This is the project I’m most proud of. This animation took me just over a year to complete, although I didn’t work on it nonstop. Somewhere in the summer of 2022 I started to get burnout and it wasn’t fun to work on anymore. Since the only reason I was doing it was because I enjoyed it, I decided to take a break. Then, around Christmas 2022, I started back up with working on it, and finished it almost exactly a year after I started.

I created a new technique that I haven’t ever seen someone do before for this project. Necessity is the mother of invention! I wanted to finish it in a reasonable amount of time, but to have it look the quality I wanted, I couldn’t just render the whole frame at the same amount of samples. So, I used what I call “sample focusing”. I render one portion of the frame with a nice and high sample count, usually 256 or 512. I render it in EXR so that no data is lost (with DWAA compression), then composite it on top of a full-frame render with low samples (somewhere from 16 to 64). This would have been nearly impossible for moving shots had it not been for the Animated Render Border addon on Blender Marketplace (link below). This allowed me to specifically pick one object to track throughout the shot and draw the render border around that, either automatically or manually.

Animated Render Border addon

There’s lots more I could say about this one, but I think you can just watch it and see what you think for yourself. I may post some behind-the-scenes stuff on here at some point.