force is located, this is where my main character lives. Besides the point, because this film is going to be created with no monetary incentive I wonder if Disney will allow it. I mean if fanfictions are allowed, why not an animated fanfiction? This is my current thought with that.

Back to the project and a little history about myself.
I was born in a place called the abyss, to a pack of gerbils, and I was told that my meaning in life is corgis. And Guinea Pigs. lol
Actually when I was young, my mom would get these 101 Dalmatian stuffed animals, along with other animals, and I always found those toys my fallback to when I needed a friend. Since I had a hard time making friends in elementary school, I would just go home, get my stuffed animals and start role playing with them. Usually it was something Dragon Ball Z related, like my stuffed animals could go super saiyan… erm, super dog, and super dog 2. It got me extremely attached to my stuffed animals, each of them had a specific history, and a lovable character. That’s where I got my love for animal characters, as well as watching a lot of Disney cartoons. As I grew up, I got my first taste in CG when I saw the Garfield movie back in 2004. Of course, I fell in love with the character because he’s an animal character and it was relatable to me thanks to my toys. But things really didn’t get serious until I saw Alvin and the Chipmunks 2 in theatre back in 2009. After watching that film, I think my life changed in regards to 3d animation and characters. I remember being amazed looking at the fur and how real it looked, I focused on the characters WAY more than the plot, specifically Theodore. I guess his cuteness and softness in personality got me hooked. His character was posted all in my life, it was my background picture on my phone, the computer, and sometimes I would dedicate a song I heard to him, or just write one about him. I even made my nickname Theo so people would know that I love that character. I was a freshman in high school at the time, and being a teenager, I wanted more. I went on the internet and searched on things about Theodore and I came up to a website called fanfiction.net. Holy crap! I was in disbelief that people wrote stories about there favorite characters and posted them on the internet. My favorite one was a like a pg-13 story about Alvin getting kidnapped and was put in this dark prison with another chipmunk that was pregnant. They escaped and the mother gave birth to the kids, but sadly died. So, Alvin took the kids and raised them as his own. These dark stories were always the best ones and it was my inspiration for making good characters. Later on until 2011 I saw another film that changed my life, G-force.


When I first saw the film, it was on the Disney channel being played on the TV. I only saw the last 30 minutes of the film and thought to myself, “Military Guinea Pigs? wut…” I mean its actually a pretty cool idea, and I rarely see anything military related involving animal characters. I went ahead and bought G-force on Blu-ray and was mind-blown about the CG and effects. Although I was a little disappointed about the plot, the film itself was considered a meh film. Me though, I didn’t care. I saw animal characters, I saw military, and being a teenager, violence was what I liked in stories. Well, being a pg Disney film, the violence was rarely there. I thought to myself, has anyone attempted a cg film like G-force that was rated R for violence like Black Hawk Down or a lot of military films. So I took action and started researching what programs were used for film making, the first thing I came to was Autodesk Maya, and I found out that G-force was made on it, so I got a student license and attempted to learn maya. I did I think 2 weeks of research on how the fur was made on g-force, as well on how they made the film. As I started modeling on maya, I was getting confused on the shortcuts and there was little info and tutorials at the time, so I accepted fate, and gave up. At the time I just accepted the fact that violence in animal character films were non-existent, at least in a modern society. When 2013 came I graduated high school and was forced to face life and lived it pretty horribly. Long story short (with the exception of this giant post) I made bad decisions and was forced to live with my stepfather again. I built myself from the ground up and got a job, from then I had little free time to write anything and was focused on life and bills rather than fanfictions. Well, me and my stepfather both lost our jobs and was forced to live with his mother. I managed to get a part-time job at a pizza place, and being part-time, I had free time again! yay! One night, I randomly thought, what if Darwin from G-force had a twin brother, and he was evil? I literally spent the whole night thinking out the plot, how it would end, who dies and lives, so on so forth. A few days later, after input from people at work and changes (major changes) to the story, I had a initial plot planned. The plot was good enough to be movie I was told, and that was my inspiration to get back into CG. After my failure with maya, I started searching for 3d programs to make films. I came up to a program called Blender.

