This is my final blog post concerning my major project called Stillness Bleeds.

This project is a 3D animated short animated in blender with final touches added in DaVinci Resolve.

Initial Story Concepts

Initially I was struggling with what I wanted my prroject to be about. I knew my medium and had a bit of an idea of an artstyle, but I had no idea on what I wanted my story to be. Eventually i decided on a setting of martial arts, to show some more complex animation and a cool artstyle. At the time I was quite invested in reading online comics such as ‘Nano Machine’ which played into the Korean/Chinese concept of Murim, a land of martial artists with named clans which span multiple stories throughout the decades. This helped me come up with a semblance of what I wanted my project to be.

The story I settled on follows. The story will follow a martial artist, Violet, who was abandoned at a site of training by her master. She is overcome with fear and anxiety at being abandoned. These fears take a physical form in a shadow version of Violet, who has to confront herself in battle before reaching an enlightenment.

In the end, the project’s final story definitely strayed from this. I kept the initial roots, but due to my time constraints, extension and the issues I had to solve with my project; it ended up being simplified to a more streamlined fight scene – taking out the unnecessary story parts to make it more of a non-narrative piece.

Character concepts and design

I definitely had a bit of a struggle coming up with the character concepts as I had been extremely out of practice with my drawing as I had been neglecting it quite a bit. To get some inspiration I just added some key buzzwords such as martial artist. I already wanted my character to be somewhat gender neutral as a way to put a bit of my personal self into this project.

After some initial sketches I had settled on a design. This can be shown below.

I had played around a lot with the hair as it was the one part I was unsure of. Whether to settle with a certain hairstyle or to have a hat of some form, eventually settling on the style shown above.

The colour scheme i settled on was initially typical of shadow and normal characters, but in the end I eventually incorporated the purple into the main character, to match the name Violet, and switched to a red and grey scheme for the villian, to show a more demonic look.

ArtStyle

I had a very clear idea of what I wanted my artsyle to look like from the beginning. I wanted to emulate the painterly effects seen in Arcane, Spiderverse and Mitchell Vs. The Machines. I knew this would be a tall order to complete, as I am aware that most of these effects are done by hand.

Through experimentation I found a way to somewhat create this effect with normal maps and a procedural texture created in Substance Designer. This was made possible by using premade brush strokes and making them flow along the normal maps, with some variation. Importing this into Substance Painter means all I had to do was connect the normal maps and strokes, with some blurring as the top layer to create this effect. This, combined with some voroni textures in Blender allowed for this effect to be somewhat close to what I desired. It is not perfect, and could look a lot better, but it ended up looking prety cool in my opinion.

Pre Production

The preproduction step was relatively simple as I finally had an idea of what I wanted to create. The only tough part was coming up with the composition of my shots.

Working through my storyboards, it started slowly and eventually I got into the groove of the work. As I was quite rusty with my drawing, the storyboards where very, very rough and sketchy. This was fine, as it served its purpose for me. These storyboards are shown below.

After the storyboards, I went on to creating a Previs for my project. This is just a simplified version of the project with minimal movement and is more focused on the timing and composition of my 3D shots.

The previs took a while to complete as I went through multiple iterations over at least 2 months. I was always working on the previs to improve the readability of the story.

Unfortunately, while I eventually reached a point which I was happy with, a lot of the content was cut due to time and streamlining the piece to a more non-narrative, fight-oriented piece.

Modelling

I completed my modelling in Zbrush, it was my first time using it for such a complex model, but I made my way through to make it work. Henry had provided me with a female base mesh to help me with the progres and save me time which I was very thankful for. I edited this mesh to create the wanted body, making it more gender neutral and androgynous.

Modelling the clothes was my first hurdle I had to overcome. i was unsure of the workflow I wanted to follow, simulation or just modelling. I ended up just modelling them as it would be much less taxing for my computer.

After modelling the clothes, much later on during rigging, I ran into a lot of issues that I needed help with to solve – specifically with skinning but i’ll touch more on this later.

UV mapping ended up being much more simple in Zbrush than I first though, as the ZRemesher was pretty good for quick retopology, although not the best so some manual work was done in blender to help fix issues.

Ultimately the final model I ended up with is shown below.

I was quite pleased with how this turned out. In the end, I decided to remove the cloak as well as the belt as they kept causing unnecessary issues with deformation later on. This model was the same for the enemy, as it was an attempt to reflect theirself.

As well as the character I modelled a sword model as well. I took inspiration from Chinese Dao swords, which are one-handed swords with a larger curved edge and a straight back. It is a single side blade compared to western double edged blades.

