Caroline's 3D Animation Blog

Editing in After Effects

To edit my project together, I imported my renders into After Effects. They were TIFF sequences. I was going to use Blender to do the compositing but I ended up thinking it would be just a lot easier doing all the editing in After Effects. So I started off, for each scene, just doing some basic colour correcting and added a Glow effect for all the underwater scenes to enhance the god rays. I changed the contract a bit as well with Curves.

I had use the same music from my previs, I tried to look for another song but I never found anything I liked better than that French track! So I stuck to that song. I had tine each scene with the track so putting everything together with the music was a bit of a breeze. I had also made sound effects for the pre-vis, which included the fridge door opening and closing. I got one sound effect from epidemic sound but the rest of the music was from Uppbeat.

I also played around with vignettes so enhance the romance between the cans. To enhance that even further, I decided to have a switch in the aspect of the screen from a 16:9 aspect to a 21:9 when the cans meet and the camera starts to zoom in etc. To really emphasise the change mood and the love at first sight that the cans developed. TO make this smooth in AE, I just used a black rectangular box and animated the position to make it a smoother transition.

Poster

I used the photoshop to quickly put this poster together. I really liked this shot from the river scene so wanted to use it for the poster. I found that font on the Adobe website and then overlaid a texture I had on the text to make the text look a bit rusty.

Exhibition

At the exhibition our class decided to paint the walls in this black funky pattern on the walls and have mirrors etc. So we spend a couple days painting and setting up the exhibit. Below are some of the photos of the exhibit and myself painting.

Final Video

This is the final video all put together!

Final thoughts

There are obviously many technical challenges that I had to contend with, which slowed me down and meant that some ideas had to be sacrificed. If I knew I was going to have so many issues I’m not sure I would have taken the decision in the summer to add three extra scenes! However!!! I am still very proud of what I was able to create. The story itself I’m proud of coming up with as well. Although I would like to improve the character animation, I am really happy with the composition and models in the scene and felt like I learnt so so much about environmental modelling. I knew from the beginning it wasn’t going to be a piece with brilliant character animation. I wanted the focus to be on the environments and the modelling. I love modelling and hope to continue to learn and improve and also use different software too. I really liked the editing at the end as well. I didn’t realise how much I would like the editing together aspect.

In the next few months I wanted to re-render the scenes that had errors like the forest scene and the outside factory scene, and tweak the character animation, but I thought it was good enough for the exhibition. I want to continue to model and move onto another software like Houdini and Cinema4D to learn motion graphics and FX as one day I would love to make content for adverts.

This is the scene that directly comes after the establishing shots of outside the corner shop. This was the most important scene for setting up the whole story.

Plan

The scene is broken into three parts

• Establishing shots of inside the shop
• Establishing love connection between the cans
• Can being brought and separated from each other

Below is the images from my Previs.

I actually quite like the composition of the scene. I wanted more establishing shots though to make it look like a bit of a manky corner shop

I also did an animation in Maya of a water drop going into a bucket and wanted to recreate something like that.

Modelling

Here is a video of a series of screen recordings of myself modelling objects for the shop scene. I modelled everything in the scene bar one object which was the cardboard boxes. I was really proud as alot of it was my experimenting and figuring it out as I went along.

I reference to create the milk bottles and chocolate bars etc. The basic shapes were cylinder and cubes.

I used loads of references to create the the shelves. I did the holes by subdividing the plane and using Loop tools.

I used the array modifier to duplicate the shelves.

I used this as a reference to create the fridge. I brought it into the scene and used it to give better proportions than I would have if I had done it without. I also collected lot of picks of inside fridges to model that.

For the surroundings of the shop, I used a Cube and separated it into walls, floor and ceiling.

I used a noise texture to created a terrazzo flooring. I also used loop cuts to make it looked tiled. I did the same to the ceiling to make it look tiled and then also add a popcorn looking effect on the ceiling.

The cereal and cans were just cubes and cylinders.

Texture Atlas

I wanted to have fake brands on the boxes but didn’t have time to create them. So I got the idea to use AI to create a texture atlas of different cereal. I found this tutorial below that helped me map the texture onto the objects.

Character animation

This was the blocking stage, the first pass at animating the scene. I wanted the the Vincent rig to re stock the fridge so it was the first time the cans met. This was different from the previs but I thought it would be better for the story.

I started by recording reference of myself picking up a “crate” of cans. There were several reference videos.

Each week I did a another pass at the animation, from blocking, I went to blocking plus. Then when I was happy I splined it.