Now, BLENDER! yea! This was my solution to what I needed. It was completely free, capable of everything I wanted to do, and had great support, artists and community. I started immediately with Cgcookie’s Introduction to Hard Surface Modeling and got a citizen membership. For some reason I stopped participating in the tutorials and just started watching tutorials just to learn. Also partly, I couldn’t do anything serious with the Dual Core laptop my stepfather had. I was in need to get a better computer. During this time of bulking money for a computer, I wrote my entire story and 3 more books (which will be explained later). Btw, that evil Darwin’s brother turned out to the protagonist of the story and he isn’t evil anymore. I also created an entire village of guinea pigs, about 40 pigs! After about a year, I gathered about 2500$ and built my computer as it is now.

I finally can start blender properly, after re-watching the tutorials, I felt confident to create my first Guinea Pig character, this is what I got.


<-lol its pretty bad

At the time though I thought it was good. I was trying to base it off of Darwin, since the protagonist is his twin brother. It was a complete failure, I don’t know why I considered that good. After getting little to no feed back about it, I was once again at the point of giving up, and I did… of course. This time I stopped for two reasons, one was for the crappy result. The other is because I had enlisted in the military. I had to go to BMT (Basic Military Training), then tech school, and finally got stationed up here in Anchorage, Elmendorf AFB. Now that my job was stable, and I still had free-time off-duty, I rededicated myself to the project. This time it was going to be done right!

Part 1 of 2

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Part 2 of 2

Storytime! Now seems a time to tell you guys about the project strictly. I will explain the plot and characters and plans for it. If you read that mess above, I applaud you and thank you for the time! seriously… this is like a dream project for me and if it gets completed, I… I wont even know what to do with myself other than continuing to make more stories. Trust me Im filled with ideas.


G-force: The Story Of Ven

This is the prequel and sorta the sequal to G-force. The story is about a guinea pig named Ven. the brother of the G-force leader, Darwin. The story shows the history of Darwin’s family from the beginnings and their side of the story. Ven is more dominant twin of Darwin, they look the same, but Ven is just a little bigger. This story requires you to at least know the basic plot from the first film. If you didn’t watch the first film, I can explain it in its most basic sense, or watch it lol. The first films plot is the paragraph below.
G-force is about three guinea pigs that trained their whole life to be part of the FBI.


The characters are left to right, Darwin (the leader), Blaster (Weapons Specialist), and Juarez (Latina MMA fighter). Although this is old Juarez, they changed her to a silver guinea pig

There is also a mole named Speckles (Information Tech Specialist). Well to prove to the FBI that they were useful, they had to be successful out in the field. So they took on a case about a guy named Saber, who is a the founder of a leading appliance manufacturer (kinda like GE). Apparently Saber was planting a chip in each individual appliance that were supposed to “communicate” to one another for improvement of life. Well in reality, these chips actually make the appliances transform into killing machines and murder everything around them. This is called Operation Clusterstorm. Well in short, g-force infiltrated sabers mansion and got info from his computer to expose him. The mission ended up to be a failure and the FBI shuts down G-force. They attempt to take the guinea pigs but G-force escaped getting into a van named Elliot’s Pet Shop. They take this van to the actual pet shop named Elia’s Pet’s Shop. They were put into a terrarium for sale. Inside this terrarium their was another guinea pig named Hurley in the tank. Juarez and Blaster got purchased and Speckles pretended to die. It was just Darwin and Hurley left. Well later on when night falls, Hurley claims to be Darwin’s brother because they have a birthmark in the same spot. Darwin refuses to accept this and escapes the terrarium dedicated to prove that Saber is evil. Hurley tags along. Later on everyone meets up back at Ben’s House (Ben is the scientist that brought up and trained G-force). When night fell again, G-force re-geared themselves up and attempted to stop Saber from activating Clusterstorm, but they’re too late. Clusterstorm was activated and machines were killing everything and everyone. G-force eventually deactivated it, defeating the bad guy and saved the world. Then they become official FBI agents and this is the ending.

