Fire Princess plays Clair de lune by Debussy on the #piano while also using her #magic in this #furry #3d #animation animated like a music video. #3danimation #musicvideo
Here it is - the animation that I have been working on during the past 4 years.
I am not sure where to even begin. I have quite a lot to say about this one.
It almost feels like pretty much everything that could've gone wrong did go wrong.
It all started with the fact that I decided to go for a night scene. It meant that I wasn't really able to use Blender's solid viewport view anymore because it wouldn't show lighting. That means one of the first things I had to do was create a separate model that I could use in Eevee viewport view mode which was fully textured so I could finally see the lighting. It took a while.
I questioned myself quite a few times whether it was a good idea to go for a night scene. I figured that eventually I will need to do darker scenes anyway though so Eevee viewport was the way to go regardless.
The animation itself took me a total of around 4 months to make. What took the rest of the time were all the things I had to do. I had to write so many addons for Blender, including my own undo and redo system using Cython because Blender's own system was too slow for me. Tens of thousands of lines of code went into this and countless hours of debugging.
There were also so many things that needed improving on the Fire Princess model. The rigging also needed so many improvements.
Shortly after I started on the animation I got a really bad existential crisis which completely locked me down as far as productivity goes. It took nearly a year for me to get out of it to a level where I could properly continue.
Then there was the aforementioned truckload of programming I had to do to improve on a whole bunch of Blender issues I had which took me the an entire year.
Then on the third year I decided to take a break and worked on something else for a year. I couldn't mention anything about it though because I stubbornly wanted to get this animation out first. I will show what I was working on was sometime in the future.
On the fourth year I finally continued on the animation again. I first finally finished all the programming I had to do so I could get to animating again.
I was hoping I could make it before the end of last year but as usual it took longer than expected.
Then there is also the render time. It took around 11 days to render this. I had to increase the sample count even more than I originally planned. There is still plenty of noise left even with denoising but I couldn't sit here and wait it to render for even longer than that. I wanted to finally get it out. Not to mention the power bills it would've racked up had I rendered for even longer than that.
Overall I constantly ended up stuck on something only to end up stuck on the next thing every time I got unstuck. Nearly every single thing I got stuck on was complicated for me so it nearly always took a considerable amount of time.
I am at least hoping that now that the improvements have been completed I am able to get future animations out faster, though I have a bitter experience now with trying to predict how long anything takes.
Just to clarify on the credits, I animated everything, I made nearly all of the models, including the furry anthropomorphic fox known as the Fire Princess, the piano and the environment (aside from the trees in the background), I made the Fire Princess textures (aside from a few textures), I rigged the Fire Princess and piano models, I handled any simulations, I wrote the addon that I used to generate the piano playing and the notes that slide into the piano, I wrote the addons I needed to improve on Blender's animation tools, I wrote my own script to render on multiple computers and so much more.
I also built the computers I used to animate and render this, though that happened years ago now and I haven't been able to afford to build anything newer.
This might also be the longest animation I have made so far.
I hope you all like the end result though!
If you wish to support me in improving my content (and for future piano animations) then check out my Patreon! Every donor gets a reward including being credited in my future videos for the higher-tier donors!
