'DOUBLE CUP' VISUALISER

During the end of the Summer of 2021, I was talking with a close friend of making a new story idea to create a cool new animation toward. We ended up thinking of an idea inspired by my previous project which involved a 'space donut', with a concept and story panning out.

During the production of the animation, I received a new client of mine that requested a piece of work that would go with his new songs as he is practicing for his music course at university. I decided to take my started space donut project file and build a new idea on top of it to see if I can adapt to a new piece of work. Here is how the result turned out.

On this page, I get to show you the processes, workflows and mindsets that I went through during this quite ambitious project to achieve this finished visualiser for the client of mine that requested a visual to go with their song.

PRE-PRODUCTION

Firstly, this project started out with an idea. This idea was one that was brought up as I was brainstorming a new animation idea to partner up with my final major project animation that I had just completed that May/June of the same year.

This first idea concept had different styles and variations that was created by my friend that I was brainstorming this idea with. I will admit that these concepts where a little ambitious as they featured quite a detailed and interesting story, and textures that would need some sort of designing and coding in order to accomplish THE result we wanted.

Here you can see a concept starting to be developed. With help from the programs I was available to use, I was getting some of these ideas into action by having them as images that I had created and would help me understand the styles that me and my friend initially has in mind when I started the production of this animation.

The concept that I currently had with the donut was for it to have textures that would slowly move on the donut, into itself giving off an impossible hypnotic type effect that would make the viewer think deeply into it as it is being viewed on screen. I wanted to put the most effort into this design because it is the main part of the story.

STORYBOARDS

Now here are the storyboard concepts that were made for this project.

This storyboard is all about the galaxy which is depicted in an ever expanding donut shape, giving meaning toward the deeper meaning of the galaxy. Because of it's donut shape, it ends up being consumed in a plot twist at the end. This being that is consuming was going to be depicted as a very scary and eerie with help of music, sound effects and dark lighting.

This storyboard starts inside of the stomach of the beast that had consumed the galaxy, we travel back through the galaxy to watch the meteorite collide with a planet. We zoom back into Saturn and watch the rings explode on beat with the music. Suddenly, silence like nothing had happened, everything reverts back.

This storyboard is all about after the consumption, after there is another donut which portrays the beast as a massive character being, and then shows the collision of both donuts.

We zoom on back in the ever expanding universe watching a mirror image either collide and crash or mirror each other. The camera angles direct to the sun and the sun expands blind the viewer.

We stand at still and watch the two Saturn's have a 2 second moment then have an epic dance by spinning around each other. We see the other Saturn disappear for a moment only to glitch back in like it's trying to stay.

On the final image we see it at a stand with its new partner on a face off. Silence is key. It zaps out with a TV noise to alter the views reality

PRODUCTION

I used the program 'Blender' for this project as up to this point in my creative career, this specific program has been the program that I've always been most familiar to and that I am most knowledgeable in.

To start this project off, I started out by modelling a donut inside of the newly created project file. One that is similar to the donut seen in my final major project. I decided as I was still learning the software, to not append over the donut to this new project file from the older project because I wanted to to continue practicing the workflow of this type of project.

So here is what the newly created donuts look like. The reason to why I am starting with the donut is because my client was wanting the donut idea from my final major project carried over into this one.

Once I had created the donut, I then imported a space HDRI (High Dynamic Range Image) into the environment, this then allows a large image to wrap around the scene and to light up the shot instead of relying on using my own lights that I placed around the donut.

This was for me to experiment with getting the lighting perfect with the scene and to match the background that I was going to add later.

I then created a little stress test animation that I rendered into hundreds of transparent PNG files to import into Adobe After Effects. I did this stress test so I can check weather the tracking inside of Blender was guaranteed to work inside of After Effects as it was going to play a crucial role in the post-production stage of this project.

Also it allows me to check up on what I am working with so far with the workflow, render settings, lighting and to test out a few effects I could use later in post.

During this stress test animation process, I went through some little ideas like to include a long road that I thought I could include later along with this low polly house that I can have floating out in the distance.

I ended up never using and scrapping the long road idea because I didn't know how to incorporate it and thought it was a little too much to dedicate time toward, I did keep the house floating in the distance though. You can see the start on the Earth in the background.

These are some processes of how I experimented with liquid inside of the cup, hopefully to give you a better idea of how I got the liquid to look the way that I liked. Here I show the physics set up, showing the simulation into a solid, shaping into the cup, material experimenting and a few extra that eventually made the look.

The first process was getting a liquid simulation to work and to fall inside of the cup at a certain velocity and area to achieve the specific splash effect that I was going for. I wanted this drink to look as if it had been launched out into space. I had to rely on Blender's own physics engine for this liquid engine and through trial and error, I ended up with a splash that I was happy with.

The next step seen is when I had to take one of the keyframes from the simulation to form the liquid splash that I want and to turn it into a solid object. This is because as the liquid was inside of the physics simulation, it is very limited with how you can play around with it just like a normal solid object so this part was mandatory.

After turning the liquid into a solid, I had to cut and edit the parts that I did and didn't want as before featured a very messy lot of polygons.

This is a demonstration of how I made the two cups for the liquid along with an actual screenshot from when I first created it for the project. The cups ended up being just an extruded circle to make one, then duplicated and transformed above the lower up. I never realised how simple it was until my friend sitting next to me wanted to watch me make something inside of the project file I already had open.

After that, I had the cup ready to put the liquid inside. This cup was very simple to make and only consists of extruded circles going up with scale differences along with a Styrofoam texture put on top of it. This shaping process was to get the liquid in the same size as the cup so it makes sense visually.

Lastly, shows me experimenting with how the material on this liquid was going to look. With materials, you need to keep in mind the lighting around the area as this is important to for example adding reflections, changing subsurface and in my case, trying to make my liquid look like liquid.

At first I gave my liquid a GlassBSDF preset material as glass looks very similar to water, but this gave me a very dark and deep liquid look which isn't what I wanted. I wanted a material that will match the bright and colourful scene but with this set up, I couldn't use a liquid type material for it.

So instead I used a bright default base colour and turned the opacity down to around 50%. This gave off for a much better look in the end.

After the liquid was all set in place into the cup with its own splash, I thought including ice falling going along with the splash would add toward the overall look. I wanted to have the ice look bright and colourful to match the style of the other objects.

For these cubes I added cubes with some bevel, added a displace modifier onto it, then made its own material with a texture UV wrapped onto it. One thing I would change in the finished version would be the size of the ice as I think they were quite small in the final result.

Now I will show you some more processes I went through to create the many more models that feature inside of this animation. I will go over how the pistol, money, blossom, and Earth was created.

For the production of the pistol inside of this animation (this pistol specifically being a Glock 17 as was requested), I went and found the blueprints for this model and imported into Blender to then start the aligning and modelling process. I had done a version before this finished version that was mainly a test and was embarrassingly low detail, I already knew I had to make a second version.

After the model was complete, I had taken a look at how this pistol looked for the materials to find out that the slide is a little darker than the grip. With this in mind, I had the model and materials ready to be animated. I am very proud of this result.

One thing I would do differently would be to model the magazine to animate along side the pistol because I feel as if it would add a little more toward the overall look of this finished result.

Here is some production on the money inside of this animation. Making it was as simple as adding two textures to the top and bottom of a plane, arraying around fifty of them, displacing the transform a little bit, and then creating the band to wrap around.

This blossom was created by adding a picture of a petal, duplicating a few to go around in a circle and then warping them so give a wavy look.

The stem was modelled starting from a low polly circle to then being extruded to make the top and bottom of it. I texture painted on this stem to give the stem it's green and pinkish look.

The Earth was made by adding a sphere and uses three layers. One layer is for the Earth texture that has it's own nodes for the material and look, one layer a little bigger that has a cloud texture, and one more layer a little more bigger for the convincing glow wrapped around the whole thing.

Now that the production part of this project was done, the rendering process had begun and gave me a little bit of time to have a break and to slowly plan the post production stage. For the rendering process, I did plan ahead a little as all the whole render is going to be a folder flooded with thousands of PNG's.

I did two renders, one for the foreground and one for the background. This is so I can add depth between the two renders in After Effects as I can now retrospectively put layers between the two like rotoscoping and the smoke.

POST-PRODUCTION

I used Adobe After Effects for the post production potion as this program is my go-to for in detail editing and effects. It helps that this specific program has been a program that I've always been familiar to and that I am most knowledgeable in ever since the end of 2015.

To make the smoke for this project, I started off with an old preset I made a long while ago for my older projects for the plugin 'Form'. Here you can see an in inspiration of what I wanted the smoke to look like from a screenshot from the Netflix show 'Kid Cosmic'.

Once the I got the smoke to look how I wanted, I imported in both the render and the 3D tracking camera from Blender into After Effects and placed the result into the scene to preview what I was working with.

experimenting with transitions, masking and references.jpg

I got to experimenting with transitions between some of the shots to add continuity to every shot. For example, this fire transition that I took from a fire transition reference and got to creating an animated mask for it.

As I wanted to include rotoscoping to this animation, I thought I could use this effects to add to shots, but to also point eyes toward parts of the shot that may need it. So for this example, I used Adobe Animate to draw a white outline around the UK in this scene as I thought it looked quite plain before and seemed perfect for this effect.

As I said, I continued with the rotoscoping idea by giving some other shots like this one for example some splines that stretch behind the foreground and wrap around the camera. This just adds to the shot but I would admit, looks quite chaotic with how much is shown at the moment so that would've been something I should've thought about ahead of time in the 3D stage.

For the looks in the post production stage, I use Maxon's Magic Bullet Looks. This plugin is great for turning bland looking results and renders into beautiful results and here you can see me experimenting with some of the effects that this plugin has. If I were to change anything about the finished animation, I would maybe tone down the 'Haze/Flare' effect as I fell it is too overpowering.

For the impact during this animation I decided that I did not want to go overboard as I wanted to fit the vibe and feel of the song for this. I decided to mask an adjustment layer that covers the bottom half of the screen. Then I added a glow and twitch effect to sync up with the drums and claps of the song.

The process of syncing is actually quite funny to picture, it was done by running the audio for the song inside of After Effects and hitting the '*' key every time I would want there to be an impact. To this date, this is the most I've pressed the '*' key on the keyboard in my life!