Home page video introduction

Software used:

Process

I wanted to put a cool intro together using Blender, showcasing a bunch of assets I’d made and adding some animation in After Effects.

The great thing about Blender is how quick and easy it is to create assets and realistic materials. I absolutely love this software!

I don’t work out of my garage…. but sometimes when you’re sat at your desk it does feel as though you’re in your own little world, and I wanted to show that feeling. I also like the idea of working out of a little rental unit in a derelict industrial area, there’s a kind of hipster charm to it!

The whole project started when I was trying to figure out a good way of making a neon sign with moving lights – I settled on using a simple curve and utilising the start-end mapping modifier to have the light travel through. At this point I realised rendering in Cycles was going to set my house on fire, and so settled on EEVEE. 

This was a great opportunity to test out EEVEE’s glass and volumetric rendering.

Here’s an example of being efficient (lazy) by only creating what is visible in the camera. The street stops just past the camera, and I only modelled the front portion of the mountain. The actual building is a tiny little box on the middle right portion of the rectangle.

I used a lot of arrays and instances of objects to save render time, and the distant forest you see in the background of the final render is a simple flat transparent png. No need to model individual trees!

Here’s the front view to give a sense of scale. You can see here the flat rectangles are the forest planes. I set the camera up very early in the process to give an indication of what I needed to make, and which faces were important.

It also gave a more complete sense of the feel of the scene. Working on projects like this is a time intensive, quite isolating process, so I wanted to show that feeling as the space was meant to represent the creative space I live in.

Here’s the in-camera view I worked to as the original aspect ration was 16:9, which you’ll see in the mobile view of the home page of this website. I also created a much wider aspect for the desktop view, which shows a little more of the street and mountain.

I wanted the inside of the space to feel quite lived in, hence the clutter. I’m a big fan of indoor plants, this isn’t too far off what my study actually looks like!

I tend to texture/shade as I go along as I find it helps with lighting and composition. Here I’d played around with the screens. I originally wanted to add the content in After Effects and have some animation, but having seen the reflection in the table top I realised I wouldn’t be able to realistically reproduce it in AE. 

A pretty simple node set up for this, and I could swap out the image texture with a couple of clicks in future if needed.

Once complete, it was on to animating the lights and garage door, and final rendering.

Wireframe Render

Here’s the scene rendered with the camera blur with basic clay textures to see how the composition works.

Final render

Here’s the full composition rendered in EEVEE with a lot of lights, bloom, and fog (Creepy PS1 Silent Hill vibes). I wanted to add lots of detail to make the audience want to watch it a couple of times to see everything.

I added sound to give a little more realism, although it does have a sort of ‘dream’ quality to it that I’m a big fan of. Sparks (and sounds) were added in After Effects. Overall I’m quite happy with it, but I’m most excited to start the next Blender project!