I found the character animation part incredibly hard. There were a lot of timing issues, I kept animating it too fast!!!

So I would grab key frames and drag it along to correct it.

I also had a lot of difficulty with the changing between IK and FK and having a constraint with the hands and the box. little movements meant the difference between the rigs arms being normal and just randomly shooting up into the air. It just took alot of time an patience in the end, as for once, I couldn’t find an answer to the problems I was having with Blender. I think the modelling part in Blender was amazing but the character animation proved far more difficult in Blender for me.

There is still timing issues, something that I would like to fix in the future.

For the animation of Rain, the other rig, I actually went backwards and forwards between Blocked and Spline. I’m not sure why but it made it a bit easy and the rig was also SO much easier to use than the Vincent rig

Camera and Light Animations

I wanted to get across that the cans were falling in love so it was all in the camera animations. I had a lot of panning shots so it looked like the cans were looking at each other. I used quite a few different cameras for the fridge shot along, and switch between them to make it as personified as possible. I knew in After Effects I wanted to add in a vignette and pink tones to manufacture a romance.

Some extra things I thought of to enhance the romance was to change the aspect of the screen. When the camera starts to zoom into the can, I changed the aspect ratio from 16:9, which is how the film began, to 2560×1080 which is 21:9 ultrawide display. I thought it looked more cinematic and made it really emphasise the change in mood.

Lastly, I had modelled a light inside the fridge so to enhance the colour that I knew I would add in post, in After Effect, I just animated the colour of the lights inside the fridge.

Final Thought and Final Renders

I was quite happy with the final look. But there was a few issues with the render. I had issues rendering on the render farm as per. The rigs were not compatible with an old version of Blender. So I had to render on Blender 3.5 on render farm, but it meant that the texture issues arose. The mistiness in the fridge was different floors etc. I like the overall look but I think because there were issues rendering I didn’t have time to render out Vincent picking up the cans. I wanted to add it in later. I also didn’t realise until I had rendered it, that the other rig, Rain, the animation for that was really jolty from inside the fridge. It wasn’t evident on the test renders because the fridge wasn’t as transparent on Eevee compared to the Cycles render engine.

I also wanted the can to look like it was crying, but the water droplet addon didn’t work properly with Render farm. Plus I didn’t have time to render it out on the computer.

I also wanted to add more things in the scene but it was being so heavy for my computer.

For the future, I would love to keep working on my character animation and re-render with more objects in the scene and the water drop working. I think without the water droplets, there is something missing for me unfortunately.

Plan

This was one of the scenes what weren’t in the pre-vis. I wanted to include more nature shots and thought a river scene would be nice. I thought it would emphasise the impact of litter in the environment.

I found this tutorial on creating a river that helped me a lot with this scene and all the subsequent scenes.

Modelling

I started off with a plane that was subdivided loads. I used Proportional Editing to make the bank of the river. Then used just a simple plane underneath this one. The simple plane will act as the water.

I then modelled a few varieties of rocks using the landscape addon. I used the geometry nodes to instance the points on the plane. This helped the scene not be so heavy than if I used a particle system. This distributed the stones on the plane. I added some bigger rocks to the scene and then placed them on the river part. To add to the texture, I downloaded a rocky texture from Ambient CG. I used the UV map to add a Displacement map using the Displace modifier. I then played around with the colours and make it more pinky to match the aesthetic of the project.

I then added a texture to the water plane and noise texture. When I changed the W value of the noise texture node it makes it look like water moving.

I then added a noise animation to the Can and animated it going down the river.

Rust

I thought by this scene the can should look rusty. I found a tutorial on how to make procedural textures. I used several noise textures and a second Principled BSDF node to mix it with the metal label texture I already had on the can.

Shader editor below showing the rust texture.

Pines

I wanted there to be a connection between this scene and the next one which is the forest scene. So I added trees to the scene. Instead of adding actual models of trees to the scene, I added planes with the images of trees. My computer was getting so slow at this point so I wanted to do something to free up space.

I had a separate Blender doc with a model of a tree and rendered a couple different images from each tree. One ordinary render and one that was a normal, to create a normal map. I used the orthographic camera instead of the perspective.

I then had took the images to place them in to the river doc. The normal map helped with the depth of the image, to make it look more 3D.

I then overlaid the planes together in the shader editor. I placed them in the scene around the river bank to look like the river was surrounded by a forest.

