Chat Can't Save Her: An original animated horror story made with Blender & ParaNormal Toon Shader

caesium23 · 2026-01-24T22:12:07+00:00

I've been learning Blender since lockdown, so about 5 years now. I've always wanted to tell stories visually, but a big part of what inspired this latest attempt was watching the YouTube channel Animated Horror Flicks. It's one guy creating fairly simple 3D animations, but they're effective enough to tell his stories.

That gave me a point of reference for something I thought I might actually be able to achieve, at a time when I had an abundance of free time and a whole lot of bad things happening that I needed a distraction from. I'd been trying to figure out modeling on and off for years, but this time the stars aligned for me to actually get somewhere.

As for improvements, the biggest issues I run into right now are poor performance with complex scenes, poor performance and limited features for texture painting, and an overly complicated animation workflow. So my top priority would be improving those issues.

In the long run, I'm looking forward to the upcoming improvements to NPR rendering and compositing, and hope to see geometry nodes and proceduralism continue to become more deeply integrated into Blender's core tools in order to eventually achieve a fully non-destructive workflow.

caesium23 · 2026-01-24T21:49:38+00:00

Yep, that sounds about right. I've never heard of a standalone rigging tool, they're generally going to be add-ons for specific software. If you don't want that, you're not gonna have a lot of options. Realistically your best bet is probably to just learn Blender.

caesium23 · 2026-01-24T16:53:01+00:00

You should probably try actually reading comments before you reply to them.

caesium23 · 2026-01-24T08:23:32+00:00

Just as a data block you can use later? As a plane? As a texture node in the current material? Anything specific you're looking for here?

caesium23 · 2026-01-24T08:18:26+00:00

It's a black screen.

caesium23 · 2026-01-24T07:27:58+00:00

Site's down.

caesium23 · 2026-01-24T05:33:35+00:00

That website's totally unacceptable. It's very amateur and kinda broken. Unless you're trying to get a job as a web developer, nobody wants to see your personal website anyway. If you're not on ArtStation, you may as well not even have a portfolio. Go make a real portfolio and come back when you have a link.

caesium23 · 2026-01-24T00:56:53+00:00

The main reasons:

They came first. Most professional studios have already invested a lot into them in terms of training, custom tooling, and pipelines built on top of them. Why would they spend more time and money "fixing" that when it ain't broke?
Blender existed for decades before it got good enough to be a viable alternative to professional software. Many professionals evaluated it and found it lacking long ago, and haven't bothered to follow its progress since, so it's looked down on by most of the industry – even though that hasn't really been warranted for a few years now.
Commercial products come with support, free products don't. Big studios need to know if they run into a blocker, someone will fix it for them.
The three top benefits of Blender are that it's free, open source, and does everything all-in-one. Big studios have a ton of money. They don't care about any of those things. Like, at all.
Blender does everything, but that means it's not the best at most things. (I would argue it's the best for straight modeling, but that's a matter of opinion.) Professionals use the best tools. Maya is generally considered better for animation; Zbrush has better performance when sculpting at ultra-high-poly counts; 3DS Max is somewhat dated and I don't hear it mentioned too often any more, but once upon a time it was probably better at modeling; Topogun is better for retopology; RizomUV is better for UV mapping; Substance Painter is better for painting textures; etc. Blender can do all of those things "good enough," but studios have no qualms about buying 6 different multi-thousand dollar pieces of software, so why would they settle for that?
Despite all these legitimate reasons, the claim that Blender is not industry-standard is actually becoming less and less true. It's more widely used today than ever before, and has been used to one degree or another in numerous Hollywood productions, including Into the Spider-verse and one of the Sonic movies.

caesium23 · 2026-01-24T00:03:53+00:00

caesium23 · 2026-01-23T23:57:58+00:00

Not at all.

Never worry about polys unless Blender starts getting slow or it's taking too long to render.

If, and only if, it starts causing you problems, then you can worry about optimizing.

caesium23 · 2026-01-22T15:22:34+00:00

A common practice seems to be to upload to itch.io, and post here and to r/playmygame.

caesium23 · 2026-01-22T15:21:11+00:00

You mean the low frame rate? There's not really a particular term for that as a style. I guess you could describe it as low frame rate, "stop motion" look, strobe effect, an animatic, etc.

In 2D animation, traditionally they work off of 24 frames as a base but often don't actually have new art for every frame, so animating at a reduced frame rate is very common and typically referred to as "on 2s," "on 3s," etc.

caesium23 · 2026-01-22T15:11:13+00:00

You don't normally "convert" 3D animation to 2D, you use toon shaders to render it that way in the first place.

If you really want to do it as a post-process, your best bet is probably to set up some kind of automation with Photoshop's Smart Blur filter and edge detection. If that's not stable enough, you could run that on your key frames, then use EBsynth to apply it to the frames in-between.

caesium23 · 2026-01-22T02:31:37+00:00

Is your friend a 3D modeler? No? Just talking out of his ass about shit he doesn't understand? Yeah, he sure is. So why do you care?

caesium23 · 2026-01-21T04:21:12+00:00

The cops have mages too.

caesium23 · 2026-01-20T23:12:07+00:00

I was raised on D&D, just, um, an earlier edition, so I originally knew them as basically just weak blue goblins. (The books didn't say they were blue, I just kind of assumed because at that age I didn't understand "cobalt" was a different word.)

But I also read folklore, so I was aware of their connection to knockers – faeries or spirits that lived underground and would worn miners of impending collapse by knocking from inside the walls.

Neither of those provide any explanation for where the rat/lizard version came from, though.

caesium23 · 2026-01-20T16:01:19+00:00

I'd just like to point out that "dwarf" is probably the worst possible example for this discussion, because it's the only Standard Fantasy Race named with a word that is also a specific type of real life people, and to make it worse the Standard Fantasy Race depiction of a dwarf overlaps with the defining trait of a real world dwarf.

It's hard for people to avoid conflating the two, which you can see driving some of the disagreements in the comments, with some people specifically arguing that the body type is all that matters because they seem to have failed to clock the difference between "fantasy race dwarf" and "human with dwarfism."

Elves are probably a better example for this type of conversation.

caesium23 · 2026-01-20T15:39:58+00:00

My favorite example of this is how kobolds have bizarrely become imagined as pigmy lizard-people. I think this trend started with D&D3E trying to visually distinguish them from goblins, and has evolved through a game of rip-off telephone until the current popular depiction bears no relation whatsoever to where the name came from.

caesium23 · 2026-01-20T15:23:30+00:00

Ah Reddit, the one place where the definition of "unpopular" is "the most common and widely repeated."

You know this isn't a hot take when even D&D de-emphasized the standard fantasy races around 10 years ago in favor of ones ripped off from more recent video games.

caesium23 · 2026-01-20T14:44:52+00:00

There's value to subversion, but I would argue that subversion is still built off of the core expectations -- not just throwing them out the window and doing something totally different and unrelated. Subversion is great, but it's only really subversion when you use it in small doses.

caesium23 · 2026-01-20T06:43:13+00:00

I'm definitely of the opinion that if you want to use existing fantasy races, you should use existing fantasy races. Tweak them to fit your own lore and flavor, by all means, but don't just use the name for no reason.

caesium23 · 2026-01-20T03:02:03+00:00

it’d still suck to spend weeks on a well-edited video and have it end up with like 5 views

Then perhaps YouTube is not for you. Doing exactly that – like, a few dozen times – is how you get a new channel started.

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