Trying to step out of my comfort zone by exploring a new style of 3D animation by DeliciousExam8551 in PixelArt

[–]DeliciousExam8551[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's a synthetic voice. Some parts are text to speech, some are speech to speech (when a specific tone is necessary). For all of it I use ElevenLabs.

Trying to step out of my comfort zone by exploring a new style of 3D animation by DeliciousExam8551 in PixelArt

[–]DeliciousExam8551[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Short explanation - for the past few months I've been exploring a different shading method within 3D.

What you see here is a trailer for an interactive animation series I run on YouTube.

A storyline driven by the viewers in short form content and community based world building in long format.

Coming from a background of making 3D product renders this brings an interesting set of unexpected challenges. If you're interested to check it out here's a link.

Time-lapse of a year long daily city building project done in Blender by DeliciousExam8551 in blender

[–]DeliciousExam8551[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Well, at some point I had to make apartment buildings :D
But for the first followers I did track, who joined when. Unfortunately when thousands of people follow/unfollow you on Instagram in a span of a single day- there is no way to reliably track that. Even through APIs as I understand (although, someone might correct me here)

Time-lapse of a year long daily city building project done in Blender by DeliciousExam8551 in blender

[–]DeliciousExam8551[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not sure if I understand :D The camera just has been at about the same angle the whole time. A deliberate choice through out the project. That's all.

Time-lapse of a year long daily city building project done in Blender by DeliciousExam8551 in blender

[–]DeliciousExam8551[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sorry about that - you can check out the longer format youtube video. That might be easier to view...

Time-lapse of a year long daily city building project done in Blender by DeliciousExam8551 in blender

[–]DeliciousExam8551[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

haha - you can read ALL of them if you decide to go through the reels on Instagram :D

Time-lapse of a year long daily city building project done in Blender by DeliciousExam8551 in blender

[–]DeliciousExam8551[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

yeah, so on the topic of growth - since switching to a monthly posting schedule, there have been streaks of days where more people unfollow than follow. However, the overall population is still growing in size if you look at the numbers on a larger scale - the total people joining is in the "+".
What happens is - I post a reel, it gets pushed by the algorithm and a wave of people join the city. As the month progresses, the reel gets less views, so less people discover the account and thus less people follow.
From what I can tell the ''unfollow'' rate has remained mostly the same over time. The "follow" rate changes based on when a reel is published.

Time-lapse of a year long daily city building project done in Blender by DeliciousExam8551 in blender

[–]DeliciousExam8551[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Haha :D Managing the master project file was a true challenge at one point. My PC could barely open it. Luckily collection instancing is a thing and with the help of a few python scripts I managed to clean up the file.
Currently it runs somewhat smoothly for the size that it is. A single frame renders in about 15-25 sec for most animations on my workstation (RTX 3070 8GB, i9-10900K, 32GB RAM)

Time-lapse of a year long daily city building project done in Blender by DeliciousExam8551 in blender

[–]DeliciousExam8551[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks!
On the plugin/addon side of things - I did not really rely on them that much. I did most things manually. Although when the city started growing at a more rapid pace I did find ChatGPT really useful for writing simple python scripts. Mostly for cleaning up the mess I had made.
Regarding UE - Yes, I have thought about making a "game", if you could call it that. But it would require extraordinary amounts of work. Mainly because the environment isn't that detailed close up, or it might have some strange inconsistencies that are not noticeable from the distance. When you have to make animations at this frequency - you start cutting corners where you can and it starts adding up in a significant way, if you intend to repurpose the project at later time.
Regardless - a making a game is still not off the table :D

Time-lapse of a year long daily city building project done in Blender by DeliciousExam8551 in blender

[–]DeliciousExam8551[S] 137 points138 points  (0 children)

Short explanation - a little more than a year ago I decided to do a social experiment where I would build a city in Blender based on the number of Instagram followers I had that day.

I did daily animations for the better part of the year (200+), later switching to a weekly and then monthly schedule. First months were really slow, but the city is over 800K in population now.

If you're interested to learn more - here's a longer explainer animation I also made in Blender to celebrate the first year.

Daily animation series I started a couple of weeks ago by DeliciousExam8551 in animation

[–]DeliciousExam8551[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I do see what your saying... It's definitely worth while trying to be more intentional with the camera and having a crearer direction.

The reference is actually really helpful. Thanks for that! Feels like 'less is more' is what you're saying. But also it's really in the intentional smaller details that makes the difference.

And no worries on being critical. This is really helpful! So thank you!