[Tier 3] Kiriko's Plaything Project Breakdown (Patreon)

This was only my second official animation I have ever made so I wanted to use it as an opportunity to practice different skills. That's pretty much why it is a relatively simple animation that is more of a compilation. Going into this project I knew what I wanted to do, and what I wanted the final product to look like, (other than the background, I had no idea what that was going to be). Each scene took me roughly a day or so to animate. The final 30 second clip of the animation took me longer and it also took me a while to get the jiggle physics right (as explained in previous Project Breakdown post).

One thing that was kind of disappointing is I wanted to animate fluid squirting out, to add more wetness to the animation, however I am very new to fluid sims in blender, and I even tried to hand animate singular strands shooting out but it just wasn't working how I wanted it to so I scrapped that whole idea entirely.A big change I made between this animation and my last one was that I switched from rendering in cycles to rendering with Eevee. There were two main reasons why I made this decision, The first was that I realized I am animating video game characters, so trying to go for a super high-quality look using cycles probably wasn't the right idea. The second reason was simply that Eevee renders much faster. Cycles is usually used for realistic renderings because it calculates pretty much everything such as how light bounces around a scene, which takes a long time, Eevee is more like a video game engine, so it approximates these things to be faster.Once the animations were all complete and the render settings looked good, I had to finally decide what I wanted to do for the background/setting. I ended up going through different Overwatch maps to see if any of the locations fit the theme of the animation. I settled with one of the Busan spawn rooms that I used for inspiration. The room was very empty, so at first, I added the couch on the left and a large square vent on the right. However, after doing a test render, the vent just looked like a big gray square blob (because of the blur from the depth of field). So I removed that from the scene and added the table with empty party cups instead.

Making the toy was also easier than I expected it to be, just some straightforward shapes merged together, and a few modifiers used such as array and remesh. I did have to learn how to parent a bone to the top of the object so it could easily be animated and rotated from that position. This way I could also add a child of bone constraint so Kiriko's hand could easily hold it and it would follow the movement of her finger perfectly.

Now getting into the most unexpectedly difficult part of the whole project... the audio.A MASSIVE thing I have learned from making these projects is to trust the process. Not only with the blocking phase vs the final animation, but also with audio because you have to put it together piece by piece. You need to analyze what is actually making sounds in the animation, then you need to find that specific sound in the sound pack, then edit the sound so it actually fits the setting. This is a relatively 'ok' process, but I didn't realize I had to do it like 6 times for this one project until it was all rendered. Another reason why I fully finished the audio for the last 2 scenes was because it was easier to do than the scenes before, because I had readily available plap/sucking sounds that were easy to add in. The other scenes were slow and needed almost custom sounds and voices. This is where I had to really cut up and edit different audio files so it would work. I also had to make sure I wasn't reusing dialogue from the limited audio files I had, so the characters wouldn't make the same sound more than once. Overall, I personally think it came out pretty good, but it definitely took some motivation and effort to get the audio all edited and finished.

I also need to work on my organization when it comes to audio. I don't use different label colors as much as I should be. I also should work on keeping certain sounds on specific audio tracks. That is pretty much my main thoughts about the creation of this project. The software that I used was Blender, Premiere Pro, & Photoshop. I know I am bad at explaining things so if you have any questions at all or even suggestions of how I could improve or do things differently let me know.