It’s been a while since I last posted, and that was because I was hard at work using Blender to create some new animated projects. And finally, the first of those projects is done! A spec ad for the fictional project “SOK Neural Headgear.” I came up with the idea in a dream involving a brain-chip powered neural web browser, and wrote down the details as soon as I woke up.
This ad is inspired by fake ads for evil or morally dubious fictional companies, such as this teaser for the Resident Evil 2 movie that starts as a skin cream commercial. I also adopted the white, sterile backgrounds and chrome highlights of that trailer to give the ad a “futuristic” look.
Early on, I decided to follow a traditional design process for this project. I started with a script for the ad, then used Procreate to create storyboard sketches for each shot. After recording the script and editing the shots into an animatic, I began modelling each shot one at a time. Each shot was created in a separate Blender file, while all the animated text and web mockups were made in separate After Effects files and imported as mesh planes. While I previously used Cinema4D’s Takes System to switch from shot to shot inside a single project file, I wasn’t sure if Blender had a similar feature. Let me know in the comments if there’s a feature or plugin for Blender that works similarly to C4D Takes.
While I initially added animated gifs to my mock web browsers, those tanked my render speed once I imported them into Blender. I made do by animating still images and text in After Effects before adding the rendered movies to Blender so the program wouldn’t have to render extra items in real time in the browser. I incorporated item models and textures from BlenderKit, and animated figures from Mixamo into the project to save myself time creating them myself. The Mixamo figures were especially useful, as I could select from pre-rigged characters, apply the animation I wanted to them, then import the animated figure right into Blender. I have not tried rigging characters in Blender yet, but I plan to practice basic rigging in the coming months. My next big project is a 2D animation titled “The 4 Brain Cells Dance.” I look forward to showing that off once it’s done!
