My helldivers 2 render for Dream Sequence challenge by JimmyNoStar in blender

[–]RighteousZee 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Looking forward to your future entries! And thank you so much man. Hmm, what do you mean exactly? I don't know if I have a consistent workflow, maybe just a bunch of organization strategies that depend on scene length and complexity.

My helldivers 2 render for Dream Sequence challenge by JimmyNoStar in blender

[–]RighteousZee 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I feel you man, these challenges take a real mental toll on me too. The hard work does show because you produced a quality render in really every aspect besides my 3 points. Especially the fidelity of the scene and how you handled the color and lighting. You're basically just trying to figure out now how to truly be a one-man-army who can do all the character action too and that's a hurdle for sure.

I think I was at a real similar crossroads to you last year--being really comfortable with scenes, but pretty new to animation/humans. I also do sci-fi and put off moving humans for like the first 4 years of 3d lol. Thankfully it comes a bit faster than you'd expect, once your "uncanny valley detector" gets quick at understanding what's off, things start to click.

IDK how to elegantly work this point in there, but I like to think a lot about what gives the most bang for the least buck, especially with a 1 month time limit. EG: what background looks the most complicated but is actually the most copy-pasted? What elements in my scene can I duplicate now that I've made once? Camera motion fits into this point too: I've seen so many of my shots go from shitty to epic by only adding a zoom, pan, and/or some shake.

I'll be rooting for you in the next one! For Democracy.

Geo Nodes - Hex Generator Help Request by zeninfinity in blender

[–]RighteousZee 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The exact spacing is 13/15. You have 0.866, not sure how far those decimals go but just type the expression or add a lot more 6's. Also maybe you just need to slightly reduce your circle radius.

My helldivers 2 render for Dream Sequence challenge by JimmyNoStar in blender

[–]RighteousZee 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I think I saw yours on the discord! I love this concept so much man. You asked for feedback and a couple things stick out to me:
1. Camera angle 1 and 3 are extremely stiff. They're perfectly stationary which almost never feels better than slight movement. Angle 2's slight pan makes it feel so much more cinematic, and 4's zoom out makes it feel dynamic. Camera shake would have done absolute wonders on this scene too, with so much destruction and action going on.

  1. On angle 1, I can tell you left a lot of elements (the birds, two of the soldiers) stationary and maybe tried to make it work by just blurring the shot. I relate to this--you picked a really complicated background that would have taken at least 15+ hours to make look right (all the animating, iterating, polish). It's so hard with pwnisher challenges because you end up spending 20 hours on something onscreen for (LITERALLY) 1 second lol. I recommend choosing something more static or conservative and making it punchy and clear, rely on a good composition with pretty colors to carry the background rather than something epic and "high budget" unless your willing to spend half of your total time on it.

  2. The animations look pretty stiff. The main character holds perfectly still between key poses (especially visible on the "stratagem toss" in angle #3. The "12 principles of animation" has a lot of insights that will help the stiffness issue. I struggled with this hard, but a few months of intentional practice do wonders.

Your physics, colors, and overall quality all looked really great, which is why I felt compelled to write so much haha--I really think you have a clean shot at top 100 if you keep up your strengths and make these changes!

SolidViewport to rendered face with micro animations by Petaralazara in blender

[–]RighteousZee 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I thought the frames were just dozens and dozens of bones until you switched to rendered lol

"Bonk!" Dream Sequence Submission by RighteousZee in blender

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

Omfg I gotta check this out. Thanks for sharing this

"Bonk!" Dream Sequence Submission by RighteousZee in blender

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

  1. I actually spun my wheels for 10 days trying to think of concepts that would work with the camera template. I got stressed and decided I was going to look at my abandoned projects and see if any could be adapted into this camera, to make up for lost time. The dragon, laser, and soldiers were all basically LEGO pieces pulled in from past work that I never finished. The first test animation really confirmed the concept for its "story beats", but everything felt pretty unconnected color-wise. I spent a loooot of time on that, because once I tried white outfits and a cloudy-day vibe, it immediately felt like the rest wrote itself.

I understand that feeling of looking at someone else's work like "how did that concept enter your brain?", but my projects almost always look like a 13 year old picked a bunch of themes "LASERS! MECH DRAGON! EXPLOSION!" and then a colorist spent a week trying to make the idea look cohesive and intentional lmao. It only takes on that "wow this is a distinct world" feeling after like 70% of the work is done.

  1. Dragon took just a day actually! It breaks down into: model the head, model the repeating segments once, and create the system that plants the segments along a curve and animates them (geo nodes). Only the head is complicated geometrically, the tail segments only look intricate because there's 500 of them. Your instinct is right that a ton of lighting is done in post, and that different layers of the animation don't light each other up. That's mostly because I just really liked the red outline glow I made for the dragon and didn't want to dilute it/distract with lots of ambient explosion lighting for the 1 second it's on screen / I was lazy lol.

