The Cycle

My first long animation, all made from scratch, by myself, except musics and character base meshes (from sketchfab and credited in the animation), clearly inspired by the cyberpunk vibe and Blade Runner.

As I started 3D and VR less than eight months ago at the moment, I thought it was time to make a test bed for everything I've learnt.

The project has been made between January and the 4th of March. I planned the airing date as a real production do, to had no choice than finding solutions to get the full animation done in time, I annouced the date two weeks before release on my networks. And at that time, nothing was prepared at all but the assets.

- First month was mainly to push all required techniques and make the storyboard.
- Two weeks making all the assets.
- Two another weeks to make the final layout, the animation and the final cut.

Final render cames out of Blender Eevee and the cut into Vegas Pro.

It was a real marathon, but so rewarding on pleasure and knowledge.

Hope you'll enjoy the idea.

Several keyframes from the animation.

The last one wasn't used finaly as the still image works better than the animated version.

Blender viewport layout views.

Two weeks before the release, to challenge myself and had no other choice to aired on time, I launched a trailer to announce the final date, as a real pipeline could be.

Also having fun to show a glimpse of the main building, made with the Kitbash 3D Art Deco set and personnal additions.

The main character of this story is finally the car itself. A Lotus Esprit Hover GT 2076 (hopefully found into Cyberpunk 2077 (joke)), and inspired by the original Lotus Esprit 76.

Spent three days on the sculpt, polishing, kitbashing and texturing some parts, and finaly made the render, also in Blender Eevee.

Base design has been made into Gravity Sketch VR, and Blueprint made on Twinmotion.

Quick process captions from Gravity Sketch to a late Blender Cycles test and Eevee final renders.

Also the references I used, and a rough interior view, as I made a bit of details inside, just in case I had to use it.

First shapes design tests to find quick techniques to make the city.

All Blender Eevee renders, and a bit of overpaint for the last one.

As everything doesn't alway work as planned, I tried a procedural windows technique with parallaxe, learnt from Ian Hubert.

Test has been pretty good, but it was too time consuming to add in the final animation, as I announced a release date. Production choice.

So here is the quick fun made out of it.

Rendered in Blender Cycles.

And finally the quick storyboard, made the 2nd of January at the begining of everything.