Lastly, I wanted to add plants to the scene. I tried to use the GScatter addon but it made my computer very slow and crash. So I ended up downloading a plant set from Quixel Bridge. Then I used the geometry nodes to distribute the plants. I then used an empty with a Noise animation on it, and then used the empty as an origin on the Simple Deformer. This made the plants move.

Final Thoughts and renders

I was really happy with this render. It took a while again because it looked really weird in renderfarm so had to convert it to an older version of Blender. But after that it was quite smooth after that. I played around with the lighting a few times but happy with what it looked like in the end. Would have have loved to have water drops on the can but that can’t be render on render farm as the drop addon I have is only compatible with Blender 3.5!

In this scene I want the can to look like it had ended up in the middle of a forest, again showing the impact of rubbish in the environment.

These are the images from the Previs. It is just a person picking up the can and throwing it into the back of a van. The van will drive off to the factory

References

So I started to gather references again in PureRef. I wanted to have this forest floor with lush ferns surrounding it.

Modelling

The references were super helpful. I was able to quickly model the forest floor by subdividing the mesh of a plane and using the verts of the plane and proportional editing to make the floor uneven. The using the Displace Modifier and a displacement map from a texture I got from AmbientCG. I was able create this rocking/mossy floor.

If I had time, I would have loved to model some plants, but for time reasons I decided to download the model from PolyHaven. I modelled a couple of different varieties of big and small rocks using the the landscape addon. I used the weight paint tool to show exactly where I wanted the rocks and ferns to go on the landscape. I left part in blue for just the rocks, so it looked like there was a clearing. I downloaded a log and a tree stump too and place that in the scene.

From there it was super easy. I just placed a HDRI of a forest into the scene and added a warm sun light to match the lighting in my other scenes. I also selected the verts on the plane closest to the camera and subdivided that area again. This is so that part looks super detailed without having to subdivide the whole plane.

I also added the pine trees that I used for the river scene.

I downloaded a van from Sketch Fab. I re-created the Dutty Juice label in Adobe Illustrator and used the UV map on the van to replace the texture it came with.

Animation

I used two cameras in the scene. One at the floor of the forest that panned up from the floor to the can. And another camera facing the rig and the van.

I downloaded a rig from Blender Studios. It was really simple animation of just the feet and hands. I went into pose mode and just used the controls to move the hands feet and torso.

Render Issues

I had loads of issues with rendering this scene. Because the rig I got was only compatible with Blender 3.5 and above, I could do the thing where I convert my file and to a older version for render farm. However, I tried several times to render on the university computers and some how they ended up looking like the renders below.

I didn’t work out what the issues was in the end. So ended up using the render farm. But of course it meant that the shader editor was messed up. It meant that the visibility of the tree planes were messed up and the plants came out white. By this point I had very little choice but to go with the scene so it could be used in the fmp.

Final Thoughts and Renders

I was really happy with the scene in Blender but after it was rendered it did look really different. It is something that I will definitely change for the future and update the scene. I will also continue to work on the character animation. But in terms of the story, I think the scene was able to still tell a story of the can being picked up and taken away to the factory.

Plan

This scene is a transitional shot between the can getting found in the forest and getting thrown into the van and the Can ending up inside the factory. I thought there need to be a short shot showing where the Can ends up.

Below is a still from the Previs of the van pulling up outside the factory. I liked the closeup shot to the back of the van with the camera then panning out to show the factory. I wanted to have similar motion with the camera.

References

As per, I gathered references that helped me decide what the factory would look like and the textures and colours etc.

Below is a screenshot of the images I had gathered and collated in PureRef

Modelling

I liked the composition of the previs so didn’t stray from that too much. The modelling aspect was very simple. They were a a series of cubes and cylinders that were extruded or inset for the doors.

The part that probably took the longest was the corrugated metal. It was just essentially a plane that I cut edges into and extruded those rectangle shapes or set inset into them.

Or there was the other type of corrugated steel, which I used for the garage doors.

For this I used a cube that I scaled to be quite flattened. Then added loop cuts and using proportional editing I pulled the middle edge out do make a curve doom like shape. On the last edge I extruded it to there was a gap between the curved shapes. I only had to do that once as then I used the Array Modifier to duplicate that shape to make a corrugated effect.

The Buildings where just cubes and I used the same technique that I used for creating the windows in the terrace houses.

Below I added a dirt ground texture from PolyHaven as well as a HDRI. I was influenced by the colours I saw in the reference that I gathered

I wasn’t super happy with the scene, but like most of my scenes, I went away to work on a different scene and came back to it at a later date.

