Progress Update #112

Hello, everyone 👋 I'm still working on that pokemon short. But it has gotten a little bit bigger!

The first one was about Misty, so I wanted to do another gym leader. And since it was supposed to be a simple animation, I decided to finally try making it in Blender. And oh, boy! Have you seen how many pokemon models are available for download on the internet? 

All of them!

Including humans! This Sabrina is from the Let's Go games and they updated her design quite a bit. I had to modify it to look more like the original. Also I'm using a Cel Shaded look to match the previous short, which is not the easiest thing to do in Blender. You have to open up the shader editor and mess around with the nodes to "build" your own Toon Shader. Maya has its own Toon material that's very easy to load up and customize, it was a lot more intuitive for me. If I don't get used to all the nodes, maybe there's some add-on out there that will make things easier.

Once you get familiar with the UI and the shortcuts, it becomes really easy to pose and animate the characters. And I was really impressed with the rigging! In Maya, you have to make sure everything is set up properly (topology, UVs, joints) before skinning your character. In Blender, you can edit everything after the character is done and it just works! It does crash a lot though :p

I was hoping that special effects in general would be easier to make in Blender. I needed an explosion for this animation and after watching a lot of blender tutorials, I realized that I had two options: hyper realistic simulated explosion or static geometry node cartoony explosion. And I wanted something like the explosions in Breath of the wild which are a blend of different styles and look really good and smooth! I did try to build one with the shader editor, but I sucked at it and Blender kept crashing. So I just said "fuck it" and decided to make all effects with After Effects. Which I wanted to avoid because you have to render a lot of different masks to composite things properly in AE, and if you decide to change one small thing in the animation, you have to render all the different masks again... It's a pain in the ass. But in the end I think the explosion I made in AE looks pretty good, or at least better than anything I can make in Blender right now.

So, yeah. I went a little bit overboard with it. Encountered a lot of issues. But it's all par for the course when you're learning a new software. I wasn't able to finish the animation this month, but it's looking really good so far, I'm making a lot of progress every day, and I'm excited to keep working on it and learning Blender!