TOGD Timelapse + Thoughts + Tools (Patreon)

Oh boy ! We did 8 hours on Trail of Shar, and I thought that was long. Lol :) Here is a 12-hour video of me redoing everything 5 times :) And honestly, I loved every second of it :) Timestamps are included.Exclusive to Animation Tier Supporters. You’ll get access to:

the full, unsped-up 12-hour version

a x12 timelapse version that’s about 1 hour long

I’m also releasing some tools I've vibecoded to help me with this project - more on those below.

So, what have I learned? Well, a lot of obvious stuff, but you need to make mistakes to understand why they’re mistakes :)

Optimization - you should think about optimization the moment you delete that cube :) Thankfully, I thought about my VRAM budget early and optimized all assets. I downsized all environment and vegetation textures to 2K and removed unnecessary nodes from shaders. Did you know that if, in a material, a node is connected somewhere to the output, Blender will load it into memory even if it’s not used in the final look? The most common place for this is all the texture variants a lot of models have. Anyway, think about optimization early. Do everything you can to reduce render times without impacting quality.

In the end, I had almost 8,000 frames to render, and even though I managed to reduce each frame to around 30 seconds, it still took me 4 days. Fight for every second :)

Build around your shots - in theory, it would be cool to build the scene as fully as possible and then freely play with angles and cameras. I did that in Trail of Shar and in TOGD. I built the whole room with all the details and assets, and then looked for good camera angles. I think that’s a bad approach, because in most cases 80% of that work goes to waste. If you want to be efficient, first decide on your shots, then build the minimum scene needed to support them. It will save memory and, in the end, render time too.

USE FUCKING REFERENCE - I follow this rule religiously when doing stills, but somehow for animation I thought I could do without it. Silly summer child. I spent 2 days trying to animate a pose that was not physically possible :( And when I finally looked for reference for that pose, I couldn’t find it, BECAUSE IT’S PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE :) It’s really hard to find exact animated reference, but it’s a must.

Use links - by that I mean linking another blend file into a scene. It’s an absolute game changer. I have to admit, in Blender it’s a bit confusing, especially if you want to override and change some things in the linked file, but in most cases it helps a lot. I had a main file with the Temple, altar, and Lara linked into it from other blend files. It allowed me to focus on each part in the fastest way possible and keep everything organized. At some point, if you work with large environments, complex characters, and physics, things get very, very, very slow. Separating everything helps a lot.

Constraints - I’ve really improved my understanding and use of bone constraints - you just can’t animate effectively without them. I’m sure there’s still a lot more to learn, but I’ve already used them in every loop so far. I've also asked Claude to do a handy script to use them more efficiently.

And as usual, I need to stop overcomplicating everything :) Overall, it was a hard project, but I can understand why. I’m an experienced artist and used to breezing through still images without issues. I’ve made so many of them that I’m very confident in my skills and, most importantly, I know their limits and can avoid things that slow me down. Right now, I’m learning animation, and everything is a challenge :) I know eventually I’ll reach that knowledge threshold where things start going much more smoothly, and I’ll be able to focus more on creating art.

Tools:I like automating everything :) And thanks to AI, creating Blender scripts is very easy now. Here’s a few bits of vibe-coded stuff I made for TOGD, and I’ll definitely keep improving them. You can see using them A LOT in timelapse video. Of course, keep in mind: vibe code - everything is hanging by a thread :)

Create Loop - a script that adds a button to your Dope Sheet panel. On click, it creates keyframes at the start, middle, and end frames defined in the UI. If you keyframe a lot of bones, it’s a huge time-saver.Toggle Frames - if you work with physics (jiggle or dynamic bones, for example), you really want to set playback to Play Every Frame, or your simulated stuff will jump around. But when you work on animation, you want Drop Frames for proper timing. The issue is that there’s only one place where you can change this (as far as I know), and it involves a lot of clicks. This script adds a button to your Dope Sheet panel to toggle playback (Small play button on the right of Make Loop button). Very useful.***

Bone Constraint - it’s very easy in Blender to quickly create constraints on bones. You can select any bone and press Shift + Ctrl + C, and it will create a new empty with the desired constraint. The problem is, if you’re using the Animation Layers addon, that empty will be outside of your "layer". So if you want to animate that empty with the constraint, you need to enable Animation Layers on each one. I think there’s a way to group them together with the new Slots structure, but I haven’t figured it out exactly yet. This script lets you create constraints in a similar way, but instead of an empty, it creates a new bone on the selected armature and uses it as the constraint target. This way, you can animate everything in the same “layer.”***

Bake Manager - while working with Bone Dynamic and Jiggle Maker, I found it very time-consuming to search for my physics objects, adjust them, and bake them. Even when I had a relatively low number of objects, like 7 or 8, it was still a pain to find them in the outliner or addon panels. This tool keeps track of your cloth/physics objects and lets you navigate to them easily, as well as bake them all in one go.As i mentioned, these tools are vibe coded and I don't want to wrap them as addon. Instead, I suggest to load them only when needed. You can use free blender extension Script Manager Pro, designate folder with scripts and run desired script from N panel when needed.

I have more tools I’m tinkering with, and I hope I’ll share them later.

Thank you for reading and supporting my work!