Once I had time away working on the other scene, I thought that the image above was quite drab and didn’t fit the colours that I had in the other scenes. I thought because the piece is stylised, I can be way more bold and creative with the colours. So as many of my scenes had pink tones and the Dutty Juice Can was pink, I thought I might as well be bolder and just make the metal pink.

I much preferred this and started to texture using peeling metal material from AmbientCG. I experimented with the texture with a noise texture in the shader editor, which was plugged in to the Factor of the Mix shader (show below). I liked this effect as it meant that some spots had the peel and some did not depending on the noise textures influence.

The finishing touches were to add a fence around the parameter of the site. I got the fence from PolyHaven. Then I got a texture for the ground with was a pebble effect. As I had done for my other scenes I subdivided the ground plane and added a Displace Modifier and used the Displacement Map to create a bump.

For my River Scene and Forest Scene, I had added pine trees using planes, so I imported the ones I had already made and repeated that process.

I changed the HDRI to something much brighter and had a sunset ambience which I already had been reflecting in the other scenes.

I also wanted to add a bit of grass so the same grass from that I used in the river scene, I imported in to this scene,

Animation

For the Forest Scene I had purchase a van and customised it to have the Dutty Juice Labels on it. So I just imported that same customised van into this scene and because its rigged, by going into pose mode, I could animate the motion. And the good thing about it was that when I moved it forward the wheels rolled. I just did a simple animation that started off with the van just moving forward and turning in to the factory site. But then I also added slight forwards and backwards shacking when the van braked and sided to side shaking when the van when up on the curb.

The great thing about my purchase of the Van was that it also came with massive containers that I thought would actually suit the scene seeing as it was a factory. So I placed the containers on the site to make it seem less sparse.

Final Renders and Thoughts

There was a few issues with the render, firstly, just like the other scenes, I had to do that long thing were I changed the version of Blender to fix the texture issues. However, the render farm needs to know exactly where the textures are located in which folder. However, somewhere, something has gone wrong where I have not set the textures in the folder correctly, as some of the object have come out a magenta colour. When that happens, that means that the textures could not be found. So the grass and the containers have that error. By the time I had rendered it, it was too late to re- render, so it is definitely something I need to fix for later on. But for the show, I didn’t have enough time.

I also wish I added a bit more to the scene, like a bit of foggy mist like in the previs. It suggests that there is pollution from the factory. I think it would have made the scene look a bit better. Plus, although I believe the trees were need to cover the emptiness of the background, they don’t look quite right to me. I think I should have found a HDRI with trees, but the last one I found didn’t suite the scene.

I also should have duplicated the vans so there would have been more parked up.

I think with those changes I would be a bit happier with this scene. But it still serves its purpose as a transitioning shot.

Plan

This is the scene where the Can is taken to the Factory and it is recycled, and re filled with the soda and taken away again back to the shop. Even though the models are basic, I really liked the feel of this scene and wanted to preserve that. I liked the way it was almost like a one of those “Satisfying Loop Animations” and how it was a bit abstract in the way the Can was recycled. I had it go into a van and then in to a mold, where it quickly reappeared as a Can. This is obviously not what happens in a real factory but I liked the way it was quite playful and helped the story stay stylised.

References

For this scene I used PureRef again to collect loads of pics of inside factory buildings and the equipment. I wanted it to be stylised but I needed to add things in the background so people knew it was a factory.

Modelling

After collecting the reference images, I started modelling my scene. Everything in the scene, apart from the van, has been modelled my myself.

From collecting the reference images, I started modelling the staircase, which was created from extruded verts that I later make a solid, I modelled the vats and pipes which started life as a cylinder. But the more complicated models were the Main Vat and the Conveyor Belt.

Below is a screen recording of myself modelling the vat and the Conveyor Belt.

The conveyor belt looked different at first but I eventually wanted to make it look futuristic. The actually belt itself started off looking like the image below, with was a rectangle shape with an array modifier and a Curve modifier which made the rectangles stretch around that curve. The curve was also a plane with the edge bevelled so it was smooth and rounded.

That plane was used to model the outer rim of the conveyor belt and I used a mirror modifier so I only needed to do one half

The end result below

The vat took quite a bit of experimentation to get to the end result. I also had reference images of futuristic looking vats and equipment like that to help me. I wanted a barrel thing for where the metal is heated and then a weird bit and the bottom for the metal to be shaped and pushed through, similar to the original thing I modelled.

