This is a prject I did a while back, mainly to test Cycle’s capability for serious animation rendering. The results are not perfect, but I’m quite happy! I also modeled, textured and rigged the characters myself using only Blender 2.91. You can also check out this project in my Artstation, but I also wanted it to be showcased here! 
My Artstation: https://artstation.com/homspau
This is amazing!
Is there any animation demo that could be seen?
How do you rig characters? Do you use Blenrig, create everything yourself or some other approach?
Do you recommend some tutorials for character creation?
Great job, good luck!
Thanks, mate!
In regards to the animation, the scene (everything before lighting) was taken from a failed project of mine, a very short short film involving this characters. So yes, this was animated. The thing is, at the time I got tired after animating 30 shots hahahaha. Looking back the animation felt rushed and I wasn’t motivated to animate the shot again so decided to focus on having a nice still.
For the rigs… I have to admit I’m very on the “quick and dirty” side of things and made those rigs only for myself and they aren’t anything fancy. And no, I didn’t use any addons. Only working directly with bones, parents, constraints, bendy bones, custom viewport display… Honestly I did what worked for me after a lot of trial and error.
About tutorials, I feel I’m not the appropriate person for you to ask about that, since it’s very likely that I’m doing everything wrong.
Thanks again for your support, it means a lot!
However you got there, it looks really good.
LOL, I know that feeling when you work for such a long time on something, and you are aware of many imperfections that could be better.
But, speaking as somebody who loves animation and who has seen a lot of animated movies, that screenshot you put here looks very professional and you definitely shouldn’t be too hard on yourself.
Btw, check Blenrig, it’s Blender’s rigging system that is included in Blender and although it’s a bit complicated to learn it, I believe that it makes your life much easier in the long term.
Good luck! 
Nice… maybe only hair are ( especially blue dude ),so perfect. Henson’s puppets usually have much more wild hair.
I featured you on BlenderNation, have a great weekend!
Thanks a lot!
I really like the way you managed to get the felt look to be so convincing. I really like the green hands for example. I’m recreating Statler and Waldorf and getting the skin to look good is prety difficult.
Overall a very nice piect of work!
Thanks, mate!
That. Is. Amazing. Perdiod.
Wow! Thanks a lot!
I agree with the foregoing – this is very nice indeed.
Since “doing the actual renders for a movie” seems to be a sticking-point (with Cycles), I wonder what EEVEE could do (much faster)? It might be worth exploring that angle so that the film could be completed. This “still” looks extremely tight and professional … EEVEE’s rendering would of course look different and might not have quite the same subtlety, but it would probably get the job done in a more-reasonable amount of time.
the lighting is exquisite! Just some area lights / ies light for lamp?
For those, like I, who aren’t familiar with the Q.
Rod is the blue one.
Indeed! A super crazy musical which is defnatelly worth the listen!
Thanks! I’m soty to say, though, That it isn’t simply one light. I used arround a dozen spot and area lights to get the thing to look good. But the setup is quite simple, a light group for the lamp t act as my key light, another group to emilate the blueish tones from a window as my fill light and a top light to tie the whole thing together.
I’m definitely exploring in depth how to make decent looking lighting in Eevee, as long as how to comp it so that it looks realistic (or not necessarily realistic, but in terms of light transportation fidelity). This scene had a major issue though: the hair. I find rendering hair in Eevee a pain due to the absence of a decent equivalent to the “Principled Hair BSDF”. For other works I add a Translucent BSDF with a Principled BSDF but the results aren’t comparable in a scene where hair has such an importance. Still interested though!
You can watch a case where I hot to render something decent with Eevee in the first animation of my reel:
Hey Pau,
Really nice project. I like the fixes you made on the final comp, but I also love the warm and brighter lights of the original render. Anyway very high quality result.
I particularly like the fur of their skin
I suffered (then failed) when I tried to create short hair which flattens on the surface a bit and still looks dense.
What was your setup, how did you do it?
