Breakdown: Creating Animated Short Inspired by Spider-Verse & Arcane

An artist known as Renderia showcased a short episode from an animated series called GRAVITON and shared the workflow behind it.

The video, inspired by Spider-Verse and Arcane, has the character, Graviton, escaping a loop in a futuristic sequence. 

Renderia sketched their ideas and collected references "aiming for stylized futuristic costumes and armor with robots." Then, they sculpted the models in Blender, starting with default cubes, "sculpting with reference, head and details with texture alignment, body with details, and overall retopology of the model." The armor was one of the most time-consuming parts:

The female character's textures were created procedurally by mixing Wave and Raven shaders, adding emission, and setting up mapping.

The lines of the protagonist's armor and the environment were painted with a regular brush for a more hand-drawn and stylized look.

As for the animation, Renderia said that "blocking was challenging due to intervals with impacts where it was difficult to calculate launch area and amplitude of Graviton himself." They used 2.5D effects and Grease Pencil to add more impact to actions and a smear effect instead of motion blur.

The blur effect was set up with aberrations in three colors, and the comic book feeling was created with halftone dots and lines.

"The coolest part was using Cryptomatte in Blender to separate characters and objects from the blur effect." Finally, Renderia settled on 100-200 samples for different shots and a denoiser, compiling the scene into EXR (32-bit color) in After Effects, adding final effects, SFX, and a bit of color correction.

If you want to see what's next for Graviton, visit Renderia on ArtStation. 

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