Blender has that cool mesh called Metaballs that meld together when they touch, which I thought would be perfect for the bubbles

Constraints

I felt a bit more prepared for the constraints in the fmp because of the previs. I understood the concept more and what was best for certain situations. However, because I was in Blender it was obvious different to Maya, but the constraint functionality was not as intuitive as Maya.

I used Follow Path object constraint in the images below. I found it easier to use an Empty as the object that was actually following the path and then an additional Child Of Constraint to make it a bit more flexible.

Here the Can has a Child Of Constraint to the empty, then I switch that Constraint off and then another Constraint is switched on so that the Can then follows the turntable around.

Spray

One of the last things I did to sell this scene was the kind of “magic” spray to make the can go from just aluminium to having the label on it

I found this tutorial which was very helpful

I used a particle system made out of tiny cubes and made the cubes my emitter object. Inside the hoses, I put a tiny sphere which I made the object that the spray came out of or the Emitter Object.

I changed the frame start from 1 to the frame the hoses were close up to the can which was frame 724. Then it was a case of changing the velocity and the making the value Object Aligned on the x axis higher, which made it spray in a stream rather that a cloud.

Animations

The animation for this scene was quite robotic so was not complex. For the machines like the Conveyor Belt, the crusher thing and the turntable, I added a Cycles Modifier so that there motion would repeat.

I added shape keys to the funnel thing at the bottom of the vat and used the proportional editing function whilst in edit mode manipulated the verts.

Final Renders and Final Thoughts

I really love the way the final renders came out. I think it unintentionally is giving Wes Anderson vibe with the colour and the lighting.

However, for reasons unknown, there were quite a few glitches in this render. Sometimes the light would come out really weird…

The Hoses used to spray the the can where moving all over the place in the render. When I went to check the original scene, they moved fine, So I had to do some editing in After Effects to correct this.

I also wanted to include a robot that picked up the cans and put them into the box, but again, I didn’t have enough time. Also the liquid sim wasn’t quite how I wanted it but is something that I think I will re-render for the future.

This scene is the key establishing shot on the film. I wanted it to be a corner shop on a quintessentially British street. This is the simple scene I modelled in Maya for the Pre-vis consisting of cubes and cylinders. I liked the sun hit the scene to give that sunset effect.

This is the scene where I probably gathered the most reference images. I made a mood board for not only the street itself but the look of different shops

These moodboards where extremely helpful when it came to giving me ideas about textures, colours, lighting, composition and how exactly the models should look.

Street Objects

I know I could of brought the assets but there was an aesthetic I wanted to maintain and more than that, I really enjoy modelling and wanted to concentrate on that as I would like to do that as a career.

The first thing I started to do for the scene was to model the objects for the street. I thought it would be a nice start to practice my modelling skills before I got to modelling the buildings.

So I started gathering image for the street objects, even taking pictures on my phone of things I’d see outside. On of the first objects I saw was a bin, and one of the easiest to model. This consisted of cubes and a pyramid shapes.

Another very simple one was the bollard, consisting of a cylinder and using the extrude tool.

I also modelled a cone, also made up of a cylinder, however, this was a bit trickier to go from the cone shape to the squarer shape at the bottom which required me to manipulate the verts.

The lamp post was actually probably the trickiest. It was made up of several shapes. The light itself and the cap part of the light were made up of spheres. Then the curved pole at the top was made up of a cylinder and I used the Bend tool in Maya to create a the curve shapes. The bottom part was made up of 4 planes that I stitched together with an arch shape at the top.

The bus stop ended up being quite easy as it was just a cylinder cut in half and placed on cube shapes. I also modelled a screen that sometimes is seen next to bus stops that plays adverts. George suggested that it would be like a funny easter egg to include my last project in to this scene. I really liked this idea and thought the screen next to the bus stop would be the easiest way.

I also modelled a telephone poll which again was very simple. The main shape was made out of cylinder and the other shapes where cubes.

The traffic lights were not too hard but difficult to make the topology flow well. The pole was of course again a cylinder then the lights itself were a cube shape and I extruded the three light sections.

The buildings

Once I had modelled the majority of the objects that would be in the street, I started modelling the buildings. I was worried about the difficulty of it but actually because I wanted the corner shop and the street to be made up of terrace housing, it was essentially cubes and planes.

The main corner shop itself was two cubes, one for the first floor and the one for the ground floor which was the shop itself. The bottom part I removed one of the corners and extruded inwards to create the door.

I also added details like the 1960s retro patterned wall. That started life again as a cube that I subdivided and scaled down and moved the edges to be like one “wing” then used the mirror tool to make four, then duplicated to create the complete wall.

