A few Blender Tests

A few tests I did in Blender which piled up.  I'll post todays animation of my daily challenge in a separate post.

 
Sci-Fi Scene:

I did it as a test to figure out how fast I can render a pretty decent looking interior scene with a character, volumetrics, a bit of fog etc. I did some test with a real smoke simulation and particle hair / Blender hair (this one doesn't include them) but it increased the render times insanely. That's something I still have to figure out how to make it work without increasing the render times like x10. It was also a composition test by doing most of it within Blender. The only thing I did outside of Blender is some minor color grading in After Effects which I probably could've done in Blender too. I think this short clip was like 1 hour to render? That's really really fast but mostly works on shots without close-ups since I used a denoiser at low sample rates and close-ups would lose visible detail if I render them that short. Without a character in the scene, render time was even just 15 minutes!

Bend Back Animation:

This one was a little hand animation exercise. Yep, everything animated by hand, no mocap or animation preset. I could need a new suit and Rokoko is soon releasing a really decent v2 of their current suit, that's on my wishlist for 2022 but I want to learn better animation by hand too. I didn't set up the rig perfectly which resulted in some animation limitations on the hip area in the end but oh well... it was supposed to be just some test from the start, that's why the blank naked character. :D
I tried to add a male to female morph at the end but encountered some issue which I know how to avoid now though.

A belated Halloween picture:

I finished that one yesterday but I didn't feel in the mood for sharing it because I wanted to do way more than just a bland pumpkin picture. Made in Blender too.

New Toon Girl:

I created a new toon girl from the ground. There's some minor things I need to fix and probably make the hair a bit less messy. At some point I'll do a "bigger" TGTF with toon characters.

Deformation thingy test:

I created some deformation effector by proximity with a pretty new feature in Blender. This will work on bodies too. As of now it doesn't work with morphs but it can add a little extra deformation motion during transformations. I most likely will utilize it during my daily November challenge.

It's not everything I tried and tested. There's a lot which I didn't really document with videos. I put some time into figuring out better ways to render my stuff for example,  to make it look more "crisp". My older animations often have visual artifacts because I didn't pick the best render settings possible. It could result in bigger files going from now but I'll always create versions with lower bitrates and smaller file size to be sure they run on most phones and weaker PCs too. :P