LogInKarl Poyzer told us how he brought his sci-fi cinematic shot to life using only Blender, detailing each step of the process.
Introduction
My name is Karl, and I'm a Multidisciplinary Artist from the UK. I have been working professionally for over a decade as a live-action cinematographer, but decided to branch out a little during COVID. Now my professional life is a weird mix of film, animation, and even some game stuff (I'm currently part of the writing team on the sequel to the game Cloud Punk).
I entered the animation world with a series of short films called Floaters, which gained a lot of traction online, including an episode starring Zach Braff and Joel Fry. I have since shot a feature film in the UK as well as helped create an art exhibition with Chino Moyà and Ridley Scott Associates. In short, I'm having a weird career!
Getting Started
I came into animation through a love of sci-fi. It was really the first thing I started to make after completing the Blender doughnut tutorial, and I find that it's always a go-to for me when I'm between paying jobs. When posting this clip, I actually wrote that I make stuff like this to relax, and I think that was weirdly surprising to people who do this as a full-time job.
I didn't set out to try anything in particular with this project. I knew I wanted some kind of forward motion, but for the most part, I was acting on instinct! I find a shape, an angle, a lighting setup, and go from there.
Workflow
It tends to be the case that I'll have a Blender project open with something unfinished sit there for a little while. The film might present itself quickly, or it might take a few days. For this, I had the sort of bottom section of the big ships sit for a few hours staring at me before I decided to play around with the bigger shape on top. Once I had that, we were rolling!
The great thing about working in 3D after spending so much time on a film set is that you really get the luxury of trial and error. Once I had the shape of the ships, I found they looked quite good from below, and so that became the foundation.
With regards to time saving, I like to work quickly. I never want a scene like this to take me more than an afternoon, so over the years I've learned a few tricks. I have built a pretty good kitbash library. Everything in this scene is an asset I've created, but having the ability to drag and drop them into a scene saves a lot of time. For anyone interested in any of my assets, you can download them here.
Collection instances for the ships also saved some rendering time. Duplicating them all as individual objects would have put more strain on my system, and it was already incredibly hot in my office when I made this!
I tend to light scenes as I go because knowing where the shadows are helps you assess where you need detail. I hate wasting time adding detail where we won't ultimately see it!
One advantage to coming from a lighting background is knowing how to make very simple textures look more refined than they are. Everything here is just image textures, cube-projected onto the geometry. For big objects like these, I tend to find you can get quite far with just that. It gets harder when you work closer and smaller, but when doing fun stuff for myself, I tend to keep it pretty simple. Keeping reflectivity fairly turned down and utilising shadows normally keeps me fairly covered on these kinds of animations. All that work was done inside Blender.
Texturing
The textures themselves, particularly those on the ships, are just a collage of metallic textures that I did some basic colour adjustment using nodes in the texture editor inside Blender. There's some ambient occlusion too, but that is pretty much it! I was never trained formally on any 3D software, so in the early days of learning this stuff, I was spending half my time figuring out tricks that could hide my lack of knowledge, and I still use most of those tricks today!
One thing I did learn about on this was the View Layers inside Blender. Because of how hot it was when I made this, I decided to split the render into layers more than I might normally. The ground, background, orb, ships, and fog were all rendered separately, and setting up view layers properly made working that way so much easier.
Artistically, the principle was, if it looks right there, leave it there. I positioned ships to keep the scene balanced. I wanted to still see the sky through the herd, but it was mostly just guesswork.
Lighting & Rendering
Like with some of the other processes above, lighting is something I enjoy experimenting with as I go. For this, we're mostly looking at an HDRI with a few orange light sources coming up from the trenches below. The volumetrics really help sell that. I'm sure it's not the most efficient thing to do, but I just tend to stick a volumetric cube over the whole scene and render it as its own pass.
Lighting is probably the place I feel most comfortable, so I will often experiment with 20+ lighting setups per scene. A luxury I do not get on a film set!
The scene was rendered in 4K all within Cycles.
Conclusion
The whole thing took an afternoon to animate and most of the next day to render the passes. From there, I composited everything in DaVinci Resolve, added a slight colour grade, and that was it!
I also created the music for this, so I dropped that into the timeline and exported!
It's very boring, but the thing I learned from this was how to correctly set up view layers inside Blender. It's something I should already have known, and to many might seem very elementary, but yeah, that's something I will use on every project going forward!
As for this project generally, no plans. You guys will probably be the last people to ask me about it, and that's fun to me! I do these to unwind, and I'll probably be staring at a new one before this article goes live!