Luckily, there is a lot of images to use for inspiration as there is an abundance of examples of different designs through history.

Creating the sword was relatively simple, as it wa something I had experience in creating before, using simple planes and primitive shapes with bevels to smooth it out. This also allowed for simple UV mapping. The sword model is shown below.

Texturing

This was where things started to come together for me and I was able to properly see some progress. With the smart material I created earlier during my tests, texturing was a quick breeze.

The main issue I had with texturing was only near the end when I had to revise some textures. As I had issues with my rig and skinning, after receiving help from the lecturers, I ended up having some significant changes to the mesh and therefore the UV maps. This was resolved easily and I eventually had the revised textures for the final animation. These are shown below, for both the characters and sword.

The process of texturing was near identical for all the models as it was just an iterative routine to match the style. Where in these images the colours seem flat, that is just within the Blender viewport and they look better within the final render.

Rigging

Oh rigging, my one true enemy I have never been able to get my head fully around. This is where I ran into the majority of issues within this project. It required the help of multiple of my lecturers to fix. Initially I used the Blender plugin AutoRigPro which created the rig quite simply. The initial rig was looking fine as it was created looking fine. But when it came to skinning the rig, even through multiple tries no matter what I did it would never go right. There was either crackling distortion or huge bulging displacements within the mesh. Even when going through manually with the weightpainting I could never do get the model to move as I wish.

This created a huge mental block for me. It was tough trying to get something to work for two hours it would just keep me from doing work for weeks because of the dread, it terrified me. This wasn’t helped as I had personal circumastances happen as I was nearing the ending of this project, requiring me to get an extension.

Eventually after weeks of repeated attempts and then being unable to even touch this project for weeks, I resigned and went to Alec as my last resort as I could not fix it myself. Alec came through and fixed the issues with my rig and sent it back to me. This finally allowed me to make a start on the animation which I was happy to get to as I enjoy the animation and find it relatively simple to complete.

Granted, with all my issues with rigging, after everything was fixed, I managed to add to the rig without completely breaking it to pieces (to my surprise). I added shape keys for eye blinks as and added controller bones linked to a driver successfully. On top of this I added drivers with controls to manipulate child of constraints so the sword would follow the hand bones and allow it to be disconnected and attached to a separte bone to hide it from view. I was quite proud of this as it meant I had progressed, albeit a small bit, with my rigging skills.

If this project taught me anything, it’s that I must really work on my rigging skills and put more time into understanding it. I think it will help me for future personal projects as I would love to be able to finally get my head around this. I really must put more time into this but it is so technical it drives me away.

Environment Assets

Instead of creating my own assets, which I saw as a bit too much for me to do this project by myself, I downloaded a creative commons asset pack which fitted within my style. This saved me much valued time and meant that all I had to do at the end was populate my scene and slap on the textures.

The assets I created myself were an animated toon-style river as well as just a basic sculpted earth. I will touch more on these later as I played around a lot with the shader nodes with them.

Animation

Finally to the part I really enjoy, the animation. I was excited to finally take a stab at animation this piece.

Before starting the animation I wanted to do a tiny bit of research into the workflow I wanted to follow. I was accustomed to pose to pose animation, as it is in my opinion the most efficient way for me to animate well.

in the past I used this technique with the default blender animation settings, adding major poses and then adding inbetweens to the parts I needed to fix as I went along. This worked okay in the past but by looking through some videos online, I found a way to streamline this. By setting the default extrapolation type to Constant, it means when playing the animation it would just jump to the poses, isntead of the computer calculating the inbetweens everytime. This gave me much more precise control over the inbetween poses and allowed me to add a lot more poses before doing a final pass through the animation to fix any issues or weird movements calculated by the computer.

After animation the key poses and most of the inbetweens while it was constant, I then went into the graph editor to change it to bezier extrapolation and then changed the interpolation to ease in and out. Finally, I went back over as a final pass to make the animation look much more to my desired effect.

This new ‘reform’ of sorts allowed me to do the animation much faster and I am glad it is now within my skillset and workflow and I will make much use of it in the future for projects.

It took me a few weeks to finish the animation, but I was relatively happy with the progress and final product. I actually quite enjoyed this part, as I was able to learn more and actually have fun with this. It was a lot less stressful than the rest of the project as I ran into very little problems and was able to just breeze through it, which was a MUCH needed break within the duration of the project.

I feel like I really did improve in my animation skills with this project. It gave me a deeper understanding of animation and I also got to explore more with taking my own reference videos, for example. This has been amazing progress in my personal skills that I will not forget.

