One shot was never enough.  With real life kicking in and my specializing in a different field, I honestly thought most of Blender was behind me, outside the occasional test or minor project. However, this is probably my most advanced full-CG Blender project yet! I'm really grateful to learn that life doesn't have to put an end to projects like this. In any case, this was a full, multi-camera project rendered in Eevee (although the mask in the final shot was rendered in Cycles), and it used no small part of everything I'd learned (and some I hadn't yet): HDRIs, shape keys, multiple cameras, animated procedural texturing, and even gravity/collision physics. (I still don't dare attempt fluid simulation; the lava in the second-to-final shot used up to 6 shape keys to imitate both generic "waves" and its reaction to the falling rock.) In the meantime, I used After Effects for some minor compositing, sound, all of the final shot outside the mask itself, an...

Hello all, Last October, my father (known to Zoom Times as the Grand Emperor of the Zoomlian Empire), a Theory of Knowledge teacher, learned that his school wanted a short video from each teacher in his program introducing prospective students to the program's various subjects. Having noticed that he has a video creator in the house and having a creative concept in mind, he approached me with an atypical script and asked about directing and editing the short film. As it turned out, I'd just recently acquired the video editor DaVinci Resolve and had been looking to test it out, and this helped me grab the basics of the program pretty quickly! This is mostly video editing (done completely in Resolve), although I did use After Effects for two shots, one compositing-focused and the other motion graphics-focused. I couldn't find any stock music that fit the tone my dad was looking for, but Lei Hart's "It's About Time" track worked perfectly, so I got permis...

Oh no I guess a couple images weren't enough! Now, this could just be a one-shot project, but...

Now that BIONICLE's return is (in a sense) confirmed and imminent, I decided to jump on the hype train and place the Toa of Fire's latest iteration into some Ta-Wahi scenery!  Tahu himself was made with Stud.io, but the rigging and background were done by myself. I used some displacement maps here to actually affect the ground's geometry, and I was able to use a scratched-metal texture's bump map to add some scratches to Tahu in imitation of his 2001 animation, too!

There's a certain phenomenon BIONICLE fans know of, referred to as "the dream." When I first saw the teaser trailer for the second Doctor Strange installment, I knew what to do. To be honest, this is probably the first time I tried the After Effects rotoscoping tool and it actually turned out well. In the past (e.g. Clash of the Jedi ), the results of rotoscoping would be questionable, need a lot of cleanup, or both, which made me rely entirely on masking instead throughout the ABYDOS duology, but this time it worked out pretty painlessly. Anyway, I used rotoscoping for Strange himself and a mask for the ground; after that, it was mostly a matter of finding as many full shelf images as I could. I stuck them in a pre-comp, then moved it to track with Strange's vision and color graded it to fit in a little better, throwing a CC Snowfall on and tweaking it to match the ashes. 

It was an excellent experience working on a number of posts for Ace McNacho's in-universe blog, and for my last post there, I wanted to add a little something special. With that in mind, right after the events of Robotrio's first season, here are Cast and Dant, both safe and sound! The first image was my pure Blender render, while the second reflects some changes I used in Gimp to add some depth-of-field style blurring and slightly change the lighting (I could've used Photoshop, but why not go open source?).     Among other things you may have noticed, I've (ethically) given Cast an upgrade! He now has new hands with three fingers, shoulders that can rotate independently from the torso, separated eyes that can allow for more dynamic expressions, feet (invisible though they may be), and a new mouth based on a tutorial Lei found for me ! In the future I'd like to make the house a bit less clean-looking to be more realistic (it looks more like a vacation house than a...

For this year's unofficial BIONICLE celebration day (the blog post came a little late for August 10th, but I put it on YouTube in time), I decided to whip up a logo recreation in Blender, using After Effects for some fancier lighting/compositing. I was trying to recreate the rarely-seen animation at the start of this commercial: https://biomediaproject.com/bmp/files/vid/More/Promo%20CD%20Videos/BohrokSwarmIntro.m4v .    I felt some aspects could use a bit of work, particularly with the camera, but for the time allotted I think it turned out pretty well. This is also one of my first attempts at node-based procedural textures in a while, so anything that helps me learn is a win on my count.  The sound, as well as the reference video, belong to LEGO; thanks to BioMedia Project for archiving.