Short film: "Run Rabbit"

Artwork Animations
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Hi Blenderers! I’ve been self-learning 3D for a little over a year, but I wanted to challenge myself to create a short film from scratch - designing, modelling, grooming, rigging and animating all the characters myself.

I would LOVE to hear any feedback you have about what works, what doesn’t work, and what you think I can do to improve my skills and make my next project better.

I’ve spent the last four months on this project, and I’ve learnt so much about sculpting, grooming with the new Blender hair curves, rigging with Rigify, environment scattering, animating characters, lighting and rendering large scenes. But I know there is still so much to learn, so any feedback from the Blender community would be so appreciated and helpful :slight_smile:

Cage_still_1.2.1
Cage_still_1.2.12048×858 2.72 MB

Kit_still_1.3.2
Kit_still_1.3.22048×858 1.27 MB

Thank you and have a lovely day!

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If anyone is interested in learning more about how the film was made, please feel free to check out this behind the scenes video: https://youtu.be/x78REgQClow

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Great work @cgsophie keep it up :slight_smile: !

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This is extremely impressive for one person! The walking animations (for both the rabbits and the hunter) are a bit robotic, but since this was made by one person, I’ll let it slide. One thing that really could have helped the short be more impactful without hiring more people or learning a new tool would be to use more of those extreme close-up shots so that we can feel just as claustrophobic as the mother bunny while she was trapped in the cage, as well as feel the emotions of the character more than we could in the medium/long shots of the bunnies.

Look at the original Toy Story for reference on the importance on emotional, extreme close-up shots–obviously the rendering and animation of that 1995 CG-animated classic hasn’t aged all that great, there is no DOF blur to emphasize the characters’ emotions or how small the toys generally are, and again the facial expressions are crude and robotic. But thanks to some excellent cinematography on Pixar’s part, we were still able to feel the maximum amount of empathy and emotion in each reaction and scene WITHOUT modern CG technology like DOF or advanced facial rigs. It’s easy for someone like me, who grew up watching the first two Toy Stories in my youngest years, to forget how surprisingly low-stakes these movies can be. They are essentially about the plastic merchandise we tend to forget about and throw away once we outgrow toys, and the plots of the 4 (so far) Toy Story movies essentially boil down to just a bunch of toys trying to get back to their kid so they can be played with as much as possible–Andy in the case of the first 3 movies, and Bonnie in the case of Toy Story 4. Yet through excellent cinematography magnifying the emotion of each shot one-hundred-fold, I still find myself wiping my eyes a bit particularly in Toy Story 2 where Jessie reminisces while Sara McLoughlin sings “When She Loved Me.”

Still, this is mind-blowing stuff for what is basically a solo animation project. Do you have any tips for me, who also does solo animations but tends to opt for an easier “low-poly” style because doing realistic renders sounds like it would take too long for one person? Like, do you use Eevee to speed up renders (and if so, what post-processing effects, like AO or Bloom, would you recommend for the most Cycles-like rendering)? How do you know when to just buy a pre-made asset online and when to manually make something from scratch in Blender (or possibly Audacity in the case of sound effects)? More importantly, how do you avoid what programmers call “feature creep,” and keep the overall scale of the animation as small as possible so that you can just focus on the major characters and story?

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Hi Jeffrey, thank you so much for taking the time to watch and give me some awesome feedback! I agree that the body mechanics are a bit mechanical, and it’s something I’m keen to study more and improve on.

I’ll take on board your feedback about the emotion and claustrophobia not hitting hard enough as well. Other than that, what did you think of the story? Was everything clear to you? Did you understand enough about who the characters were? Was there anything you thought wasn’t working in terms of the script/story?

Yes, I always tear up at that scene in Toy Story 2 as well!

This was all rendered in Cycles, and it’s definitely challenging! I originally wanted to render it all on my laptop, but realised that wasn’t feasible and ended up using Garage Farm render farm. But it was a big process uploading every shot, getting it back, making tweaks etc. And it cost about $820 USD, which was really the only major expense on the project. I think doing a more “low poly” style is a sensible route for solo 3D filmmakers, but I’m unfortunately just drawn to a more photorealistic/Pixar-esque style. I don’t have much experience with Eevee so I can’t really provide much advice, but maybe I’ll explore it in the future.

With making vs buying assets, my philosophy is to create anything that is bespoke and essential to the identity of the project. In this case, the rabbits and the cage are all created from scratch as they’re the essential elements. Beyond that, I feel like if you can source it affordably then do it, otherwise I’ll make it myself. So the foliage is GeoScatter assets, the dirt scatter is made by me, the food is bought from FlippedNormals, and the hunter is a mixture (jacket modelled by me, boots and pants are bought assets, the rifle is a combination).

I fortunately didn’t really have an issue with feature creep because I was very clear on the goals of the project (two minutes, complete story, animal characters etc.) and had written the script before doing anything in Blender. I did a lot of “R&D” where I stepped through the process of creating and rigging a “test rabbit” character before starting on the actual production models, so I had some idea of what was going to be required. So I guess the answer to how to avoid feature creep is to have the script locked before starting.

