LogInMyxo Mycota, the founder of Crash Landing Studios, shared the development process behind the short movie Graduation, inspired by Hololive's Gawr Gura, showing how the feelings of love, loss, and nostalgia were expressed with Blender tools.
Introduction
Hi, I’m Myxo! I still think of myself as a painter who wandered into Blender. I just wanted my illustrations to move! One lucky day, Ian Hubert’s lazy tutorials were recommended to me, and I realized – oh! This doesn’t have to be scary. You can just mess around with the software, scissor-tool things together, and make something beautiful. It totally changed how I saw 3D.
I’ve been self-taught ever since, googling every problem I run into, and trying things until they click. Most of my energy goes into our channel’s animations, and along the way, we’ve teamed up with some really cool companies and indie creators. It’s been a wonderful journey so far!
From A Warm Winter (2022), my first full 3D animation
Graduation
Oh man. The moment Hololive's Gawr Gura’s graduation was announced, I knew right away we had to make something. There was barely a week and a half left, but I wanted one last piece that could carry love… loss… nostalgia… and everything in between.
We pulled a lot of inspiration from those early 2010s slice-of-life animes (the shows a lot of us grew up with) and went with a school graduation. It’s a universal goodbye, the kind of time when you don’t know if you’ll ever see your closest friends again.
More than anything, I wanted it to feel like the very last evening of a golden, perfect summer – a moment in time before your world changes.
Scene from Chapter 1 of Detective Diaries
Characters
Bringing 2D designs into 3D is always a balancing act. They need to look like their 2D anime designs, while also surviving real lights and shadows in 3D space. I kept tweaking vertices, rendering, and doing paintovers until they finally felt nice. Digging them out of the uncanny valley was truly a challenge – it’s a very iterative process that really challenges your eye.
A scene from A Warm Winter
For their clothes, I had a really specific vibe in mind – that tactile, jittery, stop-motion vibe. A lot of this was shaped by A Warm Winter, which was inspired by those classic Christmas stop-motion films.
All the textures were painted by hand! The style I aimed for is this interesting dance between graphic shapes and painterly strokes, an oil-and-water mix I’ve slowly tweaked and refined over the years. It’s like a funny 3-dimensional canvas – you gotta be a 2D artist to pull it off in this way! It’s less about workflows and more about taste.
A close-up of our Gura model
Development
This was one of those rare projects where the vision just kind of appeared in my head all at once. In under an hour, I had already sketched out the full sequence. The deadline was super tight, so there wasn’t enough time to properly realize a full set like I normally would – bending bashed-together props into our painterly style was an interesting challenge, and meant painting over every background, but it was definitely fast and gave its own unique look.
The animation stayed minimal, with most shots on 8s. I did want to paint over every character frame for that oil-on-glass painting vibe, but, sadly, time wasn’t on my side. Even so, that idea shaped every composition, and each shot holds up as a standalone illustration.
Rendering
Rendering was definitely a bit esoteric. I combined sharper EEVEE renders with higher-quality Cycles renders, then composited passes from both renders together to get the best of both worlds. I then took that final image and painted over the whole thing, blurring edges and placing brushstrokes, with some color grading on top.
Background from Graduation
However, repainting each background shifted colors and tones so much that raw character renders looked like stickers, and I ended up needing to hand-tweak every shot. Honestly, it felt more like 2D matte painting than classic 3D comp, but it felt all the more unique for it. I even sprinkled in a few Capcut filters at the end. Strange for sure! But they really added the dreamy nostalgia this piece needed.
The node graph for our recent Graduation short. Phew.
For the summer flash-forward, I used one of my first techniques: simple rigged PNGs slowly swaying back and forth. It was a bit clumsy and nostalgic, but such a perfect throwback.
A shot from our Graduation short. It's made from simple rigged PNGs in 3D space
Conclusion
The whole thing came together in just one week, start to finish! It was the kind of project where you’re totally locked in, and nothing else matters but getting it finished. The hardest part was building this new pipeline on such a tight timeline, but now I know a lightning-fast, post-heavy workflow can actually work when the vision is clear.
As for useful tutorials, I always recommend Ian Hubert! His whole philosophy, to just get it looking right in the frame, is something I carry with me to this day. That mindset is what allowed me to approach 3D at all without getting overwhelmed.
I’m also working on a course for 2D artists looking to dive into 3D without drowning in jargon. It’s made for people like me who just want to make their 2D works move, and let the vision lead the process, so keep an eye out for that!
As for what’s next… Well, that’s still in the air. It truly feels like the end of an era, but we’ve got several shorts finishing up, along with a larger chapter brewing, and some exciting collaborations. We’re also looking more and more at the indie VTuber space. Lots of cooking that I can’t spill just yet, but I’m excited!
I hope this sparks ideas for anyone carving their own road into 3D. Forget perfect pipelines… trust your eye, follow your vision, and make pictures that move people.
More experiments and emotional stories are on the way! See you soon!