Shaders

One of the final steps for me was slapping on all my textures and creating some shaders.

Through this project I found my new favourite part of Blender, the Voroni texture! Seriously, I used it everywhere. combined with a bit of noise and colour ramps really helped me get closer to the artstyle that I wanted.

Honestly, even though they are very technical I actually had fun playing around with the shader nodes. I spent a lot of time playing around with them for the environment. I created a sky/barrier plane at the edge of my scene to create a somewhat fake sky. This was relatively simple but it did stick out quite a bit in the scene.

Following through with this, I wanted some way to mask it, hide it slightly from sight behind the trees more effectively. To do this I played around with volume nodes. Using this, a cube and some voroni and noise, I created a simple fog. This was the first time I had done it so I looked at a few quick videos online and improvised my own version from there. I also animated the location as well as the seed to create the effect of movement and randomness. It ended up turning out relatively well.

Another thing I used the nodes for was to create a water texture. I wanted to create an animated toon water effect just using a plane. This ended up, as well, being relatively simple with just a mixture of texture nodes, and a bunch of colour ramps and math nodes. At first when I animated it, the animation was flying by WAY too fast, and finding the right axis to animate on effectively kind of melted my brain a bit. With just a bit of tweaking, it turned out quite all right in the end.

Finally, to top it all off, I decided to experiment with smear frames. I had never used them in 3D before but the principle is the same as 2D. The method I settled on was just using planes, and as I had no experience in using geometry nodes I made use of surface deform and hooking empties to manipulate and animate the geometry.

Getting the smears to follow the animation was actually easy enough as I had to just keyframe them.

For the texturing, I just used the shader editor to create materials. I used, you guessed it, voroni and noise textures! This really allowed me to play around with the effects and by adding a simple animation to the texture coordinates, it made a nice swooping effect. With more time I would have really enjoyed and liked to polish them further and make it look a lot nicer.

The final bit of shaders was creating the big funnel effect for the final blow. I found another nice texture conveniently named a magic texture. This created a really cool swirling effect when animated and combined with a noise texture.

Rendering

Rendering was my biggest concern for this project as I was aware I would be pressed for time and while I do have a powerful laptop, it wouldn’t be enough, I feared. My initial plan was to render this in cycles which would have taken ages.

I considered using a render farm as well for this so I could render this in cycles at my desired look. Unfortunately I was unable to as, well, it estimated to cost around £400 which frankly I do not have enough disposable money for.

So, ultimately to my dismay I had to settle with eevee. This meant my resolution was not the best and the final film did not look exactly how I wished.

It seems like my horrific time management caught up to me once again, and as I say everytime I really need to get on top of it, it really has NOT helped my time at uni.

I do still wish to see this in cycles, therefore I plan on submitting the eevee render and doing a further render on cycles over the next few weeks to upload online for my portfolio.

Compositing and VFX

My final stage was to do some compositing and VFX. For this I chose DaVinci Resolve as honestly, my adobe license would not work. I have used this program before but mostly for simple editing and colour grading. Therefore, I had to do a bit of learning on its VFX system. It has a VFX system built in called Fusion. Compared to other programs such as After Effects, which are more layer based, Fusion is a node based engine. Due to the timing of doing my shader nodes, the workflow was relatively simple for me to follow as I already had an inkling of node based workflows.

The main reason for using the VFX was quite simply noise reduction. Due to it being rendered in eevee with a frankly low sample rate, the end product had quite a bit of video noise. With the noise reduction I went through each of the RGB channels and manually smoothed out the noise. This was also an interesting learning experience as my previous use of noise reduction has been with Red Giant plugins nearly 10 years ago. At that time they were just simple sliders, so being able to go through each of the channels was quite interesting. Ultimately it ended up a tiny bit overly smooth, although any less just looked too grainy in my eyes. As soon as I saw this though, I saw not a setback, but instead an idea. I incorporated the idea of battling oneself, but instead through the idea of a dream. This later informed my colour grading decisions.

The next step in my VFX was to create a magical defeat/disapearing act for the enemy. For this one I did use the help of videos online to help get an idea of how certain nodes work. In the end I used displacement nodes. With this I used masks to mask the area around the character and discovered some neat properties in the displacement node. I was able to distort the focal length in a way and when keyed correctly it created a nice implosion effect. Using the same technique, but with different shped masks, I was able to create a shockwave with chromatic abberation, which was pretty cool in my eyes. The final touches of this disapearance was a good old fashioned noise texture built into the mask and a neat little effect called edge glow which found dark edges and made them glow around the character disappearing. Oh and don’t forget a little bit of camera shake and a vignette.