Thank you again for taking the time to give me some valuable feedback. If there’s anything else that you thought, or if you have any other suggestions for areas to improve then I’d love to hear it :blush:

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What did you think of the character design? Did you think the rabbits looked ok, or was there anything about them you felt was off-putting? Very curious to hear any feedback anybody has :rabbit:

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Good work.

The anthropomorphism combined with the semi-realistic style I find a bit uncanny though.

In spite of that it is still an impressive achievement as is. Well done.

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Thank you! Do you think the uncanny feeling is coming more through the design (the humanlike eyes/brows etc.) or more through the animation being a little mechanical? Or a combination of the two?

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I understood the story and characters perfectly fine, I was just suggesting some ways to further enhance the emotions of each shot, hope I didn’t come across as TOO critical.

Rendering in Cycles sounds expensive in more ways than one, so I would recommend at least trying to get to grips with Eevee if your laptop has a GPU (any GPU, Eevee for better or worse doesn’t take advantage of the real-time Ray Tracing technology in modern GPUs until Eevee NEXT is fully finished). You could still bake the PBR textures in Cycles, then to get fairly-convincing lighting (at least superior to the very first Toy Story in 1995), you can turn on AO and then Bloom (maybe Screen Space Reflections if accurate-ish reflections are critical for the specific shot) when it’s time for the final render. Eevee is not true real-time, it still can take anywhere from a couple seconds to an entire minute to render each individual frame, but that is still cheaper and faster overall than using a render farm to render a Cycles project.

Of course, the advantage of offline renderers like Cycles is that you don’t have to fiddle around with all these settings and “fake” expensive effects like Global Illumination, the computer figures all that out for you, but I personally find optimizing Eevee renders fun sometimes and render optimization/faking expensive effects is a very useful skill to learn in 3D, so it’s up to you if you want to bother with Eevee.

I’d probably come up with some more feedback if this was a larger team project, but in my experience solo 3D animation is frankly kind of brutal, so I don’t want to be too rigid about stuff that is hard to pull off without at least one other animator helping you out. I guess just take the feedback you get here and try to apply it in a future project you make. Just make stuff and put it out there, making each animation better than the last.

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Absolutely, same to you! And I should really explore Eevee more
Thanks so much for all your amazing feedback. I was actually just quickly wondering, you mentioned the character animation was a bit robotic in your last post, which I completely agree with and I know there is big room for improvement there. In terms of the character design though (aka, semi-realistic but with the big humanlike eyes and brows etc.) how did you think that worked? Did it work for you, or did you find it a bit uncanny? Would love to your opinion and thoughts on that :rabbit:

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The humanlike eyes and eyelashes were a bit uncanny, to be honest, sorry. Perhaps you can simplify the eyes by not modeling every individual eyelash and making the eyes round instead of humanlike almond-shaped. Again, perhaps studying how eyes are done in Pixar movies may help. A lot of CG animated characters are basically simple cartoon designs and shapes with realistic fur, hair and materials on top, if you really think about it. Either that or it’s like Shrek or Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, realistically-proportioned characters animated in a cartoon-y way.

Perhaps either make the character designs super-cartoon-y (but with realistic PBR materials) or realistically-proportioned (but with cartoon-y movements). Or go full stylization like the Spider-verse movies, that’s a third option, although I’ve been told it’s better to get good at realism and the fundamentals before working on one’s unique “style.”

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To echo Jeffery: More so the human features. Rabbits have prey eye arrangement (side of head) and to see them with predator eye arrangements is a bit weird. The Watership Down creature design sticks with more realistic eye placement and that in a sense emphasizes their vulnerability (while also managing to anthropomorphize them).

So, I think maybe the uncanny valley effect comes from the design being neither stylized enough or realistic enough to allow the eye arrangement to feel ok… it is somewhere in the middle which makes it feel weird.

This may also only be my opinion and you would do well to get more feedback on this point before doing anything about it.

Good luck.

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Amazing work Sophie considering the short amount of time since you started with Blender. Your “making of” video is a must see for all aspiring 3D modellers, animators, environment creators, story writers and video producers.

As another proud Melburnian, I can’t wait to see where this takes you next :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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I featured you on BlenderNation, have a great weekend!

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Aww thank you so much, that’s very sweet of you to say :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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Thanks everyone for all your comments and critique, I really appreciate all your feedback and it’ll make my future work so much better. It’s so awesome to be a part of such a helpful and supportive community. I hope you have a lovely day :sunflower:

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I absolutely LOVED this. :sparkling_heart:
The rabbits were brilliant, and the little sounds.
And the sheer amount of emotion you put into them, and the narrative.
Serious Kudos. :+1:

Oh, and I wasnt biting my nails down to the quick… Honestly. :pleading_face:

So happy about the ending. :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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Thank you so much for watching it and I’m really glad you enjoyed it :smiling_face_with_three_hearts: :rabbit:

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Wow! I created an account just to say that I am so inspired by your work! I see a bright future for you in CG :slight_smile:

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Aww thank you! That is honestly so so sweet! And welcome to the forum :smiling_face_with_three_hearts: