Just started a new Blender course from CGCookie called HUMAN. I'll post some updates along the way as I learn to sculpt the human face. Here's what I've got so far.

Defined the nose.

Added detail to the eyes and brow.

Took a couples weeks and made this backrooms animation just for fun. It’s a little goofy but I learned a lot. https://youtu.be/O7zVqLpBn5E

Globalt:

Messed around with a sword I sculpted and a painterly effect. This is the result.

To commemorate our first DnD session last week, I made this artwork.

My Hobbit barbarian casually elbowed the dwarf who was carrying a bound goblin looking for his friend Scortch (sic). Well, he ended up finding his friend… at the bottom of a deep, dark pit…

I’d call it true neutral, c’mon, it’s just a goblin!

Any feedback is welcome.

All done in Blender.

Hey gang. I decided to try and animate our sessions, and I made this first intro to test things out. I had some musical help from Nathan's killer talent. Let me know what you think:

@wanderingwolf Cool animation, though I do not believe the uninitiated realizes how long it takes to make such a simple animation. Not only the actual animation part, but the time it takes to render the images. More intensive images can take hours to render, especially if you have a lower end computer.

Mind telling me your computer's specs? If you're a fan of the low poly style, you might find some value switching from cycles rendering to evee, (if you haven't already) which I find is MUCH faster and doesn't harm NPR content. Then you could get some free frames if you wanted to use the frames you animated yourself as "key" frames and had blender generate a few in between frames. It would do a lot to make your animation look less like a slide show. If you had access to some 2d tools you could also edit the mouth after the fact, but that's extra and not something I'd consider necessary.

@BrokenPromiseThank you for your kind words. Yeah, creating assets, rigging them, animating them, then rendering and adding sound effects, etc. can definitely amount to a herculean feat. Thankfully, for this animation, I went with eevee, so I didn't have to wait long for these 400~ frames to render.

My computer specs are thus!
CPU: i5-9600k
GPU1: AMD RX 6700 XT
GPU2: NVIDIA GTX Titan X (2016 card, but works for the Optix denoising and offloading rendering)
RAM: 32 GB
VRAM: 24 GB (both cards added together)

I actually used the method you're describing above where you render only key frames, then add them back into Blender and space them out to re-render the middle frames, but I did this for the mouth animation and decided against using it, in the end. It was just simpler to my process to render the in-between frames because I wanted animation to be going on in the background, too.

This animation took me about 3 weeks of work between getting the intro set, the characters modeled/animated, the sound, etc. It could have taken longer, now that I think about it.

Do you have any projects you wouldn't mind sharing with me from your previous work? I'm curious what you're using Blender for.

Been messing around with some Pixar Cars stuff because my nephew just turned 5 and I wanted to wish him a happy birthday! (he loves Cars, btw)

Animation is nowhere near done, but here’s a still from a bit ago:



And here’s a basic animation test with a rig.

@wanderingwolf The mouth is probably the one feature I would solely animate with key frames. I'm not sure if you've watched "Chicken Run," but it's a claymation movie and thus works with stop motion. The mouths of the chickens were animated in an interesting way. They would have several beaks made up for every possible sound they could make and then just swapped them out when the frame called for it. The blender equivalent of this would be setting "shape keys" for your characters mouth and selecting the right one for the right frame. Upfront time investment would be high, but would make animating the character's mouth easier down the road. Though it doesn't seem like smooth animation is your goal here, which is fine. I would be quite happy if my tabletop group did something like this.

As for what I've been working on, none of it is very impressive. I dabble in blender and it's mostly to do still images or high-poly models. I use blender to make changes to models I want to print and occasionally do tutorials. The closest thing I have to an animation is a pot of boiling water, and I don't even know if I have that on my computer anymore. I have been meaning to get back into it, maybe I'll show you something one day. I really just know a bit more than a casual observer when it comes to making films in blender.

@BrokenPromise I have seen "Chicken Run," yes, and that's an interesting way to do it. Thankfully, I'm just going for mouth and eye cards with this for simplicity. Maybe down the road, if I find better solutions, then I might make a big change. I'm excited to start using the NLA editor to create and blend looping animations so that should hopefully make things simpler when animating.

I'm interested to hear more about your creative work, in Blender, or out of. Do you share your creations anywhere online?

Mouth/eye cards? I don't think I know what those are.

I do not post any of my blender projects online for various reasons. As for my non-blender work, you can see almost everything I've written in the past six years by looking back through my posts.

@BrokenPromise Think of mouth cards exactly like your Chicken Run expressions. I've drawn a few mouth shapes for vowels, and I swap out the 'cards' on key frames to make it look like the character is talking, or looking a different direction. That's what I mean by mouth or eye cards. They're drawn eyes or mouths that I swap in between in order to match the voice acting.

Thanks for the tip, and I'm interested to read some of your writing. And let me know if you are interested in sharing some of your 3D or 2D art.

Working on a walk cycle. First time I've used the action editor, and hope to learn more about the NLA.



Youtube turned it into a short so it won't embed here for some reason...

youtube.com/shorts/cRUko--akK8?featur…

Finally completed the walk cycles for these guys, now on to idle animations and actually getting through an episode:

I made this image for a Blender Artists competition last week. I didn’t win, so I took some more time to play with composition and coloring on this image. I’ve never used Blender’s real time compositor before, so this was a fun experiment.

I’m learning how to use Blender’s grease pencil and this is the first result. I’m beginning work with a friend on a cute mouse knight game, and I traced and cleaned up this as a first pass to imagine the character.