I finished making my animation of vtuber Nanashi Mumei skiing downhill and seeing Ouro Kronii. It took me a total of three days to finish this project. On the first day I made the models and animated them. I spent days two days just waiting for the animation to finish rendering. My computer was on throughout this time. I also left it to render overnight.
I used Bricklink Studio to create Mumei and Kronii. I imported them into Mecabricks then exported them as .obj files. My initial plan was simply to animate everything in Blender and export the whole thing as an .alembic file. I would then import the file into UE4 to simply play back the animation. The only thing I would have to do was to set up the cameras. I was silly to think that this would work. My animation consists of a total of 3500 frames. The .alembic file was 22 GB. I was able to import the .alembic file but only as a mesh. When I tried importing it as a skeleton and geometry cache, UE4 just crashed. So I decided to render the animation using the Blender Cycles engine.
The following is how I made everything in Blender. I made two planes and sculpted them for the snowy landscape. I added a subdivision surface modifier to increase the resolution. I added a passive rigid body modifier to the first plane. I added a dynamic paint modifier to the second plane and set it to canvas. To get Mumei to wrap around the terrain, I parented a bone to her model. I added a shrinkwrap modifier to the bone. It took a bit of time to balance how deep Mumei's ski would be in the snow to have visible displacement in the snow as she moves. I did this by adjusting the position of the bone relative to Mumei's ski. To get Mumei's ski to affect the snow, I made two rectangular boxes in the shape of her ski and parented them to Mumei. I added a dynamic paint modifier and set it to brush. I also added a passive rigid body modifier and ticked the animation box. I parented Mumei, the bone, her ski, and the rectangular boxes to an empty. I dragged this empty all the way down and added keyframes to move Mumei from one end of the landscape to the other end. I baked the landscape with the dynamic paint modifier and the rectangular boxes. I imported Kronii and placed her at the other end of the landscape. Since I joined all parts of each model together, I could not animate their mouths easily. So I installed the AnimAll add-on which allowed me to animate their mouths while in edit mode and add keyframes to the timeline. To be able to select their mouths easily, I checked the materials tab and look for the color assigned to their mouth which is red. Since the models also have parts that have the same color, I used ctrl + shift to select the mouths while in wireframe mode.
I was able to cut down the render time per frame to around 30 seconds at the cost of quality. I set the resolution to 1024x576. I set the number of samples to 128. I used an HDRI for the lighting. I exported the animation as an image sequence just in case the render fails. To cut down on render time for the mouths I only rendered 30 frames worth of the mouth shrinking (closing). The render failed multiple times but luckily I was able to continue from where I left off. When Blender finished rendering the animation, I used the video sequencer to combine everything and add sounds. For the background I used a sky wallpaper and added a gaussian blur effect strip. I set blend to alpha over for the first image sequence. I set blend to alpha under for the second image sequence because of how I combined the mouth animations. I had separate image sequences for Mumei and Kronii's mouth animations. To get the mouth to increase in size (open), I simply duplicated the given mouth image sequences and reversed the frames. To increase the speed, I added speed control effect strips. Lastly, scaled the animation's resolution to 1920x1080.
Although this animation was more challenging to make then my previous ones, it was without a doubt immensely satisfying. The render quality is of course much better than UE4 but it took more time to render. I also could have had a LEGO plastic shader which Mecabricks' zmbx file format provides but again my first plan was not to use Blender to render it and so I only exported the models as .obj files.
This animation is dedicated to Nanashi Mumei and Ouro Kronii.
Support Ouro Kronii on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmbs8T6MWqUHP1tIQvSgKrg
Follow Ouro Kronii on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ourokronii
Support Nanashi Mumei on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3n5uGu18FoCy23ggWWp8tA
Follow Nanashi Mumei on Twitter: https://twitter.com/nanashimumei_en
I made instructions for both Nanashi Mumei and Ouro Kronii. You can purchase them from the websites below.
I made two versions of instructions for Ouro Kronii. It is a 238 page PDF. The second version includes the main model and Kronii's circular headpiece. It is a 256 page PDF.
-https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-86724/BrickHugger171/nanashi-mumei/#details
-https://ko-fi.com/s/39f1d74519
-https://www.mocsmarket.com/lego-mocs/nanashi-mumei-instructions/
-https://staycalm182.gumroad.com/
I made a 264 page PDF of instructions for Nanashi Mumei.
-https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-87006/BrickHugger171/ouro-kronii/#details
-https://ko-fi.com/s/74a792ed1b
-https://www.mocsmarket.com/lego-mocs/ouro-kronii-instructions/
-https://staycalm182.gumroad.com/
If you like my creations and you would like to support me, you can donate to my Ko-Fi page here: https://ko-fi.com/staycalm182
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