Hey Reader,

Before we even start, we’d love to let you know that the Film Stop Channel’s problems that we mentioned in the last newsletter are now resolved, and Colin’s control of the channel has been restored. 🥳

Now, on to the regular stuff.

Today, we’ve prepared a whole bunch of goodies and inspirations from the 3D world, including a new 3D Character Challenge, a jaw-dropping painterly animation trailer, and two new free tools for Blender: a painterly filter compositing node and Southern Shotty’s addon to create pixel art from your 3D models easily.

Let’s dive straight in.

​A 3D Character Contest You Can Join Too!​

Do you like to make 3D Characters? The creators of iClone and Character Creator have just announced a new 3D Character Contest you can join to test your skills and possibly win some prizes.

The biggest prize, though, is the fun, the learning, and the amazing 3D Character project you will have completed and be proud of at the end. There are five categories you can aim for, including realistic and stylized characters, design, and animation.

You can use the free 30-day trial of Character Creator to jumpstart your work, or (if you have a portfolio) apply for a 3-month free access to Reallusion’s software.

The contest started on June 1st and will last all summer until Aug 31st.

If you waited for some good motivation to start that personal character project, join the fun here.

​‘Danse Macabre’ - An Epic Painterly Animation Trailer​

Sometimes, watching the news about wars all around and doomy visions of the future where A.I. is taking over all the fun and creativity (for the greater good) can be depressing. That’s when such artworks as Hisko Hulsing’s ‘Dance Macabre’ shine a light for us, proving that human art can make beauty even out of darkest themes.

The film shows the absurdity of war in an epic 5-minute animation inspired by Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony (that is also its soundtrack). So far, we can only see a glimpse of it in the trailer (the film’s premiere will be on June 22nd in competition at the Annecy Film Festival).

All the shots look like moving oil paintings (and in fact, the director prepared a real oil painting for each of the scenes to act as style guides for the production team, which included 4 studios from different countries).

Blender was also used by one of the teams that animated the skeletons and horses. You can learn more about how it was made here.

​New Painterly Node Coming to Blender 5.2​

Perhaps you’re not an avid oil painter, but you’d love to give your 3D renders that painterly spark. There’s good news ahead. Pau Homes created a new node that will ship with Blender 5.2 (coming out this summer, but you can already play with it in the beta version).

This new Paint Filter Node for the Compositor is part of the new Online Essentials asset pack, which can be downloaded from the official Blender repository (if you have online access enabled in the Preferences).

It allows for a wide variety of painterly compositing effects. At first glance, it looks simple, like a Photoshop filter, but its real power shows when you combine it with the rest of the nodes to control and guide the effects. Pau shows a bit of how you can art-direct it in this video.

​A Free Pixel Kit for Blender from Southern Shotty​

Making pixel art in Blender has just become extremely easy thanks to Southern Shotty and his Blender Pixel Kit addon! It’s also 100% free (unless you decide to support the creator as a sign of gratitude for sharing such a cool and handy tool).

All you need to do to turn your 3D scene into nice pixel art is set up the resolution in a few clicks. It has some additional options like setting up a background color (or transparent background) and an outline (super handy for making game-ready sprites).

​Get the Free Blender Pixel Kit here (Affiliate link if you decide to donate)

For more information, check out the overview video here.

That’s all from us for today. Have a great weekend, stay creative, and till next time.

Jarosław, Zach & Alan (the CG Boost Newsletter Team)