OK, now these points I want you guys to remember that I highlighted in there,

  1. There are chips in all Saber appliances that make them transform into killing machines. This is crucial to knowing why they transform in the first place

  2. Clusterstorm was activated for about 30 minutes worldwide.

  3. Elia’s pet shop - This is the pet shop that G-force went to after they escaped the hands of the FBI. They also have a van that delivers supplies to the G-force HQ.

4. Hurley IS Darwin’s Brother - Not only because they have the same birthmark… Later in the Film, Ben tells Darwin that he was purchased at a pet shop, and his parents abandoned him because he was the runt of the family.

Those are the 4 points I want you guys to know. Why? Well remember how Ben told Darwin he was purchased from a pet shop? I asked myself, which pet shop? Elia’s Pet Shop! Darwin was purchased from Elia’s Pet Shop! That would also explain why Hurley is his brother. Hurley is the same age as Darwin, and they have that same birthmark. So Darwin must have been purchased when he was really young, and left Hurley there. Poor Hurley was in that tank for most of his life! So wait! If Darwin and Hurley are brothers and were born in the same tank, where are his parents!? Well he was told that he was the runt of the family. Ok well typically guinea pigs have 3-4 babies per litter. So there must be more than just Darwin and Hurley…


Now enter MY STORY!! FINALLY!

My film introduces and shows the other side of the story, you get to see Darwin’s lost mother and father, and other brother and sister. Ok so the mother (Elliot) and father (Marlen) have four babies. Darwin, Hurley, and two new characters, Ven and Lillie. Ven is Darwin’s twin brother, except the more dominant version. Ven is the main character in my film. Lillie was the only girl out the litter. Poor girl…

So there ya go, hopefully you guys understand all that. Heck I think I’ve spent like 5 hours typing this already. You see I’m pretty persistent. But now you understand enough to where I can explain the plot to my story. I’m not going to post the whole story, I will put a link for the fanfiction and you can read the whole thing there. BUT I will post a few Chapter Summaries to get you interested hopefully! Thanks again for reading this and I WILL continue this project and give updates as I work on them. Also I realize I can only post 3 images at a time. If you don’t know what Hurley looks like, google is your friend.

There is a total of 23 chapters in the book, below is the link to the fanfiction website. After this book is over, there are three other books that continue the story of Ven.
I’m also working on a fanfiction about Finnick from Zootopia (of course Zootopia… animals… yea…) and his history and family as it was never explained in the film. That’s a work in progress for another time.

BTW all the pictures you saw where on blender taken in various resolutions. Cycles @ 256 samples. The character shown is Ven. This was the more recent attempts at his character, and this is my progress so far as of Dec 2016. (For now… His rig is in beta)

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The book is now available to read on fanfiction.net.

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12800397/1/The-Story-of-Ven

WARNING is rated M for violence and coarse language

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Well, reading all that was certainly a ride. Out of all the obscure fandoms out there to choose from, I’ve never met anybody who is a fan of G-force before. You certainly seem dedicated to your fanfic judging from the amount of paragraphs you got there and I wish you the best of luck. Fan stuff is rare on these forums, so this’ll mix things up a little.

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Yea, thanks! I’m taking leave starting tomorrow, so I will be going home away from my computer. During this time, I will be working on the actual written book, and hopefully will have am update when I get back. Thanks again for the support!

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I have returned and now in full swing on working this project, outside of work of course. I finally started animating my character and now doing a walk cycle just to test the deformations.

I started to work on a new particle system yesterday, tweaked the reflection properties and added Fresnel. I also added another layer of particles to be the outer fuzz.



I really like how it came out, and I would like for this to be my standard for future characters. Feedback always helpful!