For the windows I was a bit unsure so followed a few tutorials including the one below. It ended up being quite simple, mainly a series of insets and extrusions.

This is a video of how the scene looked in Maya

At this point I had done a lot of my other project in Blender and knew that I could achieve the effect I needed in Blender and there was more videos and blogs online that were catered for Blender, so for that reason, I exported my models from Maya and imported them into Blender.

Here I added a HDRI I had found and started to play around with the lighting

Below I had exported the objects from Maya and started placing them into my scene.

Below is how all the object looked within the scene without the textures. For the rest of the street I just duplicated the terrace houses that I had already made and just lined them up.

Textures

I had found a tutorial for make a TV screen texture in Blender. So used this to help me create a procedural texture

Below shows a screenshot of the shader editor and how I ended up making that warped effects, by using an emission shader and separating the RBG colours using colour ramp nodes.

I really loved this effect and not sure if it would have looked right without it.

Below is a screenshot of some of the procedural textures I created for the buildings. By this point it was coming to the end of the project so I was getting used to creating textures so I had just started experimenting with what I could do. To achieve the look of worn down painted plaster, damaged by the elements, is using a material from AmbientCG, then, because the original colour was white, but I wanted it pink, I used the Screen blending mode and plugged that into the Base Colour. then using a Mix Shader, I added another Principled BSDF Shader that had a noise texture plugged into the Factor, which gave that lighter worn out effect

Below is a screenshot of just the noise texture without the colour, demonstrating the use of the noise texture

Below is a screen shot of one of the final touches I did to the scene. This included adding wires coming out of the telephone pole which was done just by adding verts.

I also added extra objects into the scene from SketchFab and PolyHaven that I didn’t have time to model. this included a rubbish bin (not the black litter bins) some rubbish bags and the Aircon on the outside of the shop.

Camera Animation

I had three cameras in the scene for the three shots. One for the first shot of the street, one for the pan away from the bus stop ad, and one by the shop door.

These were the final renders

Final thoughts

I actually really liked how the scene turned out and I liked the experimenting I did with the modelling and procedural textures. I probably spent the mode time with this scene overall, especially with the time researching and collecting reference is accounted for. However, there were still so many things I wanted to include. I wanted cars coming up and down the street to give it a little bit more life. I also had the idea of having some one coming out of the shop to leave the door open, as an introduction to the interior of the store. I really wanted to practice doing most of the modelling so I knew I had to sacrifice something.

Something that I would like to do for later is add the signage and these other details I said above. Also things like dirt and graffiti would have been the last touch, but with all the issues I had rendering it ended up taking up time changing scenes and ate some of my time away. However, I think I still like the outcome.

Plan

This is a scene that was not in the pre-vis. There are a series of scenes including this one, there I wanted some environmental shots. So the plan for this one was to have the can float past some glaciers. But I wanted it to transition from day to night as I thought it would be cool to include some northern lights. I had also timed out the music so knew at this point in the project, there was a bit where it sounded really sad, so I wanted it to look like the can was staring up at the sky and “cry”

So first, as per, I gathered a collection of images to get inspiration

Modelling

Day scene

Firstly, I modelled the glaciers by using the landscape addon in Blender. From there I used Proportional Editing and the Lattice tool to make the curve shape in the glacier up in front. I made sheets of ice floating in the water using the landscape addon in Blender again, then squashing them down by scaling them on the z axis to make them flatter. From there I just used a particle system to distribute the bits of ice on the water plan.

The water plane was just a plan with a procedural texture that I made and then a noise texture node, and by animating the W value, this made it look like a moving body of water.

From there I imported the can model into the scene and animated moving across the scene then added a noise modifier on the Graph Editor to make it look like the can was bobbing on to of the water.

For the Night portion of this scene, I had to complete the day scene, camera animation and all, so that I could then do a duplicate of of the scene change the lighting and add the northern lights, this way I can blend the scenes together by changing the opacity.

So for the night scene. I removed the HDRI and added a very large sphere to the background and removed most of it so all that was left was a sort of curved plane. Then I added a series of noise textures in the shader editor. When a colour ramp is added it manipulates the noise texture, so I could make stars and kind of nebulous clouds in the sky

I found this tutorial below that helped me create the Northern Lights. It started off by being a cube that I subdivided and the added loop cuts to create these curved rectangle shapes. I duplicated them so there were a few, this was the basis for the shape.

