Blender Assets

5.1, 7.1, 7.2

If you would like to view my semi-thorough research into different Blender techniques, please see the relevant subpage.

Foxbat

Modelling

The tedious process then began of modelling this creature. I haven't done anything related to blender since November (a good 6 months ago), and even that was just dragging things in from BlenderKit. It's no wonder, considering this, that just the modelling process for the Foxbat took around 4 or 5 hours.

I lost about 45 minutes worth of footage when I paused the screen recorder to do something else and forgot to unpause, so I lost loads of the footage of me modelling the legs. Other than that, you can see the full process in the video below.

Foxbat.mp4

Colours

After modelling it, I needed to figure it out colour-wise. In order to decide this, I grabbed some basic inspiration and created this moodboard you see to the top right. I wanted to base the colours off mushrooms found in deep caves, its real-life animal inspirations (bats and foxes), and also just the general idea of caves and darkness. With this creature being based off nyctophobia, I want it to be difficult to see, and give off an aura of mystery and shadow.

My peer who is more knowledgable on blender than me recommended I use “toon shading”, a technique you can see I ended up utilising wherein you use a constant shader mix, and it creates these cool harsh shadows and highlights. I combined this with some grease brush lineart, however I can't really explain exactly how this is created as I mostly followed advice and tutorials to create it.

Weight Painting

Then came the most tedious step, and the one I was least looking forward to — weight painting and applying the skeleton. I decided that for the sanity of myself and whoever will be looking through and marking this that I won't screen record the hours upon hours of tweaking, reassigning, and crying that went into weight painting this creature. Instead, I took a singular screenshot just to prove I did actually do it. I would like to take a second to be honest with whoever is reading this; words cannot describe how much I despise weight painting. While vertex painting was also a path I could have gone down (and at times I implemented similar techniques), I deemed it more effective to weight paint it, due to the type of mesh and the fluidity I was after with this creature.

There are a few important changes/decisions I made whilst rigging this model; I decided to scrap the Bézier curve feelers in favour of more simplistic mesh, which were a nightmare of tweaking and adjusting before they finally rigged properly. The far simpler mesh I ended up with made them a lot easier to manipulate and animate, and overall looked a lot better in the long run (and significantly decreased the poly count). I also took a fun dive into the wonderful world of bone constraints, specifically IK constraints. I used an online tutorial to begin understanding the basics, and then used a combination of peer/tutor advice and self-direction to help fully understand how the constraints work. Eventually, I became so enamoured with IK constraints that the entire body ended up being one big tail, essentially. This made the movements of this creature a lot smoother and more natural-looking, and also made it a lot easer to animate overall.

I don't know how many hours I spent weight painting the Foxbat, however it was definitely several working days worth of work. After all of this, I deemed it acceptable to begin a test animation.

Test Animation

I found a nature trail YouTube channel who had a video of a fox walking around some forestry; I took a very small segment of the fox walking and converted it to a GIF. I used this as my reference for a short walk cycle.

There were several reasons I thought it would be useful to do a test animation for this model; firstly, I wanted to test out the quality of the rig. As I animate, I find little imperfections in the weight painting, and adjust them as I go; this improves the quality of the rig for when I eventually use it in my trailer. Another reason is that I haven't animated anything in a long time, and so animating this creature I've made will be useful practice. The final reason is that I can use this walk cycle in my trailer as well, so it gives me a slight head start in some respects.

Deershroom

Modelling

The modelling process for the Deershroom took way less time that I thought it would. I think this is a result of both the general mesh being easier, and the practice from modelling the Foxbat. In total, the modelling time for the Deershroom was around 2 hours, which you can see compressed down in the clip below. I did not end up including any draping vines or mushrooms collected on the antlers, however I love how this creature came out either way.

Deershroom2.mp4

Choosing the colours for this character was as easy as colour-picking directly from my purple mushroom forest concept and copying the toon shading nodes from the Foxbat. I love the palette on this creature, and I attempted to give its eyes and antlers a small amount of emission to add ambience and match with the environment it will be in. I then weight painted and rigged it, which took maybe a day of my time, and created this short test animation you can see below. As before, it has taken me far less time to rig and animate the Deershroom as it did the Foxbat, and the process was much the same.

Maur

Maur Model.mp4

I didn't manage to capture the entire modelling process on video, however I did video most of it. As the final model I made for my trailer, this took probably the least amount of time, especially since for the colours all I had to do was colour-pick from the finished concept. All in all, this model came out very well, and while the walking animation looks a little silly and rushed, it's not like it's going to be the final animation, so I don't really care. By this point in the modelling process, I just wanted to start work on my planned trailer, so I got this modelled and rigged as quickly as possible.

Blender Scene

My first step for setting up the trailer scene in Blender was to pull in all the backgrounds I drew earlier and set them up. This alone must have taken an hour or two, and adding all the lights took even longer. I used the built-in graph editor to make the camera transition smoothly between scenes.

Scene Speed.mov

AlmostFinal Speed.mov

Animation

Then came the task of pulling in my previously made assets and animating them in Blender. I had a little trouble at the beginning, but after troubleshooting was able to use the Foxbat test walk cycle as a base for the rest of his animation. The tail was clearly not rigged very well, as it kept glitching around, however eventually I got it looking smooth. As for the other animations, it was pretty simple — I duplicated the Deershroom, shrunk it down, and gave it smaller antlers to create a Shroom-calf. Their movement was pretty simple and slow, so it didn't take long at all. As for Maur, her animation was quite simple too, however did take a little tweaking later on to get it looking natural.

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