Behind the Scenes - How I Made Tides Of Tears (Patreon)

Hey everyone! A lot of you asked how I made the pirate short, so here’s a full breakdown of my workflow. Almost everything is done in Blender.

Hey everyone!

A lot of you asked how I made the pirate short, so here’s a full breakdown of my workflow. Almost everything is done in Blender.

The Process

1. 3D Model Animation (From the Camera’s POV)I start by animating the 3D models directly from the camera view. The characters are super simple: just flat colors with emission shaders so the lighting stays consistent and clean.

2. Grease Pencil for Faces & Extra LinesThen I animate the faces using Grease Pencil. Each character has:

A Grease Pencil line art collection for the body

A Grease Pencil object for facial features and extra stuff (like the chest muscles on Cannonball Joe, lol).

To keep the line width consistent regardless of zoom or distance, I use the Screen Space Thickness modifier available here https://developer.blender.org/docs/release_notes/4.3/files/screen-space-thickness-nodegroup.blend .

Pixel Art Settings

The project is in 800x450px.To keep it crisp and pixelated:

Filter Size is set to 0px

Anti-aliasing for Grease Pencil is also set to 0

For a hand-drawn, shaky feel, I added a wave distortion modifier to the Grease Pencil line art but it introduces blur and aliasing, so here’s the (painful) workaround:

I upscale the render to 200%

Apply a Threshold modifier in after effect to clean up the lines

Then downscale it again to the original size

It's kind of a mess, but it works (sort of). I also tried the Noise modifier but couldn’t get it to look right for this style I might revisit that later.

Camera Lattice Hack

I use an addon called Camera Lattice, which generates a lattice from the camera POV. I:

Distort the lattice in Edit Mode

Move it frame-by-frame to give the whole shot a bit of shakiness and inconsistency, like it was drawn frame-by-frame by hand.

Compositing

For the final image, I export two image sequences:

One for the color pass (emission shaders only)

One for the Grease Pencil line art

Each is rendered from separate View Layers in Blender, super useful for keeping things modular.

Then I bring everything into After Effects, where I:

Do some color correction

Add backgrounds

Apply a final threshold filter to clean up any blurry edges from the wave distortions

Files + Questions

I linked the .blend files if you want to poke around and see how it’s all set up.Let me know if you have any questions or want me to dig deeper into any part: rigging, modifiers, lattice tricks, whatever.

Thanks so much for supporting this project. It’s a chaotic pipeline, but it somehow holds together and it's not as complicated as it seems lol.