I will post the walk cycle whenever the rendering finishes. (It’s on my laptop so I can free up resources on my main machine). I will post that when its finished

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Looks like a great start, but it is super dark. Bumping up the exposure makes a huge difference:


If you want it dark and moody, increase the contrast but keep some values high so we can see what’s going on a bit more.

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Yes I see what you mean… That’s probably why when I do some renders they have a lot of noise, haha. I actually didn’t realize how dark they were until you made that comparison. Thanks so much! I needed that feedback, also coming from you that’s a plus.

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I made a sneek peek based off the render I did a month ago just to test dynamics. It’s not really interesting, and has a very weird ending, I ran out of ideas of what to do next… (Reason’s why you storyboard before animating!! IMPORTANT!!)

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I made my second character a few weeks ago, his name is Alexei. He is the second main protagonist in the story.



He is based off of Juarez’s original design on the first G-force. According to Hoyt Yeatman, director of G-force, Juarez was originally a brown agouti guinea pig then later turned into a silver agouti.


I decided to take the original design of her character and make it into my own character, thus here he is! Coming up next, the village were the guinea pigs live. I already have the scaling correct and the floor plans, just need to actually make it.

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Here is the main character’s house in the works,




Yes, he lives in a house. In the story, the breeder who breeds these guinea pigs has a hobby of crafting homes of smaller scale. Once she’s done building them, she puts them in her backyard for the guinea pigs to use. They look like normal sized homes, but they are actually only about 4 feet wide and long.

The village is populated with these homes about 10-15 of them, here is what the village might look like visualized in opengl



The houses without roofs are the houses my characters live in. If you’ve read my chapter summaries above you can probably find Alexei’s home.

That’s it for now, I will post again on the next update, probably when I have the home furnished. Any ideas of what would be in a guinea pigs home? I would love to hear what you guys have to say!

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Usually I’m skeptical about big animation projects like this being made by one person, but the quality of the work here seems to hint that you have the skill needed to pull it off (same with the dedication, this is the first time I’ve heard of a fandom surrounding G-Force).

How long have you been working in 3D?

Maybe a bit off-topic, but given how you like G-force, I’m wondering if you’ve heard of this animated series…

It’s entertaining how Japanese animators take on concepts like “Animals doing military stuff” and take it to another level. :stuck_out_tongue:

Also it’s cool seeing the work on your Blender project, it’s really nicely done.

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The quality of work is superb. To deal with fur with the animation, I have get more processing power to handle it all!

I’ve been using blender on and off now for 4 years, and really didn’t start learning until about a year and a half ago.

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I have actually seen it! That animation short was one of the many inspirations to continue the project. I study it to see what I could improve on.

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I got tired of looking at Ven with his old hair model in the beginning of the thread. So I re-rendered the pose with his new model, and with less noise… That’s all!



Btw, I always love feedback!

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The before picture showed more of his eyes. Actually liked that version better.

I suppose I did lower his eyebrow a little much. That and the gun position change were the only two differences between the pose. I wanted to re-try the render to see if I could make it better, but I guess you can’t beat the original :slight_smile:

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Hey everyone! These past two months I’ve been working on the homes for the village. I pretty much finished all of the guinea pig homes. All I need now is the breeder’s home and the surrounding neighborhood. Show and tell time!!

P.S I still need furniture for these homes as they are extremely barren. Still trying to find ideas of what to put in a 3 foot home…

Here is Ven’s home re-done. He lives in a house for 4 guinea pigs. 3 bedrooms and a up-stair indoor balcony, fancy.


This is Alexei’s home, it’s secluded from the rest of the village but was built by Alexei himself. The house itself kept the same core design, but different wood was used. He also built a front porch so he could sit in his (soon to be) chair and uhh… drink, or whatever Russian guinea pigs do.


This is Tibbett’s home. He and his family of five live in this giant two story house. This was the first home ever built in the village and has been housing the original guinea pig family for generations. It is the only home that features a spiral staircase and has a step-down with fancy wood.


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