Backstory
After a long stalemate on the frontline, during a routine soldier rotation, enemy forces managed to make a break with an unexpected and devastating attack. Caught in this trap, the soldier spends the last seconds of his life with a fallen comrade.
About The Project
The animation was done during my class at Animschool, where we had to find an audio clip, come up with a story around it, and create an animation. I stumbled upon a scene in a film called “Trainspotting” in which one of the characters was singing the song you hear in my shot. I got curious and started searching for the original song and what it was about, turns out it was about two boys growing up wanting to be soldiers and where it led them in the end. As someone who has constant lingering worries about what the future might hold this song resonated with me and felt like a good opportunity to express that anxiety.
Maya was used for all the character animation you see in the shot.
After that, most of the LookDev and rendering was done in blender, excluding hand-painted textures which I did in Substance Painter.
Responsible for: Idea, Layout, Animation, LookDev, Textures, Costume Retopology, FX, grooming and rigging of horse’s mane.
Class Mentor: Scott Mcwhinnie
Character Rigs provided by Animschool and Dmitrii Kolpakov.
Audio taken from the Films: Trainspotting, all quiet on the western front, and various sourced sound effects.Song Credit - John Denver - Two Little Boys & The Strangest Dream (Live 1969)
About The Workflow
Some of the interesting tricks and workflows used in this shot were painterly normals and physical brush strokes in the background powered by geonodes. Both of these techniques were popularised recently by Blender Studio and the Blender YouTube community. I wanted to try it out and see where I could go with those techniques.
Some minor rigging like horse mane and extra controllers for the uniform was done and animated in blender for extra detail and polish. Plus Extra blend shape work on the uniform to sell the contact and interaction of the 2 characters.
Explosion FX was done in Embergen and exported as VDB.
Stills Gallery
some interactive breakdowns
the background was painted with grease pencil
Breakdown & BTS of the shot