Goblin Slayer - Crescent Animation - Journal - 3/16/2021

  Project Crescent

 

My friends and I from Pluto is Real decided to work on individual animation projects based on the word prompt "Crescent".

 

 I immediately started work on a story board for an idea I had after a friend shared a link to a Goblin Slayer model. Loving the anime and reading some of the manga, I wanted to do something cool, so I drew this out.

 

 

 As you can see, I wanted to animate the Goblin Slayer emerging from the horizon of a crescent moon, then looking up to see a swarm of goblins, which would have been some images made with the Blender Grease Pencil. The Goblin Slayer would have then lunged at them and we'd see his red eye flare. 

 

Unfortunately, the model for Goblin Slayer I wanted to use was not available to be downloaded. Not wanting to give up on my idea, looked for other alternatives which lead to me downloading Models from Sketch Fab and CGTrader to kit-bash a Goblin Slayer model for me to use.

Models used:

https://www.cgtrader.com/free-3d-models/character/fantasy/lowpoly-pbr-knight-armour

 https://www.cgtrader.com/free-3d-models/character/fantasy/lowpoly-pbr-knight-armour

https://www.cgtrader.com/free-3d-models/character/fantasy/lowpoly-pbr-knight-armour 

 

After some quick edits, this is what I came up with:

Before I got to animating, the previous rig set up for the Low Poly Knight was a little too simplistic for my taste, so I decided to re-rig it. Though I had experience from learning rigging for Maya, I had never done it with Blender, but since I wanted to become a Blender user I figured what better time to learn than now. 

 

The process of rigging is a lot easier with the Rigify add-on, which simply requires lining up the bones where you want them, and there were plenty of tutorials that walk you through the process. However, there were not many tutorials that mentioned that you could not weight paint by selecting the wires and you had to un-hide the bones in the bone layers so you could select them to be weight painted. 

Video references for rigging and weight painting:

 

 

  After finally getting the hang of setting up the model to weight paint, the process of weight painting itself was simple enough, but also a matter of making sure things bend they way you wanted and that bones didn't make parts of the mesh move that shouldn't be moving.  Weight painting the armor was also a task in itself, which I learned in the end that I should have simply kept the armor in a separate layer so I could parent them to a bone and save me the trouble.

Once I finished the weight painting and parenting the sword and shield, I started animating the walk-cycle. One thing I really love about Blender is how it can copy and paste poses and even paste them in reverse on the x-axis, which helps to save time. 

 

While I wanted to animate what I originally planned, we had a deadline and I didn't have enough time due to the rigging process for the model.  So I decided to move on and start building the scene.

 

The scene was inspired by the Goblin Slayer anime opening sequence which is a simple white plane as well as a starry night sky, only I added a red crescent moon.

 

I initially modeled a spherical moon, but I couldn't the lighting I wanted so I created two circles, filled them, then created an emission material for one then simply darken the other. For the starry sky I followed a video to manipulate the world material. 

 

 

 

 After creating the sky, I decided to had a fiery particle effect as well as another particle effect for the embers. The following videos are what I followed for the process.

After that, I created an IO Sphere and parented it to the head of the model for Goblin Slayer, and animated the emission, so once he stopped walking he would look at the camera with his eye glowing. 

 

For the music, I composed it in a program called MAGIX Music Maker using entirely Midi keys. I definitely wanted to aim for something simple yet solemn. So I chose the Viola and added some Reverb effects.

I definitely learned a lot working on this small project and I'm pretty happy with the result, though there were things I could have done better, such as the weight painting and the whole work progress. (Or maybe having a back up idea so I could focus more on the animation aspect, but then I wouldn't have learned what I have now and it was still pretty fun which is what matters most.) 

My Animation:

https://twitter.com/cosmic_rick/status/1371852629165408260