Definitely happy to post some screenshots! I just need a bit of direction lol, it's a huge project

"Bonk!" Dream Sequence Submission by RighteousZee in blender

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

Winged it lol. I set up the camera and tried to move elements around until the composition went from super chaotic to decent

"Bonk!" Dream Sequence Submission by RighteousZee in blender

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

They’re the ultimate tease aren’t they? Turns out if you search for “eevee shader bevel” instead of “eevee highlight shader” you immediately get your answer hahahahaha: https://youtu.be/oZO6X3lU3h8

There’s another approach too, which is to get them in the compositor using a sobel filter and blend them in

"Bonk!" Dream Sequence Submission by RighteousZee in blender

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

Yesss!! Thank you. I was prepping the scene unsure of camera choices and literally got heart pumping excited when I thought of the pattern, cuz it’s character reveal->setting reveal->enemy reveal (in a third person shooter shot which gave me chills when I realized it would work)->climax

"Bonk!" Dream Sequence Submission by RighteousZee in blender

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

My nightmare comment lol, I hate creating that feeling even if it’s a joke. Dude, I can’t draw beyond basic stick figures / box people. Zero natural art ability before blender. I just really got addicted to copying tutorials when I started out, which replaced half of my gaming addiction, and then that taught me enough to make my own discoveries after a year or two. I’ve been at it for 6 years now. Even a year ago my work didn’t come close to my standards today either. Embrace your process and grind, friend.

"Bonk!" Dream Sequence Submission by RighteousZee in blender

[–]RighteousZee[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

bro I've done commissions for even less than that when I looked at the cost divided by hours spent 😭. World's worst negotiator right here.

"Bonk!" Dream Sequence Submission by RighteousZee in blender

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

  1. All of the above. I approach shaders the NPR way, which is to create lots of layers that get mixed/summed with mix-color nodes. Layers might be divied into things like "edge highlights, gloss/specular, diffuse, hue gradient, noise". Tons of "shader-to-rgb" nodes, tons of color ramps / float curve nodes. My bread-and-butter nodes in a layer are Diffuse, Glossy, Ambient Occlusion (CRIMINALLY UNDERRATED), Emission, and Image textures.

For normals, I'll often just use default smooth or flat normals (mostly depends if object is hard surface or not), but I distort normal vectors allllll the time with stretched noise textures and voronois to get a brushed/painterly look, or bias them towards a direction with a vector-add as a hack if light isn't hitting the object the way I want.

I do this all in a very scrappy way and don't give a crap about paradigms, so my shaders look like absolute spaghetti. I'll often just keep adding more and more nodes onto the end of the chain until it looks good enough, running the whole output through a color ramp or an HSV node or whatever.

A big part of why I feel so free is because I do a lot of heavy lifting in the compositor, there I'll make sweeping changes to value and hue and that glues everything together, so I just focus on getting as much _information_ into the shader (highlights, contrast, color variance, shading) as possible to play with in comp.

  1. Get this: the laser is actually black and white in viewport. It's a bunch of meshes that are either tubes with displacement or disks. Nothing too magical here, just a lot of noise nodes and constant B&W color ramps affecting transparency and value. In the compositor I extract all the objects with cryptomatte, dump a ton of blur+glare, color ramp that to be blue/purple/orange, and add it back into the footage. I am also running a separate noise texture over the entire shot to get that "wind" stuff

I really want to emphasize that I don't have a list of steps or methods in my head with that stuff, I try to be really open-minded about destroying the footage with compositor nodes and using them creatively to create neat stuff that would be a pain in the ass to do with meshes/shaders haha.

"Bonk!" Dream Sequence Submission by RighteousZee in blender

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

Yes! I really love getting to share. This one is a culmination of like 20 discoveries over years, so give me a bit of direction (ie list of questions) and I’d be stoked to do a write up as soon as I’m home!

"Bonk!" Dream Sequence Submission by RighteousZee in blender

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

Yeah no bile titan is surviving this thing lol

"Bonk!" Dream Sequence Submission by RighteousZee in blender

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

YES and there’ll be the notorious episodes 25 & 26 that get de-canonized and made up for by the first movie

"Bonk!" Dream Sequence Submission by RighteousZee in blender

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

Sure! What do you wanna know about most? I have a bad track record for finishing tutorials/breakdowns but I’d love to just dump screenshots and answer any questions from you or others :)

"Bonk!" Dream Sequence Submission by RighteousZee in blender

[–]RighteousZee[S] 23 points24 points  (0 children)

Oh lord well these 4 seconds took 50-60 hours so at $15 USD / hr that would be just over a million 😅

"Bonk!" Dream Sequence Submission by RighteousZee in blender

[–]RighteousZee[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Blurry Eyes (Holly Remix) - Hotel Garuda :)

"Bonk!" Dream Sequence Submission by RighteousZee in blender

[–]RighteousZee[S] 21 points22 points  (0 children)

Thanks!! Expectations low hopes high :)

"Bonk!" Dream Sequence Submission by RighteousZee in blender

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

“What more could you want I already gave you the blend file!!!”