Then the rest of the magic is of course in the shade editor. Using a series of noise texture nodes, colour ramp nodes that are blended using the overlay and screen node, this creates a series of striped looking lights. Then using the W value in those noise textures, it can be animated to looking like moving lights.

The final part was to add the can “looking sad”. I did this but duplicating the glacier scene at night and adding a camera above the can looking down at it. I add a few lights to illuminate the can a bit better. Then I added water droplets using an addon I had purchased for the Dutty Juice advert. I animated a water droplet moving down the can to kind of make it look like it was crying. I had to render this on the uni computer as the addon didn’t work using render farm

Final Thoughts and Final Renders

I was really happy with this scene. I had to re-render it a few times as the colours didn’t look right the first time. I also had a few iteration of the scene where that curved glacier didn’t exist but in the end I felt like it was needed as a point of focus.

So this scene was the start of the Cans journey of being littered then wash away and ending up in the Ocean. In my previs I had a simple scene of the can in the sand and then the shop in the background. I actually quite like this composition as it was like the can could still where the other can had been and it could conjure this feeling of them being so close yet so far. I also liked the colours I had used and wanted to stay on with that same sunset theme.

Reference

Before I started my scene, although I had my previs, I wanted to gather inspiration to give the scene that British beach vibe. So I found out about this free tool called PureRef that allows you to drag and drop images from the internet in to this little page and view them all together and it stays open all the time in the foreground which was super helpful when I was putting my scene together in Blender. So I used PureRef to gather these images below.

Scene Composition

So although I liked the idea of having the shop in the background, I knew this beach scene was going to be super heavy from the tutorials I had looked at. I thought adding the street in the background by importing it into the scene would have been too much. I wasn’t sure of a way to add it in, plus I hadn’t actually completed that “Outside Shop” scene yet so I didnt add it in the end. But it might be something I do in the future. However, I still wanted a sense that the can had been littered so thought it would be cool to add a sign in the background and a bin that looked like it was overflowing. So I actually just imported the bin that I had modelled for the “Outside Shop” scene. Then I simply modelled a sign that comprised of two cubes scaled to look like the pole and one that looked like the sign itself. For the sign part, I bevelled all four corners to make the edges smooth and rounded.

The bin already had materials on it, as I had made it for the other scene. But for the sign I found the image in the internet of a “Please Don’t Litter” sign and used that as the material. For the pole, I used a wood texture from Ambient CG.

So make it look like there was more rubbish in the area, I found a model of a collection of bin bags that I thought looked perfect.

The then needed a sandy beach texture, so found a texture from Ambient CG and used a Displace Modifier and a Subdivision Modifier to a plane, then used the Displacement Map to make it match the bumps in the image.

Then in the Shader Node, I added the other maps and the base colour that came with the downloaded texture.

From there I just positioned my camera and then imported the all important Can in to my scene

Beach Waves

Simulating the water was one of the more complex things I needed to do in my whole project. The actually setting up of the simulation was fine but getting it to look right was quite hard for me. I purchased the addon Flip Fluids for this.

I found a tutorial that helped me demonstrate how to set it up.

I firstly modelled a platform, this was just a cube and I added loop cuts and moved the verts around to create a slope. This Slope is to help generate the beach waves, it helps the water drag back like waves on a beach.

The I needed an object to push the water. This is the “pump”. This object was again use a simply cube with one bevelled edge to smooth it out. I then animated this object going up and down and copy and pasted those frames to repeat this motion. This object actually helps to generate the waves by pushing the water.

Then there were two more objects, with consisted of cubes. One was the water itself, and one was the Domain. The Domain is what where the simulation was contain and would not go outside this box.

I also added modelled rocks for the scene and used the landscape addon for that again. I textured them using textures from Ambient CG.

For the simulation to work, I marked which object was the fluid, the domain and the obstacles in the Flip Fluid tab.

Then I baked the simulation, at a low resolution of 65.

From there it was just a lot of playing around to make it look right. I changed pretty much everything from the first bake. I change the length of the domain, the size and height of the water, the size of the pump, how high the pump went in the animation, how low it went and the size of the slope.

One of the first issue was that where I had the domain to begin with, was too short for the scene. It mean that you could see the water crashing in the the wall of the domain, like there was an invisible barrier. Obviously this was not realistic so increase the length of the domain. Sometimes the pump was too powerful so he water was visibly pouring off the edge of the scene. So I had to strike a balance.

However, when I though I had struck a balance, when I would re-bake at a higher resolution, the water would look better but behave slightly differently. The waves again would go too far or not far enough.

So it just too ages to figure out!

