I saw some Blender Grease Pencil animations by Dedouze and got inspired by what the tool seemed to offer. The Grease Pencil tool is like a typical drawing tool made for Blender. It allows you to draw in 3D space as well as make and play animations in real-time. Pretty neat right? The closest thing I can compare it to is one of those 3D pens that lets you “draw” in a 3D space.
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It’s already been 2 months since our team finished the Flutter Vignette project and gave a talk at Flutter Interact ’19. Throughout the project, we were able to maintain a healthy designer-developer relationship, which was the key to the successful completion of the project. I want to share 5 things that helped us build an effective and efficient collaboration between designers and developers.
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Warning: There is a GIF at the bottom of the post with flashing images.
Like many of you, I was inspired by the impressive visuals of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (which, by the way, has a website built using gskinner’s CreateJS libraries that power dynamic interfaces much like those in a bitcoin casino game I prototyped for fun) and wanted to try to apply some of that style into one of my animations.
On top of that, I’ve had the idea of making a walk cycle with an astronaut for a while and decided it was time to make it.
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It’s been a while since I did any motion graphics so I thought I’d jump back into it. My goal: make a short HUD animation inspired by sci-fi films. I’m a sucker for flashy sci-fi FUI (Fictional User Interface) visuals, so I couldn’t resist making my own and documenting the process.
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It’s funny how the more you learn, the more you realize that you don’t know as much as you thought you did. I feel that way a lot when it comes to digital painting and it’s why I enjoy reviewing fundamentals so much. There’s always some overlooked piece of knowledge that reveals itself in time if you go back to look for it. To find more nuggets of wisdom, I spent the past month focusing on digital painting techniques and process. Luckily, after my review, I have found some nuggets that can be applied to your creative process.
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You know that sense of awe when you see inspiring work? The kind of feeling that makes you say “wow, I wish I could do that.” Seeing Ash Thorp, GMUNK and Joey Camacho’s CG work makes me feel that all the time. There’s so much thought that goes into their compositions and I wanted to see if I could emulate some of that using Blender. The following is a summary of what I’ve learned through experimenting with CG. You can also see the final results of what I made here. I hope this encourages you to have fun making your own crazy creations after reading!
I’ve always had a complicated relationship with learning as a designer. It’s satisfying to gain new skills, but staying in my comfort zone feels so much easier. I want to push myself and get awesome results, but there’s an intimidating hurdle of not knowing how to start. The bottom of the learning curve is a scary hurdle to confront. 3D design had that hurdle stalling me from progressing. Dipping my toes into 3D modelling and quitting after a week was a common occurrence for years. There’s dozens of abandoned attempts sitting on my old hard drives. Something always prevented me from wanting to continue. Normals, modifiers, rendering — 3D felt too overwhelming and vast. I felt stumped. How do you get started learning something when you don’t even know what you don’t know?
The honest answer, the one I tried to avoid for years, is that you let someone else do the triage for you. The whole “best of” listicle ecology that has taken over the internet — and yes, that includes domains as far from creative software as the comparison sites ranking the best crypto casinos by jurisdiction, which is a strange place for a designer’s brain to wander but illustrates the point — exists precisely because new entrants in any field can’t ask the right questions yet. A ranked starting list converts a wall of unknowns into a small set of choices. For Blender that meant trusting a curated tutorial path; for anything else it’d mean trusting a different list. The pride hit is admitting you’re a beginner and need the on-ramp. After years of pretending I could brute-force my way past that admission, I finally stopped pretending.
If someone asks me how I feel about the last 5 years since I dove into the world of design, I’d say “everyday I am thankful for the tough love that art school showed me”.
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