Another final bit of VFX was just a bit of a glow around the final blast/cone. This was, quite honestly a bit tedious as I had to keyframe a mask by hand moving with the animation as I was not confident enough in using the tracking system in Resolve.

To be completely honest, while I am happy with the result, I have never used Resolves VFX engine before so I do think the VFX look a tiny bit cheesy. If I had more time to work in After Effects and more time to polish it I do think I would have a better result as I have experience in using that program.

Colour Grading

I do think that although the VFX engine is a bit too complex and lackluster compared to other programs, Resolve’s colour grading is pretty top notch for a free program. There are many options and a whole lot of channels to choose from within it.

As I mentioned earlier I had the idea to turn this into a dreamlike sequence  in the end, as it turned out a bit smooth. Due to this, I focused my colour grading on purples, blues and greens to create a dreamlike effect. Combining this with a vignette made a pretty nice result in my opinion. I have experience in using colour grading to create extravagant and very differing effects as in my personal life I enjoy grading my photos to post online using Lightroom. This means while I don’t necessarily fully understand the technical parts of colour grading, I have devloped a tiny bit of a feel for it over the past 2 years. This is the biggest part of Resolve that I like and it is why i recomend it to anyone who is looking for a good editing program. It helps that the controls and interface are also relatively similar to industry standards such as Premier Pro or Final Cut.

The final step was adding a bit of sound to this project. I used online royalty free sounds I found online. I did really play into the whimsical nature to inspire my selection. I decided on adding a dreamy soundtrack for the most of it and when the fight scene takes place it breaks out into a hard rock beat, before settling back down for the end. Honestly, it sort of works. Its not amazing by all means but it serves its purpose for this short piece. The only thing I had to change with the sound was just balancing the audio levels and adding a small explosion effect.

Oh and to just top it all off I found a neat little generated digital glitch effect I decided to slap on the start and end of the short, mainly just because I think it looked cool.

Conclusions

In the end, This project ended up severly deviating from the initial plan. It originally was supposed to just be a martial artist reaching enlightenment, but due to my time constraints and personal views, it evolved into a dream-like sequence where Violet has to fight an demonic version of herself.

I do think this evolution is extremely diverted I am happy with this outcome. Ultimately I like how it looks and I enjoy it when I watch it even though it does seem a bit cheesy to me but that’s just the creator’s mind talking.

I actually learnt quite a lot with this project. I was able to enhance my previous animation workflow with new techniques and I have definitely learnt my weaknesses – rigging. I do hope to reflect on this and focus some time into it so in future projects I have planned I will not fall for the same traps.

I enjoyed getting to learn parts of new programs such as Resolves VFX engine and being able to use Zbrush and even mess around with substance designer and creating smart materials.

In the future, I plan on taking a year out to learn a bit more about the world and travel, as I am still unsure what I envision my career being in the future. regardless I will take the skills I learnt in this course forward and I already have plans for a few peronal projects like some characters I would like to create for my portfolio. I also plan on creating a game over the next few years but it is still in early, early idea development. That does mean i’ll have to brush up on my programming skills which are already extremely basic so that’s going to be SCARY.

 

Self Evaluation

As per usual, I fell victim to myself on this project. I have extremely bad time management and the issues I kept running into with my rigging extremely affected my motivation. I really should have worked harder at the beginning so I would not run into this issue but i’m afraid I just burnt out.

As i’m sure you’re aware I do have mental health issues and I am relatively open about them which is why I have no issue writing about them here. This year I finally went to student wellbeing to help. Going through the system properly this time was what enabled me to get a much needed extension for this project. I honestly do not think I would have completed this on time if it were not for this. I definitely would have had to repeat the year, so for that I am extremely thankful and and also very thankful for our lecturers who are very understanding.

I do think this project gave me a much needed kick as it really put into perspective how much work I need to do on myself before thinking of going further in this field. Although I was successful in the end, I definitely know I could have done a lot better, given I had the facilities to do so. So for that reason I really intend on working on myself for this next year to get to a good state. I started this University year well and it just burnt me out. I am confident I can overcome this and be able to put the skills I have learnt to good use and also improve on them.

Overall I am happy with the result of my final project. Yes, it is not what I had initially planned and it evolved way outside my vision for it at the start of the year, I am happy that I got it done. I hope to make a few improvements and then render it in cycles to post online as I am quite pleased with the project. It really taught me a lot about how important your workflow is and I have managed to lock down some new techniques. I am excited to use my skills in the future and cannot wait to see what I create using them.

I have actually enjoyed myself with this course and I thank everyone involved for all their help and advice over the years!