I tried to also stay in a low res at first because the water make the scene SO SLOW. It was almost impossible to do or change anything when baked at a higher res and my computer would crash. So I did the animation for the can as best as I could at the lower res, knowing that the look of the water could change :/

So unfortunately this but was a bit tricky, as it was almost like a guessing game. I just moved the can and rotated it whenever the water come close to it. I make it looking like it was floating by adding a noise modifier to it.

After animating the can I bake at a slightly higher res then animated again, then baked at a slightly higher res until I hot up to a resolution of 350. This is when it became almost impossible to change anything and at this point I just hoped that the can was moving somewhat realistically.

Water Materials

In Flip Fluids, I ticked the Foam, Bubbled and Spray option and then selected the premade materials that came with it. From there, using my references, I adjusted the colour of the water so it wasn’t a vibrant blue colour. I wanted it to look like a proper British cold beach water. So I made it a kind of sandy colour.

Finishing Touches

I used the same HDRI for the Outside Shop scene so it looked like same time of day. I then used a low F-Stop on the camera setting and put the focus distance to where the sign was. Then I animated it so the focus distance was at the can. I wanted to really emphasise that this was the same can and it had just been littered.

Below are the final renders

Final Thoughts and Issues

I actually quite like the way it has turned out. However, I feel like there maybe could have been a better way to do the water simulation that yielded better results. But I think I would have had to explore Houdini which I had not time. I think this close up shot (above) the particles look a bit odd but I will say that my project is stylised so was never going to look ultra realistic. Also rendering this scene was a true nightmare. I did the usual thing of creating it in Blender 3.0 so it could be render on renderfarm, but because Flip Fluids is an addon, it was not possible to for renderfarm to pick up the simulation. So, because my computer was becoming a potato, I used the university facilities, but had to use about 5 different computers to get it to render on time. Some of those renders crashed so I never got the full scene. However, the renders I did manage to get were enough to put the scene together. It was a scene I actually nearly cut out because I thought it couldn’t be rendered. What I should have done, was do this scene in the summer, and render it at the uni the first few weeks we came back rather than leaving this one so late in the year.

Overall, I am glad I got to add it as it is a nice transition and an explanation as to how the Can ends up in the ocean.

I duplicated the Coral Reef scene and used that to create this anemone scene. I eliminated the hermit crab idea so I wanted a different animal to interact with the can to show the impact of littering on animals as well as the environment. I had come across this photo of a coke can when I was looking for references.

I found the tutorial below which used geometry nodes to create a procedural animation. By using a Set Position node in addition to a noise texture, and adding math nodes to displace those values, I quickly started to get the fish to swim fluidly.

It was cool to customise the nodes to make it kind of look like the fish was swimming around the can.

Below is a screen recording of me playing around with the nodes to get a the fish to move around how I liked.

Anemone

I really wanted have something else in the environment to add to the coral so thought anemone would achieve the look I was going for. I started off by using a rig but I found another tutorial that used geometry nodes and thought as the scene was already so heavy, this would be a better way to add movement to the anemone object without making the scene heavier.

I started off by adding a Sphere and by going into Edit Mode I scaled it up and moved the verts around using Proportional Editing to create an Anemone shape.

After this I started using adding an armature to the Anemone but found the tutorial underneath.

In the tutorial the use a Cone as their instanced object and use many many more duplicates than I did, So to customise it I used an Object Data node and used the object I modelled which was one anemone strand.

By using a Position Node and adding a noise texture to that, I used math nodes to control the movement of the anemone. After playing around with the math nodes, the anemone starts to move in this “swirly” kind of way. I played with the different axis too until I got the effect I was looking for.

Anemone Materials

After the movement of the anemone was down, I started playing around with the materials. Because it was all linked to the one object, it was really easy to play around and create a material, which then would effect the whole anemone group. So I decided to do a peachy colour but then liked the idea of the tops being more glow in the dark to light the underneath of the can. I know its not realistic, but I thought it was still in keeping to the semi-stylised look.

Finishing Touches

The Can and the rest of the scene was just duplicated so it was just a case of moving things around, but cans animation was basically the same as the last scene. There was a bit of a noise animation to make it look like it was floating but that was it.

Issues

This scene wasn’t as heavy as the Coral Reef scene, as after I duplicated it, I just deleted most of the rocks and other object that weren’t in the scene. But there was still the issue of being able to look and check everything in real time as it was still quite a heavy scene. I liked the final render, and I knew that I could change the colours slightly if needs be in after effects.